Hello my lovely readers, so after revising some of my old stories I discovered how poorly I have really written my first ever SQ story, and to celebrate that my life is finally going well again, I decided to rewrite my oldest story; Caving In, by doing a complete rewrite of it as I have said before. For the people that have not read my first story, you probably shouldn't it isn't that good, but if you want to read the original, you would still make me really happy.

Anyways to explain a bit about the story, After Regina has absorbed the death curse that was put upon the well, it has consequences that are not for the good, at first...

Enjoy!

x Muriel.

Chapter One

Regina felt like she was being eaten from the inside. It felt like there was a fire raging inside of her and it was slowly melting all of her organs, one by one shutting them down and making her feel even more horrible than she already felt. It had been going on for two weeks already.

She had been enduring two weeks of retching her stomach out, legs that hardly were able to bear her weight, a head that was ready to explode from all the pounding, and then her insides that truly felt like they were slowly melting away, like the wax from a candle.

Her head was held by her trembling fingers, sweat pouring from her head, though her clammy hand wasn't much of a help. She hadn't looked in the mirror for ten days, since she actually felt a kind of fear inside of her for what she would see if she did. Would she see that her face had molten itself to her skull as all the fat that was in her face had now gone?

She knew she was losing a horrible amount of weight, for all her clothes seemed to be getting more and more spacious. Not that she was elaborately dressing herself in her normal mayoral outfits though, she hadn't the energy for it. She just rotated between her five sets of almost identical silk pyjamas, and when they were all dirty she used the little scrap of magic she still had in her, that the curse hadn't eaten away when she absorbed it, to clean them all and start all over again.

She shouldn't be using magic, not when Henry had told her she couldn't, not when she had promised she wouldn't, but she couldn't walk around in dirty and sweaty clothes. She was a queen once, and a bit more refined than that. She may not carry the title anymore, but she still felt like it sometimes.

The evil queen, the woman everybody feared so much they didn't dare to hate her, or they hated her so much there was barely any fear left to have for the woman, but those also had no room for the courage to do something with their hate. Or they had enough room for both and thus harboured Snow White in their midst to defy their Queen.

The insipid girl that yet again, was to blame for the situation she was now in. If it hadn't been for Snow jumping in after her daughter, perhaps she could have joined Emma and made their way back after she herself had ended her mother. Yes, that would have been so much better.

If she had been able to just join Emma into the hat, there wouldn't have been any problems. She was sure of it. The idiotic Snow and her Charming genes that of course couldn't let her daughter go, even though she had already done so once.

Regina scoffed slightly at the idea of Snow admitting that, but just doing that sent another wave of terrible nausea throughout her whole body, if that was even possible, and her grip tightened on the banister of the stairs. Her knuckles turning white in their strain to keep her upright as her stability she had just found moments ago, seemed lost. Her hand on her head now going to her sternum in a try to keep herself from throwing up once again.

The only thing she had eaten had been some dry crackers and she had had some water to wash it down with and keep her from dehydrating. Though that didn't really matter, she knew she was dying anyways, might as well happen by being dehydrated, right?

There was a knocking sound echoing through the house and it took Regina while to recognize that it wasn't her head that had started pounding harder and harder, but that someone was actually knocking on her door.

Someone was knocking on her door? Nobody had tried to gain contact with her after she had saved Emma and Snow from the death curse, after she had gotten a hasty little hug from Henry that she had clung to like her life had depended on it. Then he had happily let go, almost as if he had been relieved that the hug was done. His obligatory part as son of hers completed and now he could be with his "real" mother. His biological mother. Something she could never be.

Her mind flashed back to when she had taken that potion. That potion that stole her chance of ever getting a child. She had taken that potion because of her mother, another culprit in the case of how she came to be here slowly dying of the curse of Rumple and hers. If there hadn't been the threat of her mother, there hadn't even been a problem.

Or if Henry hadn't begged for the life of Emma, of his damned real mother. If he hadn't done that, she wouldn't be here dying. But yet she couldn't somehow shove the blame onto either him or Emma, something was holding her back from that. She didn't want to dive deeper into the fact of why she couldn't blame Emma, Henry was obvious because he was her son and she loved him beyond anything she could have imagined, but Emma was a whole different story, and yet there wasn't any blame on her.

She painfully moved down the stairs, walking down the three more steps she hadn't done minutes ago, and walked to the door. Her legs were protesting against the movement, against the activity of walking since her body had no fuel to draw its energy from that it needed to walk.

The knocking persisted and it wasn't helping the headache that she was sporting at all. Not even close to it, really. 'I'm coming, I'm coming' She weakly said, her voice nothing more than a hoarse whisper after the vomiting had made her whole throat raw and bloody. When she opened the door though, she gasped softly.

'Henry? What are you doing here?'