Note: This will be a three-parter. (Now with a planned epilogue!)
Season 4 AU/fix-it fic that tries to resolve the Regina/Robin/Marian love triangle in less fucked-up way than canon did...importantly, Marian is truly Marian, not Zelena in disguise.
Robin covered the space between them absurdly fast, like an animal breaking free from the cage that had held it for too long, and she rocked backwards as he kissed her, grateful for the arms that came around to steady her before she could lose her balance completely.
Robin pulled her upright, and Regina came willingly, deepening the kiss as his hand slid up the notches of her spine and settled in her hair, strong fingers curling against her scalp. Both of them, deprived so long of the other's touch, fought for control, for power, as their base desires took over, and they started an uneven, stumbling, aggressive tour of the room. Glass crunched under their feet from the vials they knocked off the table, and Robin hissed suddenly when he banged his shin into a low wooden chest. Regina couldn't help but smirk against his lips at the sound, which Robin seemed to take as some sort of challenge and pressed into her more fervently than ever.
He was hard against her, he tasted of whiskey, and Regina was sparking with need, her whole body tense with wanting him. They glanced off of a wall, mouths and hands still greedily searching, and finally Robin managed to pin them both against it, anchoring them in place long enough for them both to draw back and breathe for what felt like the first time in minutes.
It only took three breaths to sober her, to bring reality crashing down around them, and from the way Robin had turned his head to the side as he panted, Regina suspected he was experiencing the same sudden awareness of the knife's edge they stood on, how close they had come to rushing headlong off of it and ruining everything.
She slowly detangled her hands from his clothing and skin and placed them on his chest instead, defensive and intimate in one, feeling the quickness of his heart (use mine for the both of us) there under her palms, a pulsing that strummed through her down to her very bones.
"Robin… we can't."
He stood with one arm braced on the wall behind them, the other hand possessively circling her hip, and rested his forehead against hers while sighing heavily, bitterly.
"I know."
"Then why did you…?"
"I need," he began, and his voice half-cracked with too much need to name."Touching you, it's like coming alive again. Do you think it's easy for me, watching you back away a little more every day because it's not 'right' for us to be together? That's not what I wanted."
He closed his eyes as he spoke, as if it pained him to look at her, and she knew that feeling all too well.
"You have a wife and a son, a band of men, responsibilities to all of them, and, as much as we—"
She couldn't bring herself to use the word love, not while the air was still volatile between them, not while she watched Robin's jaw tighten with each word that came out of her mouth, not while she had to raise her voice to quell the protest building in his body, in the mutinous expression that transformed his face into something feral.
"As much as we… care for each other, there's no other choice to make."
Robin ripped himself away from her, and a dark, humorless laugh broke from him as he paced in front of her. "You think I don't know that? I have everything I've wanted my whole life. I should be ecstatic."
He stopped moving long enough to punctuate that word with a look that left her flinching, and all the fight seemed to run out of him at once.
"And I'm not. I mean, I am happy, but it's not… all the vows and all the miraculously returned long-lost loves in the world don't mean as much when your heart belongs to someone else."
They studied each other for a long moment in the gloom of the vault, Robin pocketing his hands as if to restrain himself from taking hold of her again, and Regina thought, it's almost too perfect, to have our end in a mausoleum filled with stolen hearts.
She was glad to have the wall behind her, capable of holding her weight, because her legs were dangerously close to giving out on her, and she hadn't even said the words yet.
"I think you should leave."
Robin knew it was coming, must have known, but he staggered anyway, his face registering pain before closing itself to her, and that was how she was sure he understood what she was really asking of him: don't come back. The near-misses, the exchange of cautious, yearning looks was killing them both, and she couldn't keep letting Robin go only for him to show up on her doorstep yet again, begging for things that she was powerless to deny him.
This was quite possibly the last time they would ever be alone together.
Robin hesitated, lingered, waiting for her to give him one final look before he walked away, but she turned from him instead, counted to nineteen before she heard the clap of his boots retreating against the stone floor. She listened for the screech of metal that signaled the door closing behind him before she let her shoulders sag, clawing at the wall for support, and nearly jumped out of her skin at the loud, metallic clang that shook the chamber, just once, as if Robin had thrown something heavy against her door.
His fists, probably. Robin had never been one for subtlety when it came to his emotions.
Her vault had been thrown into disarray during their momentary surrender to impulse, and she found distraction in the numbingly mundane task of cleaning it up, picking up every piece of glass and every overturned furnishing by hand, as if she could stop herself from shattering if she tried hard enough to fix the physical damage in front of her.
She focused on identifying which jars and vials lay broken on the floor, checking for dangerous or corrosive substances, and paused when she found a half-cracked box marked 'aletheiam.' She stared at it, something stirring in the back of her mind as she repeated the name again and again and struggled to remember the herb's origins and properties. The box smelled faintly of flowers, or earth after a heavy rain, and she smiled when she realized what she was holding.
It was the answer she had been looking for. The only way to ensure that Robin never returned for her, since neither of them could be trusted anymore, he too kind and she too weak to know how to break their own hearts.
She set the box aside and took stock of the remaining potion supplies more hurriedly, hoping she and Robin hadn't smashed enough ingredients to stop her from doing what she intended to do.
.
.
It had been years since Rumplestiltskin had taught her this particular mixture, and her movements were cautious at first, choosing and measuring ingredients slowly until her hands found their old rhythm and produced several swallows' worth of sky-blue liquid.
She toyed with the flask, wondering if there was a way to test the potion before she used it on herself, but that would mean involving other people—people who would undoubtedly try to convince her that there was a better way to resolve the increasingly clichéd love triangle she had fallen into. So, no, testing was out.
She reached for a piece of paper instead. She was about to erase a significant chunk of her recent memory, and she needed to communicate that to somebody while she was still aware of what she was doing. Somebody who could disseminate that information to everyone else and, preferably, find a way to keep Robin from doing anything stupid to try and reverse the potion's effects.
The list of people that she trusted (not including Robin, for obvious reasons) was short—one might say non-existent—but Regina finally settled on Mary Margaret. She had power. The town listened to her. And though their relationship could not be readily defined, Regina knew that whether Mary Margaret approved of her decision or not, she would be able to handle the fallout more calmly than most.
She scrawled a note, giving away no more than the essential details of what had been done, and summoned a raven to deliver it. The only thing that remained was for her to drink.
The potion's color was beautiful, cycling through all shades of water and sky (the same timbre as his eyes, familiar as her own heart) as she regarded it. The thing you love most—and why did her magic always return to this, that what she ached for and what she would destroy became hopelessly intertwined?
She felt tears building in her throat, burning at the corners of her vision as she blinked.
She would not let them fall. She drank.
.
.
She was lying on something hard, something decidedly not her bed, and it was far too quiet for her to be within the castle walls. She was alone. She opened her eyes slowly, trying to bring the room into focus as her head pounded, and she groaned theatrically, content to express her current state of misery out loud even if no one was around to hear it.
Her surroundings took shape in pieces, and she pushed herself into a sitting position to get a better view. How lovely, Regina thought, you've fallen asleep in some sort of dungeonous storage room and have no idea how you got here. Mother would be so proud.
She shifted again, letting out a stream of curses that would make any man blush—she knew; she took particular pleasure in exercising that power over her guards on a regular basis—as her joints cracked loudly with the movement, a knot between her shoulder blades announcing itself painfully. She felt like she had aged decades in however long she had been knocked out.
She rose, balance wavering, to her feet and frowned down at her dress: red and tight and cut as high as a nightgown, exposing unexpected swathes of skin in a way that felt more reckless than sensual. She ran a self-conscious hand through her hair, only to find that it stopped short at her shoulders, her hand hanging uselessly in the air as if it couldn't quite process the sudden absence.
A quick study of the chamber she was stuck inside only increased her bewilderment: Regina had never been in this room in her life, and yet she could sense that it was undeniably hers. She recognized some of the magic books piled on the floor, she saw that the table of potion ingredients was arranged in her own peculiar style, and she reached out to run a hand wonderingly over the cabinet that she knew housed heart after torn-out heart. So much was familiar, achingly so, but she could come up with no explanation for her altered appearance, her sense of lost time, her inelegant awakening other than the most obvious: magic.
She narrowed her eyes. This has the fingerprints of the Imp all over it, she thought venomously, immediately drawing her magic like a cloak around her and receiving another shock from how stiff and unwieldy magic seemed to be in this place.
It required careful concentration, and she had to start all over several times when she lost her tenuous hold on the threads she was mentally weaving, but she eventually stood clothed in a plum-colored, slightly-more-modest-but-no-less-snug dress and leather boots that added inches to her height. Her face already sharpened with makeup, she did what she could with the shorn hair, huffing at the lack of volume she achieved and nearly pouting at her reflection in the mirror as she tried to determine if she had truly aged or if she was just out-of-sorts from the aftereffects of whatever magic had been cast on her.
Rumplestiltskin would pay for this latest bit of mischief.
She was no closer to remembering where she was or what had happened, but she felt less nauseous than before and was growing more confident in her control of this world's magic—and she was in another world, she would bet her kingdom on it—as strange as it was.
She looked once more around the comfortingly dismal chamber and, satisfied that she was not leaving anything useful behind, stepped towards the door, wondering what awaited her aboveground.
She would summon Rumplestiltskin when she reached open air, and she would have her answers.
.
.
The world outside proved even more mystifying to Regina. She was in the middle of a city, the likes of which she had never seen before. She held her magic tightly around her, the best shield she had, as she confronted each strange building, each unfamiliar object that her brain nevertheless supplied a name for. Car. Streetlight. Mailbox.
She inhaled deeply before calling for Rumplestiltskin, pleased that her voice didn't waver around the edges and less pleased when the Imp failed to appear. Doubt began to settle in, but she battled it back as much as she could and walked on.
She encountered no other people at first, but she found herself ducking into a side-alley at the sound of approaching voices, suddenly feeling too vulnerable, too exposed, to face anyone while she was so uncertain of her surroundings. She closed her eyes against the influx of sounds (people laughing, 'cars' whipping by faster than any horses, a baby crying) and tried to get her bearings again, to find something that she understood.
Clarity remained tantalizingly just beyond her grasp, and the harder she tried to corner her thoughts, to force herself to remember, the faster they fled. Laughter rang out again, this time so close that her muscles jolted, concentration broken, and an irrationally large plume of irritation licked up her spine.
They weren't mocking her with their laughter—she wasn't that delusional—but their levity, their carefree approach to this cursed place needled her all the same, and she could feel magic rising through her in response to her scattered emotions: confusion, frustration, and that underlying anger that drove so many actions in her life.
They weren't with Rumplestiltskin. They weren't responsible for bringing her here. But they would taste her vengeance all the same—she wasn't one to discriminate. Everyone had something they deserved to suffer for.
Regina schooled her face into the icy mask made to strike fear into the hearts of her inferiors and marched out of the alleyway. She caught the attention of the few people on the street immediately, and she grinned ferociously at their expressions of shock, suddenly thrilled to be back on the hunt.
She pushed at a passing car with her magic, testing her strength, and was delighted to see how it skidded away from her with the slightest nudge, how easily the metal crumpled as it crashed to a stop against—what was it?—ah, yes, the telephone pole.
Destruction, it seemed, was the same wherever she went, and the pleasure of it, of watching things burn at her hand, coursed through her in a dizzying rush. This was who she was. Someone with power. Someone who decided fates. Someone who tore down cities and emerged from the rubble unscathed.
Magic flowed through her, and she released it aimlessly as she stalked down the middle of the road. Windows shattered. A building collapsed on itself, baring its own foundations. Streetlights shot electricity overhead in tiny explosions. The ground shook until a chasm opened in front of her, widening and swallowing objects too quickly for her to name as peasants with stupid, terrified faces scurried away and screamed.
She threw back her head and laughed, feeling sane for the first time since she had woken in this world.
The blast came from behind, hitting Regina square in the back and driving her forward, and her vision darkened even as she fell. She was conscious only of the arms that caught her just before she hit the ground and a voice that she couldn't quite place whispering desperately against her ear.
"What did you do, Regina?"
She wanted to laugh at him, at the concern in his voice, because she had no more answers than he did, or because she had done the only thing she knew how to do anymore. She opened her mouth to tell him so, but there was only darkness.
.
.
"You didn't have to hurt her."
Robin had always mistrusted the man called Gold, but he had not hated him until now. This man had the nerve to smirk at him, pleased with the part he got to play in all this, while Robin couldn't stop thinking of the wet trails of blood that had run from Regina's ears when Gold's magic had struck her down.
"Oh? You wanted me to stand back and watch her destroy the entire town, did you?" Gold regarded the head of his cane thoughtfully, his voice and gaze no less intense, no less menacing, when directed away from Robin himself. "Whatever you think you know about Regina no longer applies; this one's another beast entirely, and you'd do well to remember that."
The warning was meant to bait him, and he jumped at it, one hand dropping to fumble for the short blade tucked under his belt—he knew it would be as useless as a biscuit against the Dark One, but he didn't care if he looked a fool if it meant he could wipe the smugness off that man's face. He managed two quick steps before Hook got a solid grip on him and forced him back into the loose circle they had formed.
"Easy, mate. As much as I normally condone beating the Crocodile to a bloody pulp... this Regina is dangerous, as he says, and we may need him."
"Need him to do what?" Robin challenged, noticing how the others shrunk from the question. No one met his eyes except Gold, and the amusement reflected back at him sickened Robin to the point where he had to dig his nails into his palms to keep from flying apart.
Emma shuffled uncomfortably in her place, one arm rising into the air to catch everyone's attention. "Can we just talk about the fact that Regina went full-blown evil with no warning? How the hell did this happen?"
"We don't know," David said at the same time Mary Margaret began, "Well…", and everyone turned to stare at her.
"A memory potion. Or a forgetting potion, I guess." She sighed. "Regina sent me a letter explaining that she was going to erase some of her memories, but I really don't think she meant for this to happen. Something must've gone wrong."
David wrinkled his forehead in confusion. "What did she want to forget badly enough to lobotomize herself?"
Emma's eyes flicked over to Robin, and he felt himself burn with shame.
"I think the why can wait until we have a better idea about what to do with her right now," Mary Margaret said pointedly. "If she truly is the Evil Queen again…"
"I don't think there's any question about it, dearie."
Robin looked to where Regina was still half-slumped in the chair they had tied her to. He had never come face-to-face with the Evil Queen during the height of her reign, but he knew the stories well enough, and the woman in front of him was undeniably dark, from the severe cut of her dress to the half-snarl she wore even in the grips of unconsciousness. But, gods forgive him, he found her as beautiful as ever despite the danger, the innermost part of him thinking it cruel to keep something so majestic chained even if her release would bring an end to them all.
"We can't keep her tied to a chair forever. Isn't it enough to strip her of her magic? Must we demean her, as well?"
Emma frowned sympathetically at him. "I know how you feel, Robin, but we need to contain her somehow until… until we know what we're dealing with."
A monster was the unspoken response that circulated the room. Robin could read it clearly in their faces, felt it lodge in his own thoughts as much as he tried to suppress it. None of them wanted to see Regina as one, but there was too much history, too much knowledge, in the room to disregard the epithet altogether.
A monster. His gut contracted sharply as he was reminded of Marian's own accusation, how he had chastised her then, and now…
Regina hadn't killed anyone—terrorized a fair few, sent a handful to the hospital with minor injuries, caused more property damage than a season's worth of tornadoes—but, no, she hadn't killed anyone during her rampage on Main Street. Robin clung to that information, but he couldn't ignore the slippery word knocking about his head: yet.
.
.
Regina woke slowly, just lucid enough to know to keep her eyes shut and gather herself before alerting her captors to her consciousness. She was bound—though loosely, it seemed—to a chair that dug uncomfortably into her back. Her neck felt sticky, and she must have bitten herself somewhere, as her mouth was awash with the taste of blood. She could hear the murmuring of voices not far from her, and she strained to listen, to discover who was holding her.
The first voice belonged to the one who had caught her, the accent teasing her again with a sense of recognition that she simply couldn't explain. He sounded angry and almost protective of her, and though she was uncertain why any stranger would take her side after what she had done to his town, she tucked that knowledge away for later use. Her defender. She liked the sound of that. She liked the idea of manipulating him even more.
Rumplestiltskin spoke, and she shuddered with a mixture of excitement and dread. She had been right: the Imp had some stake in her current predicament. Although it was never pleasant to be on the wrong side of his power, she at least knew what to expect from him, a fragment of predictability in this world where she understood nothing.
She dismissed Hook quickly. His presence was puzzling, perhaps, but the pirate was not a particularly fearsome enemy, if he was to be her enemy.
The next speaker—female, young, immediately irksome—was likewise gauged as non-threatening and dismissed.
But she hadn't been prepared for Charming and Snow to chime in, speaking at the same time as if they wanted to prove once again that they shared a single heart, a single mind. A single, simple mind. Their words were lost as Regina dug her fingers into the wood underneath her, black rage building into a headache that pulsed at the base of her neck. Oh, how she wanted to hurt them.
She drew on her magic out of instinct, needing to ready herself to face them with all of the strength she possessed, but instead of feeling the rush of heat and energy she was accustomed to, there was nothing.
The shock of not being able to use her magic—not being able to even feel it—was enough to make Regina snap her eyes open. She raised her head slightly, still wanting to avoid the notice of the others, and her eyes trailed over the ugly leather cuff that had been fastened around one of her wrists.
The mere sight of it made her feel ill, and all of the nerve endings in her spine stood on end, ringing with a half-formed pain that was not real but nonetheless forced her eyes to water, her teeth to clamp together in response to its sharpened edge.
She didn't understand what was happening to her, and she couldn't stop the soft, whimpery sound that pushed through her lips before she could bite it back.
It was hardly a whisper, but it was enough to interrupt the conversation going on in front of her. Suddenly Snow, shadowed by Charming, was taking a hesitant step forward and saying, "Regina?"
Anger and pain battled for control of her body, but it only took a moment for anger to win out, as it always did, and Regina hardened her eyes and her mouth before sitting fully upright, determined to look every inch the queen even if she was in chains.
The Snow standing in front of her was unrecognizable to the point of ridiculousness: older and rounder than Regina had ever seen her, with her hair cut as short as a boy's and no trace of royalty in the way she held herself or in the way she… dressed, if one could even use that word.
Regina's mask almost slipped as she took in Snow's appearance, though she was relieved to see that whatever magic had brought her here had not left the others untouched. Her gaze wandered over them, picking out details that she might be able to use to her advantage.
Rumplestiltskin wore a human face, but he emitted his usual aura of malice and self-interest that never failed to make her shiver. If she was not mistaken, the pirate hadn't changed his clothes since the last time she had seen him, though something in his expression had softened, and she didn't miss the way he placed himself warily at the side of the young blonde woman. The blonde… she triggered an instinctual feeling of contempt and disappointment, though Regina couldn't recall ever meeting her before.
And, there, lurking at the back with his eyes fixed firmly on the ground and everything in his body clenched as tight as a fist, was her defender. The man refused to look at her, to acknowledge her in any way, and Regina made a frustrated noise in her throat as she was unable to read anything more from him. He was a vague portrait of green and hunter and the lingering sense that she should know him, though she couldn't see how.
Snow and Charming were still regarding her curiously, and the stupid look of concern on Snow's face made it that much easier to toy with her.
Regina glanced casually at the chains encircling her, careful to bypass the cuff that had caused such an excruciating reaction before, and raised an eyebrow. "Bondage, Snow?" She focused her attention on Charming as the girl's cheeks colored. "Perhaps you should ask your wife what other secrets she's keeping."
"I wish we didn't have to keep you restrained, Regina, but it's for your own good. And ours," Snow amended quickly. "You're not yourself right now."
"I'm not myself? You stand there looking like a, a common wet nurse, and I'm not myself? Please, enlighten me. Better yet, tell me why you brought me here, and how."
An uneasy silence filled the room until Charming said, "We didn't bring you here. You did."
She frowned at him. He seemed certain of his statement, they all did, but she was lost until Rumplestiltskin lifted his chin slightly, giving her an almost imperceptible nod.
"The curse?" she asked incredulously.
The group's quick exchange of glances confirmed everything, but Regina refused to believe that years of planning and toil, years of sacrifice, had given her only this.
"The curse is supposed to give me my happy ending, and, regrettably, being tied up and put on display for the likes of you is not quite what I had imagined."
Her tone was sarcastic, but she was trembling with another surge of anger and sickness as she reached for magic that no longer existed, setting fire to her nerves once again as she pulled against the cuff.
"Well, technically, this is Mary Margaret's curse—" Hook yelped as the blonde elbowed him sharply in the ribs. "What, Swan? It is."
Snow took another step forward, gentling her approach as if she were drawing near a skittish, wounded creature, and Regina hated her for it.
"You did enact the curse. We spent 28 years living out what you thought was your happy ending before Emma found us." The blonde raised one hand to give an embarrassed little wave. "She broke the curse, but we decided to stay in this land and build real lives here—lives that you're a part of."
"Your daughter?" Regina asked, eyeing the woman who should have been born, at most, a few days ago in a land far from here. "The baby you put in the wardrobe?"
Details came spilling out then, all of them impossible—Saviors and portals between worlds and a second curse and witches with green skin—and she wondered how they could think her foolish enough to believe them. They used to fear her; now they mocked her.
Emma searched through her pockets and pulled out a much-creased piece of paper, breaking away from the pirate to hold it out to Regina. "Here. Take it."
It was a picture better than any painting. It was real somehow, despite being confined to paper, as if the boy it showed was standing right in front of her. A smiling boy and, hugging him from behind, her—this new her, the one with shorter hair and distastefully conservative clothing—looking impossibly happy.
Then they told her that the boy was hers, and she laughed in their faces.
Laughed so hard and so long that she ran out of air and choked helplessly on her mirth until her lungs worked again. The idea that she had a child was ridiculous enough; the claim that she shared a son with another woman, the daughter of the girl she had spent a lifetime trying to eviscerate, was pure madness.
She studied the picture again, attempting to find anything recognizable in those people, before she crumpled it in her fist, destroying it as thoroughly as she could with her wrists bound.
"This means nothing."
Everyone's faces (except Rumpelstiltskin's, which remained unreadable) filled with dismay, and Regina felt a flicker of triumph: she had hurt them, though she didn't understand how. They peeled away from her in pairs, defeated for the moment. Her defender hung at the back of the group and, before slipping out of the room and leaving her in solitude, lifted his head just enough to meet her eyes.
Blue, she thought, steady and rough at the same time, like a river.
And, all at once, he was gone.
.
.
They left David to watch over Regina—from afar, as no one wanted to be within range of her barbed tongue—as they regrouped. It was hard to pretend that their first talk with this version of the Evil Queen had been anything but disastrous.
"You said you found this in her vault?" Gold asked Mary Margaret, holding up a small flask.
"I think it might be what she used. It was on the floor when I got there, and nothing else looked disturbed."
Gold nodded, passing the flask under his nose and saying, "Lethe's Waters. I taught her this one myself—a relatively simple but effective forgetting potion, highly adaptable to the maker's desires." His mouth twisted into a sneer. "Unfortunately for us all, Regina was never the most careful of students. Too much moonberry, if the smell is any indication."
"Never mind what's in it, how can we reverse it?" Emma asked.
"Only the maker of the potion can reverse its effects. If Regina decides that she'd rather live with her memories, painful though they may be, then and only then will they be restored."
"But… if Regina doesn't remember drinking the potion, and she doesn't remember who—what—she wanted to forget, how can she choose to take it back?"
Gold shrugged, his eyes alight with something like glee. "Therein lies the difficulty, Miss Swan."
Emma groaned in frustration, and Mary Margaret put a calming hand on her back. "I learned a long time ago not to underestimate Regina and the strength of her will. We'll figure it out."
"I need to find a way to tell Henry."
"I'll come with you."
Emma and Mary Margaret began to leave, Hook following on their heels, pausing only to shoot a questioning glance back at Robin. He waved them on, determined not to leave Regina and Gold in the same building without providing as much interference as possible.
Gold regarded him for a long moment, head cocked to the side as he scrutinized every inch of Robin.
Finally he spoke, his voice almost seductive in the way it caressed each word, a note of anticipation tied into each one. "There may be other ways to… unlock her memories."
"How?"
"There are things that run deeper than memory, boy." Gold looked at him with contempt, disappointed, perhaps, that Robin had no appreciation for the subtleties of his art. "Light magic, love for her child, meaningful connections with Mary Margaret and Miss Swan and even you. Memory spells don't change the substance of a person, just the memories. Regina may not remember that she has all of these things, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. And if she finds them again, well…"
"Then there's hope?"
Gold smiled cryptically and disappeared before Robin could blink. There was no cloud of smoke, no fanfare or flourish of hands, just a sudden wink into absence that made Robin's heart beat a little faster, like the heart of something suddenly aware it was being hunted.
.
.
He went to Marian.
They had left her in the mayor's office, which seemed as safe a place as any, but he was not so heartless as to leave her there alone. His men watched over her in shifts, and he dismissed John now with a wave of his hand, entering the room that housed his wife but reminded him so powerfully of Regina.
Roland had stopped asking about Marian after a day or two, and though it was understandable for him not to miss the mother he had barely begun to know, Robin felt that he had been a poor father as well as a poor husband. Why would Roland occupy himself with the fate of his mother when Robin himself couldn't be troubled to visit her more than a few times?
Marian remained unchanged, beautiful even under the blue layers of ice, and he traced a finger over her hair and down the length of one arm as he sat on the floor beside her.
He wasn't sure how it had happened, but he had made a habit of bouncing between Marian and Regina, seeking comfort in the arms of one when the other had been taken from him. And now they had both been taken, and he was left with nothing. A punishment for his selfishness, for trying to keep them both, and a fitting one at that.
Regina…
No, he wouldn't think of her here, not while he was beside Marian and tasked with finding a way to love her again. He did love her, and that was part of the problem. He didn't know how to make his heart whole again, how to keep from loving both women at once, though he had been left with little choice.
He pressed his lips to Marian's hand, to her throat, to her cheek, and at last to her lips.
The ice was slick under his skin, and as he half-collapsed over her body, he could pretend that the wetness he felt on his face was traces of meltwater and not tears.
"If you have any answers, Marian, please…" he begged through gritted teeth, but she remained silent and cold and unyielding under his touch.