A/N: Wow, I haven't posted anything in a really really long time! This is kind of exciting. And nervewracking.
Thank you times a million to Addicted1, without whose discussion, mutual motivation and invaluable beta work this would have never been written! Mwah!
Warning: Dark!David themes. This is a stretch on canon, but hopefully a plausible one! Takes place during The Tower, The Heart of The Truest Believer, and Think Lovely Thoughts.
"Then let's end this," David says. He can't help looking to Regina as he does so.
She gives a little nod, her dark eyes piercing.
"And send that witch back to Oz."
She holds his gaze. Her lips curl slowly up at the corners.
He breaks his eyes away first. There's something there, in her eyes and in the lazy curve of her mouth, something familiar, something like approval and…. something.
He strides forward, brushing past her, leading the way back to his daughter's car. He's relieved when Hook asks for elaboration on the unsettling opponent he'd just faced. Even more so when Regina seizes onto a particular detail of his story, her mouth turning serious and firing out several questions. The anticipatory gleam leaves her eyes as she slips easily into magical lecture mode. She stops walking, caught up in her explanation, and they all stop to listen.
Her focus is still mainly on him, but he doesn't mind that so much when she isn't wearing that little smirk like she knows exactly what's going on in his head. Regina's smiles are rarely joyful, often dangerous, and usually hold plenty of frightening promise. What scares him the most, though, is that he isn't sure he'd refuse to take her up on what those smiles are offering.
….
He had held his sword to the creature's neck and his blood had thrummed with exhilaration and he had blamed it on the ship. He had taken a handful of her hair and used it to yank her head back and expose her throat, had clenched his jaw and pressed the blade into her skin hard and he had felt intoxicated, adrenaline racing through his veins, dizzying. Powerful, that's how he had felt, and he had blamed it on the raging ocean. And Regina had leaned in to him, her dark eyes alight and he felt the fire within her, could feel it licking at the edges of his own heart.
Fillet the bitch, she had said, in her horribly tempting, husky voice, and heaven help him, he'd almost wanted to.
That had been what scared him the most. Regina had made a typically drastic, all-or-nothing, bloodthirsty suggestion; that was nothing unexpected. But he had been right there with her, before she had been the one to voice it.
Later, he would blame it on the mermaid. Something about her otherworldly power had taken hold of all of them that night. It was evidenced in the tender, swollen bridge of his wife's nose, his own reddened, bruised knuckles, the fact that Emma had still been shivering from her ill-advised dip in the ocean when she had gone to bed an hour earlier.
David hadn't gone to bed. He had stayed awake, pacing the deck, his shoulders wrapped in a blanket, pointlessly inspecting the net which had held the mermaid, resisting the urge to punch something else and further injure his hand.
"Guilt keeping you awake, Charming?"
"No," he replied instantly, even as he searched for the source of the voice. And there she was, sitting on the deck with her back against the bulwark, eyes glittering in the moonlight. She chuckled at his impetuous answer.
"Of course, I forgot, you Charmings are always perfectly persuaded of your own rightness, aren't you? Probably wouldn't recognise guilt even if you did feel it."
Against his better judgement, he moved closer to her, the better to see her face in the pale light. Her eyes were stormy and it was pain and fear and exhaustion and her body radiated tension (after all, she'd had barely a day to recover from hours and hours of torture, only to push all that recovered energy into a magical death trap to save them, and now her son was gone and she was afraid). She was clearly in a mood to deflect and rankle and that meant he should stay as far away from her as this damn ship would allow. He didn't, though. There was a bruise forming on her cheekbone, just below her left eye, courtesy of his wife. He stared at it. At her.
"Not quite," he said, in answer to her accusation.
She quirked an eyebrow in mock interest. He gave a resigned sigh. He'd always had trouble controlling himself when it came to her, and it used to be rage and the desire for violence, and now, that same desire was still there, but it was also… something. Like the inability to stop himself from coming over to sit down beside her. Both her eyebrows rose at that.
"Surely you don't want to discuss your troubles with me?" she said, still mocking.
"No troubles," he lied. "Just…"
Their eyes caught, and held, and he trailed off. She had wanted him to do it, fillet the bitch, and he had wanted to do it and almost still wished he had done it, had just taken the opportunity then and blamed it later on the ship ocean mermaid, and he would have been forgiven so he could have done it. Perhaps it would have sated the terrible, violent desire he still felt even after so many years of being a Prince and an example.
It was that which was troubling him. That part of him that wanted (wants) to do it, the part that scared Snow in the glimpse she got of it before Regina's vicious excitement (the same as his own) woke him up to what he was letting his wife see. The part he never let her see.
And he saw that excitement in Regina's eyes now, and she must have seen something in his, too, because suddenly she was smiling, a secret little smirk that said yes, she saw, she knows…
He stood as abruptly as he'd sat, her watching eyes now dancing with amusement.
"Just wanted to make sure everything was all right out here," he said, his defensiveness coming out clumsy and accusatory. "That you weren't busy setting the ship on fire or turning any more mermaids into destructive forces of nature."
In response, she slowly extended a hand, uncurling her fingers, smirk never leaving her lips and her eyes full of challenge. In an instant there was a small fireball flickering in her palm, lighting both their faces with an orange glow. He glared at her, and she shrugged.
"I was cold," she said airily.
He shook his head, because they both knew that wasn't the case, but he wasn't going to rise to her challenge, wasn't going to admit to what she thought she knew. His defiance seemed to amuse her even further, a little laughing hum coming from the back of her throat. The noise sent a shiver skittering down his arms, forcing him to turn away so she wouldn't see.
"Try not to hurt anyone, all right?" he said, doing his best to sound authoritative. She let him take a few steps away before getting the last word.
"I will if you will."
He gritted his teeth but concentrated on walking away, on not reacting, on putting as much distance between himself and her knowing eyes and that smile dripping with dark promises.
They'd stopped for the night in the middle of the never-ending jungle. Hook and Neal, determined to compete over every possible thing, had both gathered armfuls of firewood too large to see over and then fought over the flint until Regina casually pitched a fireball into Hook's abandoned pile and ended the argument. Snow and Emma had constructed the shelters and then they had all drifted into separate areas of the makeshift camp. No one was much in the mood for talking. Regina practically snarled at Tinkerbell when she tried to approach the fire. Neal and Hook had matching dark looks on their faces, sitting stubbornly apart from one another. Gold was ignoring everyone, which suited them just fine. Snow, still angry with David, had pointedly sat next to Emma and was murmuring to her in a low voice, but Emma didn't seem very interested in reciprocating. Occasionally one or both of them would glance David's way and he would contemplate the merits of punching Hook in the face.
This island, its strange magic, the stress of not being able to find Henry, it was doing something to him, to all of them, he was sure of it. He was tense, Snow was cross, Neal was alive and scowling, Emma was wretched and Hook was resentful. Even Regina's smug smile, when they found her and Gold again, hadn't lasted long after Neal had outed his father's secret agenda to kill her son. Gold was uncharacteristically passive in the face of Neal's accusations and everyone else's suspicion. He had retreated to a dark corner of the camp once the discussing and arguing was over, away from the fire, staring broodingly into his own clasped hands. Regina, on the other hand, had sat as close as possible to the fire without actually setting her hair alight, cracking her knuckles periodically, eyes reflecting the flickering flames.
David was angry. He had sat around for a while, watching his wife and daughter having a private heart to heart, and finally had stomped off into the jungle without telling anyone where he was going. It was reckless and irresponsible and unlike him, but maybe that was what made him do it. This damn island and everyone on it was making him angry and he felt so far removed from the noble, heroic Prince Charming that he couldn't understand how they could all look at him and expect to see that person still.
He felt like something vicious and dangerous was bubbling up inside him; every day the urge to release the hold he had on his self-control grew stronger and he came closer and closer to boiling over. He wanted to get something done, the way Regina and Gold got things done, and the freedom with which they got things done made him want to lash out and hit someone. But he couldn't.
Images tormented him, flashes of half-remembered dreams he supposed; killing the mermaid, beating Hook to a bloody pulp, watching Regina rip out hearts and fling fireballs and not lifting a finger to stop her. Meeting her eyes and seeing that she didn't expect him to. Seeing his own enthralled, savage expression mirrored in her face.
He wasn't sure when he had surged to his feet and marched into the woods, but now he was here and Gold had planned to kill Henry and he was stuck on this miserable island and Snow was angry and he was angry and suddenly his sword was in his hand and his inexplicable anger was bursting out of him. He swung out with his sword, wildly slashing at the surrounding jungle, over and over. He swung until his arms ached and there were piles of decimated greenery all around him. Then, when his chest was heaving and every bush and small tree within a two-metre radius had been destroyed, he walked further into the jungle, hacking sporadically at the undergrowth as he went.
It had to be the island. It was heightening his primal impulses, quickening his temper, playing tricks with his mind, it had to be. He'd always had more of a ruthless streak than he let on – a rough, poor country upbringing, where violence is often the quickest and most effective method of solving a problem, will bring that out in a person. But it had never felt as all-consuming as this. Had never been a constant torment in the back of his mind, driving him mad with unfulfilled desires, possibilities.
Part of him felt like he was going crazy. Part of him wanted to fall at Snow's feet, confess every dark thought he'd always hidden from her and beg her to help him snap out of it.
But another part of him just felt angry. Angry that he had to keep repressing a part of himself for the good of everybody else, angry that he always had to be the good man, the upstanding Prince. Angry that Regina and Gold and Pan and Hook and even Tinkerbell hurt whoever they wanted and nobody was even surprised when they did. Just angry.
Despite his exertion, he could still feel the anger pulsing at his throat when he eventually returned to camp. He'd deliberately walked far enough away that at least an hour had passed by the time he got back. He was hoping everyone would have gone to bed, and they had, except the one lone figure still sitting practically on top of the fire.
It wasn't burning as fiercely now, but as he watched, Regina conjured a fireball and tossed it into the embers. It sparked, flickered for a couple of seconds and burnt down again quickly. She repeated the action. He rolled his eyes and picked up a couple of logs from the pile as he passed it, walking up behind her.
"I'm in no mood," she growled, hearing his footsteps.
He kept coming until his shins were almost touching her back, and threw one of the logs over her head into the fire. It caused an explosion of sparks and several glowing embers jumped outwards. She started and turned around to glare at him, having to crane her neck when she realised how close he was.
"What the hell are you doing?" she half-shouted. "Do you have a death wish?"
"What are you going to do to me, Regina? Really."
He was spoiling for a fight, he realised, looking into her eyes and seeing the ferocity there, knowing she was just the person to give it to him. He felt a thrill of anticipation flare in his stomach.
She rose to her feet, though without her usual heels, she had to look up to meet his eyes. Everything about her radiated danger at that moment but he just smirked, his body tingling with suspense. Anger at Regina, the urge to hurt her even, was familiar and easy to justify. That same anger at Hook, Neal, even Snow…. no. Regina would play right into his hands, quicker to violence than he ever could be. So easy to rile up, bringing her anger level with his in a matter of moments. She would give him a reason.
He was so caught up in the adrenaline of playing with fire, as it were, anticipating her lash out, that he missed the searching look in her eyes, missed her expression melting from rage-filled into predatory as she witnessed his eagerness. But he didn't miss the way her lips curved upwards, or the way she suddenly stepped closer, their chests now touching, or the way her tone shifted from rough, snarling anger to honeyed silk.
"What do you want me to do to you, Charming?"
He couldn't help it; he took a step back, stumbling, reacting to her nearness the way she never did to his. She took a step of her own, chasing him. She conjured another fireball with a flick of her fingers, so close the heat of it felt scorching against his face. He didn't know how she'd been sitting so close to the fire.
"Do you want me to light you up, David?"
His name was a purr from her smiling lips.
"Do you want me to string you up?"
She closed her fist around the fireball, extinguishing it, wrapping her hand around his throat instead, lightly, a mere echo of what he knew she could really do. She relaxed her grip, stroking her hand up to his jaw, cupping it, teasing.
"Or do you want me to be just a little slower, a little greener, to not quite succeed in getting to you first and give you the chance to expend your insatiable anger on me?"
She turned her hand, stroking his cheek with her knuckles.
"Were you hoping to hurt me, David?"
She was definitely pressed up against him now, her other hand resting on his chest for balance, leaning forward even closer to bring her mouth to his ear.
"Does the righteous and honourable Prince Charming want an excuse to take out his bloodlust on little old me?"
He jerked away from her, eyes darting around to make sure no one was around to hear her spilling his darkest secret. She knew, how did she know?
She let him escape this time, settling back on her heels, folding her arms and watching him with a satisfied smile, like she'd won something.
"I don't have… bloodlust, that's not true," he hissed.
"Oh?"
She shrugged, as if to say, it was a simple mistake, it could happen to anyone. Then her eyes dragged back to his, her smile something cruel.
"It must have been the urge to do good then, your nobility driving you to press your sword into that mermaid's neck. I've personally never found a disagreeable problem that a slit throat wouldn't fix. Or were you intending on beheading her? I couldn't quite tell."
He growled, approaching her again, her taunts igniting something in his gut.
"It was the mermaid, she was using her magic on all of us, you felt it. It's the same magic here on the island, I know it."
She cocked an eyebrow, infuriatingly confident, almost lazy with the power she was so used to wielding. She knew exactly what to say to get the reactions she wanted and he was handing every one of them to her like an eager serving boy with a platter of grapes. Entertaining her. He hated himself for it, but he couldn't hold them back either.
"Is it?" she said, mocking. "Is it Neverland? Was it the mermaid?"
The rage she was after obediently swirled in his belly. He stepped closer, she was smaller than him but he could never intimidate her, the gap between them almost nothing, her eyes glittering, enjoying plucking at his strings. Once again she brought her mouth to his ear, using her proximity to discomfit him, whispering,
"Or is it you, David?"
She drew back, her smile malicious and satisfied. It made him want to grab her and shake her until her teeth rattled. The need to tear that smirk from her lips, to show her exactly how noble he felt in that moment, to see her eyes widen and that mouth drop open in shock, overwhelmed him. She was as arrogant and unafraid as ever, watching him, seeing right through him, relishing her control and her power, and he wanted to take it from her, desperately.
She let out a low, throaty laugh and stepped away, already so secure in the knowledge that she'd won. She started to walk away, preparing to leave him seething and frustrated, and something finally broke loose inside him and before even he knew what he was doing, he lunged for her.
He seized her arms in a bruising grip with both hands and smashed his lips to hers. She let out a muffled yelp of surprise that sent a rush through him. He forced her backward, towering over her, making her stumble, never letting up on his assault of her mouth. Her back collided hard with a tree and another sound of protest escaped her, immediately swallowed by his lips and tongue.
He couldn't pinpoint when she started responding, but suddenly he was aware that she was. He was kissing Regina and she was kissing him back and oh God what was he doing but she was fighting him now, not fighting him off but fighting for dominance and he couldn't let her win. He kissed her harder, tongue in her mouth, grinding her shoulders against the tree in a way that was sure to be painful. His own palms were braced against the bark, the grooves of it digging into his flesh, trapping her.
She was the first to pull away and he grinned, giddy with victory. He took her in, her hair mussed, her mouth open and wet, her breaths heavy. She looked surprised and he was intoxicated by it. But she eyed his arms on either side of her face and smiled, a wicked smile that said it wasn't going to be so easy.
"Afraid to touch are we? What, afraid you might lose control? Afraid you'll hurt me?"
And she reached out a hand, just like she had in the past with fireballs and in dungeons, always mocking him and always winning, and he didn't want to flinch, refused to in fact, she was going to reach for his heart to make him flinch and he was braced for it.
She didn't reach for his heart.
She brushed her hand against his crotch instead and he did flinch and God she made him so angry, so so angry and so something and just like he had in her dungeon all those decades ago he snatched her hand away and her eyes were laughing at him.
"I'm not afraid to hurt you," he snarled.
He slammed her hand against the tree to prove it, pressing hard, hoping to graze and bruise it like he hoped her back was grazed and bruised. She didn't flinch and he hated her for it.
"Not in your head maybe," she purred. "But out here, there are consequences."
He shook his head.
"No one would care if I hurt you. No one would stop me."
"Perhaps not," she said, her eyes dark. "But you don't want to do the things nobody cares about, do you, Charming? You don't want to do what's expected of you. That's why you kissed me, because you think it's something you can get away with and maybe if you do something as deplorable as kissing the Evil Queen it will sate your appetite for the things that you can't get away with, like slitting mermaids' throats, cutting down Lost Boys where they stand, hurting people who get in your way just because you can."
She knew. He didn't know how, but she knew everything, every despicable thought that had ever entered his head, and maybe it was because she recognised something in his eyes that she herself had felt and knew well but she knew and he couldn't decide if it scared him or excited him more to hear her describe the fantasies he'd had, her tongue wrapping around the words as if they were familiar, decadent sweets.
"Shut up," he choked out.
Her lips curled up again. "Or what? You'll kill me?"
He wrapped his hand around her throat. Dug his fingers in. Heard her breath strangle just a bit and kissed her again. His whole weight was pressed against her, his knee shoved between her legs. He touched her too. Almost ashamed that she had been able to goad him into it, but giving in just the same. He brushed her shoulder first, then the back of her neck and her hair, yanking on it like he'd done to the mermaid. At that, a tiny moan bubbled up from the back of her throat. He heard it and felt it and it felt just a little like victory. He pulled back to look at her. She looked angry now, and he was sure it was at herself. She opened her mouth, her lovely, luscious mouth, and he claimed it once again.
He kissed her thoroughly, exploring her mouth this time, wanting to keep her from talking as much as anything else. The hand that wasn't in her hair skimmed up her side and teased around the side of her breast. He thought he detected a shiver and, encouraged, he palmed and squeezed it roughly, pinched at her nipple. A gasp into his mouth this time, then, much more deliberate, a twist of her hips up into his. Challenging. He was hard and he knew she could feel it. He also knew he couldn't tear off her clothes and take her up against this tree. He pushed his hips back into hers, just once to answer her challenge, tugged her nipple harder to make her yelp again, and pulled away. Without moving out of her space, he whispered,
"I'm not going to kill you, Regina. I'm not going to hurt you either."
She looked surprised again. It didn't excite him any less.
He turned away, intending for his tent.
"I'll just think about it sometimes."
He was almost out of earshot when he thought he heard her reply,
"You and me both."
…
They are in the car and Emma is driving and of course Regina has ended up in the front passenger seat so David and Hook are squashed in the back. Regina continues peppering Emma with questions about the farmhouse, what was there, had they seen anything inside, what exactly had this cellar looked and felt like and why Emma should be able to feel and recognise a magical signature by now. David is staring at a spot between the two front seats, thinking about what this witch could be hiding in a locked outdoor cellar and trying not to think about that look in Regina's eyes when they'd locked with his.
Suddenly he becomes aware that the conversation in the front of the car has stopped, and Regina is turned slightly in her seat, looking back at him.
"So, David, how exactly do you plan to send this Witch back to Oz?"
And her tone is conversational, the question asked at a level Emma and Hook can easily hear and join in on, nothing untoward about it at all, really.
But her mouth pulls up at the corners and her eyes are glinting, looking right at him, not at Emma or Hook, but him, and she smiles
She knows.