A/N: A series of (probably, relatively) short late night conversations, based on prompts or my own musings. Not sure how many there will be. Will probably be vaguely continuity-compliant with one another, but I ignore a lot of OUAT canon for my own sanity. Enjoy!
I - Family
They're lying awake sometime late at night, or perhaps very early in the morning, sprawled out on their backs a short distance of hot, sweaty sheets apart, hands still clasped—hesitantly despite what has transpired between them.
"Do you think…" Regina begins, but she chokes on her words. She spoke very quietly, her voice barely louder than the crashing of the waves below the fortress, and maybe Maleficent is already half-asleep and didn't hear.
A moment passes in silence and Maleficent asks her, "What?"
Unconsciously, Regina's fingers tighten around Maleficent's hand. She feels sick to her stomach. She doesn't know how she could have possibly allowed this treacherous thought to surface. "Do you think…you'll ever have a family?"
She expects Maleficent to scoff, perhaps even laugh at her. But Maleficent remains silent for a long time before she responds. "It seems unlikely," she says, slowly, and there's something strange in her voice. "Certainly not in the traditional sense, if it is ever to be," she continues, with an attempt at lightness of tone that is entirely futile.
Regina closes her eyes, breathes in and out in time with the crashing of the waves below them, and when she speaks she feels as though her voice has left her body. "I think a part of me wants it more than anything else," she says. "But another part of me…the much larger part…fears I'll just make the same mistakes my parents did. I cannot bear to think of my childhood as inevitable."
Maleficent turns to face her. Regina doesn't see it so much as she hears the rustling of sheets and feels the movement of the bed. She feels far away, not fully present. She's speaking nonsense—she is married to the King now. The only freedom for her now will be in death. She is infertile—a bittersweet blessing. Even if she weren't under lock and key she couldn't simply find someone new and start a family.
"Of course it isn't inevitable, Regina," says Maleficent. "Nothing is."
Regina adores Maleficent just a bit more in this moment for playing along with her nonsense. She still feels detached from her body, but with foreign, shaking limbs, she reaches for Maleficent's arms and enfolds herself within them, wills Maleficent to hold her tighter, tighter, until she can feel the pressure against her skin.
"Tell me what it would be like," she entreats against the skin of Maleficent's neck. She feels Maleficent tense beneath her hands, but she does not withdraw, and after another moment of quiet contemplation, Maleficent, somewhat awkwardly, attempts to honour her request.
"Well, I…suppose you'd want two children or so," she begins. "You'll make a profoundly neurotic new mother, to be certain. Fuss over everything, every minute detail. But with the second one you'll have learned to relax a bit. They'll be…they'll be happy, Regina. So happy, perhaps, that it will frustrate you at times. Or move you to tears. They'll be naive, in a way, for they will never have suffered the cruelty you have known."
Maleficent's fingers comb through Regina's hair, and Regina realized vaguely that she has begun to cry, but she makes no attempt to stop or conceal it.
"And they'll love you, Regina," says Maleficent, as sweetly and as gently as she has ever said anything. "They won't always like you, but they'll love you. And they'll never for one instant doubt that you love them."
Regina's fingernails dig into the skin of Maleficent's back. She's heaving shallow breaths as hot tears pour down her face. It can never be, what Maleficent is saying, and yet Regina wants it with all her heart.
"I want it so—so badly, Maleficent," she weeps, voice reduced to little more than a hoarse whisper. "I feel—I feel as though my heart is being—being ripped from my body, for how I ache for what cannot be…"
And none of it can be. She will never be free. She will never have a family of her own. They will never even have the chance to be happy or to love her, because they will never, ever exist.
Maleficent holds her in solemn silence, smoothes her hair and traces soothing magic all over her body until Regina has cried herself out and fallen into that hazy state between wakefulness and sleep where everything seems a bit softer, a bit easier to believe. She places lazy, half-conscious kisses on Maleficent's shoulder and along her sharp collarbone, nestles her head beneath Maleficent's chin.
The last thing she hears before she drifts into a merciful and dreamless slumber is Maleficent's voice, cool and gentle as the ebb and flow of the ocean. "Nothing is inevitable, Regina."