Chapter Text
The girl is at most nine or ten when she’s brought into the castle. She stands with her hands at her sides, her shoulders stiff and her eyes red-rimmed, and Rumple lays a proprietary hand on her shoulder. “Make her feel at home,” he orders, and then he disappears to the upper levels of the castle, the places where none of the girls are allowed to venture.
There is no explanation. There never is. Rumple is their master, their owner, their teacher. He doesn’t offer justifications or tales or backstory. They get their orders and they follow them, because what else do they have but this cold castle and their missions? Kill. Steal. Sabotage. At twelve, Regina knows better than to question Rumple, even when he dumps a ten-year-old in their domain.
Because Rumple deals in children– babies, toddlers, sold to him by mothers in exchange for the mothers’ deepest desires. Ursula has been here since she was hardly old enough to stand. Mal had been here even longer. Zelena had been left in the castle as an infant by Regina’s ambitious mother, traded for power and given to Mal to raise. Cruella had been the oldest until now, handed over at six by a fearful mother who had only asked in return that she be kept forever.
Regina had been four, the last to arrive. Mother hadn’t asked for anything in return. You will go, and you will be strong. See what I do for you? Mother had once been one of Rumple’s girls, too, Regina knows, aged out once she had become too old to manage rather than running away. It is not an easy thing, escaping from Rumple. Regina tried a few times when she was younger, and her punishments had been enough to deter her. There is a contract, Rumple had reminded her. You can never run.
She eyes the new girl and wonders if she might try to run, too. She is too old to be molded. She knows a life outside of this castle. Rumple would never bring in a girl so old unless she has great power.
The others seem to have figured this out as well, and they creep closer to the girl with interest. “Oh, you are dripping with magic,” Cruella croons, letting her fingers run over the new girl’s cheek. “Where did Rumple get such a treat, I wonder?”
The girl tries to swat Cruella’s fingers away, and Cruella cackles and snatches the girl’s hand, hard enough to snap bones. “No-no-no,” she purrs. “Here, nothing is yours.”
“Welcome home,” Ursula says dryly.
The girl speaks, her voice emerging fierce and so young. “This is not my home!” A wave of white-hot magic erupts from her, throwing the other girls back. Regina, who hasn’t approached, feels only the wind rushing through her, a shiver of warm air that has her stumble.
The others are on the floor, stunned and gasping for breath. The girl presses her hands to her face and begins to sob.
Her name is Emma. Regina doesn’t speak to her– doesn’t want to know her at all, really– but she hears Rumple call her by her name as he returns her one day from private training. He favors her, brings her to the courtyard and works with her as though she is his only student.
Once, he had favored Regina. The weakest of my girls, he would say, patting her shoulder as Mal and Zelena had rolled their eyes good-naturedly. But her sheer determination is what makes our Regina indispensable. Regina has spent the past eight years being told that she isn’t good enough, that she will never match up to the older girls, and it has only made her work harder to keep up. Once, that had been enough.
Now, sharing space with a girl who shines with unsuppressed power, Regina knows that her time as Rumple’s favorite is over. There are worse things than special attention, the creep of Rumple’s hand against her back as he whispers commands into her ears. She should be grateful, but resentment still bubbles up within her when she watches Emma stumble back into the castle, spent.
The others shift between that toxic attraction to power that comes with being Rumple’s girls and petty jealousy. Cruella trips Emma, occasionally makes her bleed with a knife and laughs at Emma’s horror. Zelena snatches Emma’s meals and splits them with Cruella– Emma gets more than them, and better food, too– and Mal moves Emma from the bed that Rumple had given her to the floor. “It’ll make you strong, little one,” she croons, then rolls her eyes and returns to her books.
Ursula doesn’t bother with any of it except the occasional snide comment. “Power can only take you so far,” she observes. “You need to really want it to use it right.”
Emma huddles on the floor near the wall, as far from the others as she can manage, and she grits out. “I don’t want power. I just want to go home.”
“You don’t have a home anymore,” Mal says frankly. “Your parents sold you to Rumple.”
Emma’s eyes flash. “You’re wrong,” she shoots back. “You’re all wrong.” A dangerous magic ripples through the air, sucking all the oxygen from their breath, and Regina can feel her lungs deflating. Her eyes go fuzzy and dark, and she chokes with the others, sinks to the floor as her head aches.
She can only hear, past Mal’s strained protests and Zelena’s choking, Emma’s panicked voice. “I’m sorry! I don’t know how to stop! I don’t know what to do!”
Regina stumbles to her feet, struggles to see as her vision comes and goes. Carefully, she makes her way toward Emma, the resentment building with her fear as Emma’s voice gets higher and higher.
Emma says, hysterical, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
Regina can’t speak, can’t get out the words to tell Emma– something, anything, some way for her to get control– and Emma’s magic is so bright and strong that Regina can palpably feel her emotions, her shining power. There is no way to get through to her, except to…
And yes, there is a sense of satisfaction that comes with punching Emma in the face with all of the strength she can muster.
Emma yelps and stumbles, and her magic, interrupted, stops whirling around the room. Fresh, sweet air floods Regina’s lungs, and she takes in a few burning breaths and then glowers at her. “Never do that again,” she bites out. It might be the first time that she’s spoken to Emma.
“I don’t know how I did it,” Emma says, her face taut and blood dripping from her nose. “It just–”
“Then figure it out.” Regina stalks away, fully done with bratty ten-year-olds with zero self-control.
Emma’s nose is purple and throbbing for several days after that, and Regina refuses to feel guilty about it. “The girl is a liability,” she tells Rumple at their next group spar. Emma has been paired with Zelena, the next-most powerful opponent, who burns her with scalding lightning and strikes mostly to hurt instead of winning. “She has magic she can’t master.”
Rumple cackles. “Are you threatened by her power?” He runs a hand over Regina’s cheek, an unwelcome reminder that he owns her. “No worries, dearie. You’ll always be special to me. All that rage, waiting to be released…” He lets out a satisfied sigh, almost a moan. “Someday, you will scorch cities to ashes for me.”
Regina glares at him, then at Emma, whose hair is blackened in several spots from Zelena’s attacks. Still, she fights gamely on, waving a sword to deflect the worst of it. Emma has some training with the sword, Regina notices. It’s the only sort of fighting where she doesn’t look like an amateur.
Rumple tires of training eventually and returns them to their room inside, and they tend to each other’s wounds as they always do. Mal uses a salve on Regina’s blistered arm where she’d breathed fire onto it, and Regina closes the wound that she’d opened in Mal’s abdomen when Mal had been in dragon form. “You’re getting better at that,” Mal murmurs, rubbing the cool salve into the skin. “I remember when you couldn’t get in a single blow.”
“I was younger then,” Regina says, grimacing at the stinging sensation as the salve begins to work.
“So was I. You learn faster than the rest of us,” Mal says. “It’s a strength that will do you well.” She is rarely kind to the others, shows little interest in any of them, but she is gentle with Regina. They all are, at times. Regina has always thought that it was because she was the youngest– except now, when their new littlest sister sits alone with her injuries and her swollen nose in a corner.
Their food appears by magic in the corner, plates labeled with their names as though they are a pack of dogs instead of girls. Regina has been given only bread and butter, a reproach from Rumple for her words about his favorite. She takes her food and eats in silence at her bed, a low fury thrumming in her veins.
She scowls at Emma, who still has more than she does after Cruella has pilfered her roast chicken and square of chocolate. Emma glances up as though she can sense Regina’s resentment, then ducks her head again.
There is something pathetic about the injured little girl shivering in the corner. Regina understands why the others are drawn to bully her, to talk her down. They have all been trained to root out weakness and destroy it, and no flashes of power can hide the fragile vulnerability of the girl.
If Rumple will not chastise Emma, Regina decides, then it will be her duty to rebuke the girl. To give her the consequences that the rest of them would suffer for acting out. Emma can’t be allowed to do whatever she wants, no matter how valuable she is to Rumple. Regina knows all the right words to say to terrorize little girls, to make them afraid and timid and bury themselves. Rumple has sent her on more than a few missions to princesses and noble children, to give them living nightmares and manipulate them for his purposes. Someday, her profile alone will spark terror in every royal’s heart.
She waits until bed, when the others have drifted off. Mal sleeps half-dragon, scales climbing up her skin and smoke emerging with every breath. Cruella snores, draped across her cot as though she is a royal drowsing on a four-poster bed. Ursula is so still when she sleeps that Regina can never quite tell if she’s out, and Zelena curls into a ball in the bed that she shares with Regina and takes all the blankets once she’s asleep.
Emma is asleep, too, in her corner with a shred of blanket that she’d managed to procure from a tapestry. She sleeps sitting up, ready to wake at a moment’s notice at one of the others’ jostling. Regina walks to her, bare feet cold against the stone floor, and she crouches down opposite Emma, ready to strike.
Before she can speak or attack, Emma whispers, “Will you kill me?”
Regina stumbles back. Lands on her rear, startled. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I don’t sleep well. Not anymore.” Emma opens her eyes. They are weary now, the fear of her early days here gone and replaced with resignation. “I just keep thinking about my parents.”
“You don’t have parents anymore.” Regina doesn’t know how Emma can be so stupid, how she can insist on clinging to a fairytale vision of the parents who had given her away. “Rumple makes deals for powerful children. He gives their parents whatever they ask for, and the parents give them the child. That’s how it works.”
Emma shakes her head. “No.”
Regina sighs. “Look,” she says. “I know that…you’re kind of old to be here. You had time to bond with your parents, and I guess that you felt like they loved you. Maybe they did. But it’s hard to say no to Rumple when he promises you everything. And I’m sure he paid them handsomely for you, with all your raw power.” She says it mockingly, though Emma doesn’t seem to notice.
Her eyes are bright and defiant, and she says, “They didn’t make a deal for me. I was stolen away from them, and they won’t stop until they find me.” It’s naive, the sort of dream that Regina wouldn’t expect from one of Rumple’s girls. This is the folly of taking a child so old to mold into his agent. She’s already learned bad habits from the outside.
“Okay,” Regina says. “I’m sure.”
“I mean it.” Emma clenches her fists. “You don’t know them. They love me so–” A gasping sob, and Emma is crying, palms pressed to her face and tears leaking out from beneath them. Regina stares at her, stymied. Emma cries more than she’s seen from everyone else in the castle in her entire life. It’s like drowning in emotion, all the time, and never channeling it into something productive. It’s wasteful.
But it makes her uncomfortable, watching the tears of this shivering girl, and she doesn’t know what to do about it except that she wants it to stop. Emma cries into her piece of blanket, soaking it with tears, and Regina climbs to her feet and walks away, her chest quivering in a strangely uncertain way.
She stops at Mal’s potions, the salve that can ease any wound, and sighs before she takes a vial and a cloth and returns to Emma. Emma’s skin is black and cracked along her wrists. Zelena’s handiwork, more malicious than her usual. Regina takes one hand in her own, dips the cloth into the vial, and dabs at Emma’s wrist.
Emma stares at her, silent and wide-eyed, and she doesn’t pull away. Regina rubs the salve along the wounds, then the other wrist. “Anywhere else?” she asks tersely.
Emma nods. Rolls up a sleeve, hisses when it pulls at the wound and reopens it. There are more– one on her hip, a nasty cut down her leg, and a single round injury at her abdomen. Most are burns, though some are coated in dried blood.
“I can’t do anything for your nose,” Regina says when she’s done. Emma is still watching her, that expression on her face that makes Regina uncomfortable and desperate to get away. “And I won’t. You deserved it. Learn some control.”
Emma looks at her hands. “I don’t know how. I didn’t even know that I had all this magic until Rumple forced it out of me. Now I feel like…every time I feel anything, it just comes pouring out. Look.” She points behind Regina.
Regina’s lips part in surprise. The walls are covered in shelves of magical items, in potions and ingredients and knickknacks that Rumple has picked up over the years. But right now, all of them are floating, hovering in the air as though someone has cast a spell on them.
Had Emma done that unintentionally because of some stray feeling of…what? Grief? Resentment?
Gratitude?
“Magic is emotion,” Regina reminds her, a little snippy. “If you want to control it, you’ll have to control yourself. Breathe.” Emma blinks, bewildered. “Breathe,” Regina repeats. “Count to yourself. Imagine yourself walking somewhere that makes you calm.” Regina has a stunning capacity for emotion, according to Rumple, and she has been training to channel it since she turned six. “I like to run through dance steps in my mind. Forward-back, to the side, spin, bow. If that kind of thing works for you, I mean,” she adds, suddenly awkward.
Emma nods, eyes wide as though she is taking in every word. Regina is hit with a wave of self-consciousness. If the other girls see her speaking with Emma like this, she’ll never be able to explain herself. She hardly knows how to explain it to herself. She stands up, backing away from Emma. “And for gods’ sakes, you’re a witch. Learn how to conjure up a pillow or make your blanket bigger and thicker instead of sitting around shivering. You’re an embarrassment to us all,” she snaps, and she stalks back to her bed without daring to look back.
After that, something shifts. There are few more incidents, yes, but Emma gains control over her magic. She moves faster, calls it with more confidence, and she learns to hold her own against Zelena in the months and years that follow. Rumple watches her with pride. “See how she grows?” he demands the rest of them. “See what she’s capable of? A little ugly duckling, grown into a swan.”
The others are still snide with Emma, but they don’t pick on her like they did at first. There is too much power around her now, too much strength. When Zelena reaches for her food, Emma zaps her away, and she slams Cruella against a wall, arm to her neck, after Cruella comes at her with a knife. Little Emma has learned to fight back, and the others respond with faint respect and distaste.
Mostly, it all just annoys Regina.
Rumple pairs them for sparring because he thinks it’s funny. “Like a giant fighting a wasp,” he crows when Emma slams a hurricane of magic toward Regina. Regina lets her come, then disappears in a wave of purple and reappears behind Emma. With a single motion, she has her hand in Emma’s chest, around her heart.
Emma chokes. Rumple cackles. “Careful, dearie. The wasp stings!”
They battle with swords, which is still Emma’s strength, and Regina learns– figures out when Emma is feinting and when she’s about to go on the offense, learns to dodge and slash and match Emma’s blows. She trains for hours on her own, determined to prove her worth, until she is nearly Emma’s equal. When she first wins– leaves Emma gasping and disarmed, her eyes flashing with outrage– it feels like it was all worth it.
“No one works as hard as Regina,” Mal observes, wrapping an arm around Regina’s shoulders. “So little natural strength, but she’s a hellion in the field.” Regina is fourteen now, old enough to flush at the older girl’s attention, and she sneers at Emma.
Emma watches them with a strange expression– almost anger, almost irritation– and scoffs. “She beat me once. It won’t happen again.”
Zelena feels enough sisterly loyalty to say, foolishly, “Just try her.”
Emma flattens her in the courtyard with three blows. Regina gets up, staggers to her feet and sets the ground on fire. Her rage and humiliation are alcohol-soaked fuel, and the force of her emotion is enough to briefly stymy Emma.
It’s not enough. Regina lasts another ten minutes before Emma manages to take her down, and the others laugh and shrug it off. Oh, well. It was just a lark. Then they return inside while Regina still lies there, head pounding and limbs unmoving, in a hole in the ground where Emma had fired her final blow.
Only Emma remains, knelt at the edge of the hole. “Good fight,” she offers. She holds out a hand to Regina and Regina spitefully yanks her instead, drags her to the soft, muddy ground that Emma’s magic had cleared. Emma shoves her, her face darkening. “I didn’t ask for any of this, you know. You don’t have to be so…such a…” She stumbles over her words, and finally lets out a little cry. “Ugh!”
“Very articulate.” Regina feels at last in control, cool and obnoxious. Good. Emma deserves obnoxious. “It’s incredible that Rumple hasn’t sent you on any field missions yet, what with your skill for diplomacy.” The others might put down Regina’s abilities, but she completes more missions than any of them, and she does them well. Emma has never even left the castle.
Emma glowers at her. “He can’t.”
“Oh, right. Because your parents are searching for you,” Regina says mockingly. “It’s been two years, Emma. Don’t you think they’d have found you by now? It’s not exactly a secret that Rumple’s out here.” All the people in power know about Rumple’s agents, the mercenary girls who are afraid of nothing and no one.
Emma grits her teeth. “They don’t know I’m here. They’d have never hired Rumple. They’re good. Their people obey them because they love them, not because Cruella and Ursula have to terrorize them into submission.”
Regina can’t help but laugh. “I’m sorry, are you saying that your parents are royals? Now you’re a missing princess?” Emma is stony silent, face streaked with dirt and defiance. “You can tell your inane fairytales if they make you feel better,” Regina says primly. “But I don’t see why I have to be the one to listen to them.”
Emma doesn’t respond, only watches Regina with that familiar stubborn expression. Regina allows herself a moment of sheer, burning loathing, and then she leaps out of the hole and sets it on fire.
Emma stomps in a few minutes later, shaking ashes off her tunic, and she spares no glance at Regina.
There is something that burns about Emma deciding that Regina is no match for her, and Regina feels it course through her each time that Emma defeats her. It’s become a hobby of Rumple’s, pitting his two favorites together, and he seems more gleeful with every defeat. “You are nothing compared to her,” he trills when Emma leaves Regina half-stunned and bruised on the ground. “Do you see it yet? Do you feel that fury?”
He goes nearly catatonic when Regina is angry, the magic swirling around her like it never does when she’s calm. Regina still doesn’t understand what the point of Emma is, when she isn’t allowed to leave the castle, but she can’t deny that Rumple feeds off their magic. It keeps him alive, keeps him powerful and wealthy in the high towers of the castle, and Emma must be an ever-present fount of it for him. Regina, in her rage, must give him nearly as much.
She takes comfort in the moments after the fights, when Zelena makes snippy comments at Emma in her defense and Mal patches her up. She is only fifteen now to Mal’s nineteen, still young enough to be a little sister, but she likes to think that there is a tenderness to Mal’s ministrations, a care that might someday, when they are both much older, become something more.
Emma watches them with those baleful eyes, the jealousy nearly palpable. No one cares for Emma after their routs. She sits alone, healing herself with the force of her magic, and she never scowls quite as much as she does when Regina has the care of the other girls and she has nothing.
Regina meets her gaze, and leans back against the wall as Mal cleans out one of her wounds. “Too much dirt in here to close it up yet,” Mal says briskly, frowning. “This is going to sting.” A warm cloth digs into Regina’s cut, and she lets out a pained gasp, her head falling back onto Mal’s shoulder. Emma’s eyes are like hot furnaces, scorching into Regina.
Regina says irritably, “You can’t stare me into another defeat.”
Emma scoffs, her face pinking. “I don’t need to,” she retorts. “What, you want best of fifty? Seventy? What are we up to now?”
Regina sits up to sneer in her direction. “These are just little skirmishes,” she says dismissively, what she’s told herself a thousand times by now. “The war isn’t over yet.”
“Regina,” Mal sighs, fond and long-suffering. “I do so admire your moxie, but you must learn your limits. You have so many strengths beyond magic.”
“She hates to lose,” Ursula drawls. “That’s our girl.”
Zelena is up next, an age-old complaint. “What I don’t understand is why Rumple keeps pitting Emma against her. All my love, Regina, but you’re hardly a match for her.” She jerks a thumb in Emma’s direction. “What purpose is there to a lopsided battle when I’m the only one who can give her a fight?” It’s a sweet kind of loyalty that Zelena won’t refer to Emma by name after Regina loses to her. Regina takes sweetness from Zelena where it comes.
Mal shrugs slim shoulders. “Perhaps Rumple doesn’t want her getting too strong,” she observes.
But that can’t be it. Rumple trains Emma often, teaches her new things that none of them can do, and Emma displays all of her increasing strength in every spar with Regina. No, it’s about Regina– a way to mock her, to remind her of her inadequacies, to make her fume.
She knows it, but it doesn’t make her rage any less, and she glowers at the wall and says little until the others are asleep.
Emma is still a light sleeper, though, and it’s still difficult to figure out when she’s sleeping and when she’s awake. In the night, with the others snoring peacefully, Regina is startled more than once by Emma’s quiet voice. Today, she counts on it.
The murmur is barely audible over Cruella’s whistling snore. “I think he likes to embarrass you,” Emma says, her clear eyes open. “That’s why he does it. He knows that you’re…” She swallows when Regina turns her glare on Emma. “The others…they’re not like you.”
Regina’s lips twist. “I’ve heard.” She doesn’t need another screed about how much more powerful everyone else is.
Emma shakes her head. “No. Not like that. It’s like…they don’t care, you know? This is their life and they’re suited to it. Mal would be content sitting in a castle forever. Cruella loves murder and mayhem and all the things that Rumple sends her to do. Ursula doesn’t care where she is as long as she’s with Cruella. And Zelena is just happy to be wanted. They’re all Rumple’s girls.” She shrugs, bites her lip. “But you…you don’t belong here. Like me.”
Regina smirks. “Because you’re a secret princess?”
It’s a mark of how often she’s needled Emma about that little fantasy that Emma doesn’t react to it anymore. She leans forward. “Because you could be a leader,” she says. “You could be good. You could do much more than work for a sociopathic imp with delusions of grandeur. And he knows it. So he keeps you down, makes you feel like you’re less than you are, because otherwise you might figure that out.” She stops, her eyes flashing as though she’s ready for Regina to lash out at her again.
And Regina wants to laugh, because somehow, Rumple’s interest in harvesting her anger has given Emma all the wrong ideas. No, she doesn’t have some grand destiny outside of the castle, and neither does Emma. This is the deal. This is their contract. They’ll be Rumple’s forever until he tires of them.
Regina doesn’t know if he’ll ever tire of her, the endless emotions that she can’t tamp down that he feeds off of. She doesn’t think about what comes next– a stint for a mercurial king, perhaps, who will pay her to complete his meaningless tasks. Perhaps she will find Mal and they’ll live together in some distant land. Somewhere quiet, where she could maybe one day raise children.
More likely, she will be killed as most of Rumple’s girls are, dead on a mission gone awry. She has no delusions about her capabilities when faced with a stronger enemy.
And it is that lingering thought that has her lift her chin and respond to Emma at last, her fists clenching over bruises that are still tender. “Fight with me, then. Do it again and again until I’m stronger than he knows.”
Emma smiles. It’s an expression far more rare on her face than any others that Regina knows– defiance, anger, stubbornness, grief, loneliness, envy– and it makes her bright in a way that Regina has never seen before. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s do it.”
It takes years. Years, until Regina is eighteen and Emma is sixteen, no longer gawky children but honed and powerful weapons. They fight at night after the others are asleep, tear into each other in the courtyard until they are both gasping and bloody and exhilarated by the battle.
And the tide begins to change three years into their secret fights. Regina doesn’t question her first victory– they do happen, scant as they are– or even her second. By the third victory in a row, she is suspicious and angry. “If you’re letting me win out of some misguided attempt to be nice–”
Emma, bruised and disarmed on the ground, lets out a choked laugh. “Regina, I don’t think you’d know nice if it punched you in the face. You won fair and square.”
Regina crouches down to help her up. A little bit of magic is enough to ease the bruising, Regina’s fingers drifting across Emma’s cheek. Emma watches her, lips parted and gaze intent on her face, and Regina takes in a shuddering breath. “Are you…does your magic still feel like it’s at full power?”
“Yeah.” Emma groans as she leans against the courtyard wall. “Ow. I think you might’ve broken a few ribs this time.” She presses a hand to her upper abdomen. “I’m stronger than ever. You think you’re the only one who’s benefited from these fights?” She grimaces again. “This is– this is the thing with you. You’re, like, unstoppable. You’re going to become the strongest of us through sheer determination.”
She smiles. It’s far from the first time that Regina’s seen it, but it still sears something into Regina’s heart, something that Regina brushes aside. “You’re getting better than me. That’s all.”
Regina scowls at her. “That’s impossible.”
Emma lets out another groan, and Regina huffs and swats Emma’s hand away from her abdomen to inspect her ribs. She rucks Emma’s shirt up to eye the damage. It must have happened when she’d thrown Emma against the stone wall. She winces and presses her hand to Emma’s chest.
Emma’s skin is warm and supple over the planes of her abdominal muscles, and Regina’s hand trembles a little as she calls her magic. She’s surprised to note how deep her reserves have gotten, how much she still has left after that victory. Emma lets out a ragged sigh, her gaze fixed on Regina, and she murmurs, “I can take care of it myself. You should save your strength. You have a mission tomorrow.”
Regina shrugs. “It won’t be a problem. It’s just a quick espionage bit.” There is a part of her that used to feel smug when she would leave the castle on missions. Emma might be Rumple’s favorite, might be the shining star of the castle, but she is never allowed to leave. Regina completes tasks and meets new people and explores the world, and she is Rumple’s most efficient agent.
Tonight, with her victory in hand, it feels empty to crow to Emma, who is too valuable to lose, according to Rumple. “I don’t think I’ll need much magic for it. Here,” she says, her fingers splaying across Emma’s abdominal muscles. “It’s going to take a while. Do you want to lie down?” She imagines that it’s more painful for Emma to sit like this right now.
Emma shakes her head. “N-no,” she says, her skin shuddering beneath Regina’s touch. “This is fine. Just need to…to focus on something beyond the pain.”
Regina smirks. “We can argue with each other. That always works.”
Emma snorts, then chokes on it. “Ow. Ow. It hurts much more when you make me laugh,” she says, her eyes glinting. “Is that part of your secret plan to sabotage me? Work me every night until you can beat me, then have me laugh to my death. Rumple will be so disappointed in you.”
It’s Regina who laughs now, and her own body aches, a reminder that she, too, hasn’t come out of the fight unscathed. She doesn’t bother with her own wounds. Emma is in far worse shape. “Something else, then.”
A strange expression crosses Emma’s face. “You could sing,” she says, the words tentative. “I’ve heard you sing before. In the fields with Zelena sometimes, collecting the vegetables. Where I can’t go.” She stares out over the courtyard, quiet longing on her face.
Regina winces. “I’m not very good,” she says. “I remember…” It’s strange, the memories that return to her when she thinks about singing. Her first mission. Her first failed mission, too. “I was probably seven or so when I went on my first job. An assassination. Rumple liked to start us off strong.”
“Something to look forward to if I ever make it out,” Emma says dryly, but her eyes are intent on Regina’s face.
Regina shakes her head. “I was supposed to kill…some little girl. Daughter of a new queen in one of the northern kingdoms. But I was seven.” When she’d been seven, bright-eyed and sure that she could do anything as Rumple’s honed blade, she had imagined herself to be a fierce secret agent. At eighteen, she only remembers what a child she’d been. “I made it into the princess’s bedroom and then I froze up. She was just this little girl, and I had no idea then what it meant to take a life.”
The soft-faced girl hadn’t even opened her eyes. There had just been that quiet voice, sleepy and curious, Why are you here?
And Regina, without any idea of what she might do next, had sheathed her knife and said, Would you like me to sing you back to sleep? She had known only one melody, the song that her father had sung to her when she had been young, before Mother had taken her to Rumple. It was a lilting song, clear and true, in a language that she had lost in the years that followed. The girl had drifted back to sleep, and when Regina had returned to the castle, Rumple had scorned her failure and deemed her back in training for another year.
Regina sings the same song now, low and tremulous as she heals Emma. The wind roughens around them, swallows up Regina’s song, until it is only loud enough for Emma and Regina. Regina’s eyes lock onto Emma’s and she doesn’t let them go, not until the song has petered out and Emma is breathing easily again, and the night is beginning to flee the rising sun.