Sic Semper Tyrannis
Note: this was started before the finale, and the curse was broken not by true love's kiss but by the death of its creator. This being a Swan Queen offering, I hope deviations from canon shall be forgiven :)
Flog: I shall also post this on tumblr, which I am an absolute noob at, hence the name Naive Knave. I am running on rusty writing skills so your prompts would be welcome
Disclaimer: made not for profit, but for fun.
Chapter One
Magic, dark or light, is never exact and even small, unintended variations can ripple into unexpected consequences. Knowledge of magic passed as lore contains a trickle of truth mixed with a great deal of imaginings, and spells and curses can be undone in many ways beyond lore. Thus it was that the curse that created Storybrooke, Maine was broken not by true love's kiss, but by the death of the creator of the curse, Mr. Gold, at the hands of his true love, the tragic, bewildered, young Belle.
They found her sitting outside a stable, still regal, and she looked on at the mob as if chastising them for being late for her execution. The merciful thing would have been to remove her head from her shoulders, but Regina understood the poetry behind her glass coffin. It wasn't a coffin, really, but a facsimile of her home in Storybrooke. From what she could tell, tons of fairy dust must have been used to create this illusion of Mayor Mills, alone in what appears to be an empty town in Maine. Of course she tried to get out of her yard, but an invisible shield kept her from venturing beyond it. She wondered, though, if Snow herself was responsible for a significant alteration in her backyard. Her apple tree was absent, and the spot where it should be was now an eyesore. She had no guards for none were necessary and her only means of communicating was the quaint way she was allowed to put in requests for provisions on the mailbox.
She repeatedly requested for news about Henry, but there was only ever silence on that front. Once she even asked about the savior, Miss Emma Swan. Regina knew Henry would easily acclimatize in Fairy Tale Land, aided by his intelligent young mind, but Miss Swan would be, as they say, a stranger here. She had a lifetime outside Storybrooke, one in which she was an orphan, and here, in a sense, she would continue to be the odd duck. Aside from loving Henry, that was perhaps the other thing that they share, of being that thing that didn't quite fit in.
The illusion created night and day, but Regina didn't trust that time would be the same as that in the rest of Fairy Tale Land. She herself would have loved the opportunity to punish an enemy with a distorted sense of time, making it faster or slower as she wished. She made use of the mailbox as her diversion, and she tested its limits the same way she tested the invisible barrier in her yard. She thought of impossible requests and made note of what they granted. Of course she tried to ask for weapons and none were given. She requested books, DVDs, and porn - and magically appeared in her foyer by the time she went back in her home. She asked for gardening tools, for herbs, for various objects that would occupy her mind and make use of her energy. She asked for alcohol and other mind-altering substances, but was frankly only expecting cigarettes off that long list.
It was while smoking that she began to draft a letter, not to Henry, whom she wanted to write to first, but to the one person who might make it possible for her to communicate to the boy somehow, Princess Emma of Fairy Tale Land, who was Sheriff Swan of Storybrooke.