The day is interrupted by a summer-heavy downpour, warm and wet, the kind of weather that everyone smelled when they woke up this morning but kept trying to deny. She's out on her own for an espresso run—her secretary, Astra, has been woefully mislaid; something about her brothers molting?—without an umbrella, as if stubbornly insisting that it wasn't going to rain would make it so. She stumbles into the coffee shop with a hasty "thank you" to the man holding open the door, already drenched through her blouse.
"You're welcome." The voice is cutting, prim, painfully familiar. Snow whips around and takes a step back, rocking on her heels.
Charming is standing in the doorway, folding up his blue umbrella as the door swings shut behind him. She is briefly caught up in the sight: the broad slope of his shoulders, the catch of raindrops in his dark lashes; however mixed her feelings toward him, she will concede that the prince's beauty has always rivaled hers. But now is not the time to admire the way he endearingly tries to blow the one curling lock of hair from his forehead.
"Billy," she says. The name is heavy on her tongue. She hasn't been avoiding him, but she hasn't been making an effort, either, and she pushes down the emotion that swells in her chest because she still doesn't know what to feel and is clinging to the belief that she doesn't need him. Doesn't need to think about him. "Sorry, I didn't—didn't see you there."
He leaves the umbrella propped in the corner and brings a hand up to the nape of his neck, giving her a tight smile. "Well, it's been a while."
She smiles back, the gesture equally forced. "I guess it has. I mean, with the new jobs and all. Still settling in, right?"
Charming opens his mouth to reply and then seems to think better of it. He starts forward, about to shift past her and join the line, before stopping and turning around abruptly. She suddenly realises that he looks so, so tired.
"Don't bullshit me, Snow."
The words are weighed down and weary. She cringes. "I'm not—" she begins. But she's out of excuses. "I'm sorry," she says.
"Right." His laughter is cold, and he starts to turn around again. "Right."
"Hey." Her fingers catch on his sleeve. "I am."
"You're—call me bitter, dear, but you've never been sorry for anything."
Her face must express her confusion, for Charming laughs weakly again. "Of course you didn't—Snow, every time—" He takes a deep breath that shakes when he exhales, and she realises with a sickening lurch that she has never seen his emotions manifest in anything close to this hysteria. "Whenever things 'didn't work out'—it was my fault, and... my overprotectiveness, my pride, I mean, I get that I was at fault for a lot of things, but I tried to fix them and nothing changed and eventually I just thought—" His voice breaks. Water, Snow notices, is dripping silently from his umbrella onto the floor. She looks at the growing puddle so she doesn't have to look at him.
"I thought there was something wrong," he says. "With me."
And then he goes very quiet. She finds little comfort in the fact that this is the Prince Charming she knows better: stoic in his sadness, unused tear ducts still unused. It's not becoming of a prince to cry.
Unceremoniously, all her words have left her.
He orders his coffee.
She can't remember what she pays for but she ends up with something too sweet. He is sitting at a table for two by the window, watching rain hit the glass.
She sits down across from him and they watch, and people watch them—because of who they are, their names, their histories; because of what they have grown to mean to this aberrant town—but they have long since stopped caring what other people think. They have trouble enough knowing what to think of themselves.
The day is washed out and the sunlight grey. The rain-streaked window distorts the street outside.
"I know you don't want to be here," he says. His voice is low.
"That's not true," she says, too adamantly.
"It is true. You don't want to be around me and you haven't for a long time. So why are you here, Snow?"
Snow suddenly feels as if she hasn't quite been seeing him. She's been looking, certainly, but only now does the mist clinging to Charming's silhouette fall away: the palest of light paints his edges with a softness she never saw when they were together.
"I want to know," she says, "why I don't love you anymore."
His eyes are a clear, watery blue in what little light peaks through the clouds.
"I thought there was something wrong with me," he says again, as if their initial conversation were never interrupted.
Everything about the man is hurt. She wants to tell him there was never anything wrong with him. But then she thinks of every day he treated her as if she were something fragile, and of the futility of lying.
"And then I found out about the Book, and I thought—perhaps this was the great and terrible thing that was wrong; this is why I could never seem to hold onto you, even though—even though that's all I ever wanted to do. We just... weren't meant to be. I wasn't meant to be. Important, I mean. Or even immortal. I wasn't even in your story."
"Our story," says Snow, frowning. "I can't remember it without you."
"Snow White." The name is soft the way it rolls off his tongue, affection seeping through carefully constructed walls. "It always was yours."
"Billy…"
"I respect that," he says. "I respect that it was yours, and that you wrote your own way out of it."
Snow wants to hold his shaking hand.
She pulls her fingers back from the table.
His breath is sharp on the intake. "I'm just not sure anymore," he says, "of how much of me is—me."
And choked with nervous laughter as he exhales. "I don't even know who I am, Snow."
She gapes at him, desperately searching for any semblance of something smart to say. What can one say, to something like that? She knows what he feels like, a little—she felt it back when Bunny told them—but in the end she had come to the conclusion that it didn't matter. Her fate was her own. Her fate is still her own.
Isn't it?
"I… I'm sorry," she says helplessly.
He laughs harder, the sound verging on hysterical, and buries his face in his hands. "Here we go again. Snow White—I've fallen in love four times." He holds up four fingers, the others still splayed across whatever expression he's trying to hide. Each digit goes down as he counts off. "A girl in glass slippers," he says, "A girl asleep. A girl who leapt from a tower for me."
One left. He raises his head and her heart lurches at the look in his eyes.
"But you," he says softly, as his hand curls into a loose fist and drops to his side. "The girl in the glass coffin. My first love, and the truest."
It is terrifying to see him like this, vulnerable and exposed.
"That's how I found you," he says, "Hopelessly naïve. No—I know. I romanticised you—I barely knew you—I shouldn't have. And I shouldn't have assumed that you needed my protection."
She nods, unsure as to where this is going.
"You never needed me," he says. "But I needed you."
The furrow in her brow only deepens. He goes on, "Falling in love is one thing, but staying in it… and then somewhere along the line, for whatever reason, you fell in love with me too. But you lived so long in this—apprehension, this denial of getting close to me because you believed I still saw you precisely the way you were five centuries ago—I was too big a part of that old life, the girl you hated, the princess who trusted so wholly that she met death right at his doorstep. And a lot of that is true. I loved you and I thought the best, the only way to express that love was by keeping you safe. I didn't know that sometimes love is understanding that you are fully capable of protecting yourself. That love is trusting you. But then I did trust you. I put all my trust in you."
Snow thinks she's never felt heartbreak before this precise moment.
"I still remind you of the girl you hate," he says, and she knows that at least in part he speaks the truth. "I am forever fixed in your mind to that narrative. That's why I'm here, isn't it? I was an accident, a circumstance of your existence. You have no obligation toward me, but I am undetachable from you.
"I could never detach myself from you. And that was my mistake. I thought that you loved me, and were okay with loving me at last, and then you took off again. Took my job, which I don't mind. Took my heart, which normally—but you stopped returning my calls. And I thought—how did I fuck up this time? What do I need to fix? I was in a panic for weeks."
Miserable as she is, this time she takes his hand. I'm sorry, she wants to say again. I'm sorry. But it wouldn't mean a thing to him. He does not press back into her palm, does not look down or acknowledge her touch at all.
"It took me a long time to realise that somewhere along the line I started doing it right. That I've changed for the better. That you were the one…"
Charming stumbles, at a loss for words. As usual, his gaze falls past her. "So if you've fallen out of love with me," he says finally, his voice cracking, "if you want to know why—you're not going to find the answer here. Not with me."
With the hand that isn't beneath hers on the table between them, he pulls a handkerchief from the inside of his jacket and holds it out to her.
It is only then that Snow realises she is crying. She stifles a sound between a laugh and a sob and takes it. "William Charming," she says, wiping away tears. "My first love. The truest."
He meets her eyes at that; she is caught off-guard by how discerning his gaze is. He frowns as if to say, Don't.
"No," she says, "I loved you. I really, really loved you, Billy, you know I did. I loved you more than I've ever loved anybody else."
She pauses, looks away. "I guess, except—you know I'm not the perfect, selfless princess everyone wants me to be. You, of all people, know I'm—flawed, and in some ways I'm ruined completely; like you, like my mother, like the Grimms—all of us were always more like the Grimms than we wanted to admit, weren't we?"
He hums a wordless agreement.
"Anyway," she says weakly, toying with the kerchief in her hand, "I was selfish. You're right, you've grown. You're kinder, more generous, you—and it's all effortless now, like it doesn't kill you to help for the sake of it. You've changed so much and I'm happy for you."
She thumbs over the monogram in the lower corner of the cloth. This is hers, she realises. She gave this to him—what, a century ago?
"I'm scared," she admits. "Billy, I've only ever loved you. I never stopped loving you. So after the votes came in—when I looked at you and you were wearing that same stupid, gorgeous grin I'd fallen for again and again and I didn't feel—anything—I was terrified.
"I shouldn't have done that to you," she says quietly. "I know I was scared but I shouldn't have stopped talking to you. I shouldn't—I didn't even know I was doing it, but I shouldn't have blamed you. You deserve better. Especially from me."
He turns his palm face-up and squeezes her hand.
"I think when I heard my name called I finally realised," she can feel her eyes well up with tears again, "that I'm going to be okay on my own."
Her arm is lifted and she looks up to find his lips pressed to her knuckles. Her breath hitches at the sight, the feeling; it's a familiar one, a jolting reminder of what they used to be.
And he lets go.
"You are," he says. "You're going to be just fine."
The rain has stopped. They stand apart from each other on the puddled street, more distance between them than there used to be.
"I'll be all right," he says.
"Will you?"
"You never wanted to be dependent on me. I never should have been dependent on you. Or anyone, really. It's time to—find myself is such a cliché, isn't it?"
"I hope you figure it out," she says, "Being you."
Charming nods as if he doesn't quite believe he will. Snow stares at him a moment, a complicated prince in all his simple hopelessness.
Then she leans forward and hugs him tightly. "I'm sorry," she says, her words muffled against his chest. "I love you in every other way, Billy, I swear, I'm sorry."
Breathless, he replies, "I love you too."
When she pulls away he is smiling, if sadly. "You don't really need to be sorry. It's not your fault either, after all."
"I handled everything like a child."
He shrugs. "We're both still growing up."
She brushes a stray curling lock from his forehead. "For what it's worth, I'm glad I got to grow up with you."
He shakes his head with what is perhaps his first real smile all day. "Get back to work, Mayor White," he says. "Ferryport Landing needs you."
"I'll see you later," she says, and that's how the princess leaves her prince a second time, the sun on her back and the rain at her heels. Her last words are a promise in the space between them.
a/n: thank you for reading. full disclosure, i don't actually think charming would swallow his pride enough to have this conversation with snow only a few months after the end of the series, if at all, so this piece falls outside of any of my personal canon. nonetheless, i think the dialogue is a worthy way to explore these characters and their relationship, and i hope you enjoyed it.