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After several nights on the road, around Marian and Roland every minute of every day, he decides to take a shower. They've all been running baths instead when they can, one slightly more familiar thing in a sea of unknown ones. But in this hotel room, the bathroom has double doors separating it from the bedroom, and with the steam and the sound of the water, it feels like his mind finally has the space for thoughts other than navigation and finding them their next meal and keeping Roland calm.
Marian and Roland have both fallen asleep, while he lay in bed wondering if he'd prefer to have the dream that often visits him at night, of Regina running into his arms and her smile and her hair between his fingers and her body solid against his, but then he always has to wake from those dreams, and perhaps not sleeping at all is preferable to the pain of realizing she isn't truly there.
He doesn't have the intention, when he steps into the steaming water and closes his eyes against the fluorescent light. But when he does close them it is seconds before he is imagining the cheap, glaring lights to be the dimmed candlelight from Regina's vault, the walls around him to be the tasteful neutrals he imagines her house must be filled with, frosted glass and taupe and soft lighting. Her murmuring voice, soft and low and irresistible as she speaks to him in the last lingering hours of darkness before dawn, her silky hair between his fingers, and that disbelieving, elusive smile spreading across her face as she kisses his neck, his shoulder, her soft skin and her gentle touch and the determined furrow of her brow. Her body pressing into his, fingers digging into his skin, gasps falling from her lips, her smell and her warmth the feel of her surrounding him.
And before he has even consciously chosen it, he has wrapped his hand around himself, his movements frantic and desperate and not nearly as wonderful as he remembers Regina's hand being, that night in her vault, Regina's lips, but the memory of it only urges him faster. He stays quiet as he pants and shivers, depressingly, frustratingly still aware that none of this is real, that when he opens his eyes they will be fluorescent lights and a clear glass shower door and he will be alone.
He comes with a gasp, her name half-formed on his lips, and he presses his eyes shut even more firmly as he comes back to himself, breaths heaving in and out of his chest as he chases the memory of her lips and her smile. It keeps slipping away from him, like a thin fabric on a breeze, and every time he reaches for it, it flutters farther away. And he thinks again of the page he left her with, her hope, and considers, not for the first time, how he has no other image of his love, nothing to grasp but his own memories and his aching heart.
He presses his forehead into the cold tile, the water lukewarm rather than hot at this point, and lets out a groan that turns into an angry, frustrated sob. Another. And another. For his guilt for thinking of himself when he has a family to care for in the next room, for his shame for not feeling guilty, for his agony to think of Regina alone right now, the possibility of their life together a dream they shared for mere seconds before it was all snatched away. He cries silently until the water turns cold, his palms flattened on the tile. And then he lets the water run over his face, turns off the tap, swallows past the lump in his throat. There will be no breaking down in front of his family, he tells himself, no showing them the helplessness that has stolen its way into his bones.
He's wrung out his exhausted nerves and muscles enough that when he returns to bed, he falls asleep at last.
He hears his name, a hopeful question carried to him on the wind.
He calls back to her breathlessly, and when she responds, his name has become joyful and certain.
He laughs, and runs towards the sound of her voice.