Just a quick angsty Regal Believer piece because I was inspired. I would, of course, greatly appreciate feedback. Enjoy! :)

"If this is how I have to go out, showing you that there are people that love you—that's a worthy end for me."

King Henry's hands are shaking as he pins his opponent to the tree with considerable force, much crueler than necessary considering how little the Evil Queen is resisting the arm at her throat. She's almost sagging under his grip, focusing more on getting the words out than staying alive, and if that isn't the oddest and most uncomfortable of fights that Henry has ever had the displeasure of being involved in.

Not that he hadn't been the one to provoke it, really. But he thinks that killing one's greatest enemy should feel like that; hard and straining. Relief will come when it is over.

The Queen's words—he promises himself that they will be her last ones—snap him out of his rigid stance, the sword that remains tightly clutched in his hand due to a lifetime of hard practice. She meets his eyes steadily, though her voice is anything but that, and it irritates him to the point where he feels almost frightened.

Because the Queen, despite her magic (restrained by Rumplestiltskin's cuff), isn't at all bad with a sword. Henry is confident that he'd have won either way, but he will never know because the Queen had gone on the defensive and stubbornly refused to even come close to scratching him with her weapon.

King Henry blinks. The more seconds pass, the more desperate his grip gets, and the more visible are the tears in the Queen's eyes. He has defeated his foe, but malicious as she is, she refuses to let him claim his victory peacefully. She rewrites it as surrender instead; maybe even sacrifice. It infuriates him to no end.

Her soft gasps invade his ears, and he lifts his sword just a little. If he waits one more minute, he will have choked her to death, and that is not a tale worth telling. She smiles up at him. It's not without strain, but somehow that makes it even worse. She had talked of a worthy end; as if anything about an Evil Queen could be worthy. King Henry's vision blurs with anger. He has craved her end for so long, and he will not let her take this from him.

The blade enters her body with frightening ease, tearing through skin and muscle and soft flesh. She gasps, both for air and because of the shock, and is sagging in his grip, bright red spilling on the ground. Henry releases her, his hands tainted with proof of her imminent death, and he forces a calm expression on his face; one of feigned indifference, that he hopes looks at least somewhat victorious.

He can only hope because he doesn't feel any of the pride that should be thrilling him. He thinks of his grandparents, strong, majestic people, and their brightly glowing hearts turning to ash. He thinks of his mom begging on the cold floor.

But the Queen is sliding down the tree stem, falling on the ground, the hand that is curled over her belly bright red with her own blood. Her dark eyes are fading with pain, but they remain on him, her lips mouthing his name, affectionate in a terrible, misguided way that he doesn't understand nor want.

The Queen is bleeding out before his eyes, and though he has killed many times before, his victims have never mattered enough to him to stay and watch them die. It's a messy, faded, crushing experience, but he thinks that if he walks away now, he will regret it for the rest of his life.

She hasn't much more than minutes left, he knows. Because even with emotions high, he still knows where to stab a human.

Oh, but she isn't human at all. She is a monster who had taken everything from him, and he had long since yearned to slay one, hadn't he? Dragons are nothing against an Evil Queen; she is a force of nature, without soul, and had deserved to die years ago, when instead another version of her had fled on a pirate ship.

The sharp scent of blood nauseates him as it never has before. He just wants this to be over; King Henry is looking at the sky instead of his dying adversary, and only as he notices, he forces himself to stare down at her with hard eyes.

At least monsters seem quite impressive when laying slain, he ponders. The one before him looks small, almost frail, just a bleeding woman whose last words are sharp and clear, if entirely undecipherable to him. She looks only human, and hurt, and the thought invades his mind without asking for permission.

King Henry can't help it; he looks away again, mere seconds passed since he had stabbed the Queen, but they seem to him eons away, and he just longs for this to be over now. So he can get back to a kingdom currently led by his moronic council, and people who have long since forgotten that he is their king; who had dared to call him evil and soulless when his only fault had been not caring about them in times of grief.

The sky is painted a dull, metallic color.

A shout rips through the air.

"Mom!"

It's the older, scrubby-looking version of him—the one that Rumplestiltskin had claimed to have always gotten everything in his life. King Henry can see it drip off him, his naivety. It has made his doppelganger stupid. He is easy to manipulate in a way that King Henry hadn't been since that fateful day where he should have been knighted, but had been crowned instead.

As far as he can see, they have only one thing in common—their desperation. Though Henry Mills is frantic for his pitch-perfect family, his wife and daughter, and King Henry despairs for a family that was taken from him for good.

The world shifts and hazes as Henry Mills drops to his knees on the ground, cradling the bleeding woman, calling her 'Mom' over and over, again and again, and again.

Emma isn't here, King Henry thinks bitterly.

But then again, he isn't sure how much of that she ever was. His memories of her are blurry and vague, dreamlike visions; up to the birthday with the single blue candle. He cannot feel her anymore, and the only thing he sees clearly is her in that youthful dress, handing him the sword and talking about his father; her sobbing on the stone ground of the Evil Queen's castle.

What he can remember before that, are his grandparents. Their overprotective strictness that had at times felt suffocating, but also the way they would arrange for his favorite, apple turnovers, after a hard day of training. It is as though it had indeed been them who had raised him, as though his abducted mother had never really been there, to begin with.

"Mom," Henry Mills sobs nonetheless, crouched over the Queen's body, cradling her in his arms, holding her hand, his clothes tainted with her blood. Her eyes flutter open and closed, and she is lifting a hand to his cheek, cupping it in an affectionate gesture even as her whole body is trembling. "Mom, we've had this before," Henry Mills gasps, he squeezes her hand lightly, turns to King Henry, and the anger in his eyes more than makes up for the weakness that his tears betray. "I won't ask you twice," he warns as he looks at the young King, the red blade that is lying carelessly beside him in the grass. "Where is my pen? It's okay, Mom," he soothes, turning to look at the Queen again, "it helped the last time you were stabbed, right?"

King Henry shakes his head sharply, engulfed by the scene that is playing out in front of his eyes. What is wrong with his other version? Shouldn't all spells that the Evil Queen could've cast on him wear off with her injured?

"I gave it to Rumplestiltskin," he explains condescendingly, though he suspects that his other self isn't paying much attention to anything besides his desperate request.

"Of course you did," Henry Mills whispers. He nods, closes his eyes tightly and leans forward, pressing a light kiss to the Queen's forehead. She looks at him and smiles slightly, painfully, and he cries out again, crumbling under the weight of his grief.

"It's all right," the Queen breathes, her eyes spilling over with affection. "I love you, Henry. I love you." She looks up at the paralyzed young King, then, and her words ring in his ears without him recognizing their meaning. "I love you, too. I am sorry, and as I hope you'll find your way out of the darkness, one day you might want my forgiveness, too. You have it. I'm incapable of not forgiving you. You might not be my son in your reality, but in mine, you always will be." She sighs, and King Henry feels tears of confusion brimming his eyes. This is a nightmare—it's not how he ever wished this to go. She cannot love him, and he does not want to be loved by a monster like her, either.

"Please," Henry Mills begs as if the Queen can evade death only by trying hard enough. "Mom, please, I'll do anything, I'm sorry. I've got you, please don't go—"

"I love you," she repeats, looking at him again, and tears roll down her cheeks.

"I love you, too." Henry Mills is crying, and King Henry had thought it would be unsettling to see himself cry, but this is breaking apart, and it is something that he remembers from after his grandparents' death. Only that he cannot recall having fallen so completely apart as his other self is right now. "I can't lose you, Mom. Mama. Mama, please don't leave me. I love you."

Rushing steps are nearing, and Henry Mills' people are finally approaching, but they are too late. The Queen in his arms has already gone limp, her breaths evened and then stopped entirely.

"Please, I love you," falls from Henry Mills' lips one last time, and then he is sinking into himself, crumbling, just crying over his mom's dead body, rocking her back and forth gently, frantically.

The little girl is rushing forward, her knees buckling midway, she is exclaiming, "Grandma! Grandma?" but nobody is listening.

The beautiful woman is falling to her knees beside her daughter, calling out for her husband, but Henry Mills doesn't react, doesn't so much as cast a glance in their direction. A younger version of the infamous Captain Hook is lunging forward, gasping and screeching for the Queen, and King Henry just wants to cover his ears, take all the noise and the breaking away.

The odd, weak Rumplestiltskin copy is nearing, too, stopping in his tracks, his expression tormented with disbelief. He calls for "Regina!" but nobody is answering, and he can't seem to process the scene in front of him. His gaze shifts to King Henry, to the bloodied blade, and something in his eyes hardens, becomes dangerously Dark One-like and less the defeated old man King Henry had thought him to be.

"What happened?" he growls, closing the distance between him and the young King, his teeth flashing dangerously. King Henry staggers back, stumbles over the abandoned blade, then over another, the Queen's plain sword without any blood of its own tainting the blank surface.

King Henry is not fast enough to fathom what has happened since he had stabbed the Evil Queen, his mind is blank and filled with gruesome images—his older self begging and crying—likewise, but no words will come. He knows of the danger he is in, though, so he picks the first phrase that is dripping into his mind, and ends up reciting the Queen's last words before getting stabbed; he stutters, "'If this is how I have to go out, showing you that there are people that love you—that's a worthy end for me.'"

Rumplestiltskin freezes, frowning darkly, and he is faster than he should be as he grabs King Henry's collar and sneers in his face. "Did she say that? Were those Regina's words?" And it's now that Henry Mills chooses to look up, his eyes swimming with tears.

King Henry nods fearfully, the consequences of his actions far bigger than himself, and Rumplestiltskin tells him so, hissing in his face that King Henry has no idea who Regina was, no idea at all.

Henry Mills' eyes are on them, interrupting the start of Rumplestiltskin's speech.

"Mom," he whispers again as if the Queen could still hear him. King Henry knows she can't, knows that he and no other is the cause of that, but still, there is some tiny part of him that wants her not to be dead, because he wants answers and not even a king can demand explanations from the dead. A small part of him, too, though he cannot consciously admit it, wants his other self's despair to stop. Wants to not have caused the little girl's outcries for her grandmother.

"You have no idea what you have coming for you," Rumplestiltskin growls, but his eyes are sad, and his grip on King Henry's collar is tight, but not malicious. "There are a lot of people who knew her so very long. I, for my part, would count her to my oldest friends." He almost chuckles. "Don't tell her I said that."

Rumplestiltskin's humor is morbid, but there are real feelings in his eyes, and it makes no sense because Rumplestiltskin was the one who had set this all up in the first place—another version, so very dark and twisted that even his alter ego recoils from his wickedness.

"You had the right to anger," the Dark One proceeds, "but you did not have the right to kill Regina Mills. Just as she had no right to die this way, before her old teacher, at least." He lets go of King Henry, slowly turning away from him. Rumplestiltskin shakes his head. "She's always loved deeply to the point where it destroyed her."

King Henry's knees are weak and give in easily; just a few steps away, he dazedly watches Rumplestiltskin do the same, sinking on the cold hard ground next to the girl and her mother. Next to the adamantly head-shaking pirate; in front of the lifeless body of the Queen.

The Evil Queen, though Rumplestiltskin had called her a friend. Though she had been a grandmother, and a sister, and an aunt. A leader. Regina Mills.

She had also been a mother and had cared enough about any version of her child to die for his happiness.

How she had imagined that for King Henry was a mystery; he doesn't think that his older version and his family will ever forgive him, let alone love him. What he doesn't know, though, was that Regina had been at that same place in life many years ago.

He doesn't know how fiercely she had believed in her son, and her family's ability to love.

Henry Mills holds her in his arms and hopes that she hasn't left this world yet, and is still there, with him. If he is right, what she sees right now is a group of devastated people grieving her. Two sons, of whom one loves her enough to break two curses with her. Friends, and family, and people who are both. People who know of second chances and their value, and will hopefully, when the time comes one day, grant another one to her murderer.

Maybe her words were true, and this is a worthy end for her; but that doesn't make it a right one.

Regina Mills, for all that she was, mattered. Her story isn't over.

In another life.