Yes, I said 'we'; this fanfic is co-written by myself and the amazing SarcasticAlexWilliams, and can also be found on her account.
Of Mice and Men, and What Might Have Been
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, 'it might have been.' – Kurt Vonnegut
Prologue
Number 9, Pine Drive, Deer Isle, Maine
Thursday, 11th December 2006
What awoke Regina was Snow's shrieks, which were of the shrill, girly kind. Just the sort that would wake the dead, let alone a light sleeper such as herself.
'Why are you screaming?' she wanted to ask, only to find herself at a loss of words.
Her head was pounding and her eyes stung, not to mention her nose, which burned. She gasped for air for a moment, her chest heaving with harsh, dry coughs, and when she looked up again, Snow had been reduced to whimpering, her small thirteen-year-old form a fuzzy blob of white nightie and dark hair in the spinning red of her room.
"Why are you screaming?" she actually asked this time, her throat hurting but her voice sounding normal enough. "Are you hurt?"
As her vision cleared and Snow continued to whimper, she glanced at her alarm clock, frowning as she read the time. Eight minutes past ten. Since when did she wake so late?
She surveyed the room a second time, and that was when she realised what had happened. A light dusting of powder littered the bedside table and floor, stark against their darkness (Regina had designed her room as a lair and comfort-zone, not a meadow, she always said when Snow asked her why she hadn't made it any lighter or airier, which was often) and it slid down the covers as she pulled them down and sat up.
The half-empty prescription pad Daniel had nicked from school was all Regina needed to confirm her suspicions. Not that it was anything new. It was a while since Regina had acknowledged her drug addiction. She had no intentions of doing anything about it. But was she going too far? She wondered. Right from the beginning, Regina had promised herself that her younger sister and drugs would not mix. Snow was too pure, too sweet, too naïve. They took the drugs while they were at Daniel's, they were tidy about it. Where did they go wrong?
She tried to think back to the previous night, but her search for memories came to a pause as her gut gave an unpleasant clench and she was sick down the side of the bed. She fell back, exhausted, her stomach still clenching uncomfortably as she watched through half-closed eyes as Snow wandered forward, stopping not too far away from the pool of sick dripping down onto the floor by the side of the bed. The right side. Daniel always slept on the left.
She was a mess. Her mother would give her a slap if she were her to see this. But, Regina thought with a limp smile, Mother was dead. Good riddance, if she had anything to say about it. And Zelena…Zelena.
"Where's Zelena?" Regina asked Snow in a panic, her stomach lurching at the thought of her elder sister seeing her in such a state. The embarrassment it would bring.
"She had the early shift at the hospital," Snow whispered, always as quiet and delicate as she was. "That's why I'm here. Hunter wet the bed."
Regina was sick. Again. This time in her lap. Snow looked downright terrified, yet she took a ginger step forward and tried to hep by patting Regina's back. It didn't (help, that is). But the thought was, like usual when it came to Snow, sweet, and if it weren't for the whole 'projectile vomiting thing' Regina could have hugged her.
She and her boyfriend of four years had gotten high. With her thirteen year old stepsister and two year old niece in the house. And the high possibility that her sister would walk in on them. What had happened? Had the drugs somehow addled their brains?
They could have, whispered something in her head. The powder means you snorted, tonight. Daniel always did prefer that. Idiot, it added, almost fondly, if tiny voices in your head could do so.
"This, is why I, will be a world-class Neurosurgeon," somebody said, "and you, won't."
Perhaps it was the drugs, or the booze which a some half-a-dozen half-empty beer bottles on the ground implied, but it took her a good while to realise that it was not somebody in the room, but rather herself. In a… Memory? She couldn't be sure, but she hoped so.
"What if I don't want to be a Neurosurgeon?" Came Daniel's familiar voice with a leap of her heart. "What if I plan on becoming an Oncologist like I always have?"
"Then I hope that brain Cancer becomes the next breast Cancer, so I can see you every second of every day."
"That's romantic in the sick sadistic way of bringing pain to others?"
"You tell me."
"I think I know a better way to see you every day…"
Before she could try to recall further what had happened, Regina was shaken back to the real world by Snow's clammy hands and heartbreaking sobs.
"There's blood on your face," Snow snuffled. "Around your nose. And your face is pale. I thought you were dead. It scared me. I don't want you to be dead. I want you to stay alive. Everybody else leaves, but you haven't, and I don't want you to."
Even though Snow had a dramatic flair which could prove her very much annoying, there was very much a reason she was very easy to love, and that was because everything she said had either the power to make you laugh or cry. Regina hated it. But she hugged Snow anyway, because she loved the kid. (Just a bit. Not, you know, much. Not enough for it to make her weak. Or to look sappy).
What she and Daniel had done was stupid, but it was a mistake, so Regina begun to go about her day. She cleaned up the mess they'd made, got ready for the day, and then cleaned up Snow and Hunter too. It was only as the two girls were downstairs eating breakfast that she remembered to wake up Daniel.
He was still asleep, the lazy prat. She climbed onto the bed, shaking him awake by the arm, which was always a fairly long process, so she didn't question when he didn't begin to get up straight away. His arm was cold.
"Wake up," she hurried him along after a while. "I called us in sick at school today. I caught the Flu and passed it on to you. Wake up, Dan!"
He was asleep on his stomach again, forehead pressed into the pillow. The idiot did that a lot, despite her telling him that one day he'd suffocate himself and die.
After a long time even for Daniel had passed, she got worried. And then she began to shake him more. And then she flipped him over.
His eyes were bright blue and wide open, and his chest wasn't moving.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
"Marry me."
"What?"
"You heard me. Marry me! We can have the wedding this summer – you'll be a spring bride! – and we'll finish our schooling together, and then have kids somewhere in our residencies, two boys and a girl – no, three boys and a girl! – and then we'll raise them and by the time we finish our residencies they'll be old enough for school and babysitting, and then we'll raise them and send them off to college and we'll grow old together. Marry me. Because Regina, you're my happy ending."
"Yes, but Daniel-"
"No buts."
"But I'm pregnant."
"What?"
"I'm sorry."
"I love you."
"We should get clean, go to rehab. Start our future together. A good one, for our little girl."
"One, last time."
"One last time."
"Then it's the end, and we go to rehab, and it's happily ever after."
"Happily ever after."
"Do you think it'll harm the baby?"
"I don't think so? It's still what? Three, four weeks old? There's still nine months of cleanliness to go! But tell you what, just in case, I'll have more and you have less. Then there's no leftovers and no harm to the baby and nothing in our way to happily ever after."
She sat, still as stone in the middle of hospital chaos, watching them carting away his body in a bag – for the autopsy, they told her – seeing the speaking nurse in front of her, but not hearing a word.
Her heart hurt.
There was a peeling plaster on her hand from the IV she'd had put in to sober her up.
Zelena was in surgery, they told her. Nothing too bad, just a routine C-Section. She should be back soon, they said. Snow sat across from her with a tear-stained face, a squalling, egg-stained Hunter wriggling in her arms. Regina couldn't bear to look at them, imagine her sister's face.
There'd been policemen, but she refused to speak.
The silver band on her ring finger felt as heavy as a cinder block, yet nothing in comparison to the heavy sinking feeling of a child, a child with Daniel-eyes inside her, inside her womb.
At one point, a tear streaked down her face, and Regina nearly cried.
That was before she realised that it was her fault she was widowed, that it was her fault her daughter would grow up without a father, that she killed Daniel.
She steeled her broken heart and vowed to never feel again.
Loving her was just too dangerous.
~0~
Rural North-East France
Monday, 27th April 2009
It was Robin who drove the car that day, because Marion was seven months pregnant and yet already too big to fit behind the steering wheel. Their one night stand experience was never imagined to have turned out to be a new child to add to their 'family'. She had been complaining for over two hours now at the fact that's she didn't want to come on his journey.
"I've never been to France for a reason! It's the country for the loved, for the lovers. We are only joined by the person GROWING IN MY STOMACH!"
He had been very sensitive on this topic - for the first hours that was - but now he decided it was the result of some kind of hormone acting up with Marian, one that he should definitely not mention. His unborn child was more like a burden set upon him rather than a gift.
He sat upright, staring onto the empty streets as the rolls of clumped dust flew across the air. His rusty old Mercedes could probably be heard from miles off, clunking up and down at every one of Marian's moans at their current state of affairs. He dreaded the moment she would meet Père, as that would only begin another set of arguments.
All because he, in all honesty, was a pathetic man, concerned about the feelings of a woman destined to steal his child, leave him and refuse all his rights to see his unborn child. Robin was in some ways – he decided – exactly like his father.
Though it seemed ridiculous a thing to do under the circumstances of now, he sometimes couldn't help but imagine the child growing in Marian's stomach. Perhaps it would be beautiful like Marian, or stoic like him. Perhaps it wouldn't though. Or perhaps it would be a hideous creature like his Père; big nosed and sharp-faced.
He scowled as Marian let out yet again another moan.
"Since when have women been so annoying?" Robin whispered to himself, trying to hide the emerging smirk on his face. His face was soon covered with the glee he had brought upon himself with his 'stand up comedy', and he began to think of further ways to make fun of the woman accompanying him.
"Robin!" Marian practically screamed as if he wasn't sat directly next to her.
"I'm hungry! I want food, now."
"What would you like to eat, my DARLING?"
"I'd like so many things, but I'm stuck with an idiot and his stupid-ass baby (which wants pretzels)."
"Don't speak of my child like that!"
"It isn't your child! It's mine and once I'm home it'll be ALL mine!"
"You can't just take control of a whole person like that!"
"I can if it's my person!"
At this point Robin had given up; Marian had taken total ownership of the only thing he had to live for (because she just had to, the shrew). His face dropped from an already fading smirk to an expression of utter despair. He had finally given up on all hope that Marian might have one of those 'sides' that she could turn to in order to forgive him, to trust him, to at the very least allow him to see his child when it was born.
"Robin, SPEED UP THE CAR OR I WILL SHOOT YOU!"
Robin laughed the kind of laugh, that signified that he knew she was joking but also knew she wasn't. He nervously sped up the car and didn't dare look back at Marian. He saw her out of the corner of his eye though, a cross-eyed, demon-type of possessed monster that would be the mother to his child. Thoughts rushed through his already busy mind, about how was he going to overcome the obstacle of being unable to keep his child. His mind went blank. There was nothing he could do.
Rushes of anger filled Robin's body, his head full of the future she was taking away from him. His eyes turned almost red at the sight of her. The car wheezed as it slipped over a boggy, dug-up part of the road. He panicked. He reacted. He did it.
The car swerved out of motion, passengers flying every which way out of the car. Marian's scream filled the silence of the empty countryside.
His trusty Mercedes eventually fell on its side, his Marion flung onto the streets.
Robin swung out of the car desperate to see her still alive. He saw a red body across the other side of the street. An alive, but unsalvageable corpse. Guilt and betrayal were the only things left present in Robin's mind. The only thing he had left to live for was dying, along with the reason he wanted to die.
He had killed two people.
The person he loved the most.
Gone.
The person he (sort-of) hated the most.
Gone.
So stupid, stupid, stupid.
What did he do? What had he done? He'd just killed two people…
He looked around the streets, nervously trying to see if anyone had seen. There was no-one around (as usual). Suddenly, he missed Marion's snide comments, felt their silence as Marion groaned. She would die soon. So would the baby, probably. God, the baby. His baby.
He could never trust himself again.
Loving him was just too dangerous.