Marian's reluctant to go back to the woods too early most days.

It had seemed like a dream when she'd first seen Robin in Granny's, like she'd finally escaped her death and found home again. She'd known she was in the future and hadn't dared expect to see Robin again- or to find that he'd moved on, and she'd have no one at all. Her kingdom had escaped the curse entirely, perhaps one last loyalty from Regina to her father's people, and she'd been alone in a sea of strangers.

And then Robin had been there and all the weight of the world had been lifted from her shoulders. She hadn't been alone, dependent only on Emma. She'd had her family back and her old idyll restored.

And now she's anxious around them, unsure of her relationship with Robin and what has been sustained beyond their child. She feels like she's striving toward something impossible now when she's around him, like she's trying to be what he wants instead of trying to figure out what she wants for herself. And she knows it isn't his fault, that he'd encourage her to be her own woman if he knew, but explaining it to him just seems like another wedge between them that she can't bear.

So instead she trails around after Regina, Roland by her side, and she winds up in Regina's house more often than not. There are more incidents with shattering glasses and magical earthquakes and, on one occasion, the piano in the living room shooting across the room and pinning her against the wall before Regina can push it back, but Regina is wary and alert around her at all times, cautious and prepared for anything.

"I'm sorry I'm underfoot all the time," she says when she emerges from the shower in Regina's guest room one evening. Henry had brought home a science project from school, a little flowerpot with newly planted seeds inside, and Regina had touched it and it had sprung to life, growing dozens of feet long and spreading vines that had wound around Marian and nearly strangled her to death before Regina had pried her free. "I can go back to camp if you'd prefer."

"I have no preference," Regina says, turned to the stove. Henry is in the next room with Roland, playing video games, and Regina is preparing dinner for the rest of them. Marian takes her station at the cutting board with an avocado. "There's no need to hide in a place where you're apparently unhappy just so I won't accidentally kill you." There's a stack of books in Regina's office that they've been reading through after dinner, searching for a clue to how they can stop these accidental murder attempts, but with no luck. There are few discussions of successful time travel at all.

"I'm not…I never said I was unhappy," she says defensively, thinking about how embarrassed Robin had been when they'd displayed a crack in their marriage in front of Regina. "I'm alive. I have my family. Isn't that all I need?"

"Perhaps." When she turns, Regina is watching her. It isn't mocking or calculating or hostile, just thoughtful enough that she turns back to her avocado, head bent.

And there's something peaceful about preparing dinner with another woman, even though Regina handing her the knife had almost ended with it stabbing her in the heart. She's been living among the Merry Men for so long that she's missed her sisters, missed her mother and their women guards and the cook. And now she can't quite rid herself of the feeling of being the odd man out, even with Mulan in camp with her.

And so her guard is down, maybe enough that she admits to a woman who doesn't give her more than curt nods and sparing words, "It's different now. Everyone's different. And I'm still…I'm the same person. I feel like a child among them."

Regina hesitates over her saucepan. "You are very young," she allows. "But your husband is no bastion of maturity, either. He's a father of a five-year-old, so yes, he's protective, but I've also seen him hiding in a wardrobe in my castle and jumping out to terrify Roland whenever he'd walk past." There's a sadness in her voice that she can't quite conceal, and Marian wonders at it. She knows Regina and Henry had been separated for a year, and she can't imagine what it must have been like to see Roland with his father during that time, a constant reminder of what Regina had lost.

"They were living in your castle?"

"Everyone was living in my castle," Regina is quick to correct her. "It was the safest place to defend ourselves against Zelena, and the woods are no place for a child. I didn't exactly want any company, but Snow is…persuasive. Like a hornet whining in my ears."

"I was surprised to see her here," she says, and maybe it's too personal because Regina flinches and doesn't glance back at her.

When she finally speaks again, it's strained. "We have made peace, I suppose. It must be unwelcome for those caught in the crossfire between us."

"No, I…uh…" She hadn't actually been imprisoned because of Snow White, even if it had been what she'd claimed. It may have even been the reason why Emma had decided to save her. And she sees the way both women are so happy around each other now. She's had enough of isolation to not wish it on anyone else, even in vengeance. "I'm sure everyone's pleased that that war is over."

Regina laughs. "No, most think that I was too easily forgiven, that Snow's soft spot for me is the only reason why I'm not languishing in a dungeon somewhere or burning at a stake." She frowns for a moment, as though a memory that doesn't quite fit is suddenly floating up again, and Marian knows which immediately. "I'm no stranger to being loathed. I'll survive."

She watches the lift of Regina's chin from behind, and it's as though she's ten again and marveling at Regina's courage once more. And when Regina turns back to her, there's an odd look on her face as she regards her, as though she's suddenly seeing that girl for the first time, too.

As she walks home that evening, she sees someone just outside the town market, the door oddly frosted over in the warmth of spring. She moves a little closer and there's a flash of white and blue, a figure bolting through the door with a full shopping basket in one hand.

"Excuse me?" she starts, and then there's another flash of white, a spark that nearly hits her directly. She ducks away (and it's freeing to be able to move when she's being attacked) and dodges the blow, only to stare in disbelief as the wall the creature hits instead shuddering under what looks like an enormous icicle.

She turns back toward it, but it's already gone.

At night she lies beside Robin, watching him as he sleeps. He's still much the same from the last time she'd seen him before she'd gone, his beard the same length (if a bit lighter) and his build just a bit more impressive. She can't see him climbing trees and hanging out of windows anymore- though according to Regina, he's at least hiding in wardrobes still.

It's his eyes that have changed the most. They're still soft when they look at her, but distant and heavy and aged all the time, as though the years without her come back each time she's in the room. As though there are still secrets between them she knows he won't tell. But with his eyes closed, he's still the man she'd loved, reassuring and close and family in all the ways he'd been before.

She feels guilty for it, for being happiest when he isn't quite there, and she rises and pulls a shawl around herself before she steps out of their room in their cabin. It's a small three-room building, with a large bedroom and a smaller one for Roland and a single couch. Their cooking and eating is still done communally but she knows Robin had purchased a sack of clementines just days ago and it's still sitting on the table in front of the couch. She feels her way through the room in the dark, finding the clementines and sitting down on the couch.

"Hi, Mama," says a voice from right beside her, and she jumps.

"Roland!" Her eyes are beginning to adjust to the dark and she can see him now, hunched over on the couch with a clementine of his own. "Shouldn't you be asleep?"

"I was hungry." He chews and swallows, methodical about it, and when she looks down she can see that he has arranged his peel into a long line of orange pieces. Methodical, indeed. "Why are you awake?"

"I was hungry," she says, smiling down at him. She slides her nail into the skin of the fruit, carefully peeling it so the skin comes off in one curling piece. Roland's eyes round. "Do you want me to show you how to do this?"

"Yes, Mama!" He bounces a little and it's probably too late for him to be awake and so excited, but she can't find it in herself to care too much. Not when Roland is bright-eyed and fascinated by the movement of her hands, when he's struggling to do the same thing and she can see how he's already picked up his parents' dexterity at such a young age. He feels like her son today, like a little carbon copy of how she'd been at his age, and they work at the clementines with happy little noises.

They peel too many of them to eat, and Roland curls up beside her, his hands sticky with fruit juice. "I can peel apples with a knife," he informs her proudly. "Little John showed me."

Her eyebrows shoot up. "He let you use a knife?"

Roland bobs his head. "He's my best friend. Except Mulan. She let me hold her sword but I was too little to pick it up. And Regina," he adds as an afterthought. "I like Regina best."

She isn't surprised, from the way he runs to the former queen when they see her and how happy he is around Henry. And there's a full year Regina had spent with him that Marian had missed, and she bites back her jealousy and asks, "Did you play with her in her castle?"

"Sometimes." Roland chews thoughtfully. "Papa said she was too sad to play then. But we got ice cream in Storybrooke. Papa wanted to hold her hand but she let me instead." He beams proudly, missing the way her eyes widen.

"Papa…wanted to hold her hand?" she repeats, cautious as her hands clench around her shawl.

"Uh huh."

She can feel her heart stop, feel her breath catch in her throat, and she feels like an idiot for never thinking of it before. For it never occurring to her just what it is that has Robin so angry, that has Regina so distant and sad. For the way she'd shrugged off the secrets she'd known were being kept from her because she hadn't wanted to be an inconvenience and hadn't wanted to suspect, to consider anything close to the truth.

An inconvenience. And she'd slipped right into a role that Regina had been filling. Roland's favorite. The woman who would have murdered her. The woman appointed as her protector. Robin had moved on from her after all and she'd never known it, never known that she'd been an outsider even within her own family. Robin is trying desperately to hate a woman he may very well have loved.

She still hasn't let out her breath, hasn't dared say anything more to Roland. She can't imagine going back into that bedroom again to face Robin, but she manages to kiss Roland on the cheek and take faltering steps toward the wardrobe just inside the doorway of the room she'd shared with Robin.

Regina wouldn't have slept in a cabin like this, not when she had that palatial mansion with all of Henry's old toys for Roland. Regina, who's so much closer in age to Robin and who has a son as well, a brother for Roland and a queen for Robin. Regina who is perfect, who transformed from her dark past is a woman more than suited to Robin.

She needs to be away. She can't bear to stay in this home where she's never belonged while Roland eats clementines and talks about Regina and Robin is...(who knows what Robin is dreaming of right now?)

She walks from the encampment with the phone in hand, and only when she reaches the edge of the woods does she remember why she needs it. And she laughs and laughs until she's close to tears and presses down hard on the images of letters on the screen.

Heading to Emma's apartment, she reports to her savior, to the woman whose life she'd stolen just weeks after Regina had done the same to her, and she hits the send button before she can write anything more.

Emma opens the door after a full minute of banging. "What the hell, Marian? Is everything okay?"

She stands straight, firm and determined. "Tell me about Robin and Regina," she says, and Emma's eyes widen and her head drops an instant later.

"Oh, fuck."

She doesn't want to go home after. She stands in the doorway of Emma's apartment for a full minute, fidgeting from side to side, and Emma takes her hand and says, "The kid's in his room tonight, but you can take my bed."

"Oh, I…I couldn't."

Emma's eyes are kind, and she thinks she might be grateful if she weren't so staggered still. She feels unsteady on her feet, lost like a string unraveled so far from its source that nothing can pull it back. "Take it," Emma says. "I fall asleep on the couch half the time, anyway." She shrugs, and Marian notices the dark spots under her eyes for the first time.

She hesitates. "Emma…is Regina so angry at you because of me? Because you saved me?"

"No. Yeah. It's…it's complicated." Emma runs her fingers through her hair, pulling it away from her face. "I think we were just kind of in a good place and then I dropped an anvil on…you know. The whole soulmates thing."

"And I'm the anvil."

"God, Marian, not like that." Emma's fingers catch on a knot in her hair and she winces. "I don't regret saving you. You have every right to be here, and she would have executed you. It's some kind of terrible irony, I guess, and she's just going to have to deal with it." She shrugs, letting her hands fall from her hair. "If she has to be angry with someone over it, better me than you. I'm the one who screwed things up. You were just an innocent bystander."

She doesn't feel any better about it now. Rationally she knows it's because it's never a good idea to be on the bad side of a witch capable of great evil, but there's a piece of her dwelling on Regina, standing at her stove and laughing to her, and she bites down on her lip and nods.

She wakes up coughing, smoke heavy around her, and long-honed skills spring to mind immediately. Window. Find a window. She's a woman of the forest, accustomed to the fear that that ominous crackling can bring, and she surges forward to heave open the window beside Emma's bed.

Emma. Henry. She can climb out of the room now, the ground-floor apartment easy to escape, but all she can hear is the faint whisper of smoke as it fills the rooms and a distant crackle like paper being crumpled. "Emma!" she shouts, throwing open the door.

More smoke explodes at her, pouring into her doorway and obscuring her vision, and she can just barely see the ratty green couch that Emma's supposed to be asleep on. "Henry?" she coughs, feeling her way toward his door. The doorknob is cool and she turns it, letting in a new wave of smoke.

Henry's silhouette sits up in bed. "Marian?" he says, puzzled. "What's going on?"

The sound of fire abruptly vanishes, and the front door is slammed open. A large figure- one she recognizes with relief before she recalls the night before- is brandishing some sort of long jug that releases white foam everywhere, dousing the room as the smoke begins to fizzle out the windows. Henry- intuitive as any child of Regina's would be- pushes at his own window, pressing his mouth to the grate as he breathes.

Then a frantic voice, high like it's never been before. "Henry! Emma!" Regina shoves past Robin, running to the room where they're still standing, and she wraps her arms tight around Henry as he blinks up at her. She's shaking and shrill and her arms aren't quite moving right but her eyes are wild and she pats at Henry's back and her elbows bend inward, clumsy as they hang around him.

"Mom. I'm okay. I'm okay," Henry says, again and again, but his arms tighten around her, his face buried in her neck as she holds him close.

And then Marian is being encircled, too, Robin kissing the top of her head and murmuring at her. "You disappeared last night. I was frantic. Regina said you'd be here but there was a…another of her attacks…we didn't see until the lower level was up in flames. Are you all right?"

There's a bitter taste in her mouth from last night, memories of Emma's revelation returning in full force, and she pulls away, feeling unclean. "I'm fine."

"Emma." Regina pulls out of Henry's grasp, eyes wide. "Where is Emma?" She runs back to the living room like it's still on fire, dropping to sit on the couch beside Emma. Emma is lying prone on it, face dirty from smoke and unmoving. "Emma!" Regina shakes her, frantic and heaving. "Emma, get up this instant!"

She's a stranger now, panicked in a way that Marian's only seen her around her son before, nothing like the woman who sits opposite Emma at Granny's and offers only curt barbs her way. Emma can insist that Regina hates her now but there's no sign of it in this moment, Regina bent over Emma, hissing angry demands into her ears as she shakes her by the shoulders, and none when Emma's eyes flicker open and she stares up in confusion. "Regina? Why are you in my house?"

"You idiot!" Regina snarls, hugging her close and letting her go so swiftly that Emma bangs her head against the back of the couch, and she stands straight and and stalks back to a protected position behind Henry. Emma sits up, looking bemused. "You can't sleep through a fire! My son was in your apartment! You could have died!"

"Our son," Emma corrects, rubbing her head. "How did this happen? What was–" Her eyes land back on Regina accusingly. "You did this."

"She didn't mean to," Robin says automatically. His face freezes an instant later and Marian takes a second step back from him, closer to the window where she can breathe easily. Robin watches her but says nothing.

Regina speaks again, her voice strained and her hands settling on Henry's shoulders. "We only realized that I'd done it once he couldn't move." She nods to Robin and doesn't quite look at him, doesn't say his name, and Marian's heart constricts again. "This is worse than before. There was never any risk of collateral damage before now."

"Collateral damage?" Robin repeats incredulously. "That's what you're calling it? Your son, his mother, my wife…" He reaches for her again and she angles closer to the window instead, apparent enough that Emma toys with the string on her pants and Robin's brow furrows. "Marian?"

She looks away, to Regina and Henry where they're murmuring to each other, and Regina says coolly, "This is a consideration. Until now, there had been no risk for Marian at home. But the pressure to end this is intensifying and I won't have anyone else in her path being hurt because of it." She cocks her head, eyes narrowing. "Roland, for instance."

"Oh," Marian breathes, and Robin is still glaring, hard and focused. But now that she knows, she can see the pain in his eyes, the hesitation when he looks away from Regina. She sinks onto the bed, feeling as though the world is dropping out from under her. "What do you think we should do, Regina?"

"I suppose you'll have to stay with me." Regina doesn't sound thrilled about it. Robin shakes his head.

Marian doesn't know if she's relieved or disappointed, if moving from Robin to Regina is all that different. Robin who's been keeping things from her, who has a soulmate who isn't her. Regina who's been volatile and has every reason to want her dead, even if they're actively trying to keep her alive now. "Yes," she says, the same reluctance in her voice. "I suppose so."

They're moving around the room now, all of them in shaky orbits of each other. Regina is phoning the hospital and Robin sits beside Emma and murmurs to her as she rubs her head again. "Yeah," she says, just loud enough for Marian to hear. "We're all fine. I think Regina tried to kill me this time, but that's nothing new."

She coughs hard and Regina is sitting on her other side in a flash, fingers pressed to her throat. "Breathe," she orders. "How much smoke did you inhale?"

"I don't know, I was asleep!"

"How the hell do you sleep through that?" Regina demands, her nails scraping against Emma's neck. Emma coughs again. "Were you drinking?"

"What? No, I wasn't drinking!" Emma scowls at her. "I had Henry tonight! I wouldn't…" She rubs her head again, slumping back, and Regina sighs and rubs the backs of her fingers against Emma's temples. Emma exhales, eyes closing under the pressure. "I just don't sleep much anymore. I guess it all caught up with me."

Regina glares at her. Marian leans back against a counter, Henry rolling his eyes beside her. "That's unacceptable."

"Thanks for caring, Regina." Emma's head lolls to the side, nearly on Regina's shoulder, and Regina softens just like that. Her eyes gentle and her fingers slide over Emma's and she's so focused on Emma that she doesn't see what Marian does from across the room. She doesn't see Robin watching her, his eyes pained and uncertain as he sits on their other side, but Marian does.

Marian shivers in the smoky apartment and Henry moves a little closer to her, his arms folded almost challengingly as he glares at Robin, and Robin exhales, rough and ragged. Their eyes meet and nothing is said with their gazes. Once she could have signaled to him an incoming army by direction and time remaining with only a shift in her eyes, but today there's nothing but blankness in their eyes, nothing but a gulf widening ever more. There is no cavalry today, she doesn't say, but it feels like horses beating out fury against her insides regardless.

Robin and Emma have disappeared into the woods to look at newly frozen trees and Regina hovers in the back of the cabin, an arm around Henry's waist as she holds him tight. They're both as somber-faced as they'd been since the stop at the hospital on the way here, inseparable and uncomfortable in this cabin. With a family that might have been theirs, Marian thinks, and stares back down at her unpacked bag.

"Here," Mulan murmurs, passing her her crossbow in its canvas bag, and she puts it down on her bed beside her clothing. "Are you sure this is what you want?"

"I don't really have a choice, do I?" It's sharp and bitter and she flushes. "I'm sorry, Mulan. I'm just…"

"Frustrated," Mulan finishes.

And Mulan had been her friend, someone she'd trusted, and she's suddenly angry. "You knew. You know about Robin and…" She glances toward Regina in the doorway and the other woman meets her gaze silently. "Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't anyone tell me? I was walking around like a fool believing that…that my husband hadn't…" She chokes on her own breath and Roland scampers to her from where he's been watching them on the bed, touching her cheek tentatively. She kisses his hand, presses her lips to the top of his curly little head and tries to hold back her frustration.

Mulan rubs her eyes. "I would have told you. I thought…it seemed dishonorable to hide this from you. But not yet. Not while you were still coming to terms with this world."

"Not while I'm still about to die, you mean." She shoves her small pile of clothing into the bag. "When they can pick up the pieces once I'm gone and start up all over again." She stares at the two little bags on the bed. This is it. This is all the impact she's left on this world. Clothing and a crossbow.

"I have to go," she says abruptly, and stalks from the cabin with the rest of its occupants trailing behind her.

She sits on the porch outside of Regina's house the next evening, reluctant to go inside to the noise of family, Regina and Henry and even Emma stretched out in Regina's living room and halfway cordial. Which means sniping for the sake of sniping and Regina hostile but unable to keep herself from checking on Emma's cough every few minutes and Henry sitting between them, sighing heavily.

They're a family, fractured as they are, and Marian doesn't belong. Not with them, not with her own family, and she thinks about Roland peeling clementines beside her and bends her head to her knees, wetness dripping from her eyes to darken her pants- leggings, Regina had corrected, and frowned at Emma for suggesting just them- from grey to black.

She doesn't want to think about Robin and Regina anymore, doesn't want to look at the woman who's taken her life away and is struggling to give it back now that it's too late. Doesn't want to think about what should be happening and what's destined for them. Doesn't want to consider the image of the three of them walking together, Roland and Regina holding hands as Robin smiles on. Regina, slotting neatly into her place.

And she knows, she knows that this can't go on forever. That there's been not a single clue in any of the books they've pored through, that the Dark One has no answers for them, that there really is no answer. All she's doing is torturing herself and everyone around her, forcing them to acknowledge her presence as an obstacle to their happiness and nothing more.

She wonders if Regina smiles around Robin, if she'd been as soft and loving with him as she had her son. She wonders how quickly Robin will forgive her for executing Marian, now that it's against her will.

She wonders…

"Marian." She knows the voice, formal as it is, and she's startled when Regina comes to sit beside her, tugging her short dress down to cover her thighs. "You should come inside. It isn't safe for you to be so far away." Regina doesn't touch her, not like Emma, who's so tactile that her first instinct when anyone is suffering is to reach for them. Regina sits as tightly as Marian, the two of them compressed into their tiny spaces where they are alone even in the openness of the night.

She's silent for a while, watching as a few sparse snowflakes scatter in the wind, and Regina sits in silence beside her. "How do you do it?" she says finally.

"Do what?"

"Sit next to me like this. Knowing that I shouldn't be here. That I'm the reason you're not with your…with your soulmate."

Regina startles visibly. She reins herself in a moment later, too composed by years of royal training to act with anything less than perfect poise. "Ah. I see." She drums her fingers against her bare knee. "I had my first love return from the dead, too, you know."

She blinks. "You…what happened?" She hadn't known this, hadn't even imagined the Evil Queen with any love at all. It's easier to imagine on Regina as she is now, Regina who can't quite look at Robin or Regina who (yes, Regina who) softens when she watches Emma without being seen. But before this, Regina had been cold and dark and cruel and she wonders what first love could have looked like on the Evil Queen. "Who was he?"

"Only a stable boy." But Regina is smiling, the same distant softness in her eyes now. "Before I was forced to be a queen. And when he returned, it was here, and he pleaded with me to kill him." She turns, intent on Marian. "He wasn't whole, he was suffering, and I…" She trembles, just the barest shiver in the cold air, and Marian knows how this story ends.

Regina laughs, a hitch in her voice as she does. "Sometimes I wonder if soulmates only means parallel lives. If we're just going through the same stories, living them out, and we happened to intersect only by mutual understanding."

Marian huddles in closer, tucking her hands under her knees. "Are you in love with him?" she whispers, and they both know she isn't talking about the stable boy.

"No," Regina says immediately. "I don't know how much Emma has told you- it was Emma, wasn't it?" Marian nods. "But we'd only started seeing each other a bit before you came back."

But they're still soulmates, still destined, still with this bond that Marian can't touch, and they move around each other like satellites. Never touching. Always orbiting. "Then why–"

"He was a good man," Regina says simply. "Good men have never wanted me as I am."

She feels compassion burning at the back of her throat and it's absurd. Regina is who she'd made herself to be, and she'd sat in a cell in a dungeon and hated her. She'd been mocked and dragged through the dirt and begged for her life and all because of the woman beside her, and sympathy is nothing that Regina deserves.

She forces words out, bitter and hateful as they can be summoned. "And you believe you deserve love? That you deserve someone good after all you've done?"

Regina is silent, and Marian surges forward. "I'm certain…it's only a matter of time before I'm gone. Before you can both have each other. And when he goes back to you- and he will, won't he? Isn't he destined to be your true love?- when you have my husband and my son and Robin decides that he's going to forgive you for murdering me, he will deserve you. You'll deserve each other." She's angry. She has to be angry, because if she isn't angry she might weep in front of Regina, might fall into frustrations and helplessness and the knowledge that she's only a bump in the road for someone else's fairytale. "You deserve–"

Saltwater slides over her eyes, leaving only blurry shapes before her, and she heaves a single sob before she's folding back into herself, shaking with the force of her tears, and she feels tiny and useless and ephemeral under Regina's gaze. She can't think about Robin because it tugs little strings of energy from her heart, tearing her apart from the inside as fiercely as thoughts of Roland. She could flit away in the wind and they would all be relieved that she was gone, and she sobs and sobs and sobs until there's an awkward hand against her back, hovering and settling down and hovering again.

She doesn't have the energy to pull away and the comfort offered is tempting, so tempting, like a girl riding bareback through King Xavier's forest- If they laugh, you just do better. Until they stop laughing- and the gentleness in her eyes, gone and returned again. She slips to her side so quickly that there's a faint "oof!" as Regina catches her, as she slides tentative arms around her as though she's Henry, as though she's a sister or a child or someone worth protecting.

She tucks her face into Regina's shoulder and Regina tightens her grip around her and Marian feels as though she has a center for the first time since she'd come to this land. As though, for an instant, there is someone who understands her, who knows about not belonging and love twisted into something that should be dead. And there is nothing she need offer in return.

A tree branch cracks loudly above them and Marian doesn't know if she can't move or if she won't. If this is another moment that might be her death. But she can feel Regina shift to look up, feels a hand leave her back for just a moment, and instead of the force of the branch crashing onto them, there's only a soft mist of newly fallen dew.

She lies awake in the guest room and listens to soft murmurs from the hall. "So you're sleeping on my couch again?"

"Yeah. If you don't kick me out." Emma sounds challenging, on the offensive, and Marian almost smiles at her tone. Regina doesn't back down, Emma doesn't stop provoking, and it's how they communicate, comfortable and tense all at once. "Or I can go back to the apartment you almost burned down, but I think my landlord is having second thoughts on me as a tenant after he had to send in a cleaning service yesterday."

"Gold is your landlord."

"I know. He's kind of an ass, remember?" She laughs lowly and Marian already knows what happens now, Regina caught between a glower and softness that creeps up and threatens to overwhelm her face. Emma hopeful and trying not to show it, happiness as evasive for them as it is for her, if only because of the way they skitter back as quickly as they do forward.

And then Regina speaks up and Marian's heart pangs in her chest at her words. "I know Robin sent you here to keep an eye on her."

A sigh. "Regina." Nothing from Regina, just the low tapping of shoes on varnished wood, and Emma says, "Yeah. He asked me to. That's not why I'm here."

"Why are you here, then? To sleep on my couch and eat my food and take away even this time I have with my son?" Regina demands. "Haven't you intruded enough?"

"I'm here because you've been- off, Regina." Emma sounds exasperated. "You lost your sister and you lost your soulmate and you're being forced to be someone else's death sentence and you haven't done anything and I'm worried that you're going to have a breakdown one of these days, okay? I'm just looking out for you."

The tapping on the floor quickens, reaching agitated speeds. "Oh, so you're here to make sure I don't start killing people again?" Regina sneers, and the hurt is palpable in her voice. "The savior who can't save anyone anymore, making it her personal business to protect Storybrooke from me?"

Emma is breathing hard, loud enough to hear from the crack of Marian's door. "Fine. If that's what you want to believe…fine. That's why I'm here." Her footsteps are usually softer than Regina's, careless and uneven like the vocals to Regina's perfect beat, but now they're banging vibrations against the floor, stomping toward the steps downstairs.

"Emma," Regina says, and Emma stops. "You don't need to sleep on a couch to protect anyone here. You can go home if you want to." Her voice is soft again. They rock back and forth like this dozens of times a day and Marian's never sure how it's going to end, in fury or with secret smiles or something else entirely.

"I don't," Emma mumbles. "Want to." Her feet shift, squeaking against the floor, and Marian can visualize her shuffling back and forth. "Okay?"

"Okay," Regina echoes in a murmur, and she stands in place, half-obscured by Marian's door for a long time after Emma clomps her way down to the living room.