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She thinks, sometimes, of the first of her supposed victories: white fingers curling around shining red, the sharp crunch—more like a snap—and the fall. The apple tumbled downhill, to be snatched away to a new world, to stew in a new false triumph. She hadn’t known that at the time. She hadn’t been watching for it.
Instead, she watched Snow White crumble.
She didn’t approach Snow’s body to listen closely for her breath, didn’t reach out to feel where her heart had stilled. The last time she’d placed a palm to that breast had been perhaps just as desperate, but there had been hope in it, faith in the wide-eyed innocence of that little girl. This was different. Love is magic, she’d told her then, and it was true enough, but she’d been wrong to think it the most powerful. Now, there was grief, and anger, and a shrunken body at her feet, and she swelled and swelled with it.
And anyway, the deed was done. Still, she found herself looking for the non-existent tiny movements of Snow’s eyes beneath those pale, blue-veined lids. She wondered how much Snow would see her face in those regret-filled dreams, if Daniel would be there too, if his gasps at her intrusion—at his heart as it left him—would echo in her ears. Perhaps she would dream of her false prince, always beyond her reach but clamouring, clamouring, the ghosts of their unborn children whispering around them.
In a cell in Maine, Regina reminds herself that the details of the nightmare had never mattered; the suffering had been the point, after all.
~
The first night at Leopold’s palace, in a four poster bed hung with sweeping velveteen canopies that will not be hers for long, the dreams begin.
Regina dreams of a Snow whose body fits the shape of her sins, warped and haggard with bones that jut out beneath her skin. Regina is pulled into a tight embrace and sliced open on the razor edges of her ribs—her blood a vivid, terrible red as it flows between them.
She wakes, sticky with sweat, her mind clouded with their faces. Snow’s face is bright, clear, shining. Daniel’s lines her every moment, waking and sleeping, but the specifics are fading. She knew every shade, every fleck of colour in his eyes, once, but now they are nothing but blue, and sometimes shut to her entirely. She clings to thoughts of him, lies still and tries to map out every inch of him that she had ever known, but the roads run a little differently each time: his hairline changes; his height too inconstant to measure.
I won’t forget you , she silently promises, pressing his ring so hard into her palm it leaves a red mark in its shape. The skin doesn’t break. Minutes later, the lines that trace her hand are all her own.
The ring itself is smudged with Snow’s fingerprints, and they won’t for the life of her rub off.
It’s not her fault, she tells herself; she didn’t know; she didn’t understand, and tries to love in the manner Snow already believes she does, but then all she can see is Snow’s smile, the treacherous, satisfied thing, and when sleep comes for her once more, there are hands at the child’s throat, tightening and tightening, and yet still she smiles, smiles, smiles.
The visions bleed into her waking hours, and she lives whole moments where Snow might be choking on the length of her own silken hair, Regina pulling it tightly.
In reality, Regina steadies her shaking hands as she combs through loose, soft curls.
Snow hugs her, in thanks, and she is slight but soft—pliant—in Regina’s arms. Pulling apart, their eyes meet, and Regina memorises every shade, every fleck of colour in them.
~
Do you think this is what he would have wanted? Snow asked, when they came for the kingdom—the presumptuous, arrogant child, always speaking out of turn, on behalf of people she had never even known. Do you think he would have loved what you’ve become?
Snow wears the self-same look now that she had worn then, standing on the other side of the cell door that had once formed her own prison, letting her prince do the talking like trapping Regina isn’t what she had always wanted.
David’s jaw is firmly set in familiar righteous anger, and his eyes Regina can meet with ease. The lie comes so effortlessly it feels like truth: “Because there’s nothing to go back to. That land is gone.”
Beside him, Snow turns away before Regina can hold her gaze and says, “We should get to Gold.”
It’s Regina’s stolen glance at Emma that nearly undoes her. Emma wears her discomfort across her shoulders. Her eyes shift, her brow furrowed. She might even be mistaken as worried for Regina’s sake, as if placing herself between an angry mob and its target had been more than an act of simple, foolish heroism.
Emma’s hand moves to Henry’s shoulder, and Regina is quick to shake the thought.
Henry is silent, unreadable as he glances up between them, meeting Regina’s gaze for a matter of seconds. She wants to reach out, say something, but he’s already being steered away.
How much like his grandmother he is, Regina thinks, as she watches him go. He hasn’t figured it out yet, despite everything—despite herself—how easy it is to love the very thing you despise.
~
Love is magic, a young woman once told a little girl.
Regina is impotent. The hat won’t work—she won’t work; she can’t even tear a hole large enough to so much as lightly graze the other side.
The whole world opens up for Emma Swan’s fleeting touch, though, just as another had always bowed down for her mother. Regina stares in a mixture of awe and jealousy as she pulls away from Emma’s grasp, and it’s only the shove out of harm’s way that reminds her for whom they are doing this.
Stupid, noble Emma Swan, saving her enemy only to lose herself. Snow leaps for that final thread of light after her, and falls to a dead world. David falls flat on his belly, and tearfully rages.
Love is weakness, an old witch once told a broken girl.
Regina remembers, and the walls come alive for her.
~
She forgets this lesson again all too quickly, because love is in her now, and she is out of practice. It’s ingrained in her skin; it reaches the tip of every nerve; it clouds each breath from her lungs. It plugs the hole in her heart they said would never be filled, aches where it sits: not mended, but patched.
She would conjure whole new worlds for her love of Henry, just as she had from her father’s ashes, and what she shows him now is just the start—a promise.
“You can make them love you,” she tells him but what she means is, I am trying to make you love me.
For all his mouth tells her, tightly drawn in determination, there’s the glimmer of fear in Henry’s eyes that gives him away, and she knows what he’s been trying to tell her all along: fear and love are not the same thing. She’d known that, years ago. Somehow, she’d forgotten.
Her love and her magic: Henry rejects them both. They sit in her chest as two weights, side by side.
Love is magic, she’d have said, once upon a time, and meant it. Now, she’s not so sure.
~
Snow takes Regina’s hand in her own and shows her the palace: its dim cloisters, its open courtyard, room after luxuriant room. Her excitement ought to be infectious, catching, but Regina’s senses seem dulled to it.
The bed chambers are other-worldly, broad spaces. The one that Regina is to call her own—until the wedding—could easily contain three rooms from their own mansion. It’s richly decorated with ornate colonnades, bold stone archways, a broad and tall four poster bed, and mirrors whose frames are encrusted with eye-like gems. The wooden furniture has been carved by a skilled hand—the legs of tables sculpted into paws. Their surfaces are littered with combs of ivory, jewellry boxes carved from soapstone and glass phials presumably filled with the finest scents.
Regina is struggling to shake the feeling that the room might come alive and consume her at any moment when the movement of three previously unnoticed maids catches her eye as they scurry across the room and out of sight, mouse-like in their swiftness and silence.
“Do you like it?” Snow asks, peering up at her, round-faced and hopeful, as if entirely oblivious to the servants.
“It’s beautiful,” Cora says. “Isn’t it, Regina?”
The appropriate response, of course, is a simple one, but the words catch for a moment in Regina’s throat. Snow, still clinging to her, looks fleetingly confused. It’s beyond her, such a young girl, how such splendour could fail to delight anyone the way it so clearly thrills Cora, how anyone could want for much else.
Regina can feel the warning in her mother’s gaze without even looking at her.
“Yes,” she breathes. “It’s perfect.”
~
For all the mirrors in the house on Mifflin Street, only one is full-length, tucked away on the inside door of her closet. Regina absorbs the sight of herself in it, from the heels already slid onto her feet to the one or two flyaway hairs on her head that she’s quick to press down. One thing she still has control over, she thinks, leaning in to check her makeup, is her appearance.
The lines that gather at the corners of her eyes are becoming more defined, now that a full year has been allowed to pass, she notes. She raises her fingertips to them, gently stretching the skin there to smooth them out and—maybe she’s imagining the stiffness, the swelling of her knuckles.
You look like her.
She presses her eyes shut, but the shape of her reflection seems to linger beneath her lids. She imagines its fingers curling out through the glass to clasp the glossy cream edges of the door, struggling to get out. The grip slips. Her reflection falls back. She tries to imagine Henry on the other side, where she is standing, watching her fall to another world, to nothing, if he would do as she had done for freedom.
Echoes of that first charge of magic dance across her palms. There’s the sound of glass breaking, and Regina opens her eyes. Shards surround her feet. The magic was always so easy—not technically, not to master, but to feel.
“Mom?”
Henry’s standing in the doorway, staring at the shattered glass. His face doesn’t reveal concern, or even horror, just resignation. Still, he looks so small against the doorframe, in a shirt that’s at least a size too big for him. He’d been growing so fast she’d started to buy clothes that swamped him with the promise he’d grow into them, and even now through his scowls she can’t help but like how young they make him look. The muscles in her chest tighten.
“Henry—” she begins, wondering how this must look to him, but he’s already shaking his head and turning away.
~
She knows as soon as she meets him that the time has come. Leopold introduces her to the very machinery of his own doom—it’s fitting, really—a Genie from Agrabah who takes one look at her and his eyebrows rise halfway up his forehead, his mouth taking the shape of a silent oh.
He knows nothing about her, of course, but it’s no matter when with just that first glance he fancies himself half in love with her already. He loves an idea, a dream he once had when thinking himself trapped without hope, of a woman who knew as he did the weight of chains, a woman whom he could free as he himself had always longed to be freed. She promises it all to him unreservedly with that first open smile. The mirror says it all, really—a request she should see herself as he sees her: her looks, the embellishments of her stature, and nothing of her soul.
She loathes him for it.
He believes the love she purports to return, however, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t. She does love the idea of him, too: a dream she once had trapped in her tower; a man so ready, if not entirely willing, to fall—or, well, trip—onto his sword for her.
It’s easy enough to get word to her father, and from there the pieces all fall into place, until finally the Genie rushes from her chamber with the chest of vipers in hand and a lightness in his step that does not fit the scene at all.
Some time later, an urgent knock interrupts her sleep—it’s strange, how restful she’s found herself tonight—and she thinks he’s been fool enough to return to her immediately with bloodied hands, drunk with the thrill of the act and with words of their imminent freedom dropping from his lips.
Instead, she rushes to the door to reveal Snow on the other side, her gentlewoman lurking behind her in the shadows. Snow appears horror-struck, the orange glow of the nightlight she holds up to her face casting bold shadows across it, making her eyes appear more sunken, her cheeks hollow.
“Regina,” she gasps. “It’s the most... dreadful...” she trails off, looking away like the thought, too immense for her to keep a hold of, has run away from her entirely.
It is done, Regina thinks, but the triumph doesn’t settle in her bones nearly so comfortably as she had expected. She feels, instead, much the same as before, only more. This is only just the beginning.
“My dear Snow,” she says, placing a hand lightly on her shoulder and guiding her into the room to sit on the edge of Regina’s bed. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s father. He’s… dead,” she whispers, as though if she had uttered it any louder the vipers would come for her too.
Regina’s gasp isn’t entirely forced, knocked from her chest simply by hearing the words said aloud. “Dead? But... how?”
“They say the Genie, the one he liberated, welcomed into his home… set vipers on him in his sleep.”
Snow’s mouth tightens; her chin trembles; her eyes grow so large and round and bewildered that she could so very easily be that confused little girl who didn’t understand how Regina could betray her father so, that before Regina can even take stock of herself her arm is creeping around Snow’s shoulders and pulling her close until her head rests on her shoulder.
“Oh, Snow.”
~
Henry stands a few stairs above her, enough that it feels like he’s a head taller than her at least, and she feels a rush of dread at the thought of not being in his life when he towers over her naturally, and it’s all she can do to not reach out and pull him in close to her and never, never let him leave her again, even as she tells him she is letting him go.
Somewhere to her left where their hands rest on the banister, her thumb moves of its own accord and grazes the back of his hand, and for once he doesn’t immediately pull away.
“I don’t know how to love very well,” she admits, and starts to wonder if she ever did.