A/N: Fic operates on three premises:

1. this takes place in any universe where zelena is a reformed asshole
2. zombies are a thing and exist iZombie style
3. i have NO chill

WARNINGS: there is no gratuitous gore. just mentioning of like, your typical brain parts being eaten and mentions of blood.

special thanks to steph for cackling with me and feeding me some lines as i feed these assholes brains

CHAPTER ONE: THE EYE OF THE SHITSTORM

It starts with the hair. The annoyingly, whiter than Snow, hair.

Zelena could pass it off as experimenting with highlights, but even that gets suspicious––why is Zelena walking around with only one highlight today and then like three the next. So she stocks up on 379: Golden Bronze. (She probably would have gone for Vivacious Red, but that would probably bring out her whitening eyes, and, oh, not to mention, her pasty ass dead as fuck skin. So it has to be a resounding no to Vivacious Red.)

The next to go is her taste. Like, she's become the actual worst about food. She won't eat at Granny's anymore. She's actually upsetting Regina with the faces of dissatisfaction during dinner. It needs more Sriracha, Zelena says. I didn't know you could pronounce that word, Regina mumbles.

Fuck off, sis.

And she doesn't really mean that, of course she doesn't. She's just cranky as hell. Probably because the only thing that can get her functioning properly is to, oh, I don't know, consume human brains. Honestly what the fuck. She'd cry about it, if her tear ducts functioned at all. But they don't. Probably makes her look like a heartless asshole, which you've got to be a little bit of if you're going to sneak off into the freeway to ambush some poor bastard.

It could be worse. She could be the kind of zombie that eats everyone on sight with no regard for anything else, but nah. Zelena could have her brain and eat it, too.

[-]

If the dead sleep forever, then the undead never sleep. That's how it goes, apparently. The only time she can doze off is if like the moon and the sun are fucking aligned so of course Zelena is wide awake when Regina knocks on her door like at shitfuck o'clock at night.

(After she's Neutrogena'd the fuck out of her heavily made-up face, she doesn't let Regina see her until the sun's gone completely down. Her deathly paleness can most likely be attributed to moonlight that way, though, hell, at this point, she probably emits her own moonlight. You know, if physics worked that way.)

"Come in," she says.

Regina peeks her head in, a black fuzz in the dark of the bedroom. "Do you have room for me?"

Usually, she doesn't have to ask. Every so often Regina has a bad night or a bad dream and Zelena is always there to provide the warm hugs. But now things are different. Zelena can't answer this question with a duh, there is always room for your crybaby self, get over here you loser I love you. Now it can only be more of a, I'm dead, Regina. I'm dead and who knows if it's cuddle-born or some bullshit like that.

Except Regina doesn't know, and Zelena never plans to tell her.

"Yes," Zelena says.

When Regina tucks herself into her, she prays, really does, that she can't feel how cold she is.

"I'm worried about you," Regina says, and Zelena rolls her eyes as if she could have ever said anything else. "You've been acting very strange and I need to know if things will be okay."

Zelena almost tells her right then, because not telling her would be like, the dickiest move in the history of dick moves. But she doesn't.

"I'm fine," Zelena says. Dick. Regina's scalp is dangerously close to her lips, and she turns her head away to look at the ceiling. "I'm just having off days. Maybe I'm pregnant and I'm being hormonal."

Zelena snorts to herself cause man, yeah. She's not dead at all, in fact it's the opposite, right.

"Yeah, that's likely," Regina says sarcastically.

They laugh, but then Zelena really feels those phantom tears right now. She feels sick to her stomach and it's not because of the brain she ate, it's because they hadn't really laughed together in like a week because she's been way too preoccupied hiding this stupid secret and acquiring clumps of a very specific organ.

"I'm a horrible sister," she finds herself sobbing. "I cause you nothing but trouble."

(And right: the last person she ate had a nasty tendency for self pity and deprecation. That explains a lot. Nice.)

"That's not true," Regina says, soothingly but also warily. Zelena hasn't pulled this bullshit since they were first starting out.

"Name one time I've done something good for you."

That actually makes Regina angry, like, if Zelena wants to milk her for reassurance she could at least bother to be direct about it, instead of this emotionally manipulative crap. She sits up and hits the mattress with a fist. "What has gotten into you?"

"See!" Zelena points. "I am horrible."

(Twists people's words and actions to prove own worthlessness. Honestly. Maybe she should play 20 questions with these assholes before she devours them.

You like to compulsively lie? Haha, and then what?)

[-]

Regina doesn't really talk to Zelena the next day, which probably means she's been talking about her to other people. Asking around. Investigating. Zelena almost wants to be there when Regina finds out that the reason why her sister is being a complete knob is because she's an undead knob.

The man whose meninges she ripped open after cracking his skull like an egg lived in Portland, where he didn't have many friends and much less a girl or boyfriend. He was on his way visiting his mother in Bangor. She had Alzheimer's, so Zelena supposes she wouldn't really miss him, because she wouldn't really remember, would she?

You're such a dick, Zelena.

Tonight she's waiting by a different road, Storybrooke long behind her––it wouldn't do to eat one of her own; at least taking victims from the outer world would protect her from the law because Storybrooke didn't exist on their map, so she could just check out like bye, bitch.

Except when she's done stuffing her mouth with the medulla she's carrying back to town like it's a fucking drumstick, law enforcement does get her, in the form of Sheriff Fucksake Swan.

Zelena considers using her newfound hella fast running skills to book it right out of there, but that would require not coming back, probably.

"What?" Zelena shrugs lamely. "Can't a girl get some fresh night air?"

Emma doesn't smile. She points her gun at Zelena. "Hands behind your back."

"What––"

"Hands behind your back, Zelena."

Oh shit. Shit. Of course. Zelena's entire face and hands and shirt is covered in blood. Man, she fucked up.

"I can explain," she says calmly. Her hands are still not behind her stupid back.

"Zelena, please don't make me hurt you," Emma pleads earnestly. "I'll take you back to the station, Regina will be waiting for you––"

Zelena freaks. Like legit starts breathing hard, heart pumping loudly, and shaking her head like you just told her Glinda came to town with their sex tapes and dammit, she ate a panic-prone brain. Just her motherfucking luck.

"No, please don't do that," she begs, "Regina can't know."

But Emma's making the rather unwise attempt to restrain Zelena, which she absolutely should not have done because in one swift motion, girl has a nice big scratch on her left cheek.

Ho-ly-shit.

And the effects must be instantaneous because Emma's face goes white in fear and it never, never recovers. She drops her gun right on the asphalt ground.

"What the fuck did you do?" Emma compresses the wound with her hand, but it's useless. Her blood in that area is thickening like butter.

"I panicked!" Zelena cries.

"And panicking involves trying to rip my throat out?!"

"Yes, my reflexes have become very specific!"

Emma breathes out and digs her hands in her scalp, pacing around idly. "You're a fucking zombie."

"Yes," Zelena nods, ashamed, but when the cat's out of the bag, it jumps out.

"And now I will be, too." Emma looks like she's going to throw up. "Christ. How am I going to tell my parents."

Zelena makes a pathetic gesture at sympathy with a shrug and a head tilt. "I don't know how to apologize for this, honestly."

"Oh god." Emma bends over, her hands on her knees, winded like she just ran four miles in four minutes.

"Look at it this way, we're the palest people in town besides like your mother and Aurora, and if people haven't noticed me yet they certainly won't notice you."

"I think it will be very noticeable once we start eating the brains of Storybrooke's inhabitants, but thank you for you input," Emma says irritatedly. Then she looks like she's going to cry, but they're coming out like mud because she's very, very slowly dying already.

Zelena grabs Emma by the forearms and makes her look at her. "Look, whenever I catch a brain I'll split it with you. Do you have a preference for a particular lobe or hemisphere?"

Emma looks at her like she is the product of a threeway between God, Satan, and the Aflac duck.

[-]

In retrospect, Zelena shouldn't have assumed that zombies like, synced with each other when it came to cravings. For her, an entire brain can last her somewhere in between three days to a week. One of the temporal lobes probably lasts a day. But Emma, her zombie metabolism is Fucking. Wild. Girl would ask for more even after downing the midbrain––Zelena's favorite part, which she'd have to sacrifice for Emma's unholy brain feasting libido.

They'd discussed lines before. Like, how far each would go just to get the B. I have to stop at people younger than thirty, Zelena'd say. And people I know, of course. Emma nodded in agreement, but. with. hesitance.

And so in retrospect, she should absolutely have not been surprised when Emma had called her at buttfuck in the sunless morning to meet her in the woods.

"I ate Hook."

"You what?!" Zelena hisses. "He's inside this fucking body bag?!"

Emma sets her jaw to the side in annoyance and puts her hands on her waist, foot resting on what would be Hook's shoulder. She's still got a big band-aid on her cheek where Zelena got her. "I panicked, okay. I didn't mean to target him."

Zelena huffs and crosses her arms. "I've been looking for a reason to do this to him for weeks, Swan."

"Look, he wouldn't stop bothering me, and things got physical so I ended up scratching him in the face, and then––like, no, right? Hook as a zombie is a no. That's another mouth to feed and more bodies to hide."

"So you ate him."

Emma swallows. "So I ate him. Help me dump this fucker in the harbor."

[-]

At the very least, this incident traumatizes Emma's infant hunger into controlling it's damn self. But at what cost? Zelena asks. This asshole now goes around wearing black leather jackets, gross amounts of eyeliner, and whenever she passes by a mirror she just cannot resist checking out her own bust. The fuck, Swan.

And only when she's got pieces of Hook's brain in her that she is absolutely fucktrucked by the revelation that she will never be getting ass again.

"Regina thinks I don't want to fuck her anymore," Emma sobs over a the parietal lobe of some fifty-something man as they hide in the woods. Zelena rolls her eyes and tears out the cerebellum for herself.

"It's not like I don't want to fuck her, I do want to, but what kind of disaster would that be? What if my nibble becomes a bite, or I scratch her back with my nails? What if I scrape too hard on her vaginal walls? That's the worst way to go!"

Zelena gags mid-consumption. "Please never mention my sister's vaginal walls to my face again."

"We need to do something about this Zelena. We need to tell Regina. Maybe this is reversible."

"Don't you think I'd have found a way if it were reversible? Are you forgetting which of the Mills girls read like a fuckton of Magic Academia to make a working time portal?"

"We should still tell her."

"Tell me what?"

Zelena and Emma freeze. In all their feasting they hadn't heard Regina approach, even though her feet had been crunching loudly on fallen branches and leaves. They hadn't even seen the bright white of her flashlight. Useless hunters, they are. Useless.

Regina shines the light on their bloodied mouths and hands, and she sighs, taking it much more calmly than either of them would have expected. "What have you tontas done."

[-]

Regina takes them to Zelena's old isolated farmhouse, and out of everything on Zelena's list of ways Regina could possibly react to her sister and girlfriend being murderous zombies, sitting them down to wipe the blood off their chins was not one of them.

"How long have you known?" Emma asks.

"When people started asking me if you and Zelena were having an affair," Regina says flatly. "And I would've believed it too, with all the sneaking around and secrecy but then Hook goes missing, there are reports all over Maine news about bodies being found out in the road, messily buried and with their craniums marred and emptied beyond belief. You two don't like my food anymore, instead would rather down a bottle of Sriracha or Tapatío, which is absurd, because Zelena is as gringa as they come."

"Hey," Zelena interjects, and Regina wipes right over her mouth with the towel for effect.

"And what," Emma says, rubbing her hands with a wet paper towel, "you're just like, okay with this?"

"I'm..." Regina pauses, sitting down on the stool across from them. "No. You're still... you, and I haven't completely lost you as I would if you two were merely dead. But I can't just let you eat people."

"What do you suggest?" Zelena asks. "Grave robbing?"

"You could wait til people died, you know, naturally."

"The death rate doesn't look so good here," Emma says. "Unless we wait for another Big Bad to cause some tragic damage, which I'm not sure I'd like to deal with as a zombie."

Before Regina can open her mouth to communicate whatever, there's a large crash outside the door on the patio. It's Emma, ever the savior, even in zombiehood, that springs up first, her arm outstretched to keep the other two behind her.

Unpleasant, salivic noises and grunts make themselves audible and they sound grotesquely familiar, they sound like––

"Oh fuck no," Zelena mumbles, and then the front door is blown off with two blurs whizzing past the curtains just to show off or something. The lights go off, and she feels a fist against her jaw and she's actually down, and even Emma is flat on her ass and suddenly, like the worst of her nightmares, someone is straddling Regina and hissing over her until––

"Tinkerbell?"

The disgusting gurgles stop. "Regina?"

The second one of them groans, holds his head up. "Great."

While they have a chance, Zelena tackles Tinkerbell off of Regina, pinning her down with her arms at the back, and Emma restrains the second dude, which is, surprise surprise, Dr. Whale, like so.

"I like to keep cuffs on my person at all times," Emma says, latching them on to both Whale and Tink.

"There are more of us?" Whale asks, and Zelena scowls, because fuck that, she is not getting grouped up with Flying Booger and Frankenstein, who instead of creating monsters, is one now.

But Regina is bothered. So god damn bothered. She's like, actually sweating. "How many more people have been affected?"

"You can say the Z word you know," Tink says, face still on the floor. She sounds ashamed.

Regina is not having it. "How many more?"

[-]

Twenty. Mother. Fucking. Zombies.

Well, eighteen, because no one knows about Emma and Zelena yet save for Regina, Whale and Tink, who for their own reasons have decided to protect with secrecy. Then you've got our old girl Ruby––gods, everyone is mourning that one, but at least eating people isn't something new to her––along with David, Mulan, Astrid, Bashful, a handful of other fuckers and like six kids, ranging from elementary to middle school age. What the fuck happens when children turn into zombies? Who knows. Maybe they'll know soon.

So this is like, The Worst. People could handle shit when populations were being flung back and forth from Storybrooke to the Enchanted Forest so much that they were getting temporal and spacial whiplash. People could handle it when Zelena was kidnapping babies and flying around on a goddamn broom. Barely anyone so much as blinked an eye when the Nevengers team took off to save Wonderboy. But a zombie apocalypse? The Worst. This was no longer a fight for the royal bourgeois. Former peasant-folk could no longer look up from their newspapers after the earth finished shaking and go, man, what are these rich white people plus Regina doing now.

Madam Mayor, what will you do?

"Containment," she says, and it hurts her to say it because now Emma and Zelena, sitting in the audience of City Hall smelling of too much perfume and too much make-up, are looking at each other with fearful anticipation. They sit with the rest of the townsfolk, while the eighteen are on the other side of the hall, sitting in their own little section.

"And what does that entail?" asks Granny, nervously, thinking of her girl Ruby. Always thinking of her.

"Well," Regina starts. "It seems that this state of being is spread through scratches, bites. Fluids less so, but I wouldn't cross it off the list. So those of you with clear symptoms will have to be isolated––I can easily order a property expansion on my sister's farmhouse to make everyone affected comfortable. For those who have come into contact but are not yet showing symptoms, you will have to come in for periodic testing at the hospital until you are cleared."

"What about the brain eating thing?" someone else asks.

Regina swallows. "I am informed that the brains do not necessarily have to be human. Maine is full of wildlife. And I'm sure the taste and nutritional value won't be so different."

Bet you she never thought she'd ever have to say those fucking words before. This is a trainwreck waiting to happen.

"Meanwhile I'll assemble a research team to make this reversible," Regina adds, because what is politics without empty promises, "and make sure that we can all return to our normal way of life as fast as possible."

The last to raise a hand is Smee, holding his red beanie against his stomach.

"Yes?"

"Was it one of them?" he asks. "That killed Hook. Did one of them do it?"

Emma wants to scream but instead opts for squeezing Zelena's hand.

Regina regards Smee sadly, hands resting calmly at the sides of the podium. "I don't know, Smee. I'm sorry for your loss. Each person will be questioned individually so we can learn what they know."

[-]

"They're not people."

It's muttered in the clamor of a dispersed town meeting, so Regina doesn't hear it. But Emma and Zelena sure as fuck do.