"He's dealt with."
"Not by me."
"Regina," Emma pleaded.
The frazzled brunette paused at the desperate tone and swallowed hard before sitting down on the edge of her much too large and empty bed. "Did he. . .when he—" She took a breath. "Did he hurt you?"
"No," Emma reassured unconvincingly. "He tried though."
"And he's still living?" Regina ground through a clenched jaw.
"I know," Emma said flatly.
"Why aren't you home? Why didn't they send you home?" Regina hugged her waist, completely beside herself.
"My trigger finger is still intact."
"That's not funny."
"I wasn't trying to be."
A tear fell from Regina's eyes, and she shut them tightly, but that did nothing to ease her imagination. Emma hurt. Emma vulnerable. Emma broken. "My love," she said softly. "I'm so sorry."
A breathless scoff sounded over the phone as the soldier took a moment to inhale deeply then exhale and swallow hard but despite the attempt, Regina could hear her clearly. Emma was crying.
"Emma," Regina said softly. "It wasn't your fault, okay? You did nothing wrong."
Regina worried her lip when the blonde kept crying over the line, her thoughts running a mile a minute. Not for the first time, Regina felt completely helpless where Emma was concerned. A million miles away was still halfway across the world no matter how much she cared for the younger woman. But it wasn't in Regina's nature to sit back and watch as events around her unfold. Not anymore. "What can I do?" She pleaded in a quiet desperation.
A soft almost hopeful and breathy laugh sounded from the soldier. "Just, just be there. Be there when I get home. Please."
"You know I will," Regina answered, tears welling up from the flurry of emotion she had kept bottled up.
"Can—can you just talk?" The blonde stammered. "I really need to hear your voice."
Regina nodded and shakily crawled back into bed, resting her head on her pillow as she clutched the phone tightly to her ear. "When I was fifteen, my mother was incredibly upset with me because I hadn't received a perfect grade on a literature assignment. Truth be told, I hadn't even finished the book because I had a riding competition the following month, and at that point I was convinced I'd be in the Olympics by the time I was eighteen."
"You could still probably do that now."
Regina shrugged though the move went unnoticed. "She never supported that dream, so I refused to have dinner with her, and I was starving by midnight and I snuck downstairs to the kitchen, and my father was just sitting by the fireplace having a Mojito and reading a book, and he took one look at me and got up, led me to the kitchen, and he taught me how to make Habaneros."
"Your dad sounds amazing."
"He was. He'd love you," Regina said fondly. "I'll teach you."
"Teach me what?"
"How to make them when you come home."
"What if I burn the kitchen?"
"Then you're sleeping on the couch."
Emma laughed, her tone lifting despite the tense undercurrent always behind it. "Keep talking."
"I took Henry to the park today, and he saw some of the older children riding by on their bicycles and he took one look at his own and asked how come it had a tail. . ."
Try as they might, they couldn't stay on the phone forever, so when Emma sighed during Regina's third story saying she had to go, Regina just nodded and murmured her understanding before stopping Emma with a quiet "I love you." The blonde responded in kind, and with a promise to remain safe, they hung up.
The sound of silence permeated the air, and Regina couldn't help but lay in bed, going over the conversation she had just had and clenching and unclenching her fists in anger, frustration, and fear. For a woman so in control of everything from the outfits she wore to the snacks her son ate, having Emma in her life, already an unpredictable variable, stripped her of any hindsight she thought she could have.
Emma got hurt and there was nothing Regina could do about it.
So she lay awake with the younger woman constantly on her mind and trying desperately to reassure herself that Emma was alive and nothing truly scarring had happened, but that was a load of garbage and she knew it. The psychological scars were already there and now they were bigger. And all Regina could do was lay in bed.
The sun was up before she knew it, and when she watched her alarm clock strike 6:30, she was already moving out of bed on autopilot because if her mind wandered too much on Emma then she'd find herself enlisting in the army and finding that bastard of a General and throttle his throat in his sleep.
Henry proved to be a sufficient distraction since her son had filled her in on his latest dream filled with superheroes and burning buildings and falling damsels and evil villains. She smiled at his imagination and kissed the top of his head before placing a plate of two pancakes in front of him, chocolate chip just because she could.
Her resolve faltered for a moment when she dropped him off at preschool and he had ran off to play with his classmates in a playhouse. Regina stayed by the fence and watched him play until Tina and the other teachers had told them it was time to go inside. She had called his name, and he ran over to her, receiving a kiss and an extra long hug that he had to wiggle his way out of because he was the only child outside and it was arts and crafts day today. With great reluctance she released him, not before catching Tina's eye who looked curious. As soon as the preschool teacher took a step closer to her, Regina shot up from her crouch and pulled together her blazer, returning to her car knowing full well that Tina was watching her every move.
No matter how hard she tried, the budget reports before her did nothing to take away her middle of the night call from Emma. Instead, she had instructed her secretary to clear her day and barricaded herself inside her office where she spent the entire day researching: Soldier deployments and returns; Locating overseas soldiers; and more reluctantly yet absolutely necessary Sexual harassment in the military.
What she found made her breathing shallow and the gears in her head spin wildly out of control. Compared to males, female soldiers were more likely to face harassment from a fellow soldier than get killed in combat. Three times more likely in fact. The number of reported cases of incidents to occur astounded Regina, but the fact that the convictions were significantly smaller made her blood boil.
Dear god, what had Emma been going through over there? She closed out of her internet browser, unable to read anymore statistics or any incident cases and not imagine it to be Emma as the victim in them all.
Bravery was something Regina always associated with the blonde, and Emma being a female soldier, an outed one at that, brought new meaning to the word. When she came home, Regina vowed she'd find some loophole to make Emma stay. Hell, she'd shoot her in the foot or break her trigger finger if she had to. One thing was for sure: she was not going back.
Her wrist watch beeped, alerting her to pick up Henry. Her day spent researching simply added a truck load of fuel to an already raging inferno. As she walked down the street to Henry's daycare, forgetting her car entirely, the statistics rattled off in her brain: nearly 50% of women won't report an incident due to fear of retaliation, 80% of the accused perpetrators remain enlisted, how often rape is the case.
Regina felt bile rise in her throat all over again.
"Regina?" Tina waved her hand in front of Regina's face, and the Mayor blinked, seeing she had arrived to the preschool and Tina had Henry by the hand. The rest of the playground was empty since Regina had been standing there, constrained in thought for so long. "Are you okay there?"