A/N ~ So that happened. I literally cannot believe I'm writing this. How did we get here so fast? I have loved writing this, and I love every one of you reading it. Thank you to everyone who's read, reviewed, followed, shared etc! You all rock. Deep breaths. Here we go.

Also, in the interest of shameless self-promotion, keep a look out for my SQ pirate AU, which I'll be posting sometime next week, if that floats your fancy.

The Beginning (of The Rest)

Emma Swan came home as spring begun to dawn on the world. It was the season of rebirth and similarly, with her return came the spring of Callendor.

Every day, she woke up to the sound of birds singing and her own thoughts. Her gaze always snagged on the side of the too-soft mattress that had always belonged to somebody else as she pushed out of bed. There was no one there, but at least the war was over. Her heart was weary but she pushed on.

The first weeks after, Emma would wake with the dawn and sit by the window, closing her eyes and letting the sunlight crawl across her skin, warm her back to life. Beyond the sun-warmed glass, the White Palace slowly came back to life. Supply carts clattered through the yard, people went freely about their business, children shouted without fear or hesitance. The sky was too blue, and the world was too safe. It made Emma want to cry. She did cry when she was with her mother again, and her father and Neal.

Those first few weeks were a blur. She slept and woke and ate the food the servants brought her and slept again. Sometimes she dreamed of blood and brown eyes and woke screaming. Sometimes she collapsed into a leaden dreamless sleep that she woke from more tired than before. Sometimes she laid in the dark listening to the quiet and wondering when the next attack would be. War never caught up until you stopped moving.

As the kingdom was rebuilt around her, Emma rebuilt herself.

Slowly, slowly. She walked through the town, and through the market and down past the creek, trying not to keep her twitching hand on the sword at her hip so much. She sat and read in the library with Henry, neither of them acknowledging their missing third piece. As the seasons changed, she learned to laugh again. She rode with Neal in the meadows that had started to flower again though nobody had time to seed it, met with August and read his finished book. She walked with her parents as they healed together. She smiled again. A thousand times she picked up a quill and stared at the blank parchment in front of her, mind full of dark hair and scars and a laugh like home, and a thousand times the paper ended up ash in the hearth. Crops grew. Babies were born, who would grow into a new generation who had never known war and would never have to. Rain fell, and was chased out by sunshine. They buried the dead and buried them inside themselves. People lived and loved and died as they should.

The years passed.

Emma threw herself into cleaning up her war-torn kingdom. There was a hole in her chest where Regina used to live, and she tried to fill it with life. She helped her men rebuild houses, the villages that had been burned or razed to the ground. She rode through farms and planted trees. She visited the hospitals, the camps set up to help soldiers and victims both. We did this, she thought suddenly, sat on a tree stump in the dappled sunlight between putting up new houses, we did this. She wondered if all the hearts that couldn't move on were truly because they waited, because they were so stupid and crippled and blinded by doubt they should never have carried so young. If she'd just asked Regina to marry her first, Cora be damned... All of this might have been avoided.

"You're blaming yourself, again," Henry told her. His shadow fell across Emma's face as he stood over her, tall and gangly. His voice was breaking. "But it wasn't your fault." The boy who was suddenly becoming a young man before her eyes flopped down beside her, brown hair falling in his face. "I miss her, too."

Emma sighed, wrapping her arm around his shoulders and pulling him close. "Where'd I be without you, kid?"

Maybe everything happened for a reason and maybe it didn't. Maybe she had to lose Regina to find Henry so they could come back together and build a family in the middle of a battlefield. Maybe their love, all they'd shared was too good, too pure to remain when the children who'd started it grew up. They were killers and victims. Survivors. Leftover humans. But Emma's poisoned blood still ran. Her bones still held her up, however cracked they might be. She still felt. Maybe everything they'd been through was all for some higher plan and maybe it wasn't, but if she'd learned one thing from all of this it was that hearts were more resilient than she'd thought, and maybe that was what she'd needed to know all along.

Emma tucked her head over Henry's and breathed in this broken new era of the sun.

-0-

As war turned to scars that would turn to memory that would become someone else's old stories, Regina tried to do right by her kingdom. Tried do right by something, for once in her life.

When she came to the Mightfort, eighteen and full of bruises and anger, she'd thought it was a cruel and cold place. A hard land built for hard times. A war camp that crossed leagues rather than miles. But she was beginning to realize it didn't have to be that way. She had a chance now. To make a difference to thousands of lives as Emma would have done. So Regina did what she never thought she wanted to do: she ruled. She woke early and slept rarely, throwing her everything into fixing George's mistakes, and trying her best to show his heir a better way.

Regina could handle the days. They were bright and full of promises, summer breezes that spoke of better times to come. Between rebuilding the council with true and intelligent men, reordering a kingdom, sowing seeds, mending a long-broken economy, dealing with the dead, her days were so full she didn't have time to think about herself, or the heaviness that covered her chest like dust.

The nights were a different story.

In the darkness all alone, the queen and the strength fell away and she was just Regina. And she could never sleep – she was glad. She didn't deserve to sleep after everything that had happened. Staring at the ceiling while in soft black silence, she let herself shatter and the ghosts came creeping in through the cracks.

When they were younger and left Feather in the stables, she whinnied and pawed at the ground because she thought Emma didn't love her anymore. But Regina could feel Emma out there somewhere, loving her. And somehow that was a thousand times harder.

She was miles and miles away, happy, healing. Regina hoped she was doing well, and learning to live properly, finally free. Free in a way she never had been before. Regina stopped trying to bring her back – she only came back when she felt like it, in yellow butterflies and broken down deja vu. She was never really back, but she never really left either. Finally, Regina understood what she meant when she told her she'd always been with her. Because just as a river carves a valley where it flows, so too had Emma shaped her soul with her passage. There were some memories that defined you. Some promises you just couldn't scrub out.

Some people stained.

The leaves were just turning golden when the raven came. Regina was standing at the window in her bedchambers, watching the world turn. She tried not to see her reflection in the glass but years blind you, just as youth once did. Regina tried to see beyond the horizon. Emma was out there, somewhere, moving on with Henry. A faint smile crossed her lips at the thought, fingers brushing the hard stone sill.

Her heart leapt and collapsed at once when the bird arrived, as it had so long ago. Regina took the scrap of parchment from it, unfurled it. She recognized the elegant, careful script. It was not from Emma Swan, but she cried anyway. She cried because of everything she was used to and everything she wasn't. She cried because of all she never said, and all she always knew. She cried because a thousand years ago, the gap-toothed blonde girl in the back of a straw cart had been right.

She always had been.

With her heart beating hard against her chest and tears stinging her eyes, Regina wrote her single-word reply to Queen Snow's request.

-0-

"Come on, Emma. You're going to be fine."

"I know, Mother, I just..."

"Emma. Trust me."

"Okay –" She bit herself off, breathing in the hard unforgiving air and hurrying to keep pace with her mother.

Emma watched her feet against the floor. It was easier that way. The golden sunlight of the ending summer struck the stained windows high, light stretching and sprawling in a myriad of colours against the stone floor. The rainbows shifted over her narrow leather boots as she passed. She could feel it on her face as well, warm and gentle as the kisses that glorified her childhood. The hallway was long as ever, but she still had a pang in her chest when she remembered how high the low arching ceiling had seemed when she was a little girl.

She hadn't wanted to agree to this. She hadn't wanted a lot of things, if she was being honest. But she cared about their kingdom, so skeletal, so ravaged by the still marks of war. And anyway, this wasn't confirming anything. It was just meeting someone, and seeing how it went. It was all in her hands from there. This wasn't an agreement.

When Emma had told her mother she could arrange a marriage - or a one-time meeting, at least – for her, she did it for the sake of Callendor. In her heart, she'd been married for a long time anyway. Honestly though, she couldn't see herself ever meeting with whoever Mother had found her more than just this once anyway.

The double doors leading into the chamber that had defined her for so long were advancing. Why all her important meetings happened there, she didn't know. Emma followed her mother towards them – it was strange. She was still very much Mother. Features soft, eyes full of unguarded pride, posture relaxed. She hadn't yet adopted the more formal stance of Queen Snow that she always did for important political matters like this. Strange. Emma stopped before pushing the doors open, closing her eyes and taking in a deep breath. She hadn't been in this room for years, avoided the dyed glass windows and painted ceiling; there were too many ghosts.

Emma steeled herself and shouldered open the doors.

They groaned on their rusting hinges as she entered, to a soft smudged blur of coloured light. Inside she could see her father, and Neal, and Henry. What they were all doing there she didn't know. And then Emma saw, and all the broken pieces inside of her healed up.

Her breath caught in her throat like a snared animal. Emma turned around, staring at her mother with the question in her eyes. Snow just looked back at her with hopeful wide eyes and a small smile, and Emma was so flooded with love that she couldn't think properly anymore. Emma walked as if in a dream, soft footsteps drowned out by her aching heart, to the centre of the room where they'd met and changed everything, all those years ago. She could feel the hot wet tears stinging paths down her cheeks, her hair sticking to them, but everything had gone away.

Everything but the woman with the dark hair and the scar on her lip, standing with shining eyes in a blue dress, waiting for her.

And so, after one war and a life's worth of goodbyes, she met Regina as she had twenty five years ago. Quietly, in the rainbow light of the same room, with her parents looking on, and the sun burning high and hopeful above them.

Emma didn't remember going to her so fast but suddenly they were close, close enough for Emma's chest to cave in and grow back at the smell of apples and home. Close enough for her to see each dark eyelash, and the breath as it left her lips, her throat working as she swallowed. Close enough that the warmth of her skin reached hers. Tight throat constricting, Emma raised a hand tentatively to her skin. The feel of it beneath her fingers was warm and soft and familiar.

Whether for tradition or respect or because they were back in this room, Emma reached for Regina's hand, lifting it shakily. She touched her gently, fingers barely brushing hers as they wrapped loosely around them, she was so afraid of breaking her or turning her back to dust or waking herself up. Her eyes fell shut for a moment, tears slipping from beneath her eyelids and she brought her hand to her lips and kissed it tenderly, as she had done nearly twenty five years ago.

And then Regina sighed, and all of Emma's broken pieces fell back together.

She was real and here and staring up at her with her dark eyes shining and her beautiful face as overwhelmed as she felt. Emma tried to breathe in but there was no air. She looked hopelessly between her parents, her mother's teary eyes, her fathers' proud smile, and then back at her. "You..." She faltered. "The marriage, it..."

Regina stared up at her. "George's heir comes of age in a few weeks. I don't have to be queen anymore." She breathed in carefully. "I miss you. I love you, Emma. I always have. And all the bad stuff, that's gone now. We might finally have a chance to live. So I'm here." Regina swallowed, eyes shining with tears. "I'm here, if you want me."

Emma stared at her like she had all those years ago, when the were young and full of light. Back then she'd been thinking that she was pretty, and that she shouldn't have kissed her. She was still pretty, but if all of this had taught her anything it was that she should have kissed her. She should have set all this in motion. Because suddenly she knew, with irrevocable clarity, suddenly, fiercely knew all that pain, all that suffering that had defined her adult life was worth it. It had brought her to this moment now, hadn't it? Suddenly she realised.

I would rather spend a lifetime saying goodbye to you than live happily with anybody else.

Sighing, Emma lunged forward to wrap her arms snug around Regina's waist and her back, pulling her against her and burying her face in the top of her head. She released the breath she'd been holding for twenty five years, shaking but stronger than she'd ever been. Regina was warm and soft and right, everywhere they touched was alive again. She could feel her cheek pressed against her shoulder, her fingers curled against her. Her heart was beating like crazy, like a magnet and Regina's heart was pure gold.

They drew back at the same time, Regina raising her head to meet Emma's gaze. Emma pressed her lips to hers. The kiss was warm and tasted of tears. It lasted only a second but it held more than she could have thought possible. Emma smiled hopelessly at her, pushing Regina's hair from her face. "Always." She told her.

And with the ghost of their childhood laughter echoing off the walls, they walked together into whatever would come next.