Chapter Text
in which a closet is again our focus (as is happily ever after).
Anamika still sucks her thumb.
It’s the first thing Emma had noticed about her, before her narrow frame and her defensive stance and the eyes that scream defiance that had won Regina over so quickly. (She looks like you, Regina had murmured, which had been an absurd statement until Mika had turned her glower toward Emma.) Henry had noticed that she’d barely spoken during their early visits, even to the social worker, though even a few shy words had been more than her norm. Emma knows it all, but it’s the thumb-sucking she hones in on. It’s not uncommon in group homes, and there’s a sense of deja vu to it.
Which is, she supposes, to be expected.
Mika is sitting silently on her new bed, sucking her thumb with her legs swinging over the side, and Henry bangs his head on a shelf in the closet and says, “Ma, you left a box in here.”
“What?” Emma huddles down beside him, nudging him out of the way. “I thought everything in here was the crap you brought home from college.”
“This one’s yours,” Henry says, backing out of the way, and Emma sees the box and realizes.
They’d moved back to the West Coast only a few months ago, and she hadn’t thought about that particular box since. It had been tucked into the closet in the master bedroom in Storybrooke, behind a row of perfectly tailored pantsuits, and she only takes it out on rare occasions. (Not sentimental, Regina had said once, taking great pleasure in mocking her. Right. Emma had thrown a pillow at her head.)
“What’s in it?” The voice is still unfamiliar, and Emma turns around. Mika watches her, thumb back in her mouth, but the defiance in her eyes has shifted to curiosity.
“It’s…a few old things I’ve saved from the past ten years or so.” Emma tugs out the first item, a crumpled script smoothed out and flattened after years of being packed away. “This is the script from the hundredth episode of Happily Ever After.”
“Rose,” Mika says, and Emma nods, startled.
“I didn’t know you’d seen the show.” It’s been five years since it had ended. Anamika would have been three at the oldest for the final season.
The girl shrugs, solemn. “A little. One of my foster dads put it on a lot when he was out. Then he saw the moms kissing and he made us stop.”
“We’ll have to mend that,” Regina says briskly, walking into the room. Mika’s eyes follow Regina as she sits beside her. She talks even less around her than she does Emma, but she leans against Regina without flinching and watches her all the time with a muted sort of awe.
Only Henry has managed to get through to Mika on both counts, and he settles comfortably beside her still-swinging legs to watch Emma unpack the box.
Emma pulls out the next item, grinning at it. “This is a mug Regina got me.”
Henry snorts. “I haven’t seen that in months. I thought you broke it.” The mug is personalized, illustrated with a screencap of a tweet.
Three days after Emma and Regina had kissed on the red carpet, they’d been everywhere. There had been photos and articles and a dozen interviews where they’d been tersely instructed by Cora to promote the show finale first. (Cora had spoken only to Emma and Henry for weeks after, during which Gold had taken advantage of the rift between Millses to make Regina an offer.) And there had been Twitter, true to form, where they’d been celebrated and decried.
They’d gotten their share of congratulations and I knew it! before the usuals had arrived. There had been a dozen more shouted rumors about Regina breaking Emma and Killian up, about Regina forcing the relationship, about it all being a publicity stunt because Victory Rose had been a failure. Emma had endured it for days before she’d remembered that she’s done and she can say whatever she wants to to the fans.
And so @emmaswan14 tweets, For the record, anyone who harasses my family over a SHIP gets an automatic BLOCK. My personal life is not yours to dictate. #fuckoff. It had cost her another terse reminder from Cora that her image is family-friendly, but she hadn’t deleted the tweet and had felt pretty smug about the whole matter.
Regina hadn’t acknowledged the tweet at all, and Emma had thought at first that she hadn’t seen it because she’d been so bogged down with the battle with Cora. But one morning, the personalized mug had been on the table with the #fuckoff carefully edited to #f***off and Regina had poured her coffee and kissed her temple. “Morning, darling,” she’d said, studiously casual, and Emma had grinned lazily and basked.
They don’t say I love you all that often in the usual ways, but somehow it always manages to emerge regardless.
Now, Anamika says, “F-star-star-star-O-F-F?” and Emma gulps. Henry snickers.
Regina strokes Mika’s cheek. “Why don’t you show Mika the book you keep in there?” Mika falls silent again, a hand in Regina’s, and Emma drapes her own legs over Henry and sits on her other side.
Mika shifts, uncomfortable, and Emma is careful to move slightly to the side and give her an easy exit from the circle of family. She kicks at Henry’s back until he budges and she opens The Art of Victory Rose. “See? Here’s Rose and Victoria at a fair with Jamie,” she says, pointing to one of the pictures. “Here they’re all eating ice cream.”
“I like Jamie,” Mika says, touching his face.
Henry perks up. “You want to meet him sometime?” Mika bobs her head, still gazing at the art. “We room together at Berkeley when he isn’t filming. I can make that happen.”
“Okay.” Mika is more comfortable with Henry than with the two of them, thus far, and Emma shifts over when Henry settles in beside her to show her some of the pictures in the book.
Regina pulls her from the book, tugging her back to the closet. “Anything new in your box? Maybe some mildew to commemorate our move? A half-empty bottle of wine from One Night Stand?”
Emma pouts. “Are you mocking me?”
“It’s called teasing when we’re in love, Swan,” Regina retorts, plucking a paper from the box. “What’s this, a letter to Henry–“ She pauses halfway through the first line. “Ah.”
“Not Henry,” Emma says, retrieving the letter and folding it again. Her cheeks are flushed and this is…overly sentimental, even for her.
She’d written the letter on his eighteenth birthday, added it to one of the sites where she’d been registered as a birth mother and waited, waited, waited. He’d never contacted her, but she’d thought…she’d wanted him to know, at least, that he could have her if he’d wanted.
Regina curls up beside her, her head against Emma’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” she asks, and Emma slides an arm around her waist and holds her closer.
She has her family. She’d very nearly not had her family after Regina had come out, after Henry’s birth mother’s sister had caused a stir trying to regain custody of him (They’re going to turn him gay with their perverted, immoral lifestyle, she’d insisted, and she’d been popular enough on the Bible Belt that too many had sided with her), and there had been lawsuits and smear campaigns and the three of them on their own.
Henry had been the one to save them in the end, arriving on Cora’s doorstep and begging her for the help that his mothers had been too proud to seek. It had been the only effective way to end the months of hostility between Regina and Cora– painting Cora as the hero, leaving them forever in her debt, and Cora had taken it without hesitation.
It had been too late to salvage the Mills business partnership, though, to Regina’s relief and Cora’s dismay. And that had panned out quite nicely for them all.
Henry is still showing Anamika the book, but her eyes are on them again, boring into Emma’s back until Emma turns to smile at her. Mika turns away swiftly, pigtails bouncing against dark brown cheeks with the movement, and sticks her thumb back into her mouth.
Emma moves the box over into Mika’s line of sight. Regina’s already reaching into the box, her thumb running over the material of the tie that Emma had worn to SDCC before Season Six. “My favorite,” Regina murmurs, tying it back around Emma’s neck. The kiss is chaste with their son and foster daughter (foster daughter, Emma’s mind repeats, savoring the words as they flicker through her mind for the first time) in the room, but Regina’s hand curled around the tie and her knuckles brushing against Emma’s collarbone are a promise, unspoken.
“Let’s not forget the last time we competed for top dick-ery– for top…meanie prize,” Emma amends, and Mika presses her lips against her thumb like she’s trying not to laugh. They part in surprise when Emma plucks out a fifty-dollar bill from the box.
“I can’t believe you saved that,” Regina grumbles.
“You loved it.” They’d arrived to the Paleyfest ten-year reunion of the premiere separately. For the first time since Cora had cut them off, Emma had gotten a role beyond failed pilots and unsuccessful independent films, and she’d been shooting One Night Stand’s first season in Storybrooke while Regina had been mid-production of her pilot in LA. They’d sat side by side on the stage while Killian had made lewd jokes and Lacey had kicked him in the boot and they hadn’t made eye contact once.
The moderator had brought up the show’s two real-life love stories, and Mary Margaret had gone on and on about her three children and the charity she runs while Emma had shifted awkwardly in her seat.
"Regina and I have actually been separated for a bit–“ she’d begun, straightening in her chair, and murmurs of confusion and anger had rippled through the audience. Emma had hung her head.
Regina had said, rolling her eyes, “Yes, we’ve been separated…by the middle of the continent. I’ve been working on producing a new show on the West Coast and Emma’s been filming in Storybrooke. It’s been three weeks and Emma’s a troll.” Emma had beamed. Regina had tugged her back against her seat, flicking a finger against her temple. “You have no idea what I put up with,” she’d confided in the audience.
“This from the woman who bet me fifty bucks that I couldn’t pull off our ‘separation’ with a straight face,” Emma had retorted. “I’ve been in character all day. Pay up.”
Regina had handed her a bill, still smug. “I’m going to get at least a dozen nasty tweets about this after the panel,” she’d said, smirking for the audience. There’d been a loud hoot from somewhere near the stage.
It had been a good reunion. Regina still makes sure to do at least one convention a season and Emma tends to sign up when the con can afford them both, and their prior cons had…had their moments.
There’d been the early one after the finale where New Guy had been a featured guest and hadn’t caught the gossip about Emma and Regina beforehand. He’d groped Regina’s ass in the group photos and Emma had– very politely– stabbed him in the leg with her heel. (“How do you accidentally stab someone?” Regina had demanded, exasperation not enough to hide the amusement in her eyes. “You drew blood, Emma! Blood!”) New Guy had limped around for the rest of the con and Emma had gotten a few dirty looks and a few high-fives. One of them had been from Henry.
There’d been the terrible one where she'd been cornered at a meet-and-greet by an overly aggressive fan who’d bought the ticket just to tell Emma that she was going to hell for corrupting Regina with her homosexuality. Emma had nodded for security but that one had nearly ended in violence between fans, and Emma had skipped that con the next year.
There are good memories, too, like standing up in front of an audience who loves her at last and talking about her first experience reading fanfiction. “It was harrowing,” she’d admitted, covering her face. “I swear, I wanted to burn my computer after stumbling onto that.”
“What was so terrible about it?” Jamaal had wanted to know, and Emma had shaken her head vigorously.
“Nothing you need to know!” she'd nearly shouted, and the audience had snickered.
The fandom has mellowed toward her as the years have passed and she’d gotten used to speaking her mind again. She’s always careful to be positive about the show and its creators, but she’s nothing less than fiercely protective of Victory Rose and her costars. “It’s yours,” she’d said at the Paleyfest reunion. “That’s…um…that’s always been the most amazing part of it for me. You took the narrative we’d given you and you wrote us a love story before we had ever gotten there. Victory Rose belongs to you all, first and foremost, no matter what we did with it after.”
The words are still echoing in her mind as she sets the fifty-dollar bill aside. Anamika is still staring at it as though she’s never seen that kind of money in her life. Emma hadn’t, at her age or for a long time after. She tosses Mika an encouraging smile and the girl ducks her head and slides closer to Henry.
“I remember this photoshoot,” Regina says, smoothing down the next photo she plucks from the box. They’re standing toe-to-toe, glaring at each other and much too close to be rivals. “They didn’t use this one, did they.” Emma knows the look on Regina’s face now, the sneer and the burning eyes that mean she’s about to launch herself at Emma and make her scream– in less than hateful ways, of course.
“It was a nice batch,” Emma offers, sly. “I had to save one.”
“So sentimental even about us hating each other,” Regina sighs, linking her ankle with Emma’s on the floor. She reaches for the other photo in the box. “What’s this, a production still of you punching me in the face?”
It isn’t. It’s Regina during the pilot filming for her new show, the one they’d officially moved back to LA so she could supervise. “It’s a delicate story,” she’d said, fidgeting as she’d brought it up. “I know you’re still filming in Storybrooke and it isn’t fair to expect you to–“
“Yes.”
Regina had been dumbfounded. “You…yes?”
“Yes,” Emma had repeated. “You’re doing important work here and I know you’ll be impossible about it being perfect in the best ways.” Her filming schedule is much lighter for One Night Stand, a comedy about a woman who discovers one day that her prior one-night stand is the woman about to get engaged to her best friend. It’s an easy workload without many sets or CGI to juggle, and she’ll happily fly back and forth a few times a month to support Regina’s show. “I’m proud to be a part of it.”
In the photo, Regina is crouched beside one of the cameras, watching Jamaal gesturing to their teenaged lead actress. She looks driven, invigorated by the work, and she’s glowing like she hasn’t since they’d fought for Victory Rose and won.
Emma had been there when they’d announced the show at SDCC this past summer, at a panel titled True Love’s Kiss: LGBTQ Stories in Fantasy that had featured both of them with several other actors and writers. There had been buzz about an announcement at the panel and the room had been packed with curious fans and the huge crowd of Victory Rose shippers who still follow them everywhere.
Regina had paused near the end of the panel, nodding at the last question asked by the moderator. “And where do you see the future of stories like these going?”
“Funny you should ask that,” Regina had said to the laughter of an audience anticipating it. “I think that– I think that as long as we’re writing queer fairytales about adults, we continue to normalize the idea that this is an adult topic. And too often it’s reduced to a ‘Very Special Story’ and not a natural part of this world. Which is why Mr. Gold and I have been working with Disney and ABC Family to develop a new project– a spinoff of Happily Ever After where a teenaged princess will come of age and learn magic and fight dragons and find that she, too, is looking for a princess of her own.”
There had been resounding applause and Emma had breathed a sigh of relief. It won’t work, Cora had insisted, listing demos and production issues and stabbing insults Regina’s way. But it does. The pilot has been picked up and the first few episodes have aired now to critical acclaim, and Cora’s fury stems from her capacity as advisory-only.
This is Regina’s project, and Regina had been adamant from the start that it wouldn’t be Happily Ever After redux in its early seasons. “I want this to be the new normal,” she’d said at the SDCC announcement. “To see girls of color– to see queer children– to see them all represented onscreen in every genre. You wrote Victory Rose first,” she’d echoed Emma’s pronouncement from Paleyfest. “And I can’t wait to see what those children write as they grow up.”
Emma had slipped the photo from filming into her box as she’d packed it up for the move, and Regina gazes at it now with surprise. “This earns a place in your box?”
“I’m not just your adoring partner,” Emma says, holding it by the edges as she sets it down on top of the script from the hundredth. “I’m also your biggest fan, remember?”
Regina’s eyes are warm, her fingers tracing patterns into Emma’s leg. “It’s very mutual,” she murmurs, kissing Emma’s cheek. “Is that the end of the box beyond that monstrosity at the bottom of it?”
“Well. Just one more thing.” Anamika is watching them intently, and Emma flushes and retrieves the little black box from it.
There’s a moment of hesitation– an instant when they’re all frozen in place, awaiting, Regina’s reaction, and then Regina gasps mockingly. “Emma! Are you proposing now, on Anamika's day?”
“Shut up,” Emma mutters, but it’s taken Regina some time to get to the place where she can joke about the ring, so…progress.
Emma had agonized over it for weeks last year, talked it through with Marian and Henry and brought them both with her to pick it out for Regina’s birthday. She’d been determined to find something perfect for the ring, something that would be right for them both, something that would solidify their relationship even more.
Instead, she’d taken Regina back into Storybrooke for her birthday, gotten down on one knee in front of the mansion that had been Mayor Stone’s, and Regina had turned on her heel and fled.
Regina had slept on Marian’s couch that night and Emma had stewed alone in the dark, old abandonment issues returning to play. She’d gotten an emoji from Regina, the koi-on-a-flagpole that has come to be their everything’s going to be okay. But Regina had run, unwilling to accept the ring, and it had been difficult not to take it as a rejection.
“It’s not a rejection,” Regina had said when she’d finally returned, her eyes still flickering to the box on the nightstand. “I can’t get married. I can’t.” There’d been a stumbling explanation of Daniel and the impossibility of marriage there, and then another of Cora’s arranged almost-wedding between Regina and Leopold. Marriage is terrifying for Regina, is something that had been so twisted for her that she still has hangups, and Emma had tucked away the ring box and hadn’t had the heart to return it.
(I love you, Regina had whispered into her skin like a prayer. I love you, I love you, I love you, each confession a plea for nothing to change. Emma had held her close and put aside a dream that had suddenly become a step too far. She’d cried when she’d thought Regina had fallen asleep and soft hands had brushed them away and whispered renewed devotion into her ear.)
“It’s a beautiful ring,” Regina says, opening the box and examining it for the first time. Emma stiffens. On the bed, Henry sucks in a breath. Regina’s finger runs over the delicate twist of the band. “Marian said you chose it.”
“She was there to make sure I didn’t wind up with something horrible, but this felt…” Emma shifts, awkward and uncertain as she’d been after the flubbed proposal. “It doesn’t matter.”
“May I?” Regina says, and Emma nods with trepidation as Regina lifts the ring from the box. She undoes her necklace and removes the pendant that had been on the chain, sliding the engagement ring into its place. “It just…it seems like a waste to keep it in that box, gathering dust,” she murmurs, but her eyes peek out from under her lashes with a vulnerability that twists Emma’s heart. “I do love it very much.”
Emma nods hesitantly, and Regina turns so Emma can clasp the necklace again. On the bed, Anamika and Henry are both watching with wide eyes.
“You know,” Emma says, addressing Mika. “That isn’t even the best thing in the box. There’s still one last surprise in it. Want to see?” Mika nods solemnly.
Emma puts everything back into the box, marching out of the room, and Henry says, “You’re going to like this. She hasn’t done this since I turned eleven.”
Regina’s rich laugh follows Emma from the room as she dresses quickly, adjusting her outfit and picking out her props; and when she bursts back into the room Anamika screams.
No, squeals, a burst of laughter escaping from her throat for the first time since they’d met her, and Emma winks and straightens out her clown costume before she starts juggling plastic fruit. Anamika is still laughing, eyes bright and shining, and Emma thinks back eleven years to when this all had begun.
She’d been standing in a clown outfit at a birthday party, doing impressions for the birthday boy (Milah’s nephew, she knows now. He’d managed to make his way onto Killian’s ultra-popular stint on The Real Housewives of Storybrooke and is dating some tween-friendly singer now). Gold had been in the corner, watching her so intently that she’d thought he’d been a potential stalker until he’d handed her his card.
And she’d thought it would be a weird encounter, back then. A story to tell girls in bars about the time she’d almost been discovered. She’d watch that weird fairytale show and think, hey, that could have been me and never thought once about those two mothers falling in love onscreen and off it.
She hadn’t imagined this: a boy who calls her Ma egging her on as he watches her perform; a little lost girl with eyes like hers and a blinding smile; and a woman she loves watching her every movement as her fingers twist around the ring hanging from her neck.
She hadn’t imagined home, trickling into her life as gradually as it had Rose Turner’s, and now she can’t imagine anything else.
