Regina knew the spells that could call forth a soul from the lands of the dead, from nine different hells, from the untouchable stillness of the World Beyond.
She knew them, and yet the words never rose to her tongue, not even during the aching hours of her first nights without him, when desperation followed the path of her hand to her heart and tightened there, and she had thought how easy it would be to crush whatever was left of her.
She did not speak the words that would bring Robin back to her side, back to his children - his soul had been wrongfully taken, there were laws - and this was how she knew she had never deserved the love of such a good man.
This was why she could not meet her own eyes in the mirror.
The magicks that turned death back on itself were not forbidden, exactly. Written in the darkest of sacred tongues, yes, ones that had not been heard in a thousand years (and never in this realm), but the rites were not secret, not impossibly locked away as they might have been. Any dedicated (desperate) mage could find their way to the right texts, could piece together the exact phrasings that would raise a whole hell of souls - and Regina had been so dedicated once before, though she had not spoken the words then, either.
She consoled herself with the thought that the spells only remained lawful because they required a special sort of madness to attempt. Even Rumplestiltskin, at the height of his power and insanity, had sneered at her hintings that such magic might appeal to him.
Oh, too dear a price to pay for something… secondhand, he had said, serious, catching her by the chin and looking at her with the studied laziness of a cat about to strike. Much too dear, dearie.
But consolation felt like nothing so much as emptiness - as empty as the other side of her bed, as the house with only her voice and (sometimes) Henry's to color the space.
She had forgotten how to be reckless, had tamed herself from the one who would have torn through all the worlds that separated her from Robin with an easy hand. Once, once she could have torn her own life apart to follow the man she loved through fire and ruin and restore him home, no matter the sacrifice. To kiss him one last time in the sunlight as the world burned around them. Even now, perhaps she could...
Except.
(And it was the except that stopped her throat from working, as efficient as any steel-trap.)
Except she wasn't that woman anymore.
So they told her, and so she knew to be truth in the quietest deep of her heart, but damn them, damn them and herself most of all for leaving her so toothless in this endless, inescapable field of enemies.
Except she was needed, if still half-despised, by these people she had so long-ago cursed here, by the family she had built hesitantly around herself even as they wandered further into their own happy lives and left her lonely in her too-big house, in her too-big grief.
Except Hades hadn't left her even a fragment of Robin's soul to reach for.
She could roam the lands of the dead for years seeking traces of him, calling like a wanting bird after his heart, could play Isis and reconstruct him from the very atoms (no mortal thing could be destroyed, not truly, so she must tell herself), and maybe she would, if she thought such deeds had even the slenderest chance of success.
But she had stumbled into the wrong mythology here - it was always the wrong mythology for her - and what good was having the wrath and power of a goddess if all the other powers were deaf to her, forever bent against her?
No, there was nothing left of Robin for her to collect, or to call forth.
After the… burial, and a broken piece of fletching passed into her keeping from Roland to Zelena to her, magic started to itch within her, ceaseless, and there weren't enough channels in her body to hold it. She took to lighting candles. Burn, snuff, burn again - too many candles, the wax drying between her fingers in hard lines - until the wicks refused to take the flame.
The others worried for all the wrong reasons. They looked at her from the corners of their eyes, furtive and concerned, and Regina knew they wondered if she was a danger to herself. If one day she would tire of candles and set herself alight, or worse. And she laughed where they couldn't see her, for she had always and only been a danger to them, even with her heart half-mended with light.
She was what drew disaster, every time, down on all she loved. Darkness called to darkness, and she was dark, still. Her power, what she had so long considered her strength, beckoned those who would claim it as their own. She was unspeakably dangerous, even when she tried not to be.
She should wear a warning label.
(She did. In her eyes, in every sharp word and ungentle touch, and still they all willfully failed to read it.)
All of her strengths (magic, love, and how brittle they both feel now) had become loss, and maybe… maybe she was finally ready to stop losing. Robin was beyond her now, but there were others she might save by turning her magic inward, by following every twist of darkness that ran through her and burning it out.
She had split Snow's heart to resurrect a man; could she not split herself to cast out the worst of her, the wrong in her that had created the Evil Queen from rage and pain and every surrounding shadow?
Bold and audacious, perhaps, but not evil, Robin would say (and kiss her, and kiss her), but she knew far better than that.
Regina took refuge in her crypt late in the night when no one would miss her and pored through book after book, unsure of what she was looking for. Spells of division and destruction, draughts that purged the user of ill humors, erasure, invisibility, enough diagrams of magic circles to make her eyes cross, and, at last, a simple potion tucked into the footnotes of a communing spell that promised to separate soul from body.
She should be grateful, she supposed, that Rumplestiltskin's tutelage had taught her how to manipulate magic, how to cheat the rules, above the usual applications of it. With a little tweaking, Regina was fairly sure she could use the potion to remove a chosen part of her soul, the blackest part, and then destroy its corporeal form.
All she needed was a handful of herbs, the new moon, and discretion enough that no one would realize what she intended before it was too late to stop her.
She felt settled, carrying the knowledge of her plan secretly with her, and (so much for discretion) she noticed the worry lines around Snow's mouth, then Henry's, soften when they marked the change in her.
They thought she was healing. Maybe she was. She would, if they didn't interrupt her.
She nicked a bottle of harpy blood from Gold's store (the shelves were dusty, and he never moved to stop her) and recited the other necessary ingredients under her breath, feeling their weight before she even touched them: nettle for defiance, marigold for despair, belladonna for death.
She might be mad, after all.
But she knew how to save them, and herself, at last, and madness was a suffering infinitely preferable to adding another name to the list of those she had ruined.
Regina outwaited Snow, and Henry, and Emma, outwaited their silent questions and their wondering eyes, until the rhythm of her conversations with them had returned to something passably normal. She waited until even the moon had turned its back, the beginning of a new cycle, and made her way to the cemetery after midnight, walking quickly so her eye would not accidentally alight on the names carved into the stones.
Robin would argue with her, if he knew, if he could speak, just as he had the first time they had met. The last time, too - they were (had been) nothing but shadow and symmetry for each other, two halves of the whole circling each other's edges, tentatively but irresistibly joining…
And now broken.
She had been saving the belladonna until the last possible moment. Too much or too little added to the potion would tip her over into suicide or the unbearable stasis of failure - another month of being stuck, waiting, another attempt at holding her hands steady while she poured - and she hardly trusted herself with such delicate choices right now.
She only ever meant to kill half her heart.
The potion turned black as the belladonna settled, and Regina cut a wide cross into her left palm: the ritual of intention. With bloodied hand, she lifted the glass to her lips (thinking of Robin, to whom she still owed a drink) and emptied it.
It was lightning, and drowning, and nothing like whiskey.
She was dimly aware of her knees crunching against the stone floor, and her hands scrabbling at her chest and at her throat as her vision flickered like a candle's flame. And then it was over, as suddenly as it had begun, and she was left with aching lungs and blood drying on her shirt and no idea what she had done, if the potion had done anything at all but choke her.
…
He was being pulled.
Something had seized tightly around his bones and started dragging him, wrenching him up from where he lay, and up and up, and the pressure, the sudden panic of it all would crush him.
He couldn't scream around the dirt in his mouth.
Voices that were not his own, that were not anyone's, began to whisper past him, all saying the same thing that he could not understand: summon, summon, summon.
He is summoned.
And then there was air again, and something like light, and dirt falling from his collar, clenching between his fists, as he tried to find his breath. He spat dirt and blood, sitting on his knees.
He couldn't see and feared blindness until he turned his face to the sky and found the stars. They seemed… different, somehow. Washed out. His eyes were adjusting slowly, all of his senses reawakening one by one to feel out the new night that surrounded him.
His hand, inching outward, hit stone to his left. He followed its edges, swept his fingers across its smooth body only to be caught in the dip of something engraved in the center. Without the moonlight, he could not read the words, but he traced his finger down each letter in turn, spelling curiously.
Robin Hood.
A name carved into stone, and a throat full of dirt, and that was all he knew for sure, but all signs pointed to the fact that he (that Robin, his brain supplied mockingly) wasn't supposed to be here.
He had been summoned, the voices had said. Like an obedient lapdog.
He twitched his hands irritably, and - oh, this was new. To feel things so deeply, so powerfully, and to put names to them as well: hunger, and rage, and need, and, underneath it all, a desire to hurt.
These were hands that could kill, and gladly.
He could kill her.
The thought flashed through his mind, and he frowned, trying to slow it down long enough to understand what her meant.
The burn of whiskey over his tongue, and hair stroking under his fingertips, late nights breathing campfire smoke and pine, the sweetness of apples on her lips and then on his, holding her, an extra heart tucked into his shirt beating against his in double-time, and…
And his hands finding her throat, his teeth against her skin, and all of it so right.
"Who are you?" he asked, hungry for it, hungry for her, as if the night could answer him.
The name teased him, hanging just out of reach even as he pictured (remembered?) the soft angles of her face, the way her body matched so perfectly against him.
Regina.
The second name he knew in all the world, and with it came the clarity of his purpose here, of the whole reason behind his summoning: he was meant to be her shadow, and her end.
This was a hunt.