Clock Chimes

Chapter Eight

STORYBROOKE, MAINE, 2026.
Four years after Emma's death.

Regina's breath is ragged. Her head pounding, her weak knees fail her and she collapses on hard ground, vomiting blood mixed with stomach acid. Her eyes burn with pain and despair, trails of saltwater pouring down her cheeks and mixing with the sick on the ground. Lifting up her head, she screams until she's hoarse, tearing through her vocal chords, and until she no longer has breath.

Because what she has just seen she can't ever forget--the image is seared into her brain like a scorching hot piece of coal. She presses her palms roughly against her eyes, as if the action will erase from her memory what she has just seen.

The mangled body of her wife lay below her, blood staining the pavement and lifeless eyes staring up at her. Regina presses her hands farther into her burning eyes--though they protest and sting and show her fireworks and sparks behind her eyelids--letting out one more strangled scream although her throat is bleeding and only a series of squeaks exit her mouth.

Emma is dead.

Regina wakes with a yell, springing upwards in bed. Sweat pours down her back and chest, and she gasps for air, remembering her dream. She screams, then again, then again, the despaired yelling quickly morphing into hiccuping sobs.

Instinctively, she gropes the bed next to her in the dark, before her disoriented mind remembers Emma isn't there. Her hand closes on empty bedsheets, and her heart drops down to her feet. The bed is suddenly grotesquely large, a grand canyon between her and Emma. The sheets feel as though they're strangling her, and she panickedly flails her legs and arms to free herself from its chains on her sticky body. She leans over into Emma's side of the bed, reaching for her pillow that has not once left Regina's bed. Desperately, she presses her nose into the pillow, searching for Emma's scent. She recoils, horrified when she realizes how terrifyingly faded it is. Again, she brings the pillow to her nose, pressing her nostrils into the old pillowcase, searching for the smell.

And it's there, but barely; which is what scares her. It used to fill every inch of her side of the bed, the closet, the kitchen, the seat she normally sat on the couch downstairs--and now she's struggling to find it where she used to lay her golden head each night. She sniffs again, focusing on what's left. She smells trees and outside air--Emma was outside more often than not, running, working, hiking, saving stupid cats from trees--the floral, fruity kiss of her favorite perfume, and the faintest woodsy musk of the cologne she sometimes wore on special occasions that made Regina's heart beat wildly and her knees go weak. But above all, she smells Emma, the irresistible, unique, special scent that followed her everywhere and stuck on all of her clothes and her bare clean skin. The smell alone causes an almost unbearable siege of memories to wash over her, and she closes her eyes, allowing them to crash into her one by one.

It's truly amazing, isn't it, how a single sense of the body can trigger an unforeseeable rush of memories and emotions? How a single whiff of foreign air can take one back to a childhood classroom, a lover, a deep memory long since past? Regina lays there for longer than she knows, not knowing whether or not she's in a dream, reliving a lifetime of memories with Emma. So real are they that she feels completely lost in them; recalling a picnic at the park from seven years ago leaves Regina feeling the grass on her feet and the fresh air in her nose, the wind picking up her dark strands and moving them around her face. And then there's Emma, who is so wondrously, breathtakingly, refreshingly, concretely alive in Regina's memory; Emma, who throws her head back when she laughs, green eyes sparkling and blonde locks tumbling across her shoulders and back. Emma, who snorts when she laughs too hard and makes inappropriate comments and lays her sweet head on Regina's shoulder and reaches up to bite the brunette's ear when she shouldn't.