Chapter Thirty-One

Regina was perched on the very edge of the sofa, staring at the clock that was sat on the mantelpiece. Henry was with Archie, and it was Tuesday. Each week Tuesday, without fail, meant the same thing.

She had tried her hardest to dress as normal. She had made sure to find the time to send her black slacks and crispest white shirt out to be laundered, and now they were so firmly pressed that she could feel the fabric cutting into her flesh at the crease of her elbows. Her black heels were pinching at the sides of her feet. Everything was as it always was, and yet she felt like the seams were splitting and the leather was struggling to hold itself together. Her knee wouldn't stop bouncing.

She isn't going to leave you, she told herself firmly, her eyes unblinkingly watching as the minute hand crawled closer to five o'clock. She's Emma. She isn't like the others.

It wasn't a lie, because Emma wasn't like the others: she was better, and she was worse. She was the only person to have trusted Regina – really, truly trusted her – since Daniel had died and she was the only person who never should have done: anything that had ever damaged her had been because of Regina. And now Regina was blithely telling herself that she would just drop her angry heart and forgive her anyway – simply because she was hoping that she would.

The minute hand was suddenly sitting bolt upright, and Regina's heart stopped. It was Tuesday, and on Tuesday she never had to wait long.

At exactly ten past five, the doorbell rang. Regina's palms were sweating. The heavy weight that had been following her around all week had somehow settled down in her stomach and she was suddenly certain that if she tried to stand up, it would drag her to the floor.

But she could sense Emma bouncing impatiently up and down on the balls of her feet just outside the door. It was freezing out, and she couldn't keep her waiting. Regina forced herself onto her already-aching feet and stumbled towards the door.

She reached out a hand and plastered on her old, fake, comfortable smile. When the door was open and the two women were facing one another, Emma smiled right back.

But there was something in her face that made Regina falter. Before she had even invited Emma into the house she found herself pausing, her slightly clammy hand still wrapped around the door handle: there was something swimming in Emma's eyes that looked dangerously like relief, and it threw her. She hadn't been expecting her to still, after everything, be genuinely pleased to see her.

Emma saw the way that Regina's face crumbled, and she stopped smiling.

'…what?' she asked worriedly.

For a moment Regina just looked at her, her free hand twitching nervously by her side. Her mouth opened with the words that she and Henry had spent the whole of the previous night rehearsing together, over and over, already formed on her lips.

'…I have something that I need to tell you.'

But the words never came out because Emma's worried eyes stopped them. Regina had been a queen once, and she had been strong. She had been fearless. But in that small grey town, she was weak, and she was a coward. She had found love and she had fought for it and suddenly it was right in front of her and she was about to say the one thing that she knew for certain would crack it into irreparably small pieces.

Love is weakness.

Emma was still watching her. The January air was frozen around her and the sky was nearly black, and yet somehow her oceanic eyes shone through it all. They locked onto Regina's and they waited.

They were going to stop looking at her like that soon. Very soon. They were going to glare at her again, and hate her, and wish that they'd never turned to look in her direction at all.

But… not yet. Not today.

Regina pushed back the voice that was screaming at her to stop being pathetic, to stop being an idiot and to just get it over with before it was too late, and she reached out. Emma blinked when suddenly she felt a pair of hands taking hold of the sides of her face, tugging her forwards. A pair of lips that were impossibly familiar pressed against hers, and her body sagged with relief.

Regina pulled her into the house and kicked the door shut behind them. Emma felt her back suddenly collide with it, the weight of Regina's body pushing forwards and holding her firmly against the wood.

'Regina…?' she managed to mutter between frenzied kisses, but Regina didn't answer. She grabbed hold of Emma by the lapels of her jacket and tore the damned thing from her body. By the time that it had dropped to the floor her hands were already back against Emma's skin, clutching tightly onto her jaw and making sure that she wasn't about to go anywhere.

Emma was kissing her back, willingly and frantically, but not for the same reasons: she was kissing her because she missed kissing her. She was kissing her because she was glad to have her back in her arms again.

Regina was kissing her because she knew that she wouldn't be able to soon, and because kissing her was the only thing that made that fact hurt just slightly less.

She wedged her knee between Emma's legs and relished the surprised gasp that followed.

Just as she felt fingers starting to pry at the bottom of her shirt, Regina pulled sharply away. She didn't let herself look at the confused frown on Emma's face as she took hold of her wrist, ignoring how thin it still was, and started to pull her towards the curling staircase.

They reached the bottom stair and suddenly Emma was pressed up against her, her arms sliding around her waist and holding her tightly against her stomach. Regina stopped walking, her body involuntarily shivering as she felt deft fingers unbuttoning her pants. Before she could respond Emma had managed to spin her around, forcing her back against the wall. One hand, still startlingly cold from the January air, crept down the front of her panties and grazed across her skin. Regina's gasp was swallowed by Emma's mouth as she pressed it back against hers, dragging her tongue over her teeth as she rocked her hips forwards. As her hand slid forwards, downwards, and, all of a sudden, inside, Regina heard herself groan.

And then, no. This isn't for you.

She tugged Emma's fingers free and took her face back in her own hands, kissing her blindly as she edged away from the wall once more. She took a shaky step backwards, then another, and began to guide the pair of them up the stairs.

Emma continued to stubbornly pluck at Regina's shirt, trying to sneak her hands beneath it or down into the unbuttoned pants below it. Regina kept pulling them away, catching Emma by her wrists and tugging her more forcefully up the stairs. Distracted, she thudded back into the nearby wall and suddenly Emma was pressed up against her, her hands free and curling through her knotted hair. After a moment she pulled it downwards and allowed herself to stare at the long, exposed column of Regina's throat, moaning as she bent forwards to drag the flat of her tongue across it. She felt Regina's breath vibrating beneath her touch. She tried to push herself away from the wall, but Emma forced her back again.

When fingers slid back down the front of her panties she reached out and threw an arm around Emma's neck, begging her to keep her upright.

'Bedroom, Miss Swan,' she muttered, her voice shaking. She felt a cold finger circle over her clit and she shuddered. 'Now.'

Because it was all about now – it was all about touching and feeling and tasting every last part of Emma before now was over and suddenly she wasn't hers to have anymore. It was about the tiny sighs and squeaks of surprise that Emma made when Regina did something just right – when she touched her exactly where she had wanted her to without her having to say a word. It was about the smell of vanilla and the sound of panting and the feeling of actually having someone to hold who painfully, desperately wanted to hold her back.

But it was all for now. For one last time. And it was for Emma – not for Regina.

She wrenched Emma's hand back out of her pants and, with her arm still thrown around her neck, nudged her backwards onto the last curve of stairs. Emma smirked against her lips but, for once, did as Regina wanted. They finally staggered onto the landing, Regina wincing as she bumped her hip into the sharp corner of the banister, and ricocheted down the hallway that led towards her bedroom.

The moment that they fell through the doorway Regina dropped her hands to Emma's waist, unbuttoning her jeans as she pushed her back towards the bed. Emma kept her hands fisted in Regina's hair, clinging to her like a child, kissing circles around her lips without letting her tongue slide inside. She listened to her sighing, and she grinned.

Then suddenly the backs of her knees hit the edge of Regina's mattress and she was tumbling backwards, the mayor standing over her and deftly removing her own jacket like she was about to start an oil painting and didn't want her draping sleeves to distract her.

Emma pushed herself up onto her elbows and tried to sit up, reaching out for Regina's waist. Two hands immediately pushed against her shoulders, surprisingly firmly, and shoved her back down onto the bed.

'What…?' Emma muttered, leaning on her elbows once more. Regina bent forwards, taking hold of her chin with one hand and holding it steady while she crushed their lips together. Then she released her, pressed against her shoulder once more, and watched her collapse against the mattress.

'Stay there,' she said quietly, sinking to her knees. Emma lifted her head, frowning.

'Regina,' she murmured, keeping her body flat but stretching out one arm to curl a finger through Regina's hair. She felt her shudder beneath her touch; her dark eyes momentarily closing as she relished the feeling of their skin touching quite so easily. Emma blinked: for a moment, she looked sad. So desperately, bitterly sad.

But then her own hand shot up and snatched up Emma's wrist, drawing it free from her hair and holding it down against the sheets.

'Stay there,' she repeated.

Emma huffed with annoyance, her head thudding back to the mattress, but the sound was swiftly replaced by a sharp intake of breath as she felt her shirt being hitched up half an inch, a pair of red lips planting a kiss on her abdomen.

Regina's nails slowly scraped down the fronts of Emma's legs, from her jutting hipbones and across her toned thighs, down until they reached the leather of her boots. Keeping her eyes on the ceiling, Emma bit sharply down on her lip as she felt Regina's fingers beginning to unzip them. She felt them being slowly prised from her feet, landing with a thud somewhere beside the mayor's kneeling body.

The feeling of Regina touching her was lost momentarily. Then she felt the devastating sensation of fingers curling around the waistband of her jeans and her hips automatically arched off of the bed. Without preamble, Regina tore them from her body and tossed them into a heap behind her.

Hooking a finger through Emma's panties and pulling them to one side, Regina fell into Emma the way that she always fell into Emma: she allowed her lips and teeth and tongue to devour her, and worship her, and completely and utterly break her. But whenever Emma moved – to arch her back, or to reach out to touch her – Regina would reach up and gently push her body back into the mattress. Afterwards she would slowly release her again, as if she was unsure that she would actually stay put.

At first Regina's insistence made Emma's teeth grind together. All she wanted right then, in the entire world, was to reach down and tangle her fingers through Regina's hair and hold her against her; feeling the way that her entire body was working so perfectly between her outspread thighs.

But then she realised what Regina was doing. She realised it when it dawned on her that all she could feel was the steady thrumming of her clit; the rushing of blood in her ears; the frantic crescendo that Regina's fingers and tongue were building up against her wet pussy. Those were the only feelings in the world – no soft hair beneath her fingers, no warm breath against the inside of her thighs distracting her.

Regina was targeting. She was forcing the pleasure that she normally allowed to sweep across Emma's whole body onto one single, ravaged spot.

From the sounds of Emma's ragged breathing and the way that her fingers were clawing outwards against the sheets, but never clenching closed around them, it was working.

Regina closed her eyes and listened to the sound of Emma repeatedly whispering her name, her voice growing quicker but never louder, until finally the letters blurred into one long, agonised howl.

She kept her lips buried against Emma's clit until it was over - until her body collapsed back against the sheets, her shirt ridden up to her waist and her flushed chest heaving up and down. Then she slowly withdrew from between her legs with her eyes still closed.

Her own panties were soaked and her heart was beating so furiously that it was starting to hurt her. But she didn't reach down beneath her own clothes.

When Emma sat herself up and tried to do it herself, she smiled and shook her head and told her not to worry. That it would be her turn later.

Henry narrowed his eyes at her across the kitchen.

'You still haven't told her.'

Regina dropped her cup to the counter with a clatter. She knew that he was due home from school any minute, but she somehow hadn't heard him walking through the door. So far that day she had managed to rush past him at every possible opportunity and so he hadn't properly glimpsed her face yet - in the end, though, he hadn't needed to. He had seen her slumped posture against the kitchen counter, and he had just known.

Closing her eyes, she leaned further across the sink and shook her head.

'Not yet,' she said flatly.

'Mom,' Henry sighed, dropping his backpack onto the floor and perching himself on one of the high stools in the centre of the room. 'You can't keep putting it off, you know.'

'Funny,' Regina muttered. 'You never seem to have this attitude when I tell you the same about your math homework.'

'Mom,' Henry repeated. Regina still didn't turn around, but she could somehow hear the arch of his eyebrow. 'Come on.'

Regina swallowed and tightened her grip on the edge of the marble worktop.

'I'm trying.'

'Are you really?'

'Yes,' she snapped. 'I nearly told her yesterday. I promise you. But it's... it's hard, Henry. She won't understand this like you did.'

'How can you know that?' he insisted, leaning against the counter with his chin resting in his hands. His mother's turned back was rigid and fiercely defensive, but he pressed forwards. 'She's Emma. She's different, and she—'

'She might surprise me,' Regina interrupted sharply. 'Yes. I know that. She might. Or, she might do exactly what any normal adult would do and throw everything back in my face and get up and walk straight out of my life. She's either going to think I'm pathologically insane, or she's going to think that I'm a murderer. Which one is preferable, do you think? Because I just can't choose.'

Henry flinched. 'Mom…'

'And what is it going to do to you, Henry?' she asked, finally turning around. Tears were leaking out from beneath her clumped eyelashes and Henry didn't quite know how they had gotten there. 'Have you even thought about it? If I tell her, and she leaves me - if she leaves us? Are you going to be able to stand the sight of her stupid little car clattering away across the town line and never coming back again? Or will you hate me more than ever, because I'm the one who drove her to do it?'

Henry blinked, his mouth gaping open. 'I don't hate you, Mom. I've never hated you.'

'But you will,' she choked out, her glassy eyes rolling up to look at the ceiling. 'And so will she. Do you really think that I can deal with any of that?'

Henry considered this. His young face crumpled into a frown as he did so.

But eventually he took a breath, and he spoke as quietly as he could.

'You're my mom,' he said. Regina glanced back down at him, her face pinching with surprise. 'So's Emma, I know. But you're… you're my mom. And if she leaves me, it'll kill me. It'll kill us both. But if she does, then that's her choice. Because if she told you something like this, you would never leave me because of it. You wouldn't abandon me. You're my mom and you love me and you would stick by me whatever happens – so if she decides to leave, then it'll hurt, but it won't be your fault. It'll be her fault, because obviously she isn't my mom after all.'

Regina felt her throat close up. Something was making her palms itch and her stomach hurt.

'You…' she choked out, shaking her head. 'You mean that?'

She watched as her son nodded with absolute certainty. 'She won't leave, Mom. She loves us both and she won't leave us.'

'But you really…?'

'Yes,' he said firmly. 'I would stick by you over her. I wouldn't go with her. I wouldn't go after her. If she leaves, it's up to her to come back.'

He watched his mother's fingers twitching anxiously by her sides, like she was reaching out for something that wasn't there. A sad, grateful smile was twisting at her lips.

After a moment she held out a hand.

'Will you come here?' she asked quietly. Henry leapt down from his seat and scurried over to her.

As he hugged her he realised just how easily their bodies melded together. His head rested perfectly in the dip of her shoulder, and her arms locked so very neatly around him. It was a dance that they had been perfecting for nearly eleven years and finally, it had come down to this. This one moment where he was holding her and she was holding him back.

'I will tell her,' she said as firmly as she could manage.

He squeezed her waist. 'I know.'

'Soon.'

'I know.'

The moment that she was certain that Henry was asleep, Regina crept back downstairs into her office and shut the door behind her.

The photo album had been sat on her desk all day. She had tried to force herself to open it that morning, before Henry had woken up, but she had failed. Just like she had failed, again and again, to just tell Emma the truth.

She picked up the book and carried it over to the couch. For the next ten minutes it simply sat in her lap, unopened. Her fingers curled around it like she wanted to rip it in half.

It took a moment for her to realise just how pathetic she was actually being.

It's a photo album, she scolded herself, peeling open the front cover. Not a time bomb.

She had already seen the first few pages, but they still sent a jolt of guilt ricocheting through her. She often forgot how small and thin Emma actually was, but looking at photos of her - where she was forever smaller than the other children surrounding her, wearing clothes that were too big for her, with wide green eyes that seemed alien in her head and straggly blonde hair that no one was bothering to cut – it felt like a slap in the face. Emma had always been ever so slightly damaged, and Regina hardly needed reminding of it. But she turned the pages anyway. She ploughed through Emma's life and forced herself to look down at the shadow that she herself had cast upon it without a second thought.

Emma got older, and taller, but the downwards turn of her lips never seemed to lessen. The tiny, faint bruises that at first Regina managed to convince herself were just smears on the photograph, or streaks of mud across her arms and shoulders, grew larger and darker and much harder to overlook. Emma's eyes seemed less green somehow. Her hair stayed long and tangled.

And then there was a gap. Emma must have hit sixteen, vanished from the foster system, and met Henry's father.

There was one page with a single word scrawled across it.

(Neal)

And then she was in Storybrooke.

Somehow ten years had passed with no vacations; no Christmases; no drunken snapshots in bars with friends. Ten years of being alone – more utterly alone than even Regina herself could imagine – had crawled by while Emma had hit the streets of one grimy city after another, tracking down people who didn't deserve their families and making sure that they would never hurt them again. Then she would go home alone, to an apartment filled with boxes, and curl up in a bed that had only ever seen another person in the shady, lonely hours of the night.

That was when Henry had shown up at her door and thrown a startling light across her life. It was then that the photos reappeared.

Sidney had taken more than Regina had realised, and she held her breath as she looked through every last one of them: Emma walking down Main Street, awkwardly chatting with her son. Emma sat in Granny's laughing with Ruby and, later, with August. Emma at work in the first job that she'd ever had that involved her staying in one place, without her feeling desperate to leave.

Emma talking to Mary Margaret. Emma talking to Graham.

Regina turned that page quickly, feeling the paper burning beneath her fingers.

When the photos that were taken after Moe's attack came through, it hurt to look down at them: somehow, at some point over the last few months, Regina had managed to convince herself that Emma hadn't been quite as broken by it as she thought she had. She hadn't gotten that thin. Her ribs had healed much quicker than she remembered.

But in the photos the bruises were fresh and her collar bone was sticking out and the flesh on her face was raised and purple and almost sickly green around her eyes. She skulked through Storybrooke when the sun was barely out with sunken eyes and hands that were always fiercely bunched into fists. She wasn't chatting with Henry anymore and August was the only person brave enough to go and find her.

Until the photos with Regina in them started to appear.

She drank them in. She saw the way that Emma had organised them; deliberately going from their early awkwardness to their rapid hatred of one another, where their eyes were sharp and angry and their posture was rigid. Where Henry was nowhere to be seen because they were too busy fighting over him to actually notice where he had wandered off to.

She reached the final page faster than she thought, with sharp tears clinging to the back of her throat and the skin of her palms tingling.

It was the only photo of all three of them: Regina, and Emma, and Henry. They were stood outside City Hall and Regina immediately recognised it as being the day of the sheriff's election. She remembered the conversation – she remembered being cruel to the both of them.

But Emma's posture was somehow almost relaxed, and Regina was leaning towards her. Henry stood between the both of them, perfectly equidistant, with his eyes filled with utter amusement as he looked straight up at them both. At his mothers, as they bickered and sniped and belittled.

Regina was smirking. Emma was almost smiling. Their eyes were filled with fire.

Regina felt herself starting to laugh as she realised that it almost looked like a family portrait. A tangled, dysfunctional family that couldn't agree on anything. Then the laughter died in her throat and she felt a sudden punch of realisation in her stomach, hard enough to make her vision swim.

This was a family photo. To Emma, that was precisely it: they were all that she had, and all that she loved. That was exactly why it was the final photo in that entire book.

She was their happy ending, somehow. Regina and Henry had been the light in her darkened room.

Regina choked, slamming the book shut. It felt electric between her fingers as she lifted it closer to her face. It smelt of vanilla.

She heard herself howling, the tears starting to fall hot and fast, just as she raised the book above her head and flung it across the room with as much strength as she could summon. It spiralled through the air and hit the mirror with a crack that made her bones shudder.

Glass rained down on the carpet just as Regina herself slid from the couch, pressing her face to her knees as the tears started to choke her. Her body shook with them. For the first time, she didn't try and smother them. She let the sound come out of her without a thought for how loud or shameful or pathetic she sounded – she let herself cry for Emma and for her son and for herself until footsteps began to pad down the staircase.

Henry opened the door, saw the smashed glass, and crept over to her side without a word. She was shaking with sobs as he wound his arms around her shoulders.

'Mom…'

'I'm sorry, Henry,' she choked out, her face still buried against her knees. Her toes curled with shame against the carpet, her whole body aching under the weight of it. 'I'm so, so sorry.'

'It's okay,' he murmured, pressing his face against her arm. He didn't ask what she was sorry for. 'It's okay. I promise.'

She sucked in a breath, hearing it crackle in her throat, and tried to lift her head. Her eyes immediately found the broken glass, and she moaned.

'Oh god…'

'Mom,' Henry said firmly, squeezing her to him. 'It's okay. We'll clear it up.'

'It's not…'

'It's okay,' he repeated, because he had nothing else to say. 'It's okay.'

Regina tried to breathe. 'Emma's photos… they…'

'We'll fix it,' Henry said. 'All of it. Everything.'

Regina looked round at him.

'Everything?' she asked, her voice cracking.

'Everything,' he said. His voice was strong, and it startled her.

She wetted her lips, even though they were already smeared with salty tears, and tried to nod. He was wrong, but still she nodded.

Henry took a breath, then reached out towards the coffee table. Regina looked down, saw her cell phone in his hand, and felt her whole body start to hurt.

'Henry…'

'The longer you leave it,' he said quietly, holding it in front of her, 'the worse it'll get. For everyone.'

She knew that he was right, of course. But the thought of it still made her jaw clench until it hurt, and her eyes began to sting again.

'I wouldn't forgive me,' she said softly. 'If I were her.'

Henry shrugged. 'I did.'

Regina offered him a weak smile. 'Because you're special, Henry.'

'So is she,' he said, glancing down at the phone. 'And you know it.'

Regina looked down at the phone. He was right – so impossibly, infuriatingly right. And yet his utter naivety was still blinding him. Emma wouldn't forgive her. She knew it, without a shadow of doubt.

But she took the phone from her son's unshaking hands even so. She typed the message before she could start to let herself think again.

Can I see you tomorrow?

Emma always replied quickly, but the twenty seconds where Regina was kept waiting made her feel like she was walking towards the gallows.

Sure, she sent back. Your place?

Regina sucked in a breath through her teeth.

No, she wrote. Henry was reading over her shoulder and he watched as she paused. His hand found her elbow. She closed her eyes and finished. I think we have to go somewhere else for this.

A/N: I know it's taken a while but try and keep your titties on, everyone - because oh IT'S A COMING