Chapter Forty-One

Regina swallowed, her eyes on the unmoving pen that was gripped in her right hand. The clock on the wall sounded so much louder than it normally did. Holding her breath behind her teeth, she found herself counting the booming seconds in her head. It was a long, slow climb to forty-five before she was finally able to force herself to look up.

'Are you sure that you don't want to talk?'

Emma, who was sitting cross-legged on the mayor's sofa with a pile of paperwork balanced precariously on one knee, shook her head without raising her eyes.

'No.'

Regina opened her mouth, then felt it slowly close again. Emma's jaw was set in a tight line and her own pen was scribbling furiously across her stack of neglected work. Deep lines were etched across her forehead. It didn't hurt Regina as much as she knew that it should do – she was concentrating. She was actually working and at least that was something.

Regina looked down at the stillness of her pen and knew that she should be doing the same. And yet…

She was almost wincing against the sound of every heavy, crashing second that fell from the wall. Her black and white office was vibrating with the sound of it, and yet right in the centre of it a splash of blonde was the only thing that remained steady.

Emma had turned up at her office – just like that. A stack of papers had been pressed against her chest and she had almost smiled when Regina had opened the door.

Like a child wanting to climb into her parents' bed for the night, she quietly asked, 'Can I work in here today?'

Regina hadn't been able to say the word 'yes' – instead she had nodded, stepping back from the doorway, and watched as Emma entered the room with her shoulders down and her arms shaking under the weight of all of the work that she needed Regina to help her finish. Sitting opposite her was enough, apparently. Though Regina couldn't possibly understand how.

Emma's pen hadn't stopped moving since she'd settled down on the couch forty minutes earlier, and yet Regina's hadn't moved. The familiar, comforting presence of Emma and all of her usual chaos was so delicious that she wanted to lie down and sleep in it. The vanilla scent was making her eyes water, and she kept finding herself blinking against the sudden sting of it.

Are you sure? She wanted to ask it so badly. There must be something that Emma wanted to talk about. Regina couldn't understand why else she would bother to be there.

She sighed: two days before they had woken up together, and she hadn't asked it then either.

Again, it had been the smell of vanilla. It always was. Regina had wrinkled her nose, rubbing her cheek against an unfamiliar pillow, and cracked open one eye to the sight of Emma's blonde hair billowing out next to her.

She was curled up against her side, her legs tangled between Regina's and her cool hand pressed lightly against her naked stomach. Regina sucked in a breath, almost flinching away from her, until the incredible fact of the matter suddenly washed over her. It was warm, and it stopped her:

Emma was sleeping.

Her angry green eyes were closed and her chest was rising and falling ever so slowly, a faint snuffling sound escaping from her nose. Regina could feel her breath against her shoulder. She had finally stopped running, and she was still.

She swallowed and lifted one hand, moving as tentatively as she could. Emma didn't stir. Her fingers were intermittently pressing down against Regina's ribs as if she were playing a piano in her sleep, but the rest of her remained almost entirely motionless. Regina turned onto her side, facing her, and waited nervously to see if her movements would jolt Emma awake.

After a minute of only more stillness, Regina dropped her hand and let it rest against the soft indent of skin beneath Emma's ear. She grazed her thumb over it, feeling its familiar smoothness just before it melded into the sudden jut of her jaw bone.

She sighed. It was quiet and pathetically wistful, and it was that which finally woke Emma up.

She surprised them both when she smiled. It was tiny, tight, and it was laced with sadness, but it was a smile that they both recognised nonetheless.

They watched each other for a few moments; Regina's thumb tracing over the hard clench of Emma's jaw while Emma continued to play her imaginary song against her stomach. Then there was a sigh that could have come from either one of them, and Emma rolled away. She began to get dressed without a word.

Two days later she was back again, sitting cross-legged on Regina's couch. Neither of them had mentioned it. Regina's knees were bouncing with the irrepressible desire to do so.

The ticking clock kept knocking against her temples, and she realised that it was making her feel dizzy. Emma's pen kept scratching, and scratching, and her eyes continued to dart across the page but never once did she seem to want to look up at the woman who was staring at her so intently that she must have felt it. Regina's whole body was burning and Emma couldn't possibly be ignoring the heat of it. She couldn't possibly carry on writing so calmly when there was a heart in front of her that was on the verge of breaking all over again.

For a split second, Emma paused. The clock stopped with her. And then she simply turned the page, sighed, and kept on writing.

'No,' Regina suddenly demanded, throwing her work to one side. Emma jumped, a sharp black line slashing across the page that she had been working on.

'What?' she asked slowly, frowning.

'I can't just sit here like this,' Regina groaned, covering her ears against the sound of that damned clock. 'Emma. For god's sake – please, please talk to me.'

Emma stammered, 'But… I don't—'

'You need to tell me why you're here.'

Regina watched as Emma's tired face softened. '…you don't want me here?'

She groaned, falling back against the couch. 'Of course I do.'

'Then what's the problem?' Emma asked, finally dropping the pen. 'I obviously want to be here too – does it matter why?'

'Of course it matters, Emma,' Regina muttered. 'You haven't even wanted to look at me for weeks and now suddenly you're sat on my couch like nothing ever happened. Something's changed. I just want to know what.'

Sadness suddenly crept over Emma's face and Regina found herself bracing against the inevitable pain that was about to shoot through her heart.

'...things aren't going back to normal you know, Regina,' Emma said slowly. She was speaking quietly, like she was trying to minimise the damage of her words, and that alone should have made Regina feel less like crying – but it didn't.

'I know that,' Regina bit the words out. 'I'm not a fool. I just… I want to know if they are ever going to. I want to know if… if you can see yourself ever forgiving me.'

There was a pause. Emma's eyes never left Regina's face – they scurried over it, soaking up every last detail that she had ever fallen in love with. Eventually she had to close them, just to stop them from brimming over with the realisation that she would probably never be able to fall out of it.

'Regina,' she said, the word carried on her sudden intake of breath. 'It's not that I don't want to.'

'I know,' Regina said flatly. 'It's that you can't trust me anymore. I understand that.'

'Regina…'

'What I don't understand, however, is if that's the case, then why are you here?' Regina asked. Her voice was pathetic and pleading and she hated herself for it, but her heart had enough holes in it already and she was desperate to at least try and fill just this one. 'Why did you sleep with me the other night? You don't trust me and you probably never will again and yet you'll still spend time with me? Am I meant to understand any of that?'

'No,' Emma said softly. 'Of course you're not.'

'Then explain it,' Regina demanded. 'Just… tell me why.'

After letting her eyes drop to where Regina's fists were trembling in her lap, Emma sighed. She spoke without looking back up.

'Because I miss you.'

Regina knew that she meant it. She heard it in the crack of her voice. But after a moment she still heard herself asking, 'Why?'

The self-loathing that suddenly seemed to drip from Emma's face was thick and poisonous. She looked down at her hands as they fidgeted between her spread knees; at the bitten nails that were digging into her palms, and she groaned.

'You made me happy,' she said flatly. 'Somehow. And you made me a better person. I… what happened with Moe was bad, of course it was, and it messed me up a little bit. But, honestly… oh, Regina. I was already a mess long before that happened.'

Regina swallowed, waiting for her to continue. Emma shook her head to herself and released a reluctant groan.

'Moe was an excuse,' she said, her eyes still on the white half moons that her nails had left embedded in the palms of her hands. 'You know why I couldn't get over it? Why I was such a mess for so long? Because I wanted to be, Regina. Because I finally had an excuse to be angry that people would actually understand and I finally had scars that I was allowed to be hurt by. And that makes me pathetic, I know, but whatever – I was hurting and maybe I just needed to actually be hurt. It made it all less… watery. It was there and it was real and I had broken ribs and I couldn't hug my son and it suddenly made sense because I've never deserved it. I never deserved to hold him. I gave him up and he loved me anyway, and when all of my ribs broke I knew that I deserved it. I deserved everything that that man did to me.'

'What?!' Regina exploded, knocking her papers to the floor of her office with the sudden force of her opposition. Emma didn't wince. She didn't even look up. 'Emma. You can't seriously—'

'And it's funny,' Emma interrupted her with the flattest voice that she possessed. 'Because I sort of thought that you knew that at first. You didn't feel sorry for me – you didn't pity me. You came by because you felt obliged to apologise to me and when you saw me you didn't look sad: you looked surprised. You knew that I should have been fighting it harder. We hated each other and resented each other and did everything we could to piss the other one off, and you saw me that day and knew that you were going to lose that. You didn't feel sorry for me – you just wanted your opponent back.'

'Emma,' Regina said, trying to remain calm. 'I have always wanted you. Always. But competition wasn't the reason.'

'Then what was?'

'I…' She paused, swallowing. 'I liked you. Why do you think I was always so pissed at you all of the time? I knew even then that we were similar and I knew that I actually admired something about you and that was unbelievably painful for me because, god, I hated you. Everything about you made me feel conflicted, and then even when Moe attacked you and you could barely stand up anymore, it was still happening – I was torn because I wanted to just let you sit in a corner and mope, but I also wanted to shake you out of it because you were pathetic and I couldn't allow myself to keep admiring you when you looked like that. I wanted to just simply hate you, and leave you, and that would be it. But I couldn't. I never could just leave you alone.'

Emma swallowed. She didn't look like she felt any better for hearing this.

'And that's actually the real problem, Regina.'

'What is?'

'That,' she sighed, gesturing to the woman sat opposite with a perplexed frown etched across her face. 'You. How you fought for me. How you brought me back.'

Regina's eyes narrowed. '…how is that a problem?'

Emma sighed yet again, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. She wetted her lips. Her voice was low as she muttered, 'Because I never deserved you either.'

Something dropped like a stone inside Regina's chest. 'What?'

Emma shrugged. 'Moe was my punishment. I get that. And then out of it, I got you. I… I never deserved you making me happy. You could have always done better – Jesus Christ, Regina, look at you. Look at how incredible you are. You're beautiful and ambitious and caring and shit-scary sometimes and I'm just… well. You know.'

'Emma, I cannot even—'

But she was cut off yet again by a voice so flat that it no longer sounded like Emma at all. 'So how do you think that made me feel, Regina? I never deserved you and yet I had you anyway and every day was like a goddamn broken rollercoaster because it was so fast and exciting and crazy and yet I knew – I knew – that soon enough you'd realise your mistake and I'd just end up falling from it. I had no idea whether I was supposed to be happy or sad about any of that. And then… then you tell me…'

There was a sudden pause, and Regina felt that same dropping feeling inside of her. She watched as Emma scrubbed a bony wrist across her face, taking a deep, shuddering breath.

'You tell me the… the Evil Queen thing. The worst thing that you could have possibly done. You broke people like I was broken and all this time I'd thought that you were better than me. I thought that I didn't deserve you and then I find out that and I knew that I was meant to start thinking otherwise – I was meant to think that all along, you hadn't deserved me.'

'Emma…'

'But did I? Did I hell. I find out this hugely fucked up thing about you and suddenly you're someone completely different and I hate you and I want to kill you with my bare hands, and do you know why?'

'Emma, please don't.'

'Because no matter what – whatever you've done or will do or can do – I'm still not good enough for you.'

Regina heard herself hiss, 'Emma. Don't you ever—'

'You're a psychotic bitch and a murderer and yet I still love you. I still miss you. You're still the greatest person I've ever met. And do you know how fucked up that is? How can this ever work? If I can't even feel worthy of a sociopathic fairy tale character… then who the fuck is ever going to see me as worth anything?'

Tears were dribbling down her cheeks and, in the split second where she reached up to brush them away again, Regina had made it across the room and was crouching before her. Emma groaned, turning her head away so that she couldn't look at her, but Regina was, as always, so much faster. So much better. She snatched a hand out and took hold of Emma's chin, turning it back towards her as gently and yet as fiercely as she could.

'You are an idiot, Emma Swan,' she said firmly and quietly. Emma wriggled in her grasp, but Regina held on tight. 'You are worthy, of everything. Not because you're the… the Saviour, or whatever that ridiculous book calls you. Not because you chose to love me. But because you are good, and kind, and strong, and because you… you made me a better person. I told you my secret, Emma, you didn't find it out – and that was because you made me want to tell you. I didn't even want to tell Henry, but I wanted to tell you. Do you know why?'

Emma shook her head, and Regina slowly let go of her chin. She waited for her to spring up from the couch and run for the door, but instead she just reached up and scrubbed at her eyes once more.

'I told you because you deserved better than that. You deserved better than me, and you still do. And… yes, I'd hoped that you'd forgive me. I still do. But I don't expect it. I expect you to get up and leave me and leave this town and, honestly, the fact that you haven't yet just shows me and again and again and again just how much of a better person you are than me.'

Emma sniffed, swallowing tears back.

'It shows that I'm a fucking moron,' she said after a moment.

Regina smiled. 'Well. Maybe that too.'

Emma laughed half-heartedly, shaking her head. Regina watched her, ignoring the stabbing in her knees from crouching in front of her. She reached out a tentative hand and brushed another tear away from Emma's cheek, watching with disbelief as Emma let herself smile.

Her eyes were startlingly green. Her face was angry, but as kind as ever. She was looking back at Regina with love and gratitude and such an agonising amount of self-loathing that Regina felt herself wince. After a moment she tilted her head to one side and sighed.

'What happened to you to make you see yourself this way?' she quietly asked.

Silence began to spread out behind her question, and she knew at once that Emma wanted to push her away again. She wanted to walk away, and they both could feel it.

But after a moment she shook her head instead, exhausted.

'No one's ever said anything to make me feel otherwise.' As Regina frowned, she attempted another smile. 'Not before you, anyway.'

Regina heard these words with such a sharp pain in her stomach that she suddenly thought she might vomit. Without taking her eyes off of the silver scar that trailed down Emma's temple, she groaned.

'...and then I tell you something that makes you think that everything I ever said to you was a lie.'

Emma just looked back at her, her teeth biting into her lower lip.

'Including how I felt about you,' Regina continued cautiously. 'Including what you mean to me.'

Emma tried to laugh. 'Well. I'd have to be pretty crazy to believe anything that the Evil Queen had said to me.'

Regina suddenly felt desperately certain that she might cry.

'That is true,' she choked out, her voice cracking. She reached out and rubbed a thumb over Emma's cheek, feeling the traces of warm tears against her hand. 'But the Evil Queen never said anything to you, Emma – not even once. It was always me. I would... I'd never let her anywhere near you.'

Bunching her fingers into tight fists and squeezing them between her knees, Emma forced herself to smile.

'Am I ever going to stop hating you?' she asked quietly.

'...I almost hope not,' Regina admitted. 'I know I'll never stop hating myself.'

'Well,' Emma said, swallowing. 'Hatred made us fall in love, you know. Or at least, we thought it did.'

Regina smiled. 'A fair point. So in that case, maybe your complete indifference would be a better punishment.'

She blinked in surprise when Emma suddenly scoffed at her.

'I can feel many things for you, Mayor Mills,' she said quietly. 'But unfortunately, indifference is never going to be one of them.'

Tears yet again pricked at the backs of Regina's eyes, and she swallowed. She let her head drop forwards, her chin sinking towards the ground.

'I'm sorry, Emma,' she muttered. 'I'm so sorry for everything.'

A hand gently touched hers. 'I know you are.'

'Do you…' Regina asked, stopping for air before she could bring herself to finish the question. 'Do you think that you'll ever trust me again?'

There was a pause. It felt sharp against her ears.

Eventually Emma squeezed her hand, lifting it into her lap until it was pressed between her own.

'I don't know,' she said. 'Maybe not. But… I did trust you once. I trusted you more than anyone. And, as much as I hate to admit it – you're right. You haven't changed since then. If anything, you've only gotten more honest.'

She sighed, and suddenly her forehead was resting against Regina's. The smell of vanilla covered them both like a blanket.

'Maybe I don't trust you anymore,' Emma said quietly, screwing her eyes shut. 'But… I don't know. Maybe I still can.'

Regina swallowed. 'Not today, though.'

She knew that she didn't want Emma's forgiveness yet. She had broken her heart, and she wasn't worthy of it.

She wasn't disappointed.

'No,' Emma agreed, sighing. 'Not today.'

They sat like that for a few minutes, with their foreheads pressed gently together and their fingers tangled in Emma's lap. It was odd to hear the other breathing again: it was like coming home and suddenly realising, for the briefest of seconds, exactly what home smells like.

Regina looked down at their interlocked hands. Emma's wrists were so thin.

And then Emma exhaled. She tapped one finger against Regina's palm.

'Not just yet, anyway.'

The smell of home got stronger.