#sqw4

Washington, D.C. April 5th

///

“You know, John, there’s been a lot of speculation since the Riverside trip back in March. The President hasn’t been seen with anyone on her arm in over six months, but she and that Press Secretary have been awful close. Today, some sources seem to think they’ve got the scoop: Emma Swan, photographed two days in a row picking up Henry Mills outside St. John’s Secondary School alongside several Secret Service agents. Is this the sign of a new Mrs. Mills?”

“I’m not ready to call it a done deal, Jake, but it would explain a few things. There has been a lot of speculation about why Senator Mills made such a conservative choice of running mate two years ago; this kind of secret could be the answer.”

Emma sighed, turning off the news screen as she settled beside the President on the green couch in her East Wing office. Shoes were still on, this time, and the cups of tea on the table hadn’t been touched. “So. The luck didn’t hold.”

Regina shook her head. “No. It didn’t.” All the distance in the world wouldn’t have helped; there were two single women in the White House, how scandalous, how sensational. The distance had happened all on its own, or, rather, with a bit of help from a national security crisis Emma wasn’t cleared to hear about, but all that had meant was a frantically overworked Regina practically throwing Emma at her son, asking her to spend time with him, to meet him after school when she couldn’t be there, to catch her in the hallway at least once or twice and let her know how Henry was doing without her. “It was never going to.”

Emma’s lips curved into a resigned smile. “You and I know what’s true. Isn’t that supposed to be what matters?”

“You’re the Press Secretary. You’re supposed to know better.”

Emma shrugged. “I can make us old news, if that’s what you want. Punch a reporter, maybe. That should take us off the air for at least half a day.” She cocked her head to the side. She bit her lip, but it would have taken a bullet to stop her next words. “Would it really be so horrible, though? People thinking there’s something between us? If it weren’t for the job, of course, I mean.”

Smooth, Swan. Very smooth. Even I’m not sure what I just asked her.

“And yet, the job exists.”

“Okay, but, I mean… what, would you never date a single employee of the federal government? Because you’re the boss’s boss’s boss of all of them.”

Regina didn’t rise to the bait. “If not the job, there’s the lovely matter of the public opinion polling.”

“You’re not even out and someone’s already been asking America how they’d like you with a First Lady?”

“Of course they have.”

“And what does America say?”

“Their favorite word: no.”

At Regina’s dispassionate answers, Emma sighed. “So. I guess that’s that. What do I tell the press?”

Regina stood, pacing between the couch and the coffee table. “I suppose you could tell the press that my administration is a disaster, that, yes, my Vice President is one of my worst enemies, that I had to beg her onto the ticket with me, did you know that? Because they’re right, John and Jake on Channel Eight… I needed her, a morally conservative Democrat—can you believe there’s still one alive?—just to balance out my existence. My politics were hardly left of center back then but… Latina, a single mother… These newscasts are déjà vu. You remember the rumors last time. Then again, if you don’t, maybe you should remind the press about the last time they were nosing around my sexuality: The Senate Sweetheart and Her, The Dragon of Wall Street, Mal and I being dragged through the papers like I was cheating on some imaginary husband just by spending time with another brilliant woman and I—”

“Regina, you don’t have to tell me this,” Emma said softly. She stood, crossing the floor. This was the most time alone she’d had with the President in weeks, and she didn’t want to spend it watching Regina agonize over campaign decisions long since made.

“—I wouldn’t do that again. I’ve already learned I can’t have a life while I’m in office, I know I can’t—”

“I know,” Emma continued, stepping closer. “I understand.” She reached out, capturing one of Regina’s hands between her own, stopping the pacing in its tracks. “I’ve been right where you are. I’m not pushing, I’m just—”

“—I can’t,” Regina repeated, but she didn’t have the heart for any real denials. Not when she had Emma’s fingers tangled with her own, the first welcome human contact she’d had in days… “I can’t do this again.”

Emma stared silently into her eyes, and that was invitation enough.

She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around her Press Secretary’s solid, lanky form, sighing when Emma’s actions mirrored her own. She let her face rest in the crook of Emma’s neck, wondered how similar their heights would be if she kicked off her heels. Her heart was working double time, but she could feel Emma’s pulse racing to catch up, and she drew in a deep, comforting breath, catching the faintest hint of the signature potpourri she knew a White House designer liked to leave in the offices of her senior staff, and something beneath that, simple and clean and… Nice. This was so, so nice. And in that moment, Regina envied every soul in the world who could have this for their own without complications, without repercussions, without… fear.

Jesus. Emma pressed her face into Regina’s hair, wishing desperately that Regina was feeling everything she was in this moment. She squeezed a little tighter, knowing that the two or three seconds that could still mean nothing more than friendly, comforting contact had long since passed, that, if this wasn’t going to become something else, she needed to let go, but that she wasn’t going to be able to do it. She breathed in deeply, readying herself to speak, but instead, felt the softest contact against the side of her throat. She went completely still, eyes wide and unseeing. Oh, no. Oh, God, she’s kissing me.

Regina pressed her lips against Emma’s soft skin a second time, just a bit lower, reveling in the tiny change she could feel in the texture of Emma’s flesh, little goosebumps rising to greet her lips. And her lips were so warm, like all the heat in the rest of her body had fled, racing towards the first place it might melt the stiffness away from the woman in her arms. She could feel the almost painful intimacy of her own motions, feather light kisses heavy with mistake, mistake! But it just felt so necessary to finally stop dancing around politics and arguments and words, words, words.

She pressed closer, parting her lips, just brushing Emma’s throat with her mouth, feeling her pulse beat faster in response, and in that moment, she knew no words had ever tasted as good on her lips as Emma’s skin.

Emma’s fingers crept up into her hair with aching slowness, neither pressing her closer, nor pulling her away, but the scrape of nails against her scalp made Regina shiver, and she wanted revenge. She pulled back, straightening just enough that she could press forward again, claiming Emma’s lips before she could convince herself of one more possible reason not to. There wasn’t room for fear, here, only the instinctual rightness of this, of losing herself in the kiss, the press of Emma’s tongue against her own, the strange little sounds in the back of her Press Secretary’s throat that she never could have imagined her making, the feeling of teeth against her bottom lip that proved yes, oh yes, this was exactly what had been waiting between them, in every heated word, every tense silence, knees inches apart in the back of the limousine, hands brushing over the podium as Emma relinquished the mic… Every inch of that had been this, had been desire, and now, she could taste it.

It was half adrenaline, really, the thrill of one chase ending and knowing another had already begun, rabid reporters hot on the heels of what hadn’t even become an affair, but whatever it was, Regina was in, all the way, body responding, fingers and toes curling, stomach clenching as Emma’s grip on her waist pulsed straight into her blood.

When they finally parted, Regina sucked in air through lips she wasn’t sure belonged to her anymore, completely at a loss for words, head floating away from her, vanished somewhere well beyond the White House, mind eloping with common sense in a hot air balloon and leaving her behind on the ground with nothing but heart and want and Emma Swan.

“That was… um…” Emma scrambled for words, for composure, but all she found were Regina’s wide, wanting eyes, and she was half a second away from pulling her right back in.

“Hey, Mom, Ruby said I’d find—”

The door opened, and Emma found herself staring over Regina’s shoulder right into Henry’s eyes.

“—you here.”

Emma was already pulling back, but Regina’s hands seemed to be going with her, not letting go of her arms.

“Henry,” Regina said softly, maintaining careful, unreadable eye contact with Emma as she held her in place with nails and fingertips alone. “Would you give me two minutes to finish up this discussion with Ms. Swan? Then we can head home early, alright?”

Emma could see Henry staring at them, ignoring her request. Slowly, a grin spread across his lips. “Yeah, Mom, sure. I saw on the news, you know, about you two. You could have told me; I think it’s great!”  

Regina’s expression didn’t change, and Emma didn’t know what to say, so she was infinitely glad when Henry stepped back towards the door. “Maybe Emma can come home with us? She makes a bomb grilled cheese.”

Emma could have sworn his grin was the last thing to disappear as the door swung shut.

Regina immediately stepped away from Emma, spinning towards the couch and bracing herself against it. “And this, Ms. Swan, is why this can’t happen.”

Emma froze. “Wait, what? You heard the kid. He didn’t see anything, and even if he had, he’s fine with it.”

“And the next person? My Head of Security? My Chief of Staff? The Clickfeast reporter who just got his press pass approved for your briefing room?”

“So we’re discreet!” Emma spluttered, unable to make the leap from Henry’s enthusiastic acceptance to Regina’s harsh denial.

Regina snorted. “Don’t you understand? There is no discretion in the White House. We can barely keep our national security secrets out of your reporters’ hands long enough to run rescue missions! We have the worst kept secrets in the country! Personal secrets don’t even have the luxury of a clearance code.”

Emma was standing right beside her, but Regina wouldn’t look her in the eye.

“You can’t do that again.”

Emma jerked back, Regina’s dismissal as clear and harsh as a slap. “Excuse me? You kissed me! What, next time I just don’t kiss you back?”

“Next time you have some common sense!” Regina snapped. “I’m paying you to be my sanity, remember?”

For the first time, Emma registered the strain in Regina’s voice, the crack at the end of the question, and for the first time, it occurred to her that the President was a little bit… scared.

She reached out a hand, pressing two fingers against Regina’s shoulder, turning her into her arms. “Regina,” she muttered. “Regina Mills. You could pay me with the state of Texas, and it wouldn’t be enough to think kissing you is less important than sanity.”

“Texas is a horrible state,” Regina murmured, reaching up and tracing Emma’s cheekbone with the tip of one finger. “How about Maine, in the summer.”

Emma shook her head. “Still not worth it. I’d visit with you and Henry, though.”

At Henry’s name, Regina stilled again, the moment of vulnerability disappearing behind a mask of displeasure. “Henry—”

“—is waiting,” Emma finished. “I know.” She leaned in, pressing a quick kiss against Regina’s unresisting lips. “And you should go home with him.” She reached up, brushing her thumb over the tiny scar that had captured her attention that first day in the hall, revealed even in the dim light now that their kisses had smudged aside Regina’s executive concealer. “I just want you to know you don’t have to do this alone. I adore your kid. I’ve kept your secrets. And I don’t have to be one of them, a secret, but I can be, if that’s what you need. At this point, I’m pretty sure the only thing stopping you from kissing me again is your own pride.”

Regina’s lips twitched. “That,” she admitted. “And the entire electorate of the Midwest.”

“Honestly, Regina… screw the Midwest.”

the end

...of swan queen week. 

Final Author’s Note: Believe it or not, but there are at least three significant political events already written out, but that didn’t end up making the final cut here for time’s sake. Which resulted in this interesting reality where you don’t know who Regina’s Vice President is, among other things. Between that and the intense lack of resolution after only two years in office, the lack of all things Swan Queen future, I… well… let’s just say I’m probably going to get back to this universe sometime.

Until then, hope you enjoyed, and remember, in two more years…

Washington, D.C. March 18th

///

D.C. was a mud pit. Any hint of snow had long since given way to its brown, icy, slushy brethren, lingering in alleys and at street corners in heaps of deeply unappealing sludge that no amount of almost-spring rain could wash away. The warm front was moving in, though, and the brutal winter was slowly but surely falling in its path. Regina could hear the faintest chirp of a lonely robin on the other side of the thick White House glass, and she greeted the sound with a sigh. Yes, she was more than ready for a genuine spring.

Regina was tired of winter, of chilly legs and thin, flattering coats and coffee that went cold twice as fast if she left it near a window. One would think, with all the effort they put into making those things bulletproof, they could do a little better by the environment and keep the heat inside where it belonged. More than the coffee, though, Regina was sick and tired of always being the one in a skirt. If her Press Secretary could get away with an off-the-rack blouse and the same pair of (admittedly quite flattering) black slacks four times a week at minimum, she could wear a pant suit every now and then, dammit. She could “play up her approachable femininity” the next time she had to get elected. Today, for this meeting, with that woman, she was Commander in Chief, and she was wearing some goddamn pants.

By the time she knocked on the door of Emma’s office, she was late, but as she nervously ran her hands along the waist of her long, navy jacket and tugged at the seams on the sides of the matching straight-legged dress slacks, she couldn’t regret the extra minute. It wasn’t her usual camera-tested, just-past-the-knee skirt-suit that public opinion polling had been putting her in for years, but it felt like an extra line of defense, both against the unnecessary air conditioning that went off intermittently to counter the admirably aggressive West Wing heating, but also against the conversation she was about to have.

When Emma opened the door and proceeded to take an entirely unwarranted amount of time staring down the length of her body, the pantsuit suddenly felt as effective a shield as tissue paper.

“Madam President,” Emma murmured. 

“Ms. Swan.”

Emma glanced up sharply. In the time since her speech in Riverside, that moniker had fallen largely out of favor. Regina bit her lip, realizing a return to that greeting wasn’t going to be any better a distancing strategy than the pants.

“Emma,” she amended softly. “We need to discuss—”

“—Yesterday. I know.” She stepped aside, letting Regina in. “You’re the third one through my door this morning and I haven’t even gotten breakfast.” She was fidgeting visibly, twirling a pencil around and around in her fingers. “And you were the only one who bothered to schedule it. Some kind of irony in that.” She sighed. “Look, I know it wasn’t the best wording, but I—”

“—Not the best wording?” Regina finally lost patience. “You might as well have confirmed everything!”

“Well, I was never going to deny it, was I?”

Regina glowered at the row of news screens on Emma’s bookshelf, noticing that two channels were clearly still running the story. She walked over, turning up the volume on the nearest display.

“Emma, can you give us some context for those pictures? That’s the third night you’ve been spotted out with the President’s executive assistant.”

On screen, Emma looked visibly startled by the question. Honestly, Regina was, too. She hadn’t even realized Emma was friends with Ruby, let alone friendly enough to start that line of questioning into their relationship.

“Ruby is a friend and coworker. That’s all the context there is.”

“Clickfeed reported yesterday that you two had started dating. You deny it?”

“Of course I do. I just told you, she—”

“You’re single, then?”

Even seeing it the third time, Regina wanted to yell at the Emma in that image to remind the press that her dating life was none of their goddamn business, but, of course, it was too late for that.

“I am. And trust me, when I meet Mrs. Right, you’ll know.”

The din in the press room after that line was deafening, and the news cast turned to commentary, so Regina turned it down again. “You just had to say ‘when.’”

“Well, yeah,” Emma offered. “I mean… I guess I was never in the public eye enough to be ‘out,’ but I’ve never been hiding, either.”

“You’re the face of my administration, Ms. Swan, and you didn’t think that was something you should inform me?”

“I… I mean… no?” Emma shrugged. “Look, maybe I meant to say ‘if,’ but I didn’t. I said ‘when.’ I’m not going to deny it now, and so far, it’s not hurting you.”

Regina shook her head. “That isn’t the point. I’ve seen the numbers.” She sighed, not looking Emma’s way. “God. You can be Press Secretary and a lesbian and I get political points. Meanwhile, if I kissed a woman, I’d get impeached. They can barely stand having a single mother in this office.”

That was the closest Emma had heard the President come to admitting what Kat had told her. “What is the point, then? You knew that already,” she pressed. “I mean… I’m not dating your secretary, but I’m pretty sure she’s a lesbian, too.”

“You haven’t researched it?”

“Okay,” Emma admitted. “I know your secretary is a lesbian.”

“Yes,” Regina huffed. “And when my secretary is a lesbian and a prominent but unconfrontational activist for the LGBT community, I get a bigger portion of the millennial vote and get to say a few words at the GLAAD Conference for Change on equal opportunity hiring in the federal government. Meanwhile, if I—If I…” She trailed off, staring as the text First Openly Lesbian Press Secretary Emma Swan Discusses Dating Rumors scrolled across the nearest screen, Emma’s face looping through her “Mrs. Right” line for the umpteenth time on national television. “…If I’m out, I don’t get elected in two years,” she finished quietly.

Before Emma had a chance to offer more than an understanding, apologetic smile at the real confirmation she’d been waiting for, Regina plowed ahead. “The men they find for me to take to these events, I mean, my God.”

Emma couldn’t help a slight chuckle. “I remember at least one cute one. Graham? What was he, CIA?”

Regina shook her head. “Graham was… indescribably generic. And public opinion polling found out too many people thought he looked like a serial killer, so… poof, he was gone.”

“Well, he had to have been better than the next one. Where did you even find someone that… that…”

When Emma trailed off, Regina chuckled. “Oh, do go on. Insult away. Robin was probably the worst mistake of the past year. I think I picked him out of the stack—”

“—The stack?” Emma asked, incredulous.

Regina shrugged. “You think the President has time to go out and get a date the old fashioned way?”

Emma snorted. “Point.”

“Anyway, yes, there’s a stack of… well… Some of your people pull it together. PR people, I mean. Men who would make a nice addition to any given society event, a few leaked candid moments in the White House… No one asks questions, then. I think I picked Robin because he looked like such a character on paper. I thought we might actually have something in common. He was a huge activist in college, Socialist Alternative, some intense environmental activism on an iffy side of the law, any number of protest arrests… I couldn’t believe they even considered him. The file made him out like a twenty-first century Robin Hood.”  Regina rolled her eyes. “In person, he’s approximately as engaging and appealing as a dinner with a roomful of pine trees.”

Emma smirked at the image. “Hey. Wouldn’t want to insult a perfectly good pine tree. They… give us oxygen.”

Regina’s answering tone was scathing. “And they are utterly useless at it next to the green stuff in the oceans. I suppose if I had thrown Robin off the end of a pier, he might actually have become more interesting, too.”

Emma tried to keep a straight face, nodding sagely. “Ah, yes. The greatest test of Man. Just apply salt water.”  

Regina broke first, chuckling softly, and Emma joined her, enjoying the brief relief from the tension still lurking, unresolved, in the air after Emma’s words at that podium.

When their eyes locked again, Emma found herself unable to break the intensity of Regina’s gaze. “Is… I mean… Do you want my resignation? Is that what has to happen? Since I didn’t tell you?” It had been a long while since she’d stood this close to the President, and she felt a slight, untimely yearning to move even closer.

“No,” Regina said, far too quickly. In the past three months, half of the Press Corps and most of her own staff had fallen in love with the beautiful human sledgehammer of a woman that was Emma Swan. Regina wasn’t planning to let her go any time soon.

“No?” Emma repeated, giving in to the temptation, stepping closer.

Regina didn’t move back, but she did look away, scanning the room, settling on the little plate of apple slices and cheese on the corner of Emma’s desk. She smiled. On particularly bad mornings, Ruby liked to leave out food for the staff members she thought were least likely to remember to eat.  

“Why did you come, then?” Emma pressed, and suddenly, close became too close. 

Regina breathed in sharply through her nose. There had been reasons. She was sure there were. Emma Swan was waiting for Mrs. Right, and that had felt like one hell of a reason not fifteen minutes ago, but now, she couldn’t for the life of her remember why.

“Because I… because…” She glared down at the apples. “How am I supposed to maintain the… even the premise of any professional distance from you? Just look at us!” Regina gestured angrily at the distinct lack of space between them. Emma had them standing so close their thighs nearly touched, and Regina was already leaning just a little closer, giving up on the apples, needing a better angle to get lost in Emma’s eyes. “I’m in so much trouble,” she whispered.

“Because I’m gay?” Emma asked softly.

“Because you’re here.”

Emma bit her lip. 

“Because I’m about to make a mistake,” Regina continued.

Suddenly, Emma’s hand raised between them, and Regina found herself face-to-face with a single slice of apple.

Emma meant it as a peace offering, or maybe as a forced hesitation, but when Regina chuckled and murmured, “A bribe?” Emma answered with a nervous laugh of her own.

“Can’t expect anything else in Washington, can you?” She wiggled the apple. “And Ruby swears these are good for us.”

Regina sighed, accepting the apple with another nervous laugh. She held the fragile slice of fruit between two fingers, not eating it, just… holding it there, between them. “What Ruby doesn’t understand is that privacy would be even better.” She took a deep breath. “You’ve managed to be here three months before anyone even thought to ask who you were sleeping with. God, I envy you that. I’m never alone. That’s part of the problem. Do you have any idea how nervous you’ve managed to make me? I’m completely incapable of coherent conversation around you,” she admitted. “I… babble.” Regina actually shuddered a bit, repulsed by the word even as it passed her lips.

“Nah,” Emma lied. “You’re perfectly suave, as always. You’ve charmed the entire nation, even the ones who hate you.”

“And you, Ms. Swan?”

“You’ve seen me with a chocolate mustache. No charming necessary.”

Regina finally slipped the apple into her mouth, chewing more aggressively than was strictly necessary. She couldn’t afford to smile again. “This doesn’t end well, Emma. You know what they are going to say, next. The logical step from you sleeping with a pretty younger woman is to you, sleeping with your boss.”

Emma wrinkled her nose. “Ew. Kat’s like a sister to me. Everyone knows we’d never—”

“—Your boss’s boss, then,” Regina clarified, impatient.

Emma scuffed her foot against the carpet. “I knew what you meant,” she admitted. “I just… we don’t have to tempt fate, alright? They haven’t grabbed it yet. You’ve got a stack of men at the ready if they do. Maybe they won’t.”

Wrapping an arm around her stomach, Regina nodded wearily. “Nothing to grab, anyway,” she muttered, staring at the apples again.

“Yeah.” Emma stared up at the ceiling, breathing shallow and strained. “Nothing.”

Washington, D.C. February 5th

///

“It’s official. I’m losing it.”

“Hmm?”

“I am sitting at the bottom of the rabbit hole.”

Kathryn looked up, glaring at Emma over the edge of her monitor. She hadn’t even bothered to knock when she barged into Kat’s office for the second time in this morning. “What happened?” she asked, injecting as much I-don’t-care into the question as she could manage without actually saying “Not that I care.”

Emma didn’t seem to notice her disinterest. She sat in the chair across from Kat’s desk. “Six reporters just asked me about an endangered sloth from Nicaragua stuck at the border, I’ve now heard not just one, but two of the no-neck guys with guns whisper ‘Umbrella Stand’ into a headpiece when I walked by, and last night, your boss confessed to murder and I wanted to kiss her.”

Kat froze, annoyance forgotten. “Did you?”

“What?”

“Kiss her?”

“What? No, I—”

The rest Emma’s words finally registered, and Kathryn pushed back so violently the legs of her chair screeched against the floor in protest. “Wait, murder?”

Emma groaned, letting her forehead drop onto the pile of papers at the edge of Kat’s desk. “Well, not quite.”

“Oh.” Kathryn slowly pulled herself forward again, infinitely relieved. “She told you about her father.”

Emma’s head jerked upright again. “You knew?”

“Emma, Regina Mills has been my friend almost as long as you and I.”

Kathryn wasn’t sure she’d ever seen someone look quite so taken aback.

“How do you think I ended up as Communications Director? The President and I have been working towards this together for years.”

“I had no idea,” Emma admitted. “You never mentioned her, not until she was already your boss.”

Kathryn snorted. “We never talked, Emma. You sent me dollar store Christmas cards that said ‘Hey, Kat!’ and we swapped a few emails. When I showed up at your apartment, I didn’t even know for sure if you’d let me in.”

Emma rubbed at her wrist and looked away. “It wasn’t personal, Kat, I swear. I… I’m no good at keeping people in my life.”

“I know. I never pushed.”

“True.” Emma’s eyes slowly found her again. “But, I mean, you knew? What, is there actually some big conspiracy hiding this after all? Did you just up and decide things would go better with Henry Mills out of the picture? For good?”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Well, no. She said… I mean, she made it sound… not like an accident, not really, but not premeditated, either.”

“Then she told you exactly what she told me, and Emma, I need you to believe her.” Kathryn searched Emma’s eyes. “Regina didn’t have the easiest relationship with her father. What she did, that night… It had nothing to do with the campaign.”

“That’s not what she told me, Kat.”

“I know. She won’t talk about it. And I don’t mean that in a ‘you should push her some time,’ kind of way, either. Her mother… I knew her mother. She…” Kathryn sighed, unsure how much to say. Abusive hardly scratched the surface. Regina might never have run for office if not for Cora Mills, and certainly would never have gone at it so quickly, pushed herself so hard, made so many ethically questionable choices. And Henry Sr. had never stepped in, never stood up for her, never offered anything more than what affection he could muster as he drank himself towards an early grave. The apathy than ran underneath the love between Regina and her father… Kathryn had seen it, and she knew that, even so long after her death, it was the shadow of Cora Mills still hanging heavy between them. “…did a lot of damage, to Regina, and to her relationship with her father. Honestly, with what I know about her childhood… I’d have been tempted to kill them both years ago.”

Emma considered Kat’s words. “Okay. Thanks. For telling me that, I… I actually feel a little better about it, knowing you know. I just… I don’t know.” She sighed. “She looked scared, Kat, and I…”

Kathryn found the smile creeping back onto her face. “You what?”

Emma glowered. “I wanted to help her, alright? I couldn’t even make myself care about the whole ‘dead dad’ thing until I woke up this morning. Not when she was sitting next to me, telling me that, I just…”

“You wanted to kiss it better?” Kathryn teased.

Emma groaned. “Kat. You know how I am with brunettes. You didn’t tell me she was so… She’s so… In person…”

Kathryn was openly grinning, now. Oh, yes. She knew perfectly well Emma had a thing for brunettes.

“But she’s so straight!”

Kat raised an eyebrow.

Emma’s eyes widened. “She is straight, right?”

Kat pulled her bottom lip between her teeth, still smiling.

“Oh my god.”

At the dawning realization on Emma’s face, Kat finally laughed. “Oh, this is priceless.”

“The rumors… I mean, I always figured it was just the ‘single’ thing that made it a story, but... And, I mean… she took a guy to the Kennedy Center Honors last year, so I just assumed…”

Emma had never seen her friend with such a shit-eating grin. “Right. You assumed.”

Finally, the last realization struck. “You’re trying to set me up! Jesus, Kat. You’re trying to set me up with the President!? You got me a job just to—”

“—Hey, now! I got you a job I knew you’d be good at. If it just so happened I’ve been trying to drag my boss out of the closet for almost ten years, too, well…”

Emma groaned. “This is the worst idea you’ve ever had, Kat, and that’s saying a hell of a lot considering you talked me into working here and I just found out you named me ‘Umbrella Stand.’ She’s the President. She’s an asshole. And she still pretty much hates my guts.”  

Kathryn sobered in an instant. “That’s not true, Emma. She never would have told you what she did last night if she didn’t trust you.”

“You’re paying me to be trustworthy. ’Trust’ and ‘like’ are two different things.”

“Then listen to me when I tell you that, for her? Trust comes a lot harder. And if you managed that in less than a month, ‘liking’ is going to be a piece of cake.”

///

“My next briefing is in twenty-seven minutes. Someone tell me what the deal is with this sloth.”

Emma wasn’t exactly sure who’s office they had ended up in; there was a Star Trek poster on the wall, no one was sitting at the desk, and when the Chief of Staff, Press Secretary, Communications Director, and her Deputy had all entered one after the other, the room’s initial two occupants had fled.

Kathryn offered the run down. “As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, the Nicaraguan Ambassador is currently caught up in Customs at the US-Mexico border, along with a small assortment of personal staff, two animal handlers, and a critically endangered pygmy three-toed sloth.”

“Named Pongo,” August Booth cut in.

“Named Pongo,” Kathryn echoed her Deputy through gritted teeth.

“And every news organization in the state of Texas,” Emma muttered.

Kat ignored the second interruption. “Pongo is supposed to be a gift for the National Zoo. President Murillo was sworn into office less than two weeks ago, and claims he was given permission to send his ambassador, sloth and all, for a talk on continued assistance in the territory dispute with Colombia. Apparently, no one informed Customs.”

“So inform Customs,” offered Booth with a shrug. “We stop holding up border traffic, we get an endangered sloth, the President meets with the ambassador to a Central American country we’ve got an alright relationship with. No harm, no foul.”

Mr. Gold shook his head. “No one informed Customs because no such permission was given, not from within this office. It would seem Ambassador Nieto has been in contact with a number of state governors, planning some sort of press tour with the sloth through the southern states on his way to the capitol. This is a publicity stunt for the new President.”

August shrugged again. “So? We get some of our animal people down there, make sure the sloth is alright, doesn’t have any diseases, and let him have his publicity stunt.”

“There’s another problem.” Kat crossed to a large map hanging on one wall, flipping aside pages like a calendar until she reached an image of Central America, and Emma wondered if that map was the reason they were in this office to begin with. “This—” She tapped the map. “—is Nicaragua. Which I’d hope you all know, but to be honest, I haven’t looked at a map of Central America since eighth grade geography.” She dragged her finger along the map until it was lurking over a speck of land in the middle of the ocean. “And this, is the Isla Escudo de Veraguas. Which just so happens to be the only place in the world with a population of pygmy three-toed sloths.”

Emma squinted. “That’s not in Nicaragua, is it.”

“Not even close.”

Mr. Gold nodded. “Panama called. They want their sloth back.”

Emma groaned. “Oh, come on.”

“And while we do have a cordial relationship with Nicaragua…” Gold continued. “…we have a much closer relationship with Panama.”

“But we also have no relationship with President Murillo yet. We can’t start off on the wrong foot, or we could have the territory dispute with Columbia spreading towards Costa Rica again. The President did a lot of work on the San Juan River Agreement with Murillo’s predecessor. We can’t just send the Ambassador home.”

Gold nodded along with Kathryn’s words. “I agree.”

Emma shook her head. “Okay, so we bring in the Ambassador, let him do a quick photo grab with a couple governors, then send the sloth home.”

“The zoo wants the sloth,” Booth cut in. “I’ve been on the phone with Director Kelly twice this morning. We’ve never been this close to getting one.”  

“Well, you’re going to have to disappoint,” Emma offered, glancing at her phone. “Because I’m on in five minutes, and there’s no way we’re keeping that sloth.”

“Actually, we are.”

Emma spun around. “I just said—” The objection died on her lips when her brain caught up to her ears and she realized just who was standing in the doorway.

“I’ve just okay-ed it with Customs,” Regina continued. “Which the four of you would know, if you hadn’t made yourselves so impossible to find. And I don’t think you’re going to try to pull rank on me, Ms. Swan.” She was fully aware of how much her words would annoy the Press Secretary, and she wasn’t above admitting to herself that she was enjoying it. “At the rate Panama is destroying their habitat, those sloths could be extinct in the next five years. We’re not just taking the gift; the three of you are going to get on phone lines and talk down the Panama government, and Ms. Swan is going to get on the news to thank Panama for graciously donating a second sloth.”

“Panama will never—” Emma began, but stopped when she saw the general climate of the room.

Mr. Gold was frowning, but Kathryn was slowly nodding her assent. “We’re thrilled, of course, with such a generous gesture of friendship between our two nations, and we’d welcome their delegation at the White House with the new sloth. Panama won’t look like Nicaragua took advantage of them, that way, and they won’t be able to turn it down without losing an important opportunity for diplomacy.”

“We’re still legitimizing Nicaragua poaching endangered species.” Emma flashed the President a look that was part irritation, part trepidation. “You’re going to insist on this, aren’t you?”

Regina arched an eyebrow. “I shouldn’t have to insist, Ms. Swan. I should only need to ask.”

She hid her smile. She had been in a remarkably good mood all morning and had a feeling it had far too much to do with the woman across from her. She could practically see the bones in Emma’s jaw grinding against each other through clenching muscle and tightening skin. Good to know that, even after shared cocoa and shared secrets, she could still easily antagonize her. That was important. It wouldn’t do to get attached. Ms. Swan’s entire purpose here was to act as a human shield against the press, and Regina had been up for quite a while last night, considering how quickly it had become difficult to willingly cut her loose once her services were no longer required.

“In that case,” Emma said, voice tight. “I’ll go inform the press to expect our wonderful new Diplomacy Sloth to be crossing the border soon.”

“You do that, Ms. Swan.”

///

“Panama is even angrier, now.”

“And yet, in two weeks, the National Zoo will have its very first pygmy three-toed sloth,” Regina murmured, surprised that Ms. Swan had fallen into step with her as she left the building that afternoon. She was taking the rest of the day off to spend time with Henry, and she had almost made it through the doors unopposed.

“They really wanted that sloth back.”

“Don’t make me say it, Ms. Swan.”

“Hmm?”

“We can’t always get what we want.”

She had a smug little smile on her face, and, for the first time, Emma wondered what she was getting out of this. “You seem to get what you want pretty damn often.”

“One of the perks of the job.”

“Why did you want this sloth so much?”

“If you haven’t figured it out, I’m not sure I should tell you,” Regina said, keeping pace with her Press Secretary, hardly realizing they were no longer headed towards the Residence.  

“Humor me,” Emma said through gritted teeth. “I’m new.”

The President’s little smile spread just a bit. “Weston Kelly. Director of the Smithsonian National Zoo, brother of Adrienne Kelly, senior Republican Congresswoman on the House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus.”

Emma’s step faltered. “You’re stacking up Republican votes for the energy initiative. Why? We pushed it back. Indefinitely.”

Regina shook her head. “We pushed it back because of the oil crisis. Adrienne Kelly will propose an amendment to postpone only the domestic oil restrictions for six months, to be implemented incrementally in the next year. It’s a slower timeline than we wanted, but if I can get the rest of it before the midterms, I—”

Regina felt her own tirade cut short as she stared skeptically at the hideous yellow bug parked against the curb; it was a few missing psychedelic flowers away from being at home in the era of free love, and from the dents and scrapes and general state of disrepair, Regina wasn’t sure the mileage wouldn’t reveal and age to match its hippie origins. “You drive that?”

“I do.”

That car probably voted for Hanks. “You know, part of the energy initiative I’m trying to pass is an incentive to trade in older vehicles for low-emissions models, all manufactured in countries whose labor laws—”

“—live up to the Fair Labor Standards Act. I know. It’s my job to know.” She pulled open the door and slid inside. “Also, your interns have very enthusiastically made absolutely sure I know.”

Watching Emma settle behind the wheel, Regina did her best to quell the strange mix of envy and desire coiling up in her gut. It had been a long time since she had gotten to drive herself anywhere, so long that even that appalling excuse for a vehicle was starting to look good, and that fact had never irked her quite as much as it did right now, Secret Service agents lurking in the background as her tall, cocky Press Secretary turned the key in the ignition of a death trap on wheels with far more poise and fondness than that monstrosity warranted. “You don’t have to give me the spin on the legislation, Madam President.” Emma was still talking, and Regina narrowed her eyes, not sure whether she’d ever met another soul so skilled at imbibing titles of respect with that degree of scorn. “But if you think I’m trading in this little beauty anytime soon, think again.”

Emma closed the door, offering Regina a quick smirk. “Also, if you think anyone is trading in cars any time soon, you might want to recount those votes. No one was worried about it, since we thought we had a while to fix it, but Kat seems to think you’re losing the labor caucus again.”

In a visible puff of exhaust, Emma’s car pulled away from the curb.

Regina felt her jaw clench. Of course she knew that. Kat was her Communications Director, after all, but if this ridiculous woman Kathryn Nolan had hired didn’t start falling into line soon, a change could certainly be arranged. Communications Director up for Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, stuck at the top of a mountain somewhere. Or, better yet, Kazakhstan, mountainy and cold. Kathryn Nolan hated the cold.  

Washington D.C. January 28th

///

A tiny, rhythmic clinking sound pulled Regina’s stare up from the pile of reports on her desk. Ruby stood in the doorway, tapping a fingernail against the glass face of the decorative clock beside her.

“That’s not a watch, you know.”

Now that she had the President’s attention, Ruby moved the motion to her bare wrist. Tap tap tap.

“Not quite the same effect.”

The President had been in such a mood the past week that Ruby hated to say anything. Still, it was her job. “Madam President, you’re very late.”

“Aren’t I always?” Regina muttered, reaching blindly towards the other side of her desk for her phone.

“The Dow doesn’t ‘always’ open five hundred points down, ma’am.”

Regina speared Ruby with her sharpest stare. “I know,” she said, impatience dripping off every letter. “I know. I just… I need five minutes. I’m already late.”

“Five minutes takes you from ‘already late’ into ‘incredibly late.’”

Regina sighed, skimming three pages off of the top of the pile to get down to more pressing documents. “Please, Ruby. Apologize for me again. Five minutes isn’t going to change the global economy.”

“Tell that to Black Tuesday,” Ruby muttered.

“Ruby—”

“—Sorry, ma’am, but I’m not leaving till you’re out of that chair.”

“I’ll give you the state of Idaho.”

Ruby shook her head. “Not a big fan of potatoes, ma’am.”

“I’ll give you your own country. Something gorgeous; right out of a storybook.”

Ruby sighed, though she couldn’t hide a smile. “Don’t think you can do that, ma’am, but I won’t turn it down… after the meeting.”

Regina groaned.

///

Emma hung up the phone, scowling at the row of clocks on the wall. “You didn’t think to warn me that it’s one a.m. in Beijing right now?”

Kat didn’t even look her way, hunched over half a salad and a packet of spreadsheets. “With all due respect, I didn’t think you cared.”

“Well—” Emma started with exaggerated indignity. “—I don’t,” she admitted. “But apparently some people actually go to bed at a human hour.”  

“No one is going to ask about China,” Kat muttered.

Emma figured the comment was supposed to be reassuring, but for once, Emma was more worried about the actual economic repercussions of this hellish day than she was about how she would spin it for the press. “The slowest economic growth in twenty years from an absolute giant,” Emma grumbled. “And it’s going to get trumped by crude oil prices killing the Dow.”

“If you say ‘killing’ and ‘the Dow’ in the same sentence again I’m going to make you purify the entire West Wing with sage and salt circles.”

“I’m pretty sure one of those is for summoning demons.”

Kathryn finally looked up, a pale, blinking thing wandering out of her cave of numbers for the first time in too many hours. “What?”

Emma shook her head. “Never mind. Do we know if the President and Mr. Gold have decided how we’re going to spin this? Because I don’t think ‘market fluctuation’ is going to go over too well when everyone and their blind grandmother who shouldn’t be driving a car in the first place can see that gas is under two dollars.”

“Forty-seven cents.”

“What?”

Kat waved one of her packets in the air so violently that she knocked the rest of her salad into the trash. Emma wasn’t even sure she noticed. “Michigan. That’s what I’ve got here. In a couple places in Michigan, gas costs forty-seven cents.”

“So while I have to spin that the last administration’s domestic oil push is making our economy go haywire, the Republicans just have to say ‘Hey, guys! Look how cheap your gas is!’”

“Not just that,” Kat said. “They get to brag about single-handedly making the President’s oil sanctions in the Middle East possible. If we manage to get the energy initiative through the House now, oil prices are going to skyrocket again, the market will take another hit, and everyone is going to start demanding we drop the sanctions against Iran and rebuild the wells in Iraq. But if we wait for it to recover on its own…”

“Everyone gets used to forty-seven cent gas. Two more national parks get drilled. But at least we don’t have to start trading in a war zone.” Emma sighed, staring at the fatalistic headlines popping up one after another as stock exchanges across the world began to wake up. “But the energy initiative gets pushed back. Indefinitely. The President isn’t going to like it. It was supposed to be her big break. You guys have been running low on legislative success stories lately.”

Kat nodded, already dreading her meeting with the President. “I’m the one that has to tell her we’re killing her baby. I just need you to come up with a less defeatist reason why we’re doing it.”

Emma bit her lip. “Research?”

“We don’t have the budget for any more research.”

“Analysis?”

“We don’t have the budget for—”

“—Do we have interns, or do we have interns.”

Kat paused, taking a minute to thank the hellish gods of capitalism once again for providing her with young, free labor. “We have interns.”

///

“As I’m sure everyone here has heard, the Dow opened five hundred points down this morning. Economists are speculating that the Chinese markets may open even lower. I’ll keep you updated as the day goes on. While I can’t say it’s nothing to worry about, we’re expecting the market to make a full, if slow, recovery, since this drop is a direct reaction to the falling price of crude oil. If there’s a drilling field in the middle of your county, you can keep thanking your local Republican congressman for the damage to your air quality, your water supply, and now for the damage to the global economy.”

Regina tapped a pen against her bottom lip as she watched Emma start the briefing. It was becoming a bit of a morning habit, signing her personal correspondence while her Press Secretary started off the news cycle. In the beginning, she swore it was just to watch for any further embarrassments, but a week in the briefing room had more than proven Emma Swan’s ability to command the full attention of a crowd and to time her punches with a bit more… intent, albeit still without much tact. Now, Regina wasn’t sure how she would justify the habit if anyone asked, but she was the President, and no one would.  

She only had to justify it to herself.

“On another note, I hope you all have been doing your homework on the energy initiative, because we’re pushing back the timeline a bit for further analysis. Our interns will be putting out weekly progress reports just for you, and I expect to find one-hundred-percent accurate writing on the statistics they pull together.”

Regina could hear the groans from the crowd, and she sympathized. It wasn’t like she was looking forward to six more months without an improved energy portfolio, either, but at least neither she nor the reporters were one of the interns scraping pointlessly through the original data with a fine-toothed comb because the administration before her had decided to start drilling in their national parks.

“And if any of those pens waving in the air is going to be a complaint, I’ll assume you’re volunteering to lend the interns a hand. I’ll take questions now.”

Washington, D.C. February 4th

///

The President and the Economic Council disappeared into National Security meetings for all week, and as the immediate oil crises were taken off her plate, Emma finally had the time to start researching a few things that had been pushed aside in the general melee of current events.

Namely, certain pestery questions surrounding her current employer that never seemed to die away, bits and pieces that Emma had noticed now and then in the general hubbub of the campaign, but that seemed to creep into her Q and A sessions with the press more often than she would have expected for bygone events.  

She’d had a few quick interactions with the woman herself since they declared their strange, probationary truce, but Emma hadn’t managed to learn anything from her that the internet and some surprisingly competent underlings hadn’t already told her. It wasn’t exactly something that would come up naturally, after all, the dead father. The President was notoriously tight-lipped about and protective of her family.

It was reasonable, really. There had to be a lot of pain, there. There was nothing private about a death in the middle of a campaign. His alcoholism had been known even before it killed him, but it pushed to the front and center after his death. Reputable news sources refused to treat the story as anything more than the tragedy it was, worthy of a kind obituary and a few words about the sad timing for the then-Senator’s campaign.

Now, all of a sudden, the story was sparking up again, and Emma seemed to have been dropped right into the heart of a surprisingly large conspiracy. The blogosphere was paying far more attention to the story than anyone had at the time, and Emma didn’t want to be caught unprepared if it came up in the newsroom again. So, here she was, trolling through the archives of some self-accredited “political analyst” on the internet who was probably living in his parents’ basement, but who had managed to get himself way more notice than he was worth by deciding it was Daddy Mills’ death that had won Daughter Mills the presidency.

Gritting her teeth, Emma dove in.

The Mills campaign had been flatlining for nearly a month. They weren’t falling in the polls, but they weren’t rising, either, and in a Democratic field with sixteen contenders, she might as well have been dead in the water. When the press got ahold of her father, Henry Mills Sr. had been an instant liability. He seemed like a kind man, living alone out in the countryside, well provided-for in retirement by his daughter’s political career, but when his drinking habit became common knowledge, he became a common target for the rabid press, and refused to accept interference or protection from her against them. He answered questions too fiercely in his daughter’s defense, incredibly loyal and often… incredibly drunk. He had no discretion, addressing topics the Senator had never discussed, stating opinions she didn’t hold, taking hints of scandal the press threw his way like words straight from the lips of God, and a particular image of him leaning across an outdoor restaurant table to yell at a reporter, “Your great-grandma wasn’t born here, either!” had become the subject of a particularly vicious viral internet meme ripe with racism and tired immigration rhetoric.

No one bothered to make a soundbite out of the reporter demanding to see Mr. Mills’ birth certificate, first.

It was a PR nightmare, one Emma was sure glad she hadn’t had to deal with, but when he died, the campaign had managed to spin the tragedy into an impressive policy initiative. The Invisible American Illnesses Act, or the IAIA, raised awareness, funding, and public support networks around addiction, mental illnesses, diabetes, and other health and lifestyle concerns coming to a new head in the information age. Some of it had always rubbed Emma the wrong way, but so did most of the policies that could actually bludgeon their way through Congress. Things that didn’t piss off a room half full of aging theocrats were bound to piss off at least a segment of the American public, but no one could fault Senator Mills for trying to help others like the father she’d lost. When the policy flew through Congress with nothing but token resistance from a few Republicans, earning a significant budget for her cause in the process, her run had picked up the spike of momentum it needed to pull ahead.

Emma had always brushed the whole thing off as a miscalculation on the part of her opponents. As a Latina woman and a single mother, Regina Mills wasn’t an obvious frontrunner, so sneaking something as big as the IAIA through a Republican House was bound to be a blow to the other candidates leading the Democratic pack, none of whom had particularly impressive congressional success stories behind their names. Still, as far back as Senator Mills had been, it should have been disruptive without being suicidal, knocking the leaders back a bit without actually giving a real contender a better shot.

But instead of ruining things for her party favorites and fading back into obscurity, Senator Mills had picked up the momentum and run with it, thinning the race down to three by the time Emma had a primary to vote in. it was impressive, but it wasn’t unprecedented.

Now, almost two years later, someone had decided it was too impressive. The timing of his death was too convenient, the biggest liability of the Mills campaign taken out of the picture just before the New Hampshire primary… and now, someone was gathering evidence.  

Emma wanted to ignore it. Really, she did, but it was getting too much traction already. It was now or never to nip it in the bud, before anyone who actually mattered started writing about it.

Closing out of her fifteen internet tabs, Emma ran a finger down the President’s cramped schedule. Ever since the economy took its inconvenient little nosedive, there hadn’t been a minute of her time unaccounted for. The only chance of even seeing the President face-to-face was in transit. Emma closed her eyes, wandering the West Wing hallways in her mind and picking out the best chance she had at an interception. A quick glance at clock—the one that actually displayed Eastern Standard Time, amazingly enough—and she dashed out the door, turning two corners before she was caught up in the flow of the usual entourage surrounding the President every minute she wasn’t shut off behind a closed door.

“I need ten minutes with you before I go into the briefing tomorrow.”

“It’s not going to happen, Ms. Swan,” Regina muttered, accepting a packet of papers from the aide on her other side. “Run it by Gold; we can discuss it tomorrow. Or Thursday.”

Ten more steps saw Regina vanishing into the Oval, and Emma was shut out, left behind in Ruby’s office.

The rest of the staffers began drifting away, set free from the magnetic field that seemed to surround the President, but Emma lingered, pacing in front of the secretary’s desk.  

“I really, really need ten minutes with her, Ruby. Before tomorrow,” Emma added when she saw Ruby start to flip over the schedule.

Before she could offer more than an apologetic look, the door to the Oval Office slammed open, and someone very old and very angry stormed out in a cloud of raised voices. Emma thought she probably would have recognized him as someone very important, too, but his face was as red as his tie, so as it was, it was all she could do to step out of the way as a shiny bald mystery head passed an inch below her nose and disappeared into the Mural Room with a lurching stride of pure indignation.

“Oh, look,” Ruby muttered, glancing over at where the President now stood, scowling in the doorway. “Ten minutes just opened up.”

Regina glanced slowly between them, trying to calm herself. It was the end of a brutal week for national security, as the volatile oil market had set tensions in the Middle East at an all-time high, and she had finally gotten a hold of her own Minister of Foreign Affairs, only for him to dismiss her concerns and go on a tirade about how sacrosanct his vacation time was. Emma was still staring at the place where the small, infuriating man had been, and Regina found herself breathing a bit more easily when the concern and hint of amusement in Emma’s eyes turned her way.

“Actually,” she offered. “I now have the rest of the evening. That was supposed to be a full foreign crisis session, but it would seem the NSC has everything under control. Why don’t you come—” Regina paused. She already had the door to the Oval opening behind her, but she hesitated, then pulled it the other way until it clicked shut. She didn’t want to go back in there. She’d spent too much time behind that desk and standing at the corner of the table in the Situation Room today. If she was going to have a meeting with someone whose political impression of her she couldn’t care less about, they weren’t going to do it in there. “—with me. Let’s take this across the hall.”

“Across the hall,” Emma soon learned, actually meant the East Wing. The halls were surprisingly quiet as she walked beside the President; no one was expecting Regina to be out of the Oval Office again that night, so no one had prepared an ambush of paperwork or policy proposal to sell from the sidelines. 

“This space is usually reserved for the First Lady,” Regina murmured, pushing open a door into a small, airy room. The high ceiling was actually a bit unnerving for Emma, used to the almost claustrophobically short office spaces demanded by the single-story West Wing. The East Wing had a second floor, though, and this small office-study-lounge space was on a corner, so there was nothing above their heads but the unusually lofty, sloping ceiling and a single dangling houseplant. There was a desk in one corner, but it was miraculously empty of paperwork, and the bookshelves on either side were a riot of color suggesting recreational reading, fiction, even, rather than the legal texts and priceless first editions strategically placed for the aesthetic of wealthy professionalism that filled the average White House office or the paper-strewn nightmare shelves of the understaff. “They wanted to make this another legal office, but I claimed it the minute I saw it.”

Emma ran her fingers across the back of the plush green couch that filled most of the floor as she crossed to the desk and glanced at the single picture frame it held, immediately recognizing a photograph of a younger Henry, lap buried by a giant picture book, grinning happily up towards the camera, but not directly at it, as though the photographer had managed to capture the genuine joy of his greeting. “I can see the appeal, ma’am,” Emma offered, glancing back towards the middle of the room. “If I were you, I’d want a space of my own, too.”

Regina actually found it very strange, in the past weeks, when Emma Swan addressed her like the rest of her staff. The first argument in the hallway had given her a somewhat unrealistic expectation that her Press Secretary was going to be at her throat every time they were in the same room, but once Regina had called for civility, she had gotten… a very traditional interpretation of it. “In here, we can dispense with some… formalities,” Regina offered, not a little curious how Ms. Swan would react. “Why did you want to see me?”

Emma glanced back down at the picture. “You’ve got a great kid,” she said, considering her words. “You named him after your father?”

Emma wasn’t completely sure, but she thought she saw the President stiffen. “I did.”

“You and your father were close?” Emma pressed.

“What is this about, Ms. Swan?”

Whatever strange calm had followed them into this room had fled.

“Look, I’m sorry to even ask…” Emma started, crossing the floor to rest her hands on the back of the couch again. “What can you tell me, about the night your father died? I’m guessing you want to say ‘nothing,’ and I respect that, but I really do need to know.”

The President frowned. “My father was an alcoholic. At his age, drinking has consequences.”

“And where were you, that day?”

“Excuse me?”

“I think you heard me.”

So much for civility. The thought flickered quickly through Regina’s mind as she paced away from the door. “Why are you asking me that?”

Emma was surprised. Regina’s question was terse, tense. She had expected something more polished, some quick, easy explanation, but it finally occurred to her that the President may not have ever been personally subjected to these questions. “I’m not,” she said. “But the press is, and just because it hasn’t gotten to you, yet, doesn’t mean it won’t.”

“My father’s death is of no concern to the Press Corps,” Regina said, stepping closer to Emma from the other side of the couch. “And it is your job to ensure that they understand that.”

Emma shook her head. “I’m trying, believe me, but they’re concerned, and if this is the kind of response they’re going to get from you when they ask, then frankly, so am I.”

“My father died, drunk and alone, almost two years ago. The story ends there.”

“It doesn’t, though,” Emma pressed, pulling open the folder she had tucked under her arm. “Look.” She stepped flush with the couch, thighs pressing into the upholstery, and held out the photograph towards the President’s still form. “That’s you. At your father’s house. And that date, that timestamp, is remarkably close to the time the coroner’s report said that his heart stopped.”

“Where did you get this?” Regina held the blurry photograph in hands she only just kept from shaking as she stared down at her own face, washed pale and colorless by the bad image quality and the bright, rural-Maine moon. “Where did this come from?”

“There’re plenty more, too,” Emma said, offering the entire folder for Regina’s perusal. “There were press coming and going on your father’s land nearly every day of the campaign. These pictures were floating around in some dead corner of the internet, right up until a blogger did enough digging to find them. And put a few things together.”

Regina tried to keep her face as expressionless as possible as she slowly closed the folder and set it down on the couch. “What exactly are you insinuating, Ms. Swan?”

“I’m not insinuating anything,” Emma insisted, holding up her palms. “I’m just telling you what other people are insinuating. And you being there, that night, insinuates some things all on its own.”

“And if I say, yes, I was there that night?” Regina offered. She could feel two fingers of her right hand kneading at the seam running down the side of her skirt, but couldn’t bring herself to stop the nervous gesture. “That we had a nice dinner, chatted about the campaign, and I went home, never imagining he’d finish off two bottles of wine alone and never wake up again?”

At the cold, quick words, Emma winced. “Then why did you never mention it to anyone? Can’t you see why this looks bad? You should have given a statement to the police at the very least, been accountable for your whereabouts after you left… You were there, the night a man died, and you never even told the examiner that he didn’t die during dinner time? Did you really think no one would ask me—”

“—My family is not up for discussion in your briefings!”

Emma finally realized that she was watching the woman across from her coming unraveled with each word out of her mouth, and it didn’t bode well for the future.

“Well, I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t your family being discussed in my briefings. It’s you.”

Emma almost jumped when Regina’s furious step forward made the couch jolt back against her legs. “This is my father we’re talking about!” The step had brought her so close to the front side of the sofa that her knees pressed visibly into the seat cushions. Emma was tempted to step back, put a bit more than a single couch-width’s worth of distance between herself and the suddenly furious President, but the intensity of Regina’s stare held her locked in place. “My father, the man who raised me, the man I hoped would be standing beside me when I took my oath of office, the man who died in the middle of the most grueling year of my life, and you’re wondering why I didn’t answer questions no one asked?”

Regina knew she was getting unnecessarily close to the other woman, but there was something about Emma Swan that just demanded anger, and demanded it right up in her face. “I was grieving,” Regina spat. “So whatever this conspiracy is that you’ve uncovered, whatever useless allegations some child is making about me on the internet, if it involves my father’s death, then yes, it’s about my family, and it doesn’t belong in the press room.” She shook her head. “Then again, what would you know about family, anyway,” she scoffed, finally turning away.

“Excuse me?” Emma spluttered. The outburst of emotion from the President had been startling enough before she turned it on Emma, but now, it was personal. “I don’t know about family? What the hell are you imply—”

Regina silenced her with dismissive huff. “Oh, I don’t imply, Ms. Swan. I know your history, so forgive me if I’m not particularly inclined to allow you to decide what does or does not constitute a family affair.”

“Well forgive the lowly foster child if she doesn’t get to decide what people write about you on the internet!” Emma fired back, her anger finally breaking through what little professionalism remained.

“It is your job to shut these things down, not bring them to me on a night when I have a slipping economy, an oil war, and a major policy setback to deal with!”

“I can’t do my job if you won’t answer my questions! Would you rather get it from me, now, or from a Clickfeast reporter with a camera in your face?”

“I’d rather get a good night’s sleep!” Regina snapped. “And some level of basic competence from my senior staff. But apparently either of those is too much to ask for.”

“Apparently you—”

Emma’s half-formed reply was cut short when the door swung open without warning.

Ruby heard the argument from halfway down the hall, and it had taken her all of ten seconds to decide she had better intervene. She came baring gifts, a plate of the cinnamon chip scones she had seen Emma eyeing on the staff tables all day balanced on top of two mugs of cocoa. Without a word, she walked directly up to the couch, placing herself between the squabbling women, handing a mug to each, and placed the tray of scones in Emma’s unsuspecting other hand.

Before either woman could offer another word, Ruby made a quick departure, resisting the temptation to press her ear against the door once she’d closed it behind her.

They stood in silence for a good minute. Emma’s arm started to droop from the awkward angle and the surprisingly dense pile of scones, so let herself make a quick circuit of the couch and slump down into its soft, welcoming embrace, the tray settling nicely in her lap. She was probably breaking ten rules of presidential protocol in the process, but couldn’t really bring herself to care.

Regina stared, wondering how long it had been since someone besides her son had sat before she did. Slowly, Regina sank down beside her. “Here,” she muttered, pulling a low-sitting table towards them from a few feet away. She shoved aside a pile of books and paperwork to clear most of its surface.

The President made the motion of taking off her heels so slow, it seemed reverent, a strange and private ritual not many were offered a chance to witness. Emma almost sighed, just watching her kick her feet up onto the spot she’d cleared and melt back into the cushions with a tiny sound of pure relief, eyes closed, nostrils flaring as she breathed in the steam from her mug.  

“Everything seems more manageable with your feet up, Ms. Swan.”

Emma eyed the table with all the skepticism she could muster. “You sure?”

Regina chuckled warily. “I’m sure if it belonged to George Washington, he put it through worse.” She reached down, a bit surprised by her own actions when she decided to poke Emma’s calf with two fingers. “Up.”

Emma shoved the plate of cinnamon scones at Regina. She sighed and propped her feet on the coffee table. From here, she could actually see that the strange, warm light in the room came from a fake fireplace that had been mostly hidden by the table. Now, sitting on the lounge, the flickering light was a bit… menacing, but she could tell it wasn’t the fire lending the dark shadows to the space beneath the President’s eyes. It had been a beast of a day, a hell of a week, and Emma hadn’t exactly made things any easier for her. If she was this beat from a day with the press, Regina must be drained to the bone. “Tired?” she asked, even though her brain had long since provided the answer.

Regina looked at her like she’d lost her mind, but answered the rhetorical question all the same. “Yes, Ms. Swan. Exhausted.” She stared down at the glass of cocoa nestled between her palms with mild disinterest. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy cocoa, though before Henry entered her life, she hadn’t touched it since childhood, but at the moment, the warmth of the mug in her hands was much more appealing than the sugary beverage. It was late, but it was still incredibly nice that Ruby had thought to bring it, even if the obvious meddling in her conversation was less so.

Effective, though.

“I’m sorry,” Regina said, voice soft. “I shouldn’t have said that. About your family, I—The foster care system… That was…” The words tasted bitter in her mouth. “…incredibly insensitive of me. It’s just…” She paused, finally taking a long, slow sip of cocoa as she tried to make up her mind. There was an unexpected temptation to… tell the truth.

“I was there, that night. And not just for dinner,” she began, keeping her voice measured, smooth. “He was drinking, all the time I was with him. A beer, a glass of wine, another, and another, and we were fighting. Of course. I wanted him to let me hire a bodyguard to keep the press away. He wanted me to take care of myself, not to worry about him, but I—I snapped. I said that, as long as he was talking to the press, he was the biggest problem in my whole campaign.”  

She took another sip, wishing the heat would stay inside her, spread through her bones, chase away a chill that had lingered for too many years. “He just looked… so sad, so disappointed, and I couldn’t stand it. It wasn’t supposed to be about him. This was supposed to be my moment, my triumph, and he just couldn’t leave well enough alone. I couldn’t look at him; I left the room. By the time I came back, he had finished another bottle and passed out on the couch. Losing consciousness, drunk, at his age, I—I knew I should have stayed with him, or called an ambulance, but instead I just… I just sat there, watching him struggle to breathe, one arm hanging off the side of the couch, and after a few minutes…” Regina stared at her feet on the table. “I walked out the door.”

Emma seemed to have been shocked into silence.

“Legally, did I kill him? No. But if anyone found out… that wouldn’t matter. I could have intervened. But the relief.” The word was a sigh. “I was grieving. I was. But knowing I had just removed another obstacle to this, to where I am now, it was just…”

Emma was caught by the vulnerability etched into the shadows of the President’s face even as a sick feeling rumbled through her gut. Regina Mills had just essentially confessed to killing her father, and Emma was a bit appalled with herself for wanting nothing more, in that moment, than to offer her forgiveness.

Tentatively, she set a hand down on the President’s knee, patting the coarse, thick fabric of her skirt just once, then pulling slowly away. “We all make bad calls sometimes,” she said, voice hoarse.

“But not everyone’s bad calls end up as patricide.”

The mug in her hands was visibly shaking, and Emma wondered if anyone else had ever heard this particular confession.

“Some do. Okay, maybe not many, but death…” Emma mirrored the President, taking a quick sip of hot cocoa, gathering words together in her mind. “When I was in the service, I had to stop thinking about how many of my choices ended up with someone dead.”

“That’s different,” Regina said, impatient, already regretting the impulsive honesty. “That’s your job. You were at war, not sitting around knowing you could have saved someone, and had chosen to kill instead.”

“Sure I was. Joining up, you’re signing on to kill. Not joining, on the other hand, you’re signing up to let other people die for you. And taking the oath of office… you’re signing up to decide when a hell of a lot of people live and die. You just… Got started a little early.” Emma tried not to shiver at her own words. She had a feeling it would all hit her at three in the morning, a much-needed punch in the gut to remind her that her President had practically watched her own father die in front of her eyes, but for now, the immediate reflex was to reassure her that everything was going to be alright.

“Try telling that to the press.”

Emma offered the most comforting smile she could muster. “They may not ask again. I’ve dodged it so far, and if it looks like we’re not worried, they may assume there’s nothing to hide.”

“If it does come up, though. I—”

“—You had dinner with your dad that night. It’s a difficult memory. No one ever asked, and you, reasonably, didn’t want the last words you shared with him turned into a soundbite.”

“I can’t ask you to lie.”

“I’m not. Every word of that is true.”

Regina turned the phrases over in her mind and realized her Press Secretary was right. “And if it still doesn’t go away?”

Emma shrugged. “That’s what I’m here for. I shut it down. I remind them, again, that they can leave their condolences, and their nosy questions, on the memorial page. Maybe the ghost of Henry Mills Sr. will come back from the grave to enlighten them.”

It was a risk, trying to make light of what she had learned, but when a small smile flitted across Regina’s lips, Emma knew it had been a worthwhile one.

Silence fell, and Emma watched the fire, thinking over the insanity of a world where Regina Mills might not have been president if she had saved her own father’s life.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Emma said softly. “Day in, day out. I’ve barely started, and seeing what you have to live with… How do you survive six more years after this one?”

Regina smiled. “Well, that optimism helps.”

Emma picked up a scone, then another, setting both on her lap as she picked up the cocoa again. Who gave a damn about crumbs when some brilliant soul had invented dry cleaning? She held out the plate to the President, but she shook her head, and Emma dipped the beautiful hunk of cinnamon and carbs right into her mug. “Not optimism,” she mumbled, trying to chew quickly. “Stats. Everyone agrees. It would take a miracle for the Republicans to pull out a challenger for an incumbent. Short of divine intervention, they’re not going to get themselves together, and you’re not going to make a big enough mistake to lose it. You’ve got six years, if you want them.”

“I want them,” Regina whispered. “But I want it all, Emma.”

Emma blinked, quickly gulping down another mouthful of cocoa to hide her surprise. That may well be the first time she’d heard the President use her first name.

“Can’t I have it all? The White House, motherhood, a good night’s sleep… sanity?”

Emma pretended to think it over. “Well, you’ve got the ‘mom’ thing down, we’re sitting in the White House, and if you kick me out soon, you could probably be asleep before one. Sanity, though… that’s just greedy.”

Regina smiled weakly. “I’m starting to see why Kat hired you. I’m not sure it has anything to do with the press.”

Emma frowned through a mouthful of scone. “Hmm?”

“You’re good for that. Sanity.”

Emma made a muffled noise of surprise, hurrying to swallow. “I just yelled at you until you confessed to negligent manslaughter.”

“And yet, you’re still here.”

Emma took a moment to look at the President, to really look at her, as she took another sip of her cocoa. Why was she still here? Her time in the capital so far had been… fast. She had come in ready to work for someone she didn’t really like, ready to argue, to fight, to try and make at least one meaningful change in this weak, war-hungry White House. And she had, twice now, gone head-to-head with President Mills. But in the eerie stillness after each fight, she was forced to examine how little impact both she, and the President had on most of these things. Working with a state-level campaign, little issues felt so big, it always felt like something was getting done. Here, nothing was a little issue, not the oil crisis, not the President’s final visit to her father, not the resignation of Milah Shelley, but there was nothing she could do. She couldn’t go pay a personal visit to a retired naval officer and ask why she’d given up on her career, couldn’t offer a sympathetic ear, the understanding of what it meant to fall into bed with another woman under the watchful, judging stare of the entire American military. And she couldn’t go back in time two years and tell a tired, campaign-wary Regina Mills to call a fucking ambulance; it was all she could do hope the tide of the questions thrown at her in the briefing room would turn her way, hope she’d drowned herself in the right information, and hope certain things stayed behind closed doors, where they belonged.

She didn’t like it, the reality that Kat had probably been right about a lot of things, and that one of those was… she could like this woman. President Mills was… dark, darker than some, but not as dark as it got, in Washington, and she was… refreshingly honest about it, at the very least. “Yeah,” Emma finally muttered. “I’m still here. Not sure what that says about my sanity, though.”

To Emma’s surprise, Regina laughed.

When really, really looking at her, like she had been doing for the past probably-too-long bit of time, it was hard for Emma to ignore that President Mills was a beautiful, beautiful woman.

Well, damn.

A knock sounded on the door.

“Yes?” Regina called. She turned towards the interruption, letting her feet fall onto the floor in exasperation.

A member of the First Family’s Secret Service team stepped halfway into the room. “Good evening, ma’am. Just wanted to let you know that Mongoose has gone in for the night.”

“Thank you,” Regina said, and Emma could hear the sudden weariness in those two words without even looking up from her second scone.

“Mongoose?” she asked as soon as the door had swung shut again. “Is that Henry?”

Regina nodded. “I let him pick our code names,” she admitted.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve actually heard yours, yet.”

“Cobra,” Regina said quietly. “He was… Last year was rough for both of us. The transition… he was in a dark place. He wanted mine to be ‘Evil Queen,’ actually. Security nixed it, so he named me after a snake instead. I was suitably insulted, but it could be worse.”

Emma finally made the connection. “Mongoose. Furry little things that fight cobras, right?”

A small, indulgent smile flickered across Regina’s lips. “Precisely.” Things were better, now. Not perfect, but Henry had settled in at the D.C. school, made friends. Now, the code names were something they could laugh about, on the better days, and on the tougher ones, they were a good reminder to talk, not to let herself go any longer than she had to without seeing her son, not to let him go to sleep angry before she had a chance to apologize.

“Wait,” Emma said, pulling Regina out of her introspective mood. “I don’t have one, do I?”

The President smirked. “You might want to ask Kathryn. The White House Communications Agency assigns them to most of the senior staff, and I don’t think they give everyone the luxury of discussing it first.”

Emma’s eyes widened. “Oh no.”

Washington, D.C. February 5th

///

“You named me Umbrella Stand?!”