#3x14 the tower | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cdyssey · 2 years

Text

Family [2/3]

Prompt: Set roughly during “The Tower” (3x14) in the Missing Year, Snow accompanies Regina to her family’s estate to search for clues about Zelena. The princess is loathe to admit it, but so many events are weighing on her mind—her impending pregnancy, her husband’s strange reaction to it, and the fact that she’s pretty sure that both he and Regina are lying to her about something or another, but even still, she clings to hope. Snow Queen. Snowing. Pre-OQ.

CW: Vomit Descriptions; Implications of Parental Abuse; Light Gore | Ch. 1 | AO3 Link

—

A little over halfway to the estate, an unexpected wave of nausea shudders through Snow’s entire body. She assumes it’s mostly because of the pregnancy, her body still renovating itself to share space with its newly arrived tenant… and then partially because it’s been well-over thirty years now since she’s ridden horses for speed and sport. The rocking motions have finally gotten to her, the inherent roughness of this pastime she used to love. She slows her steed down with some gentle coaxing—(“easy, Zephyr”)—and dismounts rather gracelessly, just as Regina, realizing that Snow is no longer keeping pace with her, circles back around with her own horse (a fittingly arrogant stallion named Lucan).

After securing Zephyr’s reins around a tree and hanging her bow and quiver on one of its branches, she just barely makes it a few more steps away from the poor beast before she’s throwing up in a bush, shaking hands braced on her knees. A thin layer of sweat lacquers her forehead even though it’s chilly out, and bile coats her tongue, the acrid smell triggering another round of sickness.

“Shit,” she hears herself moan aloud, temporarily forgetting that she’s not alone until a short bark of a laugh lets her know that Regina is directly behind her.

“Hardly the language of royal princess, now is it?”

“Oh, like you don’t curse enough to make a pirate blush,” Snow grumbles irritatedly, remembering all the f-bombs she’d heard the Queen drop when they miserably traipsed through Neverland.

(Fuck this and fuck that. Fuck you. There’s animal shit on my fucking heels.)

(Emma had also liberally used the word during their time on that awful island, usually in relationship to Regina, “Oh, my fucking God, Regina.”)

“Point taken.”

When she thinks she’s finally done vomiting, she swipes the back of her hand across her mouth and leans against a nearby tree for a moment, closing her eyes against the sudden and total exhaustion of her body. She has vague flashes of her last pregnancy, when her constant morning sickness had pretty much ensured that she was draped over the chamber pot on most sunrises. Poor Charming had tried his best, holding her hair back from her face and brewing tea that he unfailingly neglected to steep long enough.

Bent over a godforsaken bush in a godforsaken forest, Snow misses her husband with a pang—his kind caresses and his soft smiles, his attentive ministrations and his superbly shitty tea. And she wants nothing more than to be in his arms right now, safe in his warm embrace. But then she rather violently remembers that he’s somewhere in these dark and sprawling woods too, lying to her about something or another—hunting, day drinking, cavorting with Robin, his true feelings about their baby. He’s “thrilled,” but the word surely has emphatic quotation marks around it, suffocating the sincerity from it.

“Sorry for delaying us,” she eventually exhales through clenched teeth, breathing heavily. A thoroughly unnecessary apology, but at least it interrupts her silent pity party. “I’ll be able to ride again soon… just need a minute.”

She’s not particularly expecting a response that isn’t a withering quip, but to her wonderment and temporary alarm, she receives one in the form of an intense coldness jolting the back of her neck; Snow hastily opens her eyes to find a damp rag neatly draped over her shoulders like a compress. And perhaps even more shockingly still, she registers that it is Regina who is right beside her—(who else could it possibly be?)—simply staring at her from the depths of inscrutable eyes. There’s no rage in them anymore, no pain, no bitterness, no all-consuming, logic-defying, monomaniacal hatred.

Just a pair of eyes so dark that they’re almost black, the emotion in them indiscernible to Snow for the first time in decades.

It frankly startles her—more than she ever thought it would—not knowing where she stands with the Queen anymore. She quickly rationalizes and half-believes that it’s because that had been her one constant during her bandit days—she’d always known whom she was running from and why she was doing it.

She had told a secret; she had ruined a life.

“Here,” her former stepmother says curtly, extending a wineskin, another unforeseen and comically inappropriate gesture to which Snow can only lift a skeptical brow. “Oh, don’t look so scandalized. It’s water, not Pinot Noir, and you look like you’re nearly about to keel over, so drink.”

Admittedly, it takes a few seconds for Snow’s bewildered brain to put it all together.

The dampened rag.

The water-filled wineskin.

You look like you’re nearly about to keel over.

(Regina’s been paying attention.)

So drink.

(Regina is offering care.)

Her mouth parts in a soft ‘o’ of surprise as she suddenly recognizes, with all the sweeping elegance of an epiphany, that she is surely experiencing the unadulterated kindness of the Queen.

It’s been years now—storied and bloody decades.

There had been a runaway horse.

And then there had been Regina.

“Thanks,” she croaks weakly, accepting the pouch and taking a long swig of the deliciously cold water. After giving it back, she slides the rag from around her shoulders, wipes the sweat from her face, and tries to return it as well.

“Keep it,” Regina firmly shakes her head. “You can wear it while we’re riding. It might offset some of the nausea.“

Numb, still disbelieving, and somewhere beneath it all, exceedingly grateful, Snow dutifully wraps the cloth around her neck again and continues to stare at her former stepmother like she’s seeing a ghost—very specifically the ghost of the young Queen who used to brush the tangles from her unruly hair every morning and sing her lullabies in a quiet, scratchy voice. It was only when the princess spent her nights in the woods desperately evading that same woman that she appreciated those memories from the early days for what they were—Regina resisting evil for as long as she possibly could. Surely, she must have hated her from the very start of her marriage to the King, but Snow knows—she has to believe anyway—that those first few months were not entirely an act.

There was still genuine affection there; there was kindness; and there was the specter of the brave, young woman who didn’t hesitate to save a stranger’s life.

“What?” Regina asks sharply, obviously discomfited from the excess attention.

“Nothing,” Snow murmurs. “It’s just… thank you, Regina. I appreciate it.”

The compliment only serves to vex the older woman even further; she’s never accepted niceness easily, always searching for the bottom line and the inevitable betrayal beneath a smile.

“Don’t misconstrue sheer practicality for anything other than what it is, Snow,” she insists, restlessly shifting her weight from one boot to another. “I couldn’t have you puking on me, now could I? This is a custom tailored coat.”

“If you say so,” she can’t stop herself from grinning, well-aware that she’s just being a little shit at this point.

“I say so,” Regina only sniffs before stomping off back to her horse like an overgrown child in ridiculously high heels. Snow silently giggles into her hand before slowly following, far more versed in knowing what to do with kindness once it’s received than the woman huffing and puffing in front of her.

She cherishes it.

She doesn’t know how to ever let it go.

—

They take the rest of the journey more steadily after this—with Regina’s convenient, emphatic, and unconvincing excuse being that she doesn’t want to overexert the horses—but the princess knows that the adjusted pace is primarily for her benefit, and she’s deeply appreciative of the gesture. She doesn’t think she could have continued at full throttle without getting sick again.

For a while, they’re both quiet, the clopping of horse hooves the only sounds echoing through the skeletal treetops, but Snow has chronically never been one to sit still with the silence for too long, and when they’ve gone about another half-league, she dares to break the implicit spell between them.

“So… Regina—“ She starts, with the vague intention of alluding to something that happened in today’s tumultuous council meeting—(the Queen’s ridiculous proposal, her confrontation with Robin at the table, the pregnancy news that Snow had so inexplicably wanted to be the one to share with Regina herself)—but she’s immediately interrupted.

“And here I thought you could last twenty minutes without pointlessly annoying me,” she drawls, talking loudly over her would-have-been-question.

“Old habits die hard,” she chuckles lightly, not particularly taking offense. “I have a daily annoy Regina quota to fill.”

“Trust me, dear—you’ve reached the maximum threshold already.”

The princess shakes her head rather uselessly at this: the quip, the quipper, this entire unproductive conversation of back-and-forth quipping. Regina seems determined not to look her way—her side profile all haughty arrogance—which leads Snow to suspect that the Queen’s doing everything she can to avoid a remotely serious conversation, that she’s already anticipated it, and this is her favorite tactical evasive maneuver: pure and unadulterated snark.

“You always have a comeback locked and loaded, don’t you?” She asks with a knowing sigh, a gesture that must not be lost on Regina, because she shifts uncomfortably on her black saddle.

“Something to that effect,” comes yet another quip, but the retort sounds less snappy than it does tired, and less tired than it does mechanical, as though she’s just going through the familiar motions of being a certified asshole.

She suddenly thinks about how in their earlier days, Regina would have rather spit fire than been caught with her guard down. (This is the same woman who only betrayed her fear a second before the firing squad had succeeded in shooting her heart clean from her chest after all.) And on the heels of this recollection, she just as immediately recognizes that this is another way her once enemy has so totally changed—or has been changed—by Henry and her perpetual grief for him. She can’t sustain the facade of the Queen like she used to, the armor of her wit and her bravado and her aloofness less cohesive beneath the staggering weight of her pain.

Snow dares to sneak another glance to her side and confirms her intuitions when she notices the unsubtle lines beneath Regina’s eyes, how they’re as vivid as her sharply winged eyeliner but not nearly as gracefully drawn.

With just a little bit of difficulty—meddling is both her preferred way of showing love and her occasional moral failing—she resolves to hold her tongue for once and stop pressing her luck. She decides to be kind to Regina, which in this infinitesimal moment simply means just looking away and pretending that she didn’t notice a blessèd thing: the older woman’s crumbling defenses, her exhaustion, and her visible, aching, indelible, undeniable pain, scrawled across her entire body like calligraphy.

The two of them lapse into heavy silence again as the forest continues to thin out around them on either side of the dirt path, dense trees giving way to tall weeds and rolling plains.

The manor where Regina had once lived is at the southernmost edge of the kingdom, where hills once unfurled like green ribbons in the summertime. Good riding land. A popular location for vineyards. However, the encroaching winter, as well as the lingering effects of the Dark Curse, have largely ravaged the territory, turning lush trees into bleached bones and once verdant undergrowth into brown nothingness—detritus and death and dust.

Snow remembers touring through this part of the kingdom with her father as a child, accompanying him to meetings with important leaders in the Forest. The King had always pointed out the Mills Estate—formally known as the Royal Manor—when they had passed, his brown eyes strangely wistful as he spoke of it.

“So beautiful, she was,” he had once said, and Snow, even at nine years old, had always thought that it was a strange thing to remark about a house, even an undeniably gorgeous one.

(But sometimes, she can sort of admit now, her father was a deeply strange man.)

To her immediate right, the Queen slows her steed to a stop, and Snow follows suit. They’ve reached an intersection where a weathered signpost advertises that the Royal Manor is due north, about another league away.

“When we get there,” Regina suddenly says, gripping her horse’s reins rather tightly, though her tone is deceptively cool, “you’re not to touch anything. I wouldn’t put it past my mother to have practically cursed everything, or to have placed a few general protective spells over the boundaries at the very least.”

“When would she have had the time to do that?” Snow asks, her own voice as skittish as it is curious. She knows it’s hardly her place to even refer to Cora, but Regina thankfully doesn’t acknowledge this tension, only shrugging a jacketed shoulder.

“Sometime after the Dark Curse was broken, I’m presuming,” she replies, “but then there are also the spells she’d already cast long before I married your father—border alerts, security shields, and the occasional nasty hex to deter thieves from penetrating her inner sanctums.”

A brief pause, and Regina smiles flatly, the gesture far from touching her eyes, and Snow passes an inadvertent shudder off as a reaction to the nippy breeze. Everything she has ever learned about Cora has been against her will—all of it shockingly horrible and exceedingly wicked.

“If that sounds dirty, just know that it assuredly is given Mother’s preferred style of play.”

“Ah,” she only says timidly.

There’s nothing else to say to that, really.

At Regina’s lead, they ride past the sign and onto a marginally smoother path than the rock-strewn road before. Snow can see the faint imprints of old carriage tracks gouging the grit and dirt, the only signs of former life that remain in these woods, all so empty and hollow now, mercilessly excavated by the Dark Curse.

Their world was half-destroyed so Storybrooke could be created.

A kingdom for a town.

A not entirely unwarranted restlessness in her fingertips, the broken silence of the trees discomfiting her, Snow quickly works up the nerve to pose another question since Regina finally seems inclined to talk a little.

“Will you be able to detect your mother’s newer traps before they’re sprung?” She smiles anxiously as a particularly dark joke comes to mind. “I don’t think a sleeping curse would be good for the baby...”

It has the potential to be a remarkably sore subject between them given the fact that they’re literally returning to the place where Regina put her under a sleeping curse some three decades ago, but the coolness of the rag around her neck reminds Snow that they’ve moved past that now.

They’re healing.

Regina snorts harshly, immediately understanding the irony, but she takes another few moments to respond, her brow lowered thoughtfully over her eyes.

“There’s no need for alarm,” she eventually says, glancing over at Snow. “All magical practitioners have… mmm, certain quirks which distinguish their magic from others. I’m well-acquainted with my mother’s tells, which will allow me to identify and disarm her interventions before they can leave a nasty impression.”

It’s a genuinely fascinating description of magic, one that makes sense to Snow with her basic, if rather limited understanding that sorcerers’ essences tend to be infused with their capacity to enact certain spells. And for the first time, now that she’s afforded the safety to do so, she idly wonders about Regina’s magic—how it surely differs from her mother’s and Gold’s and Emma’s—but then, before she can dwell on the thought for too long, she feels her former stepmother’s gaze nailing her down again, this time lingering far longer and much more darkly than a cursory appraisal.

“But while we’re on the delicate subject,” Regina continues, her usually composed voice strangely pitched, disbelieving almost, prodding, “perhaps you can enlighten me as to why you’ve subjected yourself to this trip in the first place… Snow, I—”

She only briefly hesitates, biting her boldly painted lip, before articulating her next words with a deliberate and painful slowness.

“… I know my family home doesn’t have the most pleasant memories for you. Because of our history.”

Another measured beat—the Queen smiles bitterly as Snow can do little more than gape.

“Because of me.”

She blinks rapidly, mouth still half-open, frankly struggling to compute that Regina is even alluding to that windy day on the hillside when they had stood over Daniel’s weathered grave together, much less tacking on a genuine admission of culpability to go along with it. It’s not exactly an apology, per se, but it’s acknowledged responsibility, and that alone is extraordinary coming from a woman who spent well over a quarter of a lifetime blaming other people for her own unhappiness.

“But it’s also where you saved my life,” Snow breathes emphatically, nodding towards the sprawling hills around them. Surely, they’re getting close to the spot where this all began, where there was a startled horse, a princess, and her savior—a kind girl, a so perfectly selfless one. “And I haven’t forgotten that, Regina… I never will.”

But for all the sincerity in her voice, for all the gratitude she knows must be shining in her face—unaffected, childlike, and true—the Queen doesn’t seem to relent, her gaze distant, lost in thought, and what Snow uneasily identifies as self-loathing given what she says next.

“Does one good deed outweigh all of the bad, though, Snow? I saved your life once and then tried to kill you twenty dozen times after that—not to mention all of the countless people I hurt, tortured, and murdered for the choice crime of daring to stand in-between us.” Another laugh, harsh and discordant, so darkly amused. “That’s hardly deserving of any accolades.“

“No,” she shakes her head carefully, agreeing on this indisputable point. Regina has blood on her hands, and she always will; the recognition of that brutal fact will be her eternal burden to bear, and that’s not something Snow can take away from her with a rousing speech and a smile, even if she wanted to—and she doesn’t especially want to.

However, that doesn’t mean the princess can’t personally try to forgive her.

Despite everything.

Or maybe even because of everything.

It’s amazing how little difference there is between the two rationales anymore.

“Definitely not… but I’m not one to linger on past mistakes, Regina, not when you’re trying so hard to make things right now…”

The older woman is silent for a long moment after this, seemingly mulling the words over in her head, and Snow doesn’t press her, content to let her work out the earnestness of her good will in her own time and space. It’s something she’s only just really learning about her former stepmother after all these years. Sometimes, Regina needs to be pushed, sure and absolutely. Her particular brand of stubbornness occasionally only responds to stubbornness. But other times, she need the freedom to arrive at the right conclusion on her own without someone breathing down her neck or pulling at all of her delicately arranged strings.

“It’s… what Henry would have wanted,” she finally says, her voice quiet and broken, a hundred emotions thick. Snow’s chest wrenches first at the mention of her grandson and then at the familiar pain she sees reflected in Regina’s swirling eyes.

Loss.

Devastation.

Total and unbearable grief.

She experiences this agony for her daughter and grandson every day, but she differs from Regina; she hopes for a better tomorrow all the same and nonetheless.

“If he could see you right now, he’d be so proud of you,” Snow murmurs as tears form in her own eyes, hanging delicately on her lashes.

“He’s lost to me,” comes a defeated reply.

“But even still, Regina,” she insists softly, and in a reckless impulse, dares to breach the gap between them to place a hand on her former nemesis’s arm. “He’d be so, so proud.”

Regina tenses at the touch, her entire reaction in her face—distrust, unease, lingering guilt, and disbelief—but for all of these visible hesitations, for all these self-evident excuses to isolate herself and silently deal with the pain, she doesn’t immediately pull away.

Snow smiles at her with watery eyes, all kindness, despite everything.

Because of it.

—

Some twenty minutes of Regina-pretending-that-they-didn’t-just-share-an-intimate-moment-and-Snow-generously-accommodating-the-fantasy later, they finally reach the Royal Manor and the unpleasant surprise wrapped around it like a neatly tied bow.

Like the Dark Castle had been upon their arrival, the entire estate is surrounded in a magical, shimmering dome—what she recognizes to be some sort of protection spell—but while Zelena’s force field had been virtually transparent, Cora’s is the exact shade of blood.

Unsubtle.

The woman always was.

However, what’s truly disorienting is that beyond the violently tinted bubble, Snow can tell that Cora’s magic was powerful enough to preserve the entire manor—as well as the surrounding hills—from the effects of Regina’s curse. The grass is green and lush behind the wall, the stately manor perfectly untouched by the inevitable grind of time and dark magic.

Frowning deeply, Regina dismounts Lucan and ties him to a tree before approaching the dome. Snow, still on Zephyr, watches with a kind of horrified fascination as the witch delicately probes the barrier with her index and middle fingers before nodding once in immediate understanding.

“Oh, Mother,” she murmurs, her voice low and contemplative, almost… nostalgic even. Snow’s stomach clenches in inexplicable foreboding. “You never changed, did you?”

“What?” She asks as she dismounts Zephyr, securing him to a tree with a reliable knot. As quickly as her numb legs will allow, she hurries to Regina’s side. “What’d she do?”

“A blood lock,” Regina replies without looking at her, touching the force field again. It seems to sizzle upon contact, though the Queen’s fingers come back unscathed. “I can get through because I’m her daughter…”

Snow scrutinizes her skeptically, hearing an implicit but in the good news.

“I have a feeling there’s something you’re not telling me here.”

“Nothing significant,” the Queen sighs rather sharply, and the gesture seems to sieve the remaining dreaminess from her demeanor. She squares her shoulders and passes a hand over the crown of her head, smoothing her windswept hair. “Just that I’ll have to pay a tribute to bypass the lock. One of my mother’s tells is that her magic tends to exact a precise and pedantic payment.”

“Gold always says that magic comes with a price…” Snow listens to herself mumble, suddenly recalling Rumplestiltskin’s oft-repeated refrain. Funnily enough, he didn’t say it to her when he was persuading her to kill Cora. Perhaps the price was already implicit to him—maybe even worth paying—her heart’s purity for another’s life.

“Yes,” Regina smiles grimly, “and my mother took that particular lesson to heart when she began to invent her own spells.”

I bet she did, the princess just barely refrains from saying.

She doesn’t think it would help.

“Anyway, we’ll water the horses and leave them here... I can only get the two of us through at one time.” The Queen pauses again and gives Snow another appraising once over, perhaps seeing something about herself that she can’t because she adds, “Take a minute to refresh, too, if you’d like. The wineskin is in my saddlebag.”

And with that, she heels away to conjure metallic troughs for both of the horses before calling over her shoulder that she’ll be back shortly; she’s just going to a nearby spring to fill them.

“Be safe,” Snow murmurs unnecessarily, more than a little on edge now that she can see the stable where Daniel had apparently died in the reddened distance. She imagines that the memory must be weighing on Regina’s mind, too, because she looks paler than usual, the skin around her eyes tightly drawn.

“Mmm,” she hums somewhat disdainfully—as is the Regina way—and heads off into the thicket, levitating the bins behind her with a dramatic swish of her hand.

In the meantime, Snow places her bow and quiver against a tree and takes Regina up on her offer, retrieving the wineskin and upturning it a little greedily, the coolness of the water soothing the column of her slightly parched throat. She also replaces the now-dry rag with the Queen’s things, folding it neatly on top of… an incredibly intricate onyx dagger, the pommel embedded with a blue diamond that’s nearly the same size as her thumb. She shivers at the mere sight of it, wondering what Regina could possibly need it for since she uses her magic to simulate any tool or weapon she requires at the moment. But ultimately—with all the new restraint she’s been trying to exercise towards her former stepmother today—she reluctantly represses her curiosity and closes the black saddlebag before wandering off a little ways to find a fallen log to sit upon while she waits.

Her sore legs appreciate being able to stretch out, and her not entirely settled stomach revels in the momentary reprieve from strenuous movement too. Maybe Regina looked at her a few moments ago and clearly saw exhaustion, the toll she’s been attempting to ignore for the better part of two hours now. She places a hand on her belly and silently apologizes to the little life inside of her for riding so roughly. In the coming months, she’ll have to be more careful about paying attention to the changing reality of her body, a task that both scares and enthralls her out of its sheer and painful novelty. With her last pregnancy, she’d been so worried about what the Evil Queen was planning to do that she hadn’t really given herself much energy to feel any particular emotion about her pregnancy besides a general sense of doom. But now, working alongside Regina instead of against her, living in a relatively stable home with her loving husband, and occasionally sorting through the last of her emotional hangups with Hopper, she supposes that there’s breathing room enough at last for her to actually enjoy her pregnancy—and then, in roughly eight months to the date, motherhood itself.

But this is yet another thought that produces conflicting emotions in her—her tentative happiness of getting a second chance to do right by a child is always mercilessly undone by the searing guilt that remains from so bitterly failing her first one. Even after all the time she had spent with Emma in Storybrooke, the Enchanted Forest, and Neverland—trying to make up for a lifetime of ruinous absence—it never seemed to be enough. A hard life had scarred her daughter, and while she grew to love her parents… there was always a lingering distrust in her eyes that firmly suggested her inability to believe that a happy ending could last forever. She could only call them Mom and Dad when she thought they were at the goddamn end of the line.

And Snow, wide-eyed with dawning horror, wonders if this is precisely what is bothering her husband, a man who cherishes his belief in family and love as strongly as she does, but who believes in self-sacrifice and abnegation as the dual correctives to any external obstacles. He largely blames himself when things go wrong, and he hardly admits to doing so—shame his greatest motivator, fear, and simultaneous weakness.

The longer she thinks on it, the more she’s convinced that her supposition is true, and with this increasing conviction comes a certain nausea that has nothing to do with her pregnancy. She presses the flats of her palms hard over her eyes and wills the revulsion in her stomach to go away, but the sickness and the guilt remain, gnawing at her where she sits, all vicious and exacting teeth.

“Snow?”

She straightens to attention at the approaching sound of Regina’s voice and hastily uncovers her eyes just in time to catch the older woman emerging from the opposite tree line, levitating the now-filled troughs behind her. With another flick of her hand, she sends them floating towards each of the horses, where they land with gentle, sloshing thuds. It disconcerts Snow and simultaneously touches her when her former stepmother legs over to her quickly afterwards, hell on high heels, something like alarm brightening her black eyes.

(Regina’s paying attention.)

“What’s wrong?” She demands imperiously, glancing downwards at her stomach. “Are you still sick? Hurt?”

(Regina is offering care.)

“No, no,” she shakes her head dramatically, not particularly wanting to appear weak in front of the Queen. (Old habit. From her childhood days of idolizing the woman or her more jaded bandit ones of running away from her, she’s not really sure.) “Just a little tired… that’s all.”

It’s not the most believable lie she’s ever told, and Snow’s never exactly been good at lying in the first place; quite unsurprisingly, she’s met with an arched brow of exceptionally practiced skepticism.

“Maybe you should stay here with the horses then? Rest. It shouldn’t take me too long to—“

“No,” Snow says again, this time rather fiercely, standing up with a swiftness that nearly makes her stomach revolt. She works her mouth into a harsh smile all the same and resists the instinctive urge to place a soothing hand over her belly. “I’m coming with you.”

“Charming wouldn’t be happy if he knew you were sick.” Regina shakes her head, still scrutinizing her with those eyes that have always been able to pierce her through so intimately, like a knife sliding through butter. She was twelve, and it had been the Queen who had realized that she was embarrassed because she had just gotten her period. (One of the last good memories—Regina had sent all of the chamber maids away and helped her into a warm bath.) She was sixteen, and Regina had spotted the hickey from Prince Svein of the Southern Isles that her adoring father had not. (One of the first bad memories—Regina had dragged her to Johanna, practically by the hood of her cloak, and told her to deal with it. She didn’t have time for Snow’s foolishness.) She was twenty-seven, and the Evil Queen delineated how it was all explicitly her fault as they stood over the grave of an innocent stable boy. (It was the first time that Snow had ever looked into her former stepmother’s eyes and understood her—all the pain she had kept inside for all those years that she had been her father’s quiet and regal queen. She ripped his heart out—because of you.)

“I’m not sick,” she insists—very much and overwhelmingly nauseous. “And what Charming doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

She knows it’s a slip before the sentence has fully left her mouth, can see it in the way that Regina’s brows launch upwards in clear and momentarily unguarded surprise.

Dammit—

“Well, well, look at you!” The Queen laughs explosively, recovering from her shock with all the glee of a child on Christmas morning. “Being all deceptive. I didn’t think I had it in you, especially when it came to your blue-eyed Ken doll… trouble in paradise, perhaps? A little marital strife to spice up the bedroom?”

Snow bristles at the insinuation, mostly because she’s right. Gods, she can be so annoying sometimes. Often. Nine times out of ten. Her cheeks feathered red, her pride most certainly wounded, she determinedly moves past Regina and her stupidly perceptive eyes all the same, heading back towards the dome. She retrieves her quiver and bow from the tree she’d leaned them against along them way and slings them both over her shoulder angrily. The telltale clicks of Regina’s heels trail behind her, punctuating the ground with what can only be an insolence specifically designed to piss her off.

“Shut up, Regina, and just get us through the dome.”

“Oh, I quite like this Snow White. She’s got some teeth.”

“Regina, I swear to the gods—“

“Loosen your corset, dear—I’m coming. I’ve had my modicum of fun.”

Still smirking like an asshole and clearly reveling in being one, the Queen saunters ahead of Snow to the very edge of the dome, her maroon coat flaring behind her in the wind. With an elegant whirl of her left hand, she procures something out of thin air that the purple smoke gently drops onto her palm.

The onyx dagger, its diamond hilt gleaming coldly in the gray light of day.

“What’s that for?” Snow asks breathlessly, trepidation immediately quashing the worst of her annoyance. She watches, with a tightened throat, as the Queen slowly turns the blade over in her hand, staring at it with a kind of hypnotic fascination, the steel edge audibly scraping against her supple skin.

“An inheritance from my mother,” she replies detachedly, her recent mirth draining from her face, soon to just be a distant memory like all the rest of Regina’s smiles. “So many spells and potions require a witch’s own blood… it’s perhaps the most powerful binding element there is…”

Snow puts the pieces together immediately: the blood lock, magic always coming with a price, Cora’s signature tells.

Precise and pedantic payments.

“You have to cut yourself,” she breathes, suddenly feeling more sick—if that’s even humanly possibly—as her eyes dart from the Queen to the malevolently shimmering barrier inches away from her pale face.

Of course, Cora would devise such a twisted method of proving relation; of course it would have to hurt.

“A tribute,” Regina echoes herself coldly as she removes the glove on her right hand, stuffing it into the pocket of her riding coat. “Advantage always comes at the expense of a little bit of pain. That was her favorite philosophy anyway.”

“Regina, you don’t have to do this,“ she tries urgently, suddenly wishing that she’d thrown the dagger far into the woods when she’d first seen it. She would have, without the slightest degree of hesitation, had she known whose flesh it would be running through. “There’s got to be another—“

But before she can finish protesting, there’s a glint of black steel as it snarls through the air, and then, before the horror of the moment has fully coagulated in Snow’s throat, there’s a thick line of crimson appearing across Regina’s palm, dripping profusely. She doesn’t even flinch, only regards the newly inflicted wound with a kind of indifference that can only come from experience with this sort of injury.

Like it happens all the time.

And it kind of does in the Enchanted Forest.

To Regina.

So careless, convinced that she’s doomed.

“You’ll have to hold my hand,” she tells Snow, extending her reddened fingertips with a cold smile, “so Mother will know we’re together.”

“Regina—“ She whispers, her voice hoarse with the awfulness of it all: the family dagger, the brutally clinical cut, the blood spiraling around the Queen’s slender wrist like an incriminating cuff, but she only receives an exasperated shake of the head in return.

“It’s done, Snow—live with it, and grab my hand before my sleeve gets stained.”

And so she does, swallowing hard, intertwining her trembling fingers with Regina’s, revolted and undone, wondering how a mother could ever be so cruel.

How could she hurt her own child like that?

She would never—

(—but hadn’t she?)

(Hadn’t she hurt Emma?)

(Unintentionally, but still—)

(She’s always been a failure, and she’ll never be a good mother. She wasn’t to Emma, and how could she ever be to another—)

Regina’s blood is slick against her skin.

#snow white #regina mills #snow queen #once upon a time #ouat #s: ouat #reginianwrites #this was only supposed to be 2 parts but then i got so invested in writing dialogue ohms god #cw: vomit #cw: parental abuse #cw: light gore

3 notes · View notes