Note: I have deleted these drabbles from the drabble collection and am reposting them because this verse will be expanding and I want it all together in one place.
He befriends her in childhood, goes on adventures with his parents' employers' daughter at an age when children mix and adults think little of it. Her mother wants her to be a wealthy and powerful businesswoman, and as the best friends age into their late teens, Robin and Regina begin to grow apart, he into a life of mistakes and second chances and laughter and dreams and messing up, and she into the life her mother has planned for her from infancy.
She plays violin, beautifully, comes alive with it, and one day as he watches her practice he gives in to the gravity that has always drawn them together, waits to the end of the nocturne and joins his lips with hers, feels her kiss back for one beat, two, before she is running, she is gone—stubborn, young, fearful, running back to her life as he slips back into his.
Years later a friend invites him to a concert hall, and there she is, a famous violinist, untouchable, stunning, wearing a blood red gown that picks up the veins of color in her instrument and in her long, dark hair; she went after her dream and not her mother's, after all.
He comes again the next night, and the next, finally finds the courage to knock on her dressing room door as she practices, and when she calls that he should enter and continues, the way she breathes with the instrument, the joy in her soul, touches something in his as it had all those years ago, makes her suddenly within his reach as he watches, waits, sees the flare of recognition light in her eyes, the hope, a second chance.