A mother is dead and a little girl cries.
She is alone in her room, the space too small to hold the memories swirling and dancing around her in lights and colors and emotions, reminding her of all she has lost. She sees her mother everywhere.
She sees her in the bureau and remembers the time spent taming cowlicks and listening to her mother's stories of princesses and frogs and ogres and giants and a world outside the castle walls full of adventure and life and promise.
She sees her mother in the bed too big for a tiny princess where she would lie at night, listening to her sing lullabies of pleasant dreams and happy mornings.
She sees her in the mirror when she looks too closely at her own face and sees her mother's frown reflecting back at her.
And then she blinks and her mother is gone and she can see only a reflection of her own moroseness, her own sadness, her own loss. She wonders if her face will ever return to what it was or if she'll wear the marks of her mother's death – the red, puffy eyes, the tear-stained cheeks, the downturned mouth – until her own time comes.
Big thoughts for a little girl, her father would say, but she thinks that sadness may have aged her because she doesn't feel quite so little anymore.
She curls tighter into a ball on her bed, pressing her face into the already-damp pillow, willing sleep to come quickly so that she can escape this nonsensical nightmare. She will wake to her mother singing with the birds.
She tries to forget that her mother will not sing anymore.
But she can't.
Her mother will not sing anymore.
Her mother will not dance anymore.
Her mother will not eat or dream or laugh anymore because her mother is dead and there is no cure for death and it isn't fair and it makes no sense and Snow wants to howl at the wind and cry to the heavens "WHY?" because her mother was good and kind and her mother and mothers shouldn't die, mothers should always be there for their daughters because without them, daughters don't know who they are. Without mothers, daughters are lost.
Without her mother, she is lost.
There is so much she doesn't know, so much her mother did not have time to teach her. She wants to ask how to make her cowlick behave, how to dress for a ball, how to greet a prince. She wants to learn how to read a scroll and slay a dragon and love her enemy. She wants to ask her how to be good, how to be kind, how to be fair.
Her mother told her once that she was good, that goodness was within her, as much a part of her as her fair skin and dark hair, but she doesn't think it works that way. People are not good or evil, not in the way that stories or mothers would have her believe.
She thinks, based on her limited experiences with fairies and candles and impossible cures, that goodness is a choice (perhaps it is a choice more easily made by those who see its value, but it is a choice nonetheless). She wonders how she's supposed to know which choices are good and which are evil and who is the decider of such things. She wonders what becomes of those who make bad decisions with good intentions.
She wonders if she will ever be one of those people.
She doesn't want to know what her mother would think of her if she began making bad choices, so she holds onto the part of her that values goodness because goodness was what her mother loved best and goodness is what she is most afraid to lose.
She hears the cry of the horn, loud and long and plaintive, as it leaves the castle, telling the kingdom of its loss.
The kingdom will grieve with her, but they mourn the death of a Queen, kind in her reign, unprecedented in her respect for her subjects, the fairest in the land. Their grief is not her grief; she is surrounded by people who love her, but she is alone in all that matters.
Only she mourns a mother instead of a crown.
She looks at the candle at her bedside and she hopes she made the right choice.
A mother is dead and a broken woman cries.
She is alone in her house, the space too big to hold the hollow memories of things that never were, reminding her of all she never had. She sits in her office, at the desk where her mother sat only days before, and the emptiness enfolds her in its arms, as though she belongs there and nowhere else.
When she was a little girl, she dreamed of a mother who would brush her hair and sing her songs, who would kiss her forehead when she tucked her in at night, and who would wake her with a smile and the promise of a new day. She wished for a mother who would ride with her, who would race her down the field and back, laughing as they traded the lead back and forth. She wished for a mother who would hold her when she was sad, who would dry her tears on her sleeve, who would tell her that everything would get better.
She wished for a mother who would challenge her without pushing her. She wished for a mother who would love her, as mothers are supposed to do.
As she grew, she left behind childish notions of who she wanted her mother to be. She didn't brush her hair, she didn't sing songs, and she didn't love her as a mother should but she loved her in her own way, demanding and impatient, but always wanting the best for her child.
It wasn't enough, but maybe it was all she deserved.
It is certainly all she deserves now; she is the Evil Queen, and no one ever loves an evil queen, not even her mother.
She feels the chill in the room as the wind whistles past the windows and she wonders what it would have been like, had her mother lived with her heart thumping in her chest instead of dying on the dirty floor of Rumpelstiltskin's shop. Would she have been warmer? Kinder? Would she have been able to make a life in Storybrooke with Regina and Henry?
Not with Snow and Charming around, the town arbiters of truth and goodness. It wouldn't matter to them that her mother had changed; all they would see is the person she was, and her life would be forever colored by it, just as Regina's will.
She scoffs now at the idea of redemption, so foolish and so far behind her. She could do a thousand good deeds, save a thousand lives more than she took, and they will never change their minds about her character. To them, she is wicked through and through. To them, she will always be the Evil Queen, no matter the amount of goodness she attempts.
Goodness, she thinks bitterly, is nothing more than a social construct. Evil deeds done by good people are justified and good deeds done by evil people are discredited. The losers of any fight become the villains because the victors become the storytellers.
She is not the victor here.
Her mother would be so disappointed.
But her mother isn't here, and her mother will never be here again, and Regina doesn't really know what that means or how to feel or if the freedom tugging at her sadness is freedom from love or freedom from pain or freedom from the need to be all of the things that her mother wanted her to be.
She picks up the box that held her mother's heart and she traces the patterns in the wood. In spite of all she'd done, in spite of all she'd done to her, Regina loved her. Because she was her mother and, in the end, she was all Regina had.
She is alone in her grief; the rest of the town is celebrating the death of Cora, the evil Queen of Hearts, the monster who threatened their loved ones and their lives.
Only she mourns a mother.
She cries both for the mother she had and the mother she could have had, the one who looked at her and smiled and who told her she was enough.
She looks at the box in her hands and comes undone.