Chapter Forty-Three

The door slammed shut behind them, and for a moment Emma simply looked around her. It had never ceased being unusual to her just how familiar Regina's house had become: even now, after weeks of painstakingly avoiding it, its pristine surfaces and constant smell of home cooking couldn't fail to make the corners of her mouth twitch slightly upwards. She forced her hands into the pockets of her jeans and sighed, her eyes fixed on the closed kitchen door and the wafting scent of tomato sauce that was curling out from beneath it.

It took a few moments and a small cough from Henry for her to remember that there was somebody else with her.

'You okay, kid?' she asked, turning to look at him. He nodded, and then began to walk over towards the stairs. 'Where are you going?'

'Upstairs,' he replied, leaping onto the first step. 'Homework.'

'But don't you—?'

'Loads of homework,' he interrupted without looking back at her. She could tell, somehow, that he was grinning wickedly.

She rolled her eyes as he took the rest of the staircase two at a time and then shot across the upstairs hallway. There was a pause, and then a bang that told everyone within a radius of four houses that he was in his bedroom.

Emma winced, closing her eyes. For a moment there was nothing. And then—

'Henry?' A voice called from behind the kitchen door. 'Is that you?'

I'm going to kill him.

When there was no answer from the hallway, Emma heard Regina sigh and then place something back onto the counter. The footsteps that followed made Emma's stomach turn, and she found herself edging backwards. Her body was turning back towards the front door of its own accord and before she knew it her hand had reached out and was desperately grasping for the door handle.

But then she heard a sharp intake of breath from somewhere behind her and she froze, her shoulders forming a rigid line beneath her red jacket.

'…Emma?'

Emma inwardly groaned, her stomach flipping over and over again like it was a cork bobbing through the high tide. Eventually she forced herself to turn back around, her eyes seeking out Regina's from across the hall. Regina was stood completely still, her hands still pressed flat against her apron from where she'd been wiping them clean. The kitchen door was swinging back and forth behind her.

Emma swallowed. 'Hi.'

Silence stretched out once more and Regina looked like she was painfully battling with the amount of questions that she wanted to ask.

Why are you here?

How did you get in?

Is everything okay? Where's Henry?

But a thud from upstairs as Henry dropped his brimming backpack onto the floor answered most of them for her. Wetting her lips, Regina took a shaky step backwards and swung the kitchen door open again with the flat of her palm.

'Do you… want to come in?' she asked quietly.

After a beat Emma shrugged, like she didn't care either way. But, without being asked twice, she still took a shaky step forwards with her heart pounding out its usual drumbeat somewhere around her temples.

As she squeezed past Regina and into the kitchen she felt a sudden intake of breath from beside her. She didn't look around, knowing without a doubt that Regina would be flushed pink and dizzy from the unfamiliar scent of vanilla.

Emma found herself stood in the centre of the kitchen with her arms hanging awkwardly by her sides. The smell of Regina's cooking engulfed her and, with a cold rumble of her stomach, she was forced to remember just how much she had missed it. A stream of awkward dinners with her roommate-come-mother flashed past her in a whirl of uneaten food and unspoken words and she found herself looking longingly towards the stove, where two saucepans were brimming full of sauce.

Regina edged around her and, following her gaze, quietly offered, 'I'm making lasagne.'

Emma couldn't help but laugh. 'Of course you are.'

'It's Henry's favourite,' Regina smiled. 'And mine too.'

'And mine,' Emma said without thinking. She froze automatically. Regina paused, waiting for her to say something more, but nothing seemed to be coming. After a few moments she let out a light, tinkling laughter that was so unlike her usual chuckle that Emma found herself jumping.

'I've been meaning to make it for weeks,' Regina said. 'It's funny how I ended up doing it tonight.'

'Why's that?'

'Because now you're here,' Regina said softly.

Drawing herself up and out of her usual slouch, Emma said flatly, 'I didn't say that I was staying for dinner.'

She watched with some satisfaction as Regina instantly deflated. 'Oh. I'm… I'm sorry. I thought that the invitation was obvious.'

'It was,' Emma said, slightly less aggressively. 'I just never accepted it.'

Regina looked down at the floor for a moment, her eyes momentarily stinging. After a moment Emma heard her mutter, 'What if I told you that I was making garlic bread too?'

There was a pause. And then, '…really?'

When Regina looked up again that familiar glint had found its way firmly back into her eye. 'Absolutely. And lots of it.'

Emma looked longingly back at the sauce that was bubbling away on the stove. 'Oh. Well. I don't…'

'Would you like a glass of wine?' Regina interrupted, forcing a smile. Immediately Emma relaxed: wine, at least, was an obvious choice.

She watched as Regina neatly poured out the glass of rich merlot, her hand trembling only slightly against the glass. She handed it to Emma without meeting her eye and quickly turned back to the stove, her cheeks burning. While she was looking away Emma slowly lowered herself down onto the nearest bar stool, biting her lip against the sudden urge to smile.

Neither one of them spoke as Regina began to carefully layer up sheets of pasta with the swirl of red and white sauces. Emma allowed her eyes to trace over every part of Regina, safe in the knowledge that she couldn't see her and that, even if she could, she probably wouldn't have stopped her. She followed the decisive line of her arm as it spooned the thick sauce into the dish; the violin curve of her waist beneath her white shirt as she turned and bent and moved. She watched the way that her fiercely dark hair teased against the base of her neck with every movement that she made; a shadow that tiptoed across her flesh. She watched her endlessly, without once registering that Regina probably wasn't looking back over her shoulder because she could already feel the fierce burn of eyes that were sometimes blue and sometimes green against her spine, and she didn't want it to go away again.

Regina shivered, somehow warm.

They both knew that the silence had to end at some point. It was only a question of who decided to break the spell.

They both got their answer only a beat and a half later, when Emma suddenly exhaled as though she were trying to empty her lungs completely. Straightening up from where she had been gently pushing the lasagne dish into the oven, Regina swallowed and braced herself.

When she turned to face Emma, she was no longer looking at her.

'So Henry said something weird.'

Regina forced a smile. 'Henry says a lot of things that are out of the ordinary.'

'True,' Emma sighed. 'This one was pretty good though. In fact, I almost laughed.'

Regina winced: Emma did not look like she had been laughing about anything.

'What… what was it?'

'We were chatting,' Emma said flatly, her gaze swimming in her glass of wine. 'About the Evil Queen and the curse and stuff. As you do.'

'...right.'

'And he said the funniest thing,' Emma forced out a chuckle that almost sounded painful. 'He was talking about August, and their plan to keep us together. Operation Scallop, or something.'

'Lobster,' Regina said quietly.

'And apparently,' Emma continued, 'they had this great idea as to how all of this shit was going to go off. How I was going to find out the truth. And it was pretty interesting, actually. It really got me thinking.'

Regina's face crumpled into a frown. She had a fairly good idea as to what was coming next – it was almost inevitable that at some point Emma would find herself wondering this. And yet… the disappointment in her voice. It didn't make sense.

'Emma…?'

'Why didn't it happen, Regina?' Emma suddenly snapped, not longer laughing or even pretending to. Regina winced – not at her tone, or even at her question, but at the sharp look in her eyes that told her without question that Emma was fighting back tears. She was blinking quickly and her hands were clenched into fists on top of the table. Everything about her told Regina that was fighting against the cracks through her own body and yet she had no idea where they had even resurfaced from.

'Why didn't what—?'

'You loved me!' Emma demanded, shaking her head. 'And I sure as hell loved you. So why didn't it work? What did I do wrong?'

'Why didn't what work?'

And suddenly Emma was out of her chair, storming across the kitchen so that she could push her lips against Regina's. They were harsh and challenging at first, and then they became softer. But when Emma pulled away again, leaving Regina confused and not quite sure of whether the lips that were still tingling in her face actually belonged to her, her expression was just as flat and determined as it had been when she'd first sat down in her chair.

'I always knew that fairytales were full of complete bullshit,' Emma said coldly, taking two steps backwards and scooping up her wine glass. 'You might be the real Queen, but even you can't pretend that the rest of that crap is real.'

She met Regina's eye and saw the defeated, swirling confusion there. She sighed, draining her glass, and leaned back against the nearest counter.

'True Love's Kiss, Regina,' she said quietly. 'It doesn't exist.'

And there was that cold dropping sensation in Regina's stomach again; something that she had become so very used to over the last few weeks.

Swallowing, she forced herself to meet Emma's accusatory gaze.

'I'm afraid that it does,' she sighed. 'Your parents are endlessly keen to prove that.'

Emma smiled bitterly. 'But your curse is still going, isn't it? So obviously—'

'Emma,' Regina said gently, shaking her head. 'Come on. You know that's not the reason.'

'Do I?' Emma bit out. 'Because I loved the hell out of you, Regina. I have never felt like that about anyone before in my whole life. So unless there's something else I don't know about you – maybe you were actually just monitoring me for some crackpot government cloning experiment or something, I don't know. All I know is that you can't possibly have loved me as much as I thought because—'

'No,' Regina cut straight over the top of her, shaking her head. 'No, Emma. Do not ever say that. I told you the truth, okay? I told you the one thing that I knew would make you leave me and I did that because I loved you more than I had ever thought was possible.'

'Then what was it?' Emma asked, sounding less angry now but infinitely more frustrated. 'What did I do? I'm… I'm the Saviour, aren't I? Surely if anyone can kiss a curse away, it has to be me.'

Regina smiled weakly. 'You didn't do anything, Emma. You just… you loved me.'

'Right. I don't get it.'

'You loved me,' Regina pressed. 'Or, you thought you loved me. You loved someone, at any rate, but it wasn't someone that you actually knew.'

'How can you say that?' Emma demanded. 'Of course I knew you. I—'

'You didn't, Emma,' Regina said sadly. 'And that wasn't your fault – it was always mine. You didn't know about my childhood because I could never tell you about it. You didn't really know about Daniel because I could never tell you the truth about him either. Everything that I ever told you was a half-truth at best because there was always an entire existence that I had to try and hide from you. You loved me, but only some shadow of me. And so how could that create True Love's anything? It wasn't truthful, so it could never be true. I was feeding you lies day in and day out and I sat back and let you fall in love with them all and that's why us kissing never did anything. I was so in love with you, but you were in love with the completely wrong person.'

Emma frowned, processing this. As the reality dawned upon her, her face grew slowly less cloudy.

'I was in love with Regina,' she said cautiously, her eyes blinking rapidly once more. 'And for the curse to break…'

'You needed to love the Evil Queen,' Regina muttered, nodding. 'Yes.'

Emma deflated immediately. 'Oh.'

It took a few moments before Regina could summon up the courage to walk towards her. Leaning over the counter, she reached out one hand like she was going to take Emma's. They both waited for her to do so. But as the clenching feeling in her stomach only grew more painful, Regina sighed and forced herself to tap Emma's empty wine glass instead.

'Refill?'

Emma nodded. 'Yeah. Please.'

Regina reached out for the glass stem and wrapped her fingers around it. Her eyes flicked up, and for a moment she and Emma simply looked at one another. The bitter disappointment was brimming from Emma's eyelashes.

And Regina turned away and found the wine bottle with her other hand. Filling both of their glasses once more, she casually threw over her shoulder, 'I take it that you're staying for dinner after all, then?'

She could hear the faint smile in Emma's voice as she replied, 'I guess so. Only for the lasagne, though.'

After fighting both of his mothers on how a boy of eleven years old did not need a bed time of 9:30pm for a good twenty-five minutes, Henry finally conceded and dragged himself up the stairs. Planning to hover by the top step and listen to as much of their conversation as he could anyway, he plonked himself down on the soft cream carpet and waited. But after only a few minutes he heard footsteps walking into the living room, followed by the soft click of the door being shut behind them. Besides a gentle muttering leaking out from behind the thick wood, he couldn't hear anything worth hearing at all.

Muttering to himself and cursing the structural integrity of a house that Regina had literally created out of thin air, he forced himself back to his feet and stomped off into his bedroom.

Downstairs, thanks to a bottle of red wine and half a glass of whisky, Emma was allowing herself to relax on Regina's sofa more than she normally would have. Curling her legs up beneath her, she let herself watch as Regina glided around the room; her feet now bare and padding across the soft carpet and her dark eyes gleaming with the soft burn of too many drinks. The fire was lit – God, that was such a Regina thing to do – and Regina was glowing beside it. It was always odd to Emma how someone as dark and shadowy as Regina could always manage to exude such a wild, burning light.

And just then Regina glanced back over her shoulder and caught the smouldering expression from above Emma's flushed cheeks. She smiled to herself.

'Everything alright, Miss Swan?'

Emma glared at her from beneath her eyelashes. 'Don't you try and get the upper hand by Miss Swaning me, Mayor Mills. I am the one in control here.'

Regina raised an eyebrow. 'Your glass would say otherwise.'

Emma looked down just in time to see her tumbler tilting dangerous to one side, the golden liquid swirling around the rim already making a bid for freedom halfway down her index finger. She quickly straightened the glass up, not raising her eyes.

'Oops,' she muttered.

Regina suddenly appeared on the seat next to her, her throaty, musical chuckle curling around the both of them.

'No harm done,' she said, leaning back against the cushions and momentarily allowing herself to enjoy the sight of Emma feeling actually, genuinely awkward. She smiled graciously, nodding down at the liquid that was still trickling down Emma's hand.

'Do you want me to get that?'

Emma jumped and immediately raised her clenched fist to her mouth.

'No thanks,' she said, sliding her tongue from between her lips to catch the whisky before it reached her palm. Regina's eyes never left it. 'I've got it.'

Silence fell between the pair of them once more and Emma let her gaze settle on the crackling fire. It hurt her eyes to stare at it, but the slight itch against her heavy lids was nothing compared to the churning inside her stomach. Discomfort seemed to be spreading through her extremities at an alarming speed, and all that she could think to do to slow it down was to ignore it entirely by losing herself in the dancing of those flames.

But Regina was watching her; her dark eyes following the slump of Emma's shoulders and the flush of her cheeks. She swallowed, tasting whisky on her own tongue, before she forced herself to ask, 'Are you okay?'

Emma looked round at her. 'Hm?'

'You seem a bit…' Regina frowned, trying to find the right word. Eventually she sighed, and she finished with, '…disappointed.'

Emma shrugged. 'Yeah. Well. Maybe something like that.'

'Tell me why.'

It wasn't a question: it was a command. But Regina had said it in her softest voice and it reminded Emma all too vividly of quiet Sunday mornings curled up in the mayor's downy king size bed. It reminded her of warm arms around her shoulders and delicate feet grazing between her bare legs. Emma swallowed, shaking the image of what she had really thought that love looked like from her mind, and sighed.

'I just...' she started, and then paused. After a few moments she heard herself mumbling, 'If that wasn't true love, then I have no fucking clue what love is meant to be.'

Regina's heart crumbled. Blinking vigorously, she reached out for Emma's hand and squeezed it gently beneath her own.

'It was love, Emma,' she said, her voice firm but barely more than a whisper. 'Of course it was – no one could ever doubt that. But… true love. That is something else entirely.'

Emma scoffed at once. 'So you keep saying. But—'

'I didn't believe in it, Em,' Regina interrupted, her voice breaking on the name that she knew Emma loved and hated all at once. 'That's the truth: it was my fault. I loved you to the very ends of this earth and back – I still do. With every part of me. But I knew all along that what we had was built on something weak and terrible, and even from the start I knew that it was going to collapse in on me eventually. I didn't believe in it, and that's what went wrong. If I had, then who knows? Maybe the curse would have broken after all.'

She watched the flash of fifty different emotions that swept across Emma's pale expression: relief, anger, guilt. And then sadness. Her green eyes were swimming and Regina knew that she couldn't bear to see her like that even one more time.

'But I believed in you.'

Emma snorted, raising an eyebrow. 'Me?'

'Yes,' Regina said firmly, lacing her fingers through Emma's and squeezing down on them, hard. 'I believed in you, Emma Swan. I always have. And if I was going to let anyone break my curse, and then my heart – it would only be you.'

She watched as Emma's hard features slowly softened. She seemed to be melting in the fire; the ice that had been clinging sharply onto every inch of her body for weeks and weeks gradually, hesitantly, beginning to thaw.

Emma looked down at their interlocked hands and forced herself not to smile.

'Stop it,' she muttered.

Regina blinked. 'Stop what?'

'Stop making me love you,' Emma said quietly. 'I don't… I don't want to anymore.'

But there was a lightness in her voice that Regina hadn't heard for some time, and so her words didn't hurt quite as much as they could have done. She waited for Emma to glance back up again, and she smiled at her.

'But you still do?' she asked.

Emma paused for a moment, and then sighed.

'Of course I do.'

Finally she seemed to realise just how close they were sitting, and when she looked back up again all that she could focus on in the entire world was the slight curve of Regina's ruby mouth. A flash of white teeth gleamed from beneath slightly parted lips and, oh – she remembered them so well. The feeling of those teeth buried deep into the grooves of her shoulders was something that she would never be able to let herself forget.

And when she raised her eyes slightly, she found that Regina was staring at her own slightly crooked teeth in return. Her dark eyes had turned to warm honey. Yet again there was the feeling that the air around them had grown thicker, was moving slower, and when Regina's thumb moved across the surface of Emma's skin it was like it had somehow turned electric too. Emma jumped, the strange, soft voltage passing through her, and Regina finally met her gaze.

'Are you okay?' she asked for the second time that evening.

And Emma looked back down at her lips. They were so close. Only millimetres away and everything in the world that she had missed and needed over the last few painful, lonely weeks. If she leaned forwards, just slightly forwards, they would be hers. And she knew that Regina was thinking the same thing because her free hand had suddenly crept upwards, seeking its favourite position at the base of Emma's neck where tiny, soft hairs reminded her of just how fragile and human the woman whom she loved actually was.

The vanilla was blanketing her. All she wanted was to lean forwards.

For a split second, there was nothing: no movement in the thick air. No crackling from the fire. Then Emma took a single, shaky breath and said in a voice that was almost drowning with self-loathing, '…there's still a lot that we need to work through.' And suddenly her lips seemed so much further away.

Regina sighed. She was right – she knew that she was right. They may have been sat inches apart with their hearts beating in time and their fingers interlaced, but a wall was still standing between them. It had cracks in it, and Regina's heart lifted every time that she realised it – but it was still there. It was solid and unforgiving.

And so Regina found herself nodding, her thumb delicately pressing down against the very centre of Emma's palm.

'We do,' she murmured, her pain leaking through her words.

The silence continued, interrupted only by Emma's nervous swallowing and the creak of the floorboards from upstairs. But eventually Emma spoke again.

'But... I still want to work through it.'

And light filled the room once more.

'You do?' Regina whispered, closing her eyes. Bracing herself against the answer.

She needn't have bothered: 'Of course I do. You're my light switch – remember?'

Author's note: So I feel like now is a good time to a) apologise for just how slow I have gotten with fic updates recently, and b) warn you all that they're probably about to get even slower... I'm off on holiday for a couple of weeks tomorrow, and then pretty much as soon as I get back I'm starting a new job (EEEEHHHH!) so things are going to be a little bit hectic for a while. In no way whatsoever am I losing interest in this fic, I promise! I might just have to beg some more patience off of you all for a little while. Big snoggies xxx