Sorry about the wait. Here's a long chapter for y'all.
Regina continued to haunt Emma's thoughts at every turn, especially the sight of her own reflection made the blonde think back to when she had first met the tantalizing woman, how she had reflected in her own mirror, looking more regal and imposing than she ever would. The woman that had entered and left her life in the space of just a few days. In the small moments the princess had spent with the queen, she had felt a pull towards the woman she hadn't experienced with anyone earlier; it wasn't so much a feeling that made her giggly or made her stomach flutter with excitement, it was something about the intriguing goddess that was ever out of reach, that made Emma long to be near her. She stared at the mirror, vaguely registering her mother fussing around her about how gorgeous she looked in yet another dress. She hated dress fittings, but her thoughts were too consumed by the matters of the immortal, that things like dress fittings seemed terribly unimportant.
"Are you all right Emma?" Snow inquired, lifting up her daughter's dress a little and motioning for Johanna to hand her some pins, all the while peeking past Emma into the mirror to catch her daughter's eyes.
"Yeah, I just hate dress fittings." Emma answered absent mindedly, wondering how she would look in an imposing black dress like the one that Regina wore.
"Yes." Snow said slowly, lowering the dress by a few inches again, apparently deciding the short length to be too 'provocative' or whatever word she would use about anything that Emma would consider even mildly interesting. "But you usually hate them with more vigor."
"Just thinking." Emma mumbled, frowning at the strange bulge of the fabric forming around her midsection that she only now noticed. Her shifting and pulling on the dress earned her a gentle tap from Snow on her hand, but her face was empathetic.
"Is it about your father? I know you would love to have him attend the ball, so do I. He would be so proud of you." She abandoned the dress to brush her hands over her daughter's pale arms. "You know what they call the ball on your eighteenth birthday? True love's ball. Of course there's no pressure but …"
"Mom." Emma snapped at her. "Don't change the subject." She added in a softer voice, earning herself another sad smile from her mother and a slight combing through blonde hair with her mother's fingers.
"Sorry, it's hard on me too. Do you want to talk about it?"
"It's just." Emma started with slight hesitance, biting her lip and worrying it for a moment before deciding to take the plunge. She had to know the truth and part of her knew that there was only so much Regina would tell her. Besides; she had a lot of questions to ask her mother.
"How did you meet him… My dad?"
Snow flinched almost unperceivably, and if Emma had been young and innocent she wouldn't have seen it. Now she did. Snow immediately reciprocated by combing her fingers through Emma's hair again as if she was a young girl and smiling. "Haven't I told you that story? I met him on a journey, we had to part, but our love was strong enough and we found each other. As we always will." She smiled wistfully, a hope that her prince would one day wake up and find her again still smoldering deep in her soul.
"Yeah I know that part, but I mean before. Why were you on that journey, why did you have to part with him and why could you be with him later all of the sudden?" The story that Snow told was no longer enough for Emma; it was a fairytale, a beautiful story that the little girl in her still wanted to believe, a story that didn't need a plot because it had its meaning. The story had lost its meaning to Emma when the hero of the story died, now she wanted a plot. She wanted answers.
Snow sighed, taking a small step back from her daughter and taking in the determined look on the girls face. The defiant glint in her green eyes reminded her so much of her prince's that it nearly brought tears to her eyes. She truly looked so much like her father at times. At times like this Snow hoped that perhaps she was able to understand her own daughter as she had understood her father.
"Regina told you something didn't she." Snow concluded slowly. Emma nodded in response, staring back at her mother demanding answers.
"I need you to know. The story I told you is true, all of it. There's just something I didn't tell you."
"Like you used to be a goddess." After the words had been spoken, silence fell over the room. A silence that turned the air thicker than the presence of Regina between them had. Snow shuffled around on her feet, but Emma held her ground, not moving an inch, waiting for an answer.
"Yes. I used to be. But I gave it up." Snow finally answered her daughter.
"Why?"
Snow smiled at her daughter, stepping towards the girl again and taking her hand. "I need to tell you the whole story for that." She said on a gentle whisper, taking the girl towards her bed and sitting on it. The unicorns danced and turned slowly above their heads.
"My father was the god of life, he created the world and everything in it. He created the humans. He had passed away and left the task of life to me. It made me weary at times, watching over an entire world. I was still young, just a few years older than you are now. So I started longing for the world below me. I set out on long journeys to look at my father's work, his touch was everywhere and it made me feel at home. People believed in the goddess of life, but never recognized me walking between them as one of them. It was magical, Emma, being away from that life, that responsibility, that burden. It's on one of these journeys that I met your father. He didn't recognize what I was, but he still cared for me and helped me without asking for anything. That was new for me, something I didn't know. I can't explain what it was Emma, but you know that feeling when you meet someone, and you know they're not right for you and you're still drawn to them? That is what I felt for your father."
"So you fell in love with him." Emma concluded. Snow smiled and shook her head softly.
"Oh no, that came later. I was hesitant to love at first, but I couldn't let go of him. So mostly I just watched him. It was only when he had a run in with a boar and nearly got killed that I realized the depth of my feelings for him." She smiled, the memory still fresh in her mind. She had thrown herself in front of the boar to protect the young man she had become enthralled with, making the wild animal turn around like a meekly sheep. "I had to explain what I was afterwards, and also the reason I had been 'stalking' him." She chuckled at the fond memory and absent mindedly started waving her fingers through Emma's hair again. "He was such a great man Emma, there's not a day I don't feel sorry about what happened to him, especially for you, oh Emma..."
"Why did it happen? You used to be a god, but you abandoned that to be with him, right?" Emma mused, drawing from the memory of what Regina had told her and her own reasoning. Snow smiled fondly and nodded, impressed with the intelligence of her only daughter. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to bear that burden. It doesn't matter who we used to be, Emma, it matters who we choose to be in the end."
"But you chose to be human, and what happened to my father was the punishment for that?" Emma continued, trying to remember everything that Regina had told her before. Snow's smile dissipated as quickly as it had arisen and a frown formed on her face.
"No." She slowly started, studying her daughter's face. "My punishment for leaving my duties as a goddess was my own mortality. And losing my immortality for love was a sacrifice I was happy to make."
Emma froze at her mother's answer, letting the words and meaning filter through her mind. Regina had told her why her father's fate was bestowed upon him, but her story was different from her mother's. Her mind understood the goddess had been lying, but her heart refused to believe.
"But you left the gods, if what happened to my father isn't a punishment for that, then why did it happen to him?" She whispered, still somehow hoping that her mother would make sense of Regina's story. The goddess had been one of the few people Emma had allowed herself to trust and the feeling of the trust crumbling down weighed down heavily upon her heart. "You said it was Re- The goddess of death. " Emma added on a trembling note, speaking to her mother as well as her mother. Snow stepped towards her and wiped the tears that Emma hadn't even registered yet from her cheeks. She had once cared for the woman as had her daughter and the ruin of their relationship still rended her heart.
"It was a punishment, but not for that and not by the gods. It was a punishment by her, for something that happened a long, long time ago." Snow explained on whisper, looking into her daughter's eyes and feeling her heart sink down at the heartbreak she saw glistening in there.
"Why, why would she do this to you –to us?" Emma asked, barely holding her voice steady as she asked the question. "Why would she lie." The girl's voice broke on the question that was perhaps more prominent in her mind. She had felt a true connection to the woman, felt as if they could somehow understand each other when the rest of the world couldn't. Clearly she had been mistaken.
"She blames me for ruining her life." Snow bit her lip at the admission and brought her trembling hands up to her daughters, enveloping the fragile fingers with her own. Emma looked down at her own hands in her mother's and felt her resolve breaking, tears slowly streaming down her face. At the first sight of them Snow drew her daughter into a hug, holding her close to her and gently shaking her. "I'm so sorry Emma. I'm sorry for not telling you, I'm sorry about your father and I'm sorry she lied to you. I'm so sorry."
Emma allowed herself to be held and didn't bother to stop the tears. She barely heard her mother's words, her mind reeling on just one question: what had driven the wonderful, woeful goddess she had seen to hate someone so much as to take away their true love for eternity. Perhaps her mother would be able to answer the question, but she wanted to hear the truth from the one woman that had lied to her about it before: she wanted to hear it from Regina.
She was dressed in sturdy pants and a leather vest, a blood red cape hanging from her shoulders and her hands wrapped in linen. It were clothes she usually wore on the rare occasions that her mother allowed her to train with the militia swordsmen. She held the slim, elegant blade in her hand and tried to stop it from trembling as she walked towards the window, gazing out into the night sky.
"Show yourself!" She shouted into the darkness, forcing herself to believe in the woman that had betrayed the same trust that had brought her to her in the first place. Her voice echoed from the castle through the night sky, but Regina didn't show.
"Show yourself or I … will jump of this tower! You said you didn't want to be responsible for my death! Well you will if you don't show, because I …" Her breath faltered as she gazed down from the window. She had no intention of really jumping from the tower, but it was the only way she could think of to get the woman to notice her, because Emma knew that the goddess cared for her. She had seen it in the desperation the woman had pulled away from her. It wasn't a lie, Emma thought, she didn't want it to be a lie.
She appeared without a word, Emma barely caught a glimpse of her in the mirror as she stood on the other end of the room. When the princess turned towards her, the goddess still didn't speak a word.
"Tell me." Emma finally spat, keeping the blade focused on the woman. A small voice in her head told her that threatening and immortal goddess with a sword probably wasn't very useful, let alone smart, but she ignored it; it was all she could do not to crumble in a pathetic heap at the sight of the goddess. "Tell me why!"
"Why what?" Regina asked, her voice flat and toneless as she took in the blade. The sword didn't intimidate her; it couldn't hurt her and she wouldn't have cared if it could either. The sight of the girl pointing the sword at her hurt infinitely more than a thousand cuts by the steel blade ever would.
"Why did you curse my father? What did my mother do you lie? Why did you lie to me?!" Emma felt her resolve break at the questions, but held her ground as she kept pointing the sword at the goddess. Her hands trembled with anger, fear and heartbreak, her mind cloudy from the emotions flying through it, consuming her thoughts.
"Tell me!" Emma stepped closer to the goddess when she didn't answer, edging the sword near the woman's neck.
Regina could easily have batted the sword away and turned it to dust, she could have send Emma flying back through the room and disappeared forever, but she didn't. Instead she sought she girl's eyes as she answered her. She confessed her sins in the green eyes of a broken hearted princess.
"In the time I was a mortal I loved someone. His name was Daniel and he was a stable boy. He was my first and only love. We were young and foolish and I had never been happier. I got to be with him for almost a year before I was called into the heavens." She swallowed thickly at the memory of the day that everything had been ripped from her. It was the only day she could remember every little detail from, it was the day she had lost herself. "I didn't want to, but he had fallen in love with me, so my love didn't matter, didn't count. I married the god of life and thus became the goddess of death. I didn't lie to you about that." She saw the princess lowering her sword, but didn't react to it, closing her eyes and forcing herself to tell the rest of the story. Her voice toneless, but with a slight tremble. "I created death and granted the gods the gift of immortality. I didn't grant it to him and then one night, I killed him. I thought without him I would be free. But I wasn't." She remembered the look on her husband's face as he perished from the death she herself had created. She remembered Snow's cries, confused about what was happening to her father. She remembered the guilt she felt the first time she brought death, her innocent soul still unscathed. "I had always wanted to go back to being human, but when I stood there, watching death and destruction below me, I couldn't do it. I was too scared to return and face all of that. It is one of my greatest regrets." She screwed her eyes closed to stop tears from emerging at the painful memory, self-hatred burning inside her throat.
"I didn't belong in the heavens, yet I forced myself to live there and rule. I often went back to earth to Daniel. He didn't know I was a goddess, so he couldn't see me. It didn't matter to me, just being near him offered me solace and comfort in my lonesome world. Part of me didn't want him to see me, didn't want him to see what I had become. It went well for a long time, helped keep me sane, helped me remember who I used to be rather than what I had become. Until … until I lost him." Tears brimmed in her eyes and she was no longer able to hold her tone steady; her voice breaking at the words. "I lost him."
"How?" Emma asked on a single breath. Stepping closer to the woman, nearly close enough to touch her.
"Snow. She found out about me and Daniel, about my past. And she-." Regina swallowed at the memory, forcing herself to look into Emma's eyes. "She told Daniel about me, that I was still alive and about what I had become. So the next time I went to him, he could see me."
"Isn't that good?" Emma asked slowly, not understanding why this particular memory caused the goddess to tremble.
"No it's not, because … Because when he saw me, he ran towards me to hold me, kiss me, I don't even know because the moment he touched me –" She stepped away from the princess and turned around, not willing the girl to see the weakness that was growing in her eyes.
"The moment he touched me he died." She could hardly hold back the sob that rose up in her chest at the ancient, yet still fresh memory. "I held him, I kissed him, I begged the god I had despised and killed to return him to me, but he was gone. I wasn't strong enough to control the death I had bestowed upon him with only a touch." She slowly turned around, avoiding the emotions that she would find in Emma's eyes. She couldn't handle them.
"After that darkness and anger just took over. Snow had to pay for what she did and that is why I cursed your father; because there is no greater curse than being without the person you love."
"Regina, I'm sorry." Mumbled, not sure how to respond to the story the goddess had told her. She had prepared herself to be angry, but all she felt was everything she had once believed falling apart. Regina didn't answer and Emma hesitantly took a step towards her, getting as close to the woman as possible without touching her. "But hasn't this gone on long enough? Hasn't my mother been punished enough?"
"No." Regina answered flatly, backing away from the princess and striding past her. She stopped only when she reached the window, gazing out over the hundreds of flowers her former step-daughter had planted there over the years. "She will suffer for eternity, as will I."
"Would you do that to her? To me?!" Emma asked, not moving from her spot at the opposite end of the room. Her voice was soft, but every word of it still reached Regina's ears. The goddess flinched slightly, turning around slowly, her gaze resting upon the necklace around Emma's neck. The ring that had once stood for hope and love, now hanging around the neck of the daughter of her greatest enemy. The sight of it hardened her soul, reminded her of who she had become.
"Yes, Emma. I'm sorry, but this is what she deserves. Even …" Her voice trembled, hesitated for a second. "Even if it means your suffering."
The sword dropped to the floor as Emma couldn't muster the strength any longer to keep it in her hand. The goddess was staring at her, her black eyes unforgiving, but her hands trembling as much as her own. "I thought we were friends. I thought we-"
"I don't have friends." Regina cut her off, balling her fists and forcing herself to keep looking at the princess. Emma flinched and stepped away from the woman until her back was pressed against the wall of the tower. "I'm the goddess of death, and that is never going to change."
Regina felt her legs grow heavy underneath her at her own words; felt her arms start to tremble and the breath being forcibly slammed from her lungs. When she lifted her hands to disappear from the room, she saw it turning to a thin, purple smoke in front of her eyes. She knew what was happening, it had happened once before, but it hurt much more this time. It hurt her in places she wasn't aware she could still feel anything after all those years, it hurt her more than had ever imagined it would.
"What do you think you're doing?!" Emma screeched, her voice a combination between anger and fear.
Regina gave her sad smile, feeling the smoke creep up towards her dark, stilled heart. Feeling it slowly take over the breath of life in her, draining away the magic that sustained her being. Breathing hurt, but she still forced out the words.
"I'm dying."
"You're immortal, you can't die!" There was a strange sort of desperation in Emma's voice, almost a pledge for Regina not to leave her. Regina shook her head at the words and watched as the smoke slowly enveloped her limbs.
"It's the closest we gods come to dying. We exist on faith, when there is no one left to believe in us, we disappear into an eternal sleep. You've lost faith in me Emma, and that's okay. I will go to sleep now." She closed her eyes, tilting back her head to allow the smoke to overcome her, to take her away from the mortal world. "I will awaken when someone finds faith in me again, when someone needs me." She sighed, feeling the cold smoke creeping up towards her mouth. "Goodbye Emma."
"But I need you!" Emma screamed to the woman in desperation, stepping towards her in a desperate attempt to get to woman to stay. She kept repeating the words in her head, like a mantra, a prayer, but the smoke kept swallowing up Regina. Emma kicked away the sword in frustration, trying desperately to get herself to believe in the woman that had lied to her, that had refused to help her. She couldn't. "I believe!"
Regina gave her a sad smile. "No, you don't."
She didn't speak another world before the smoke swallowed her, leaving the princess alone in the room without hope, friendship or love.
Again.
Oops I depressed myself with this one. Please R&R?