Chapter Text
The stolen heart thumps, thumps, thumps inside of Regina’s palm. It feels warm and glassy against her flesh, like an ornament gently heated by the fireside.
She squeezes the heart, increasing the pressure with each of her fingers, one by one, like she’s playing the piano. The heart bulges beneath her lightest of touches, and she deliciates in it: feeling the thump, thump, thump escalating its tempo, sending its vibrations thrumming through her veins.
Her head reels with the heady rush of power, and even though it’s locked safe inside her vault, her own heart pulses with renewed vigor, too, almost enough to make her feel some of its distant warmth, make her feel alive again with the power. Make her feel like her heart beats for some other reason than just to keep her upright.
(Almost.)
“Please,” Snow weeps, throwing herself against the other side of the protection barrier. The purple waves of magic undulate each time Snow’s shoulder slams against it, but hold firm. Obviously. The days are long past when Snow could demolish Regina’s spells with the strength of her true love. Most days, Snow barely has strength enough lift her head from a pillowcase permanently warped by her tears.
(Most days, Regina barely does, either. Most days, Regina won’t even admit that to herself.)
On the other side of the barrier, beside Regina’s feet, David flails against the ground. With each delicate press of her fingertips against his writhing heart, Regina sends a fresh convulsion through his limbs:
A touch of her pinky to the right, and his chest jerks sideways.
A flex of her thumb, and his mouth parts in a guttural scream.
A shift of her index finger, and his skull slams against the cobblestones, cutting off his scream as it knocks him into oblivion.
It’s musical, in a way, a sort of chanted call and response, but made with the spasms of his body, and the delicious power she wields with the slightest touch. So much more powerful than any musical instruments.
“Unfortunately,” purrs Regina, “in this case, ‘please’ is not the magic word.”
Snow throws herself against the barrier again. The protection spell pushes back against her and sends Snow sprawling to her knees. Instead of getting up, Snow rests her forehead against the barrier.
The sheen of purple magic warps Snow’s features, making her skin look waxy and her cascade of tears iridescent, like the arc of a waterfall.
Regina can almost feel the mist of that waterfall on her cheeks, almost filling her with a wonderous thrill that she can create such a sight of broken beauty with so little effort. Almost making her remember the wild ecstasy she felt the first hundred-thousand times she saw the sight of Snow White as utterly broken as she’d left Regina.
(Almost.)
“Okay,” Snow whispers. “Okay. I’ll do it. Just please. Stop.”
A smile touches Regina’s lips as her fingers unfurl from David’s heart and his body stops thrashing. He’s unconscious, and probably has some broken bones or torn ligaments, so his limbs stay settled at odd angles. Like the limp tentacles of a jellyfish beached upon the shore.
He’ll be fine. This isn’t anything he hasn’t survived before. Really, if Snow had a brain in her head, she would’ve figured out decades ago that Regina would never kill David. Not out of any compassion, mind you, did Regina keep him alive – but because as long as David still breathed, Regina could make Snow do anything.
Really, if Snow had any true compassion, she might realize it would perhaps be kinder for her to murder both David and herself, spare them both further torment.
That had been Regina’s original plan, to kill David in front of Snow. Once. Years ago. Exactly as Daniel had been murdered in front of her. To watch Snow clutch David in her arms, press him against her chest, as if to reawaken his heart with the beat of her own, and all the while to feel his limbs stiffening, heavy with the weight of inescapable death, while her own arms supporting him began to feel too loose, her bones like water inside of her, dissolving, dissolving into less than a puddle of herself.
Regina could envision it, could feel it, and oh, it was such a satisfying fantasy.
And Regina had almost done exactly that, the very first time. But as she’d held David’s heart, its edges bulging between her fingers and its pulse thrashing erratically against each of her knuckles, and as she’d watched Snow guard David upon her lap, keening in a primal language that had long ago forgotten the sensibility of words, Regina realized:
If she broke Snow in that very same way, then Snow could never be broken quite so thoroughly again.
And if Snow were broken in such a way, it’d give her the opportunity to piece herself back together again, as Regina had done – irreversibly altered, of course, with some jagged pieces that’d never quite fit into a whole . . .
But still. Snow would mend herself enough to survive. Just like Regina had. Snow’d have no other choice.
This, however, . . . to keep Snow perpetually hurting, perpetually in fear of losing everything, hurting everyone she loved . . . this was it. Regina’s perfect, ultimate, eternal revenge.
Regina snaps her fingers, sending a message to one of her knights. Her hand pulses as she feels the knight, from somewhere deep in her castle, jolt in response to her call. In the ensuing silence, punctured only by Snow’s continued wheezing sobs, Regina waits calmly, regarding her prey and trap with detached satisfaction.
Minutes later, the knight drags in the prisoner by his hair. Regina’s already forgotten his name. Or did she ever know it? Doesn’t matter. His identity is irrelevant. What he does to destabilize the last vestiges of Snow’s identity – that’s what makes Regina’s blood tingle with anticipation.
(Once, it was far more than a tingle. Once, she could’ve sworn her blood was thrilling in her veins, poised to start applauding before this beautiful swan’s song was even through.)
The knight deposits the prisoner next to Snow White. The prisoner collapses in a heap, already unconscious.
Regina passes through her protection barrier, her own magic caressing her skin as she joins Snow and the prisoner on the other side. Mindful as ever of being a lady, she bends her knees just enough to reach out and jerk the heart from the prisoner’s chest, giving it a squeeze as she passes the heart to Snow to wake him up. It isn’t nearly as much fun if he’s asleep.
(It isn’t nearly as much fun as it was the first hundred-thousand times Regina made Snow enact this scenario, either.)
The prisoner groans as his eyelids flutter. Snow’s tears fall upon his heart inside her palm, sizzling against its beating surface as they make contact. The prisoner winces and Snow whispers, “sorry,” and Regina laughs, because what a silly thing to apologize for when she’s about to murder him. The sound of her own laughter makes her skull feel hollow, like there’s too much room for that laugh to bounce around inside.
Snow closes her eyes and turns her face away, so her tears fall instead on the shoulder of her tattered dress.
“No,” Regina instructs. “Look at him while you kill him.”
“I can’t,” Snow whispers.
“You can murder him,” Regina drawls, “but you can’t afford him even the dignity of watching him die by your hand?”
Snot runs from the princess’s nostrils, mingling with her tears in a disgusting mess along her jawline and chin. This used to be a moment when Regina had to hold herself back from laughing, she remembers, so she tries to let that sense of hilarity well up inside of her now.
(But in truth, it’s been too long since she felt any sort of anything well up inside of her. In truth, her insides feel like the smoking embers left behind after each genocide of a village. Smoldering chunks of emptiness that can neither be extinguished nor fanned into flames.)
Snow takes her free hand, fits it around her own chin, and forcibly turns her face toward the prisoner.
He’s more awake now and, as he jangles the chains binding his wrists and ankles together, more aware of his pending death. Though not, apparently, the inevitability of his death, because he starts to plead with Snow: “Please, your highness . . . I have a wife, and two children . . .”
“I’m sorry,” Snow whispers again as she closes her fingers around the man’s heart.
The prisoner starts to whimper and thrash. Snow’s eyelids start to flutter, obscuring her vision with a mess of wet matted eyelashes, but Regina orders her to keep them open.
And so Snow does, clutching the prisoner’s heart against her chest as she squeezes, squeezes, squeezes it, her eyes bulging wide with her effort to follow Regina’s command. The whites turning pink from all the red lines snaking across them, inflamed with the tears she can’t cry.
Then the man collapses and goes still, and Snow’s left clutching just a mess of sand that must burn her scratchy eyes even more as she burrows her face in her hands, body wracking with sobs.
“Good girl,” Regina croons, stroking a hand over Snow’s matted hair before snapping at the guard to return the doomed prince and princess to their cells.
xxx
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” Emma sings to herself as she traces formless shapes through the dust coating one of her mirrors.
Her own voice grates against her ears, not nearly as pleasant as some of the voices she listens to croon this nursery rhyme from the other sides of the mirrors.
But it’s important to make herself do this, sometimes. Talk aloud. Exercise her own voice. Do anything that allows her to escape all the well-known, exhausted nooks and crevices of her mind. If she doesn’t do these things, her mind will collapse in on itself, like a dying star. So she has to keep her consciousness burning bright however she can.
“How I wonder have you any wool,” she sings next, trying with her finger to recreate the shape of a sheep she’d seen once in the dust motes. That line doesn’t sound right; she must be confusing snatches of tunes again.
But it doesn’t really matter. Like every other shapeless day with no end or beginning, she’s her only audience.
“Yes sir, yes sir, a fleece as white as snow . . .”
That’s probably supposed to be funny, because it’s the name of her theoretical mother, so Emma makes herself laugh, the way she’s heard others beyond her prison-realm do sometimes.
Her laugh doesn’t sound right, though. Sounds more like a rumble made by one of those moving contraptions in some realms called automobiles, or a cat about to vomit.
“Like a diamond on a bull . . .”
Emma lifts her non-dusty hand and runs two fingers down the lines of her throat, wondering what it’d be like to take a drink. Of water, of wine, of anything, really. In this prison behind the mirrors, there’s nothing to eat or drink.
Not that it really matters – in this prison, she has no traditional human urges, either – but it looks pleasant, when she watches others beyond the mirrors take a drink. Some of the other needs that those beyond the mirror realm must fulfill, Emma doesn’t feel like she’s missing out on as much, like needing to pee or bathe. But drinking and eating . . . sometimes Emma watches as they let out this relieved sigh after taking a sip, or loosen the tension in their shoulders, or smile at the person sitting across from them.
That must be nice, too. To have another person nearby.
In this land behind the mirrors, time has no meaning. It’s not frozen, exactly. Emma can still move, breathe, think. But the sky never lightens or darkens. It remains a flat, cold gray at all times, like the most dull silver on utensils that one gave up polishing long ago.
When she peeks into the worlds and lives beyond this one, time’s still going by for others. The sky changes color; animals fall into dozes. Flowers bloom then wither and die. People wake up and fall asleep over and over again, and in-between, they complain and work and love and kill. And that must just, for them, be what life is.
Here, life, or whatever passes for it, is just . . . this. Scores and scores of mirrors scattered across this barren space of stone floors and skyless skies. She’s tried walking to the ends of it, multiple times, but there never is an end. Somehow, at some time, whenever she is in time, she always just ends up where she started.
She’s tried to get out of this realm, on occasion. For a brief time, at some point in time within this never-ending time, there was someone else in this mirror realm, too, with her. Someone with a beard and an accent like those beyond her mirrors in the realm of Agrabah. He believed that, if he could assemble the pieces of a large broken mirror, then they could both escape here.
But that was a long time ago; Emma thinks the Evil Queen must have removed him from this realm, though she has no evidence. One moment, the man was there, and then in the next moment – or many moments after that one, but still in a moment that feels too long ago – he was not.
Emma returns to his puzzle pieces, sometimes, but just for something to do. Not because she believes they can help her. If not even the Savior can save herself, then how the hell could a puzzle do that for her?
“Twinkle, twinkle, little – ”
“Emma? Emma? Emma?”
Emma holds back a sigh at the familiar trill of her name, just in case her caller can hear.
“Emma? Emma?! Emma, please? It’s your mother.”
A mother. Emma thinks about the mothers she sees in the lands beyond these mirrors: mothers cradling babies in their arms; mothers cleaning their children’s’ scabbed knees; mothers combing this young child’s hair; mothers kissing that grown-child goodbye; mothers giving away their children at weddings; mothers talking late into the night with their children, sharing wisdom or trading stories.
Emma considers not going to search for the mirror, but knows, eventually, she will. If only because she can’t bear the sound of her mother’s voice when it’s ignored: how it gets all high-pitched and starts crackling with tears Emma can’t wipe away.
So Emma abandons her dust-art and picks herself off the ground, eyes tracing over the landscape in search of her mother’s scrap of mirror. She tries to recall when she’d last spoken to either of her parents. Had it been just after she’d been watching a war in the realm with all those noisy machines? Or perhaps it’d been right before she’d plucked out some of the hairs on her body and made such a pretty-ugly, yellow-gray design mingled with the dust? In a world without days or nights, without pauses for meals or bathing or work or entertainment, it’s a bit hard to keep track of anything.
So all Emma can do is strain her hearing to follow the sound of Snow White’s voice. She picks her way past the cluster of tall mirrors leaning against one another like bonfire logs, past a few circular mirrors piled one on top of another, past the broken puzzle pieces that still lay arranged more or less as the man had left them years ago.
Finally she finds the shard, nestled among a collection of mirrors with pearls inlaid upon their frames. Emma remembers now putting the fragment of her mother’s mirror here on purpose, to make it easier to find next time. Maybe one day, she’ll find a spot she actually can recall on cue. Maybe one day, it will be easier for her brain to retain information because there will actually be things for her mind to do rather than spin endlessly in on itself.
Maybe one day, she'll believe change is possible.
Snow’s already started crying before Emma even picks up the mirror shard. The tremulous connection forged by the mirror shard magnifies and distorts the sounds of her sobs, like a violin badly in need of tuning.
Emma steels herself, taking a long inhale through her nose and shaking her sleeves out over her fingers, before delicately picking up the broken shard.
“Emma,” Snow manages to say through her tears. “I’m so happy to see you.”
Emma isn’t very good at lying. Why would she be? In general, for her entire existence, she’s had absolutely no need to deceive others or even partially conceal the truth.
So all she gets out as a response is, “Good morning, Mother,” even though she has no idea whether it’s morning or night in her mother’s realm.
Snow must be currently inside her dungeon, because the half of her face Emma can see is all confused by shadows and dust-motes: her dark hair blending in with her surroundings, the whites of one eye gleaming with tears. Something that might be a bruise on her cheek, all swollen and purple, but muddled by the darkness.
“I love you,” says Snow. “You know how much I love you, right?”
Emma does. That’s one of the constants in their sparse interactions: Snow saying she loves Emma.
Emma would like to reply she loves Snow, too. She knows from watching enough exchanges between loved ones that’s how these things usually go. But how can she really have any idea what love is? Is this love that she feels, when she forces herself to stare at the fragments of this woman who now and again appears in a mirror, only to have her disappear again for endless stretches at a time, long enough for Emma to incorrectly learn several more songs and pluck half the hairs off her body? Is this love, that her parents couldn’t protect her enough from the Evil Queen to save her from this fate? Is this love, that they still can’t fight for her freedom now?
“I know,” says Emma.
“Your father’s here, too.” Snow changes the angle of the mirror and Emma squints into its surface. She manages to make out two of the bars that separate Snow’s cell from her father’s, and a dark, human-ish shape with strands of hair matching hers in color.
Emma waves at the shape. It doesn’t move in response.
“He’s a bit – well, he’s tired,” says Snow, turning the mirror back on herself.
“Are you two okay?” says Emma, even though she knows that the answer is no and even though she knows that Snow will lie to her. Yet it feels impossible not to ask, not to care. However meaningless the words mother and father are to Emma – however much she dreads these sparse interactions and too often feels that a total dearth of a relationship with them would be better than this pale imitation of one . . . she doesn’t want them to suffer.
She watches Snow hoist her mouth into a shape that Snow probably hopes resembles a smile, even though the corners tremble and the muscles in her jaw look clenched.
“Now that we’ve seen you today,” says Snow, “we’re better than okay.”
“Ugh, all this sweetness,” drawls a voice from somewhere within that realm. A voice that makes Emma’s skin prickle even as she feels relief wash over her with the knowledge this forced time with her parents is almost over. “Are you trying to give me a cavity?”
“Please,” whispers Snow. The view within Emma’s mirror changes to something grimy and wrinkled – the cobblestones of the jail? Snow’s dress? it’s still too dark to tell – as Snow presumably tries to hide the mirror. “Just a few more minutes.”
“To what?” the Evil Queen mocks.
Emma can’t see the Queen, but she imagines her smiling her own counterfeit smile. All gritted teeth and candy-red mouth stretched uncomfortably wide, flattening the scar on her lip and pushing into the corners of her eyes so no one can see the pain there. Emma might not be any good at lying herself, but with virtually nothing to do her entire life but study other people, she’s become pretty damn good at telling when someone else’s faking it.
“Drip more snot on your dress?” the Evil Queen continues. “Repeat the same conversation you’ve been having with your daughter for over three decades?”
“Please,” says Snow again, but then Emma’s view within the mirror gets all wobbly, purple veins of magic obscuring what she can see.
The sounds of Snow’s sobs recede until there’s only the click, clicking of Regina’s heels against the cobblestones. Emma runs a finger over her own bare, callused heel, wondering what those shoes might feel like on her feet.
“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,” Emma mumble-sings to herself, “but all the king’s horses and all the king’s men didn’t know how to chew . . .”
“Well,” the Evil Queen’s voice drawls, “I was about to ask how my favorite failed Savior’s doing today, but I suppose that answers that.”
Emma’d forgotten for a moment she isn’t alone. Well, she is alone, of course, but she’d forgotten she has an audience.
The Evil Queen appears in the mirror then. She must be somewhere in her chambers; the lighting’s better here, letting Emma take in the ridiculousness of the high collar framing her neck, the severity of the kohl framing her eyes. The predictable, sad fragility of her fake smile.
“Gone on any daring rescues lately?” the Evil Queen taunts.
Emma sighs, because of course the Evil Queen means to needle her, and of course it’s working. Not because of the taunts themselves, but just because of their exhausting familiarity. Emma finds these interactions with the Evil Queen less excruciating than those with her parents, for the simple fact they’re not nearly as emotional . . . yet ultimately, these interactions are just as predictable. Just as mind-numbing as everything else composing her pale semblance of a life.
“Ahem,” says Regina into Emma’s prolonged silence. “Your Queen just asked you a question. Are you really going to ignore a direct inquiry?”
Emma doesn’t, usually. She’s memorized her scripted part here – to let the Evil Queen verbally needle her, to occasionally respond in a way that’ll give the queen more material – and she plays it as well as she can.
But today . . . she can’t exactly explain it. She’s just so tired of always being tired.
So Emma just stares into the mirror at the Evil Queen, putting enough distance between herself and the shard so the Evil Queen will see every weary line on her face, the flattened landscape of her gaze.
Regina finds her own fingers tightening against the edges of the broken mirror. Too, too tight – the soft pad of her middle finger breaks beneath the jagged perimeter, oozing blood along the silver sheen and dripping onto her dress.
She bites her lips to prevent herself from swearing aloud, but some of the blood sneaks onto the mirror’s surface before she can staunch its flow, so she knows Emma can see the effects of her injury. Knows the damn Savior can see that she’s gotten under Regina’s skin.
And still Regina finds herself waiting, waiting, waiting for a response that the stupid princess’s not going to give her. And for what purpose, really? Even when she does occasionally prod the Savior with several barbs carefully designed to prick just so, even when Regina does manage to let herself disappear for just a few minutes into the delight of torment . . . what’s she left with, afterward? It’s not as if Emma can fight back. It’s not as if this has been any fun for years.
But then, something happens that disrupts every exhaustingly familiar aspect of both Regina and Emma’s lives. Something that causes Regina’s hands to spasm and drop the mirror fragment in shock. Something that causes Emma’s fingers to frantically twist her piece of the mirror this way and that with fervor, with a desire unlike anything she’s ever experienced to leap beyond this realm and join humankind.
Something that prompts both women’s hearts to hammer in a way they’d swear they’ve never felt before.
“Moms?” quavers a voice.