fic: again, the fall (once upon a time)
gen, pg-13, ~2900
warnings for graphic child abuse
Once, an apple tree grows in the shadow of a tower.
Before, offered an escape in a moment of mocking pity, the old woman instead says: “I wanted a child.”
“You have had one,” and before the words are done, she is shaking, what’s left of her power rolling inside her with quiet rage.
“I told you I wanted one like me,” she spits at him, and her own garden taunts her from so far below as her belly devours itself, as the sky promises her an escape through the single window.
After a heartbeat, voice amused: “Maybe you can try again next time,” and he is gone with the heavy ropes of shining hair wrapped around his arm, a trophy a lifetime in the making, her power stolen away.
After, her flesh slips from her bones too slowly when she crawls through the gap in the stone to escape the constant hunger, and she rages even then inside the earth.
Once, an apple tree grows in the shadow of a tower.
When the husband first notices it foraging for food for himself and his wife, the sun is shining so that the light illuminates the overgrown disarray that must have once been someone’s garden. Fruits and vegetables are scattered, herbs spotting through the weeds, and yet he only stares at the apple tree that sits in the shadows for too many minutes as he forces himself to start to search the greenery.
It sits in the dark, leaves nearly black but the skin of the red fruit startlingly bright.
The tower stretches into the heavens above it, and if there’s a door to the top he cannot see it from where he is crouched into the dirt, digging and searching for the best that he can find. The only break in the weathered stone is the small window at the top, a tiny opening so high up it makes him nervous.
He thinks, vague and half-aware, that the apple tree sits beneath the window.
And the fruit is beautiful, and he does not know why he does not simply grab several, it would not be-
Then the husband thinks of his wife and finally manages to pull his attention away, focus on his work.
Because there are lettuce and potatoes ripe for the taking, carrots and radishes and onions and the more he searches the more he finds, and there’s so much food there’s too much for him to gather the first time.
And so he takes this first batch home to his too-thin wife with a last lingering glance back.
The leaves of the tree tremble, silently, and he does not feel a breeze.
The wife says, the first time she sniffs at a carrot: “They smell rotten.”
“They’re perfect,” he returns as he studies the vegetable in her hand, and it truly is perfect, all of the food is perfect, and the skin of the carrot feels warm under his fingers as he reaches to push it harder into her hands. “I’ve never seen such perfect food even at the markets when I was a boy.”
“But it smells awful,” she insists and her cheeks are beginning to sink in, and he can feel her ribs beneath his hands when they curl together in the night beneath his father’s old covers.
His wife is as thin as he and he thinks, as always, that she would not be so thin if she had not chosen him.
That she might have married the man chosen by her father instead of the peasant and that she might have loved him, and he thinks, an odd ache inside him that he will not voice, that the other man might have given her a child, she wants one so. He has lost count of how often she’s told him that she knows that their daughter will one day be as loyal as him and as determined as herself.
But they are already not as young as they had been years before, and there has been no child.
“I brought it home for you,” he says in a moment of emotion he cannot control, the bitterness simmering inside him where he wishes she had married the other and does not go hungry, and she breathes out.
Turns away and begins to tend the cooking fire, leaning back into him with a smile when he moves forward to press his lips to her hair, squeeze her shoulders in a moment of relief that dies all too suddenly a heartbeat later.
Her bones are sharp beneath his hands.
The stew she makes the first night he brings her the food from the abandoned garden beneath the tower is perfect, the best the husband has ever had in his life, but the wife gags the first few times she tries to eat it.
She finally manages a little with his help and then rubs away the lines wrinkling his brow and begins to feast by herself without any problem- and then eats all of what he doesn’t.
“So good,” she sighs as she finishes and is still sliding one finger around the inside of her bowl for more.
When she sleeps that night, her breathing is odd and too noisy, an old woman’s instead of her own.
But when he wakes early the next morning, she is already cooking up much of what he’d brought back with him yesterday; before the day is out, she has sent him back for more.
She devours all he brings her, and then sends him out for more.
The apple tree trembles in the shadows of the tower where the light does not reach, and he does not let his hand reach to pull the blood-red fruit from the leaves.
The third day he returns, she whines like an animal, “it’s not enough” and turns back to her cooking.
“I’m starving,” she screams at him the sixth night, and smashes everything around her as he tries to comfort her, attempts to cradle her body against his. But she screams and cries, twists like a wild animal in his hands, and weeps that she will die if he does not bring her more.
And her skin feels fevered under his palms, her form trembling so violently it may shake apart and after so many hours, he breaks.
That night as she cries and claws at her dress around her middle, the husband steps warily over the crumbled remains of the wall and gathers more of the abandoned garden’s contents into his sacks, eyes drifting again and again to the tree.
His wife has gone mad, some small distant part is aware with aching calmness, but the rest of him rebels so viciously that he makes it not true as he works- and by the time he has crept to stand closer to the tree, he is somehow sure that this is what his wife needs, that he must bring her everything that he can find.
A part of him thinks of how he has seen nor heard any sign of any bird or squirrel or rabbit here.
But his wife waits, and he knows that she is screaming in the small hut that is all he can give her, he can almost hear her-
His fingers curve around the skin of the apple, and he feels the flesh inside, so impossibly tender.
The stem breaks neatly before he even pulls to remove it from the tree.
His wife devours all what he brings her, and hums, low and soft and satisfied, when she finds the apple.
“I have never tasted anything so sweet,” she murmurs as she cleans all of the flesh from the core with her teeth like a lazy cat, and the skin around her eyes is pulled oddly, seems unfamiliar in the firelight.
But his wife smiles at him then, for a moment as beautiful as she had been when she had caught his eye from her father’s carriage a dozen years before, and Henry allows himself to be satisfied.
In the nights, his wife’s breathing is slow and ragged, and he listens to her in the dark.
She no longer tucks her cold feet between his legs in her sleep.
Her smile is closer to a line now than a smile, and her walk is more of a lazy sway, no longer the easy stride that had set her apart from the other young women she had been raised with in her uncle’s court. Her ribs are disappearing back beneath her flesh, her arms are again strong, and she sends him out every three days for more food from the tower’s shadow-filled garden.
The garden is always abundant and his wife devours it all- and will not allow him even a taste of the apples. And if there is a flicker of fright that looks like her again the one time he nearly tries a bite he is too rattled by the way she strikes at him and knocks it from his hands.
“It’s not for you,” she half-shrieks and the hair raises along the back of his neck so that he slips away.
His wife announces her pregnancy only days later, and he is too grateful that she will finally have her child to be afraid of the new pitch of her voice, of the new way she pulls her dark hair back from her face every morning after so many years of cutting it short.
It’s past her shoulders now.
The tree is ever fruitful, and his wife has not gone hungry in many months.
“Regina,” his wife says as she gazes down at the baby, and that is the little one’s name.
Their daughter is born in the middle of the night, and does not have blue eyes.
Her eyes are brown instead, bright-dark and brilliant as Henry stares down at her from the best angle he can manage since she has not been offered to him and he will not ask, knows better than to ask.
Regina is frowning slightly in her mother’s arms as he studies her small face, beginning to fuss slightly, and then fusses more when put on the breast- and then his wife pinches her sudden and firm on one round cheek, and the baby cries for a moment and then begins to feed.
“Obedient already,” is the quiet pleased sigh beneath his wife’s breath, and then all is silent.
Henry swallows his tongue, and watches over his wife.
Regina grows ill constantly, is at times frighteningly small in his arms, but she always recovers.
By the time she is two, she has already stopped the curious babbling that he had begun to enjoy so much and she is preoccupied with the world around her, watches it with brilliant dark eyes and shifts when her mother is close, nervous like a dog when her father is preparing to go for more from the garden.
At four, Regina shrugs off her father’s attempts at coddling, and grows furious when he tries to hold her.
Six, and she is sleeping on a mat at the foot of her mother’s bed instead of in the one he had made her.
“She stays with me,” his wife informs him the one time he brings it up, and he breaks the little bed down without another word.
Henry uses it for firewood, to keep his wife and daughter warm through the night.
Regina is eight when she grows tired of the pinching of her flesh, of the tugging and yanking of her hair.
In a fit of sudden fury, so frighteningly small for her age despite the meals her mother makes her that she eats like a starved animal, never satisfied and never full, she flings herself at her mother one morning.
She screams and she snarls, and Henry pulls her off in a panic, drops her away to pull his wife to her feet, to check her, to make sure she is well-
Blood streaks her face, jaw swelling already, and her eyes are shining as she pushes past him to rush after the fleeing girl. She drags the girl back after so many hours, and Henry sits quiet for all of them, and then leaves the house when his wife carries her daughter into the bedroom like a sack of potatoes.
Regina sleeps outside the front door of the small hut for the next three nights until she comes to sit on her mother’s knee with a mantra of apologies and promises to do as she is told, submits to her mother combing her hair into the tight braid down her back and feeding her carrots and peas and potatoes.
Henry feels the weight of Regina’s quiet gaze as he checks the fire once and again and again.
He tries to make the house as nice as possible, spends hours every day finding firewood and cleaning the area around the small home he and his wife had built together, and his daughter does not leave the house.
Regina is always hungry, her face a shade too thin no matter how much she eats.
Regina’s torment is constant and quiet, and she endures it silently now, eyes heated but mouth shut.
A spoonful of hot potatoes against her neck when she defends her own cooking, hair ripped from her scalp when her mother combs her hair out every night and every morning, the angry dark marks spotting along her arms that follow her mother's fingers through the long hours of her day.
She sleeps on the mat at her mother’s feet still, and when his wife drifts to sleep, Henry drapes a blanket over her, crouches beside her curled body in the silent darkness broken only by his wife’s rattling breaths.
Sometimes, weak, Henry touches her hair until she silently moves out from beneath his hand.
When she rolls away, a quiet dismissal, he leaves her be.
Eleven, and Regina’s hair is a rope of black down her spine that she is too afraid to cut.
So she defiantly loops it up under a strip of old dark cloth through the day, and it is all her mother allows.
“We can go,” she says, only once, and she is not looking at him, her expression unhappy as Henry checks the fire once and then twice restlessly, as her mother takes the nap she takes every day without fail.
“Your mother needs us.”
Regina says nothing, and when he glances back in a moment of weakness, she is staring at him.
Contempt and something else simmers in her eyes, and then she turns away, returns to her cooking.
A small girl standing as tall as a queen.
There is screaming only a month before Regina turns thirteen, and blood is streaking down her chin when she smashes into him as he rushes into the house from outside, this sound breaking his restraint.
Her upper lip has been torn open, and she’s holding her favorite carving knife, blade held high with one strong arm as her mother watches her quietly from the bedroom doorway, once-brown eyes impossibly dark. Regina looks wild and it takes him a moment to understand why his mind stumbles over her image, to completely understand the dark clumps spotting the floor between them.
The windows are rattling, and the fire is whining, popping.
“What- what did you do?”
“We’re going,” his daughter informs him, and it’s a flat snarl like a savage dog, short and steady as his wife ignores him, merely watching Regina with some mixture of amusement and something close to fear. She seems unsure for the first time since he had found the garden, and he is torn.
His daughter bleeds.
His wife- his wife may be injured, may need him.
“What did you do?” he begs, and then does not know who he is asking.
“She will not touch me again,” is all Regina answers, and finally looks at him, eyes darting to him for a heartbeat before they snap back to her mother, her fingers flexing with disconcerting skill around the handle of the knife. “Her or me, I don’t care, she will not touch me again-”
Then her voice trembles for a moment, and she shuts her mouth with a shudder, draws herself straight.
“Regina-” And his heart is weak and too heavy, and he is tired of all things. “Regina-”
He turns, eyes searching for his wife, and his daughter moves in a blur of movement, back turning on her mother as she steps too close, small body radiating heat, frighteningly tall as he gazes down at her, frozen.
His daughter stares at him, a firm shape between himself and his wife, and her eyes are wide and wet.
“We can go,” she says, and her voice is damp, and he can see a bruise forming across the cheek above the torn flesh of her upper lip, aches with the truth that there is not blood on the knife, only black tendrils of hair stuck in the rough spots of the old blade in her hand where Regina had cut the braid from her skull. “We can start over-” a short ragged breath, Regina’s voice wavering, desperate, “we can have a new life.”
Past her shoulder, he has a glimpse of his wife watching him, and her face is familiar for a moment, soft-eyed for a heartbeat, lips pulled back in agony-
A shifting beneath skin, and she is staring at him with narrowed eyes, a quiet challenge-
Regina jerks around, short hair looking soft and almost gold in the firelight, and his wife falls back into the shadows of the bedroom, and he can hear her breathing shift to something ragged, heavy with age as she hides herself.
And then Henry is shoved, and the power behind the silent order is sure, and then Regina is dragging him like a child.
The night air that had been warm moments before is now cold as he’s dragged behind her for so many minutes and then, finally, stumbles into his own clumsy movement, legs carrying him to the edge of the forest and then beyond.
Regina falls easily a few steps behind him, a shepherd driving him forward, and they hurry through the night.
Henry thinks, once, before he crushes the thought, that he does not know the way home-
And Regina is sure, and Henry is already following.
-
notes: base fairy tale here belongs to the story of rapunzel. and i blame the moment of inspiration on my fascination with the difference in how regina wears her hair, re: in happily ever after as opposed to how she wears it in storybrooke.
while i'm open to any well-done ideas re: the evil queen's backstory, the idea of regina as the miller's daughter from the rumpelstiltskin tale makes no sense at all to me, not unless they're fantastic writers and, gotta be honest, seeing no real sign of that yet. the biggest lead-on for that, though, would be rumpie's little name drop and her last name in storybrooke. so i'm sadly pretty sure this is what they're going to pull. on the other hand, mills could just as easily be derived from the greek word for "apple," which would be, ta da, "milo." (i could go with the rumpie background, btw, if she's DESCENDED from that miller's daughter bloodline and that rumpie is back for revenge decades later since 1) he does have the gift of foresight and 2) not only does he get regina's kid but, also, lolol, snow white and prince charming's grandson. that's how i could buy it, but im not holding my breath after so many years of abc's awful writing.)
some of regina's dialogue to gretel was rather telling, i think, and i do think that a young regina would have been very like that girl, minus one very important thing: the kind of emotional connection offered by a sibling. also interesting? not just the way regina often treated her father but also her line in 1x02 when he steps up to speak to her after her first spell fails. 'oh, you're trying to protect me now?' why so bitter about him protecting you by speaking up after the fact, regina?
warnings for graphic child abuse
Once, an apple tree grows in the shadow of a tower.
Before, offered an escape in a moment of mocking pity, the old woman instead says: “I wanted a child.”
“You have had one,” and before the words are done, she is shaking, what’s left of her power rolling inside her with quiet rage.
“I told you I wanted one like me,” she spits at him, and her own garden taunts her from so far below as her belly devours itself, as the sky promises her an escape through the single window.
After a heartbeat, voice amused: “Maybe you can try again next time,” and he is gone with the heavy ropes of shining hair wrapped around his arm, a trophy a lifetime in the making, her power stolen away.
After, her flesh slips from her bones too slowly when she crawls through the gap in the stone to escape the constant hunger, and she rages even then inside the earth.
Once, an apple tree grows in the shadow of a tower.
When the husband first notices it foraging for food for himself and his wife, the sun is shining so that the light illuminates the overgrown disarray that must have once been someone’s garden. Fruits and vegetables are scattered, herbs spotting through the weeds, and yet he only stares at the apple tree that sits in the shadows for too many minutes as he forces himself to start to search the greenery.
It sits in the dark, leaves nearly black but the skin of the red fruit startlingly bright.
The tower stretches into the heavens above it, and if there’s a door to the top he cannot see it from where he is crouched into the dirt, digging and searching for the best that he can find. The only break in the weathered stone is the small window at the top, a tiny opening so high up it makes him nervous.
He thinks, vague and half-aware, that the apple tree sits beneath the window.
And the fruit is beautiful, and he does not know why he does not simply grab several, it would not be-
Then the husband thinks of his wife and finally manages to pull his attention away, focus on his work.
Because there are lettuce and potatoes ripe for the taking, carrots and radishes and onions and the more he searches the more he finds, and there’s so much food there’s too much for him to gather the first time.
And so he takes this first batch home to his too-thin wife with a last lingering glance back.
The leaves of the tree tremble, silently, and he does not feel a breeze.
The wife says, the first time she sniffs at a carrot: “They smell rotten.”
“They’re perfect,” he returns as he studies the vegetable in her hand, and it truly is perfect, all of the food is perfect, and the skin of the carrot feels warm under his fingers as he reaches to push it harder into her hands. “I’ve never seen such perfect food even at the markets when I was a boy.”
“But it smells awful,” she insists and her cheeks are beginning to sink in, and he can feel her ribs beneath his hands when they curl together in the night beneath his father’s old covers.
His wife is as thin as he and he thinks, as always, that she would not be so thin if she had not chosen him.
That she might have married the man chosen by her father instead of the peasant and that she might have loved him, and he thinks, an odd ache inside him that he will not voice, that the other man might have given her a child, she wants one so. He has lost count of how often she’s told him that she knows that their daughter will one day be as loyal as him and as determined as herself.
But they are already not as young as they had been years before, and there has been no child.
“I brought it home for you,” he says in a moment of emotion he cannot control, the bitterness simmering inside him where he wishes she had married the other and does not go hungry, and she breathes out.
Turns away and begins to tend the cooking fire, leaning back into him with a smile when he moves forward to press his lips to her hair, squeeze her shoulders in a moment of relief that dies all too suddenly a heartbeat later.
Her bones are sharp beneath his hands.
The stew she makes the first night he brings her the food from the abandoned garden beneath the tower is perfect, the best the husband has ever had in his life, but the wife gags the first few times she tries to eat it.
She finally manages a little with his help and then rubs away the lines wrinkling his brow and begins to feast by herself without any problem- and then eats all of what he doesn’t.
“So good,” she sighs as she finishes and is still sliding one finger around the inside of her bowl for more.
When she sleeps that night, her breathing is odd and too noisy, an old woman’s instead of her own.
But when he wakes early the next morning, she is already cooking up much of what he’d brought back with him yesterday; before the day is out, she has sent him back for more.
She devours all he brings her, and then sends him out for more.
The apple tree trembles in the shadows of the tower where the light does not reach, and he does not let his hand reach to pull the blood-red fruit from the leaves.
The third day he returns, she whines like an animal, “it’s not enough” and turns back to her cooking.
“I’m starving,” she screams at him the sixth night, and smashes everything around her as he tries to comfort her, attempts to cradle her body against his. But she screams and cries, twists like a wild animal in his hands, and weeps that she will die if he does not bring her more.
And her skin feels fevered under his palms, her form trembling so violently it may shake apart and after so many hours, he breaks.
That night as she cries and claws at her dress around her middle, the husband steps warily over the crumbled remains of the wall and gathers more of the abandoned garden’s contents into his sacks, eyes drifting again and again to the tree.
His wife has gone mad, some small distant part is aware with aching calmness, but the rest of him rebels so viciously that he makes it not true as he works- and by the time he has crept to stand closer to the tree, he is somehow sure that this is what his wife needs, that he must bring her everything that he can find.
A part of him thinks of how he has seen nor heard any sign of any bird or squirrel or rabbit here.
But his wife waits, and he knows that she is screaming in the small hut that is all he can give her, he can almost hear her-
His fingers curve around the skin of the apple, and he feels the flesh inside, so impossibly tender.
The stem breaks neatly before he even pulls to remove it from the tree.
His wife devours all what he brings her, and hums, low and soft and satisfied, when she finds the apple.
“I have never tasted anything so sweet,” she murmurs as she cleans all of the flesh from the core with her teeth like a lazy cat, and the skin around her eyes is pulled oddly, seems unfamiliar in the firelight.
But his wife smiles at him then, for a moment as beautiful as she had been when she had caught his eye from her father’s carriage a dozen years before, and Henry allows himself to be satisfied.
In the nights, his wife’s breathing is slow and ragged, and he listens to her in the dark.
She no longer tucks her cold feet between his legs in her sleep.
Her smile is closer to a line now than a smile, and her walk is more of a lazy sway, no longer the easy stride that had set her apart from the other young women she had been raised with in her uncle’s court. Her ribs are disappearing back beneath her flesh, her arms are again strong, and she sends him out every three days for more food from the tower’s shadow-filled garden.
The garden is always abundant and his wife devours it all- and will not allow him even a taste of the apples. And if there is a flicker of fright that looks like her again the one time he nearly tries a bite he is too rattled by the way she strikes at him and knocks it from his hands.
“It’s not for you,” she half-shrieks and the hair raises along the back of his neck so that he slips away.
His wife announces her pregnancy only days later, and he is too grateful that she will finally have her child to be afraid of the new pitch of her voice, of the new way she pulls her dark hair back from her face every morning after so many years of cutting it short.
It’s past her shoulders now.
The tree is ever fruitful, and his wife has not gone hungry in many months.
“Regina,” his wife says as she gazes down at the baby, and that is the little one’s name.
Their daughter is born in the middle of the night, and does not have blue eyes.
Her eyes are brown instead, bright-dark and brilliant as Henry stares down at her from the best angle he can manage since she has not been offered to him and he will not ask, knows better than to ask.
Regina is frowning slightly in her mother’s arms as he studies her small face, beginning to fuss slightly, and then fusses more when put on the breast- and then his wife pinches her sudden and firm on one round cheek, and the baby cries for a moment and then begins to feed.
“Obedient already,” is the quiet pleased sigh beneath his wife’s breath, and then all is silent.
Henry swallows his tongue, and watches over his wife.
Regina grows ill constantly, is at times frighteningly small in his arms, but she always recovers.
By the time she is two, she has already stopped the curious babbling that he had begun to enjoy so much and she is preoccupied with the world around her, watches it with brilliant dark eyes and shifts when her mother is close, nervous like a dog when her father is preparing to go for more from the garden.
At four, Regina shrugs off her father’s attempts at coddling, and grows furious when he tries to hold her.
Six, and she is sleeping on a mat at the foot of her mother’s bed instead of in the one he had made her.
“She stays with me,” his wife informs him the one time he brings it up, and he breaks the little bed down without another word.
Henry uses it for firewood, to keep his wife and daughter warm through the night.
Regina is eight when she grows tired of the pinching of her flesh, of the tugging and yanking of her hair.
In a fit of sudden fury, so frighteningly small for her age despite the meals her mother makes her that she eats like a starved animal, never satisfied and never full, she flings herself at her mother one morning.
She screams and she snarls, and Henry pulls her off in a panic, drops her away to pull his wife to her feet, to check her, to make sure she is well-
Blood streaks her face, jaw swelling already, and her eyes are shining as she pushes past him to rush after the fleeing girl. She drags the girl back after so many hours, and Henry sits quiet for all of them, and then leaves the house when his wife carries her daughter into the bedroom like a sack of potatoes.
Regina sleeps outside the front door of the small hut for the next three nights until she comes to sit on her mother’s knee with a mantra of apologies and promises to do as she is told, submits to her mother combing her hair into the tight braid down her back and feeding her carrots and peas and potatoes.
Henry feels the weight of Regina’s quiet gaze as he checks the fire once and again and again.
He tries to make the house as nice as possible, spends hours every day finding firewood and cleaning the area around the small home he and his wife had built together, and his daughter does not leave the house.
Regina is always hungry, her face a shade too thin no matter how much she eats.
Regina’s torment is constant and quiet, and she endures it silently now, eyes heated but mouth shut.
A spoonful of hot potatoes against her neck when she defends her own cooking, hair ripped from her scalp when her mother combs her hair out every night and every morning, the angry dark marks spotting along her arms that follow her mother's fingers through the long hours of her day.
She sleeps on the mat at her mother’s feet still, and when his wife drifts to sleep, Henry drapes a blanket over her, crouches beside her curled body in the silent darkness broken only by his wife’s rattling breaths.
Sometimes, weak, Henry touches her hair until she silently moves out from beneath his hand.
When she rolls away, a quiet dismissal, he leaves her be.
Eleven, and Regina’s hair is a rope of black down her spine that she is too afraid to cut.
So she defiantly loops it up under a strip of old dark cloth through the day, and it is all her mother allows.
“We can go,” she says, only once, and she is not looking at him, her expression unhappy as Henry checks the fire once and then twice restlessly, as her mother takes the nap she takes every day without fail.
“Your mother needs us.”
Regina says nothing, and when he glances back in a moment of weakness, she is staring at him.
Contempt and something else simmers in her eyes, and then she turns away, returns to her cooking.
A small girl standing as tall as a queen.
There is screaming only a month before Regina turns thirteen, and blood is streaking down her chin when she smashes into him as he rushes into the house from outside, this sound breaking his restraint.
Her upper lip has been torn open, and she’s holding her favorite carving knife, blade held high with one strong arm as her mother watches her quietly from the bedroom doorway, once-brown eyes impossibly dark. Regina looks wild and it takes him a moment to understand why his mind stumbles over her image, to completely understand the dark clumps spotting the floor between them.
The windows are rattling, and the fire is whining, popping.
“What- what did you do?”
“We’re going,” his daughter informs him, and it’s a flat snarl like a savage dog, short and steady as his wife ignores him, merely watching Regina with some mixture of amusement and something close to fear. She seems unsure for the first time since he had found the garden, and he is torn.
His daughter bleeds.
His wife- his wife may be injured, may need him.
“What did you do?” he begs, and then does not know who he is asking.
“She will not touch me again,” is all Regina answers, and finally looks at him, eyes darting to him for a heartbeat before they snap back to her mother, her fingers flexing with disconcerting skill around the handle of the knife. “Her or me, I don’t care, she will not touch me again-”
Then her voice trembles for a moment, and she shuts her mouth with a shudder, draws herself straight.
“Regina-” And his heart is weak and too heavy, and he is tired of all things. “Regina-”
He turns, eyes searching for his wife, and his daughter moves in a blur of movement, back turning on her mother as she steps too close, small body radiating heat, frighteningly tall as he gazes down at her, frozen.
His daughter stares at him, a firm shape between himself and his wife, and her eyes are wide and wet.
“We can go,” she says, and her voice is damp, and he can see a bruise forming across the cheek above the torn flesh of her upper lip, aches with the truth that there is not blood on the knife, only black tendrils of hair stuck in the rough spots of the old blade in her hand where Regina had cut the braid from her skull. “We can start over-” a short ragged breath, Regina’s voice wavering, desperate, “we can have a new life.”
Past her shoulder, he has a glimpse of his wife watching him, and her face is familiar for a moment, soft-eyed for a heartbeat, lips pulled back in agony-
A shifting beneath skin, and she is staring at him with narrowed eyes, a quiet challenge-
Regina jerks around, short hair looking soft and almost gold in the firelight, and his wife falls back into the shadows of the bedroom, and he can hear her breathing shift to something ragged, heavy with age as she hides herself.
And then Henry is shoved, and the power behind the silent order is sure, and then Regina is dragging him like a child.
The night air that had been warm moments before is now cold as he’s dragged behind her for so many minutes and then, finally, stumbles into his own clumsy movement, legs carrying him to the edge of the forest and then beyond.
Regina falls easily a few steps behind him, a shepherd driving him forward, and they hurry through the night.
Henry thinks, once, before he crushes the thought, that he does not know the way home-
And Regina is sure, and Henry is already following.
-
notes: base fairy tale here belongs to the story of rapunzel. and i blame the moment of inspiration on my fascination with the difference in how regina wears her hair, re: in happily ever after as opposed to how she wears it in storybrooke.
while i'm open to any well-done ideas re: the evil queen's backstory, the idea of regina as the miller's daughter from the rumpelstiltskin tale makes no sense at all to me, not unless they're fantastic writers and, gotta be honest, seeing no real sign of that yet. the biggest lead-on for that, though, would be rumpie's little name drop and her last name in storybrooke. so i'm sadly pretty sure this is what they're going to pull. on the other hand, mills could just as easily be derived from the greek word for "apple," which would be, ta da, "milo." (i could go with the rumpie background, btw, if she's DESCENDED from that miller's daughter bloodline and that rumpie is back for revenge decades later since 1) he does have the gift of foresight and 2) not only does he get regina's kid but, also, lolol, snow white and prince charming's grandson. that's how i could buy it, but im not holding my breath after so many years of abc's awful writing.)
some of regina's dialogue to gretel was rather telling, i think, and i do think that a young regina would have been very like that girl, minus one very important thing: the kind of emotional connection offered by a sibling. also interesting? not just the way regina often treated her father but also her line in 1x02 when he steps up to speak to her after her first spell fails. 'oh, you're trying to protect me now?' why so bitter about him protecting you by speaking up after the fact, regina?