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Summary: Regina thinks of letting Robin Hood love her but she doesn't know if she is strong enough.
Voices
She was running. One foot in front of the other, leaving behind everything. Leaving behind everyone. She couldn't tell how far she had come. She refused to look. Because only when she looked did she realize everything she was missing out on. Everyone she was leaving behind, not that they wanted her anyways. Her emotions would take over and her fatigue and that little voice whispering to her that if she just stopped and let people walk with her, she would feel happier. That voice would win if she stopped running and let herself hear it over the pounding of her shattered heart. But she couldn't let that voice win because there was also another voice. A bigger voice reminding her what had happened last time she had stopped running. What had happened the last time she let someone walk with her and hold her hand. So she kept running.
She had found peace once, with her son. When he was placed into her arms she knew that letting him inside of the mile-high walls she had built to keep herself from breaking was the best thing she could ever do. And so she let her heart love the boy, wholly and truly and without considering the consequences. And they walked together and for those years, those ten wonderful, best years of Regina Mills' life, she was happy. And then Emma came into town and Regina broke into pieces all over again. She was fragile to start with, held together only with tape and glue, and the slightest bump in the road could wreck it. Emma Swan had been that bump in the road.
But what hurt the most wasn't that Emma came, but that Henry left.
He left the safety of Regina's arms and searched for a woman who had given him up, wanting nothing to do with the little bundle of joy, and he chose Emma. Was Regina really that horrible?
He left her home to go live with this woman who he had just met. Was living with the woman who he had called mother for ten years really that bad?
Henry left her, taking with him pieces of her broken heart. Was loving a woman who only wanted the best for him so inconceivable? Apparently so.
She had tried to fight. Fought tooth and nail to make her son see that she loved him with whatever she had left. She fought to make whole a family that was once happy. She fought to get rid of Emma so she could have Henry to herself. She had fought a bloody demon to bring her son back to life. She had fought to keep him by her side and for him to hold her hand because that was what she needed most. She fought herself, forcing herself to not let the evil in her heart triumph the good. Really tried.
But nothing worked. Regina was left back where she started. Back to where her heart was broken for the first time. Back in a vulnerable place, everything she had worked her whole life for stripped away from her, leaving her with a bigger whole than what she'd started out with and her son in another world, not remembering her at all. To him, his only mother was Emma.
So why in the world would anyone believe that Regina would let down her walls again? How could they believe that? She didn't have more pieces of her heart to give away. Tinkerbelle said she could be happy. Regina couldn't believe any more lies. So she shut everyone out.
She shut the Charmings out and she shut Tink out. And that annoying archer who had been making her feel things she didn't know she could still feel? Regina shut him out too. She refused to hope anymore because the only thing hope had gotten her was hell. And so, the woman that once loved so wholly, that woman that thought she was unbreakable, that woman who let herself be free of fear, Regina shut her out too. She chose to be lonely and she couldn't say that she was disappointed. She felt safe here, inside of the walls she had built. In the end, the bigger voice won and she gave in to the fears.
