Part 4 of Vengeance
Lightning cracked the sky outside, briefly illuminating the interior.
"No!" Two panicked shouts commingled in the returned dark.
Regina bolted upright feeling the bed shaking. "What the hell?"
Panting beside her was Emma, shaking the whole bed in her mad scramble to get off the mattress.
"What the hell was that?" Emma fumbled out of the sheets, legs tangling, falling to the floor, dragging half the bedding with her. "Ow! Fuck!"
Regina put her hand over her chest, using the point of calm contact to consciously focus on slowing her racing heart. She blinked several more times, separating the sharp images in her mind from the dark dull reality of the small cabin. She looked toward Emma, and sighed. The woman was all right, the Chernabog hadn't gotten either of them.
"That's not the way it happened!" Emma barked. She was staggering to stand, hands tugging at the sheets, trying to untangle herself. She leaned on the headboard, finally throwing the sheet away and freeing her feet. "That's not what I said, that's not what you did! You vanished from the car and -"
Emma cut herself off as she realized Regina was looking past her, rather than at her. The shock was expected, but something made her turn around.
The dreamcatcher was glowing, spinning. And rapidly increasing in size on the wall.
Things around the room began blowing around. Emma used an arm to shield her face, reaching the other toward Regina.
Regina grabbed for Emma as Emma grabbed for her. Their hands clasped at the same time they both felt the grip of the portal's effects.
"Grab something!" Regina shouted.
"What?" Emma had grabbed the headboard, but they could both already see it distending in toward the center of the portal effect. She looked around for something, anything else. The door to the cabin stood open.
"Head for the door!"
"What?" Regina turned. "How?"
"Who cares? Go!"
Regina raised her free arm and staggered away from the portal effect; Emma still had her other hand. She tightened her grip. Emma's grip tightened back and out of the periphery of her vision, Regina saw Emma bracing against the swirling air currents, also heading for the door.
Another lighting flash illuminated the doorway. Standing in it was the gray haired man from the office, arms spread as if holding the door open. "Help!" Emma shouted.
"The Darkness likes how you taste," he said. "You can no more fly from your fate than can the Swan."
"What?" Regina shouted. "Stop!"
The man vanished in the next lightning burst.
Both Emma and Regina were so shocked they were unprepared as the portal sucked them off their feet, dragging them away.
Regina screamed; Emma yelled. The magic engulfed and then swallowed them.
Loud thumps and then silence accompanied their painful drop against a hard surface. Before lifting her head, Regina tested her limbs, relieved to feel Emma's hand still in hers as she flexed her fingers.
"Hey," Emma's voice came to her muffled, but the tone suggested Emma was about as intact as Regina was. Regina rolled onto her side while opening her eyes. Few details of their immediate surroundings. The hard surface they had landed against appeared to be rock. There was a vague source of light, because she could easily make out Emma struggling to her hands and knees alongside her. The hand slipped from hers and then laid against her shoulder, shaking it gingerly. "Hey, Regina, you… you all right?"
Regina swallowed once, testing her jaw and her throat, didn't find anything particularly felt amiss, and spoke, her voice came out gravely, "I think."
"Therefore you are, huh?" Then Emma rambled on. "Oh, wait, let's not put Descartes before the horse, huh?" Regina frowned and stared up at Emma who was laughing.
"Have you lost your mind?"
"I just fell through a fucking portal - AGAIN! Of course I've lost my mind!"
Regina rolled her shoulder muscles experimentally as she used her arms to push herself upright. Emma's hands were on her momentarily, but she shrugged them away.
She brushed her hair out of her face, pushing aside the brief embarrassing thought that she must look a fright.
"So, where are we?" Emma asked.
"How am I supposed to know?" Regina grumbled. She looked down to notice that they were both still in their chosen sleepwear. Without thinking she snapped her fingers, her body engulfed in a blinding red flash.
"What the hell?!" Emma barked in surprise when Regina stood up wearing a blue belted vest over a white cotton linen shirt, and tanned hide leather pants with knee-high boots.
"At least we know something about where we are - there's magic here. So we're not in the woods of Massachusetts." Regina said.
Emma stood slowly.
"You might want to change out of that," she indicated Emma's thin linen pajama pants. "It's likely impractical attire for here."
"Where is here?" Emma grumbled. "And when can we catch the next portal back home?"
Regina shrugged. "I have no idea. Now, change your clothes so we can find our way out of here. Just think 'I need something practical.' Your magic will figure out the rest."
Emma sighed, snapped her fingers and reappeared from a fading white flash now wearing a simple gray cloak and blue dress. "Seriously?" She sighed.
"That's obviously what's appropriate for here. I'll teach you more intentioned magic later so you can choose your own clothes. But we probably don't want to stand out."
"Shouldn't we, like, stay put? I mean the portal did drop us here. Maybe it'll come back to pick us up."
Regina shook her head. "Did it any of the other times you fell through?"
"Well," Emma thought aloud then admitted, "no."
"Then we walk. Figure out where we are. Then we will find our way back."
By mutual silent agreement they headed toward what appeared to be the source of light, figuring it had to be an exit to the caverns where they were currently. After a while of trudging, quietly Emma said, "Did I imagine it, or was our hotel host at the door just before the thing grabbed us?"
"I saw that too," Regina admitted.
"Who do you think he was really?"
Regina considered everything about the man she had seen. "He...he repeated something Rumple had said to me once."
"But Gold is back in Storybrooke."
"I didn't say he was Gold, but...he…" She trailed off, recalling the encounter with the hotel owner before in the office. "He knows the stories."
Emma stopped. "You… maybe, but me. I'm not in the storybook."
"You are. Now. After your little trip with Hook in Zelena's portal."
"But I put everything back the way it was! Nothing changed!"
"You brought Marian back here. You brought the Ice Princess-"
"OK. Okay, yeah. You're right. I'm an idiot." Emma held up her hands.
"Yes, we did agree on that."
"This isn't my fault." Emma pointed out. "I bet that guy-"
"Oh, but which of us insisted we had to stop? I could have kept driving."
"There was about to be a blizzard, Regina." Emma put her hands on her hips. "But if we're gonna get to it, you're more to blame for this than I am."
"How so?" Regina was appalled.
"Who came to me begging me to leave town with her?"
"I didn't beg! I asked." Regina went on the defensive. "Besides we also came out to look for Maleficent's child - the one your parents defiled with your potential darkness!"
"Why didn't you promise Maleficent, get yourself back in your ex-girlfriend's good graces?"
"What?" Regina spluttered. "My - Male- what?"
"The dragon was your girlfriend. Are you sure you're not even this magical kid's 'father'?"
"That's not possible!"
"Why? You were lovers! I saw her fawning all over you while you were undercover with them!"
"Maleficent and I had a relationship, yes. A century ago!"
"You're not that old!"
"Emma, shut up. We'll find Lily and we'll both get her back to Maleficent."
"I need to make that up to Lily. I do. It should've been me," Emma retorted. "You're mission is your soulmate - your happy ending!" Emma pushed off the wall and stormed toward Regina before Regina could say anything, though she opened her mouth. Emma interrupted, "I made a promise!"
"I did too!"
"What?"
"To keep you from falling into Rumple's plans!" Regina shot back. "I made a promise, Emma."
"I know, you told me. To Snow."
Regina shook her head. "I swore to Rumple he wouldn't get to turn you into a monster the way he made me," Regina grabbed Emma's arms and shoved herself off. "I need you."
"To help you get your happy ending, I know, I told you, that's my job, and I will see it through."
Regina moved away from Emma, clutching her arms around her middle as if she could hold herself together that way. "I don't care about that."
Emma followed. Just as she grabbed hold of Regina's arm, to demand what she did care about then, they both stumbled in their footing. The ground had changed from stone to grass. Separating, they stared up at a clear blue sky, gazes flitting around at a grassy dale, a line of trees and bushes a few dozen yards away. Exposed rocks from the cavern formation jutted up or had tumbled down from the mountain face that they now saw towering above and behind them.
"What in the -?" Emma cut herself off as she gaped at the sights around them. "Where are we?"
Regina, who had dropped her eyes from up to down, put her hand briefly on Emma's shoulder. Then she pointed when Emma turned her head.
In the valley below seemed to be nestled a scattering of thatched roof buildings; a town.
"Let's go find out."
The two women started down the hilly incline, occasionally reaching back or forward to offer a hand to steady the other. But each was deep in her own thoughts.
Regina had encountered a number of realms in her travels to learn and gather magic to eventually become powerful enough and have all the necessary ingredients to cast the Dark Curse. She was going over and over in her head, cataloging the foliage, and the scents, and the fauna scurrying away from them, trying to determine if she had ever been to this particular realm before.
Emma on the other hand was trying her best to ignore the foliage and the fauna, thinking about her nomadic, but much more civilized, city life. She looked at her hands, thinking about magic, thinking about the "Savior," thinking about how all of it could have been different. If her parents hadn't taken her darkness and put it in Lily where would she be right now? She glanced toward Regina, noticing the easy way the former queen moved through this land, and wondered if either of them could ever have really beaten Fate, as they boldly proclaimed the purpose behind this mission to right others' wrongs.
The path they were on seemed to become more defined the lower they went. Near the bottom, deep in thick trees on either sides, their path intersected with a rutted cart-wide dirt road leading off in either side direction. Regina looked again at the cluster of buildings and, despite the thicker foliage, chose the pathway to the right. "This way should get us down there."
Emma thinned her lips and said nothing.
"Do you have a better idea?"
"No."
"If you have an idea, share it."
"I'm an idiot remember."
"No, you're not. You're good, Emma Swan. To a fault sometimes, but you are extremely good."
"I was never a very good thief," Emma said. "Lily was better at it. Neal was way better at it. I fumbled through everything. What if all of it was fate? I couldn't get away from any of it."
"I told you, we can make this that day," Regina said. "We can beat fate. Together."
"I'll admit we can do a lot of things together: stop a destructo-diamond, cause an eclipse, drive off a Chernabog," Emma rattled off the list. "But fate...Maybe that's too much. Too big."
"I can't believe that," Regina said. "You've broken so many of the other 'rules' I thought governed fate. If anyone can break the cycle, it's you."
"Elsa said I had to accept myself, both the good and the bad, in order to control my magic," Emma said. "What if the bad is even worse than I've experienced already?"
"You mean, too much to handle, to counteract? You think you're like me, easily seduced into evil, because you couldn't recognize it?"
"No. We're alike because you didn't see it. Just as much a pawn as I am, was...You didn't."
"Oh, I did, Emma. That's been my problem. I have known what evil truly was, all along. I'd seen it face to face. I thought it was the answer to everything. And I embraced it."
"But you changed."
"Not for a very very long time."
"I told everyone that Author or no author, I wasn't going to turn dark."
"And so you won't."
"But what if it's all false bravado?"
"It's not. You can't think that way."
"It's true."
"False bravado is ego driven."
"Is it?"
"Oh yes. Your lack of it is why I prefer you over the two idiots."
"You-" Emma had to stop speaking as Regina pulled her to one side, slapping a hand over her mouth.
"Shh," Regina hissed in her ear as her body pressed into Emma's side in the small space between some trees and a bush.
Over Regina's palm, Emma's gaze darted around their location, seeing now that they had come up near one of the outermost buildings of the small town. There were people moving about in the town center just beyond. It looked like stalls of vendors were assembled like an open air market. In the small sliver from their vantage point, Emma saw meat slabs hanging over one stall, cabbage or lettuce, and red rounds she assumed were tomatoes, in another. She heard the jangle of metal among the hum of bargaining voices and saw a donkey-led cart rumble through the middle, its contents books. Live chickens squawked, and a high-pitched voice yelled an apologetic "excuse me!" But everyone simply went about their business.
Regina let Emma go. They both adjusted their clothing. "Now, let me take the lead, all right?"
Emma nodded. Regina led the way into the open air market.
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