Warning for language. Regina's relationship with Graham (if you can even call it that) was a horrific, terrible thing and I don't think it could be any different in any other universe, which is why I wrote it like I did.

In my first year of Hogwarts, some muggle-born and half-blood Griffindor geeks decided to give everyone a secret (and then not so secret) code-name based on muggle fairy-tales. The pure-bloods joined after someone's Brothers Grimm hardback made the rounds, because everyone loves curses and severed limbs. And then Hans Christian Andersen, and some old book of Persian stories, and then I lost track. Personally, I had no interest in fairy tales of any kind, muggle or not, which made me quite the pariah and earned me the nickname Evil Queen. I never asked which one they meant.

This spread even beyond the Griffindor common room and like it or not, most first years and some teachers were eventually bestowed with a fairy-tale identity to the extent that after a time nobody could remember real names any more. Except mine, of course, because Regina fit so perfectly into their little delusion.

Eventually, so did my hatred of Mary Margaret, a.k.a. Snow White who, as the stories go, is disgustingly pretty and kind and makes friends with everyone she meets. Hell, she even managed to befriend me before the Daniel thing. Nowadays I hate her almost as much as Daniel hates me.

But because almost everyone loves Snow and I can't stand it, by fifth year my only friend is the Huntsman, my fellow prefect. He is, however, a paranoid mess of hate, angst and good looks, so it's best not to spend too much around him. We kiss, sometimes, but never hold hands.

Emma Swan arrives so suddenly nobody remembers to give her a nickname. She unnerves me because everyone pays attention to her and Graham gets emotional whenever she's around.

"I see things when I think of her," he tells me, because he is convinced that I care. "The wolf is trying to show me something."

Honestly.

"Graham," I warn him, "you're insane."

But he just stares at me with his beautiful dark eyes because at that moment he is more sane than he's ever been in his life. He looks alive.

I guess I'm just jealous, but I can't figure out what I'm jealous of.

Emma Swan is trying to usurp me. I'm running out of time to wreck my revenge on Snow, so I start spending all of my spare moments in the library instead of just some of them. My prefect-ship will be destroyed in a few weeks when everyone realizes I'm searching for a good curse instead of prefect-ing, but this is all I needed it for anyways.

Snow will suffer, and I will get to see her haunted, horror-stricken face. It will replace the look I saw on Daniel's when they snapped his wand and ceremoniously banished him from Hogwarts. I'll be able to rest in peace, knowing that she will never be happy again.

On Tuesday evening I slipped a few drops of a mild hallucinogenic potion into her hot chocolate. She put so much cinnamon in it that it would be impossible to taste anything else, she made it so easy. The drug was just to make her more susceptible to illusiory magic, which wasn't one of my strong suits. I prefered my spells with a little more destruction, but setting Snow White on fire would be risky and would most likely end with me expelled.

After dinner, Snow skipped off to choir and Charming strutted into the library. They usually reunited outside the choir practice room at seven, but this time I followed the boy and carefully cast a sleeping curse to leave him drooling all over his homework.

The runes along the corridors were under a cloaking spell, as invisible as I could make them. I'd spent the last three weeks meticulously engraving them in the stone, along with contingency plans and blood. They would work. There was no other scenario. I'd sacrificed my cat for this.

Snow waited three minutes for her friend, then proceeded to walk back on her own. She looked vaguely displeased, but the girl was hopelessly forgiving. Unlike me.

I activated the runes with a tap of my wand. The corridors shifted, walls moving and reshaping themselves around my victim. She was unaware of all this, until the illusion of Charming manifested itself behind a corner. Snow looked as happy as I felt and I almost botched the spell in all the extitement.

Charming melted into a puddle of blood and bones as soon as she said Hi. She stared at the horrific scene for half a second, then her shrill screaming filled the corridors. This was fine, I'd soundproofed the space earlier. Nobody could reach this place and nobody could hear her. I couldn't even see her face, she'd covered it with her hands which was a shame because she wouldn't be able to see the walls dripping in blood, and all that red soaking into her shoes.

It squelched when she turned to run, which was delightful and hilarious. I just couldn't stop laughing. The torches along the corridor were snuffed out with a single thought, so that she couldn't avoid stepping on crunching bones when she ran. She'd taken her wand out in an attempt to fight whatever was happening, or at least light the way but her hands shook too much for any spell to work.

It was wonderful.

Eventually she crashed into a wall that hadn't been there before. It was made softer by the streams of blood running down, and her wand slipped from her hands. I picked it up, safe in the knowledge that everything here was an illusion. It was too dark for her to see me.

Snow recoiled from the wall, slipped and landed on the floor. I laughed, loudly enough for her to hear and she froze.

"Aren't all Griffindors supposed to be brave?" I pointed my wand at her face, casting Lumos. She was squinting into the light, casting about for her own wand.

"Regina?" Her hands waded through rivers of a thick soup of flesh and blood.

"No."

"It's you. What are you doing?" Her voice was shaking from all the tears she'd swallowed.

I shook Lumos off of my wand, leaving her in the dark. The light from Obliviate was just bright enough for her to see the skeletons one last time.

Of course I'd forgotten that we shared a dorm, so I spent the night being angry at myself. Snow kept waking from the nightmares, screaming and horrified, which would be fine if only I could sleep through it. I wanted sleep more than I wanted Snow's terror.

The other girls gave her a lot of support. They were sickeningly nice. They weren't as tired as me because they hadn't just spent a full evening hexing corridors.

Somehow I made it to breakfast in the morning, and watching Snow twitch every time Charming looked at her was enough to make me feel so much better. She blew up her desk in charms, which was even more satisfying, but by dinner I saw her laugh genuinely at something Charming said and sighed.

I'd planned to curse her every three days for at least a month, to make up for her support network. Miraculously, I managed to get it down to a rutine enough to concentrate on my school work and prefectorial duties so nobody even batted an eyelid at the previous month's dismal performance. Snow stopped sleeping at night and started sleeping during classes. Her grades dropped exponentially.

Nobody except fucking Emma Swan suspected anything. I found her frowning at me when I forgot not to smile at Snow's tired, haunted face. Nobody knew that Daniel was Snow's fault except me and Snow, so nobody could ever suspect me of motive, and yet Emma Swan watched me like a hawk.

Graham saw me spiking Snow's drink one evening.

"What the hell are you doing?" He asked, with an unusually confident attitude. He'd started hanging out with Emma Swan recently and it was making him less dead and more unhinged by the minute. I missed the old Graham, the one that had only been mine.

"It's you, isn't it? You cursed Snow." He climbed off his bench, but I caught his wrist before he could escape.

"What? Why would I do that?" I asked, "what are you talking about?"

"I just saw you..." he started, uncertainly, "I… I don't know. I'm sorry."

"Are you okay, Graham?"

He stuttered through an apology, sitting back down at the table and burying his head in his hands. I felt kind of sorry for him, but it wasn't my fault he didn't know what was real anymore.

All I had to do was take advantage of that.

There was something wrong with the castle. I finished tormenting Snow, thinking that if this went on for any longer her parents were going to pull her out of school and that would be the end of it.

I erased the runes from the castle walls, but they still shifted with my thoughts. The weather in the great hall became aligned with my mood swings, which were pretty drastic and I saw the headmaster looking thoughtfully at the sky. I knew they'd start investigating soon.

The corridors had always shifted without warning, and the stairs moved that wasn't new. The worst thing was that I found I could make them shift with my thoughts alone, which meant that somehow I had tied my mind to the castle's whims, and now I was in control of the whole thing.

I only started panicking when I left for Magical Creatures and came back to find cracks along the walls and every brick frozen in place. The portraits and ghosts were in an uproar and so were the teachers. If I left for any longer would the whole castle come down?

I had to fix it before the summer started, but the walls were bleeding way before I even had any idea where to start. If I told the teachers I'd be expelled. If I told anyone else, they would tell the teachers and I'd be expelled.

Shit, I thought at the height of my eloquence, I broke Hogwarts.

It had taken Graham a while to realize the castle's misbehaviour was not a figment of his imagination. Before he did though, his mind spiralled hilariously out of whack, and I saw him spontaneously kiss Emma Swan like it was going to save him. She hit him in the face, obviously.

The most hilarious moment was when the headmaster made an announcement at dinner a week after the bleeding walls started. Graham looked betrayed. Haunted. Then he laughed, bringing the entire hall's attention to himself. It took effort not to laugh with him, and at him, but god, he was still beautiful even in humiliation.

Snow recovered admirably fast. She still had nightmares but Aurora stayed up most nights with her, making sure to wake her before it got too bad. Aurora was the resident insomniac after a third year potions disaster sent her to sleep for a week, but not because of me. I'd considered doing the same to Snow, but trying to figure out what went wrong that day would require asking Maleficent and as she was a Slytherin we never really had any opportunity to become friends.

Graham pretended he had come to terms with being rejected by Emma Swan through means of kissing me, which was nice, but it always felt like he wanted to be someplace else when we were together. But alas, he didn't have any friends because he hated people, so he was stuck between loneliness and me, which were two and the same. It became difficult to keep nudging him towards insanity, as I had planned to do, because rather than trusting me over his own mind he wholehartedly ditched trust completely.

That said, other than being an experiment in psychology and a useful comfort to me, Graham was nothing. I don't know why I cared so much.

After an adorable, tiny first year was found dying of exhaustion after being trapped in a maze-like semi-independent structure of almost fictional corridors, parents were starting to notice that something was off about the school. Some kids were pulled out, and rumours of the castle being shut down were painting themselves on the walls.

If this happened I'd have to leave, which would ruin my life for more reasons than you'd think. First and foremost, who knows what would happen if my link with the castle was suddenly severed. Second, I'd never see Graham again. Third I'd have to spend more time with my mother as she would probably insist on homeschooling me. Fourth, I'd have to spend more time with my mother. Fifth, I'd have to spend more time with my mother. So on and so forth.

I went to the corridor in the dark of night. It looked inconspicuous but felt like reaching into my cat's shaking, dying body for his heart. It was his blood that ran down the walls, intensified by the illusion spell.

I didn't regret it at all. I was miserable, but I wasn't to blame because it had always been Snow's fault. All the unhappy moments in my life eventually led back to that weakling's naive faith and kindness.

My favourite spell had always been the one that set everything on fire. There was a stage where a small area of a material exploded outwards due to the rapid heating of the boundary, so not only was there fire but debris flying off in all directions, destroying more and more.

I shot the corridor to pieces. I yelled the spell over and over, tearing my throat dry in the process, and eventually the fire had nothing to burn but unreactive stone. Dust was sticking to the tears on my face. I remembered that dust was flammable, cast a shield around myself then struck a match on the wall with my other hand.

For a moment, I was blind.

The corridor was reduced to something that resembled the great hall, and then slowly it began to shift the pieces of stone and settle them back like puzzle pieces, because I wanted it to.

Emma Swan cornered me on my way to potions one day, in the dark of the dungeons, shining light into my eyes like I had done to Snow.

"It's you, isn't it? You cursed the castle," she hissed.

"What?" I feigned confusion.

"I have evidence."

"Huh?"

"Graham told me. I didn't want to believe it, but it all makes sense. You cursed Snow, then you cursed the castle."

"Thats… what? Graham? Why would I curse Snow? What do I care about Snow White? Why are you talking to Graham anyway, he's crazy."

Emma Swan hesistated for a minute moment.

"Then who cursed the castle?"

"How would I know? Did it have to be a person? This castle's never been normal."

She let me go.

Man, I had to hurry up and make this right. I tried all the rune combinations I could think of. I made my way meticulously through the cursebreaking section of the library, but I couldn't get any meaningful results from the analysis spells. There was a residual spell, but it's components were so chaotic and disorganised just trying to lift a piece out would probably blow the whole corridor to pieces. I inspected the walls, thinking I'd left a rune or two but I couldn't find any. It was hard to look for tiny markings when the blood was running down them in buckets.

I panicked, and the castle panicked with me. It dissolved walls and made new walls, flattened stairs and made new stairs leading to nowhere. The sky was a perpetual thunderstorm, tossing hail and snow at our plates as I tried to clear my head and not think of just how fucked up this situation was.

It only calmed down when I was with Graham, but he started dissappearing from rooms as soon as I walked in. He still looked at Emma Swan like she was the only person he'd ever have respect for, which was probably very likely since Graham had been raised by warewolves on the outskirts of society.

Emma Swan, on the other hand, started spending a lot of time with Belle, an upper year Ravenclaw. They whispered furiously over ancient tomes of runic magic, cursebreaking reports and Hogwarts history books. I saw them try a few spells, once, but all it did was give me a migrane, so I started snatching their books and hindering their efforts in an attempt to save me from the nausea.

It seemed like not only was the castle dependent on me, I was dependent on the castle.

This made me wonder what would happen if I left for a longer period of time.

It became difficult for everyone to find their way anywhere. The castle had shifted to a greater degree than anyone even remembered, and some of the classrooms even disappeared. Then people started disappearing and showing up two days later, exhausted and crying.

Of course this never happened to me. It took me less than two minutes to get anywhere in the castle, but it's not like I advertised this ability.

Three weeks after it started, the teachers decided to call off classes for the day and try to break the curse together. They got the most talented upper years to join, and Emma Swan was obviously one of those, as well as Belle and a guy nicknamed Robin Hood who ran a duelling club that we had started together. I had called it quits after I realized he was too attractive for me to remain emotionally detached from humanity.

Graham was invited too, because he had good intuition, and me, but I only went because I wanted to make sure Graham wouldn't tell them anything about his suspicions. I was desperate to fix this without getting expelled.

After three days of discussion and arithmancy, we had a spell ready and some helpful runes carved into the corridor where it all started – which was heavy with my stray magic, reinforced through the castle's own.

All the students had to do was add their power to the spell, but I can't remember how it went because I blacked out as soon as they began. They thought there was something wrong with the spell, but I wasn't going to tell them otherwise. The next time they didn't invite me and I hid in an empty classroom to suffer through the headaches.

It didn't work. Probably because I was in the way, but they couldn't know that. They tried again and I sat outside the castle, but that still made no difference. I thought that the only way to achieve this was to involve me in the spell somehow, but how could I tell them that without making it clear that I was the cause of it all?

Emma Swan figured it out right after the first try, but she waited another week to tell me, after the teachers failed for the third time.

"I know it's you," she said, "and I know why you won't admit it. I don't care why you did it, Regina, I just want to fix this, okay? Neither of us wants Hogwarts destroyed."

We were in the empty Griffindor common room, at 3 am. I wasn't sleeping because of stress, and Emma wasn't sleeping because she'd waited up to give me this speech. I started crying, which was disgusting but also kind of nice because it felt like the first honest emotion in two months and made me less frightened.

"I can't..." I started, unsure of what I was going to say; I wanted to say everything all at once. Emma was looking at me steadily, with a resolved expression. "Don't let them expel me." I cried, "don't tell them it was me."

Emma gave no indication that she was celebrating inwardly, but she was a good actor and hated me enough that I wouldn't even blame her for being delighted about this whole thing.

"What did you do?" She asked.

"I just… shifted a few corridors. I erased the runes after I didn't need them anymore, but something must have went wrong because… because…"

"This happened."

I felt like screaming.

"It's sort of dependent on my will, but I can't control it." I'd hidden my face in a cushion, so I wasn't sure how well she heard me, but Emma was still not shouting at me.

"You need to calm down then."

"Fuck you."

"Look."

I felt a hand on my shoulder, yelled, scrambled to my feet and toppled over the back of the couch. Emma recoiled.

"Geez, I wasn't trying to kill you, are you always this twitchy?"

She extended a hand and I looked at it tearfully for a moment, a bruise forming on the back of my head. I wanted her to leave me lying on the carpet, with only my misery to comfort me while the castle died and I died with it. But she just made an upwards motion with her hand like she was expecting me to take it.

I did. It was cold. She was so calm and collected.

She hauled me to my feet and then placed her other hand on my shoulder, waiting until I met her eyes to speak. I didn't let go of her hand.

"It's going to be fine," she said slowly, like I was a child, "we can fix it. You and I. Okay? It's going to be fine."