She wasn't always so cold, so dead. She was kindhearted and gentle. Innocent, the word ran through the mayor's mind.
When did all this start, she wondered. After Daniel? Before? Or maybe when I met Rumple. Bastard. When I became the Evil Queen? Was it the curse?
She realized that maybe given her current position, it wasn't the most opportune time to be weighing the regrets of her past, what shaped her future.
But what else did she have to do?
Graham came over at half past eleven and he barely gave her a second to close the front door before ushering her up the stairs to the bedroom. "A quiet night at the station," he said. "Be there in five." She wishes he didn't come, she always does. But as always, is glad he does.
Moments like these, encounters hidden in the dark of night, are the former Queen's anchor to the natural world, her body no more than a vessel, numb to all that surrounds it.
In silence, Regina stared at the ceiling past the undulating Sheriff's shoulder. She didn't know how long ago it was that they entered the master bedroom, only that it seemed like eons. Or something akin to being stuck in this godforsaken time warp. It was a strange sort of thing. Intellectually, the mayor knew she could feel the man moving in and around her. However, she couldn't feel it. The most vital part of feeling is trust. The thought alone would have caused a sardonic laugh to fall from her lips at any other moment. She couldn't let herself trust The Huntsman. Regina couldn't let herself trust, at all. Evil, she thought. I am no Queen, but I am evil.
Graham would eventually leave once she lied well enough to sate his chivalry. "I believe you have a town to oversee, Sheriff," she'd sometimes say, easily slipping back into her superior role as mayor, even underneath satin sheets. Once alone again, she knew better than to offer her self, release. She did it anyway, ever so aware of the unchanging outcome, of her personal incarceration.
As she trailed an unthinking hand down her abdomen for the umpteenth time, she she tried to stop, she wanted to, knowing that there was no end in sight, but couldn't reconcile herself with the action. Maybe this time. Maybe just this once. What do I stand to lose from myself? But, as always, she remembered all she had done. It would never leave her. Everything.