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They live in New York for six months, but it is loud and overwhelming. Henry still puts his hands up to cover his ears when the sirens of a passing ambulance scream by and Emma finds herself reaching for a nonexistent gun each time someone knocks on the door. She’s certain she’s never done that before they moved into this new place, but she can’t seem to stop. They spend every Saturday and Sunday in Central Park, trying to find ten square feet of space that aren’t occupied by another person. Henry loves the dogs. The hot dogs. His new school. His friends. Six months after they move, he looks up over his bowl of spaghetti and asks pointblank, wiping his face not-so-delicately with his napkin, “Can we maybe think about moving somewhere else?”
They’ve always lived in a city. Phoenix. Boston. New York. But when Henry’s question shoots into the empty air around them, Emma feels her shoulders relax for the first time in months. Everything has been so loud. She doesn’t speak, simply takes another silent bite, before nodding and reaching across to rest her hand on his shoulder. He’s starting to fill out his shirts, growing up like a weed. Emma holds on tight, stares into her bowl of pasta. “Sure, kid. I think that might be good.”
She spends two months looking for a job, and Henry joins the soccer team, makes more new friends, and refuses to go outside after dark because it makes the night feel foreign. Something about the lack of stars. Emma cannot convince herself that he’s wrong, when everything around her feels so tight and constricting, like they’d moved into this new apartment and suddenly into a whole new world where everything is just a little bit off somehow, the entire planet tilted further on its axis, and the two of them the only people who can tell.
She says no to a school security position in upstate New York, tries and fails to get hired by any small town police station that might take her, but when she interviews with the head of a small town bank manager in southeastern Maine, she catches a glimpse of waving pine trees out the window behind him, can smell the sea fresh and sharp like it never is off the Hudson when she leaves the office, is sure the stars must burst forth each night, finally revealed. She says yes to his first offer. They move a week later. The pay isn’t too bad; there’s dental insurance. Henry lets out a visible puff of air as they cross the town line, all of their belongings having been shipped ahead. “This is better,” he murmurs. “This is so much better.” Emma agrees.
But there’s something missing still. An ache Emma can’t describe that sits just below her ribs, pressing on her lungs. It wakes her up in the middle of the night sometimes, like a weight heavy on her chest and making it hard to breathe. She finds herself stretching out her arms to the empty side of the bed or clutching the pillow tight against her chest. There’s something missing, but she can’t, for the life of her figure out what.
//
The letters start coming two weeks after they move in.
“Ma!” Henry’s voice echoes down the front hall, deeper than it was six months ago. “Ma, there’s mail for you!”
“Is it a bill?”
“No!”
“A catalogue? Oo is it from Cabela’s? That seems like a Maine type of magazine. Have you ever been to Cabela’s? We should go sometime… It’s like a nerdy outdoorsman’s vacationland.” She’s wiping her hands on the dishtowel, just having finished the breakfast dishes. Henry smirks, and she knows to reach up and wipe the bubbles off her cheek.
“It’s not from Cabela’s. And just because I’ve started wearing flannel doesn’t mean I’m a “nerdy outdoorsman.”” His air quotes are delivered with enough sass to cause Emma to roll her eyes.
The envelope is plain white, addressed in a flowing cursive. Emma squints at the postage. Somewhere called Storybrooke, Maine. She’s never heard of it, but something in her chest twinges. She puts a hand below her rib cage and pushes upwards.
“Who’s it from?”
“No idea,” she mutters, ripping it open. Their friends in New York have their new address, but no one has sent mail, and they don’t know anyone else in Maine, let alone a place called Storybrooke. Inside are a bunch of smaller pieces of paper. The first one Emma flips over is a grocery list:
• 1 lb ground pork
• 3 lb tomato
• Parsley
• Garlic
• White onion
• Lasagna noodles
• 1 lb lean ground beef
• Red pepper flakes
• Eggs
• Parmesan cheese
• 1 lb mozzarella cheese
The second is a recipe for some kind of lasagna; the direction to “Preheat the Oven to 400” is underlined twice. The third is a piece of paper no larger than Emma’s palm. She cups it there, staring at it.
I’m sorry, it reads. I miss you. And, in parentheses, Please, don’t eat donuts for breakfast every morning.
Henry stares over her shoulder at the note, his forehead wrinkling. “What the heck?”
Emma’s chest is burning. The handwriting looks familiar; there’s large space between ‘I’m’ and ‘sorry,’ almost like whoever wrote it had paused and considered not completing the sentence. There’s nothing else, no substantive letter, no explanation of who or why.
“Ma?” Henry sounds confused, but he’s moved away and is searching through the fridge for something to snack on. “Who do you think it’s from?”
“I have no idea,” Emma murmurs, crumpling the note up in her palm before turning the envelope over and over, looking for a clue. It’s disconcerting, and strange, and she thinks for a moment that perhaps someone addressed it to their house on accident, but no, there’s her name on the front: Emma Swan. She stares at the recipe again.
“Maybe it’s a joke,” Henry suggests, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Like maybe Evan or Luke sent it when they went on vacation or something.”
“Get a glass,” Emma returns, staring pointedly at the milk carton in his hands. He smiles at her, smug in the fact that he caught her in the very same act three days before. “Maybe,” she finally answers him.
“Can we go out on those trails your boss was telling us about?” he asks, moving on.
“Sure,” she nods. “Go get some layers in case it starts to rain.” After he moves off towards his room, she sits down at the kitchen table, taking out the small note and smoothing it down on the hard wood. She should throw it away, move on; it probably was only a prank. But instead, she taps the note twice with her finger, chest still aching.
“Ma!” Henry’s voice comes screeching from his room. “Where’s my fleece?”
“Coming!” she calls back, tucking the letter into the kitchen junk drawer as she goes past. It’s strange. Nothing more.
//
The letters keep coming. About once a week an unremarkable white envelope shows up in their mailbox. Once, it’s a recipe for Brussel sprouts; Emma shakes her head and puts it in the drawer with the lasagna recipe. Another time, it’s a quick sketch of the Avengers, hurriedly done on a plain napkin. The fourth letter is a book recommendation, quick and to the point about some young adult novel that Henry insists on checking out from the library and then proceeds to devour. “Wish I could write back,” he muses after finishing The Queen of Attolia and tossing it off to the side of the couch. “Maybe they’d have more recommendations; that was pretty good.” He yawns, stretches, heads off to bed. “Love you, Ma.” His kiss on her forehead is a surprise; he’s almost too old for goodnights. “Love you.”
“Love you, too, Henry,” she says, smiling, but as soon as he disappears into his room, she stares at the unoffending book lying on the carpet, unsettled and at ease all at once.
They get a photo once of a bit of the coast, jagged and raw, pine trees in the background, the sea swelling to roar over the shoreline. On the back is only a date from two weeks prior. There hasn’t been another personal note since the first one. Emma’s starting to get a little freaked out, unable to find Storybrooke on the map or in any online source. But the person hasn’t tried to contact them in any other way, and whoever it is doesn’t seem interested in receiving a reply. They haven’t included any return address or personal information. Nothing’s been too creepy or out of line, so Emma tries to relax, to ignore the pounding in her chest when Henry enters the kitchen with another envelope, to avoid pulling out that first small, crumpled note and tracing its letters with the tip of her finger.
//
She and Henry go hiking on the weekends, breathing deeply in the quiet afternoon air. Or else they have lunch at the local diner before heading out to the seashore, watching the waves crash in and sweep out for hours, Henry dividing his attention between his newest comic and combing the beach for hidden treasures. After school, Emma tries to cook without burning anything (although never lasagna), and Henry does his homework at the kitchen table, an old one with scars across its surface that Emma had managed to snag for a reasonable price at a yard sale the weekend after they moved in. It’s slower than New York, than Boston, than anywhere they’ve ever lived, but Henry comes home flushed and smiling, having made new friends easily, no longer tense at any loud, unexpected noise. Emma doesn’t really love the woods, but being beyond the city’s reaching towers and brilliant lights feels freeing somehow, like all the space around them has opened up, to let the tensions she and Henry had both been carrying float away.
The night before the last day of school, Henry hugs Emma tightly as he says goodnight. He is doing an art camp at the local YMCA, and taking German in July with his friends. He swears he’s going to keep his room tidy, and has been asking for a dog, which Emma is only slightly against. “I’m happy we moved here,” he mutters into her shoulder, his sleeves too short again as he wraps his arms around her. “It feels more like home.”
Emma wants to ask about his wording, because it does feel more like home than New York, but New York was the only home Henry had known for years. How could it suddenly have felt so off? Why does it feel more like home in this tiny Maine town, but not exactly like home. “Yeah, kid,” she murmurs, pressing a kiss into his hair. “It kinda does.” There’s something missing still, except Emma isn’t sure what it could possibly be. Maybe a dog…
//
The tenth letter comes in the middle of July, Henry away at his friend Antony’s house for a sleepover that has turned into a marathon three-day extravaganza. Emma comes home to an empty house, grabbing the mail before toeing off her shoes and heading to the kitchen for a beer. Sometimes, when Henry is gone, even if just for the night, Emma misses him fiercely, almost afraid, like that one time he got lost at the park and she was certain he’d been taken, lost to her forever because of a moment of carelessness when she looked away to check her phone. She has to take deep breaths in those moments, remind herself that he’s only at Antony’s; she could text him if she wanted to and he’d probably reply with a pizza emoji and an excited WE’RE STAYING UP ALL NIGHT!! Except, sometimes, when Emma comes home to a dark house, gets out a beer and opens it by the light of the fridge, she forgets about Henry. Just for a minute. The silence feels so overwhelming and all-encompassing, and completely, completely normal, like there couldn’t possibly be a stinky, almost-teenager sharing her house and leaving his socks in the middle of the living room, like she was alone, and had been for as long as she could remember.
Tonight is one of those nights. She sips her beer slowly in the kitchen, the only sound the hum of the air conditioning, her own heart beat echoing in her ears. There was another white envelope in the mailbox tonight, but Emma simply holds it in her hand, weighing it against the glass bottle in her other palm. It feels thicker than the others, like it might actually contain something notable, not simply a single photograph, or a leaf pressed between two blank pages. Henry had looked that one up at school: Malus pumila, the honeycrisp apple tree. Not the strangest note they’d gotten, but still odd. This one though, is heavy, two stamps rather than a single one, as if the sender wanted to be sure it made it. Emma sets down her beer, flipping a finger beneath the sealed edge. The silence is heavy, almost oppressive, and she wishes, not for the first time, that Henry was home, that she could hear him moving around his room like an entire herd of elephants, relax into the noise he brought with him, noise of belonging, of growing, of being present. Instead, she takes a deep breath, the pressure against her lungs contracting, almost like she’s afraid. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Henry is at a friend’s; this weird stranger hasn’t done anything remotely threatening; she is not alone.
Someone knocks on the door sharply three times.
Emma drops the letter, and reaches for her nonexistent gun. She hasn’t done that since they moved out of the city. The knock comes again. “Coming!” she calls, and tries not to grimace when her voice cracks. “I’m coming. “I’m – Oh. Hello.”
“Emma,” the woman on the other side of the door doesn’t smile or hold out her hand, but her eyes are wet, her mouth trembling. Emma shifts her weight from her right to her left, pulling the door closer to her body. “Emma,” the woman murmurs again. “Hello.”
Emma feels her whole body go still. She smiles, unsure. “Um, hi. Can I help you?”
The other woman holds out her hand, and Emma eyes it uncertainly. The woman drops her hand back down to her side, smooths her gray skirt.
“I’m sorry,” the woman murmurs, her voice low.
Emma leans forward automatically, but she pulls her body back, tightening her hold on the door. “Can I help you,” she asks again, harsher this time. The tension in her chest is growing, and she’s taking shorter breaths than normal, trying not to panic. There is absolutely no reason to panic.
“Emma,” the woman smiles softly. “My name is Regina Mills and-“
Emma’s chest must explode, the face in front of her blurring as her eyes go dark. She grabs at her chest, pushing and pushing and pushing, and Regina Mil – Regina – Regina, Henry’s mother is reaching out for her, hands wrapping around Emma’s arms, supporting her as she sinks to the ground. Regina. Regina Mills. Emma’s brain is pounding, her heart beating so rapidly she’s sure she’s going to pass out. Regina. Emma remembers the apple tree, the cider, that freaking, uncomfortable couch, Henry, small and mighty and sure, Regina hurt, Regina furious, Regina protective and strong, soft outside the diner, an apple turnover, Neverland. Emma remembers everything, all at once, sweeping through her like a tidal wave, cutting off her oxygen, her access to speech, her ability to move. Regina. Regina Mills. Of course. Here she is. Here is the missing piece. Regina in the moonlight, afraid, but not crying. Regina wounded as Henry pushes away from her. Regina’s magic combining with Emma’s to move the freaking moon. Regina Mills.
Emma is gasping and she can hear someone murmuring to her, gentle things like rain in the leaves of the trees outside the house on cool evenings. “It’s alright,” the murmurs continue, begin to take shape. “You’re alright. It’s okay, Emma. Emma, I’m so sorry. It’s alright. Just breathe. Just breathe.”
//
When Regina wakes up on that first morning, after they have gone, she is alone. She has been alone before. For most of her life she has lived in silence and solitude. This is different. This should be smothering, bone-crushing, all-encompassing and debilitating. This loneliness ought to kill her. She thinks that, and then she grimaces, and rolls out of bed.
It won’t kill her. She is going to get them back. She is not going to be alone again, not forever, not while her family is still out there.
On Day 15 of loneliness, Snow knocks on her door at 5:30 in the morning, a mug of coffee in hand. “What do you want?” Regina means for it to be a snarl. Instead, it is a tired sigh.
“A walk,” Snow is paler than usual, if that’s even possible. Drawn. Exhausted. “Just a walk, Regina.”
Regina shivers in the cool dawn air, sags against the doorframe. “It’s not really a good time, Snow.” This is a joke. Neither of them laugh.
“Alright,” Snow shrugs, turns to head back down the walk.
Regina grits her teeth. She is going to get her family back, which means she can’t alienate their family in the process. “I’m coming,” she states. Firm, unapologetic. “Let me get my coat.”
They walk into town, down to the shore, up to Henry’s old castle most mornings now. Snow comes by, usually before six, and they stride together down the quiet Storybrooke streets. The lights are on in the diner, but they do not pause to wave, to go in and get a fresh cup of coffee, piping hot with a touch of cinnamon. Instead, they walk in silence, Snow with her head bowed, Regina with her spine straight. They do not often speak. This is enough. This walking. It is enough.
//
On Day 70, Regina thinks she’s found a way around the wall, because that’s what Pan’s curse has done. Storybrooke was a prison before; it’s true, except no one really knew. Now, they all know how the curse has trapped them, unable to leave for any other realm, unable to reach the outside world. Time is ticking on, but they are all still stuck in a world that is not of Earth, nor of the Enchanted Forest.
It takes them until Day 50 to realize Pan’s plan: drain Storybrooke of its entire life force, using the town like a giant battery for his own infinite life. The dwarves are out by the mine, poking around, looking for fairy dust, when Sneezy stumbles upon a patch of ground that looks charred by fire. Except it hadn’t been fire, instead all of the life in the plants and organisms had been fried, leaving only ashy remains. The phenomenon was spreading, slowly but surely, taking the plant life first. It was only a matter of time before Pan’s needs began to drain the people and creatures of the town.
But on Day 70, Regina is sure she’s found a flaw in the wall, a chink in Pan’s defenses. She and Snow walk in the morning, Regina spends her days searching the wall with the little magic she is still able to conjure up, the slightest trickle that she sends out across the invisible barrier, inch by slow inch. It leaves her exhausted and shaking.
On Day 59 she collapses on her way back to her house after searching a three meter square section for twelve hours. Ruby finds her, calls for help. When Regina wakes up, she’s in a bed at Granny’s tucked in with hospital-tight corners, a growling old woman seated at her bedside, bowl of soup in hand. She spends thirty-six hours in that bed, voice hoarse, throat scratchy, being spoon fed by a werewolf, until eventually she cannot stand lying around any longer. Her family is out there. She will not be alone again.
Day 70: She’s searching the section of the wall at the road that leads out of Storybrooke, the road that Emma and Henry took to escape. Three inches above the pavement on the far right side, she feels a slight…shiver…as her magic pokes at the area. Her eyes are closed, back straight, mouth in a tight line. But there it is again. The tiniest give as she shapes the magic into a sharp point and presses harder. Her eyes fly open, and then she’s grinning, lips pulled back in a horrifying vision of delight. He is not invincible. No one can live forever. Loneliness has a time limit.
//
It takes her fifty seven days to remove a small, fist-sized section of the wall, just large enough to allow her to slip her hand through the barrier and wave to the outside world. No one is there, waiting, but it is enough. She lays down on the concrete, smelling of gasoline and tar, and pokes her hand through, palm up, open and empty to a sky she can see, a sky that is no longer so completely out of her grasp. She doesn’t linger on the pavement, afraid Pan’s goons might catch her in the act and become suspicious. But that night, she hugs her pillow tightly, and cries silently, hopeful, joyous, devastated tears.
//
On nights 3, 65, 82, 104, 113, and 137 she wakes up whimpering, reaching for the far side of the bed, coming up empty. On those nights, she wanders down the hall, pushes open Henry’s bedroom door slowly while holding her breath. She wants to lay in his unmade bed, left exactly how he left it so many months ago. She wants to feel Emma’s body lean against hers in the doorway, Emma’s fingers sliding into her own, hold loose like always, but still there. She wants to hear Emma whisper one of those things she only whispered when Henry was sleeping and the night was calm and safe: “I love him so much,” or “Thank you,” or “Come to bed with me.” On those six nights, she doesn’t go back to sleep, instead retreating down the stairs and into her study, where she has managed to transport all of the books from the vault, stacking them in precarious piles along the floor in front of her desk. Her eyes are heavy and her bones ache like it might storm, but she pores over book after book musty with age and disuse and magic until the dawn light peaks through the curtains and Snow is knocking.
//
On Day 163, Regina has managed to enlarge the hole enough that a very tiny child could slither through. She doesn’t know what will happen if you cross the boundary fully, but this small hole is enough to let her magic out, and the internet in. She spends the next four days searching for Emma and Henry. One Day 167, she finds them, in a nice apartment in New York, Henry enrolled in a good school, signed up to play soccer. She rolls her eyes at that, aware of her son’s lack of coordination when it comes to sports one plays with one’s feet. Emma has a new Facebook page, but the privacy settings are high, and Regina can only see her profile picture: a recent selfie of her and Henry at what looks to be their kitchen table, pancakes just visible at the forefront of the screen. They are smiling wide together, their shoulders bumping. Regina traces their faces gently on the screen, clicks away, but ends up going back to that photo each night before bed.
//
On Day 178, Emma’s job and current town listed on her Facebook page change. Regina searches for Camden immediately, finds the bank where Emma works apparently on Google Earth. She bribes Red with promises of her apple tart dessert into hacking Henry’s school records, finds their new address. It would feel wrong if she weren’t so desperate to understand why it is they’ve moved to a tiny town only two hours away. Can they know? Can they remember? If they remembered, wouldn’t they have come looking?
She drinks three glasses of apple cider that night staring at Emma’s profile picture. Throws up due to an empty stomach, and spends the rest of the night researching how to reverse memory spells. When Snow knocks on the door that morning, Regina grabs her wrist and pulls her inside. “What is it?” Snow asks, her own eyes red from lack of sleep.
“I found them,” Regina whispers. “You have to help me.”
Snow’s eyes widen, but she stares at the picture like Regina had, not reaching out to touch the screen, instead wrapping her trembling hands around Regina’s instead. They stand there for almost an hour.
//
Regina starts writing letters when she wakes in the middle of the night, when she stretches away from her desk in mid-afternoon, her back cramping and her stomach growling. At first she writes only to Henry, short tiny anecdotes about his boyhood. The moments she remembers the best out of all of the millions of memories she carries of him. But soon, she’s writing to Emma, too. And the letters to Emma are long, stretching never-endingly onward. She doesn’t sign any of them, finishing a page before setting it aside, only to come back to it hours later and continue where she left off.
It’s shame that she shares first. Embarrassed and halting, her script stutters across the page. Shame is not something she wears like a cloak, but rather carries in the pit of her stomach, tight and heavy. With Emma though, her lips gentle against the back of Regina’s neck in the middle of the night, the shame had been a glowing thing, laid out on the bed before them, examined, dissected, understood. There had never been enough time to unravel it all, but with the letters there is infinite space.
//
On Day 201, the hole is large enough that a person could probably squeeze through. The road is empty. Regina will not ask anyone else to risk their memories for her own family, so she squares her shoulders, and slips through, holding her breath. On the other side, the sky is the same light blue, the birds are still singing, she can peer down the road towards Storybrooke, knowing that there is a whole town of people terrified of burning up into nothingness on one side. She looks down the other way, a road leading to an outside world of little magic, to a tiny town called Camden that looks remarkably like a Storybrooke two of its inhabitants cannot quite remember. She takes ten steps in that direction, doubles back. If they remembered, they’d have come looking. With a sigh, she returns to the other side of the wall, and heads for home and books in the study. They need a plan.
//
Sending the first letter is a mistake. She is certain of it as soon as she leaves the post office. Mail had been the first sign that the hole was having an effect. Storybrooke was rejoining the world, and the postal service, of all things, was the first government agency to respond. Regina writes out the shopping list, the recipe, and at the last minute the note. Just in case. She does not cry. But she stands in front of the blue postal mail box long enough that Ruby brings her a coffee from the diner, stands next to her sipping her own coffee. “Do you think it’ll help?” Ruby asks as if she’s talking about the weather, or watering the tomato plants Granny put into the flower boxes out back.
“I don’t know,” to Ruby, Regina can admit her insecurity.
“Can’t hurt though, right?”
Regina hums. Of course it can hurt. Any action Regina might take could cause hurt; if they don’t remember, and remembering causes them pain they could live without; if Pan finds out what she’s been up to, and comes for her, or goes for them; if they do remember, and simply haven’t wanted to come back.
“Regina,” Ruby’s voice is hoarse as though she’s been yelling. It was a full moon three nights before. Perhaps she had been. “Regina.”
Regina glances at her out of the corner of her eye.
Ruby is Snow’s friend first, Emma and Henry’s friend second, but maybe Regina’s friend third. “It can only help. They’ll want to come back. When they remember, they’ll want to come back for you.” Ruby looks so sure, her face set in a straight line, her eyes heavy.
Regina hums again, but Ruby reaches out and taps the letter. “Help them home. You gotta help them.” She turns and heads back for the diner. Regina waits until she’s sure Ruby has gone back inside, squares her shoulders, feels the shame in the pit of her stomach roll over, then drops the letter down the chute and strides away.
After that, she can’t help herself. She sends them off weekly, just tiny things that she doesn’t think too much about. If she considers what she’s doing too hard or too long, considers the implications of writing anonymous letters from a town that doesn’t exist to her son and his mother when they can’t even remember that she exists. Well. If she considers it for too long, she just might stop sending them. And she will not be alone forever.
//
On day 319, Snow and Charming come to her door together. “There’s been an accident,” Charming runs a hand through his hair. “Perdita and Pongo had their puppies out on the edge of the forest playing. One of them-“
“Lola,” Snow interjects softly.
Regina sniffs at her wet, wide eyes.
“--went into the woods. She must have hit the battery line. When Perdita found her…” Charming trails off, and Regina clenches her hands into fists at her side.
“Idiot puppies,” she mutters under her breath, but inside she is screaming. The line is getting closer and closer to the town. This is the first creature casualty, but it will not be the last, and she still is not sure how to break Pan’s curse, how to retrieve Emma and Henry and return their memories, how to solve anything. Things were so much easier when she wasn’t bothered with anyone’s well-being beyond her own.
“Regina,” Snow is solemn, royal. “I know you can be in contact with Emma and Henry. Maybe it’s time-“
“No,” she snaps. “Without their memories, it would be pointless. Besides, who would we send? You?” she sneers at the Charmings.
Snow doesn’t look a little hurt as she replies, “You, of course.”
“Absolutely not. We cannot risk it.” She isn’t entirely sure what the “it” is: drawing them back into this dangerous place full of treachery and hidden motives, sorcery and heartache? Pulling them out of a new life that they’ve built for themselves, a life in which they’re happy, settled, content? Or is it her own heart that cannot risk it, the idea of looking into Henry’s beautiful face and seeing nothing but a blank stare, reaching out for Emma’s hand and being rebuffed by a stranger? “Not yet.”
Snow and Charming don’t look convinced, but they leave her to it, and return to placating the townspeople, helping Archie plan the funeral.
That night, Regina rereads the letter she’s been writing for months. It’s long, ridiculous, too honest. At the end, she’d simply written: “This is all of me. I miss you. I’m sorry. Love, always, Regina.” She will not be able to send any more letters, if Emma and Henry have even been looking at them. This will be the one that pushes Emma over the edge of protectiveness; she knows that. She’s banking on Emma searching her out, at least to protect Henry, to threaten her, to make sure she stays away from her family. She’s counting on it. It might be the one way to get Emma to come to her, to Storybrooke, but to leave Henry behind where it’s safe, where his new life is. Together, they could solve this, stop Pan, she’s sure of it. But she will not risk Henry’s safety in the bargain.
//
Three days after Lola’s death, one of Ariel’s sisters is fried on the beach nearest to the town. It is July and sweltering; she was on her way for a late-evening swim, the rest of the beach deserted.
Regina crosses the barrier an hour later, her face set, her stomach roiling. For almost a year she has ached for this, to cross the distance between her and her family, to look upon their faces, to hold them in her arms. She has woken in the middle of the night stretched toward an emptiness that is palpable; almost certain Emma is reaching out for her, too. Like planets, holding to each other from a great distance, she has yearned for her family, ached for them, forgone sleep and food and sanity to reach them. She will not be alone again. She will not let Pan drain a town she worked so hard to build without seeing her family at least one last time, strangers or no.
//
She knocks. Waits. Knocks again. “Coming!” she hears, accompanied by Emma’s pounding feet. With a quick tug, the door is open in front of her, and there is Emma, hair longer than before, face fuller. She looks Regina up and down, confusion spreading across her face. “Hello?”
“Emma,” she can’t help herself; her hands are shaking and wills them into stillness. “Emma, hello.”
“Can I help you?” Emma asks, wary at this stranger on her doorstep.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs when Emma doesn’t reach out to shake her hand. Regina’s stomach flips, the shame spreading out and warming her entire body. She shouldn’t have come. She had to. Emma’s blank gaze is a knife in her stomach, twisting.
“Can I help you?” Emma asks again. She leans forward imperceptibly. Regina feels the movement like the pull of the moon on the ocean.
“Emma,” she smiles softly, softly, softly in a way only Regina and Henry can draw from her. “My name is Regina Mills and-“ Emma’s face changes, her eyebrows drawing together, her lips parting in surprise. She is still staring at Regina, but now it’s as if she is looking at a ghost. Regina has lived so much of her life as a ghost.
She reaches forward as Emma curls in on herself, grabs Emma’s elbows and guides her to the floor. Emma is panting, and Regina forces her own body to relax, forces herself to breathe evenly. Cannot help but murmur, “You’re alright. Darling, you’re alright. Emma, I’m here. You’re okay. I’m so sorry. Breathe. Just breathe.” Emma is warm and solid in her arms, struggling for air. Regina’s entire being has gone still and steady. “You're alright. I’m here. You’re alright, Emma. Breathe. Breathe.”