A/N: An OQ Secret Santa gift for heartisdrenchedinwine over in the tumblr world. Merry Christmas, dear!
Debt
It always happens when she least expects it, when hope is but a four-letter word and all the quarters in the world aren't going to bring Robin back to her.
The first time, she's at the Charmings' for dinner, because Henry had all but insisted with that stubborn look in his eye, that stern tilt of his head that she can't say no to; and it's for the sake of her son that Regina finds herself surrounded by people when she would rather be alone, with nothing but the memory of Robin's smile for company and the dull ache in her heart that he'd left behind.
So she tucks away into the farthest corner of the couch with the baby cradled to her chest, watching him curl a fist around her finger the way Henry used to when he was small enough to fit in her arms the way Neal does now. He's staring at her, dark eyes large and unblinking; but where she finds pity in everyone else's, his are only filled with a vague sense of wonder, and she appreciates him all the more for being there with her but letting her keep her pain to herself.
The door opens and Charming steps inside, cheeks flushed where the cold has bitten into his skin. A smattering of snow still clings to his hair as he dusts it off his boots and scrutinizes the small pile of mail he's just fetched at Snow's behest.
"Regina," he speaks slowly, and with a start of surprise, "I think…I think this is for you."
She frowns as she trades Neal off for the slip of parchment in Charming's outstretched hand. It's folded into fourths, with a single word penned into a corner in tight, woven script, and her heart stutters upon recognizing the texture of the paper, the smooth waxy surface beneath her tentative touch. She opens it with Henry peering curiously over her shoulder, and then it's fluttering to the floor when the shock loosens her grip, numbs her to her fingertips. "Mom," she hears distantly, a concerned "Regina?" as well, but she's already to the door, rickety wooden steps blurring in and out of view beneath her quickening feet, and her tears are a string of icicles, while the image of page xxv burns like a hot iron seared to her brain.
.
.
.
The next time it happens, she's knocking back another shot of whiskey at the diner, maybe her third but who's counting, and it appears that she does daytime drink after all. She's two seconds away from staring down the bottom of her glass when she feels it being tugged out of her hand, and she glowers at Emma as the blonde, pointedly refusing to return her glare, settles onto an adjacent stool.
"Yeah, pretty sure you don't want to regret that one later," she remarks offhandedly, to which Regina grumbles out a bitter like I'm not used to it by now, but it doesn't so much as put a dent in Emma's resolve. She exchanges a knowing look with Granny, and it baits Regina's anger, sets her blood just below boil; she didn't ask for their concern, didn't ask for her own misery, yet here they are. Because she'd once again been foolish enough to believe she deserved otherwise.
Because even though evil isn't born, to undo what she's spent a lifetime making comes with a price that will require another lifetime to pay, and even then will she ever be truly free of its debt?
Granny slides the bill across the counter, and when Emma reaches for it instead Regina is too deep in her thoughts to protest, fuzzy half-thoughts of hope and debt and all the quarters Snow owes her now instead. She can hardly bring herself to argue when Granny mutters to Emma to apprehend Regina's car keys before she can use them to wreak havoc down Main Street.
"All right, your royal mayor-ness," Emma says as she stands, keys in hand, and shrugs her scarf back on over her shoulders. "Let's get you home."
"Ex-mayor," Regina corrects automatically. "Speaking of, where's your mother? There's something I need to—" But the sight of something cream-colored tucked beneath the corner of Emma's loopy signature catches her eye (and that's the last time she's daytime drinking, she decides, considering that she's technically unemployed and would rather not be indebted to the savior as well if she can help it). When she touches a hand to the paper, the familiar feel of it stops her short.
"What is this?" she asks sharply, tugging it out from under the receipt, unfolding it with a tremble in her fingers to match the one lacing through her voice. "Did you put this here?" But she knows it's an absurd question before she's even asked it, because the idea of Emma as the person of interest behind Operation Mongoose makes about as much sense as if Regina had written the storybook herself.
"No?" says Emma, sounding thoroughly confused. "Why, what is it?"
A hollow laugh escapes from Regina's lips as she stares down at the paper, dimpling where her fingers have gripped it too hard. She feels lightheaded, dizzy on her feet, and if only she could blame it on the whiskey instead of her heart. "Nothing," she finally gasps out as she crumples the image of her and Robin into her fist, flings it back onto the counter where she'd found it, "it's nothing." Nothing to give her hope for her future, nothing even to cling onto from her past, because it was a something that had never happened, and no matter what Robin had told her about all the possibilities it represented, what good does possibility do, when her reality is that Robin is no longer with her?
She leaves Emma standing there to unfurl page xxx in her hands, hears her answering gasp as the door to the diner slams shut behind her. When her Mercedes SL refuses to let her in, she remembers too late that Emma had pocketed her keys. Swiping furiously at the tears streaking down her cheeks, Regina raises shaky arms to unleash a cloud of purple smoke that takes her away, to the first place that springs unbidden in her mind.
The smell of forest is still strong on her pillow, threaded into her sheets and stealing through her senses as she collapses onto the bed, breathing him in. The flickering candlelight softens the darkness of her vault while his scent dulls the ache in her chest, wrapping around her heart like phantom arms and pulling her close, but it fades, it always fades and still she misses him, how is it possible to miss someone to the point of physical agony, but the day it stops hurting quite as much is the day she starts to let him go, and she's too selfish for that, for now.
.
.
.
The third time it happens, she's arguing with Little John, hands gesturing to bring their surroundings to his attention and further emphasize her point that the woods are no place for them to make a permanent home—not when civilization is so close by, and not when she's offering it so freely to him and the other Merry Men. (Granny will find ways to ensure that they make their keep, she tells him sternly when he protests that they don't accept charity, least of all from a queen; not wishing to offend your majesty, he adds hastily at the end, and she nearly smiles for the first time in weeks.)
"It's electricity, not magic," she tries to convince him, proceeding to demonstrate how the flashlight on her iPhone turns on with a simple swipe of her fingertip.
"Seems to work about the same," Little John says dubiously, and she sighs, thinking she might as well have conjured up a fireball in her palm, for all the reassurance she's clearly failing to give him. "It's not even connected to anything. How can you trust it?" But he takes the proffered phone from her anyway, begins to tap experimentally at the screen, and lets out a comical sound of surprise when tiny boxes of images disappear just as quickly as they'd come with no apparent rhyme or reason.
Regina leaves him to his technological discoveries, her wandering footsteps taking her to a familiar-looking tent, now uninhabited, the campfire at its opening a pile of dirt, ash and brittle bits of log. She feels cold, so cold as she stares at the empty space where Robin had touched an affectionate hand to the back of Henry's head, where Henry had oohed and aahed over Roland's prized arrowhead collection, where the four of them had stood together, as a family they'd never have the chance to be.
She's about to turn away when she spies something buried amongst the ash, would've missed it if the sunlight hadn't streaked through the treetops just so, at just the right angle to illuminate the corner of it in a soft yellow glow. She bends down to extract the paper, takes a shuddering breath as she unfolds it to reveal page xxxv from the missing timeline to a story that is not her own. Tears burn at the back of her eyes and she fights off the urge to scream, because who the hell does this author think he is to continually taunt her this way, with images of doomed love and lost hope?
Another bone to pick with him once we find him, she's thinking furiously as she stands with renewed determination, when she hears someone call from behind her, "Milady?" Her breath hitches just the slightest before she realizes that she recognizes that voice, and her heart resumes beating mid-cartwheel because no, Regina, you idiot, of course it doesn't belong to the man she's thinking of, always thinking of (occupying every waking thought, and every dream of one, too).
"Terribly sorry to bother you," Will Scarlet says, shoulders slouched, hands in his pockets as his footsteps halt a courteous yard or two away from her, "I couldn't help but overhear your conversation with Little John."
"I'm sure you could have," Regina responds, but there's no malice in the way she says it, and he gives her a brief smile in return.
"Right, well," he clears his throat, "I know why you're doing it. And I'm here to tell you that you don't. Have to, I mean."
She arches a brow and crosses her arms, inviting him to continue.
"You feel guilty," he says, pointblank, and her eyebrow nearly shoots through the sky. "You're thinking it's your own fault you don't deserve to be happy, and because he made you happy, because he loves you, he's being punished for it too."
Regina opens her mouth to protest, but he plows on.
"Trust me, though, it doesn't work like that. Because when you love someone, no matter how unlovable that person might think she is, you see it as a gift, not a sentence. You—" his throat seems to close off around his next words, and he pauses a moment before they make their way back to him. "Even if you're miserable, when you love someone as much as I know he loves you, that love makes all the pain worth it."
And who is the woman that Will loves, Regina can't help but wonder now, enough to make his own misery worthwhile?
"None of us blame you for sending him away, Regina." She meets his eyes in surprise, and they are wide, sad, utterly genuine. "You shouldn't either. You did right by him. And that's the best thing you can do for someone you love."
She shakes her head, hugs her hands to her elbows, page xxxv still clutched in her grasp. "Then–" she hears her voice breaking but can't do anything to stop it, "then why does it feel so awful?"
Will shrugs, looking down at the scuffed toe of his boot as it kicks up a cloud of ash. "Maybe that's the point, yeah? Maybe that's how you know that love is worth it. Because it makes you feel you're shit without it." His shoulders square, a mask falls over the pain distorting his features, "Right, then. Anyway. Thought you might be wanting these back."
Regina's lips part slightly in shock as he tugs several small squares of paper out of his pocket, pressing the pile into her palm. She turns them over in her hand, one by one, but she already knows what they'll show before she does.
They're the remains of page xxiii, what she'd torn to pieces after she saw his back walking away from her, after she'd realized it wasn't too much to ask for someone to love her, but apparently it was to ask for him to be able to stay.
"Where—where did you find these?" she breathes out.
"Where you left them," answers Will. "Hope you don't mind that I took the liberty of retrieving what I could. Didn't seem right to leave them there."
She holds page xxiii in one hand, page xxxv in the other, and she recognizes that look in Robin's eyes in both, as he smiles that half-crooked smile, bringing out the dimples in his cheeks. It's the same look he'd given her when they'd first met; when he'd told her "evil" was just a part of her name and nothing more; when he'd pulled her to him by the fireplace; when he'd smiled because she had, because it was her smile he thought of every time his eyes closed; and when she was the one he'd chosen, in the end.
And it hardly mattered where, or when, or whether it could've happened had this, or would've happened had that, because regardless of it all, he'd always looked at her the exact same way. Maybe Will was right, maybe love brought pain and suffering along with it, but love itself…wasn't to love to hope?
"I have to go," she tells Will suddenly, and he doesn't seem the least bit surprised, bids her a jaunty farewell before ambling over to the small crowd that has formed around Little John and her iPhone.
She knows where she needs to be now.
But first, she has two other missing pages to track down.
.
.
.
She hadn't been able to bring herself back here, not since the day he'd turned away and taken her heart along with him. The memory of it alone had transformed many of her nights into sleepless fits of endless torture, but now, as her heels inch closer to the town line, she feels her heart swell with something that feels treacherously like…well, like hope.
She stands there, mere feet separating her from the edge of the Snow Queen's curse, hands folded in front of her in much the same way she had the last time, as he'd broken down before her and she'd stood there, letting him, awaiting the inevitable with a heavy calm that weighed her very soul down to the ground.
But now, she feels it lifting, even as her heart continues to knock against her chest in a furious rhythm, and twice her eyes dart toward a motion in the trees beyond that turns out to be nothing more than a foraging squirrel, a bird taking flight.
Still, she can't bring herself to move.
And then, just when she's on the cusp of resignation, thinking to herself that it's getting late and she ought to be home in time to fix supper for Henry ("You just have to believe again, Mom," he'd told her as he handed pages xxv and xxx over with a solemnness that he's grown into rather well, and she already can't bear the look of disappointment on his face when she comes back with defeat twisting at her insides once more), the quiet rustle of leaves coaxes her gaze back to the woods lining the side of the road.
A boot emerges onto the asphalt, followed by a pair of trousers, the sleeve of a green jacket rolled up to the elbow, the tattoo of a lion etched into his skin.
Robin.
Regina doesn't know whether to laugh or cry as she stumbles forward, just shy of the spell glistening in the air, cutting Storybrooke off from the rest of world, her from him, them from each other. But he'd come back for her. And maybe he had every day since they'd parted, in the hope that she would be there too, because even if he couldn't see her, or feel her, touch her, hold her, kiss her, did that make his love for her any less real?
She drinks in the sight of him as he marches blindly forward, and that look, that look on his face, it takes her breath away, until he's close enough that she wonders, if she were to exhale, whether he'd be able to feel it on his skin. And maybe she's so drunk off the fact that he's there just within her reach that she imagines it, but she could almost swear it's his scent filling her senses now, and the real thing is a thousand-fold more intoxicating than her memory of it ever could be.
His eyes close as he inhales deeply, and she stares as a disbelieving smile crosses his features, as though he's caught a hint of her perfume, and then his eyes are open and so blue and they're everywhere, wild and coasting right over her face, not meeting her gaze because he can't no matter how hard he searches for it.
"Regina?" falls from his lips and she chokes back a sob, answers with his name, and of course he can't hear her but he reaches out anyway, and that's when she realizes he's holding something, the matching pieces of page xxiii fisted in his hand, edges jagged where she'd ripped right through them.
She'd turned her own back after she'd torn it apart, and she knows now what she hadn't seen that Will must've, as she scattered the page to the wind and it followed Robin across the town line. The image of her she'd left with him was one of ripping their hopes to shreds, and still, still, he'd come back to find her.
Her hand opens too now and she lets the other pages fly from her grasp; the air around them shimmers and parts as they flutter through the magical barrier, beyond. Robin's eyes follow them with a look of wonder, and then a smile crinkles them at the corners, a beautiful heart-stopping smile full of hope and promise and possibility. His free hand is pulling them out of the air before they can float past him, and she watches, cheeks wet, fingers trembling as she lifts them to wipe away the tears she knows he would've kissed away had he been able to see them.
And she knows what he sees on the missing pages now, what brightens his eyes and slackens his jaw, tugs his lower lip in between his teeth so he can bite away his own watery smile. Their story beyond xxiii, the night they'd never met inside the tavern—the heated words they'd never exchange after he'd followed her back to the castle—the torrid affair they would never have right under King Leopold's nose—and the happily ever after that would never be theirs after he'd stolen her away from the castle for good.
And it's okay, she knows this now, because while that was their story that could have been, they have their own that is, and it's different, but it's real, and it's theirs, is still being told, is not over, will never be over; and the author knows this too, she's sure of it, because he's written it that way every time, has shown it to be so, that their love for each other is the one constant, and no matter what tries to separate them, that will never change.
And it's okay, because she knows now that Robin has never given up on her, and how wrong, oh how wrong she'd been to nearly give up on them.
He's retrieving something from his pocket, and even though he can't see her, she knows he can sense her, so it's with a teasing little quirk of his mouth that his hand opens back up, and her laughter bubbles out, watery and full of hope when she sees what he's holding there.
It's as though he'd robbed an entire bank of all its quarters.
He sends them soaring, and as they fall, her eyes never leave his face, and they're smiling while the quarters rain down on them both.