I don't even know with this one. May make no sense, but I wanted a happy reunion. So there.
Disclaimer: I own nothing related to/associated with Once Upon A Time.
She stands there in the moonlight, listening to the crickets chirp and people snore from their comfortable beds. Hospital scrubs whitewashed and ill-fitting on a princess meant for ball gowns and silver heels.
She looks broken and whole, wild and tame.
The Queen said she was dead, but her Majesty lies with as much efficiency as someone without a heart. Someone like him.
He has made a hundred decisions that have all ended badly, most centered on her name and days when he made deals to keep at the very edge of sanity. Her memory stayed with him long after she left. The dungeon door never opened again.
She should be dead. But there she stands.
The ache in his leg and the cowardice in his soul keep him from walking any closer. She stands on his front lawn with her back to him. A slight breeze stirs her hair and makes her turn. Perceptive as always, he thinks with a broken smile.
She looks up at him, face pale and mouth quirked down at a corner. Seeing the man he had become but remembering the monster of the past. Expecting a lashing for returning, and a spell in the dungeon.
But his home is free of cold stone and barred doors.
He whispers her name into the night, to make sure this isn't a spell.
The crease at her forehead disappears and she tilts her head at him. "You won't turn me away again, will you?"
He shakes his head, the gravity of their past and this new impossible meeting making his shriveled heart constrict painfully. No, he will not lose her again.
"I'm so sorry," he begins, and those words could never encompass all he feels about his treatment of her. Mistreatment.
He moves to her too quickly, missing a step in his haste. For a second he feels weightless in the air and then hands, small and warm, brace against his chest. He glances down into bright blue eyes that shine with tears. The look in them is a happy one, though.
"I don't recall you ever being this clumsy before," she murmurs, and back is the laugh in her sweet, low voice.
He swallows uncomfortably. Tongue-tied around her when he's faced kings and monsters and tyrants without fear.
"I-I thought," he stammers, gathers his swirling thoughts and wild emotions in one swallow. "You- she said- she said you-"
She soothes him, calm hands on either side of his face, and he doesn't quite know how they're both standing at this point. She too small without heels and he too tall on the step above her. A mismatched pair, they are.
"That doesn't matter right now." A different gleam in her eye, a proud line in her back. This is the princess who lived through wartime. This is the woman who promised her life to serve a monster. This is the woman who faced utter incarceration and returned unbroken.
"You shouldn't have come here, dearie." Old, dusty words. They come out half-hearted and she knows it. The order holds no venom or power.
She glances up at him through her lashes, a smile curving across her shadowed face. "You said forever, remember?"
He knows come morning there will be questions and demands and utter rage cast upon him by the tyrant Queen pounding on his front door. He knows he will have to fight a dragon to keep her with him this time.
But he will move heaven and earth for her, to keep her happy like this.
Regina and her fragile reign of lies be damned.
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