She's still staring at the ring, the note, her face cracked into a wide smile, warmth flushing and flushing around her rapidly beating heart when she hears his steps behind her – she's meant to hear him, she knows. He can be silent as a cat when he wants to be.
There are words on the tip of her tongue, words from another life, and she doesn't want to start them off with the shadows of Then, and Him, but she just can't help herself.
"That arrow almost took off my head, thief," she teases, glancing up into the mirror to meet his eyes.
He's smiling at her, all fondness tinged under with nerves, and the hand not gripping his bow rises to comb fingers lightly through the brush-smoothed locks of her ponytail as he assures her, "Never."
Her smile widens impossibly – he's rougher around the edges, this Robin of Locksley. More uncouth, more crass, feistier and more combative (dirtier in all the best ways, too). But he has a gentle streak, a tenderness in the way he touches her in the quiet moments.
It reminds her of weaving fingers across tabletops in Camelot, of gentle hands on her as she lay bleeding out in that backward reality before Henry had saved them all. She's made peace with the fact that he's not Robin Hood, wrapping it up in the realization that she's meant to love this man in all his realms and roles.
She's made discovering who he is here, now, an exercise in curiosity rather than comparison, and she's found that he fits nearly along all the jagged edges left by her violent separation from her Other Half. He's quick-witted and nimble-fingered, passionate, and surprisingly patient when he wants to be. And he lacks judgement, just as he always has – as Robin Hood had, she corrects herself. (Comparison is a knee jerk now and then, after all, but she's trying and it gets easier by the day.)
When he asks her, "What do you say, Your Majesty?" and bites into his lower lip to hide the anxious anticipation of awaiting her answer, she wants to say Yes, it's right there on the tip of her tongue.
But it stalls there behind her teeth, her smile fading away ever so slightly as her answer seems to stick in her throat.
It's not her first proposal, after all. At least this time, she's the one who gets to answer.
"I've been married before," she reminds him, as if he could have forgotten when they're here in the high-ceiling chambers she conquered from the man who'd tried to conquer her.
"I don't mind," he shrugs, as if that was the issue, and as if he isn't pulsing with nervous energy that she can feel at her back.
"I did," she tells him, growing serious for just a moment, that smile finally slipping away entirely. "My marriage was hell. It was a prison; it stole me from a life I wanted and caged me in a… a nightmare."
She tries not to think of it most of the time – of those early years, her marriage bed, the King, the loneliness, and anger, and despair.
Robin's smile falls in the wake of hers, his fingertips brushing her neck lightly as they move to settle on her shoulder.
"You don't wish to marry again," he states, and try as he might to hide it, she can see the disappointment, the rejection in the way his gaze drops away for just a moment.
She brings her hand back to squeeze the one on her shoulder, and waits for their eyes to lock again in the looking glass before she corrects, "I don't wish to be owned. I know how marriage often works in this realm, and I want to make it very clear that I won't be a wife who gets treated like a subject. I'll be a partner, an equal, and nothing less."
"Have I ever treated you as anything less, Your Majesty?" he asks her, and no, no he hasn't.
"Never," she tells him with a small smile. "But if I'm going to promise myself to you, I want a promise in return."
Robin gives her a nod, and then a promise: "We'll be equals, always. We'll take only what is given to each other, and steal nothing more."
You can't steal what's been given to you echoes through her mind, but she pushes it back, forces away the shadows of what came before for what is standing behind her now.
"I've never belonged anywhere, Regina, until you. And now I want us to belong to each other, for the rest of our days."
The smile grows again, blossoming over her cheeks – he's not as prone to poetry as Robin Hood had been, but he has his moments. And he's sincere, and she trusts him, trusts his heart, so she puts him out of his misery and says, "Now that sounds like an adventure I want to be a part of."
His grin resurrects itself, his dimples winking deep and dashing before her chair is spun with the magic of well-muscled arms, the scrape of wood on stone loud in the room, and then he's kissing her. Hard and hot and eager, the way she likes it, the way they both do.
She laughs softly into the kiss – okay, alright, she giggles, her heart feeling lighter than it has since… well, since she had a lot more lightness in her, that's for certain. She feels good, feels happy, feels like things are finally falling into place. There's a future set out before her, one of her own making.
The circumstances that got her here, got both of them here, may not have been of their own choosing, but everything that lies before them is.
She'd thought her existence one of unending bleakness, and had thought that every trace of Robin had been wiped out of existence, and yet here they are. Tangled up with one another, his hands pushing soft velvet up her thighs, his mouth tracing warm kisses down her neck, and Regina feels something that she'd thought she'd never have again after she was ripped in two.
Hope.