A/N: I could probably rewrite this chapter a dozen times and find new things to tweak and try to perfect each time, but... well, the good (and sort of bad) thing with writing heated arguments like this is that it's a flawed interaction, especially when it involves flawed people. Like basically everyone in this fic. Not everything gets said and stuff gets glossed over in the heat of the moment. It's pretty fun to try to capture that, honestly, although it's almost equally frustrating because wHy WoNt YOu idIOts JUsT tALK YoUr sHIt OUt

Ahem uh yeah. I promise they'll sort their shit out sooner rather than later although that's not to say that we're anywhere close to wrapping this story up, oooohoho no! Still plenty of threads to wrap up and new threads to find and fluff and smut and whatnot. Aaaanywho it's late and I'm rambling so thanks for all the lovely comments and I hope you'll enjoy this new chapter :)

When Emma came home that evening, she felt almost as tired as after she had come home from the hospital. Not particularly sleepy, just tired enough to want to melt into the sofa. Between Hook's interrogation and assault – again – and spending the remainder of the day checking Dawn's story by calling anyone who might have seen her and Hook together, the whole day had felt more like a week in length. At least Mulan was fine, though. Hook had only caused a minor scrape and some bruises, nothing that wouldn't heal in a week or two.

She wasn't sure how long she had sat there when her phone began buzzing and blaring at her.

"Yeah, what," she answered without really looking at the screen.

Regina sounded a little confused on the other side. "Emma, we didn't decide when or where we were going to talk today, so–"

Emma blinked, the memories of their last phone call rushing back into mind. "Oh, shit. I completely forgot."

"I suppose we can do it tomorrow instead, if you'd like."

"No!" She sat up in the sofa, trying her best to get her head working again. "No, this evening works. It was just kind of a shitstorm at work today and– never mind." Her stomach suddenly grumbled. Loudly. She checked the time; it wasn't that late. "Hey, uh, have you had dinner yet? Because I kind of forgot that too."

"I have some leftovers I could bring. If you want to talk at your place and not at mine, of course."

Emma chuckled. "I don't really feel like moving, so yeah. Come on over whenever you're ready."

"I'll be there in twenty minutes or so."

The call ended and Emma fell back into the sofa. Not for the first time since all the shit with Regina had begun, she wished spending time with Regina didn't automatically mean conflicts and arguments. She was tired of it all.

She sighed and tossed her phone to the side. At least this might be the last confrontation before she knew just how bad it was between them. Before she could get bogged down in gloomy thoughts, she got to her feet and headed for the shower. She might as well try to be vaguely presentable.

Regina arrived on time a little later with two boxes of some fancy-looking salad.

"Smells good," Emma remarked, opening one of the boxes and sniffing at the contents. "Do you want bowls and stuff to put it in or do we just take it directly from the–"

One very disapproving glance from Regina stopped her mid-sentence.

"Bowls it is," Emma muttered, opting for some fancy glass bowl she wasn't sure how she had gotten and the proper salad utensils that she never otherwise used. If anyone would appreciate them, it'd be Regina.

Eventually, they were both seated around the kitchen table, eating in silence. The only sound was the soft sound of rain against the window outside and the humming of the fridge. It was cozy.

And tense.

"So," Emma began. She peered over at Regina who had kept her focus pretty much exclusively on her salad. "You wanted to tell me some things."

Regina didn't answer at first. She finished chewing and swallowed, aimlessly poking her salad with her fork. "Yes. I actually thought about preparing remarks for this, but I didn't want it to seem stiff and rehearsed." She looked up to meet Emma's eyes. "And now I'm not sure where to start at all."

"Well, yesterday you said you wanted to tell me everything, but when we talked after I got out of the hospital you said you might need weeks. What changed?"

"A reality check of sorts, I suppose," Regina muttered, frowning down at her salad again. "Kathryn and I spoke after the funeral, if you remember. She had ideas about organizing more community-wide events and to try to get people together and wanted my opinion on them. At the end, she said she'd like to have lunch some day to try to mend some fences between us."

A brief, frustrating flash of jealousy made Emma shift uncomfortably in her chair. "Yeah, you two were friends during the curse, right?"

"The closest I got to that, yes. She said she didn't want to stay stuck in the past, and thought it was about time she and I figured out where we stood." She gave Emma a deadpan look. "And that remark hit a little close to home."

Emma frowned. "But how did that change anything about whatever it was you were researching?"

"It didn't – not directly – but it made me look at it from a different perspective." She shook her head. "I could continue to go through all my books and scrolls and everything else and maybe find something, but the chances were pretty minimal that I'd come up with anything. Nothing would get better just because I'd wait another month and exhaust every single other option."

"Oh. Okay."

There was a pause before Regina continued. "I suppose I should tell you what happened that month, then."

Emma finished the last of her salad and pushed her plate aside. "Sounds like a plan."

"Alright." Regina licked her lips. "Around two months ago, I started teaching you magic and potioncraft, which you picked up rather quickly. It didn't take long for us to notice the way our magics interacted with one another, though. Magic is unpredictable in Storybrooke, so we didn't think much of it at first, but pretty soon it was clear that they tended to get linked together, in a way. I hadn't seen anything like it before, so I talked to Tink about it, and the most we could find out about it was some ancient ritual witches would perform to link their magics together to increase their power." She cleared her throat. "Besides more... intimate reasons."

"Intimate like sex or intimate like marriage?"

"More like marriage, I suppose," Regina said, but she didn't look pleased with either alternative. "It was a telepathic link too, of sorts. We couldn't talk to each other with our minds or anything, but we could feel each other, in a way." Her expression dimmed. "That's how I knew something had happened in the harbor even before I reached Mulan."

"I guess that's how I could tell the informant wasn't you even though she looked just like you," Emma mused. "I just got this weird feeling that she was... wrong."

"I would guess so, yes. When we learned about this ritual, we decided to go through with it to make our magics' connection more stable. There wasn't much information to go on, but in the end it seemed to have worked. We could use each other's magic and we could sense one another – in some limited way – and we had better control of our spells.

"At the same time, it wasn't long after the ritual that our magics started acting more unpredictably, but in a different way than before. Before the ritual, our magics attracted each other when close. Two fireballs suddenly merging midair, for example. After the ritual our spells acted up much less, but when they did, it wasn't affected by the other's magic." Regina shrugged. "It was just random.

"Magic has always been unpredictable in Storybrooke, but this was more than I was used to. And then there were the nightmares." Regina looked down at the table, her eyes unfocused. "I think they were worse for you than for me. That, or I'm more used to them. We didn't talk about them that much." She sighed. "I started researching the ritual and anything related to our magics to try to find out what was going on when you decided it was taking too long, so you went to Nova, or Blue. I think."

"Must have been really bad if I went to Blue for help," Emma muttered under her breath, getting a faint smile out of Regina.

"Whoever you talked to really convinced you, though. When you came back, we... discussed the situation."

Emma snorted. "'Discussed'?"

"Argued. Loudly," Regina said with a wince. "You said the curse and the town were falling apart because of all of the magic here, and that you were too, as long as you still had magic. According to you, the only way to fix it all was to remove it with the Black Fairy's wand."

"That does sounds pretty bad, though."

"It was. Which was why I wanted to know how you had learned any of it." Regina's expression darkened, her jaw tightening. "But you just said I should trust you and how you knew it wasn't important."

"Yeah," Emma mumbled as wisps of their argument resurfaced in her mind. She didn't remember much of what they had said, but she remembered the feelings she'd had during their discussion. Worry. Stress. A lot of stress. And rising frustration. "I remember some of it. You didn't believe me at all."

Regina met her eyes, wary and cautious, before adding, "then you might remember what happened afterwards."

"I left." Empty dark roads, leading away from Storybrooke. "I took my car and drove off to some dinky motel to try to get away from all the magic and shit. Didn't help much; I still had magic there." Emma stared off at the far wall, eyes unfocused, as more and more memories came back to her.

"You said you needed space, and then left without a message," Regina continued. "You were gone for two days. When you returned, you hadn't changed your mind and still wanted to get rid of your magic."

Emma blinked, pulling herself back to the present. "So... what was the problem? Why not just use that wand and fix it? I lived without magic for years."

"You've always had magic, Emma, even before Storybrooke. You are magic. You were born with it in a way I wasn't. No one knows what would happen if you'd lose it."

"If no one knows, why do you even think I would get hurt? And I must have had a good reason to believe it," Emma insisted. "Maybe I just didn't have time for all the details. I mean, I remember feeling pretty stressed about it."

After a moment of just staring at her, Regina let out a tired breath and buried her face in her hands.

"What?" Emma snapped.

"I'm sorry," Regina said. She sounded so tired. "It's just... we've had this exact conversation once already. And it's playing out just like it did back then."

Emma didn't really know what to say, so an uneasy silence filled the room. Her mind was a mess of feelings, memories, and memories of feelings, all mixed together until she wasn't sure what she felt and what she remembered feeling.

"I'm just saying," Emma continued when the silence got too unnerving, "why would I make up some facts like that? To play the hero, or what?"

"I don't think you made them up, but I try not to take any magic suggestions at face value, especially when I don't know who they're coming from."

"You know who they came from. Me." She didn't bother holding back the sharp edge that was creeping into her voice.

"And you got them from someone else." She gave Emma a pointed look. "Someone you wouldn't even tell me about."

Emma scoffed. "You didn't trust me."

"It could have killed you. We had no idea–"

"Exactly, you had no idea!" Emma cut her off. "And the town – and everyone in it – was in danger!"

"It wasn't worth the risk!" Regina snapped, nostrils flaring. "Even if the town–" She stopped herself abruptly, swallowing hard and trying to compose herself again. "If I had to pick between Henry and Storybrooke, I'd always pick Henry. The same goes for you."

Emma stared back at her, trying to process her words.

"I'm not some selfless hero, Emma," Regina said quietly. "And I'm tired of losing everyone I care about."

"So you took my memory to... to save me?" The words sounded all wrong when she said them. "Because you didn't trust me? That's messed up."

Seconds – tense, grueling seconds – ticked by before Regina replied.

"It wasn't that I didn't trust you," Regina said, her voice tight. "It was a lot of things. You wouldn't tell me who had told you all of this or how the town was in danger. If it had only been that, I might have thought you had sensed it with your magic, somehow. Maybe you still had some connection with the curse I wasn't aware of." Her jaw tensed. "But then you mentioned the Black Fairy's wand, something a lot more specific, and through it all you wouldn't say anything about why you knew any of this. That's when I got suspicious, and worried."

"Suspicious of what? That someone had taken my heart?" Emma scoffed. "Or someone else having messed with my memory?"

"I didn't know. I still don't know, but whatever source you got that information from really wanted to keep their identity hidden."

"Maybe Gold had told me about it and I didn't want you to focus on him when I knew the info was good," Emma said. "Like you did anyway. And no, before you ask, I don't remember who told me or anything like that, I just remember what I told you." She did remember that part all too well, though. Her trying to get Regina to listen to her while Regina stared at her like she was speaking another language, dismissing or ignoring everything Emma said.

Regina looked like she was going to retort, but changed her mind at the last moment.

"Did you really need to stay in control that badly?" Emma continued. "Just because I didn't tell you everything–"

"It wasn't that!" Regina cut her off. "It wasn't about the control." She closed her eyes and sighed. "You said you'd take Henry back to New York if we didn't fix your magic right away. So it was that too, together with everything else."

Emma stared at Regina. "Wait, what?" She let out a disbelieving laugh. "I said I'd have to get Henry to safety and you still didn't believe me?"

"If it was that bad, why didn't you tell me all of it?" Regina exclaimed. "I wouldn't have ignored it just because Gold told you!"

"If you trusted me that much, then why did you take away my memory!" Emma shot back, all but shouting.

"I panicked!" Regina's voice cracked mid-word. "I didn't understand why you wouldn't tell me anything, and I thought you'd skip town with Henry or get the wand and use it on your own. I just wanted to buy some more time to figure out what was going on, so I used your magic to make you forget about the wand and all that. I didn't plan for the spell to take away more than a couple of days, but..." She trailed off with a sigh. "Maybe the magic misfired or maybe I messed up. I don't really remember anymore, ironically enough."

Emma's anger lost a little of its momentum. "You really thought I might die."

"Yes."

The rain outside was still pattering against the window, filling the tense silence as best it could.

"Do you..." Emma stopped, not sure what she really wanted to ask, or what answer she wanted. "How can I know you won't do this again the next time you're worried about me?" She didn't bother hiding the hard edge in her voice. "Or would you just do it again?"

"I won't. I don't know how I could prove it to you, though," Regina said quietly.

"Yeah, me neither," Emma muttered. As much as she had wanted to know all of this, right now she just wanted to get it over with. All of it. After a while, she added, "so, what now?"

"We get the wand and use the spell you suggested to remove your magic."

Emma blinked. "We're just going to do what I wanted to do in the first place? After– after all of this?"

Regina just shrugged, looking more tired than Emma ever remembered seeing her. "I don't have any other suggestions. I've looked, but that spell is the only thing I can find that might help. I still don't know how it will affect you, but I don't know what else to do. At least it would stop your magic from hurting you." She sighed, again. "It's up to you, of course."

Emma swallowed her snide 'of course' remark.

"Okay," she said instead. "Then we'll go get that wand tomorrow."