EPILOGUE

And oh, the peace,
The blessed peace...
At last you come to know

Emma woke to the feeling of fingers threading softly through her hair. "Mmm." She murmured, rolling over and slowly opening her eyes to take in the sight of the woman in the bed beside her. Henry was still tucked against her other side and Eva was still snuggled on her chest, but it was the look in Regina's eyes and the way she smiled as she mouthed the word "hi" that had Emma sitting up, wide eyed.

"It's you!" She gasped, tears filling her eyes.

Regina smirked, as she rolled her eyes. "You were expecting someone else, dear?"

"Yes. No. I - it's you. It's really you." Emma's hand landed on Regina's cheek, stroking the skin there as the tears slid down her own cheeks. "You're really here."

"Of course I'm here. Emma, what's wrong?" Regina was taken aback by Emma's reaction, by the tears and the way she was looking at her as though she hadn't seen her in years.

Emma swallowed hard, trying to capture her thoughts. "You weren't here. Not for a while. Someone else was."

Carefully, Regina shifted Eva off her chest so that she too could sit up. "What do you mean someone else was?"

Emma reached out and grabbed Regina's hands, hanging onto them tightly, reveling in the fact that she could feel the current that had always flowed between her and Regina. "It was you but - a different you. From a different world."

"Emma -"

"Regina, I'm serious. She came through Jefferson's hat from a different Storybrooke and somehow ended up here."

Regina blinked at that information. While Emma might joke around sometimes, this wasn't the type of thing that she'd tease Regina about. "Wh - but - why did she come here?"

"I don't know." Emma shrugged and then proceeded to explain all of what she knew about the other Regina, never once letting go of her Regina.

Regina frowned as Emma explained that in another world, they weren't together. She thought of how hard it was at the beginning when Emma first showed up, of how the darkness had threatened to take over her. Emma had managed to break through her barriers here, but it wasn't that impossible to think of a world where that wasn't the case - where she'd resisted instead of giving in.

She thought of the way Henry had been back when Emma had first come to Storybrooke and how it was only when she'd started to let Emma in that he'd started to let her back in too. If there was another world where she'd never let Emma in, then it was entirely plausible that Henry had never let her back in either. Her chest ached for that Regina, for that part of her that had been too afraid of opening up and had probably lost so much because of it.

"She must've gone back. Whatever was keeping her here, it must've gone away. Right?" Emma searched her eyes, concern for the other version of Regina shining through them.

"I'm sure that's what happened. You know as well as I do that magic is unpredictable here. If she came though the hat, it's very possible that something triggered the portal and sent her back."

"But back to what?" Emma frowned. She was all too aware of the fact that in another life, her counterpart was not with Regina.

"Back to you and Henry - or her versions of you, anyway. Back to her second chance."

"Second chance?" Emma's eyebrow raised, even as her face lit up with the possibility Regina had just suggested. "You think she pursued her version of me when she got back? You think they got together?"

Regina nodded. "Oh, I'm sure of it."

"But how do you know that?"

"Because, dear. She is a part of me. And once she experienced this," Regina motioned to the bed, to Henry and Eva and Emma herself, "I know that she would stop at nothing to get to keep it for herself. This is our happy ending, no matter what world we are in."

Emma found she couldn't argue with that.