Regina is still on her mind later that day when she returns to Robin and gets a strained smile in return. Everything she'd once been given openly now feels forced, heavy with emotions behind it that Robin refuses to speak of.

They'd always been free and easy together before now. Robin had had a ready smile and a simplicity to his heart, and he'd been quick to offer her affection. She'd been younger and stubborn and had thought of him only as a flirtation, a dangerous thief in the woods who could only be a distraction. But she'd kept riding with him and he'd never asked for more until his face had been the first and last thing she'd thought of every day.

They'd never had secrets between each other and they'd never truly feared anything. Even when she'd been pregnant and dying, she'd never doubted that he would be able to save her. Even when he'd been locked in lords' prisons, she hadn't even paused before she'd begun negotiating political minefields to rescue him. They'd been young and reckless and in love and there had been no weight in their hearts when they'd had each other.

And for that recklessness, she'd been captured and nearly killed.

And now she's a stranger in a new land, a mother who'd never known her child while her husband had grown into his role. While her husband had added layers to his face, piled them on until he's just as alien to her as everyone else here.

Who are you? she doesn't ask him as they examine a tree frozen solid near the edge of town. Instead she tells him what they'd discovered and watches as his face darkens.

"I want to speak with her about this. Surely there must be some way we can stop it." She curls an arm around Roland and he stares up at her, perplexed at the force behind it. "Do you think she can be trusted?"

"No," he says immediately, and another mask clamps into place over his face.

She hurts at it, at the lie in his voice. "Please, Robin. If she's my only hope, I need to know who she is."

"You know who she is."

She thinks of Regina, hurling fireballs at a pole like she's been caged by it. Of unrestrained fury that vanishes when directed at a person, and of arms underwater tugging her away from certain death. "I only know who she was." She bites her lip. "Tell me who she is. Can I trust her?" she repeats, and he looks pained.

She sighs. "Please don't seek to spare my feelings when all I want is the truth." She understands his dilemma, appreciates his loyalty to her even now, but it's come to the point where all she craves is answers, as upsetting as they may be.

He leans back against another tree, shifting uncomfortably as he murmurs, "Yes. You can trust her. She won't hurt you, not intentionally. She isn't…she is no longer who she was."

He looks guilty, uncertain, as though she's forced him to admit something so much worse than an alliance with the Evil Queen, and she sighs again, folding her hands against her abdomen and tangling her fingers together. "Thank you."

"I want you to protect me."

"What?" Regina is still staring at her, door half open and a hand resting against it and Marian can see the exact moment when she remembers her manners and startles. "Why don't you come inside?"

There's a brief episode where Regina offers her cider and the glass smashes into shards in her fist, nearly cutting Marian in the eye before Regina flicks her finger and makes the glass whole again. They eschew the cider and Marian follows Regina past the foyer.

A boy– Emma's boy with Regina– sits cross-legged on the couch in Regina's living room, squinting down at a binder. There's a bright yellow marker caught between his teeth, and as they enter, he removes it to highlight a strip of text. "Mom, is this a mistake in the budget or is King George really fostering Lost Boys?"

"No, I'm afraid it's true. He's been talking about his legacy again, and as he's one of the few people to agree to foster them, we couldn't turn him down." Regina rolls her eyes. "One of these days, someone should remind your mother that she doesn't have to bring back everyone she meets in every realm. Not every visitor has a built-in family awaiting them."

Her son mirrors her eye roll. "Mom, when are you going to–" His voice stops abruptly as he looks up and sees Marian for the first time. "Maid Marian." He says it formally, but his hands squeeze around the marker and his jaw clamps shut and then he's standing up, angling himself between his mother and her. As though she's a threatto the Evil Queen. "What are you doing here?"

"Henry!" Regina says sharply, but the baby-faced boy she'd seen at Granny's and wandering around with Emma and their hands deep in matching jackets is gone. In his place is the son who would be king, steely-eyed and protective, a boy she would have believed had been his mother's only partner in life if she hadn't known Emma.

And she has a host of feelings to sort through when it comes to mothers and sons, and somehow the hostility from the boy is only drawing out respect and longing. She musters up a smile for him, more wistful than she'd meant to display, and Regina glances at her once before she murmurs, "It's all right, sweetheart. This isn't…it has nothing to do with…" Regina is pursing her lips, uncertain in ways Marian has never seen from her before, and her voice trails off.

But Henry seems to understand anyway. He gives his mother a small smile and nods toward her- still hostile, but now it's vague and undirected. "I'm gonna go put this back in your office and head up to bed." He hugs Regina, arms out wide before he wraps them around her and shuts his eyes, and Regina holds on so tightly and for so long that Marian's uncomfortable and out of place and more than a little envious.

She gets one last warning look from him and Regina exhales as he disappears up the stairs. "He'll be up all night with a flashlight and comic books," she says to herself, but she's smiling fondly and Marian thinks about Roland again, who doesn't quite understand affection from the strange woman he's supposed to call Mama.

It's a relief when Regina directs her glare back on Marian and she doesn't have to contemplate Roland again, this Roland who isn't tiny and needy and gurgles smiles at her and she'd seen only weeks ago. "You said you wanted me to…protect you?" She sits on one couch and Marian settles on the second, gathering her resolve again.

"Yes."

"Isn't that a bit counter-intuitive?"

Marian puts one hand on top of the other, then switches them. Then moves them back to how they'd been. When she looks up, Regina is watching her hands, a hint of amusement in her eyes. "You didn't have any control over the magic that hit that post today."

Regina looks offended, then guarded. "No."

"Then what happens when your magic next tries to have me killed? When you don't see it coming and I don't and then I'm dead because no one but you can stop it?" She'd rehearsed her pitch on the way here, over and over again, but under Regina's gaze she feels woefully unprepared. (Be direct, Robin had said. She'll respect you for it. She wonders if that's how he had gained the respect of the Evil Queen as well.)

She takes in a deep breath. "You would have had me killed once. And the people here…well, most of them don't trust you, but there are some who say that you've changed." Regina watches her unflinchingly, her jaw working under her skin. "So prove it."

"I have nothing to prove to you," Regina says coolly. "I won't be manipulated into being your guard dog."

"Fine." She can feel old stubbornness rising, the woman she'd been before a dungeon and this town had doused her fire, and she forgets to censor her words. "Don't do it because of that. Do it because you owe me."

"I owe you?" Regina laughs, bitter and low. "You have no idea."

Self-righteous irritation bubbles up. "Yes, you owe me! You took my life away. You took me away from my husband, my son…you would have executed me." Regina is silent, a foot curling around the other ankle. "And if you won't keep me from being executed by you proper, then you're still my killer. Unintentional or not."

She glares at Regina, frustrated and angry, and Regina turns away to stare at the empty fireplace. She wonders if Regina would light it now, if it would burst into flames and consume her in an instant. She thinks she could spend the rest of her short life waiting, waiting, seeing every movement of the wind as another way for her to die.

She feels more helpless than she ever had locked in a prison insisting that she wouldn't give away Snow White. At least then she'd been able to make her own decisions, to protect the people she'd loved and die for them. Here she's nothing more than a shadow, a prolonged dead woman walking, drifting apart in the breeze as Regina turns back to face her.

"What do you want from me?" Regina says, and it's as though her face slides, as though the lines of her face relax into someone else entirely. Into the tired woman she'd been on that bench with Robin, into the woman she'd been when Emma had seized her by the arm. And she isn't fearsome or imposing or anyone more than just a woman. The woman who had once been a girl who had once been in King Xavier's palace and avoided her eyes. "What more can I do?"

"I don't know!" Tears spring to her eyes, useless and humiliating, and she blinks them back as Regina watches her silently. There's no mockery in her eyes, no pity, nothing but exhaustion. And she's tired too, of every day of uphill battles and secrets and this world where she doesn't belong. Regina's world. "I just…I don't want to die," she whispers, flushing at the confession to her once and future executioner.

Something flashes across Regina's eyes, compassion where she'd never been gifted it before. "All right," Regina murmurs. "Then you won't."

She says it like it's the simplest thing on earth, as though it's a regal edict made fact. You won't die, the Queen Regina utters, and fate itself must bow to her whims. And in that moment, Marian dares believe.

Granny's. Eight AM. That's what the message on Robin's phone had said, curt and to the point. They're coordinating times now, sending messages back and forth to keep the other posted on where they're going to be so there are no surprises, and Marian doesn't quite know if this one was an invitation or just a statement.

But she comes anyway, sits in a booth a few minutes before eight and contemplates the phone she's borrowed while she waits for Regina. When she touches the plastic screen it reacts to her finger, moves from side to side as she traces it, and she's lost in something that looks like a game, maybe? A targeting weapon? Are those bananas? when a familiar voice says, "Hey you. I didn't think I'd see you here again after last time."

Emma slides into the bench opposite her and she shrugs and tells her, "Actually, I'm meeting the Queen here."

Emma winces. "I don't think she likes to be called that. Though, I mean, you can call her whatever you want." She shifts, her tongue dipping out to nervously swipe at her lips. "It just…it might make her cranky."

Emma's from this world, she knows, and she'd only ever known Regina as just a woman until recently. "You've seen her as the Queen now, though. She was going to execute you. She nearly did execute your mother." She'd been there for the sobbing and the horror and Emma staring blankly into a fire. "You can't tell me that it's so easy for you to see only Regina now."

"Oh." Emma leans back, contemplative. "Yeah. She was kind of a handful back then, wasn't she?" But there's something fond in her eyes even now, a spark that Marian's only seen her have when Regina is mentioned. "It didn't feel very real to me, though. Not knowing who she is now. Not even knowing the kind of sociopathic bitch-in-heels she'd been back when we'd first met. That wasn't my Regina."

"And this isn't the Queen," Marian counters, and thoughts of a fifteen-year-old girl riding bareback beside her are as pervasive as ever. She understands what Emma is saying, because the Queen had never felt so authentic as this Regina who holds her son tightly and sits in Granny's with her family does. She'd been cruel and merciless and evil and she'd never felt like a person as much as an unstoppable force.

"What are you two meeting for, anyway?" Emma asks curiously. "Brainstorming on a way to save your life?"

"Essentially, I guess." She rubs her fingers against the table, setting the phone down as she does. "I didn't think she'd be so willing to save me. She…she seems to dislike me more than most anyone else in this town."

Emma squirms in her seat, and it's almost as though she seems guilty rather than apologetic. "It's not you, really. Regina doesn't like being told what to do, especially by some crappy higher forces that decide shit like what kind of person you're going to be. Destiny's kind of screwed her over a lot." She stares at the table for a minute. "And she just lost a sister and a true love because of it, so she's a little vulnerable right now."

"A true love?" Marian frowns. "But you're still…" Whatever had happened between them, it's Regina who's been pushing Emma away, not the opposite. She can't imagine how destiny could be responsible for that. "You do still love her, don't you?"

But Emma's eyebrows shoot up and she looks perplexed. "What? I…what?" She's so pale normally that now she looks positively ghostlike, eyes wide and face white as a flush creeps to her cheeks. "I don't– I mean we were friends, maybe, but love is a pretty strong word. And she doesn't. Love me, I mean. Never did."

Now it's Marian who's confused. "But you had a child together. And she seems so brokenhearted around you." She might not know them well, but she knows enough to recognize Emma's eyes around Regina and Regina's pain around Emma.

"Yeah." Emma presses her fingers to her forehead. "I did something…something good, I think. But it screwed things up for Regina and she's been angry at me for it. Which is completely unreasonable, but Regina's kind of unreasonable all the time." Her expression is somewhere between frustrated and affectionate, and Marian keeps wisely silent about it. "There's also…" Now she sees guilt, spreading across Emma's face like she's been unmasked before the world, and there's an audible gulp from the other side of the table. "But it's not about that. Uh. And Henry's…complicated. I gave him up for adoption when he was born and Regina raised him. I only met him again a couple of years ago. No love. Not at all."

She's still pink, but Marian's too distracted by her last admission to focus any more on her relationship with Regina. "You only met him a couple of years ago?"

"Yeah. He was ten and very determined to bring me back here to break the curse. I tried to stay away, but…yeah." She turns her hands over, palms-up in a what can you do? "I fell in love with the kid and I don't think I had much choice in the matter, anyway."

"But he didn't know you then."

Emma pulls a napkin from the dispenser on the table, rolls it between her fingers. "He wanted me to be a hero for him. He had…expectations, I guess." She glances up to meet Marian's eyes, and Marian's startled at the understanding within them. "Roland doesn't expect anything of you, and I think that'll be easier in the long run."

She feels selfish to admit it, but the words emerge anyway. "He doesn't need me. He was happy without me."

Emma's face softens. "You can't think about it like that. He's a kid. They adapt to whatever they've got. I spent most of my childhood being moved from family to family and I glommed onto whoever would show me any affection before I learned." She winds the napkin around her index finger. "You'll get to know Roland, you'll figure out who he is and he'll figure you out, and you'll be special to him in no time. Just be grateful you didn't meet him when he was twenty-eight, because trust me, that's a shitstorm."

She laughs, not placing the word but divining its meaning regardless, and she knows that Emma's right. That time is the only way for her to connect with Roland like she craves. "And if I don't have much time left?"

Emma glances behind her for a moment, toward the doorway where Regina is walking inside with an arm around Henry. "You know, I think it'll be good for someone else to need Regina, too." She slides against the wall as Henry catches sight of them and sits down next to Emma, leaving Regina to sit awkwardly beside Marian.

"Good morning," she says formally, and catches a light fixture from above them as her magic sparks out to slice off the metal piece that had held it to the wall. "Miss Swan." She looks as though she's itching for nothing more than to send Emma off, but Emma's pressing her lips together stubbornly and Henry looks pleading and she sighs. "Talking about old adventures? Grand escapes from my dungeons?"

"Mom–"

"Nah, your dungeons were a joke. I could have broken out of them when I was just a kid," Emma sits back, smirking under Regina's glare. "And I hope you fired whoever was guarding us, because they sucked."

Marian closes her eyes. There's no way Emma can be so naive, or… "Wait." Emma leans forward. "You did fire them, didn't you? You didn't…" She looks suddenly sick.

Henry is glancing from mother to mother with concern, and Regina stiffens. "Yes, Emma," she lies blatantly. "I fired them. Maybe you should have taken that into account when you started freeing prisoners."

Her eyes cross Henry's and he ducks his head, staring down at the table. "I want to eat now," he says.

Regina looks affronted, Emma is still twitching, and Marian plays with the phone in her hand, sneaking glances at the rest of the table. "Of course, if they'd still worked for methey'd have likely been murdered by your mother when she stormed my castle," she says, and Emma jerks her head up again, eyes wide with disbelief. "More than half my guard was killed that day."

And Marian wants nothing more to dispel the tension, to keep a little boy still looking at his mothers like they're his world, so she swallows hard and points out, "It's a very different world than this one. More death. Less paperwork."

Regina barks out a startled laugh and she glances over at Marian, gratitude in her eyes. "Indeed," she agrees. "How about chocolate chip pancakes today?" Henry's face lights up, the shameless bribe accepted, and he can't run to the counter fast enough.

"I didn't know," Emma mumbles. "I didn't think–"

"Yes, I've noticed," Regina says dryly. "Though I suppose if you haven't seen any major changes in the timeline, they were due for death anyway. Just perhaps not at my hands."

Emma's fingers are tapping against the table now, and she's caught somewhere between shame and stubborn denial, mouth opening and closing as her face sags and tightens, and Marian sneaks a peek at Regina and sees that she's watching Emma, too. "I remember you from the ball," she says suddenly. "That red dress…"

"You remember my dress?" Emma repeats, wrinkling her brow. "I mean, I remember yours, but that was two weeks ago and it was kind of memorable. Not like the riding coat, though, that was something else. Did they have some law in the Enchanted Forest against women covering up their…" She gestures at her chest, then looks at Regina's, then turns beet red.

Regina looks as though she's holding back a smile, and her face isn't entirely unlike Emma's had been earlier when she'd talked about Regina. Exasperated, but too fond to be that angry. "You were the insolent captive who called me Regina instead of Your Majesty. I was angry and not entirely–" She stops abruptly.

Emma cocks her head. "Not entirely…?"

Regina's head swivels so quickly that Marian's almost afraid it'll fall off. "Lady Marian. How have you been adjusting to this world?"

Emma starts to speak again, and Marian interrupts, suddenly concerned for Emma's future if she provokes Regina again. "It's…all very new. I feel like every day I find something else that doesn't make sense to me." She squints down at the phone again. "What is this?"

Emma peers over at it, distracted at once. "Fruit Ninja, I think. Look, you have to swipe this button over here, and then it'll start the game over for you."

"Have you given any thought to employment within the town?" Regina says, yanking the phone from Emma's hands before she can start swiping. Emma gives her the stink eye and mumbles something about her electrocuting Marian that they all ignore.

Marian says, "I think first I'm going to work on surviving."

"Hm." Regina doesn't sound very pleased with that response, and Marian feels suddenly defensive.

"I spent enough time in your dungeon thinking of my family to waste any time I might have left without them," she points out, peeved. "My baby son…I had a future with him once, and now I have it again. I have a second chance with my husband, and I won't take that lightly. I don't–" She stops, noticing finally that Regina is sitting rigidly in her spot and Emma is shaking her head from side to side, her face green again.

"I think I have to go to the bathroom," Emma says, banging her knee in her rush to exit the stall. "Ah! Shit. Regina, come with me."

To Marian's surprise, Regina doesn't object, just takes the hand offered and stands unsteadily as Emma nearly drags her toward the back hall of the diner. Marian blinks after them, certain that she's missing something.

"Hi." Henry returns, an enormous plate of pancakes in his arms. He bounds off and returns a minute later with four smaller plates, his forehead straightening itself out again. "Are you done talking about fairytale land now?"

"I think so." She frowns, noting the relief on his face before she glances back toward the bathroom. "Is it normal in this world for women to go to the toilet in pairs?"

"Yeah, I think so. Not my moms so much unless they're up to something. But they've been weird since right before Emma went to the past, anyway." His brow furrows. "I guess I get it."

"Do you?"

He shrugs, uncomfortable. "Listen, I know my mom did some bad stuff in the past. Really bad stuff. I read the book. But she isn't a bad guy anymore." He slides down to Emma's seat so he can face her, earnest-faced under long bangs. "She's a hero now."

He takes two pancakes off the pile and puts them on a plate, offering it to her before he chooses his own. Well-mannered, as a royal's child should be. She doesn't doubt that Regina has raised him well, if a little naive. "Do you think it's that simple? That you can make that decision after all your mother's done?" She doesn't think he understands exactly what that list comprises of, but she doubts he'd look as kindly upon her executing a village for treason as he does the poisoned apple she'd supposedly offered Snow.

"Yes." He says it with firmness. "I know about heroes and villains. I know my mom and I know how hard she's been trying, and villains don't try to be good like that. Villains don't love like Mom does."

She tries a pancake. It's good, decadent like the food she'd once had in Nottingham before she'd run. And when she looks up, Henry is holding up a flask of what looks like syrup. "No, thank you. This is more than enough sugar for me."

"More for me, then." He pours it liberally onto his own plate, and they eat with appreciative murmurs, trading turns peering back toward where Emma and Regina had vanished.

She can't help but observe Henry, though, and wonder at this boy who can assert so strongly his faith in a woman he knows had once been the scourge of his other mother's family. Who placidly eats pancakes and insists that Regina is a hero. "What if she isn't?" she asks, and he sets his fork down. "What if there are no heroes like that and she can't be who you think she is?" She thinks about Emma's revelation from earlier and Roland, about it being easier without the expectations. About the way Henry talks about heroes and villains like there's nothing in between.

He shovels another forkful into his mouth, looking perturbed. "She's my mom," he says, swallowing. "She loves me." He smiles at her, and it'd be almost condescending on an older face. On a boy who didn't love his mother. "You don't know her here. You'll get it. It took me a while, too."

She's about to ask him more, but then Regina and Emma finally emerge from the back hall. Emma's gaze is on Regina and Regina is avoiding her eyes, but her lips are thin and pressed downward and– Marian can see from her position when she looks straight ahead– her fingers are loose around Emma's arm, a thumb sliding up and down her wrist under her jacket.

"I don't want to be around you," she says when they finish their meal, all strained silence and Emma turning bright red every time Regina glares at her and Henry struggling valiantly to pretend that all is normal. Regina, for her part, cuts into her pancakes stoically and nearly stabs Emma when she reaches for one (and actually stabs Marian a moment later, but pulls the utensil from her chest and heals her in an instant), and when Henry and Emma duck out to school and work, respectively, they're left alone. And Marian is desperate to explain that this isn't her ideal, either.

Regina raises her eyebrows. "We have some common ground, then. I have no interest in being saddled with another of my victims. Snow White is bad enough."

Regina isn't being friendly, exactly, but she isn't setting her on fire. So progress. "This isn't how I wanted to live my life. I used to think…if I'd ever escape that dungeon…I'd stay home with my family. I'd stop taking risks. I never dreamed I would be trapped, alone in the future counting down the days to my death." She stares down at her uneaten breakfast. Emma had insisted that she try Granny's grilled cheese, but she finds her appetite failing her when seated beside the Evil Queen.

Regina is silent for a long time, and she sneaks a peek in her direction to see Regina staring back at her, looking anguished. "You have that now," she whispers. "You have your family and I have…" She shakes her head. "Justice," she says finally, and Marian thinks about Henry and Emma and Snow's family at the table with them and she wonders how Regina can think that it's just that she has all she just lost a sister and a true love, Emma had said, and Marian feels petty for her spite.

"I have justice," Regina says again. "And you will not die."

True to her word, Regina is with her at all times when they aren't at work or in their respective homes for the night. Regina won't come anywhere near the forest dwellings of the Merry Men- "I could wind up starting a forest fire, or deforest our entire woods," she says with a disapproving frown, as though Marian is somehow conspiring to do so- and they have a running theory that Regina will only attack her when she's alone. "I drove past you twice that day," Regina tells her. "Once you were the furthest from the street, and the second time– when I lost control of the car– you were the closest."

One early morning– Sunday, Mulan says, when even the mayor doesn't work– she stops by the diner in the morning with Mulan (and Roland behind her, lagging and holding onto the other woman's hand. She knows that Robin had asked Mulan to join her, but she isn't certain if she's annoyed that he's trying to protect her from Regina or annoyed that he's trying to make Roland comfortable with someone else) and finds only Emma and Henry there together, two impressively sized milkshakes on the table in front of them. Emma licks her lips, half-ashamed, half-proud, and Henry doesn't miss a beat. "You don't mention this to my mom and I don't tell her about the lamp you broke yesterday. Deal?"

"Deal," she agrees, winking at Mulan. "Where is your mother?"

"Gardening." Henry makes a face. "It's Sunday. I'm with Mom– Emma Mom– today."

"We need a better system, kid." Emma Mom frowns at her milkshake. "New Mom name for one of us." She considers, and they can all see the moment she nixes her first plan. "For me," she clarifies.

Roland is looking longingly at the milkshake. Actually, Mulan is too, and they wind up stopping down the block at the ice cream parlor for milkshakes of their own, Marian and Roland sharing one and Mulan with the other as they make their way toward Regina's manor. The house is silent, the only sounds from the side yard, and Marian calls out, "Regina?" an instant before a pair of pruning shears come spinning toward her face.

They freeze mere millimeters from Marian, and Regina snatches them out of the air. "Texted warnings, Marian," she reminds her. She sounds cranky, more so than usual, and then her eyes drift down to the boy still clutching onto Mulan's hand and she says, in a very different tone, "Roland!"

"Regina!" He drops Mulan's hand and runs to her, stubby little arms outstretched as she lifts him into her arms. "I got a milkshake like Henry's!"

Her eyes are soft and sad as she regards him, her voice so soothing that Marian's too busy gaping at them to register what she's asking. "Really? Did Emma get one, too?"

"Uh-huh!"

"How big was it?"

Roland spreads his hands. "So big! Mama said it was too big for me, though. I got a little one." His face sours and Regina's arms tremble, and Marian remembers too late that she and Henry had had a deal. She can't think about lamps or Henry, not when Roland seems to just fit in Regina's arms, when he's talking a mile a minute and Regina is holding him with such uncertainty that Marian's envious and uncomfortable and longing all at the same time.

Her son adores everyone but her, and she follows them numbly to the garden where Regina produces a little shovel and shows Roland how to dig little holes in the soil and put them on a flat tarp she has. "Marian," she says suddenly, and Marian starts. "Why don't you work with Roland?"

She blinks down at her son, hunched over with his eyes narrowed as he carves into the ground. "I…yes. Thank you."

Regina offers her a thin smile. "I used to turn over the soil out here with Henry on weekends when he was Roland's age. He'd get filthy, but he loved doing the work with me. And afterward, we'd turn on the sprinkler to rinse him off before he came inside. You." She changes tack immediately, turning to Mulan. "Have you ever weeded a garden before?" Mulan shakes her head. "Well, you don't wack at them with your sword," she says impatiently. "Get down on the ground with me unless you plan on glaring at me all day."

Mulan looks startled, but she does as Regina says, and Marian listens to them with half an ear as Regina instructs Mulan. She remembers this woman from King Xavier's palace, patient and clear and kind, and if not for the strained formality in her voice, she might have mistaken them for each other.

They work in near-silence for a while, Roland focused on his task as Marian follows him along. "You dig here now."

"Okay."

"Make it bigger, though. A Papa hole."

She touches the ground where he'd dug the last hole. "Is this a Mama hole?" He nods seriously and she digs out a scoop with her trowel. "So this is a Roland hole."

"Too little. That's Aurora's baby's hole." He sticks his shovel into it. "Now it's a Roland hole."

"Are you sure? That looks like a Henry hole to me. Or maybe it's big enough to be a Henry's milkshake hole." Roland giggles and she grins back at him, her heart soaring for a single moment. "How are we going to fit all the dirt from a Papa hole into a milkshake hole?" Roland mulls it over and she stretches, turning as she does to see Regina sneaking a glance at her. "Thank you," she says formally. "This is nice. I used to do this with my mother."

"I was always forbidden." Regina turns back to her own patch of dirt. "I tried once with the cook's daughter and my mother…" She pauses. "Disapproved. Thought it was beneath me, I suppose."

"We had a farm," Mulan says wistfully. "I haven't seen it in years."

"Yes, you were quite the decorated heroine, weren't you?" Marian and Mulan both blink at her, and Regina sighs. "I saw the Disney movie. Henry used to run around in the snow with a toy sword pretending to be you."

"Really?" Mulan looks gratified. "I haven't seen it yet. Aurora bought a copy and insists that I see it with her, but I've been occupied with…well. Other matters."

She kneels down again, and Marian sees her shoulders drop, the delight faded with the thought of Aurora. "So Mulan gets a movie. Did you? Did I?" she asks, mostly to distract Mulan. She's seen one clip of what Roland calls a movie on Robin's phone, but it had been a sponge drawn with eyes and limbs and she'd been wholly unnerved by the concept.

Regina sniffs. "Snow got a movie. Your husband got a movie. At least I wasn't an animated fox." Which is an odd assurance. "I didn't allow Snow White and the Seven Dwarvesin the house. Mulan was the favorite."

"Hm." Mulan's shoulders press inward. "No need to tell him what happened next."

"What was that?"

"I was…celebrated for a long time. A legend among my people. And then some of the generals thought I should stay at home and wait to be courted and married and a demure wife," Mulan says wryly. "The emperor had other thoughts, but the other officers were uncomfortable with a woman as their leader, and I was reduced in rank to a common foot soldier until I grew dissatisfied and left the kingdom."

Marian's not surprised. "It took months of me riding with Robin before the Merry Men stopped complaining that I was slowing them down. I had to borrow Robin's hood and perform in an archery competition opposite Little John before he stopped calling me 'Little Lady.' He was humiliated." Her memories are full of affection for the man now, but she can't stop the little surge of smugness at the recollection of his wide-eyed face when she'd pulled off the hood.

"Is that why he was so relieved when I told him my weapon was a sword?" Mulan stifles a very audible snicker. "Men."

Regina hums in agreement. "I've found that a fireball is just as effective." One emerges from her palm and makes it halfway to Marion before it fizzles out.

"It does seem so," Mulan agrees, eyes wary on Regina. But Regina is smiling too, her eyes crinkled and half-closed like she's telling a joke, and Marian watches the tentative smile as it emerges from Mulan's lips. "Though I do have a sword that repels magic."

Regina's eyes narrow. "Fire?"

"Let's hope you never find out." Mulan touches light fingers to the hilt of her weapon, and Regina laughs delightedly. Mulan looks affronted. "That was no joke. I've fought Cora, you know."

Regina stops moving. "I didn't, actually." They both wait, Marian patting down Roland's dirt pile and Mulan's fingers moving from her sword to her shoulder and then back again, but Regina says nothing more.

They fall into silence again, though this one feels heavy with tension. Marian doesn't know much about Cora in this world, other than that she is no longer here. She doesn't know how to read the straight line of Regina's back or the way her body bends inwards now as she touches a single sprout in the soil.

And then she says, so conversationally that Mulan is the one to go rigid, "How did you meet your husband, Marian? I don't think I've heard that story." Her question is laced with something, a bitterness that doesn't cut at Marian but feels designed to cut nevertheless.

Mulan says, "Is this really necessary?" and Regina's garden fork cracks a tine against the ground.

"No," she says. "But please, tell us anyway."

"I…all right," Marian says, discomfited. "I was a ward at Nottingham Forest for some time. We had some connections to the nobles who owned it, and my mother thought it would be good for me to learn the culture."

"She wanted you to marry into them," Regina deduces at once.

It hadn't been quite so bleak, though she wonders at how swiftly Regina had reached that assumption. "She wanted me to see if it was somewhere I'd want to spend the rest of my life. If I had refused Nottingham, another of my sisters would have gone and I'd have been warded elsewhere." She wonders, in another life, if she'd have never met Robin and had been delivered to Prince Henry's estate instead. Regina would have been long gone by then, married to a king triple her age, but she imagines that she'd have followed the rest of the family to the good King Leopold's castle.

The king Regina had killed, if the rumors had been true, and she shivers and wonders about the girl she'd known before her marriage and the woman she'd seen after. "I was…I thought I was doing a passable job at fitting in. I was being courted by the sheriff of the area and we'd gone for a ride together that evening when our carriage was caught in the rain and collapsed. And then he was vile."

She remembers his insinuations that he'd be the only one in Nottingham who would ever deign to find her acceptable marriage material. The way he'd kept saying Someone like you with his lips curled. She'd learned early in her time in Nottingham to stare blankly at those who'd talked to her like that, and they'd written her off as vapid but had been too delicate to say any more. "And then he called my mother some names I didn't appreciate and made some spurious accusations about her and a royal friend of hers, and I slapped him several times."

Mulan and Regina are both turned from their work now, and she flushes under their approving gazes and Roland's curiosity. "Very ladylike," Regina says. "A proper slap?" She cocks her head, side-side-side, like they'd always been taught in the courts. Express displeasure, stun the man for a moment, but leave no mark to humiliate him.

This is no court of proper ladies, though, a woodswoman and a witch and a warrior, and Marian has yet to meet one of the so-called 'proper ladies' she'd been taught to aspire to. "Very proper. He…not so proper." He'd attacked her then and she'd fought back valiantly and with all the skills she'd ever learned, eventually grabbing his own knife from his holster and holding it to his neck until he'd stomped off, soaking wet in the rain. She'd been equally wet, her specially arranged hair flat against her head and her dress clinging to her skin, and then she'd looked up and seen a younger man crouched between two branches of a nearly tree.

She'd swallowed her surprise and demanded, Were you planning on helping? and he'd offered her a winning grin and said, You were magnificent. I didn't want to get in the way, and he'd looked at her like she'd been his world in that moment and she'd… "I just wanted to get dry," she admits, laughing. "I ran off with a strange man to his camp in the woods because he promised me fresh clothing. And he told me years later that he didn't, that he'd run to town while I was drying off to buy me a dress. It was beautiful and expensive and designed for a child half my age."

When she meets Regina's eyes, it's as though a shutter crashes down between them, turning her eyes dark and opaque. "It sounds like he loves you very much," she says neutrally. Beside her, Mulan dips her head and there's tension in the air again, created anew with the story Regina had asked for.

She knows there's hostility between Robin and Regina and she'd have been better off avoiding it altogether, but Regina had asked, and now she's thinking of the man at home, the one worlds apart from the boy with the dress. The stranger she hardly knows. "He did," she responds finally, and she doesn't know what more can be said as Regina's eyes shine through the mask for a moment, weary, too weary, and as lost as her own.

Thank you so much for all your wonderful feedback! I'm glad to know that you're all reading this. :) I'm a bit behind on replies but it's very late and I thought you'd want a chapter over replies to your comments tonight, lmao. But all are appreciated and you gave me a lot of food for thought! I wound up expanding on certain things and giving others more attention based on some of the points y'all brought up here and on AO3 and Tumblr and I am very grateful. :3