Okay, be kind, this is my first OUAT fanfic. Swan Queen if you squint. Based on 2x01 and 2x02, Broken and We Are Both.

I don't own it.

"I don't want power, I want to be free."

"Power is freedom."

Regina looks at her mother, knowing the words she says aren't true. Oh, how she wishes they were, how she wishes power could set her world right, make her heart whole again. But she knows they're the words of a broken woman, power hungry and manipulative.

She knows her mother is dooming her to repeat her own mistakes. And there's nothing she can do to stop it. She will marry King Leopold. She will become the Queen, step-mother to the child who stole her happiness, her Daniel. And no one can help her.

She pleads with her father and he thinks she has cold feet. She's not really sure why she though he would help her. He's there, but never there for her. She loves him dearly, he is her father after all, but right now she hates him for doing nothing, for letting her mother and the King control her.

She calls on Rumplestiltskin and asks him for help. She thinks maybe if she can't have freedom, having more power will make things better. When she looks back at this moment now, she thinks how naïve she was when she told Rumple she didn't want to hurt anyone. She's hurt so many people now.

But then again, they hurt her first. She's not really evil, she thinks. It's just that everything she's ever wanted or loved has been ripped from her because of these people. Because of her mother and Snow White. Precious, sweet, innocent Snow White who can do no wrong. It's laughable really, or it would be if it weren't so god damn depressing.

She thinks it funny that it's so easy for the so called good folk of Fairy Tale Land to sit on their high horses and condemn her when she's pretty sure not a damn thing has ever gone wrong in their lives. It's so easy to label her evil when they can never understand the hell she went through. They can all have their happy endings while she suffers alone.

When she enacts her curse, part of her knows it won't give her a happy ending, it will only make everyone else as miserable as she is. But that part is overruled by the delusion that she can be happy. So she curses them all to live their lives in Storybrooke, torn away from their families and their happiness.

And she lives in her pseudo-happiness for all those glorious years. Until Emma Swan come waltzing into town and ruins everything. Or that's what she thinks anyway. Until she watches Emma and Mary-Margaret get sucked into the portal with the wraith. Until she tells David that Henry can go with him. Until she realizes that she's turned into everything she hated about her mother.

Suddenly that part of her that knows this isn't her happy ending is back. She knows she can't force Henry to love her anymore than her mother could force her to be the perfect Queen she wanted her to be. She thinks now that the curse was never going to be her happy ending, not while the whole world sees her as the Evil Queen. Because evil never wins, not in fairy tales anyway.

But Regina was never evil, not really. So she thinks that maybe she can fix things, though she's not really sure how. But maybe, she can learn to love again. Maybe, someday, she can have her happy ending. Emma Swan may have torn her happiness away, taken Henry away, taken all her power, but Regina knows that power isn't freedom and maybe neither is happiness.