Regina is relieved, when she finally reaches her bed that night, that they have no memories in this room. (That is a lie; he is everywhere, colored her whole life, and his absence has rendered everything grey again.) But they have never been in this room together, it is not her office, or her vault, as absurd as it was to spend the night together beside potions and runes and slabs of stone. This is a place blessedly quiet and empty of the ghosts of his words and his touch.
She hovers at the door for a moment and finds that she is…tired. So, she coaxes herself into her usual routine, hangs her jacket in its proper place, sets her boots on their shelf, climbs the stairs at a determinedly normal rate, changes her sweater and trousers for silk pajamas and a cashmere robe. She replaces her necklace and earrings in their cases, pumps soap onto her hands and wipes off her makeup, cups cool water in her hands to wash it away, smooths moisturizer over her skin.
Her routine buys her twenty minutes of thoughtlessness, and then…there has to be a next.
That next is what breaks her.
Turn on the lamp, she thinks. Turn off the main light, pull back the covers, get into beg. She plugs her phone into its charger. Settles into the sheets, smoothes them, gathers her hair over one shoulder, and then…
Nothing.
She reaches, presses the call button on her phone to light the screen. Two missed calls, both from Snow. And one message. She's not going to return that call tonight. Or listen to the message. A hope speech is not going to fix anything. (It's nice—she'd never admit it out loud, but it's nice to have that missed call anyway, lighting up her screen, filling the void.) Henry has texted her from the next room—such a teenager, she thinks, and the thought tugs half a smile from her lips. Operation Mongoose tomorrow! it reads, Love you!
She types her son a response, that smile still peeking through. Goodnight, Henry. I love you. Sighs, sets her phone back on the bedside table.
Her eyes fall shut, and a second later, she registers her phone screen going dark, leaving only dim moonlight, and the red of the numbers on her clock that tell her it's been nearly eight hours since he left.
Should she avoid memories, she wonders, or seek them out? (It does not matter, they seek her, they will not be quietened.)
Is Robin in a hotel somewhere? That small one on the side of the road just past Storybrooke, the one with two stories and creaking doors painted that nauseating shade of peach? Or have they walked farther already?
She imagines him closer, at the hotel she can picture. Imagines him there, in darkness like this. Thinking of her or trying not to? Desperate or quiet?
Desperate, she thinks, her jaw tightening. He'll have been calm for Roland all day, and now that the boy's asleep, there will be tears like those he cried just this afternoon, against her cheek. Silent tears, heartrending and desperate, reaching for that one last thing, the idea that might save them all from this.
A few weeks ago she might have convinced herself that he was trying to forget her, to live the lovely life he could have with his wife and their son. Or at least that he would, soon, that time would set him free of whatever connection he'd felt them to have.
She doesn't think that anymore.
That was his last, best gift to her, and his final, irrevocable curse. How will she live—again—with having given someone pain for loving her?
What does it say about her, that the farthest her tears have gotten is the dampness at the edge of her eyes, when she knows, can picture so horribly, painfully easily the way his teeth are digging into his bottom lip right now, the way he's clenching his jaw against its trembling, the way he's letting his eyes drop shut so he can picture her smile? Why her smile, why her?
What does it say about her that Robin guarded that scrap of their unchosen path, and she could not bear to look at it?
She tilts her chin, turns her face halfway into her pillow to fight the uncomfortable knots tightening in her chest, and she feels the ghost of Robin's fingers cupping her jaw, lifting her face, catching her eyes, can almost remember the cadence of his voice just this afternoon, I choose you and everything unknotting and soaring. Now, it feels as if someone's promised her a beautiful view only to shove her off the cliff when she stepped too close to the edge.
It's almost funny.
Or at least, it must be to the author, because why else would she have found those empty books that led to the hope now flickering in her chest?
The hope that means she is not happy, but cannot give in to being cold, either.
It is a grudging admission that this is what Robin would want. He would want her to be open to happiness, with or without him.
Insufferable, arrogant, frustrating, wonderful thief.
And that is when the tears finally come.