storybrooke_savior | for regina: friendship (or something like it)

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for regina: friendship (or something like it)

It was a while before either of them felt like getting coffee, but Emma touched based with Regina after the...current weird and altogether crappy situation normalized and they decided to meet up at a cafe.

Emma got there first--the wholly unwanted luxury, she supposed, of not having a kid in her life anymore to tend to--and ordered a hot chocolate (with cinnamon) out of sheer habit. It was only after it was set in front of her that she realized she didn't want it. It was a fragrant representation of Storybrooke and Granny's, Henry and home, and the scent made Emma's stomach feel queasy. She scowled at the cup. All right, this was really enough already. This ball of homesickness in her gut, it had to go; it was past time to adjust and suck it up.

Emma sighed and moved it the cup from her, taking one of the crescents of biscotti from the saucer and nibbling on it to distract herself. It was insane to even think it, but talking to Regina might actually help. That was not a thing she ever thought she'd want, not a thought she'd have imagined would ever have crossed her mind, but there it was.

Henry probably would've been happy to hear it, that the two of them were getting along. Maybe she'd get the chance to tell him. Eventually.

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Regina hadn't planned on letting Robin out of her sight for a while, and she hadn't, preferring to stay close, practically sleeping on top of him. It was a reaction to days of fear that she would lose him, though she'd finally told him what part magic played in her past, and it was okay. It was all okay.

So now, days later, meeting Emma was something that could happen, though it did quietly amuse Regina that the two of them had come so far. Or maybe only she had, from attempting to destroy Emma, to reluctantly accepting her, to having coffee and chatting like old friends. Like family.

Walking into the cafe, Regina saw her immediately and sat. "My apologies for being a little late." She didn't give a reason for why, though she ran a quick hand through her hair before ordering coffee and an apple pastry.

"No problem." Emma shrugged it off, defying her own stupid homesickness by dragging her cup of hot chocolate back toward her. She nudged the whipped cream aside with the biscotti so she could dunk the hard cookie into the chocolate to soften it.

"So," she remarked conversationally after the waitress walked off. "Giant fire-breathing bee. That was a new one."

"I can't say that I ever expected to run into something fire-breathing in this land," Regina admitted, letting out an almost weary sigh.

"Robin fought it because ice and fire don't go together." Though she'd said to him that fire and ice were perfect in reference to the pair of them, hadn't she? It was blurry, that first conversation when he'd been panicking.

"But at least with that...thing gone, Robin's back to normal and it would seem life here can go back to normal. Whatever that is."

"Is he okay?" Emma asked with very real concern. She'd been stung by some of the smaller swarm a few times herself, and she knew that the situation all over town had gotten pretty bad. She had no doubt Robin was relieved to have the bizarro ice magic gone, Regina too. And if things had gone back to normal for him, they probably had for Hook, too.

Maybe he'd stop avoiding her then. Or maybe not. It was complicated.

"He's fine," Regina replied with a small smile before contemplating her own fingertips. "It seems our light magic has the power of healing." Looking at Emma again, she wrapped her hands around her freshly delivered warm cup of coffee.

"I was taught magic with the understanding that I would only ever use it to get what I wanted. Dark magic is...selfish that way."

"You healed him?" Emma's eyebrows went up. That was actually kind of impressive. She was, maybe, just a touch envious. "Wow, look at you, you get a taste of light magic and just go with it," she remarked, lips quirking. "Henry, he'd be really proud. You'll have to teach me how to do it, it would've come in handy during all the chaos."

She bit into the softened biscotti and chewed for a few seconds of thoughtful silence. "Speaking of magic and Henry," she began, pausing to suck crumbs off of her thumb. "Any ideas on how we could open up a way back home? And get back to our son?"

Taking a sip of her coffee, Regina let out a sigh at Emma's double question. "Honestly?" She hated starting a thought like that.

"Portals don't just...appear. They take a bean or a magic wand or some kind of object specifically created to make portals. The only thing that could work is if our magic combined is strong enough."

She put her palms up on the table. "Other than that? We're stuck here. Without Henry," she said with a frown, hating that she'd just gotten her son back, and now they were separated again.

"I know that, but--" Emma sighed heavily, shaking her head and setting her jaw; she didn't want to accept defeat that easily. "Dammit. What pisses me off is I had a wand in my hand, it was Rumpelstiltskin's, I used it to re-open the portal. I must have dropped it."

She tucked her hair behind ears, lowered her hands to the table and restlessly drummed the surface with her fingertips. "We've gotta at least try."

Regina frowned deeply and looked at Emma. "You interacted with Rumple while you were there?" There was something about it that made her uneasy. Maybe because she had slowly come to realize that the imp had controlled her, used and manipulated her to do his bidding from the moment they met.

Emma's last statement didn't fall on deaf ears though, and Regina nodded. "We will. Every place has a weakness. If we figure out where the magic here is the weakest, maybe we can make a portal there."

Emma spread her hands a little and shrugged. "I know it wasn't the best idea ever, especially for Hook," she added, wincing a little as a flash of Rumpelstiltskin nearly Force-choking Killian to death ran through her memmory. "We were kinda short on options."

She nodded absently, drummed her fingertips against the table. "All right. So we start looking for the chink in the armor." If she were betting, she'd imagine that it was somewhere on the edge of town. "What exactly should I be looking for?"

Something suddenly clicked for Regina, something so utterly ridiculous that for a second she simply laughed until she could finally speak.

"You. You had his help, and he cloaked you, didn't he? You're Princess Leia." It was so utterly ridiculous that it took a moment for her to compose herself. "Princess Leia," she snorted before clearing her throat.

Focusing on the question at hand, she took a breath. "Where the magic is weak the land might be barren, especially if magic is keeping this place running, like Storybrooke. Someplace void of vegetation that isn't the beach might be a good place to start."

Emma shot a quick, halfhearted glare at Regina, unable to put much behind it because it was so ridiculous and laughable a situation. "I didn't have a lot of options," she pointed out defensively. "Every other 'princess' name that came to mind was probably already at the damned ball, for all I knew." Hook had gotten the short end of the stick with the aliases; she kind of hoped he never found out that there was a real Prince Charles and he was a homely-looking man in his sixties.

Void of vegetation...interesting. Emma filed that away, intent to start searching as soon as possible. "I haven't made it far enough out of town to see for myself yet, but I was told if you keep walking you past the city limits, you just end up walking right back into town. Have you ever heard of magic like that before?"

Refocusing, Regina shook her head and sipped her coffee before looking at Emma. "No. I've never seen anything like this or...heard of it existing. I know I cast a curse that took everyone from one land to another, but it was very specific. The Enchanted Forest is just one..." she tried to come up with the right analogy. "Just one country, it's not like I brought people from all over our world in the far reaches and beyond."

Rubbing her head a little, she posed another question. "What if this isn't a curse at all? Maybe someone brought us all here for some reason. Not everyone has magic not everyone is powerful." She shifted uncomfortably at her own theory. "Maybe we're some kind of...collection."

Edited 2014-06-18 12:45 (UTC)

Emma made a face, dragging her hot chocolate towards her and taking a sip. It was halfway to cold by now, but still comforting beneath the wave of homesickness brought on by the taste. "That's creepy," she declared, every bit as uncomfortable with the thought as Regina. "A collector. Sounds like a comic book villain. Or a serial killer."

She drummed her fingertips against the cup, chewing on her lower lip as she debated letting go of something that'd been eating at her since she'd arrived in this damned crazy city. It was weird to think she'd confide in Regina before anyone else, but. Hell. "The day I got here, I ran into this guy on the boardwalk. He knew me. He knew my name, he called me 'sheriff'. He said I'd been here before, that we were neighbors, we were friends. He wasn't lying, the way he talked to me, he...knew me. He said I left a few months ago."

Regina's eyes narrowed a bit. Not at Emma but because of what she'd said. "I'm guessing you don't remember being here at all," she said slowly, trying to think, going over and over again in her mind if she'd ever heard of magic like this.

"That doesn't answer why. Why bring you back here again? Why erase your memory?" There were different reasons, of course. Regina knew that all too well after last year at the town line. But this didn't seem to have Henry at the center of it. Nothing about this was even specifically about them.

"This is bigger than a curse, or simple magic. I don't know what it is, and it makes wary in general. But I have to be honest, Emma. I don't think we're going to find a way to leave." She hated saying it; she wasn't a defeatist by nature. But this was outside of her grasp of magic, and she knew it.

"I don't know," Emma replied, the corners of her lips turning down in a frown. "I don't like it, but on the upside, it means it's possible to leave, if we can just figure out how--"

She trailed off as Regina continued, her frown deepening into an almost petulant pout. "We have to try," she insisted. If she ever did get to go home (and remember being here) she wanted to be able to tell Henry and her mother that she'd done everything possible to get home, to get all of them home.

"I didn't say we wouldn't try," Regina countered. "I'm saying this isn't typical magic." She shifted a little though, clearly with something else to say.

"This town may be odd, it may have dangers, but so does Storybrooke. And here, at least..." Regina took a deep breath and let it out. "No one knows who I was."

Emma blinked at Regina in silence for a moment, then slowly leaned back in her chair, head canted to one side. "You're saying you don't want to leave," she half-stated, half-questioned.

"I don't want to be separated from Henry long, and I would go back today if I knew it meant seeing him again," Regina clarified as she looked at Emma.

"But for as long as we're here, do you know how nice it is to walk down the street without people cowering in fear because of who I was, once. It must be nice for Robin too, to not have a dwarf approach him and tell him he's crazy." Of course, Regina had no idea if that had happened yet or not, but she could imagine it.

A part of Emma wants to be angry and argue; whatever this place is, it can't be good, whatever is behind it can't have good intentions. To enjoy or appreciate any of it feels...just, wrong. But she doesn't have to put up with what Regina goes through every day in Storybrooke. Is it earned? Quite a bit of it, yeah. Still, she supposed she couldn't begrudge her the respite from it.

"All right, yeah, it doesn't look good," she finally admitted. "But so long as we're on the same page, we've gotta at least try."

If Henry wasn't back in Storybrooke, Regina wouldn't agree to this, she already knew. But he was, and losing him the first time was still fresh. Nodding, she took another sip of her coffee before speaking. "We'll try, and see how far it gets us," she agreed.

"Remind me, at this point in your history with Hook, did he already enjoy following you like a lost puppy, or have things backslid for the two of you here?" Regina was genuinely curious, and if things were serious in Storybrooke, she had a right to know how involved Hook was going to be with her because of Henry. At least, as far as she was concerned, that logic made sense.

Her relationship with Hook--such as it was--was not a subject that Emma had any desire to delve into deeply. In truth it was all very unsettling, Hook not remembering finding her in New York, accompanying her back to Storybrooke, fighting Zelena, losing Neal. Because for him it hadn't happened, and for multiple reasons, Emma couldn't bring herself to burden him with it.

Of course she said none of that out loud. She raised an eyebrow, leaned back in her chair and picked up a spoon to scoop up the dwindling whipped cream still perched atop her cocoa. "For there to be backsliding there has to be something to backslide from," she replied evasively before occupying her mouth with a whipped cream coated spoon, hoping to effectively end that avenue of the discussion.

Regina couldn't help but give Emma an eyebrow arch. "Fine. I'll give you that nothing may be happening here. But I did happen to talk with Henry long enough to know he spent a fair amount of time with the pirate in Storybrooke. Who taught him to gamble. And cheat to win," she said pointedly.

She didn't have it in her to be genuinely upset, and to avoid smirking she had to look down at her coffee, blowing a little as if it were too hot for her to sip, suddenly.

Emma rolled her eyes, setting her spoon back down on the saucer with a firm clack, as that was a better option than throwing it at Regina. Which she wouldn't have done. Probably. Well, not hard. "You forgot stealing a boat and then giving it back," she drawled. "Or did he leave that one out?"

"Should we talk about what Hook did to me before Neverland, or has he casually left that part out because it might make him look bad in front of you and Henry?"

Regina's tone did change then, but for the sake of trying to get along with Emma, she took a deep breath and calmed herself down. "Ever wonder how Greg and Tamara got their hands on me to torture?" Probably not, she realized.

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