Once Upon a Time like sunrise, cutting through the night

Mentions of past marital rape and [probably not very safe] abortions.

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><p>When they first talk to Whale, Emma is bright and excited and Regina is knotting her fingers together and trying not to throw up. <em>We're going to do this your way<em>, Emma had insisted, and she's talking about it now, discussing fertility treatments and donors and all the other options they have while Whale casts sidelong glances at her. _I did the last one, now it's your turn_, Emma had joked, and Regina had been pale and lifeless and fading away with the wind, thinning and thinning until she's only paper and feathers and ungrounded.

Whale doesn't say anything but Regina croaks, "I don't…I don't think we should do this."

"A donor?" Emma nods. "I don't love the idea, but you said that trying with magic is too risky and I don't want to–"

"No." She clears her throat. "I don't want to have a baby."

And Emma shatters just as Regina had known she would, face breaking into a mosaic of hurt and confusion and _I thought this was both of us. I thought we were going somewhere good_.

She'd first whispered it one night as though it had been something to be ashamed of, as though she'd never thought that it might be on Regina's mind, thrumming through her with every day spent together. With every time she looks at Emma and thinks, _we could be like this forever_.

They can't do this magically, Regina assures her, and then Emma does _research _and pores over Rumple's old books with Belle for days, finding out all the details of how they can. And Rumple calls her twice and asks her, _When are you going to tell her? _as though he's never been a part of this. And then it's possible magically, yes, but Regina knows that there are risks and she didn't want to think about them, don't you understand? She doesn't want anything to go wrong.

She doesn't want to take a test and see that sign and know that this is a dream that will end just like the others, to see blood everywhere and be sick with disgust and horror and relief. She doesn't want Emma to see blood when she looks at her, blood in her eyes in her veins in her abdomen, pulsing outward and screaming just as she had.

She'd been nineteen and twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two and empty, empty, staring at the ceiling and begging the fairy godmothers who have never seen her to keep her empty. She'd been nineteen and twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two and huddled on a chair and Rumple is amused at her pleas, shaking his head, _I may not know the precise circumstances but you're destined for an important child, Regina, and I won't undo that_. She'd been nineteen and twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two and her maid had quietly summoned a woman from town to the castle and returned to the room later with hot rags and tea.

She'd trusted no one and she'd trusted all the wrong people and she'd been wild and desperate and sick at the thought of _him _and _his child _and she'd vomited again and again until she'd been coughing up blood and her maid had sat silently with her, silvery eyes weary and all too knowing.

Emma had asked her to marry her once, and she'd been joking but not really and Regina had laughed and pretended she hadn't realized.

Emma hurts like a hurricane, hurtling devastation in every direction and spinning through life, refusing to dwell and leaving little lasting damage and then she's gone, vanished from the room with nothing but silence in her wake. She doesn't ask about the doctor this time, doesn't seek to find _another way_, and she doesn't look at Regina at all. She speaks to Henry at dinner and Regina sits rigidly in her seat and then she disappears into the night and doesn't return in the morning.

Her maid had been an older woman, kindly but firm, and her eyes had been just the same color as Mother's. She'd been petrified and reassured by her all at once, and only once the sun had come out the first morning after had she spoken. _You are not the first queen to refuse this. _She'd watched the blood drip down onto the rags on the bed and thought about loving the king's spawn and been glad for the blood and been ashamed.

Snow White had insisted on visiting her quarters, on seeing her beloved stepmother, and when Regina's maid had warded her off one time too many, she'd complained to her father and the maid had been dismissed. Regina had received Snow with blankets over her legs and the rags beneath them and smiled, smiled, smiled until she'd thought her lips might crack open her skin until it all peeled off and left nothing but an empty shell beneath it.

Emma insists on nothing, and when she's in pain she turns it all within. And this time it's Snow White who stops her, who opens the door and says guardedly, "She doesn't want to talk to you," and Regina gives her a quelling glare and stalks past her up to Emma's old room.

Emma is staring out the window, knees pulled up her chin and hair hanging loose around her face, and she says, "You could have told me. If you didn't want one. I wouldn't have…you didn't need to lie just to make me happy."

An unconscious hand slides onto her stomach. "I wasn't lying."

Emma waits and she can't say anything more. Her pulse is so loud in her ears that it drowns out the sound of Snow eavesdropping downstairs, of a tabletop fan buzzing on Emma's dresser, of the low breaths that Emma had been taking, short and abrupt.

She leaves the loft, head high and neck stiff and she doesn't cry until she's in the shower, hands pressed to the tiles in front of her and water hot enough to burn. Her skin is red and raw and her eyes are the same and Emma isn't there anymore, is somewhere across town and she's lost another love to the shadows of her past, dark claws snaking out to snatch away every good thing she clings to.

She exits the bathroom and Emma is sitting on her bed, eyes wide as she stares at Regina. "What the hell happened to you?" She clambers up, tearing the comforter off the bed to wrap it around Regina and guide her to their bed, sliding in beside her to hold her close. And Emma is rough fabric and calloused leather and jeans against her still-sensitive skin but she's home and Regina buries herself in her, clings to her and weeps silent tears into red leather as Emma's hands pat awkwardly at her back.

"I don't know, Regina. I don't know what I did wrong," Emma's saying, and she raises her face to stare up at the other woman in confusion. "I don't know how to make it right if you won't tell me." Emma's eyes are bloodshot, too, and she's trembling against Regina's skin and she's swallowing back words that Regina knows will be _not good enough, not a family, _a dozen fears specific to Emma Swan.

And she whispers, "Uterine rupture," and sits up, gathering the blanket around her.

"What?"

"That's what Whale says is most likely, if I carry a child. There's too much-" She chokes on the words and tries again. "Too much internal scarring. The odds of a baby surviving would be…not high." She's had years where nothing has been fair, where she'd been ruined and where she'd been ruining, and yet nothing feels quite as spiteful a turn of fate as this.

Emma is staring at her, uncomprehending. "Why didn't you say?"

And there's such a simple solution that she knows that Emma will see only that and not the path to it, not the way it branches out into a dozen different points of agony that aren't fair at all. But Emma's hands are drawing lines on her back and she doesn't ask about the scarring, doesn't ask about every time Regina had been young and helpless with bruised thighs and the stirrings of something corrupted and terrifying growing within her.

Emma's eyes are wet and far too intuitive and she's underestimated her again, has seen her pain as a tunnel guarded on all sides and never noticed the windows to outside. Not quite casting sunbeams inside, but lightening the black to grey. Enough to see if you search hard enough.

But Emma doesn't say anything about what she's seen inside that tunnel, doesn't ask about Snow's father or about scarred tissue or about youngafraidalone Regina. She doesn't strip Regina of dignity and she doesn't force out memories and she's only silent and aware.

She sheds her jacket and shirt and holds out her arms, and Regina fits right into them, skin on skin and nothing between them. Nothing ever between them. And then Emma murmurs, "Adoption."

"What?"

"We could adopt a baby. No more mine or yours, no blood connections, just _ours_." And it's a fear she hasn't even placed yet that Emma's rushed to allay, another child in Emma's womb who might turn to her one day, _You're not my mother, you're not my real mom, you don't love me_.

But she isn't fading away anymore. She's solid and thick and _real _and there are no closed doors, no more quiet rooms where there are only blankets to seal her from the world in paltry form. Skin on skin and nothing between them. "We could," she whispers. "But." Emma's just the right size for her, not towering above her and dangerous and holding all the power in the world.

Lips at the edge of her forehead where it touches her hair. "But?"

"I trust you." She thinks of babies growing in stables and little cottages out in the woods, of babies growing in a castle with a mother who couldn't bear to look at them. She thinks of Henry, toddling through the only home she'd ever built and she thinks of Emma beside her and she says again, "I trust you."


End file.

Once Upon a Time, Hurt-Comfort