"It isn't just Regina who the resistance targeted," Emma persists, gulping down her ale as she leans in, her face earnest and determined. Regina had done something to her when she'd left for town and somehow she's holding her liquor better because of it, focusing easily on the dwarf sitting opposite her.
Well, actually Regina had done a few somethings to her, and she'd looked displeased at Emma's insistence that she wanted to visit the town again, but she hadn't protested beyond weaving whatever charm had upped Emma's resistance to the ale. Truthfully, Emma would have preferred to stay in the castle tonight too, but she can't tell Regina why. Not on this mission.
"It was me. And Henry." She flourishes her trump card, unlikely as it might be. "And it could have been Snow who'd been given that food, too, you know."
Grumpy grunts behind his glass, one thick eyebrow raised. "Snow dines with the evil queen now? You dine with her?"
One of the answers to those questions is laughable and the other is…probably unwise to reveal, so Emma heaves her shoulders in a shrug and clarifies not at all, "I don't really get to dictate the queen's whims." It's enough to make Grumpy's wrist twitch ever-so-slightly, enough for ale to spill out of his glass onto the table. "But I don't blame Regina for putting your friend and a little kid at risk this time," she finishes. "I blame Rumpelstiltskin and the royals, and anyone else who helped them send that poison to castle."
"As I remember, you were pretty helpful, too, Swan," Grumpy points out, but now he's frowning, guilt creasing his forehead and slumping his back.
She drums her fingers on the table, refusing to dwell on that unchangeable fact anymore than she already has. "I had no idea that Henry would be in danger. I thought only the queen was a target." She can't describe or think too much about her relief that Regina is still safe regardless and fights to keep it off her face as Grumpy eyes her speculatively.
"The queen does seem fond of you, though. As much as that heartless bitch could ever," he amends.
Emma nearly chokes on her drink. "Wh-what?" Had Belle shared their conversation with the resistance? She hadn't explicitly asked her to keep it quiet, but it had seemed a confidence and Emma hadn't thought that anyone except maybe Rumpelstiltskin would be informed. She hadn't revealed anything that Belle hadn't already seemed to know, and definitely not enough for the townspeople to be waiting in the mines with pitchforks and poison for her.
If nothing else, it'd concern her if Rumpelstiltskin decides to use her closeness to the queen to turn her into his weapon. Because that-
She can't be that person.
"I was here that day she retrieved you," the dwarf says, breaking her out of her thoughts. "Like you were a possession, like she owned you. I've seen her around her possessions before."
Oh. Okay. This, at least, she can't quite deny but she can counter. "I'm important to Henry. Henry's important to her. That's all." Regina's face comes to mind from the night before, after fragile peace had been established and she'd followed her to Henry's room to watch from the doorway. Regina had taken Henry's hands in her own and soothed his trembling and her own, and Henry had curled into his mother's embrace, both of them content at last.
Two apologies in one night from a queen who's never seemed capable, and Regina had been drained, returning to her room and reclining on a couch in silence. She hadn't beckoned Emma along but Emma had followed anyway, caught in the other woman's gravity field and both incapable of and unwilling to breaking free, taking a place on the floor beside the couch and leaning back in to Regina.
Nothing else had happened last night, and Emma had broken away before too long when reality had kicked in and the awareness of who Regina still was had been too much, but she knows she can't put it this simply and be telling the whole truth. She isn't a great liar, too focused on rooting out truth in others to find artifice in herself, and she can see Grumpy's eyes narrowing behind his glass, struggling to read whatever's written on her face.
In the end, though, it's something else entirely that the dwarf zeroes in on. "Look," he says, looking vaguely uncomfortable. "I'm sure the food wasn't meant for the prince. We don't do that kind of thing. It's the queen we want gone, not her boy."
And that's as reassuring as Belle's completely contradictory reaction had been unsettling. For all his talk and resentment, Grumpy doesn't hate Henry, not in the way that he hates Regina. Henry is just a kid, and Grumpy isn't a bad guy.
Most of the resistance isn't, really. They're desperate- desperate to be safe, away from Regina's seat of power and back to the idyll that a fairy tale land must have been like before. And Rumpelstiltskin's methods are their only hope right now.
They watch her with barely contained hostility as she exhorts them to listen later, and it's only that awareness that keeps her going. "I know that Regina loves him, and that she's taken away everything from you all," she tries, making eye contact with Princess Abigail. She's always seemed the most reasonable of the royals, but today she's unimpressed, sharp-eyed and proud and unmoved. "But I love him too, and I can't work with any of you if you're going to hurt him. I'll work against you," she adds, and Abigail glances to the older royal who sits beside her. "I can't let Henry suffer for his mother or for all of you."
King George barks out a laugh. "Are you threatening us, little girl?"
Not for the first time, Emma really wishes she'd persuaded Regina to just teach her a little bit of magic. Maybe enough to do the whole choking thing that Darth Vader does to people who irritate him. That'd be nice. Still, her eyes are flinty hard and her thoughts only of Henry's safety when she grits out, "You have no idea what I'm capable of."
There's a low snicker from behind her, and she swings around- maybe a magical fireball too, just a little one to burst up from her hands when she's threatened- but it's only Rumpelstiltskin, inspecting his nails and laughing at them all. "Got a problem?" she says coolly, the adrenaline of defending Henry probably sending her to some pretty terrible life decisions.
"Oh, no, dearie, I wouldn't imagine." He smiles toothily, curling his fingers into his palm. "And who are we to question you?" He addresses the crowd with lazy certainty, letting his head loll about freely as they speak. "Our next attempt will target Regina alone, how about that? Our dead queen, and the little one free to be yours."
She can't control the shudder of revulsion that rocks her at his words, and Rumpelstiltskin's eyes are glittering with mockery as he finishes, "That is what you want, is it not?"
She can feel the onset of a headache somewhere amidst all the nausea, Regina's face swimming through her mind, and when she manages to excuse herself and leave, she can't even look at the people she's been fighting with.
She's known that this moment would be coming, known that she'd have to make decisions soon in this impossible situation that she's in, but now she's on the edge of a precipice and to either side of her is a disastrous end.
Her headache intensifies as she struggles on home. She can't do this anymore, can't actively work toward the freedom of this town when it involves Regina's death. Can't avoid thoughts of how empty that feels, how Henry would cope- how she would. She's been betrayed by people she's…cared about so often that she's been hardened by the world, changed into sharp edges and cold eyes and untouchable by most; and for all Regina's similar hardness, she thinks she can still find some gentleness there, some of that last naiveté of a girl who wanted to be loved and still secretly believes she might be.
Why else would she seek out a son, someone she loves with all the intensity of the last two people on Earth? And why else has she given up so much of herself to Emma, unbidden?
Emma shivers, rubbing her temples as she walks. She won't help hurt Regina anymore. She can't.
But to acknowledge that in full, to separate herself from freedom fighters and attach herself to a tyrant instead is to allow whatever her connection is with Regina far more power than she's ever meant to give it. She isn't some kind of hero, fighting valiantly for the people of a town she barely knows, but she also can't sit by and turn a blind eye to the kind of atrocities that Regina's been responsible for just because there's some sort of emotional connection between them.
She doesn't think she can sit by and turn a blind eye to Regina's execution, either, and that's why the pain in her head is building to new proportions as she mulls over an impossible situation.
Well, that, and it's starting to feel like a hangover she might have deserved after all the ale she'd consumed earlier.
Wait a minute…
She swears so loudly that a few birds fly off into the underbrush. "Regina, you sick, evil, woman." That charm. The charm that was supposed to help her resistance to the fairy dust.
Her head is pounding by the time she makes it back to the castle, and she swears that when she shakes it she can feel her brains rattling inside, struggling to break free of the hellhole they've been trapped in. She doesn't even try to climb all the way to her room, not when Regina is closer and she did something with that charm, Emma knows it, and she's really going to yell at her as soon as she pushes open the door and storms forward-
-And lands spread-eagled on Regina's bed, unable to muster up enough energy to sit. She squashes her head into the mattress, scrunching up her face and hoping the pressure will somehow massage out the cacophony in her brain as a dry voice comments, "Really, Miss Swan, there's no need to be quite so dramatic about finding reasons to come to my bed."
"What the hell did you do to me?" She tries to lift herself enough to face the queen behind her, but she only succeeds in freeing one eye from the mattress and sending a sharp pain straight to her temples.
She can nearly sense the eyeroll from Regina. "I did exactly what I said I would. You aren't drunk, are you?"
"Is this supposed to be a normal hangover?" Emma demands. "I haven't had it this bad since, well…" Since a year after she'd stumbled out of prison and let herself think about the kid she'd given up for a three-day bender, but here doesn't seem like a good place to bring that up. "You did something!"
"I counteracted the fairy dust in your ale," Regina says coolly, but she comes over to sit down on the bed, her fingers tangling and stroking their way through Emma's hair with softness that intimates some tiny note of compassion from the woman who is, most certainly, an evil queen at the moment. And the worst part is that it stillfeels kind of nice, damn woman. "The fairy dust would normally mitigate its own aftereffects as well, I suppose."
Emma groans, in too much pain to summon up her well-deserved outrage at that revelation. "Make it stop."
Regina's hand doesn't cease its movements, but she still catches the shell of Emma's ear and squeezes it between her thumb and forefinger until Emma cries out. "How will you learn then?" Her voice is reproving, but Emma can hear the hint of amusement just beneath the surface, that utter asshole. "You've been drinking too much. I won't have it anymore. It's foul and pedestrian and you're better than that."
"You're foul and pedestrian," Emma mumbles into the mattress, but the pain is receding even as Regina massages the sides of her head, fading into nothingness with every magical touch. She's finally recovered enough to turn to face Regina and scowl at her, but Regina laughs softly, almost surprised. "What?"
The other woman shakes her head, swift to return to a straight face. "Nothing. It's nothing." Her thumb dips to run along the wisps of hair that escape the curls at the side of Emma's face. "Just…you and Henry have the same face when you're sulking."
"I'm not sulking!" Emma protests, but Regina is already bending to brush her lips against Emma's, and Emma pulls her down beside her, flipping their positions before Regina whispers in her ear, "I know what you did today."
She freezes, her stomach twisting itself into a knot. "You what?"
"I saw you." She waves toward her vanity, at the mirror attached to the wall above it, and Emma remembers a detail of the old Snow White movie that she really couldn't have afforded to forget. The mirror clears, a face materializing in the dimness to gaze out at them.
Emma pulls away from Regina, suddenly self-conscious and very afraid. "You were spying on me?"
"Checking on you," the queen says tartly, sliding an arm under Emma's waist and pulling her against her. The face stares silently, the eyes shifting to follow them. "I can't have you die out of some magnificent stupidity on my watch. Henry would never forgive me." Because of Henry. Right. Her fingers dip under Emma's tunic. "I saw you talking to the dwarf." Oh. Emma relaxes, burrowing up against Regina as the queen speaks. "You really think that he was involved? He's one of Snow's and she-" She pauses, and Emma could swear it's because she's forgotten to lace her voice with the proper Snow-related disdain. "She'd never let her people put innocents in danger."
"I don't think that," Emma says quickly, feeling guilty about it. Still, though, Grumpy's probably less responsible than she is in this case, and he doesn't deserve to be turned to stone or lose his heart or worse. "He just knows people who know people and can get a message out."
Regina is playing with her hair again, winding it between her fingers and smoothing it down with the pad of her thumb. "I can protect you and Henry. You don't need to engage with the idiots in the village. They won't stop, and certainly not because you asked nicely." She laughs, and it's haughty and bitter and lost. "If not for the wards around the castle, Rumpelstiltskin would have taken Henry from me long ago."
Emma shudders at the thought, and Regina's grip tightens around her waist.
It's possible that she's kind of snuggling up with the evil queen right now, she notices, and shoves that observation from her mind as it comes.
She's back in Regina's bed that night and the next few that follow, and neither of them question it very much. It's…comfortable. Regina is all biting sarcasm and standoffishness and obnoxiously possessive, but she's also a closet cuddler and has a secret stash of actually functional clothing and her face lights up when she makes Emma laugh.
Her fierce protectiveness of Henry has expanded now to include the Emma-and-Henry unit, and she spends less time alone in the castle with nothing but her magic and more and more time with them, making snide remarks at Snow's horsemanship skills and dueling with Emma while Henry fences with his teacher and quizzing Henry on his lessons before Snow can finish teaching them.
It should be tense, but it feels natural, easy and domestic and kind of fun. "Regina never had this kind of childhood," Snow tells her as they sit together by the library windows, watching Henry show Regina how to play Pac-man on his computer. She's gritting out threats at one of the ghosts as the familiar Pac-man death noise sounds, and Henry is laughing at her and trying to reclaim the computer before she smashes the computer with the same kind of furious fervor she usually finds before she turns someone to stone. "Her mother was pretty terrifying. I doubt she was ever given much freedom beyond the riding." And riding, Emma knows, is the one activity she doesn't join them in. She's seen Regina watching from a distance but the queen hasn't ventured back to the stables since the incident with Daniel.
She does seem to trail along on almost everything else- well, it's disingenuous to call it trailing along when she sweeps in and takes charge without batting an eyelash, ordering servants around and ignoring Snow conspicuously. Snow has gotten bolder around Regina and Regina has grown more tolerant, if tolerant means rolling her eyes and taunting her former rival instead of throwing her across rooms with magic and turning the people around her into stone.
It's a fragile kind of progress, but it's still progress, and Emma's alternately glad that Henry's mother is becoming a little less terrifying and uncomfortable for the same reason.
She's glad for Henry, she tells herself, and not for the woman whose smile still blinds her when it emerges. Tyrant. The evil queen, not just some woman, and she struggles to remember that whenever she can.
Regina, whom she can already take down with a sword and who gets huffy about it (while Snow beams, making no secret of how pleased she is at Emma's victories) and then yanks Emma out of the room and makes her scream.
Regina, who never looks more outraged than when Emma steals food right off her plate and winks at Henry, just to see how far she can test the queen, until one day regal, composed Regina tosses her roll at Emma's nose.
Regina, whom Henry now watches with concern and fascination as she smiles around the breakfast table and her attacks on Emma have lost her bite, who flushes more than she should when Emma pats her on the rear as when she walks past her into the hall.
Regina, who reads books to Henry before bed and refuses to act out the characters' voices until Emma leaves the room, and Emma can hear her atrocious accents and exaggerated evil undertones from just outside Henry's door.
Regina, who tips her chin up when she comes, baring her throat and her heart as she shakes in Emma's grasp, and shuts her eyes and parts her mouth only slightly and whispers Emma's name like it's a prayer.
This Regina is the Regina who'd ordered Snow's death, who'd turned her husband to stone and trapped a kingdom in time out of selfish vengeance. This Regina is the one who'd plucked out the Huntsman's heart and turned him to stone for kissing Emma and imprisoned Belle and had probably hurt thousands of others. She's a fairy tale villain, and they're supposed to be a special brand of evil that knows no boundaries and doesn't end until they're cooking in an oven or hanging on a gallows.
They're not supposed to be complicated, and they're definitely not supposed to mellow out and love their sons and maybe care about their lovers, just a little bit. And Emma wants to hate- wants to hate herself, for falling into this relationship with an awful woman she's agreed to help eliminate and who's destroyed the lives of so many good people- and she wants to hate Regina, for being who she was. For being who she is, infinitely more complex than she'd dreamed the day Henry had brought her here.
And as much as she tries, she can't quite muster that hate in earnest.