SUMMARY: Regina and Daniel's story, pre-"Stable Boy." Fourth chapter takes place directly after "The Still Small Voice." Canon through "Stable Boy," entirely possible to be Jossed as future events unfold. Regina/Daniel romance, Regina/Emma/Henry friendship. The audience will kindly ignore the author's My Little Pony fixation, which has nothing (translation: everything) to do with the plot.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own "Once Upon a Time," Regina, Daniel, or any of the supplementary characters, and I'm not making any money from this story.
WARNING: You're reading my fic, do any of you even need the angst warning by now? This story contains nongraphic allusions to child abuse. You didn't expect Regina's mother to be June Cleaver right up until the Daniel situation, did you?
Speaking of mothers, huge beta thanks to my mother, who did an overnight canon check for me. At the time of this writing, I've only seen seven episodes of Once Upon a Time, so I asked Mom to ensure that I didn't contradict anything that I might not have seen.
A/N and DEDICATION: To Rowan, because you asked so nicely.
One more note (will she ever shut up, you ask … :D ) … you people are bewildering and wonderful. Really. I have never in my life received six reviews and a ton of assorted "favorites" and "author notifications" for a story in the first 24 hours after I posted it. Thank you – for the love and for bolstering my confidence with my writing, it means a lot to me specifically at this point in my life. I don't want to disappoint anyone, however. Most of the reviews seemed to be under the impression that this was the start of a novel (and hoping that I'd go the SwanQueen route). This story is complete, though; there won't be any more chapters. It's intended to be Regina/Emma friendship only (although if you would like to read in 'ship, you are welcome to do so). I wrote it for two reasons: a friend of mine requested angsty Regina fic, and in the space of less than two weeks I've fallen so hard for Regina it's ridiculous. Within the Once Upon a Time fairytale realm, each character has one true love. I believe that by casting the curse, Regina tried to create a world where she could fall in love again. But she didn't take into account that it's almost as hard for us to find a second True Love, and almost as random. My Regina is still in love with Daniel, no matter how many years later it might be.
Once Upon a Stable
by Alicia
Chapter 1: The Girl Under the Hay
The cart swerved sharply left and tilted alarmingly skyward as it continued its journey. Too quickly. Darrin yelped and sprinted from the colt he'd been tending to the other side of the load of tarp-covered horse blankets. "Daniel, watch where you're –"
With a wet rhythmic thunking noise, one at a time, each blanket slid out from under the protective tarp to scatter along a quarter-mile's distance in the mud on the side of the road. The cart itself, light and empty, flipped on a rock. The cart horse halted. He stood next to the splinters and glared at Daniel.
Daniel ran to catch up to his offended horse and make amends. Darrin ran to catch up to his brother, Daniel was sure to deliver a scathing lecture and possibly lament the loss of the blankets. The rain ran in uncaring rivulets to catch up to everything: leaves, tree trunks, dirt, rocks, Daniel's back.
"How many times do I have to tell you to watch where you're going in the rain?"
"How many times do I have to tell you to let me do my job?" Daniel shot back over his shoulder.
"Fine job you did." At eighteen, Darrin's legs were longer than Daniel's. He would be there in just a few minutes.
"All I ruined was horse blankets," Daniel said, skidding to a stop next to the cart horse. He reached to take the unattached harness from the horse's back, missed, and caught only a slick rock, his hands scrabbling at the sides of the rock as his feet spread and he sat in the mud.
"And our best cart."
"Our only cart. You sold our best cart for a handful of colored sand."
"The merchants told me it was fairy dust."
"Dust to summon fairies. Fairies don't live here, bonehead. They're all the way on the other side of the forest, and they don't fly fast." Daniel's ironclad logical arguments would probably have been more believable if they hadn't been delivered by a mud-covered fourteen year old peasant boy who was at that moment struggling to become upright with too-long legs sticking out at odd angles.
Although the wind muffled his brother's voice, Daniel was sure he heard Darrin say, "How else am I going to find a girl?"
Daniel said quite loudly and clearly, "Unless you're looking for a girl unicorn to complete the herd, your love life isn't worth our cart." As he said, "cart," he succeeded in pulling himself to a standing position. That was better. He had never understood his brother's fixation with girls. Girls were cute when they danced in a town square on feast days, useful when they provided supplies and horse management tips, and generally ignorable besides that.
"And your clumsiness is worth our other cart?"
"I'm not clumsy," Daniel said. On "clumsy," the cart horse whumped him in the small of the back and he fell knees forward, soiling the entire length of his trousers, front and back.
"Nice one, boy," Darrin said. He smoothly ran the last few paces to the large rock, stepped over his brother as if the ground was steady and solid, and freed the cart horse from its useless harness.
The horse neighed.
Daniel couldn't think of a suitable epithet to use on either, so he kept silent. He envisioned the splinters of the useless cart knitting themselves back together, magically filling with horse manure, and slowly emptying over Darrin's head.
A handful of mud thumped against Daniel's back.
Daniel turned. Slipping and sliding, he covered the distance between himself and his older brother. Instead of attempting to gain proper footing to attack, he just grabbed his brother's shoulders. They tumbled into the gutter.
Twenty minutes later, Daniel addressed a large pile of mud with blue eyes. "Um, I think the rain is stopping. Since we don't have blankets to keep the horses warm, do you suppose we should find a stable for the herd? I think there's a town a few miles to the east."
The mud said, "Heh. Okay. But you still owe me a new cart."
"In that case, you owe me a new sweater."
"How do you figure that?"
"If you hadn't thrown the mud at me, all I'd have needed would have been new trousers."
"Fine." The mud extended an appendage. "On the day you bring home a brand new cart, I will buy you a sweater."
Daniel took his brother's hand – at least, he thought there was a hand somewhere underneath all the mud. They stood in unison. Their feet slid in unison. They ended up back where they'd started, on their rear ends.
Well, at least Daniel wasn't the only one to slip in the mud anymore.
When Darrin started to laugh, Daniel joined. The day could have been so much worse. He was with his brother, the herd had nearly all its members, and rain was only water. The ghost of a rainbow hovered on the horizon, over and above the still-offended gallingly mud-free cart horse.
There was indeed a village only a few miles down the road, and over the next several hours, Darrin and Daniel brought the herd to warmth and safety without incident. While the herd was too large to be stabled anywhere besides a king's palace, several merchants tied their work tents together to make a temporary canopy over the horses' heads. They refused payment, saying that the horses would be more than enough help on market day to justify the effort.
After the fifth compliment about the unusually regal bearing of the five herd leaders, Daniel whispered in Darrin's ear, "they're not really horses."
Darrin repaid him with a hissed "I know that," and an elbow to the ribs.
The elbow was a reminder of the need for secrecy, of course, but it was unnecessary. It had been Daniel's mission for as long as he could remember. Find the enchanted creatures of the enchanted forest: the unicorns, the pegasai, the fairy ghost steeds. Shelter them, protect, them, bring them together. And then, when the herd was complete, ride with them all his days as a privileged Unicorn Rider. Probably alone, he mused, since Darrin seemed to determined to settle down with a girl before their mission was complete.
Just to annoy Darrin, Daniel whispered again. "What would you do if I tell that pretty girl over there she can fly away on the red mare over there if she'll only marry you?"
"I'd poison your water flagon," Darrin responded without missing a beat. "Besides, I can tell her myself. There's no limit to the number of Unicorn Riders, you know. If I am to trade for a wife, though, I think I would rather ask the blond one over there.
"I'm going to go trip her," Daniel said.
Daniel did stalk off, but in the opposite direction from his brother's intended conquest, and Darrin, infuriatingly, did not seem even to expect Daniel to interfere with his evening plans. Daniel often wondered if there was such a thing as an enchanted Stupid Potion, and if so if he could ever procure some to slip into his brother's wine. Not a permanent Stupid Potion, of course, just one to let Daniel be the smart one for awhile and for a change.
Daniel had bigger problems, however. Problem number one, always on his mind, was how he was to lure a particular young female unicorn to the herd. She was somewhere in these woods – probably everywhere in these woods at different times, given the particular fleet footed gift of the unicorns. She was lost, scared, alone, and far too far away to tell the difference between the herd and ordinary horses, or between Darrin and Daniel and ordinary people who might hurt or sell her. As intelligent as magical horses were ordinarily, they were particularly bad at finding one another. That was why Unicorn Riders existed at all. Or would exist, once Darrin and Daniel completed their mission. They had been tracking this unicorn for several months, and were no closer than when they had begun.
Problem number two was that Daniel needed to buy a cart to make Darrin look foolish. Well, actually Daniel needed a cart so that Darrin would replace Daniel's ruined sweater, but priorities were priorities. Problem number three was that they had camped within a stone's throw of a house of nobles and had been too wet and exhausted to notice.
Normally solving a problem like a location too near to nobles would involve travelling in the direction away from the house where the nobles lived, but Daniel decided he had been the one to take the Stupid Potion that night. There were no lights in either the house or the stable, and the storm had cleared and the night was quiet. But there was something wrong. There were tiny stray bits of motion. Daniel's eyes, trained to pick out the movements of magical horses camouflaged deep in the woods, caught the movement behind the stable window in the dark, the faint vibrations of grass that were not caused by the wind. If a noble was out in his stable late at night, he would have candles and servants. Either someone was getting robbed, or…
Moving as silently, and almost as swiftly, as one of his unicorns, Daniel crossed into the noble family's yard, up the hill, and into the stable. If he could catch a thief in the act, perhaps they would reward him with money he could use for a cart.
The stable was silent and still. Nothing breathed, nothing moved … except one pile of hay in the far corner. Daniel tackled the hay. "You'll steal no bread tonight," he whispered.
There was a little girl hidden under the hay.
"What?" Daniel said, newly confused. "Where are your parents?"
"What are you doing in my stable?"
Daniel noted that her voice was commanding, but in the moonlight there were trails of tears plainly visible on her cheeks. "I thought there was someone here stealing from you," he said.
The anger slipped from her face. "There is no thief. My parents own this house, and I …"
"You were hiding," Daniel finished for her. You were hiding as a unicorn hides, he did not add. "Umm, I'm just going to go," and he backed up a few paces toward the door.
Anger had already faded from the girl's features, but as Daniel backed away, it was replaced by something like terror.
"Do you, uh, want me to stay with you? For awhile? Are you hiding from something really bad?"
She didn't answer, but made a tiny gesture that looked like a nod.
To Daniel's eyes, that was a shout. He sat down and patted the hay at his side.
She sat, not touching him. Stray tears ran down her cheeks in the dark. He finally reached over to clasp her hand. She let him.
"Better now," she said, standing. "Next time I won't cry at all."
Daniel did not have any idea what to make of this.
"Can you take away the cart I made? Mother will be angry if she sees it in the morning."
"You made this?" Daniel was still seated on the hay, two steps behind the girl he had discovered.
"Father helped me. But Mother does not like it."
"Ummm, okay," Daniel said. "But I should go."
"Thank you," the girl said. As silently as a unicorn, she vanished back into the night, away from the stable and toward the house. There was only a faint vibration of grass where she passed.
Just as silently, but far more slowly and painstakingly, Daniel pulled the cart by himself out of the barn, down the hill, across the path and woods where he had come from, and to the edge of the inn where Darrin had taken a room earlier. It wasn't perfect. The left wheel was larger than the right, and the front of the cart sloped slightly which would require extra bracing for heavy loads. But it was at least as well made as the cart Daniel had broken.
When he reached the inn, Daniel spared a second to hope that he found the right room for Darrin. He spared several more seconds to hope that he would not find Darrin asleep with the blonde girl from the village. Then he abandoned his silence, flung open the door, and announced to a thankfully-alone Darrin, "I have our cart."
"What the…" and Darrin said several words Daniel wasn't supposed to know. "Now? Cart? Sleep."
"Get yourself out of bed and outside," Daniel said.
When Darrin didn't move, Daniel grabbed a waterskin from Darrin's abandoned pack and emptied it over Darrin's head. It wasn't quite as satisfying as imaginary manure, but it was the next best thing.
When Darrin stopped coughing and sputtering and smacking Daniel – which was completely worth it – the brothers stumbled ungracefully back out the front door of the inn, probably waking all the guests up along the way.
"See?" Daniel said. "Cart." Yep. He'd taken the Stupid Potion. He was unable to come up with sentences longer than one word.
"Sweater. Tomorrow." Darrin said. "Bed."
After all that, Daniel had to sleep on the floor. But he didn't envy Darrin the bed anyway, considering that the bed was still soaked.
"Hey, kid," Darrin mumbled.
"Yeah?"
"You didn't steal that."
Daniel had never stolen anything in his life. "Of course not. A little girl gave it to me."
"Huh?"
"You know that noble family just over the hill? There was a little girl out in the stable. She was upset about something, wouldn't tell me what. But she told me she built the cart and her mother didn't like it."
"Kid built it?"
"That's what I said." Daniel was already in the strange state where he was not sure what was real and what was dream. He wished Darrin would stop talking.
Suddenly Darrin sat up. "A little girl, you said? Is she a virgin?"
Daniel did not want to think about the circumstances under which a kid that age wouldn't be a virgin. "I assume so," he said.
"You're an idiot. Young unicorns come only to virgin girls."
Maybe he was asleep already, since Darrin wasn't making any sense.
"You're a double idiot," Darrin said, and he reached over the edge to halfheartedly smack Daniel on the shoulder for good measure. "If we can persuade the kid to help us, we can find the unicorn. So go find her tomorrow and make her come with us."
"Uh huh," said Daniel. If Darrin said anything else, Daniel didn't hear. But Daniel thought he managed to say aloud, "First you buy that sweater for me," before he remembered nothing else.