Chapter Text
Are you happy?
No? In a shallow pit -- how is your life,
my beloved?
-- Mary Tsvetaeva -- from "an attempt at jealousy"
After negotiating with both Henry and Emma in the days riding up to it, Regina finally agrees to take Friday off in addition to the five other days she’s put in for Henry’s graduation trip. Every objection she raised had been countered and debunked with such force it neared reproach, so on Thursday, Regina finally conceded and notified her replacement that she will have to take Friday off in addition to the next week.
It’s only one more weekend, Marian laughed at her when she called. What are you so worried about? I’ve got this place covered. Take the time off.
That Friday morning, Regina wakes to the sound of Emma’s car engine puttering in her driveway. The radio is on full blast Emma Swan is half-bent over the trunk, struggling to clear enough space for all their suitcase.
She does all this while cursing softly in the same airy, half-aware way a person might whistle as they work.
With no one around, Regina allows herself to watch the smooth bend and flex of Emma’s arms. It’s one of those warm, windy days in June where the morning light makes just about everything sparkle. Metal, windows, Emma’s hair. Her arms.
When Emma straightens to wipe a curl of hair from her forehead, Regina’s spotted at last in the window.
Three heartbeats of hesitation pass before Emma waves. Regina lets out a slow breath and turns to get dressed.
“Hey,” Emma says once Regina has made it down the driveway. “Are you all ready?”
“Yes,” Regina sighs and knuckles the handle of her suitcase. “Are we really going in your car?”
Emma shrugs before answering, a gesture she learned from New York. “Sure. Why wouldn’t we?”
“Because Emma it’s a mess. And ancient.”
With another shrug, Emma puts on the same half-grin, half-grimace she always wears. As if happiness came with an especially painful price. It’s the same expression she’s worn for two years now, and it seems only Regina remembers her other smiles. The kind that lit up Emma’s whole face. Closed the corner of her eyes and brightened some inner light.
“Well, I’ve changed the oil and rotated the tires so," Emma rubs a hand along her neck, squints her gaze away. "I think it’ll take us much further than your Benz. You’ve kept that thing in the garage the last six months.”
The fight goes out of Regina with a sigh. It feels like a prick in the lungs to sigh like this. Just giving in. Giving up. They go straight through her.
“Fine,” she lifts her suitcase and aims for the trunk. “Call Henry down for me please?”
By 10:00am, Regina has settled herself comfortably into the passenger seat of Emma’s old Beetle with a tattered version of Treasure Island in her lap; she read it years ago to Henry and will now probably only pretend to read it.
“Alright, we got everything?”
“Yes.”
“Purse, wallet, keys?”
“Yes.”
“Phone charger?”
A quick check of her purse earns them, at last, the start of the car.
“Alright get comfortable.” It’s said almost like a joke though it’s hard to tell with Emma these days. Regina opens her book.
“Henry, seatbelt.” She mutters as they roll down the driveway.
“Got it.”
“The first stretch is going to be a little long. Kid, you want the aux?”
“Oh yeah. Hand it over, Ma.”
“Please, no Guns ‘N Roses,” Regina warns.
“You’re just saying that to hurt me.” Emma scoffs sideways.
Regina feels the beginning of a real smile but before she can tease Emma, she spots the hand on the top of the steering wheel. The diamond ring catches the light and turns real again, blowing the warmth out of Regina’s heart like a candle.
She looks out the window instead.
It is a windy sunny day – the last few cool days in summer. The leaves are still bright and green on the trees, the air clean with the smell of grass and early morning dew.
Five hours until they reach their hotel room. Four and a half if there’s no traffic. Only five hours, Regina thinks, then you’re safe again. She’ll find a way to survive the next nine days somehow. Some other time. Today, it’s just these five hours.
::
Emma drives along a black, windy road for two hours, interrupted only by the occasional stop sign. Regina watches out her window, trying to make sense of all the different trees. Spruces, firs, pines she knows by smell, but from a distance it all comes down to the needles, which flicks by too fast. Still, Regina is undeterred. She focuses on the color: blue green, silver, bone-colored, dark yellow, red. Inside, under the quiet thump of Bobby Oroza’s ‘Should I Take You Home,’ Emma talks about different kinds of roses, tablecloths, and the cake she might buy.
It takes nearly an hour for another car to join them, having gone far enough away from Storybrooke to merge with other roads. As the highway descends from the cover of trees, this world’s more common landmarks arise in billboards and glittering lights.
Deciding to stop for lunch, Emma takes the next exit, which brings them to a small, scattered little town that looks half blown away by some devastation that happened long ago. Halfway down a block, a worn-down diner advertises itself with a flashing red and blue marquee sign. It’s a small, tacky place with checkerboard floors and blue booths with shiny, lacquered tables, but the coffee looks freshly brewed and the utensils come wrapped in cloth instead of paper.
Once settled, a redhead with a butter smile comes to them with a pot of coffee. Filling Regina’s coffee cup, the waitress seems to see them twice, once without notice, and then again with an alarmed curiosity that seems to ricochet between her and Emma.
“Family trip?” The waitress asks and crinkles her eyes at Emma.
“Yup,” Emma replies, oblivious. “The kid just graduated. We’re all going on a road trip together to celebrate.”
“Ooh,” the waitress coos at Henry. “Your moms must be so proud.”
“Or relieved,” Henry grins, and as the waitress crackles with delight.
Regina hides her grimace into her coffee.
After reviewing their menus, Emma props an elbow on Regina’s side of the booth.
“Hey, wanna split something with me?”
Regina arcs an eyebrow at her.
“You do know that when you split something you only get to eat half, right?”
Emma rolls her eyes. She smells of honey and of a new leather jacket, the style of which Regina secretly hates. Not because it doesn’t look good, but because it looks exactly like something Hook would wear. Though, undeniably, it smells better. Like dry wood and summer grass.
“Killian picked up Granny’s for breakfast,” Emma shrugs. “You know how Granny’s is. I thought we could split the chicken sandwich and fries. Or if the fries are too much, we could get the salad.”
Regina folds her legs and scoots slightly from Emma’s warmth.
“I think I might just have coffee.”
“Oh. Alright.”
After a beat, Emma removes her arm. Back on her side, she looks at her menu carefully though it likely displays the same predictable variations of thawed, packaged food that, after three months of living with Hook, she must be more than familiar with.
“Maybe Henry will split with you.” Regina suggests.
Henry blinks up and grins.
“Sure, Ma,” he says, “If you’re not a chicken.”
“Henry.”
“Yeah?” Emma smirks. “Alright. What’s the bet?”
“Burger with mushrooms, fried onions, extra barbecue sauce, bacon, on a sesame potato bun” Henry sets down his menu and knots his fingers over it. “And an order of onion rings.”
After a pause, Emma turns a helpless look to Regina, who simply sighs and flips back to the lunch side.
“Fine. The chicken sandwich. But with the mandarin salad.”
“Thank god.”
Conversation flows between bites. Walking through their trip from Massachusetts to Connecticut, to New York, then back again, Emma and Henry begin to list from their phones all the possible things they can do. The list is endless: aquariums, waterfront walks, museums, beer tasting (No, Emma and Regina respond simultaneously), a tour of the Empire State building, a picnic at Central Park. All seems possible, and as Henry and Emma tack on new idea upon new idea, the time that spans nine days seems to diminish beneath the scuffle of shoes, traffic time, and business hours, minor timewasters that edge up on the last few days she has as a mother.
No. It’s best not to think like that.
She will always be a mother. She knows that.
But her son will soon be entering a stage of growing up that she can do no more than advise him in.
And Emma…
Regina sips her water and nods along to whatever they say, trying her best to stay present.
When Henry stands to refill his water, Emma sneaks two onion rings from Henry’s plate with a wink to Regina.
Regina rolls her eyes, but the batter is delectably crispy and the smell like heaven, so she still pops it into her mouth.
After a moment of chewing, Emma clears her throat.
“You know. None of the stuff we do with him really matters.”
“It’s good to know that’s how you really feel.”
“No, that not – I just meant, the kid just wants time with us,” Emma looks her directly in the eye, a rarity these days. “That’s all that matters. We don’t have to go to any museums and galleries if it starts to feel like too much.”
After a pause, Regina nods slowly and hums her understanding.
Of course, she knows that Emma is not actually as oblivious as she constantly makes herself out to be, but it never ceases to amaze her how naturally Emma can shake off this blank-eyed impersonation of hers to offer instead a sharp, cerebral insight on just how well she knows Regina.
At times, it seems so ungodly unfair that a single person can know her so well, to the point of reading her mind, and still be so far from being hers.
“I saw that, you know,” Henry says when he returns to their booth. “You’re really not as sly as you think, Ma.”
“Course not,” Emma snorts, and steals another. “Why do you think I went to jail, kid?”
::
After all their plates are cleared, Emma takes the paper roadmap from her jacket pocket and spreads its tattered corners carefully across the table.
“Emma, really?” She lifts a glass away from Emma’s careless hand. “Can’t we do this in the car?”
“The lighting is better here.”
Three beats pass. Regina draws her teeth over her lip to keep the chastisement to herself, but it seems to only darken the roux of her bitterness before she lets it slip:
“I told you to bring your glasses.”
“I know,” Emma grumbles, glaring at the thin red lines of intersecting roads. “It’s not that bad.”
“You need to see.”
“I have my contacts, Regina. They work.”
“Those contacts are from your old prescription, Emma. I’ve told you this at least a hundred times. Your glasses are better for you.”
“Yeah, I know. But I don’t like them,” Emma huffs and squints down at the paper map. “They’re clunky, and they make me look old.”
“You don’t look old,” Regina begins in a soft, soothing tone before she catches the knowing look on Henry’s face and sharpens it. “Did you not bring them at all?”
“No, I brought them. They’re just in one of my bags,” Emma clears her throat, and mumbles softly. “Somewhere.”
Distinctly aware of Henry’s attention now, Regina has no choice but to ease up, or else be subject to ceaseless teasing the moment she is alone with her son.
“Fine, well,” Regina sips her water. “Make sure you have them before we start up again.”
“Fine.”
“Good,” Regina nods, satisfied. Then she catches waitress’ eye and signals for the check.
::
By the time they are nearing Boston, the sky has bleached into a light, almost colorless lavender. Everything below that is a greying silhouette of buildings and trees, pocketed by bright yellow windows and streetlights. From a distance, it is like approaching a small galaxy.
“I’m going to pull off and get some gas. We’re nearing our hotel.”
Emma’s voice sounds rough from disuse, and Regina realizes with a guilty jolt that Henry must have dozed off at some point, and that Emma has been driving in silence for the last few hours. All the while Regina has looked solitarily out the window.
“Okay,” Regina quietly stretches, rolling her neck. “Do you want to stop for dinner, too?”
“Nah, let’s just order pizza at the hotel later tonight.”
“Alright.”
Emma slides a hand below her glasses to rub her eyes. Regina watches her quietly for a while.
After a long moment, Regina touches a hand to the back of Emma’s neck. She gently massages the taught muscles there.
“Thank you for driving,” she says. “Really.”
The headlights of a passing car briefly flush Emma’s startled face. Her eyes are golden, her face struck. Then the car passes, and Emma reverts to her usual grimace-grin.
“Of course.”
Slowly, Regina withdraws her hand.
“Are we almost there?” Henry yawns, waking up.
“Yeah, soon,” Emma grins for real, and far more easily. “I bet you’re just about beat, aren’t you? This was a real tough ride for you, wasn’t it?”
Behind her, Henry laughs and stretches his arms out hugely. His new height still surprises her. He is always so consistently taller than the version of himself that she’s raising in her mind.
Children must grow up eventually. People keep reminding her this.
Their hotel is near Fenway Park, facing Charles River. Emma takes them the “short-cut” which consists of a few sharp turns, and one long skinny brick road that Regina can’t be sure is safe or permitted, but soon has them pulling up onto Boston St. Emma slows upon a multistory garage and flicks her right turn indication. Behind it, there is a colossal blonde-brick hotel, so tall Regina must crane her neck to see the top of it from her seat.
Inside the lobby, soft indistinct jazz plays over the sound of percolating coffee. Champagne colored plush chairs are arranged comfortably around a television screen of running water. When Henry collapses in a chair with his phone, Emma stares after him with enough longing for Regina to press her forward.
“I can check in,” she nods to the lounge area. “Go and stay with Henry.”
She’d offered it only to be kind, but Emma gives her a blank look as if she’d said something strange.
“No, I’ll check in with you.”
“Fine.” Regina steps back, narrowing her eyes at Emma as they turn.
The front desk attendant, a redheaded boy named George with a face full of freckles, perks up the moment he sees them.
From just the initial introduction of, “Hello, how can I help you?” Regina can tell that George bobs his head whenever he smiles, which is a lot. Constantly, even.
In the time it takes for Regina to process this, Emma has already taken over.
“My family and I are checking in,” Emma slides her driver’s license and credit card across the counter. “A suite. The room should be under Emma Swan.”
“Wait a minute,” Regina holds up a hand with a tight laugh. “No, dear. We have two rooms, and it’s under my name. I made the reservations.”
“The old one, yeah,” Emma doesn’t even glance her way. “I cancelled that one and got us a suite.”
George glances at Regina hesitantly, his smile slipping as she silently works her jaw. Or maybe it’s the look in her eyes. Either way, Regina tries to count to ten. Making a scene while her son sits patiently in the lobby is not how she wants their first real family trip to start.
Still. She didn’t expect this of Emma. And that galls her.
“And why would you do that?”
“Because Regina. We don’t need two rooms.”
“You just decided that did you?”
Emma finally meets Regina’s eye, but reluctantly, as if the density of that thick skull strained her neck.
“I compared the prices, and it’s more affordable –”
“I wasn’t exactly worried about the money, dear—”
“—And” Emma cuts in sharply, “The kid wanted a suite. He wants us all together during this trip.”
“I see. So the final decision went to a teenage boy. Or did you get an okay with your boyfriend as well?” Her laugh, when fake, strikes like an axe hitting wood. “Well dear, on the ever-growing list of people you must get your approval from, it’s good to know I was on the bottom–”
“Can we not –” Emma glances briefly at their one fascinated onlooker before blowing out a hard breath through her teeth. “Look, I would have talked to you earlier, but–”
“—Interestingly enough, I got two rooms for a reason –”
“—You never picked up the phone—”
“—I mean, did you change every hotel room?”
“—I called several times. I even showed up. You never picked up– and yes, I did.”
The rest of Regina’s words falls back in her throat.
“All of them?” Regina asks dimly.
Emma nods, and looks down to the counter. Regina just stares blankly back. Her thoughts flicker sporadically across the blank white screen of her mind like a film at the end of its roll.
She can only think: Nine days.
Nine days.
“Fine,” Regina snaps, looking flatly back at George. “The room is under Emma Swan, then.”
George looks between them with unabashed curiosity. He has taken note of Emma’s diamond ring, and Regina’s bare finger, and seems torn between two suspicions. Marriage gone bad or Bitter affair.
If Emma catches on, she doesn’t say so. Just waits for the attendant to finish their name-search and magnetize their key.
Their room is apparently at the top of the building. Regina watches the yellow light slowly climb up the numbers with growing apprehension.
Upon opening the door, though, she sighs with relief.
There are three beds. Thank the gods. Two queens in one room, and a king in another smaller room, separated by a wall.
Emma seems to let out a breath too.
“I call the King!” Henry crows, and shoots off to the smaller, separate room, leaving them the two queens.
“Alright,” Emma carries her bag to the nearest bed, then looks back. “Do you have a preference?”
Both beds are identical, comfortable and cream colored. There are three throw pillows on each, two cloudy soft coverlets.
The real question is: window or wall?
Though the answer has more to do with the squirming restlessness in Emma’s gut, and how she invariably checks a room for exits upon entering, Regina carries her suitcase to the bed closest to the wall under the pretense of preference.
They’re good at that. Giving without acknowledging that that’s what they’re doing. Regina sometimes wonders if that’s their real problem.
“Pretty view.”
Regina looks up as she slides off a heel. Emma is standing near the window, facing the glittering lights outside. From here, it’s just lights and silence, just a ramble of buildings. But down below, the city rumbles on, as alive as ever.
Regina can see its motion even from up here. Trains frisk by, emptying and filling with motion. Lights speckle the highway. People are constantly leaving.
“Hm.”
Emma glances back. An eyebrow arches.
“Not impressed?”
“It’s busy and loud,” Regina shrugs and rubs a stiff ankle. “A train goes straight through the city. I don’t see how anyone can sleep next to that thing.”
“It’s not so bad, once you get used to it.”
“That’s the same for most things. I wouldn’t measure your life with it.”
A pause. Then Emma nods, and looks back.
Behind her, the city lights play in Emma’s hair, flickering along her bare arms and pulling at Regina’s heart.
“I do think it’s beautiful,” Regina hears herself saying. “I’m just a little stiff. I’m sure I’ll be awed by morning.”
A slip of a smile shapes Emma’s mouth. “Yeah? You’ll be less stiff then?”
Regina only arches an eyebrow, a warning Emma is more than fluent in. Emma makes a noise, like a laugh stuck in her throat.
Out the window, the city glows like hundreds of ships on water. Emma watches it with her hands in her pockets. Her face looks soft and unsure. Like she’s woken up from a dream and remembered something about herself that she’d forgotten when dreaming.
Regina watches Emma. It’s a habit she can’t seem to quit.
“Do you miss it?”
Emma looks back. Her expression answers first, then her voice.
“Nah,” she shrugs. “After everything that’s happened, I don’t think I could come back to a place like this. I’d get a coffee and let slip to the cashier that I killed Cruella de Ville. Or that I’ve gone to Hell and back.”
“I think you’d manage,” Regina answers. “Probably far more easily than you’d think.”
Emma shrugs her shoulders and looks back at the busy, restless city again.
“You ever think you’ll live somewhere else?”
Emma’s voice sounds strangely brittle. Thinking, Regina slowly undoes her earrings and puts them on the desk.
“I don’t know.”
Had the question been asked three weeks ago, she might simply arch her eyebrow. Without you? Please. She wouldn’t have had the nerve to say it, but it would have been understood all the same. A year ago, she might have said If you came with me.
Emma nods. Then, slowly, she sits down on her bed. She doesn’t look at Regina again. She stares out the window.
“I should order the pizza,” Emma says.
The room is growing too dark to see her face, but Regina knows her voice. She recognizes the bland, flat tone of it. Her own way of shouldering off any other questions.
Maybe a light bulb has finally gone off. Maybe she finally understands Regina’s choice. In one room, there is no escape. No getaway room, no place to hide.
Gods. Nine days.
“Sure. Get whatever Henry wants,” Regina says and pushes up from the bed. She will take a bath, she decides. Dip her head under the water. Try to forget.
::
Sometime before dawn, the bed creaks. Stirring slowly, Regina’s dream recedes into a pleasant shapeless warmth as she shifts to look at the edge of her bed where her son is kneeling.
With his hair stuck up from sleep and his eyes wide-eyed and dark, he is four years old again, coming to her bed after a nightmare. Regina opens her arms, but by the time Henry crawls into the space beside her, he is eighteen again and too large to be on her lap.
His chin is beginning to stubble, and he can’t quite fit like he used to, but Regina can still tuck him beneath her chin.
For a while, she just listens to his breathing. It comes slow and long. There’s a soft lull to it. Up and down. In the quiet, the warm pliancy of her dream lifts around her like bath water.
“What’s wrong, cariño?” she murmurs, struggling to wade off sleep.
“It’s nothing,” he murmurs, but his chest fills shakily. He smiles little. “I guess I’m a little scared.”
“Mhm. About leaving home?”
“Yeah. Leaving home. Traveling,” Henry rumbles. “Leaving you and Ma. Everything is going to change.”
A hot white tension presses behind the eyes. Regina smooths her son’s back up and down slowly, counting vertebrae to keep herself quiet. Up and down. Breathe slowly. Don’t say it.
Henry’s chest inflates hugely. She can feel the way his ribs separate and spread out beneath his shoulders.
“You think I’m making a mistake, don’t you? You think I should just go to college,” he whispers and grips her tightly. “Maybe I should. Maybe it’s stupid to travel.”
Sensing tears in his voice, Regina automatically touches the delicate part of his neck behind his skull, the place she’d spent the early years of motherhood fretfully cradling. Well past the need to. She’d been too frightened to let go, to let him hold his head up. Some lessons, apparently, she must keep learning.
“Honey,” she strokes his neck. “I trust in your heart. In all these years, it’s pointed you in the direction you needed to go. If it’s telling you to go explore, and have an adventure, then that’s what you should do, and I will do everything I can to support you in it.”
Henry’s chest deflates. His head sinks into the crook of her neck where he expels large, lengthy breaths, rough emotion.
“I love you, Mom.”
Tilting downward, Regina lays her cheek against the top of Henry’s forehead.
“Mi cielo,” she whispers into his hair.
A moment of quiet passes. Outside their window, the city is waking up. Cars honk distantly. Lights speckle through the early morning smog, pink from the rising sun.
A schedule of the day passes through Regina’s head sporadically. Full of train stops and street names, the museum’s location, places to go for lunch. She tries to imagine the museum in her mind, but all she has is the rough sketch from Emma’s attempts to explain it – it’s a building full of art, and each room has a specific purpose like a house, some full of paintings and other statues and other art designs that couldn’t be remembered. Each question beyond that came with a shrug, and an embarrassed smile. I don’t really know, I never went.
Then, Henry yawns and draws Regina back. She passes a hand down his spine.
“Can we send Ma to get breakfast?” he asks softly.
“Mmm, sounds a little Machiavelli, sweetheart. Send your poor Ma out in the cold so that we can stay warm?”
“She wouldn’t mind.”
Chuckling, Regina turns to check in with his other mother. She falters a little when she finds Emma awake, watching them. Just watching, on one side with both hands tucked beneath her cheek. Watching helplessly like one would watch a tear-jerking movie.
Caught, Emma raises up at once. Wariness tightens the corner of her eye, makes her smile a grimace.
“Did I hear that right? Did my own kid want to send me out in the cold?” Emma’s voice cracks with the force of pretending. “Where’s your heart, kid?”
Henry’s voice rumbles. “Down the street, at that bagel store.”
Emma snorts and slides her legs off the bed, toeing her shoes.
“Fine. I do like that place.” She yawns and tries to hide her wariness with a sleepy-looking smile. “I know you’ll want a tall coffee. Anything else?”
No, Regina thinks. Come here instead. There’s still time.
She could pat the bed. She could smile and entreat, at least once. Maybe Emma will listen.
Then Henry yawns and rolls onto his back.
“Well I know what I want. That cream cheese sandwich, with all the toppings. Except onion.”
“So salmon, capers, and tomatoes, then?”
“Yes please.”
Emma nods, then looks at Regina.
Regina puts on a smile. “Yes. Why not.”
::
After breakfast, they must hustle to make it to the Green line in time. Regina can’t quite believe how fast everything is. Or how busy. Signs flash with changing arrival times. Wheels screech on metal. The motion of everything reverberates through the platforms and up Regina’s heels. People look at their watches or at their phones, in a constant rush.
In their train, Emma guides them to two free seats. She holds the rail above them and sways lightly back and forth at each bump and stop.
The train is huddled near capacity. Shoulders bump, and feet scuff. After one stop, a man beside Regina flaps out his newspaper and touches her knee with his. Though Emma doesn’t say anything, it takes only a second for her stare to penetrate the man’s frontal cortex through the paper. After a beat, the man clears his throat and shift his leg away again.
“This one?” Henry asks.
“No, not yet.” Emma says. “It’s coming up.”
Regina listens to this three more times and finds herself smiling.
Finally, after twenty minutes of jostling stops and gut-jerking starts, they arrive to their stop. And walk another four blocks.
Already Regina’s shoes are rubbing against her heel, making her grit and fume with every turn of the block though she pointedly ignores all of Emma’s looks, having advised her against heels this morning. The smell of the city lifts with the heat. Asphalt, coffee, the exhaust from passing cars. Between buildings, there is the distant smell of drying kelp from the bay.
The relief of finally arriving is undercut by the enormous stairwell. White stairs lined on either wide with white columns, all smooth skinned granite. There are even golden rails, as if the colonial front isn’t obvious enough.
As they climb, Henry excitedly flips through a brochure. Every conversation with him now is so full of the future, of things he’ll do and see, it’s hard to stay on solid ground with him these days.
After a little while, Regina decides to give Emma run of the conversation. It seems Emma knows how to separate traveling from my son is leaving. Maybe because Emma is leaving, too. In different ways.
The thought makes Regina feel like she’s on the train again, so, straightening her shoulders, she puts her hand on the railing the rest of the way.
Inside the museum, a rigorous patchwork of baffles and translucent panels decorate the ceiling. Large canvases of all sizes line the wall. Each room is enormous, airy, and cold, echoing with everyone’s shoes.
Henry is fascinated at once. Even Emma seems moved by a few pieces.
Regina tries. Though she dawdles on each exhibit, nothing comes to her. Nothing new, at least. Often, after a long moment of staring, her thoughts will disperse before the same old roving worries she always has. Will Henry be gone long? Will he enjoy traveling? Will he come back? Will Emma really get married? Why, when she seems so unhappy?
She doesn’t want to be the sort of person who rushes through a museum without seeing anything. She wants to love it. Or at least have a better answer than ‘I don’t know’ if someone asks, What’s your favorite so far?”
“Are you liking it?”
Regina jumps. Finding Emma, she tries to smile. A quick glance around concludes that their son has abandoned them.
“Yes. I am,” she answers, and side steps away to the next art piece.
“Good,” Emma follows hesitantly behind. “…so what’s your favorite so far?”
Poking her tongue into her cheek, Regina allows a few seconds of deliberation to pass before she decides to try her best.
“I can’t say. They’re all so…” with a vague wave, she rubs the line of her eyebrow irritably. “I don’t know. Do you have a favorite?”
There’s a pause long enough for Emma to put on her glasses, then she points to the piece in the corner of the exhibit.
“I kinda like that one.”
Regina follows the aim of her finger, then frowns.
“That one?”
“Yeah.”
It might have been a picture of an oil spill on a city street. Near the top of the canvas is a dark spot which spills from it a pale polychromatic ripple of color that reaches the corners. It has a streaked shiny texture like a wet windshield under the sun.
From a distance, it looks simple like a child’s water coloring. Up close, it looks like an oily water stain on New York cement. Still, Regina studies the painting carefully, as if it were a map to Emma’s heart. She tries to follow Emma’s thinking, but all she thinks is: This? Really, Emma? This?
“Why?” Regina asks at last, boggled.
“It looks cool.”
“Sure. Everything here looks ‘cool.’ Why is this your favorite?”
The blasé smile Emma shrugs over a shoulder must be a habit developed to mollify her fiancé, because she winces afterwards.
“Uh," Emma coughs into her hand. "Well. I guess it reminds me of Neverland.”
Regina arches her eyebrows. “Neverland?”
“You don’t see it?”
“No,” she answers drolly. “But at this point I’m mostly amazed that Neverland is what endeared this piece to you.”
“Oh…Well, yeah. I know most of that trip was a nightmare,” Emma rubs the back of her neck. “I guess you probably don’t have any good memories of it.”
“Do you?”
As Emma’s cheeks darken, a sour understanding slowly seeps into Regina’s stomach.
“Ah,” she purses her lips. “I see.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Folding her arms, Regina shrugs, kisses her teeth. “I might not be able to remember anything remotely good about that trip, beyond that it was successful, but I also wasn’t going on romantic side-trysts with my boyfriend.”
Emma’s eyes flash. “Is that what you think I was doing?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Well.”
“And that’s not what I meant now, either!”
“Sure.”
“It wasn’t. I was actually thinking of you.”
Regina looks up. Under the light, Emma’s narrowed eyes flicker into gold like sun-speckled shade. Everything else in the world blinks briefly out of existence.
“Oh?”
“Yeah well,” Scratching her cheek, Emma grimaces a little as her cheeks redden. “You and Henry. Our family.”
After a long moment, Regina turns back to the picture.
“Okay,” she folds her fingers, and nods. “Explain it to me.”
After the normal prelude of shuffling resistance, Emma finally begins with a quick, “Okay, so,” which she tacks on with information she’s not sure is safe to share. It is a habit she must have picked up sometime during conflict, either from her past or from the last seven years, where relationships are maintained like rose bushes, and tensions arise quickly with no place to go. A quick expression of clarity goes along way when trying to defuse an argument. Even Regina has found herself susceptible.
“Okay, so,” Emma points to a dense purpling bruise on the top of the canvas. “You know how it looks really dense and dark at the top?” she glances back at Regina, waiting for the assuring nod of the head. “Right. Well, it’s kind of like the island. Then there’s all this rainbow of color that comes out of it.”
The longer Regina stares at it, the pale resemblance of a rainbow does show itself. A rainbow-like wave that drains out from a grated black spot.
Regina narrows her eyes. “And this all connects to Neverland because…?”
“Like I said, it’s kind of …rainbow-like. You know, like … true love or whatever.”
“Mhmm…”
Emma clears her throat and scratches the back her neck. “I guess it reminded me of a moment…you know that moment between us? After we saved Henry?”
Regina’s lungs tightens.
“Yes,” she musters.
“Right. Well. I just remember that moment where we kind of looked at each other while we were holding him, and it just felt like— the beginning of everything. We didn’t even know how the hell we were getting out of there, but it didn’t matter. We were just holding him. Just the two of us..” On ‘the two of us,’ Emma’s voice warbles, barely surviving the rest of the speech. “A-anyway. That was the first moment I really thought of us as a family. A real one, I mean. Like other families.”
“Oh.”
Regina nods slowly. She can’t think of anything to say beyond, You got that from an oil spill? and You were thinking of us? Of me?
Shoving her hands in her pockets, Emma shrugs, a punch-card gesture to knock-out the full depth of her words.
“Anyway. That’s what I see when I look at it.”
Regina can only nod. She stares up at the painting again, determined to see it as something other than an oil spill.
Which…looking past the obvious water-damage, it does sort of shimmer a little. The color is nothing resplendent or anything, but it shares all the likeness of true love.
That Emma had thought of their family (of her?) from this ambiguous mess of color does warm her to the bones.
Shifting a step closer, Emma clears her throat.
“So …nothing stands out for you?”
Regina reviews the room fleetingly, but she cannot string together a meaningful context for these pieces. In this sterile white room, these paintings feel only as interesting to her as a strangers’ house décor.
“I don’t think I have the eye for this.” She smiles wryly.
"Oh, well," Emma fishes a brochure from her back pocket, readjusts her glasses, and unfolds it out until the map of the museum is displayed. She steps closer to share the map, the warmth of her proximity radiating up Regina’s arm.. “There’s different exhibits we could check out. Bunch of them, actually.”
“Hm,” Regina nods.
Despite the spacious chill of the museum, Emma feels hot against her, still warm by the outside. She smells strongly of sun lotion and the tannin of her rolled up shirt jacket.
“We could go to the contemporary section,” Emma points first to a white room in the back, then seems to realize how much of the museum they’d have to walk through to get there and circles back to the room adjacent to the You Are Here ‘X’ with her finger. Emma’s voice dims into the soft murmur she uses when trying to come up with a plan, a tone she normally addresses only to herself, though Regina is always privy to it, having the final say on most everything. The hotel and the wedding obviously exceptions.
As Emma talks, Regina nods along distantly, lulled by Emma’s warm leather and lotion-smell. This close, she can feel the low vibration of Emma’s voice in her chest, a distant rumble like the rattle of a country train.
“Does that sound good?” Emma asks.
Jolting up, Regina nods. “Mhm, yes. Sounds good.”
“Okay,” Emma folds her map and stuffs it in the back of her pocket. “I bet you Henry is already there. Kid loves that stuff.”
“Sure.”
For all she knows, they all could be zipping up into the stratosphere to explore space. Even then, she’d have braved it without questions.
::
The rest of their time in Boston is a like a dream.
After the museum, they walk along The Freedom Trail, stopping occasionally to take pictures of the statues and historical sites. One of these sights is a surprisingly crowded graveyard, which they all wordlessly decide to have a peek through the diamonds of the fence before moving on again. Instead they stop at Emma’s favorite bakery and pick-up cannoli’s, all different flavors which they share between bites.
That evening, they have dinner at a crowded, overly warm Italian restaurant where they sit on wooden wobbly chairs near the stairwell and listen to shoes squeak up and down the steps. When their wine glasses are poured (a very small glass for Henry), Emma gives a toast that makes both Regina and Henry misty eyed. They walk back to their hotel along the shoreline, shedding off their jackets beneath the warm, cloudless evening.
Noon the next day, they buy hot dogs at Fenway park. Emma buys them tickets for the Red Socks game, with seats so far back that the men look like tiny tin soldiers. But it’s warm and sunny and Emma’s team is apparently winning, which brings its own entertainment. For her and Henry, at least. They watch the men run around the little, tiny squares with utter incomprehension until the moment Emma stands and whoops, then they clap and say things like “That was a good one,” and “Very nice,” between attempts to muffle their laughter.
At the seventh inning stretch, after a strangely moving rendition of Sweet Caroline which compulsively sweeps the entire stadium, Emma buys them all matching baseball caps, all with the same red stitching of socks. Regina firmly rebuffs the cap until Henry forcibly squashes down on her forehead.
Despite all her grumbling, she wears the cap the rest of the day.
::
That night, Henry retreats to his private room early. By 9:30, his door is closed, his light is off, and there is the tell-tale sound of his quiet snoring through the wood.
Emma seems close to doing the same. Regina checks in between stages of her nightly routine, glancing at her through the silver mirror in the bathroom. She looks close to keeling over, lying there with her socks still on and her glasses perched on her nose, flipping through some soft-covered magazine she’s likely not even reading at all.
When Emma begins to rub her eyes beneath her glasses, Regina turns to rest her hip against the doorway.
“You know, you can turn the light off,” she says, rubbing moisturizer around her wrists and arms. “I’ll be able to find my way in the dark.”
“Yeah I know,” Emma yawns into her hand. “That’s fine, ‘still reading.”
“You just look tired.”
“Mm, I am.”
“Well, then why don’t you turn off the lights?”
“I don’t mind waiting.”
“You’re going to be driving a lot tomorrow. You need your sleep.”
Emma glances up, raising her eyebrows a little at the wifely tone. Regina’s ears burn, but she doesn’t let any of her embarrassment give way on her face. Experience has shown that she can get away with a lot that way.
The corner of Emma’s mouth turns up. “I’m alright, Regina. Just reading.”
“Alright,” she shrugs, a careless shrug, and turns back to the mirror.
In silent retaliation, she takes longer than usual, thoroughly flossing and brushing teeth, reapplying another layer of eye cream, then taking a comb delicately through her hair. By the time she’s zipping up her toiletry bag it’s nearly 9:50.
Flicking off all the lights, Regina has every intention of sliding into bed and going to sleep without anything more than a cursory “Goodnight” but before she can turn the other way she spots the glasses still perched on the nose of a very asleep Emma Swan.
With a soft sigh, Regina flicks on the desk light between them. Standing, she walks to her side and gazes down on her.
When asleep, Emma looks different. No. Not different. Younger. Wiped of all her worry lines. Like the stranger she’d been once: the drifting menace who smirked and rolled her eyes and scoffed at everything Regina said even when it was true. Maybe some part that self remains in the outskirts of herself, in the twinkle in her eye or the occasional smirk, but in the lines of the person Emma has become, there is only softness now. She’d never skip out on anything. Never leave anything.
That a heart like that had gone to Hook doesn’t faze Regina at all. Stealing and stashing is a pirate’s whole life.
Regina watches for a little while longer. Just to look at her. To see her breathing evenly, in and out. Watch the small flicker of restless movement slowly ease up into sleep.
Then, carefully, Regina lifts the glasses up from Emma’s nose. She nearly gets clear of the face when a strand of hair catches in a small hinge, putting everything to a full stop.
Cursing softly, Regina gently pulls at the caught strand, drawing it out.
It almost works. Before she can free it completely though, Emma blinks her eyes wide and yelps. The cry is soundless in its terror. Like a mouse.
Regina can’t help but smile down at her.
“Don’t you worry,” she chuckles, carefully folding up Emma’s glasses. “I’m really not so dangerous anymore.”
Emma snorts and tiredly rubs her head.
“S’rry,” she yawns. “Nervous Nellie.”
Then, rolling out her neck, Emma slides back down into her pillows with a sigh. A soft, sleepy peace settles on her face again, easing the worry lines.
“Thanks R’gina,” she murmurs quietly.
“Of course,” Regina whispers and carefully fits Emma’s glasses in their case, setting it down gently beside her water glass.
After a long moment of gazing, Regina remembers herself. She flicks off the light and return to her own bed in the darkness. Settling her head against the pillow, she listens to the quiet sound of Emma’s steady breathing. There’s the soft whir of moving air from a partially opened window, and the slow drawl of yet another yawn. Small toe bones crack as Emma stretches.
“G’night, Regina.”
Regina smiles faintly in the darkness.
“Goodnight, dear.”
::
The morning bustles with the rush of packing. Emma checks all the rooms, going through an exhaustive list of things that could be forgotten and lost forever if not reminded at least three times. Regina snaps at each reminder, then, noticing her phone charger still plugged into the wall, quickly pockets it without a word.
Outside, the brightness of the morning shines in silvery streams. The tops of cars and brownstone roofs gleam with the mirage of water. After a few minutes of squinting, Regina roots for the Red Sox cap in her purse and puts it on her head.
The moment she descends the narrow stairwell into their parking garage, Emma grins. She points a finger at her.
“You totally love it,” Emma accuses happily.
Regina rolls her eyes. “It keeps the sun out of my eyes, that’s all.”
“You’re gonna wear that all trip, I bet.”
“It’ll go in the garbage in another second.”
That zips Emma up. Still, after fitting her suitcase into the small, cramped space of the Bug’s trunk at last, Regina enters the passenger side to find Emma in an absurdly good mood, even with her bulky glasses on. She’s tapping her hands against the wheel, whistling to herself. She’s even smiling. Not one of those half-grin, half-grimaces, either. A real smile. The kind that lights up her face.
Regina stares until Emma looks back, then she deftly opens her book and reads instead.
“Don’t forget to get gas,” she says airily.
She’ll keep the stupid cap, she knows. She knew the moment Emma bought it. It’ll hang with her few other hats, rarely used, where it will stay forever like treasure.