A/N: I would like to say that I do not condone Emma's practice of writing smut fics about real people. I do definitely think that is boundary-crossing. However, I've had this fanfiction idea stuck in my brain for years and I had to get it out. Also- Regina is obsessed with Emma's smut. So maybe that makes it not so bad. Also, parts of this chapter I stole from a fic I recently posted and then deleted, so if I have regular readers, some of the dialogue may look a little familiar.
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Emma Swan was proud of the fact that her fiction (which had started out as a Tumblr post) was getting so much traction on A03. In a weak moment of pining, she had written a drabble about herself and the mayor (with changed names of course), and a few hundred of her Tumblr followers had demanded that she evolved the work into a fully fleshed out fic. She was happy she had listened to them, and the dopamine shots she got from her A03 readers motivated her to post new chapters every day.
The story had started out innocently enough. It was a slowburrn romance between a rugged blonde character named Olivia Sparrow and a witty brunette named Diana Carpenter. The characters hadn't so much as kissed until more than twenty chapters into the story, but her readers were getting antsy. They were getting audaciously, shamelessly, exasperatingly horny.
From Emma's perspective, writing smut about a person she knew in real life crossed an invisible line. The whole idea had seemed pervy to her, and she did a pretty good job of ignoring the comments that cried out for a chapter full of remarkably filthy and detailed fornication.
That being said, the more chapters she published (there were over a hundred, now) the more distant the characters seemed to distance themselves from the real Emma Swan and Regina Mills. So much so, that Emma didn't even associate them together anymore. Olivia Sparrow was much more confident than Emma, more vulnerable, and much, much hotter. Diana, on the other hand, was nothing like Regina. She said things that Regina would never say and did things that Regina would never do. They were completely different people, barely even caricatures of the people that Emma and Regina were.
So Emma indulged her readers. Or, more honestly, she indulged herself. She had begun writing Olivia-Diana smut a little over a month ago, so she was no stranger to writing smut and posting it online. This chapter she had just posted was her best work of obscenity yet.
Emma was sitting at her desk, sipping a double mocha frappe from Granny's. Her computer was on and she was happily scrolling through the many comments of praise she had received on her latest chapter. It was a cool day out, for late April, and Emma had the office curtains drawn away from the windows so that the sun would warm up the room. She jumped when the door to her office suddenly swung open to reveal the mayor, herself.
Emma immediately dropped her gaze down to the papers that were at her desk and pretended to be reading them. It was an official document reporting the debacle that had taken place at Storybrooke's bar last night, and it was incredibly boring. The two people involved were already back in their homes, one of them probably with an icepack on the black eye they had earned from the fiasco.
"Miss Swan," Regina announced at she walked into the office.
Regina slapped a thick pile of papers on top of the ones that Emma had been reading. "I asked you to file these almost a week ago. So can you tell me why they were sitting on the table in the hall exactly where I left them four days ago?"
Emma grimaced, disappointed in the direction that their conversation was going in. "I forgot."
Regina flattened her brows and laid her palms against Emma's desk, leaning down to more effectively meet Emma's gaze. Her voice deepened. " I don't pay you to sit around and play phone games all day."
Emma scoffed. "You don't pay me anything! The town does. Anyway, there's nothing for a sheriff to do in your dusty old town today, so lay off." She glanced up at her computer screen for a moment to see that her story was still up on the main screen. She clicked away in a panic. "It will only take me a minute to finish this, and then I'll file your papers."
"I don't care about your excuses, Swan. Get it done. Immediately. Do you know what that word means?"
Emma scowled. Regina had gotten into a habit of being intolerably condescending, a trait she had purposely left out of Diana's character.
"Yeah," she replied, "Thanks." She pressed her lips together and looked down at the papers on her desk.
"Good," Regina said, "I'll expect to see them finished and filed in the drawer by the time I take lunch today. I need it done and sent back to me for verification."" She retreated toward the door of the office. "Goodbye, Sheriff Swan."
Emma had a hard time remembering what kind of stellar good mood Regina had been in to inspire Emma to start a story about her. On most days, the other woman was detestable. When she had brought up the paperwork four days ago, she had been just as rude as when she had reminded Emma about it just now. Did Regina not possess the ability to at least be amicable?
Emma closed out of the A03 website and turned her attention to the papers she was meant to look over. She was generally responsible when it came to her job, but she had genuinely forgotten about the work Regina had given her when a catastrophic storm had hit the town that same night. It had required a lot of clean-up, and a lot of time patrolling in the police car to watch for hurricanes or tornadoes should she need to start up the storm sirens.
On any other day, she could have gotten away with writing smut while she was at work. After her morning patrol shift, there wasn't generally anything around the office that needed to be done, except for the paperwork that had to be filed on the off chance that something interesting had happened in Storybrooke. She was lucky that way. But lately, it seemed like Regina took every chance she got to march down to Emma's office and slap a bundle of work onto Emma's desk.
. . .
Later that night, Regina sat in her office, finishing up her work for the day. It was well past 9:30, and she was still waiting on a phone call from Henry's babysitter to confirm that Henry was asleep and in bed.
Regina huffed irritably. He should have been in bed over an hour ago.
Just as she had pulled out her cell phone and was about to dial her house, her office phone rang. She picked it up and answered it.
"Kara?" Regina asked, "... Why are you just now calling? I told you that my son was to be in bed by eight o'clock sharp." She half-listened to the hurried apology as the girl rambled about how Henry had been in bed by the appropriate time, but that she had forgotten to call.
"Fine. It's fine... I expect I'll probably be home around 11:30- I'll pay you for the extra hours." She hung up before Kara had a chance to argue and she turned her attention back to her work on her desktop screen. She continued to type out a reminder about the upcoming council meeting before a distracting thought crept into her head.
Emma Swan has an A03 account.
Emma's username had been presented in plain sight when Regina had gone into her office and happened to look at the sheriff's computer screen. She knew what the website was, though she never read or posted anything on it.
Her curiosity suddenly spiked higher than her interest in the email and she opened a new tab on her screen. She brought up "Archive of Our Own" and her mouse wavered over to the "create account" button. She speed-typed her email into the text box and set her password as Henry's birthday before racking her brain for a username. She eventually decided on "regal_applepetite."
She quickly typed Emma's username into the search box and clicked on the first blog that appeared. Her mouth dropped open with an audible "pop."
The first words that Regina's eyes landed on were "lesbian" and "smut fic." She scrolled down, just below the icon of Emma that smiled up at her. She greedily speed-read the hundreds of chapters. For the first hundred or so chapters, the contents were innocent and… fluffy. Regina detested that word. But the further she read, the more brazenly smutty the story had become. Almost as if she was in a stance, Regina absorbed the rows and rows of mouth-watering chapters about a quirky blonde sheriff with an unsightly red-leather jacket and a snarky, brunette girlfriend.
The phone alarm suddenly went off, pulling Regina from a gay smut-daze. She jumped, clicking out of the salacious page as her heart leaped in her chest painfully. She pressed the button on her phone to shut the alarm off and saw that it was 11:00. Time to go home.
She shut down her computer, turned off the lights in her office, and grabbed her purse before walking out of the town hall building and heading toward her car.
