Author's Note: For OQ Angst Fest, Sunday, Prompts: 13: Can you please wake up? (coma), 43: I miss you
She'd thought he was dead. When the light poured from the crystal and his soul floated away, she'd thought he was dead and that was the end of it.
It hadn't been until later, when she'd cried more tears than she'd thought possible, her heart cracking and splintering, breaking apart. Later after she'd moved his body to her vault, onto the same platform where Daniel had rested for decades, while they prepared for his funeral. Later, when she'd returned to change him from his usual denim and cotton and leather into something more fitting to be buried in, she'd let her hand rest on his chest and realized he was...warm.
Impossibly warm for a dead man.
She'd felt his heart beat once, and then go still, a cruel joke, a cosmic tease. And then it had happened again, his chest rising so slowly she'd miss it if she wasn't looking. Had missed it when she couldn't bear to look at him.
He was alive.
There had been a frantic scramble to reorient themselves then—tests upon tests in the hospital, trying to explain to a child that Papa might not be with the angels after all, daring to hope that maybe she wasn't as toxic as she believed.
That maybe he'd been spared her miserable karma.
But all the tests in the world couldn't give them any answers.
Whale had looked at her, and shrugged, and said, "He's alive, breathing on his own and everything, but he's not there, Your Majesty."
No brain activity. Nothing. Just a shell.
And of course he was just a shell, she'd seen his soul come apart from his body, had watched it melt into nothing. It had been stupid to hope. Needlessly cruel to let Roland hope, too.
She thinks maybe it would be better if he had just died—better than this body she can't bear to snuff the life out of but with no actual life inside it.
In the end, it had been Henry who'd given her direction again, given her hope. (No surprise, there.)
"He doesn't need medicine, Mom," he'd told her as she'd sat a helpless vigil at Robin's bedside in a cold hospital room (this is karma, she thinks, for all those years Snow had to do the same for David). "He needs magic. You're his soulmate; find his soul and bring it back. He's counting on you."
He's back in her vault now, but she's traded that cold slab for the soft bed they'd spent all night and part of the morning making love in. She's read every book in her collection, and Rumple's, and has been working her way through the Sorcerer's collection, too.
It's been eighteen months. Robyn is walking. Roland has lost two teeth. Robin is still gone, but maddeningly here all the same.
Tonight, she smooths back some hair from his forehead, remembering the way she used to tangle her fingers there when he'd kissed her breathless. It feels like a dream, now. Feels so long ago.
"I miss you," she sighs into the silence. "Can you please wake up?"
As always, she receives no answer.