Work Text:
In a forgotten corner of the universe, there lies an Enchanted Forest (not The Enchanted Forest, which doesn't actually exist) whose rulers often squabble over things mundane to the constant movement of time like borders, finances, politics, and so forth. During this particular stretch of squabbling, the kingdoms settle their arguments in the brutal poetry of war and pay for their words with the lives of the peasantry and the gold from dwindling coffers. Carrying weakness borne from their talks, they are no match for Queen Cora, who rises to power and claims it from her betters. She does so with the same kind of precision and efficiency she wields when she tears the hearts of her enemies out before crushing them, terror springing from the sterility of the motion and the impassivity with which she treats life.
War, at least, has the decency to be messy in its horror.
In this time of upheaval, Queen Cora forces the other kingdoms to their knees and watches them bow from her high perch with cold satisfaction in her victory. The land breathes easy, free from the choking grasp of war but it is a short respite, to be replaced by fear in greater measure before the year ends.
Queen Cora rules the same way she conquered - with a ruthless drive toward more. Her subjects hope for apathy, which doesn't release them from their suffering but at least leaves them alive, insects that they are to Queen Cora, who demands nothing less than everything from them and punishes its absence both lethally and frequently.
They call her the Queen of Hearts, named for her preferred method of murder, spoken softly of in the shadows, and feared for the inhumanity in her human frame.
Her daughter though, they'll call the Heartless Queen when she overthrows her mother with actions infinitely more alive than her mother ever pretended at.
There surely must have been a time when the title of the Queen of Hearts and all the weight it carries did not come so naturally to Cora. Regina lives, after all. But that is a time long gone and no one is sure if Regina's lucky to have lived during it or cursed for it. She still breathes, yes, but Cora tore her heart out at her naming ceremony in the name of a mother's love, for what kind of use could a heart be but to birth weakness? And so, Cora loved Regina and Regina loved Cora the best they knew how - not at all and in pretenses with horrifying visages.
Regina grows up an outsider by more than just station and wonders what it means to be human until her mother forbids it and the ever present strings of family and love tug her away from her curiosity (just the quiet whispers of Cora to her still beating stillborn heart).
Cora should have been surprised but it appears that even without a heart, Cora suffered from a mother's blindness. Regina pushes her through a looking glass one day in what must be a fit of subdued rage (never mind that she lacks the heart to truly feel anything and the context with which to be aware of it, but the servants gossip) and ascends to her throne. The lands tremble because although the Queen of Hearts could never pass for human, she must have once been and her daughter has never had that luxury.
She has not her mother's infinite ambitions of conquest; her greed lies elsewhere and she pursues it with the same sharp focus and force her mother showed when her mother still lived in the land. It would seem that Queen Cora still lives through Queen Regina, but not in any way she would have wanted. Queen Regina rules harshly, but justly. She levies heavy taxes but never collects more than she decrees, sends advisers and overseers instead of soldiers and executioners, and carries with her the absolute belief that life is worth keeping (perhaps this is the most important thing, perhaps she believed this to be the root of Cora's inhumanity, perhaps she thought she could reclaim her own humanity through it). The land knows an uneasy peace and its people may yet remember what it felt like to be safe and protected.
She had only realized that her mother must have carried her heart on her person after she'd been rid of her. All that's left in this world of her heart is the phantom pain of her belief that she was human, once upon a time. Queen Regina wields power in the lay of her land, the desperate hope of her people, and the unbridled magic at her fingertips, but she'd trade it all away for her heart in her chest again.
Wherever her heart is, Regina idly muses, must be a land where time stands still. Eighteen years have passed and she's aged perhaps a day. She imagines a land where her mother lives in an illusion of immortality and uses it to fulfill all of her dreams of power. She wonders if her mother still holds power over her, if she could decide one day to crush her heart in a passing moment of boredom, if she'd die even though she hasn't felt its pull all these eighteen years.
Before her thoughts can turn more morbid, a knock echos through her throne room and she waves a lazy hand to open its doors. A dungeon guard enters, dragging a girl behind him.
"Your Majesty," and he bows, "we caught this one in the gardens, skirts laden with jewels from the treasury. What will you have us do?"
"It wasn't me!" the girl cries out, voice and body shaking with fear, "I didn't do it!"
"No? Then who?" Regina asks and the girl worries her lip but refuses to speak. There is loyalty in her silence. Stupidity as well, (for Regina is just, not kind) but poorly placed loyalty nonetheless. That's enough for Regina to spare her from the gallows.
"Very well then, a year of your life for the theft and another year for your silence. The dungeons, Claude, and then a suitable labor camp when she's well enough to work."
He's as confused as the girl, who looks well if a little disheveled, but he bows and marches her out. Regina sees the world with far more clarity than most. Her magic, so a part of her as to be another sense, pricks at Claude's heartbeat, the girl's, and the third one not yet born (the real reason Regina spares the girl - no child should pay for the sins of their forebears).
Regina enters her dungeons while the child is still crying, eyes closed and red in the face from exertion. The mother lies on the bed and she does not look at her child.
"Will you keep him?" Regina asks her, picking up the child who stills in her arms.
"No." the girl responds, still looking away, "What kind of chance would he have with me?"
She's not wrong, Regina thinks, but she's lived long enough to know that her opinion would be unwelcome in this moment. The child stares at Regina with such trust that Regina feels the sluggish stirrings of something that might be hope, although it's all guesswork to her.
It could have been love, in another lifetime.
When she introduces the Crown Prince Henry at his naming ceremony, she promises him the world and a life with neither want nor fear, with safety and love - a good future. Lofty promises from the Heartless Queen, they'll whisper, but in pity instead of fear. The girl knows none of this; they shipped her away two weeks prior. She'll hear of the Crown Prince months later and think nothing of it.
Henry hears the whispers of the Heartless Queen in the corridors because it seems to be a universal constant that the servants will gossip loudly and inconveniently. He ignores them best as his childish young heart can, for his mother reads to him at night and scares away the monsters and always has a hug or a kiss for him and is that not love? But his heart is childish, young, and easy to convince and he begins to notice instead the stiffness in her motions, how her smile never quite reaches her eyes, and a million other once-innocuous things. When he cries, she can no longer console him.
He runs away at ten, convinced that she never loved him (and he isn't wrong, not technically, but she tried). Regina thinks her heart would have broken in twain, had she ever had it, and perhaps her mother was right - what use could her heart be but to birth weakness? She could not love, no, but she cannot despair now either, only move forward.
Regina puts up posters and offers entire counties as reward (she'd offer her kingdom but she is still Queen Cora's daughter, even after all these years) but no one brings the Crown Prince back home for a year.
"Your Majesty?" Claude asks. Regina looks up, irritated to have been interrupted in her work, but Claude has always been competent, and she knows he wouldn't have interrupted were it not important. "There's someone here to see you. Claims to have found the Crown Prince." Regina doesn't even bother with walking, just teleports them both to the throne room. Her magic sees Henry before she can and she rushes to him, sinks to her knees (her mother would have her head for it) to hug him, and recoils when he flinches at her arms (were they prisons to him? She thought them love - her mother had never shown her such affection and she'd craved it as a child).
Taken with his return, Regina doesn't notice the other person until she's stood up again, magic at the edge of her awareness reminding her that she knows this person because Regina forgets very little. The girl's grown now, where she once shrunk in on herself, wrapped in the cloak of her youth, she now stands tall and brash, demanding the world acknowledge her presence and her place in it. Whatever innocence had lain in those eyes has given way to the sharp jadedness of one who has seen far too much of life and her hand never strays far from the sword at her waist (not that it would be any use against Regina, but she understands the need to feel safe).
She's grown in less poetic ways as well, blonde hair once both unkempt and unkept now layered like fine gold thread, an attractive sharpness to her cheekbones that have lost the fat of childhood, eyes still that lovely green but better suited to her face now that they no longer sink in their sockets, and an impressive figure (Regina particularly appreciates the musculature of her arms although the chest is a viable competitor for her favorite feature). Regina's no stranger to physical attraction and she wonders if it would be inappropriate to bed her son's savior (She's Queen - nothing's really inappropriate).
"You have my eternal gratitude..." Regina starts, realizing then that she had never inquired to her name.
"Emma." she says simply and offers no more, eyes still tracking Regina carefully and suspiciously.
"Emma, then - my eternal gratitude and thanks. I presume you'll want proper recompense? I've already put aside the gold and the land, but with my son here, I feel as though they're paltry rewards. Perhaps we could discuss it over dinner and some cider after I've put Henry to bed?"
Henry clings to Emma's leggings as though they're his last bulwark against his fears and Emma positions herself in front of him as though to deny dark things access to him. They can't know each other, Regina reminds herself, they would have no reason to. They latch onto each other as though they were each other's anchor in the storm all the same.
Regina wonders if she'll regret asking Emma to stay for dinner when Emma's hand stays on Henry's shoulder a moment too long as she nudges him forward. He removes himself reluctantly from her and Regina has to tell herself that she has no heart to break.
"Do you love him?" Emma asks, shoveling food down her gullet like some peasant. What a rude woman, Regina thinks, asking questions she has no right to ask.
"Of course I do." she responds, cutting into her meat like a civilized human being.
Emma says nothing, just finishes her meal and requests a room for the night.
The night becomes the week and then the month with no end in sight because Henry is enamored and Regina is afraid of losing him again. She watches him play with Emma and eschew time with her in favor of time with Emma and thinks she is losing him all the same.
She overhears them one day - voices echo in the halls, empty and hollow, "She's the Heartless Queen, Emma. She could never love me."
"You think? Seems to me she does a damn good job of being your mother. She loves you in the way she makes sure you're safe and happy." (Regina's opinion of Emma improves slightly upon hearing this.)
"Don't you know the stories, Emma?"
Regina leaves, unwilling to hear her son twist truths that already sit like knives in her chest.
Emma finds her on the library balcony and she stands next to Regina for a spell, letting the cold air seep into her bones and the wind muss up her hair before she speaks, "You lied, that day at dinner."
Regina thinks she'll throw Emma into the deepest cell she owns, Henry's infatuation be damned.
"I don't mean you don't try. I'm not blind, I've seen how you try with him these past few months, but he's right, isn't he? You can't love because where you should have a heart you've got an empty void that can't be filled." Emma seems to realize (perhaps by the color in Regina's cheeks) that she may have overstepped her boundaries and that Regina is still a Queen, "Or so the stories go." she hastens to add.
Regina doesn't know what to make of Emma in this moment. She's simultaneously offended by her gall and baited to the challenge in Emma's question. It's been so long since anyone's actually challenged her that she's tempted to let this charade continue.
Instead, she says, "It's time for you to leave, Emma. While I'm sure Henry finds you a great deal of fun to have as company, you're a distraction to his studies. I've tolerated it thus far but I shan't any further - you're to leave and if you make this difficult, rest assured I'll see to it your life becomes vastly less comfortable."
Emma shakes her head, "Can't. I'm still needed here. Henry, we bonded, you see, and he's like the son I never-well, you know. You were there, after all."
They're both speaking in half-truths, although neither knows the other well enough to recognize it.
"Three days." Regina says, "Three days to say your goodbyes. That's all I can give you. After that, you'll leave one way or another and don't think for a moment I won't make good on my word."
Emma doesn't say anything.
The next morning, she visits Regina. "Come with me." she says.
"Where? And for what purpose?"
"Out. We'll fill that unfillable hole in your chest yet."
And so, Regina finds herself dragged along in the whirlwind that is Emma, whisked away to see if they couldn't fill the unfillable with the infinitum of life.
On the first day, Emma takes Regina to a local inn, after the sun's set and the roads sit silent save for the muffled bustle of revelry that intrudes upon the peace. Here, she buys Regina a tankard of beer and laughs when Regina sputters it down. She pulls her up to dance when a fiddler pulls out his instrument and twirls her one way, then the other, into the arms of another dancer and back into hers. She catches the fancy of a stable boy who tries to charm her with a kind smile and soft heart. Perhaps if she were younger, if she had a heart, she would have fallen for this stable boy and they could have stolen away on the back of a horse into the setting sun, toward love and happiness she's never known.
But none of those things are true, so she slips away from him to return to Emma at the end of the song.
"Did you find your heart here?" Emma asks, "here where your people share their happiness and drink in their joy and dance their merriment?"
Regina only shakes her head because this could never be enough and Emma smiles, "That's all right - I still have two days."
On the second day, Emma takes Regina out to the forests where the trees grow so high the sun barely slips onto the floor they step on. Emma makes whistling noises and suddenly they are surrounded by men who wear the greens and browns of the forest well enough that Regina's eye could not track them. Emma introduces Regina as a friend and their leader clasps a hand on her shoulder (she tries not to bristle - she's glamoured to not look like herself here, he doesn't know to fear her here) and greets her warmly as he would any friend of Emma's. When he pulls his arm back, she sees the tattoo of a lion on his arm and recognizes it as the one the fairy had showed her, too many moons in the past. She'd been promised happiness and love in this tattoo. Perhaps, if she were younger, if she had a heart, she would have fallen for this man of the forest and they could have stolen away into the trees where adventure bound alongside them, toward love and happiness she's never known.
But none of those things are true and so she says nothing to him as they head off into the villages to commit crimes against her reign (she should be more offended. She's not) and she watches Emma come to life as they scatter through the streets, running from her soldiers and tossing gold where they can.
"Did you find your heart here?" Emma asks, "here where your people serve justice in the corners you cannot and show kindness where there are those who would see only misery prevails?"
Regina only shakes her head because this could never be enough and Emma smiles, "That's all right - I still have a day."
On the third day, Emma does not come for her and Regina worries, although she says nothing. The day passes into the night and Regina wonders if Emma's already run away, too cowardly to say her goodbyes. The thought angers her - Henry will be so disappointed.
She's about to retire for the night when the door bursts open and Emma bursts in (she must chastise Claude for letting this happen).
"I'm sorry, Your Majesty" she says (and Regina thinks she uses the honorific in jest but it's her last day and Regina's feeling lenient), "I searched your lands to see if I could find something as infinite as the unfillable void in your chest, but I found nothing you ruled to be enough."
Regina has always known, but she tells Emma, "Thank you, for trying; it's more than anyone's ever done for me."
Emma closes the distance and takes Regina's hand, "I still have tonight" she reminds her, "Do you trust me?"
And Regina supposes she does so Emma pulls Regina up and to her confusion, puts her hand on her heart, "You have to trust me" she says and pulls.
Regina's hand slips through chest as though it weren't there and comes to a stop around Emma's heart, beating quickly but strongly, defiant in this moment of weakness. Her hand automatically curls around it and she makes a move to uncurl it but Emma squeezes her wrist to stop the motion and pulls the hand out, heart and all. "No, it's yours. I think it's been yours since I first saw the Crown Prince and realized what you'd done." Her eyes are soft, her smile wistful, Regina notices numbly, "You gave my flesh and blood a home and family, best you could, gave him the best chance that I couldn't, not back then. And I thought I'd forgotten the memory of him but he found me or I found him or the fates found us, I don't know, that night and it wasn't love, but it was something worth following him back here for. He deserves his best chance, don't you think?"
She can see light cracks, where it'd been hurt and hadn't been patched up right, spots of dark that she doesn't know the story of, imperfection litter its surface but still it beats, strong in her hand.
Emma pushes Regina's arm back to her body, heart in hand, toward the unfillable void that yawns even now, greedily seeking whatever it can consume to fill an apetite that can't be sated and Regina can't let Emma's heart be swallowed up in its wake but Emma is stronger than Regina and Regina can't seem to call on her magic in this moment.
"Thank you," Emma says, "for trying; it's more than anyone's ever done for me." and she shoves her heart into Regina's chest.
For a brief moment, Regina thinks Emma's vastly overestimated how magic works and that she's killed them both. She amends this to the belief that Emma's killed her when she feels Emma's (her?) heart beating in her chest, each beat a new flood of pain and then, suddenly, everything.
There's love, but it's a fledgling love, still fragile and skittish and a stranger in this heart but steady and determined in its existence. There's anger that murmurs ever constant underneath everything else, anger at the world, at herself, but it's a useful anger that's kept her alive all these years, kept her going. And hurt, there's so much hurt, it's soaked into every twist and turn and crack and it would blind Regina in its enormity but the heart's had years to live with it and this is no more than a weight to be dragged around as it soldiers on. Happiness flits about too, rare as it is. Regina doesn't have Emma's memories to coax it out, but if she thinks of Henry, of sword fighting and fishing and of nights at the tavern and days at the woods, it'll peek out from the corners and Regina can grasp at it.
It's all too much and she's not empty anymore but she doesn't know how to be filled and Regina's left a heaving mess on the floor. Emma, kind, brave, and stupidly sacrificial Emma, kneels next to her (eyes dimmer and voice flatter and this is all wrong, this can't be Emma now) and her body must still remember what it means to be human, because she pulls Regina into an embrace until Regina's tears stop falling and her breath evens out.
When they part, Regina slaps Emma. Soundly, judging by the mark she leaves but Emma doesn't respond except to prod at it.
"You idiot! What were you thinking? What possible reason could you have for thinking this was a good and sane idea?"
"You're his best chance." Emma says impassively and Regina can't help but flinch at her mother's voice, "You needed a heart to love him. I found you a heart. It had to be mine."
And, oh. Oh.
Regina has spent the entirety of her life looking for this, and when it's finally in reach, it has to go and throw itself into the jaws of the abyss. She's her mother's daughter though and she refuses to let it be lost. She reaches into her chest and pulls the heart back out. Emma just watches listlessly and Regina grabs her by the shoulder.
"Emma, I'm going to do something just as idiotic and inane as what you just did, but if we're going to die, I won't die without having done this-"
And she kisses Emma, deeply as she can (because she knows what it's like now, to love and have that love be made physical, and the motion isn't unfamiliar to her anymore) and although Emma doesn't respond in kind, Regina has no doubt that if they survive, she'll return the favor (love still fragile and skittish, for her and their son).
She splits the heart in two.
Perhaps if she were younger, if she had a heart, she would have never fallen for this walking disaster of a woman and they would have lived their lives into their twilight years never knowing the other existed, perhaps a long life for Emma and eternity for Regina, perhaps death at the gallows for Emma and death by hail of arrows for Regina. But none of these things are true and so she finds that they are well suited to making unfillable voids fillable and unbearable scars bearable once more.
"Did you find your heart here?" Emma asks, "here where your son loves you and your heart beats to the same rhythm as mine though it only be half a heart?"
Regina pulls Emma closer, "It's enough. You're enough."
And so, they live, happily, toward love and happiness they've just begun to know.