So Does This Make Us Both The Other Woman?

20. Pillow Talk With A Child (And Another. And Another)

She wakes up to a low buzzing near her abdomen. Emma is still there, curled up under her blanket beside her with an arm flung over her stomach and her breath warm against the space below Regina's earlobe. She's wrapped around her like a second skin, so close that Regina can feel every inhalation as it frees up a tiny sliver of space between them, and she feels... safe. Like stables and laughter and the scent of a newborn, like Emma's and Henry's arms around her after Neverland, like Snow's hand on hers and Robin's on her back.

Robin. Her breathing quickens as she remembers her decision earlier in the night, the automatic choice of the person she needs. No. Yes. She doesn't know. But the relief is back, the dread that's recently accompanied his name gone with the acceptance that they're all wrong. That she might not obligate herself to be with him anymore.

She exhales and shifts against Emma's still form to find the source of the vibrating. It's Emma's phone, flat beneath her torso, and Regina sees Henry's face on the screen and answers it without a second thought. "Sweetheart?"

"Mom!" Henry's voice trembles. "Mom, you're okay."

"I do seem to be," she says, glancing up at the ceiling. The haze of purple is just about gone, drifting away into the night, and her heart isn't screaming in her chest anymore. "I'm sorry I had to send you away, but I didn't...I didn't know what I was going to do." She holds one tenet close to her, the only rule of her life that matters, and the few times she's broken it have been unforgivable. You don't hurt Henry. And in the terror of the previous afternoon, she'd expanded that law to include Roland, to get them both away. From her. "I wanted you two safe."

She thinks there might be accusations now, demands that she gives up magic again and the cautious suggestion that she's been regressing. Henry is nothing if not staunch in his beliefs, and she'd proven herself unworthy yesterday in the most blatant of ways.

But instead, she hears a catch in Henry's voice as he says, "I was so...I was so..." He's struggling to get out the final word, and she whispers it for him.

"Scared," she says gently, and Henry's breath hitches and he's suddenly crying softly. For all his wonderful, wonderful determination, for all his fearlessness and devotion to the right thing, he's just a little boy, a child who won't let himself be afraid because it's not what his heroes do. Because it's easier to fight forward than to admit that he's terrified.

"Something bad was happening! And Ma wouldn't pick up her phone and Robin never came back and I didn't know what happened, I didn't know if you were okay or hurt or-or alive..." He's sobbing into the phone, so young under those layers of maturity that Neverland and New York have given him, so vulnerable, and she longs to hold him tight like she has so many times before and protect him from truths he's not ready to face.

"I'm sorry I couldn't call you, Henry," she murmurs. "There was a lot of bad magic in my system, and I wasn't able to do much of anything until it drained out."

"I hate magic," he sniffles. "I don't want it to hurt you anymore."

"Oh, Henry, I don't think it will. I'll make sure of it," she promises, and she thinks about Robin, who'd unintentionally been the catalyst for all of this. She can't remain in that situation and hope to overcome it. For Henry's sake. For Roland's. "Emma was helping me with it all, that's why she didn't answer her phone."

"Did Robin come too?"

"Later. But I..." She bites her lip and says diplomatically, "I asked him to go for now. He might have gotten hurt if I had used any of that magic that was inside of me then." Before she tells Henry, before Roland hears about it, before anyone but Emma knows, she needs to talk to Robin. He deserves that at the very least.