After saying goodbye to Robin, Regina discovers she is pregnant. But as with so many things in her life, it does not go as planned.
She's somewhat aware of the looks she's getting, of the whispered conversations in doorways of 'keeping her longer for observation', 'nothing physically wrong with her' and the movement of nurses around her, but the concern feels far away, like it's happening to someone in a room nearby and someone left the door open. Movement around her occasionally flickers on the edge of her awareness, but her eyes stay tracked on the windows, past the view of the town and in to the forest beyond. She hasn't spoken since it happened.
It's an indeterminable amount of days later that she opens her eyes and realizes her room is empty. Not just of people, the stars outside tell her visiting hours are long over, but of everything. Her eyes sweep the room, catching on the tape marks where pink banners have been removed, and the empty corner where the carrier had been assembled ready for the trip home. The flowers next to her bed are different, not the ruffled pink carnations she remembers, with the sprigs of baby breath and tiny balloon, but a tall vase of soothing white lilies.
Anger is a sudden, suffocating bedmate. Rising up to fill her stomach, lock her throat, to force needles of heat down unused limbs. She hates this place. Hates Snow and Charming, hates Emma, hates the stupid cricket whose voice she remembers hearing on and off the last few days. Hates Tinkerbell for showing her a path that never leads to a destination and for a small, fleeting moment even hates Henry for being the one thing she can't turn her back on entirely. For stopping her stepping back into the cool, uncomplicated blackness that will keep all else away.
A burning in her hands that tells her to take her power to the town line and rent the world in two so she can track down the man she knew and scream at him 'How dare you show me possibilities'. To shake him from his ignorance of not knowing what they've lost. But she can't, she can't, so she does the next best thing and waits for a nurse to turn her back so she can run, a pale ghost through the town, heedless of the cutting gravel at her feet or of the biting cold.
The vault is out of the question now, so she settles for her house. Wants to seal the door shut, but doesn't dare let a single speck of magic loose, not now, so close to the wrath that devoured a kingdom. She fears the anger, both what she'd do with it and without. Someone has cleared the house too, moving all the paraphernalia that comes with new arrivals. Regina knows where it will be, but can't bear to take herself up to the little room painted only weeks ago. What now, what now? Standing in an empty place with nowhere for these feelings to go. Pacing, she doesn't cry, she doesn't dare, she'll never stop. There's a dot of white breaking the line of the dark wood furniture in front of her, a drawer with something stuck in it. She tells herself not to reach for it, but her body doesn't seem to be responding, even knowing what it's going to be. Why does she do things even knowing they're going to hurt?
She pulls out a creamy knitted blanket, woven with a hunter green ribbon down the side. It delivers a hard, flat crack to emotions, draining the anger away. She's so tired. She doesn't remember walking to the sofa, but she's lying on it now, fingers softly tracing the word sewn into the corner. 'Hope', the part of them that was supposed to survive.
She lies down, clutching the blanket to her, almost able to imagine the warmth coming from another source, a tiny shape under the fabric. She doesn't cry, she doesn't dare. Her sleep, if not restful, is at least empty.
A few miles and a world away, in a land without magic, Robin is dreaming of a holding a tiny baby girl, and wakes up with tears in his eyes that he can't explain.