I own no one but my own people
A/N I DID IT! Omg okay, so, I actually wrote all the fics for this challenge and came up with the plots the day of. Like I was staying up until 4 AM to write, sleep for a bit, then wake up and start writing again and post it. I'm so grateful for all the reviews and RTs and likes and thank you for giving me so many happy endings to enjoy. Remember; their story was short but that doesn't make it any less epic.
Her eyes were still that deep chocolate brown, her body could still turn heads, her hair was still soft and black, her skin was as smooth as a porcelain doll.
Regina was still beautiful. As beautiful as the day she met her thief and as beautiful as the day he left her.
Lucy Mills, now Lucy Ocean, passed at a ripe old age of 93 warm in her bed surrounded by her family, friends, and her husband. Ariel and Eric's son Triton the Forth was as old and wrinkled as his brown eyed wife.
But he had been there for Regina's granddaughter in the end. He held her wrinkled hand and kissed the back of it as Lucy smiled that still wide eyed smile that he had fallen for so long ago before she closed her brown eyes one last time, and she was gone.
They spread her ashes in the sea, as was custom for the family she had married into. Triton passed not even a month later in similar peaceful circumstances. Regina watched as their children, all of them middle aged with the dark features of their mothers families with their own grown children and even those children had small toddlers of their own, emptied the remains into the salt water so he could lay with his wife, Regina couldn't help but think how lucky he was. She envied her grandchild's husband. So much.
He was going on to be with the woman he loved, who he spent the last sixty years with, who he shared adventures with, who he had long talks with, who knew and loved the best and worst parts of her.
Regina, it seemed, would never have that.
This, she realized when she noticed her step daughters face grow more and more careworn, was the real price of the curse.
Not the hole in her heart from murdering her father. It was watching her friends and family pass on while she stayed here. Unchanging. Frozen in time, the same as when she first cast the curse, while the rest of them grew older and eventually left her.
First it was Snow. She died in similar circumstances to Lucy. Warm in her bed, surrounded by those she cared about. Regina was at her side when it happened. She kissed the now wrinkled skin of her step daughter's cheek and told her she loved her.
Snow smiled at Regina and put a trembling careworn hand on her cheek.
"Don't give up hope," she told her once greatest enemy turned greatest ally. "You'll see him again. I know you will…"
Regina chuckled as a tear rolled down her face. Even now, hours from death, Snow still had to get a hope speech in there.
The Queen didn't have the heart to tell the dying woman that it would never happen. That she would never see her thief again.
David came next in the hospital. Three years after Snow. Lung cancer. He didn't want chemotherapy. He didn't want to be revived if something happened to him, he just wanted to be with his true love.
Emma was a car accident. She refused to give up her license when her vision started to go. She didn't want to give up her independence.
"I'm fine," the 84 year old blonde would say with a roll of her failing eyes. Regina, Henry, Hope, Killian… they all tried to convince her to just let them drive her around their little corner of Maine but she was as stubborn now as she was back when she first showed up on Regina's doorstep.
It was painless at least. She died the second she collided with the truck and she had gone out the same way she rolled into Storybrooke, driving in her little yellow bug.
Killian wasn't soon after. He had been out sailing when a sudden storm blew in from the East. Some of the newer boating equipment might have picked it up but not the antiqued Jolly Roger.
In the end the Captain went down with his ship.
Zelena had a heart problem. She was terrified of passing. Afraid of what awaited her in the Underworld. After all the bad deeds she did, what heaven would accept her?
Regina and Robyn was there with the young looking red headed witch, Zelena had used magic to keep her outsides beautiful and young but on the insides time passed like it did any other, in the end along with Zelena's granddaughters Killi and Archer, two beautiful girls Robyn had given birth too, both with families of their own.
Regina told her she had redeemed herself, that she had lived most of her life as a hero. That any heaven not willing to take her wasn't a heaven worth getting into.
That brought a smile to the witches face. Robyn told her mother to say hi to her father and Zelena grinned as she shook her head.
"No. I think I'll leave that up to the woman he loves. Me and him will probably just end up arguing again."
Regina chuckled softly and told her sister to 'just shut up and do what your kid says.'
Henry had been the worst for the unchanging Queen. He had Alzheimer's. Apparently David's side of the family suffered from the illness.
At first it was little things. Forgetting where he put his keys, forgot what he had for dinner but it soon grew worse. The same question to his family several times an hour, but Regina never lost her patience with him as she and Jacinda cared for him when he forgot to wash himself, forgot where he was, forgot how to eat and had to be slowly spoon fed...
She never once let the confused man see her cry.
Not until the end.
The doctor said that Henry was probably the luckiest person in the world to suffer with this disease. As he reverted back to his childhood memories, he was lucky enough to still have his mother and she still looked exactly the same as she did when he was a boy.
One day he had shuffled out of his room. Jacinda had taken their great grandson Erich out shopping and Regina had volunteered to stay with her son.
The 79 year old called her 'Mommy' and asked if she would just stay with him in his room.
He didn't want to sleep alone.
Regina said of course.
She laid on the bed and he cuddled close to her. Regina held the grown man like she used to when he was a child, one hand stroking his now grey wispy hair, the other gripping his spotted trembling hand.
Henry turned to look at her and for a moment, for one brief moment, he remembered her.
"Mom," he said in a tearful whisper. "I'm sorry."
"For what, my little prince?"
"When Emma first came… I was so horrible to you. I always loved you, Mom. You were always my mom. I'm so sorry…"
Tears streamed down her face. She kissed his forehead, told him with a shaking breath that there was nothing to forgive, and to shut his eyes and go to sleep.
The truest believer was buried in Regina's family mausoleum as per his request along with her parents and sister.
He wanted to show the world that he was proud to be a Mills.
After Henry came Jacinda. Then Roland and his wife Hope, both of them peaceful deaths. After the blonde haired daughter of the savior left this world went Alice, and soon after Robyn followed her Tower Girl.
The longer Regina stayed on the earth, the more she hated it. She would trade her eternal beauty for death in a heartbeat, to be with the people she loved again.
To be with her son and her thief again.
When Lucy went, that's when Regina stopped counting the years.
Killi and Archer, Hope and Roland's three children Locksley, Marian and Emma, Lucy's little Henry and her beautiful twins Gina and Roni… all of them gone. Generation after generation lived and fought and more importantly loved.
Regina couldn't help but laugh when she received the invitation to the wedding between Neal's great grandson and Robyn's great granddaughter. It took six generations but the blood feud between the Mills and the Charmings had finally come to a close.
But they would pass on too. They all eventually were reunited with the people they loved. Rather it be old age, illness, daring adventures, accidents… they all eventually saw their families again.
Not Regina though.
The outside world saw war, peace, war again then peace again. But the little corner of Maine was as frozen in time as Regina was.
One night as she laid sleeping, Henry came to her. Not the wrinkled weak old man he had been when he died, but as a bright eyed seventeen year old boy again. It wasn't a dream. It felt too real to be a dream, her little prince felt too real to be a dream.
He just smiled at Regina and told her three simple words she realized she had been waiting to hear.
"Get ready, Mom."
She awoke with a smile on her face and relief flooding her heart.
Regina felt it in her heart, in her body, in her mind, in her soul… It was time for her to go.
The election of a new Queen took about a month. The people choose a descendant of the original Snow and Charming and Regina knew that she would be a good, kind, gentle ruler. She reminded Regina of Snow in a lot of ways actually. It didn't hurt that her name was Mary either.
The next visit was from Zelena, still as bushy haired and beautiful as ever.
"It's time, Sis."
It would be with a poison. A tasteless odorless poison that would bring a painless death, quick and easy. Her room and even the hallway outside was full of people. Some who were almost identical to the first people she lost, others looked like they had come from out of Storybrooke but all of them were her family.
All of them wanted to be there for the Good Queen Regina as she drank the potion and laid her head down on the pillow, a smile on her face as she finally, finally, closed her eyes for the last time.
When she opened them she was in a tavern.
Not just a tavern.
THEIR tavern.
A warm fire in the fire pit washed over her and then, all of a sudden, that familiar smell of forest, a smell she would never forget even after two hundred years, wrapped her in a warm comforting blanket.
He didn't have to speak. She already knew exactly who was standing behind her.
Regina turned and smiled up at her thief. His eyes were still that same beautiful ocean blue, his hair was still that handsome dark blonde, he still wore a smug look that made it appear like he was in on some grand joke no one else was in on.
"Nice to see you again, M'lady," Robin told her in that accent she had been desperate to hear again for so long. "Welcome to your happy ending…"
The End