Chapter Text
tuesday.
In absolutely terrible taste, Mary Margaret decides to celebrate their victory by throwing a masquerade party at Granny’s the next evening. “Everyone can be somebody else without all the murder!” she says brightly.
“I think Regina may be ready to reclaim the mayoral seat,” Emma offers diplomatically.
Mary Margaret beams, unfazed. “One last hurrah, then.”
Still, Emma is expected to go as both the hero of the story and as her mother’s daughter, and it’s easier to do that than to mope again. Regina hasn’t called, hasn’t texted, hasn’t done anything but drop Henry off outside the apartment building and flash an uncomfortable smile at her from the car, and she’s beginning to think…
She’d screwed it up, somehow, by offering Regina a way out. Regina had seized it and run, and Emma’s just going to have to live with the fact that Regina knows that she’s hopelessly in love with her. They can bounce back from this. Emma isn’t going to pull a Hook and start murdering people to win her back.
Probably.
Still, though, the things that stay with her: Regina kissing Emma back. Regina mocking her, I’m in love with a straight girl, brushing kisses along her neck. Regina inviting her out to a bar after they’d apprehended Belle. None of it makes sense and Emma struggles through it, through a lifetime of being unwanted to piece together what Regina had wanted.
Maybe she’d just been giving Emma what she’d thought she hadn’t had a choice in. Emma is sick at the idea of it.
She’s still ill at ease when she arrives with Henry at Granny’s, taking the masks proffered at them by a very pleased-looking Mary Margaret and glancing around the room. “She isn’t here yet,” Henry says, biting into a brownie as he peers around the room. “She said she wasn’t going to come at all, but I told her that I was meeting my girlfriend here.”
“Girlfriend?” Emma repeats, spinning around. “You have a… There’s a…”
Henry finished the brownie, rolling his eyes at her through the mask. “I can find a girl to hang out with tonight if it means that you and Mom will work out your own weird girlfriend thing.”
Oh. Emma smacks him on the shoulder, scowling at him with a frown that never really reaches her eyes. “You are a devious child.”
“Thank you,” Henry says happily, heading off to join some of his friends. Ava and Nick, Emma recognizes under the masks, and there’s a man sitting with them that she takes a moment to place. Erebos, under the mask, and Pan is leaning against the booth with a hand firm over his shoulder. Erebos is smiling tentatively, Ava just as tentative as she smiles back at him, and Henry slides into the scene like sunshine as he offers them brownies.
He’s a good kid. He’s a really good kid, and he has a really great mother, and if she were around right now, Emma would apologize for whatever it is that she’d done and promise to never bring up anything from Double Blind again. She would–
The doors open and Regina strides in, as though summoned by Emma's thoughts. Emma hangs back, watching as Regina yanks on a mask and stalks to Henry’s table, giving Ava dark looks. Ava glares back at her just as darkly. Henry speaks hastily until Regina is flushing and scowling and stepping away from the table, and Emma sidles over with two bowls of ice cream and says, “Regina?”
“Emma.” Regina stares at the bowls for a moment. “What…what is this?” She isn't angry anymore– which is an improvement– but she does look confused.
“I thought that was obvious,” Emma says, pressing her lips together to keep them from curling upward. “I’m apologizing.”
“Ah.” There’s a shadow of a smile on Regina's face as she accepts the ice cream. “You have nothing to apologize for. I understand that I put you in an uncomfortable position, and you had every right to back out of this…” She waves vaguely. “Thing.”
“What?” Regina had thought that Emma had been backing out? “I thought you were– I told you I was in love with you!” Emma says, befuddled.
“And then you ran.” Regina leans back against the counter, tweaking the feathers of her mask between her fingers. She seems nervous now, uncomfortable, and Emma is still gaping at her in disbelief. “I know it was an emotional time. I overstepped.” The words come out in spurts of wooden admission, apologetic and with anger pointed inward. “I wanted it to be you. I always wanted her to be you.”
Emma freezes and then exhales. “Come with me,” she says, and starts forward before she looks back to make sure Regina is following.
They’re still wearing their masks as they slip out into Granny’s outdoor seating area, which has been cleared of tables so couples can sway together to the music. Granny herself is waltzing with Marco at the center of the dance floor, and she winks at Emma with approval as Emma hesitates in the doorway. “Give us a dance, ladies!” she calls, Marco laughing lightly.
Regina’s hand slides into Emma’s. “You don’t have to,” Emma says, a bundle of nerves again.
“We can’t disappoint our public, can we?” Regina retorts. “If I’m going to run for mayor again, I’ll have to show I’m in touch with the common people.” Still, she’s just as tense as she steps down the stairs and extends a hand to Emma. Emma takes it in hers, letting Regina twirl her around once before she lands safely in the other woman’s arms.
They hadn’t done this at Double Blind. They hadn’t shared anything of themselves in public, hadn’t dared anything more than private whispers in the garden, and Emma can see the flush on Regina’s face as Lottie and Granny hoot in unison. “We really don’t have to do this,” Emma offers again. Regina is warm in her arms, smelling indescribably good, and it all feels too perfect to last.
But Regina says haltingly, “Eris was just like you. You gave so little of yourself in the gardens but it still felt like you.”
They sway together, their foreheads tilting closer so the feathered mask on Regina’s face is tickling Emma’s skin. “You were so angry with me,” Emma says, uncomprehending.
“I didn’t want to be.” Regina’s fingers brush against the curve of Emma’s mask, pensive. “I meant it when I said I wished I’d never met…” Her voice trails off. “I just needed a place where I didn’t have to be angry. And there you were.”
Her eyes are shining now, as free as Artemis had ever been, and Emma says a little breathlessly, “And here I am.”
They’ve both been caught up in their minds for so long that it’s frightening and exhilarating to have the beginnings of something real between them, something mutual, and Emma’s still cautious about pushing too hard. “I never thought you’d go to a place like Double Blind,” she murmurs. “I didn’t know who Artemis was, but I didn’t think she could be you.”
Regina curls her fingers into Emma’s hip. “I could have seen through you any time, did you know? It was all party tricks and glamours. Any decent witch could have undone them.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I wanted her to be you,” Regina says again. “I was terrified I would take off that glamour and she’d be someone else. I didn’t want to be in love with anyone but you.”
Emma stops dancing abruptly, her body seizing up in disbelief. Regina’s eyes gleam in the lights set up around them, warm and loving and open like they’re still in a garden in the woods with their faces concealed and their hearts exposed instead.
She puts two fingers on Emma’s cheek and kisses her, long and slow; and Emma can feel flames churn and calm at once with Regina’s touch, burning like a hearth on a winter’s night. “I love you,” she whispers against Regina’s lips. “I love Artemis. I love Regina.” She slips Regina’s mask up past her eyes and over her hair, gazing at her in earnest. “I love Regina,” she says again, awestruck at the way Regina glows as they’re caught in each other’s eyes.
Regina tucks her fingers under Emma’s mask and tugs it free, snapping the cheap string that had held it in place and tossing it aside. It lands on the arrow of the Cupid lawn ornament that someone– probably Mary Margaret, dammit– had inexplicably decided would make a good decoration tonight, and Regina grimaces.
Emma kisses it away: once, twice, thrice, and they’re locked together in the dim lights, drawing new endings into their beginning.