A/N: I'm sorry for the wait... heh. Also, I hope you all aren't too unhappy with the direction I'll be taking this. Please trust me on this. Thank you all again for your kind reviews and support, it warms me hearty :)

Chapter 4: The Balancing Act

He spots the red on her palm, and he knows.

"You're ... It's happening again isn't it?"

"Nothing's happening, kid. I'll be okay."

Henry's gift is left in the box under the bed, where Regina keeps the letters that had accumulated over the years. She considers reading them, like she'd done every time one came in, but decides against it.

Gem retreats into her room without speaking to Regina, a sign that her encounter with Henry was not a pleasant one. When she comes inside, she finds her at her desk, scribbling away at an essay.

"Do you want to talk about this yet?" Regina asks at the doorway.

Gem shakes her head, and Regina nods in understanding even though her daughter hasn't turned around to see.

"Dinner at 8. Don't burn yourself out, okay?"

"All right. Thanks."

She gives Gem one last trying smile before she walks into the kitchen. She grabs the landline to dial Emma's number, and she knows it's a bad idea, but lines need to be drawn. Henry hurting her is one thing. Hurting Gem is another.

It surprises her, to say the least, that she even remembers those digits and can punch them in without hesitation, or that it still is a functioning number. She taps her fingers on the counter as the tedious rings on the other end go by.

"Hello?" a slightly raspy voice answers.

"Miss Swan."

"Regina-"

"Are you all right? You sound ill."

"It's nothing. What's the matter?"

"I need to ask you to keep better watch on Henry," Regina says, and cringes a little how the words feel in her mouth.

"What did he do? He went to see you, didn't he?"

"He talked to Gem." Regina's tone suggests disapproval that Emma immediately understands.

"Oh... god, I'm sorry, I'll... I'll talk to him about it."

"You didn't know?"

"He hasn't said a word to me since he got here."

Regina pauses, and mentally kicks herself for what she is about to ask. "How is he doing?"

"He's, uh... he could be better."

"Talk to him," Regina nearly commands. "Make sure he's all right."

"Why?" Emma asks, and before Regina responds with offense, she amends: "I mean, I thought you didn't ... care."

She can almost hear Emma's hurt shrug and the wince of her face.

"I do care," Regina admits. "But caring isn't needing, and it isn't forgiving, either. This conversation has gone on longer than needed, so goodnight, Emma. And remember what I've asked of you."

"Regina, hold on."

"What?"

"Can... Can I see you tomorrow? I just want to talk."

Regina leans into the counter, her free arm folded underneath the other's elbow.

She should've remembered Emma's tendency to insist sooner; she can feel herself want to give in.

"I can't."

"Okay. Sorry for troubling you. Henry will stay under my watch."

Regina nods in appreciation, despite it going unseen. "Thank you."

She hangs up the phone and stands still for a while. It takes time to settle, but suddenly she feels as if she'd fallen into old fire.

And If Gem were not two rooms within hearing distance, Regina would've screamed.

[~][~][~]

Gem is better by dinner, though she is still visibly affected by the events of the afternoon. There is less conversation at the table, but neither can blame the other. It's been a long day. They're both tired.

Regina wants to ask Gem how she's feeling, but doesn't push the subject of Henry. They have their own ways of dealing with troubling matters, and that means time and patience and lots of thinking. And while there is lag, there is always honesty and no white lies in between.

"How about a movie Saturday night?" Regina offers between chewing. "Your pick."

Gem looks up at her, a tired smile on her face. "Yeah, that sounds good. Jackie has Brave on DVD."

"Invite her over, okay? Maybe she can spend the night."

Gem nods in appreciation, and they spend the rest of their meal in comfortable quiet, with just the clacks of metal on porcelain to fill it in.

There is no reading time that night: Gem has an essay due that she would have finished earlier if her attentions and brainpower were not focused on certain ex children.

[~][~][~]

The lamp is still on when Regina wakes up in the early hours before dawn to check on her. She'd fallen asleep on her desk, graphite print no doubt pressed on her olive face, and so Regina gently stirs her awake enough to lead her to her mattress where sleep embraces her just as easily as she'd come out of it. She covers her with her blanket, brushes the loose hair from her face.

Regina sits there by Gem's bedside, rubbing the sleep from her own eyes and considering a cup of coffee rather than another fruitless attempt at peaceful rest.

She had been contemplating her conversation with Emma that evening, her request to see her. She knows that it's not just about talking. It's going to be about more requests, excuses, and more chances. She had been thinking about if she had not met Gem, if she had never come to take her in and love her as if there were never a time when it wasn't like this, she'd dive head first into requests, excuses, and chances.

These past five years were as if the air had cleared around her. There were no more storms of worry or neglect, of pain and hurt with her own tears to wash away the remains. There is just Nadia.

She is not a replacement for Henry and Emma; she is better than a replacement. She is a new beginning, a happy ending.

But there are pockets within Regina's heart where she stores away those old wants, where it doesn't have to be one or the other, but them altogether. Those old wants that she never addresses, just places them on the side. Like on top of the mantel, that solitary photo frame.

She'd thought that keeping it there would somehow make it so that she could eventually look at it and not feel anything.

It'd never worked.

Regina has only sobered. She now knows she deserves to love, and to be loved in return. There is no more drunken desire, come what may, to be forgiven, to deconstruct her entire being for the approval of those who would never grant it to her. She is sober now, but that sobriety, to her misfortune, did not come with wiping clean the heart that loved Henry and Emma Swan.

Regina sighs heavily and makes her way back to her room, scratching the back of her head in frustration that she wishes would come to her in hours that were not between night and day.

She grabs her cell phone from her bedside and sends Emma a text before she changes her mind.

+1-3662: Come over before 4pm. You'll get 30 minutes.

Storybrooke, the curse has broken.

Emma stands there in front of Regina outside of her cell. She's not sure how she can look at her anymore - those eyes are so foreign now, so detached from the ones she used to look into late at night.

No ounce of love nor gratitude are evident in those dark pools nor are they present in any inch of her face. Nor should there be, since they had taken her from the dangers of Whale's mob but into the confines of a jail. It made Regina feel powerless and common inside the empty shell around her, and the empty shell that was her.

"Why did you do it?" Emma demands in a low quivering voice.

Regina rolls her neck up to straighten her posture with an air of regal darkness. "I have done many things," she answers, "you'll have to be more specific."

"The turnover," Emma enunciates through gritted teeth. She grips the bars of the cell, knuckles pale and it reminds Regina of Henry's skin as he laid lifeless on the hospital bed.

"Why did you try to kill me?"

"Because I'm the Evil Queen."

"Bullshit!" Emma booms loud enough to silence Regina, but she does not shrink away. Emma can't and won't hurt her.

"You lied," she says, shaking and dismayed. "You did kill Graham. You framed Mary Margaret, tried to kill Kathryn, and... goddammit, Regina, why?"

Her voice reverberates at the last question, saturated with loud betrayal and hurt being wrung dry like a towel. She turns away from the cell, for she might kill Regina as look at her, and then afterwards herself.

There is a brief trace of humanity left in Regina's eyes. But she wills it away and she is empty again. "You would have left anyway."

Emma keeps her back to her. "I loved you."

"I told you you wouldn't."

Emma misses it, the flash on Regina's face that tells it all. No one can love me. Not even you. Not in the end.

She turns around then, green eyes rimmed with red as she comes forward to reach through the caged cell to grab the hand tucked under Regina's folded arms. The touch visibly undoes her, her face in inquiry rather than cruel detachment.

It's nothing but Emma's breathing, heavy with her heart, until she produces a gold band from her pocket. She opens Regina's palm, as if to open apart the world, or a black hole, and drops the ring onto it. She holds her fingers shut, then, her hard stare never leaving Regina's.

"Then congratulations," she says, echoing the words of her mother before she bit down on that lethal apple. "You've won."

"Wait," Regina calls as Emma turns to leave. "Emma-"

"No," Emma replies, all the energy drained from her. It is a voice of resignation. Giving up. "Don't talk to me ever again."

"Please, I won't lie anymore. I'll tell you everything. Please don't leave me." The desperation in her grows, and she's now clenching her hands around the metal bars, ring pressed against her warm palm.

Emma only turns back to look at the mess she's made of herself. This isn't Regina. This is the Evil Queen. And she's sick. So, so sick. She shakes her head, and the when the door closes, there are no more sounds, not even of sobs or the sound of a ring dropping to the floor.

When Emma pulls herself awake, she finds that she is breathing heavily, a thick air of warmth engulfing her body and an invisible fist pummelling her heart rate. She'd dreamed of the curse, another spell of a nightmare that littered Emma's sleeping cycles every now and then.

The sun is up, and when she looks at the clock on the opposite wall, it is only 7am.

She lays back down, the fiery heat dissipating and her body relaxing with reality.

She'd spoken to Henry like Regina had asked her to. How she'd gotten a call from her and that this was a warning. She reprimanded him as best she could without anything escalating to fighting. She needed him to understand that what he did was wrong, and while he feels bad, it's for the wrong reason.

"You can't just barge into people's life like that," she'd said, to which he replied with bitterness: "you'd know."

"Yeah, kid, and you would, too."

Sometimes they forget that they love each other, or that they're the only ones left, and it turns into that. The return of Emma's "predicament" that night had made a hasty, and hurtful, reminder.

Emma breathes in and out for a solid ten minutes, making sure that it has left her system, and that it wouldn't make an appearance any time soon.

The green light flashes on her cell from the dresser across the room, and she carefully gets out of bed to check it.

It's a text from Regina, and Emma suspects that she'd made that decision after late night bottles of alcohol. (She knows she didn't, though. Not while she is still responsible for another living being.)

Emma exhales from an O-shaped mouth, thinking that it is too early, much too soon for her head to be set on fire with thoughts and precautions and plans and I hope I don't fuck this up.

She figures she has lots of time to prepare. 4 in the afternoon is a long way from now, she has time to calculate what to say, how Regina will likely respond, and whether to rule that line out or not.

She feels like an idiot, pacing around the room in search of notebook paper. She's reacting like a giddy teenager on her first date but the matter so much more serious than that.

She's waited and given up so much.

Henry is still asleep, and will likely be until noon, so Emma takes her time when she goes out for groceries, her cart consisting mostly of TV dinner. Impulse purchases make their way onto the cart, and Emma has to remind herself that she's technically unemployed, and the Storybrooke stash in her account won't last forever.

She checks her phone every 5 minutes to see if Regina changed her mind again. She hasn't.

Emma returns to the apartment around 10 after a leisurely drive around town, finding Henry awake and flipping through channels in the living room.

"Good morning," she greets, and he rises from the couch to help her stuff the microwave meals in the freezer. "You're up early. Sleep well?"

"Sorta. Dreamless."

"Better that my nights, I'll tell you that."

They store away the plastic bags for reuse under the sink and they decide to have Cocoa Puffs and toast with butter for breakfast.

"I need to be somewhere today," Emma informs him, and he gives her an inquiring look.

"I'm going to see her."

He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, puts a spoonful of cereal and milk in his mouth to excuse him from responding.

"If you leave this building," she warns, pointing a dripping spoon at him, "or give any reason for Regina to come to our door with a restraining order, we are leaving straight away. Do you understand?"

He nods. "Yeah."

He dares not disobey this time. He hasn't recovered from Regina's coldness, his growing awareness of how wrong he is, and the possibility that just keeps returning and returning, of him being alone.

[~][~][~]

"Half an hour," Regina makes clear again as they sit across from each other in the living room.

She studies Emma, noting what she did not two days before: she'd aged considerably within the five years of her absence. Her once unruly curls had fallen even more flat, and instead of a golden curtain down her back it is balled up into a messy bun. The lines on her face are deeper, more defined, and while there is still youth in her face, there is also a weariness. Emma Swan always used to have the worst posture, but something of her stance resembles a tree that had weathered a storm.

"Maybe less, if I don't like where this will be going."

"I feel like I'm in a job interview," Emma tries to joke, but it passes Regina like weak wind.

She swallows, keeping her shaking hands balled up in fists atop her knees.

"I wanted to explain to you what happened."

Regina's mouth forms into a tight line. "I think I know very well what happened." Her words are harsh but her voice is soft, and said any other way, Emma might've grabbed her coat and gone straight to the airport.

"I mean while you were gone," she clears. "A lot of things, just... they went wrong. They were wrong before, and they just got worse."

"Am I supposed to feel any sympathy for Storybrooke with this information?" Regina asks skeptically. "You know very well I'm not going back to fix anything."

"That's just it, Regina."

"What?"

"There is no Storybrooke, anymore."

Regina furrows her eyebrows at this news. "What are you saying?"

"They went back to the Enchanted Forest."

"Everyone?"

"Well, not me and Henry," Emma says, a faint sorrowful smile on her face.

Regina stares hard at her. "Why?"

"Well, all sorts of reasons," she starts, leaning back into the chair. "I'm not a princess. Or a future queen. I can't do that stuff."

"And Henry? Did he not want to leave you?"

"He didn't want to leave you."

Regina opens her mouth to say something, but closes it again. She shakes her head ever so slightly, not wanting any more of this. This used to work so well, when the Charmings, when Cora, would offer the smallest hope that Henry loved her as much as she. Now she's just tired. She's tired of wanting what is not really there.

"And neither did I," Emma says when Regina's silence threatens to wring her out of her own body. Still, she says nothing, but instead looks at her with intense eyes mixed with contradictory anger and five years of resolve crumbling.

"You were right to leave," she starts again, "Neither of us are blaming you, we aren't."

"So now what is this?" Regina asks, her throat thick. "Why are you here? Why did you have to just walk into my life again and dangle the hopeless prospect of-"

She stands up and turns away, and Emma gets up after her. "Please, no, that's not- I'm not trying to-"

Her back is still turned to her, her arms crossed. "I don't need to be hurt again."

"You won't be. I promise. We'll do better, just give us..."

"A chance?" Regina turns around, her brown eyes rimmed with a sheet of tears threatening to grow. "Five years, Emma. Five."

"Yeah, try 28," Emma finds herself shouting back, but immediately covers her mouth afterwards.

She expects Regina to come forward and strike her, but she doesn't. Her shoulders heave downward and she shakes her head.

"I'm sorry. That wasn't right."

"What do you want, Emma?"

"I just wanted to talk, I didn't mean to-"

Regina looks on at Emma as she begins to actually cry. It's such a reversal, to see this. Usually, back then, it was Regina begging Emma for mercy instead of the other way around. These are no crocodile tears. She knows a woman in search of another chance when she sees one. She sees herself in Emma-she had always seen herself in her-and can't bring herself to inflict the same cruelty that she was met with so long ago.

"I'll ask again," Regina says softly, beckoning Emma to look upward to her without touching her. "What do you want?"

Emma closes her eyes, breathes, and opens them again. "Give us a week."

"One?"

"One."

She gives Emma a regretful smile. "That's not enough to undo everything."

"I know," Emma shrugs. "We just want... we want to prove..."

Regina stares at her long and hard again before she speaks again.

"There's more, isn't there?"

"More what?"

"There are things you aren't telling me about what happened in Storybrooke."

Emma turns her head away. "I explained them in the letters."

"I won't read them."

"Then I won't tell you."

"Why?"

"I think it's time for me to go."

Emma walks past Regina and retrieves her coat hanging by the doorway.

"Aren't you going to wait for my answer?" Regina asks.

Emma pauses then, frozen in time. "What will it be?"

It's as it has happened all over again, with Emma's back toward Regina, missing the look on her face that says it all.

"No. And I'm sorry. But no."

Emma does not turn to face her. She nods to keep the tears from falling, and heads out the door.

[~][~][~]

When Gem comes home, she finds her mother staring at the picture again. The same look covers her face as she sits on the sofa and looks into a gaping hole with her legs crossed and her hand over her mouth in deep contemplation. When she stands at the doorway, she expects Regina to snap out of it again, ask an irrelevant question. But that's not what happens.

"Gem," Regina calls for her softly, her eyes not leaving Emma and Henry's frozen beings, "we make all our choices together, you know that, right?"

Gem sets down her backpack and takes a seat next to Regina. Her mother's arms unfold immediately and wrap around Gem.

"Of course," Gem replies, resting her head on her shoulder. "Why?"

Regina takes a deep breath, and Gem can already anticipate what she is about to ask. She stares with her at the picture, those faces she knew were packed with history.

"How do you feel about Emma and Henry being around for a while?"

"I don't know," Gem says. "Depends on how they'll be."

"They want a second chance. A week to prove they deserve it."

"Do they?"

Regina pauses for a while, shifts in her seat on the sofa. Her hand pets the top of Gem's head as she searches for the right words.

"If your father were alive," she begins, and Gem closes her eyes. "And your mother came back... would you forgive them?"

"Not right away."

"Would you want to? If they said they could change, would you want to believe them?"

It takes a few seconds for Gem to reply, though she knows the answer. She'd asked herself this question many times before.

"Yes."

"Why?" Regina asks.

"Because... even if I don't trust them, I still love them."

"Hmm," her mother sighs, and leans her head on Gem's.

"Is that what you're feeling?" Gem asks.

She takes a pause mirroring Gem's before she answers. "Yes, it is."

Gem opens her eyes again to look at Emma and Henry's picture. Something inside her hurts, not for fear of being set aside in favor of the two of them, but that she knows the pain her mother is suffering. She knows that, while she would never abandon Regina, if she could find a way for her old family and her new family to be just family, she'd do it. But the harsh reality, to Gem, is that she will never get that chance.

But Regina is getting that, right now.

"Can you tell me about Emma?" Gem asks. "You've told me about your old family, but not about her."

"Why just Emma?"

"I can already guess about Henry."

Regina sighs. "Well..."

"Did you love her?"

She hesitates, "Yes. Yes I did, very much."

"Why?" Gem questions. "If things went wrong?"

"It's not as simple as it seems," Regina starts, shifting her arms around Gem and keeping her hand on her head, combing through her black hair. She is much more than just Gem's mother for time being: she is a confidante, a best friend. "Or maybe it is. We love people who hurt us because we want to believe they can be better. I hurt Emma, Henry too, and... no one is blameless in the end.

"Sometimes we also love people who hurt us because we think we deserve it. And we think: maybe one day. One day we'll be worthy enough and the hurting can stop. And then we never are and it never does."

Gem can almost feel the warm teardrops roll down her mother's face. "Mama, you're worth the entire world. So it will stop."

Regina plants a kiss on the top of her head. "It already has."