A/N: Sorry for the slight delay in this chapter guys - I am trying to update this fic every Tuesday and Saturday at the moment, but I had a hen party this weekend so I've been face-down hungover for the last 48 hours... I hope you like it now that it's finally up!

Also, this is getting really close to its 250th review - if you have a prompt for a one shot that you want writing then get in there as the 250th reviewer and I'll do it for you :) xx

Chapter Eleven

The first thing that Emma noticed when she walked into the sheriff station was the light: the room was awash with a strange blue-ish glow, the walls gleaming silver. Light was pouring in through the windows and she had to squint at first, shielding her eyes with one hand to let them adjust.

The second thing that she noticed was that all of the furniture had gone.

A sudden groan came from the cell in the far corner of the room and, tugging down on the sleeves of her jacket, Emma found herself crossing over to it. The door was open, and a figure was hunched on the floor. Emma took a deep breath and stepped inside the room, reaching out a hand towards the figure of a man who was curled up in the centre of the cell like a child who had tired himself out from crying. The moment that her fingers touched his back, the door of the cell slammed shut behind her.

She spun on the spot, flinching against the silvery-blue light that was steadily growing brighter. The empty room was metallic, and it glinted at her. Emma wrapped her fingers around the bars of the cell, shaking them, praying for the door to open. She could hear the man behind her getting up even over the sound of her own heartbeat crashing in her ears.

Through the bright light, a figure entered the room. Emma squinted at it, trying to make out any features, but the room was too bright and all she could see was the blurred edges of someone who had already stopped moving any closer. When she tried to scream out for help only a strangled moan came from her throat.

A click came from behind her. Emma's breath hitched in her chest, and a moment later she felt something cold being pressed against the back of her skull.

She could hear his heavy breathing now, and she could feel the weight of his body slowly beginning to press against her back. As she was forced up against the door, the metal bars digging into her forehead, she peered back into the rest of the station to see if that person was coming to help her.

They weren't.

Moe took hold of Emma's hair with one hot, sticky hand and pushed it to one side, letting his breath cascade down upon her neck. His body pressed more firmly against hers, crushing her chest against the metal bars of the jail cell. A sob choked from her throat.

'Please. Don't.'

She sounded pathetic and she could feel Moe laughing at her for it. His clammy hand slipped around her neck, pulling her back against him, his breath on her ear.

'No,' she whispered, her voice cracking the moment that the gun was pushed beneath her chin. 'Please.'

The figure on the other side of the bars stood completely still, watching. Unmoving. Emma squeezed her eyes shut, gripping her fingers more tightly around the bars. She swallowed. It sounded like a gunshot.

She shot upright in bed, her thin t-shirt clinging to the sweat that was slicked across her body. The room was dark. Violently trembling hands reached up, grabbing at her own throat and feeling for bruises: her skin was damp and hot enough to burn her, but it was clear.

Letting out a shuddering breath, Emma reached over to her nightstand and switched on the light. The clock read 4:06am. She hadn't remembered falling asleep – she'd staggered into the apartment after running home from the mayor's house, tears still dribbling down her cheeks, and had necked a full glass of whiskey so quickly that it had made her throat burn. The fact that she'd made it into bed at all was nothing short of a miracle.

She ran both of her hands through her damp hair, twisting it into a long rope and lifting it away from her neck. There's no air in here. She pushed herself to her knees, tearing the window open and sticking her head outside. It's poisonous. I can't breathe.

The rest of the apartment remained silent. Apparently, she hadn't screamed.

August shook his head at the boy sat in front of him.

'It doesn't sound good, buddy.'

'We have to fix it!' Henry said desperately, his hands thudding down on the table. 'They were doing so well! They were happy. Now it's all ruined and we need to make it better again.'

'It's not that simple, Henry,' August sighed, rubbing his fingers over the bridge of his nose. He'd woken up with pain shooting through his leg that morning, and the longer it had lasted, the more the rest of him had started to ache. 'What your mom did… God, it was really, really dumb. I'm sure she had good intentions and all, but all she really managed to do was reaffirm for Emma that she's been absolutely right to have trust issues a mile high for the past twenty-eight years. I don't know how she's going to recover from that again.'

'You mean, ever?' Henry asked, his face collapsing. August couldn't bring himself to lie to him.

'I don't know, kid. Possibly not.'

'But, they have to be friends,' Henry shook his head. 'You said so. It would make them both happy and then things would get better again. And then… the curse.'

The final word was weighed down with such frustration that he slumped down in his seat, his hair tumbling into his eyes.

August took a deep breath. He suspected that he'd probably live to regret what he was about to do.

'Henry,' he said, leaning forwards. 'It will work.'

'What? Them being friends?'

'That,' August said, his voice low even in the mostly empty diner. 'And the other thing.'

There was a pause. Henry slowly leaned forwards against the table, his eyes narrowing. 'The… curse?'

August nodded.

'You believe me?'

'I don't have to believe you,' August replied, his lips curving upwards into a faint smile. 'Because I know.'

'How?'

August's blue eyes flicked downwards, signalling for Henry to look under the table. The boy threw himself onto his side, laying down on the booth's cushion with his head hanging upside down. The moment that August tugged at the bottom of his jeans, coaxing the fabric up until an inch of glowing, cracking wood was visible, he heard the thud of Henry's head hitting the underside of the table.

'Are you okay?' he asked as the boy returned to the upright position. He didn't even seem to have noticed the bump – his hazel eyes were flashing with excitement.

'You're Pinocchio!' he hissed under his breath, casting a look around the room. 'I was right – I was right all along?'

'You're a smart kid, Henry – I don't know why you're so surprised.'

The boy could only grin in response. It was true. It was all true.

And then his face crumbled as quickly as it had lit up – if he'd been right about the curse, then he was also right about the person who had cast it.

'My mom.'

August immediately leaned forwards, folding his arms over. 'Look, Henry – have you ever heard the expression "don't believe everything you read"?'

'...I thought it was "hear"?'

'Yeah, well. The point still stands,' August waved a hand in the air. 'Your book may tell you all about the Evil Queen and Snow White and this awful, wicked curse that was cast… but that doesn't mean you're getting the whole story.'

'What do you mean?'

'Your mom,' August said simply. 'You know her better than anyone – so tell me. Is she evil? I mean, really – is she the Evil Queen?'

Henry scrunched up his face, considering this. It was harder to come up with an answer than he would have anticipated.

'I… thought she was.' He said after a moment. 'She used to act like it. But recently… I'm not so sure. She's stopped being so mean and she's stopped being so angry. She's started to remind me of what she used to be like when I was little.'

'Okay. But even before that – for the past year or two, when things have been really difficult: has she really been evil? Or has she just been… challenging?'

Henry frowned. '…she killed Graham.'

'You can't prove that, Henry.'

The boy threw him a derisive look that reminded August so much of Emma that he could only laugh in response.

'Okay,' he was forced to admit. 'We'll call that a grey area. The point is – maybe the Evil Queen isn't actually real. Maybe she's just a character, one dressed up and drawn to look evil. There had to be a story behind it, one that whoever wrote this book didn't get to hear about. Because, you know, I always say that evil isn't born: it's made. Which to me means that it can be unmade just as easily.'

Henry blinked, just before the shadow of a smile passed over his lips. Everything that August was saying had confirmed the very thought that he had been clinging onto for the past few weeks. 'You think that if she and Emma become friends, she'll become less evil. And if we weaken the queen, we'll weaken the curse.'

'Exactly.'

'And will that break it?'

'Highly doubtful,' August admitted. 'This curse is powerful, Henry. More powerful than I can explain – but all curses can be broken, which means that they can also be broken down. And I think that's our best bet right now.'

'How come?'

'Remember, Emma's the one who has to break this, kiddo,' August sighed. 'And, right now? She's broken. We haven't got a chance of getting her to even believe us, let alone doing anything about it. But if the curse gets weaker – we've both seen what happens there. Traces of the Enchanted Forest come creeping back into Storybrooke and sooner or later she'll be forced to start seeing it for herself. And then she'll believe us when we tell her what she needs to do.'

Henry nodded, mulling this over. 'Make the Evil Queen less evil,' he muttered to himself. 'Make the curse less powerful.'

'You've got it.'

'But is that even possible now?' Henry asked, sighing. 'After what happened last night, Emma's probably worse than ever. She's never going to want to be friends with my mom after that.'

'Yeah. Maybe,' August said slowly, thinking back to when he'd seen the pair of them walking down Main Street side by side. 'Or maybe Emma can be more forgiving than we realise.'

Henry snorted, shaking his head. 'I wouldn't be so sure about that.'

'Do I smell a wager?' August grinned.

'I don't have any money, August, I'm ten.'

'Who said anything about money? The only stake here is pride, my friend.'

Henry rolled his eyes, laughing as he pulled his backpack onto his shoulders. 'I have to get to school.'

'Nice; change the subject. Very smooth.'

'You're so weird,' Henry said, sliding out of the booth. As he went to leave the diner, however, he turned back with a curious expression on his face. 'So, does your nose really grow?'

August simply tapped the side of it. 'Like I said, kid: don't believe everything you read.'

'That's not the expression.'

'Whatever. The point still stands.'

Emma heard a crack of wood from somewhere within her desk as she slammed the top drawer shut, but it still wasn't quite loud enough to satisfy her. So far that morning she had already smashed her I love Boston mug and dented one of the filing cabinets; both of which she would be willing to swear under oath were accidents. Wrecking her desk seemed like the next logical step – it was, therefore, a bitter disappointment to find that it was much sturdier than she'd always assumed.

Hooking her chair out from underneath the desk with the toe of her shoe, she collapsed into it and shut her eyes. The now familiar throbbing in her temples had multiplied threefold overnight, and she wasn't sure whether she had Regina to blame for that or rather her own decision to drink a full glass of single malt on an empty stomach. In either case, the pressure building up inside her skull had started to push against her eyes and they were already exhausted. It was barely 9 a.m. and she was already desperate to go home.

Without opening her eyes she gave the bottom drawer of the desk another kick for good measure, listening to the satisfying thud of some part somewhere inside it snapping off and dropping to the floor.

'You know: the city only pays Marco for general repairs and maintenance.' Emma's heart ground to a standstill as an all too familiar voice floated in from the doorway. 'I'm not exactly sure that this is covered by that.'

Emma's eyes remained firmly shut, but she covered them with one hand for good measure.

'This may come as a surprise to you,' she ground out through clenched teeth. 'But I really do not feel like talking to you today, Madame Mayor.'

She heard the clicking of heels against linoleum as Regina took three tentative steps into the room. Emma let out a strangled moan, throwing her head back so that it hung over the back of her chair. There was a scraping sound as the mayor pulled out the seat opposite her, sitting herself down in it without being asked.

'Regina,' Emma snapped, her eyes still closed. 'Go. Away.'

'I understand that you're upset,' Regina said, her voice unusually quiet. 'But I just want you to hear me out. Please.'

Emma frowned, curiously peeking round from behind her fingers: the mayor didn't say 'please'. Ever.

Regina was sat across the desk from her, her knees firmly pressed together and her purse clutched in her lap. She wore her usual slash of red lipstick, but it had already begun to fade from the amount of times that she had nervously licked her lips since leaving her home that morning. Everything else about her looked quite normal – infuriatingly so. And yet when she spoke her voice cracked, and her dark eyes couldn't meet Emma's green ones with the same defiant intensity that they normally did.

'Miss Swan…' she started, swallowing. 'Look. Obviously I owe you an explanation.'

'And obviously your hearing isn't as good as it once was,' Emma snapped, folding her arms across her chest. 'I just asked you to leave. I don't want to hear any excuses from you.'

'It's not an excuse,' Regina said, shaking her head. 'Well. I mean, I suppose it is. But it's not—'

'Regina,' Emma rolled her eyes. 'Jesus. I've just asked you to leave. Twice. I know you have a tendency to do whatever the hell you like and not really think about what effect it's going to have on the people around you, but just for once can you please, please just do as I ask and leave me alone?'

'I will,' Regina said, pulling a large brown envelope from her purse. 'I promise. But first I want you to take this.'

Emma gritted her teeth together, wondering momentarily whether she would be able to get away with hitting the mayor over the head with the nearest blunt object if she claimed that it was in self-defence. She couldn't imagine that anyone in the town would raise too many objections to it. But before she could inflict any serious harm, curiosity got the better of her, as it always did. She grudgingly reached out to take the envelope from between the mayor's fingers.

She opened it, and then she flinched: all she needed to see was the first photo; an obtrusively close shot of the angry bruises that had been clawing at her face a few weeks before, before she knew that she absolutely did not want to look any further.

'They're all there,' Regina said, swallowing. 'I wanted you to know that I wasn't planning on doing anything with them.'

'Regina, I could not give a goddamn inch about why you—'

'No, please, Emma – let me explain.' The desperation in her voice stunned Emma into silence. She fell back in her chair, glaring at the woman sat before her. Regina took a deep breath before she spoke again.

'Sidney was following you,' she reluctantly admitted. Even though she already knew this, the sheriff winced. 'Ever since the election… I wanted to be sure that you were doing your job, and I also wanted to be sure that I didn't have reason to be any more suspicious of you than I already was. You'll be pleased to hear, he didn't come up with very much.' She attempted a smile, but Emma's face remained cold.

Regina sighed. 'When the incident with Moe happened… I completely forgot about it all. I was too busy being worried about you to be suspicious of you, and then the more time I spent with you the more I realised that… that I had absolutely no reason to be wary of you. And not just because you were broken, and too scared to do anything to hurt me – but because I realised that you simply weren't going to hurt me. Because, as annoying as I find you, it turns out that we're actually quite similar, Miss Swan.'

'No, we are not,' Emma snarled.

Regina blinked. 'I'm sorry?'

'You can dress it up any way you like,' Emma said, leaning forwards against the desk. Her face was burning with anger, but her eyes didn't flash with their usual fire – they had dimmed again. They were tired. Regina and Sidney had sucked the soul clean out of them and the mayor couldn't bear to look into them for a moment longer than she had to. 'But the fact is, Madame Mayor, that you had someone follow me around town for weeks, invading my privacy and taking notes on every single goddamn thing that I did, just so you could keep a little record of it all for your own depraved pleasure. And you knew… you knew how badly that would affect me if I found out. You of all people would have known that something like that would have just—'

'I know,' Regina interrupted, unable to take the look of absolute betrayal that was carved into the lines on the sheriff's face any more. 'I know, Emma. But I promise you, I didn't realise that he was still following you – I just assumed he'd taken the initiative to stop after what had happened to you. I only found out when he showed up at my house with the photos last week, and I was going to tell him to stop. But…'

Her sentence wisped off into nothing. Emma frowned. 'But?'

Regina took a deep breath, not looking up from the clenched fists resting in her lap. 'But I realised that the time would probably come where you didn't need my help anymore. Where you'd go about your life on your own. And I had to be sure that you were still okay. I… I couldn't just let you be all alone again.'

Emma's eyes narrowed. 'So you thought that you'd just have someone stalk me?'

'If it meant that I could check that you were doing okay, then yes.' Regina glanced up, her eyebrows knitted together. 'If that's what it took… then yes.'

A loaded silence fell through the room. Emma's eyes flickered across the mayor's face, trying to gauge just how much of this confession had come from guilt and how much of it was a result of her actually giving a damn about her. She jumped when she realised that the dark eyes that were watching her were glossy, almost on the brink of tears. Regina was biting at her bottom lip, the red lipstick now virtually gone, waiting for her response.

Emma opened her mouth to reply. But then her eyes fell back down to the envelope that was still clutched in her hands.

'Regina,' she said in a low voice, one that would have passed for gentle had it not been for the angry lines around her mouth. '…you really don't know how to be around other people. Do you?'

The question made Regina flinch. Her mouth had gone dry.

'I…'

'The bottom line is, regardless of your reasons,' Emma sucked in a breath through her teeth, 'that you tricked me.'

'I did not—'

'You did.' Emma's voice cracked, and she pushed the envelope away from her. 'You made me believe that Sidney was my friend. You let me believe that I could trust him. And… God, Regina. Was that why he suddenly turned up at the meeting that day? Was he spying on me then, too?'

Regina didn't respond. Emma collapsed back in her chair once more, her chest suddenly hurting.

'I need you to go now.'

'No, Emma—'

'Regina, please,' Emma's voice was heavy as she shut her eyes again. 'You need to stop this. You can't just manipulate everyone around you in the hopes of getting what you want. These past few weeks… Jesus, you've been amazing. You do realise that, don't you? And it wasn't because you were tricking me or lying to me or taking pity on me. It was because you were being nice to me. You were being human, you were being kind, and it… it made me realise that…'

She faltered, swallowing. Regina immediately frowned.

'It made you realise what?'

The sheriff sighed, then opened her eyes to meet the mayor's once more. 'Nothing. It doesn't matter.' She reached out, picked up the envelope, and thrust it back across the desk. 'Just take them and go.'

'Emma—'

'I don't want them.' Emma pushed the package further forwards until it tipped over into Regina's lap. 'Do what you want with them. Have Sidney publish them in the newspaper if that was your little plan all along. Make a collage out of them and wallpaper your fucking house. I don't care. Just get them away from me.'

Leaning her elbows on the edge of the desk, Emma bent forwards and rested her head in her hands. Regina could only stare at her, the envelope clutched uselessly between her fingers.

The sheriff's voice, tiny and exhausted, came again a few seconds later. 'Please go.'

Swallowing down the hard lump at the back of her throat, Regina forced herself to stand up. More than anything in the world she longed to speak out, to throw one of her usual defensive, catty remarks back at the sheriff just to let her know that she hadn't rattled her. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing came to her. The woman sat before her radiated with unfathomable amounts of betrayal, and there was nothing that Regina could say that was going to make either of them feel any better.

She forced the envelope back into her purse and tripped out of the door, not looking back.

Her office felt oddly quiet that afternoon. People were bustling around City Hall as usual, her phone kept ringing, and her inbox kept demanding her attention; yet Regina's head was filled with only the dull roar of complete silence. She quickly found that her eyes were struggling to focus on anything other than the brown envelope that was resting in front of her.

It was sat between her and her keyboard for a full hour before she could bring herself to open it. All of the photos were in there: every single one, just like she'd promised. Except now, in the cold light of day, she couldn't really remember what she had wanted with them in the first place. Looking down at the evidence of Emma's battered face was already too painful for her to bear and suddenly her whole endeavour regarding Sidney just seemed ridiculous: what had she been thinking? She had known what this would do to Emma if she'd found out, and yet she'd done it anyway. She'd done it anyway because her desire to know everything and to be everywhere was apparently far more important to her than anything else.

Regina threw the photos down onto the desk and shut her eyes, letting out a sigh. When she rested her forehead against her interlaced fingers, they were cold. Her heart was hammering against the inside of her chest and she couldn't quite explain why.

If she had let herself think about it Regina would have realised that, for the last few weeks, there had been absolutely nothing else on her mind. What had initially started off as a niggling guilt had at some point morphed into some kind of compassion – but now it had reached the stage where she couldn't tell what it was at all. She couldn't tell because she spent every single waking moment trying to ignore it.

The fact that almost every night she dreamed of that evening when she had picked Emma up off of her kitchen floor and helped her into her bed meant nothing to her. The fact that, sat in her office the previous night, she had come over suddenly breathless when Emma had thrown her the tiniest of smiles was ignored. For six weeks Regina Mills had gritted her teeth and swallowed down the nervous fluttering feeling that now seemed to permanently reside inside her chest, and this is what it had lead to: the wings had turned to stone, and suddenly she was heavy. She was being weighed down by her own poor decisions and stupid, thoughtless actions, trapped in her chair by the image of Emma's green eyes flashing with hurt. It was one image that was too powerful for even her to ignore.

She reached out and turned over a photo at random. It was a recent one, probably only from the previous week: Emma was sat at her desk, reading through some paperwork with a small frown etched across her forehead. Sidney had taken the photo through the window of the sheriff station, stood on the other side of the street. Regina peered down at it: from the angle that it had been taken at she was unable to see the scar that now ran down the sheriff's forehead, but she knew that it was there all the same. The darkness beneath Emma's eyes teamed with the sharp downturn of her mouth told her everything that she needed to know.

Regina narrowed her eyes as she examined the photograph, taking in every single detail of the woman who had been stubbornly clinging to the insides of her mind for six long weeks. And it suddenly struck her as being funny - because this woman wasn't Emma. Not really. The woman in that photograph wasn't the same woman whom she'd been dreaming about at all.

She began to rifle through the pile, turning the photos over in stacks of ten or twenty until she found some of the earliest shots. Photos from when Emma's hair still fell in princess curls, when her mouth constantly curved upwards into a disgraceful smile, and her posture, though slumped, was defiant rather than defeated. This was the person that Regina knew. This was how she still saw her, how she always pictured her – not as the broken mess of a woman that Moe and his gun and Regina's own thoughtlessness had left behind.

A memory snapped at the back of her mind, even as she tried to shake it away.

So you can see yourself, the voice was low, almost purring, as I see you.

Regina dropped the photos from her trembling fingers. She frowned.

...because that was what people did, wasn't it? When they felt something… they proved it. They made the other person see it.

She still didn't think about why she was doing this; why her heart was hammering against her ribcage; why her normally cool palms were slightly clammy as she gathered up the heap of photos and headed for the door. All she knew was that what she felt was sorry - and she was going to force Emma to understand that if it killed her.

And… how do you see me?

The colours that kept flashing before her eyes were easier to ignore, because they were always, always there: green eyes. Red leather. Yellow curls and a yellow car.

She tumbled into her own Mercedes, opening the glove compartment and rummaging around for a pen.

As the fairest in all of the land.

A/N: I'm starsthatburn over on tumblr, come and say hi! :D