Okay so everyone is writing one-shot Regina reaction fics...including me. Here ya go. Angst ahead. If you feel so inclined, the song I was listening to while writing this is called Leave Me Here by Hem.
She didn't know how to process any of this. But she did know she had to get away. As soon as possible. So she did what she always did.
She ran.
It was instinct. Fight or flight. And honestly, after everything she'd been through she didn't feel like she had much fight left in her.
"A fancy way of running away..." Wasn't that what Zelena had said? Well, there was nothing fancy about the way she was running away now. Before she knew it she had stumbled out into the dimly lit street. And then she was running. Literally. Heels in hand, sobs mixing with labored breathing. Feet pounding the pavement, matching the pounding of her heart in her chest. Her resilient heart.
How could she have even hoped to be happy? Didn't she know better by now? How stupid she had been to believe this time would be different.
She wanted to disappear. To fold in on herself. Become smaller and smaller until she was nothing at all. Nothing but a beating heart.
Finally inside her house, she tries to calm herself but to no avail. In that moment she decides, for the first time in her life, to let herself fall apart. No magic or noble mask to hide behind. Just Regina, a girl who knows what it means to be broken.
She grabs the bottle of wine they shared and hurls it across the room. It shatters against the wall, the piercing noise echoing throughout the painfully empty house.
She sinks down to the floor. Clenching her jaw against the pain she plunges her hand inside her chest. Her fingers close around her small dark heart. Still there. Intact. Resilient. She had to be sure. But it had gone so still, barely beating at all. How much more could it endure?
She spends the rest of the night trying to rid her skin of the scent of him. That rustic smell of pine and earth that for a short time felt like home.
She spends the rest of the night trying to forget the taste of his wine-soaked lips.
She spends the rest of the night with her heart in her hands, fully expecting it to shatter into a thousand little pieces.