A/N: Thanks to narcolepticbadger, fiadorable, Tbuddah, outlawqueenluvr and laura-pg - far too many people who read this over far too long ago to try to help me fix it. Apologies for then basically not fixing it. I'm a terrible person.
Night -
It's hearts again, hearts as always, soft and crumbling, red and black, shifting, breaking, beating.
She wakes.
Half in sigh and half in sorrow she reaches for Robin beside her sleeping, a hand outstretched against the natural turn of the elbow and sheets under her fingertips, his shoulder solid beneath.
He's not a heavy sleeper, not really, (not that she'd know, would she, she guesses - her experience in sharing beds is hardly overwhelming) but he's heavier than Graham, could hardly not be, and though she doesn't mean to wake him there's always a second when it seems terribly terribly wrong that she hasn't.
His neck is bare and smooth except where it isn't, and she blinks away memories of the arch of neck against neck, stubbled jaw and shifting lines, and lets her fingers rest firm but light, just a second, to feel his pulse beat, beat, but then lines of muscle and tendon shift and maybe it's her own pulse she feels and he's turning, grumbling, some snort of unhappiness and a twist of the head, and then he's caught her hand in his, and Regina breathes a shaky breath she'd somehow forgotten she'd needed.
It's always him that touches, they both know, his arms, his hands, his lips. They pull at her fingers, her neck, her hips and though she does try, sometimes, to offer him that same comfort it's all too often her that needs touch to reassure.
Their knees butt in the covers and she straightens like a stretch that they might move better together, but he settles and his grip in hers goes lax.
Times like this she can barely know if she wants him or not, holding still as though to make the decision to wake him more significant.
Time was, her reaching fingers would find nothing.
She detangles easily enough, slips from a thirty year old bed down a thirty year old corridor and pushes open the door at the end with a son's lifetime of blind knowledge. Henry's lump is present and peaceful in the window moonlight, and Roland's next door, too, and then she pauses by a stretch of wall that once unexpectedly wasn't, and her heart beats loudly in her chest, staring at nothing, the whole upstairs part of her like goosebumps on her skin.
She can barely move with it, herself too made wraith.
There's a creak in the silence, a shuffle, and a vertical lump appears, roughly Robin-shaped, propping up her doorway. It's a shock in the quiet dark full of her mother, and she startles badly, but she takes herself to him anyway, fingers finding waist and shoulders clasped and whole bodies melding as he sags into her and she takes all the movement not her own like medicine.
"Dreams?" he rumbles, breathing heavily into her.
"Dreams," she says, and feels his heart beat, beat against her chest.