Chapter Text
The portal spat them out into the barnyard at a little past midnight, and Emma's knees hit the dirt before her brain caught up with the fact that she was home.
Not Enchanted-Forest-thirty-years-ago home. Real home. Storybrooke home, with its crooked street lamps and the smell of pine and salt that she'd stopped noticing was a smell until she'd spent two days without it.
"Easy." Hook's hand closed around her arm, hauling her up before she could face-plant into the grass. Behind him, half-supporting the woman they'd dragged out of a thirty-years-gone prison cell, Smee — no, not Smee, just Hook, the only Hook, the one who hadn't punched himself in the face an hour ago — looked around like he expected the world to still be on fire.
It wasn't. It was just dark, and quiet, and full of people Emma loved who were about to find out what she'd done.
"You alright?" Hook asked her. Low voice. The kind he used when he meant it.
"I changed history," Emma said. "Twice. In one night."
"You fixed history," he corrected. "Your parents met right on schedule. Your mother stole that ring fair and square. I'd call that a win."
Emma looked past him, to the woman standing a few feet off, arms wrapped around herself even though the May night wasn't that cold. She'd given her name once, quietly, in the cell, like she wasn't sure she was allowed to say it out loud anymore.
*Marian.*
Emma hadn't thought about what the name meant. Not really. She'd been too busy thinking about the rock she'd needed to throw to keep Regina-from-thirty-years-ago from executing an innocent woman, too busy thinking about Henry's book and her parents' ring and the orange light eating the sky. She'd thought, *I'll just bring her forward, she can't stay here, she'll die if I leave her,* and there hadn't been room in her head for anything past that.
There was room now. The shape of it was settling into her stomach like a stone.
"Hook," she said. "Robin Hood's wife. The one who—"
"Aye." He didn't make her finish it. "I know the story, love. Regina caught her helping Snow, locked her up. Story is she's been dead twelve years."
"She's not dead."
"No," Hook agreed, and had the decency to look like he understood exactly what that meant. "She's not."
---
Regina had not slept in three days, which she was prepared to blame on Henry's apartment-hunting websites and absolutely nothing else, and she was in an unreasonably good mood about it.
She told herself that walking into Granny's with her hand tucked into Robin's elbow, Roland skipping ahead of them already arguing with Henry about whether pirates or knights would win in a fight, did not mean anything beyond the obvious. That the obvious — that she was happy, that she had let herself be happy, in public, where people could see it and not immediately combust from the shock — was already more than she'd let herself want in years.
Tink had said *soulmates.* Regina had rolled her eyes at the time. She believed it a little more every day she got to keep this.
"You're doing the thing," Robin murmured, close to her ear.
"I'm not doing a thing."
"You're smiling like you're waiting for someone to take it away from you."
"I am not." She was. She stopped.
Inside, Granny's was a wall of noise and string lights and the particular chaos of an entire town deciding, apparently without consulting her, that tonight was a celebration. Snow had the baby. David had his arm around her like he still couldn't believe either of them was real. Belle was laughing at something Archie said, her hand resting on Gold's arm in a way that still made Regina's jaw tighten, old habits dying slower than she'd like.
She didn't see Emma.
She noted that, filed it away the way she filed everything about Emma Swan lately — *not there, wonder where, doesn't matter* — and let Robin steer her toward the bar, where Granny was pouring something that was almost definitely not on the menu.
The door opened. Cold air, briefly, and then —
Regina turned because everyone turned, because that was what a door opening at this hour did to a room already strung tight with magic and miracles, and she saw Emma first, and then Hook, and then the woman standing slightly behind them both, dark-haired, wide-eyed, dressed in clothes that didn't belong to this century.
Robin made a sound she'd never heard him make. Something caught between his throat and his teeth.
"Marian?"
The woman's face cracked open — relief and disbelief and twelve years of grief breaking all at once — and she said his name back like a question she'd stopped hoping would ever be answered, and Roland was already running, already shouting *papa, who is that,* and Robin was crossing the room like the floor had tilted under him, and Regina stood very still and watched the only happiness she had let herself believe in walk straight into another woman's arms.
---
Emma saw it happen in pieces. Robin's face. Marian's face. Roland stopping dead, confused, looking between his father and this stranger like he could feel something shifting that he didn't have words for yet.
And Regina.
Regina, who hadn't moved. Who stood by the bar with a glass in her hand she'd forgotten she was holding, her whole body gone rigid in a way Emma recognized — she'd seen Regina hold herself like that exactly once before, the night they thought Henry might not wake up. It was the posture of someone deciding, in real time, whether she was allowed to fall apart in front of witnesses.
"Emma." Snow was at her elbow suddenly, voice pitched low. "Who is that?"
"I'll explain. Later. I need—" Emma didn't finish. She was already moving, weaving past Granny and a stunned Archie, because someone had to say something before the whole room finished putting it together on its own, and it was going to be her, because she was the one who'd done this.
She got close enough to hear Robin say *Marian, this is impossible, I buried—* and Marian say, broken and joyful, *Regina. It was Regina, in the past, she—* and watched the exact second the name landed.
Robin turned. Found Regina across the room. His face did something complicated — guilt, confusion, the specific horror of a man realizing the past and the present had just collided inside his own chest — and Regina's expression didn't change at all, which was somehow worse than if it had.
"Regina." Emma reached her first. Got a hand half-raised, not quite touching her arm. "I can explain—"
"Can you." Regina's voice was very quiet. Very even. The kind of even that Emma had learned, the hard way, over three years, to be afraid of. "Please. Explain to me how you found my—" the word caught, just barely, and she pushed through it, "—Robin's dead wife in the Enchanted Forest of the past and decided the correct course of action was to *bring her back with you.*"
"She was going to die. I couldn't leave her there to be executed, Regina, I couldn't just—"
"You could have left her." Regina's eyes were too bright. "You could have let history stay exactly where it belonged, the way you were so very careful to do with everything else tonight, and instead you brought her here, to my town, to my—" She stopped herself. Looked, for one unguarded second, at Robin, who was still holding Marian's hands like he didn't know how to make himself let go, and Roland tucked against his father's leg looking up at the strange woman with cautious, dawning hope.
"It wasn't a choice," Emma said. "Regina, if I'd left her, she'd have died. You'd have had her blood on your hands for the rest of your life — the past you, I mean, but it's still you, it still happened—"
"Don't." Regina's voice cracked on the single syllable, and she hated it, Emma could see her hate it, could see her physically swallow whatever had almost come out raw and unguarded and put the wall back up brick by brick in real time. When she spoke again it was flat. Cold. Worse than shouting would have been. "You're just like your mother, you know that? Never thinking about consequences. Never thinking about anyone who isn't standing directly in front of you."
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?" Regina set the glass down on the nearest table with exquisite, terrible care, like she didn't trust herself to do anything less precise. "You wanted to fix your parents' love story so badly you tore mine apart to do it. Congratulations, Miss Swan. Mission accomplished."
"Regina—"
But she was already walking, already pushing past Granny's stunned silence and the murmurs starting to ripple through the room, already out the door before Emma could find a single word that wasn't *I'm sorry,* which she knew, with total certainty, would not be enough.
---
She didn't go far. She told herself that was strategic — that storming all the way home would look like running, and she was not running, she was simply removing herself from an environment that no longer required her presence — but the truth was simpler and uglier. She made it to the alley beside the diner, out of the light, and put her back against the brick, and let her legs stop pretending they could hold her up with any dignity.
The cold of the wall seeped through her blazer. She welcomed it. It was easier to feel than the alternative.
*Soulmates,* Tink had said. Regina had believed her. That was the part that scraped rawest, underneath the grief and the fury — not just that she'd lost Robin, but that she had been *certain.* She had let the universe convince her, for the first time since Daniel, that something good was finally, irrevocably hers, and the universe had laughed and handed it back to a dead woman.
*A dead woman I killed.*
She heard the door open behind her — heard footsteps that hesitated, then came anyway — and knew before she turned who it would be, because of course it would be. Emma Swan had never once in three years known when to leave well enough alone.
"Go away," Regina said, without turning around.
"I know you don't want to hear this right now—"
"Then don't say it."
"—but I am sorry. Not the kind of sorry that fixes anything, I know that, I'm not stupid enough to think 'sorry' un-resurrects somebody. I just—" Emma's voice was rough, unsteady in a way that almost made Regina turn around, almost, before she remembered she didn't owe Emma Swan the courtesy of her face right now. "I keep thinking about what would've happened if I'd just left her there. And I couldn't do it. I looked at her and I thought about Henry finding out I let a person die when I could've stopped it, and I couldn't make myself walk away. I didn't think far enough ahead to think about you. I should have. I'm sorry I didn't."
"How very honest of you."
"Regina—"
"What do you want, Emma?" Regina finally turned, and whatever Emma saw on her face made her flinch, actually flinch, half a step back. Good. "A medal for telling the truth eventually? Forgiveness, so you can feel better about ruining the first good thing that's happened to me since I adopted my son? I don't have it in me tonight. I don't know if I'll have it in me tomorrow. So unless you've found a way to undo what you did, there is nothing — *nothing* — you can say to me right now that I want to hear."
Emma didn't say anything else. That, more than any apology, was what almost undid Regina completely — that Emma, who never knew when to stop talking, who filled silences the way other people filled out paperwork, just stood there and let her have this. Didn't defend herself further. Didn't ask to be absolved.
"I'm going home," Regina said, quieter now, the fury banking down into something more exhausted. "Tell Henry I'll see him for breakfast. Don't follow me."
She didn't look back to see if Emma listened.
---
Emma didn't follow her. She stood in the cold alley for a long time after the sound of Regina's heels had faded around the corner, replaying the look on her face — not the anger, she could have handled the anger, she'd weathered three years of Regina's anger and come out the other side every time. It was the second before the anger, the unguarded flash of something that looked horribly like a person watching the floor get pulled out from under them for the second time in their life, that Emma couldn't stop seeing.
*You're just like your mother. Never thinking about consequences.*
It wasn't true, not exactly. Emma had thought about consequences the entire trip back — she'd thought about almost nothing else, terrified the whole time that one wrong move would unmake her own existence. She'd just never once thought to ask herself what saving one life might cost someone else's.
She went back inside because Henry was still in there, and because leaving him to process whatever he'd just half-witnessed alone wasn't an option. The party had the brittle, overly cheerful energy of a room that knew something had gone wrong and was determined not to look directly at it. Robin had Marian seated at a table near the window, Roland climbing into her lap like he was trying to memorize her by touch, and the whole tableau had the surreal quality of a family photograph nobody had agreed to pose for.
Snow caught her arm at the door. "Emma. What happened back there?"
"I brought back the wrong person," Emma said. "Robin's wife. The one Regina—" She didn't finish it. She didn't have to; Snow's face did the math fast enough.
"Oh, Emma."
"Yeah."
"Is Regina—"
"She told me not to follow her. So I'm not going to." Emma scrubbed a hand over her face, suddenly aware of exactly how long it had been since she'd slept, since any of this had started, since her whole life had been a normal, ordinary mess instead of whatever this was. "I need to find Henry."
She found him by the jukebox, arms crossed, watching Roland chatter at Marian with the focused, slightly suspicious attention of a kid who'd spent a long time protecting his family and had just watched a stranger walk straight into the middle of it.
"Hey, kid."
"Is that woman really Robin Hood's dead wife?" Henry asked, without preamble, because he'd never once been a kid who wasted time getting to the point.
"Yeah."
"And you brought her back? From, like, actually back, from the past?"
"It's a long story. I'll explain everything tomorrow, I promise. Right now I just—" Emma glanced toward the door Regina had vanished through twenty minutes ago. "I think your mom needs some space tonight. She said she'd see you for breakfast."
Henry's eyes — Regina's eyes, dark and sharp and missing absolutely nothing — moved from Emma's face to the table where Robin sat with his very-alive wife and his confused son, and back again, and something in his expression went carefully, deliberately neutral in a way that told Emma he understood more than he was saying.
"She's not okay," Henry said. It wasn't a question.
"No," Emma admitted. "She's not."
"You're gonna fix it. Right?"
Emma looked at him — eleven years old and already fluent in the particular language of trying to hold a fractured family together, already so much better at it than she'd been at his age — and felt the stone in her stomach settle into something heavier and more permanent.
"I'm gonna try," she said. "I don't know how yet. But I'm gonna try."
Henry nodded, like that was an acceptable answer, even though Emma wasn't sure it was true. She didn't know what *fixing it* even looked like. She didn't know how you gave someone back a happiness you'd personally taken away.
But she was going to find out. Whatever it took.
Across the room, Robin caught her eye for half a second — guilt and grief and something apologetic in his face, like he knew exactly what his joy was costing someone else and didn't know what to do with that either — and Emma looked away first, because she didn't have anything to offer him.
She walked Henry home a little after one, the two of them quiet under the streetlights, and stood on the mansion's front porch a moment longer than she needed to after he'd gone inside, looking at the dark windows upstairs where she assumed Regina was, alone, with whatever was left of the night.
*I'm gonna try,* she'd told Henry.
She had no idea yet what trying was going to turn into. She only knew, standing there in the cold with her hands jammed in her jacket pockets, that she wasn't going to let this be the end of it — not because she owed Regina a debt, though she did, but because the thought of Regina spending the rest of her life believing she didn't deserve to be happy was somehow the worst thing Emma had ever felt the shape of.
She just didn't have a plan yet.
That would have to start tomorrow.