A/N: What was originally supposed to be a one shot is now a multichapter fic. This assumes a previous sexual history between Emma and Regina in season one that did not continue after the curse breaking. Canon divergent after 2.17.
She wasn't hard to find. It's not like the entire town wasn't on edge every time she went anywhere in public, and they sometimes even called the sheriff's office. The queen is at the supermarket. Well, what is she doing? Buying groceries... the voice on the other end of the phone would say, as if realizing how silly it sounded as they said it. Sometimes they even apologized for wasting Emma's time. Most of the time they didn't. Regina had slipped back into a routine, she'd even gone back to the mayor's office, despite some protests. That was until Emma and a few other city employees had to point out to people that despite what they all thought before, the mayor's office actually did a lot to keep the town going. Privately Emma thought Regina needed something to do with her time.
After school was out she could be reliably found on a park bench with a nice view of the playground Henry liked. It was far enough away that no one could really object, and Emma wasn't even sure Henry knew she was there. But that's where Emma found her today.
"Do you mind if I sit?"
"If I said yes, would it matter?"
"Probably not," Emma admitted. "We never did talk again... after that night I came back from..."
Emma could never really manage to get the words out without mumbling. She'd been there and it still seemed like a crazy thing to say.
"The Enchanted Forest. I think we've probably said everything to each other that needs to be said." Regina didn't look at her, but kept watching Henry playing.
"We didn't." Emma sighed. "Are you determined to wall yourself away?"
"Is this some sort of Charming olive branch? I thought things were pretty final at the Well."
Magic makes good people do bad things. Henry had said, and Emma's reply she dearly wished she could pull back. And bad people.
"He loves you. You could try being the person he wants you to be."
"Why would that help. You aren't the person he thinks you are, Emma." The former Queen observed finally turning her head.
"We both said a lot of things we shouldn't have said. But you were trying to kill my family."
"I was." Regina admitted without any seeming remorse. "It was the only way any of you people were going to stop standing between me and my son."
"You were doing better for him. I know."
"And then you proved what a grand waste of effort that was."
"Your mother set you up."
"Don't you talk about my mother."
"Regina..."
"I told you magic had a price. Or didn't you suppose I was living enough proof of that."
"I ... shouldn't have trusted Pongo's memories..."
Regina's head snapped around as if she'd was ready to burn Emma's face off with her stare. "You were going to take Henry away from me forever based on the memories of a DOG?"
"When you put it that way..."
"Don't even try and walk that one back Miss. Swan."
"You were calling me Emma, sometimes, before..." Before the curse breaking. Before all of this mess. Before when the two of them had found each themselves in bed. More than once.
"You've made your feelings about that perfectly clear."
Emma gave a sigh and a shake of her head. "I'm not sure how that could be as I am not perfectly clear about my feelings about that."
She expected Regina to make some sort of snippy reply. Demeaning her intelligence or her capacity for adult feelings, but none came. "What do you want, Emma?"
"I just want to maybe... figure out some way we can all live together in this town."
"Aren't we doing that already?"
"No... we're all waiting for the next time we all go at each other like rebid dogs. I thought maybe we could work something out. For you ... and for Henry."
"Do not try and use my son to keep me on a leash." Regina said testily.
"I'm not. I want you to be better for him. But I think it's time we start listening to him. He misses you."
Regina looked over at her and Emma wondered if she was trying to figure out if she was telling the truth. "I thought perhaps... you could have him for dinner on Wednesdays and Saturdays?"
"At home?"
Emma inhaled through her teeth, "Can we try Granny's at first?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"I'd be lying if I said yes."
"And what's the price?"
"No price. Though it would be rather nice if you weren't actively trying to kill us."
"Do I look like I'm trying to kill you?"
"You look like someone whose very lost, Regina. I know that feeling."
"You don't know me."
"Perhaps. But maybe I'd like to..."
The look that crossed Regina's face was heart breaking, soft and vulnerable, and all the more crushing for how fast it was gone. Emma had seen that look on the faces of way too many kids in foster care. "So, dinner at Granny's?"
"Are we being chaperoned?"
"Well, half the town will be there, so I wouldn't say people wont be watching you. But I'm not asking anyone to keep an eye on you." Emma got up from the bench to leave. She got about ten feet before she could hear Regina's voice.
"Emma, wait...?"
She turned around and raised an eyebrow.
"Thank you."
Mary Margaret came by the sheriff's station with dinner. Emma was relieved to see that she looked a bit more like her old self. What had happened with Cora had nearly destroyed her, and neither David nor Emma really knew what to do about it. Emma honestly had trouble even getting the entire story out of her mother. Something about dark magic though.
It was enough not to want to mention the occasional sparks that she'd seen from her own fingers. At first she thought it was just static shock until she'd actually been looking at her hand when it happened.
"Oh, I thought Henry would be here..."
"He's at Granny's with Regina." She said looking up from her paperwork and taking the offered bag of food without comment starting to rummage around.
"With... Regina."
"Yes, she and I agreed she could have him for dinner twice a week."
"Are you sure that's wise..." Mary Margaret said carefully, in a tone that made Emma wonder if she'd use the same words if she had said that she let Henry juggle dynamite.
"She's his mother."
"You're his mother."
"Kind of..." Emma said quietly. "I mean I am... but he misses her. There are all these things that she knows about him... I'm starting to understand what she meant when I met her. About the hard stuff."
"Did you at least get her to agree to behave?"
"She's with Henry. She'll behave. Besides I've seen Granny with that crossbow she keeps stashed under the counter."
"Regina can catch arrows mid air."
"Really?" Emma realized by the look on her mother's face that perhaps that sounded a bit too excited. She decided to cover it up by taking a bite of her sandwich. Which turned into about six.
"We have to start trusting her eventually."
"No Emma... that's exactly what we can't do."
"She's not going away. We can't arrest her, we don't have any way to hold her, so perhaps we should stop beating her with sticks and perhaps see about giving her the second chance I screwed up on the first time."
"Emma... Regina doesn't take second chances."
Emma looked up into Mary Margaret's eyes and wondered, not for the first time, what really had gone on between those two women.
"Are you going to tell me about what happened between you?"
"Emma there aren't enough books in all the world to explain me and Regina."
"I mean after we got her to destroy the curse."
Mary Margaret's eyes got a bit big and she sat down.
"So you did go to see her?"
"I asked her to end it. To kill me."
Emma raised both eyebrows and stopped chewing, but decided not to comment. Nothing she could say would mean all that much.
"Our feud... it has taken so much out of both of us. I just wanted it to be over. And she took my heart out."
"Wait a second... could you go back and repeat that bit?" Emma couldn't quite compute the idea of taking someone's heart out of their chest. Mary Margaret was after all still standing there. She knew what happened with Aurora, but there was knowing... and knowing.
"She took it out and instead of crushing it.. she showed me the price of the magic I used to kill her mother."
"Why does the price of magic never sound like infinite puppies and rainbows?"
Mary Margaret gave her a look before continuing. "My heart has started to darken. I don't know if I can come back from it. She said that... She said that once your darken yourself you can never come back."
"And you believed her?"
"Wouldn't she know?" Mary Margaret asked, and suddenly Emma felt very much the older sister not the daughter.
"Maybe the answer is that someone has to believe in her like you have people believing in you."
"I believed in her for years, Emma. All it did was break my own heart."
Emma sighed, and part of her wondered why there was a knot in her own chest right now.