So Does This Make Us Both The Other Woman?

18. Looking Forward (With Eyes Shut Tight)

Roland is stumbling ahead of her, weighed down by the giant stuffed giraffe he'd gaped at in a store window and the ice cream cone he keeps accidentally mashing into the giraffe's fur. Maybe she's overcompensating a little, but words keep catching in her throat and she wants to hold him tight, to protect him from whatever new horrors her mind might conjure. She loves him.

(She'd loved Snow.)

And while Snow had wronged her so miserably just after she'd saved her life, Roland is an innocent. She's drawing up false equivalencies now, imagining connections that should never exist, and she's terrified- absolutely terrified- of resenting Roland anywhere close to how much she'd resented Snow.

Is this what it had been like the first time, to feel so trapped that she's afraid she might lash out at anyone? But while before it had been her mother and the king and Rumple and Snow, architects of the self-destruction to which she'd played a willing part, now it's a father and a child who deserve none of this.

She wants to hate someone for this. Emma, for giving her an option she'd have never dreamt of otherwise. Tink, for snatching it away as quickly as she'd admitted that she'd wanted it. Robin, simply for being so accommodating to every bump in the road. And while there had been a time when she'd find her own paltry reasons enough to hunt them all down and punish them and feel vindicated for doing so, she isn't that person anymore. She turns her hate inwards and despises herself instead. As she should.

She calls to Roland and they climb the little stair into the drugstore together, Regina's hand tight around his tiny one. He's so little. He's nothing like Snow. She thinks of herself crouched in front of little Snow, talking to her about conquering her fears, and she remembers proffering a stuffed monkey to Roland- See? Not so scary. Now you have a new toy.

There's a certain symmetry to it, that Snow would be the beginning of Daniel's end and Roland would be the beginning to finding true love again. To finding happiness.

(Not to walking the streets of Storybrooke alone at night, watching the mansion until the light in the master bedroom turns off and she's certain that her so-called true love is asleep before she reenters her own home. She's doing it all wrong, so wrong, and she's ruining everything for herself this time. There's no one else to blame, not this time.)

She walks past the baby aisle and glances at the paraphernalia to see if there's anything Leo might need. Her lip curls at the thought of the name and she tightens her grip on Roland, so hard that he whines, "Regina!"

"Oh! I'm sorry." She lets him go. He scampers for the matchbox cars in the next aisle over, and she's about to follow when something catches her eye.

It's a novelty pacifier, priced higher than any pacifier ever should be, and it sports the ridiculously tacky decoration of two enormous teeth and a false mouth on its back so a baby sucking would look like he has a second mouth over his own. It's ugly and it's not funny at all and it's exactly the kind of idiotic thing that Emma Swan would buy and stick into a baby's mouth; and as she stares at it, she's horrified to feel her eyes well up at that realization.

She thinks about Snow, musing on Emma having babies with Hook, and you know where I see us in five years from now? Here. Like this. Wanting, and it all strikes her with such abrupt pain that she's shaking in the middle of the drugstore, her hand pressed to the pacifier. Thoughts are racing within her, the ones she hasn't allowed to the forefront since she'd kissed Emma and realized that that way lies only heartbreak, since she'd decided to put someone else's needs before her own and relinquish her destiny back to her soulmate. And she's helpless to drive them away today when she's vulnerable and afraid and can dare imagine–

Emma curled up in her bed, golden mane spread across Regina's lap as Regina leans back against her headboard and smooths it out. "Henry's getting so old," she says, pressing a kiss to the inside of Regina's thigh, and Regina tingles but is too content to move. "I think we did a pretty okay job with him."