A/N: Set around the time of 2x05, The Doctor. A consideration of what might've happened to get to Regina to the point she's at by the end of the episode. And I can only hope that this is the extent of the treatment she suffered under Leopold (though I'm not convinced).
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
- x -
Dark, cold, numb, hollow. The night and her. She wanted to pull the stars around her for a blanket but they resisted, or else her hand just didn't move.
She watched herself, detached. She watched the tiny bumps rise over her flesh. She watched how her body leaned forward, hands splayed against the marble balcony, as if wanting to tumble into the dark nothing and be swallowed whole. She watched her body fold in on itself as she collapsed to the ground, pressing her face – still warm with the heat of his body from which she'd been torn too soon, or perhaps from the fresh tears – through the marble columns. She wanted to fall.
- x -
She awoke when the stars were beginning to be consumed by the inky blue. Her confusion was brief, and she longed for it to return as soon as it was gone. With clarity came remembrance, hopelessness. And then annoyance, which budded into anger at a pace which frightened her. Nobody had come for her. Nobody had been worried about her, as if her frequent absence was already normal. She supposed that, if nobody gave a damn about her when she was Queen, then nobody ever would.
She thought about her mother, and she wanted to break something. She thought about what her mother would say to her right now. Queens do not sleep on the floor of a balcony in the servants' quarters, Regina. Queens do not cry. Queens do not love. She went inside and she smashed the mirror, but it took a few attempts because she had never done anything quite so insubordinate before, and she heard her mother's laugh.
I told you, Regina. I told you not to love him. This needs to stop, now.
She agreed with her mother.
She saw her jaw clench and her body relax and something in her eye had changed, just like that.
- x -
The sky was watery by the time the time she found something satisfactory, and fully blue by the time it was prepared.
Hours spent inside the antechamber which held all of the Queen's clothes. More clothes than she'd ever be able to wear and all neutrals. These were not her clothes. They looked new, but Regina thought she could smell something on some of them that was not the seamstresses' hands or magic. She supposed they might have been the Queen's – the old Queen, Snow's mother, her husband's true love – and so she avoided them. She wished them gone (and later, this wish would be fulfilled).
She emerged with fitted trousers, brownish suede, a corset, a deep green coat. They were laid out on the bed, and she thought of them as something else, shifting, changing. She peeked out between her lashes. No change.
She thought of her mother and not Daniel – no, not Daniel and definitely not the fact that he wouldn't like this – as she pressed her hands together. The gesture suggested prayer, but her face was tight and that suggested desperation. She watched herself, entranced and ashamed. Some time passed before she would open her eyes again, as if sheer willpower was going to allow her to achieve what she needed.
Her eyes were closed, but she watched the off-purple haze press against the garments and fall through them until they were no longer the same.
- x -
She stared into the pier glass, at the girl who had her face. Behind her, another mirror, and so there was an infinity of her form, front and back and back and front, smaller and smaller and she is trapped there, somewhere.
What she saw made her uncomfortable. She looked infinitely bigger than before; she also looked absolutely transparent. She was a Queen from a storybook, apart from the flare of doubt. She was a little girl playing at being somebody else, dressed up in mother's clothes.
No. Uncomfortable did not cover it. She felt disgusting and powerful. She felt afraid because she understood that it suited her.
She looked away as she smiled, every inch her mother except for that doubt, and something stirred.
(She wished for her mother then, because at least it would be something familiar among the waves and walls of foreign.)
- x -
'Regina!' She turned on her heel, startled but pleased that she remained steady in the alien footwear. The young girl practically skipped toward her, and Regina could not help but smile a little. 'I mean, mother,' Snow said, conspiratorially, like they were playing a game, like the term was a joke between them because they both knew that Regina wasn't really her mother. She saw herself as her own mother, saw Snow's mother laughing at the little girl posing as her child's mother, saw Snow as a mother. She could not see herself as anybody's mother.
(Leopold was dry, but that was not to be said. No, it was the Queen. Regina, with the hostile womb or the faulty tubes; Regina who was barren, empty, broken.)
Slowly, the smile fell from her face.
Snow slipped her arm through Regina's, but it was more difficult and more awkward than usual because of the height added by the heels. 'You look… different…' The words were uncertain, supplied in that breathy, interested way she had.
'Yes, well,' she replied, and was surprised to feel all terms of endearment souring on her tongue.
The child looked up at her, expecting further clarification which did not come. The rest of the walk to the breakfast room was silent. Regina did not feel like herself. Her heels were loud on the stone floor, and her nerves seemed to echo.
She wondered whether Leopold had even noticed her absence all of yesterday and last night. Her stomach clenched as they rounded the corner, that familiar pang of anxiousness and defiance dancing within her. Her husband stood and fussed over his daughter for several minutes while Regina took her seat at his right hand, heart hammering.
Finally, he turned to her. He glanced at her prominently displayed breast first, then the unfamiliar, tighter hairstyle, the darker shade of lip-paint. Then came the perfunctory kiss to her cheek, just short of the side of her mouth, and the small smile that was always her reply. She wished he would say something, chide her or leer over her or hit her. She wished he would be cruel. She didn't understand indifference, and it felt worse.
She could barely eat because she kept catching her reflection in the silverware, in the bends and arches of the spoons, the grins of knives' edges, the swell of the jugs, the lengths of candelabras. She didn't like what they were doing to her face, the way they stretched and squashed it and showed something she wished was not there. (Eventually, she would cease to notice it at all.)
For the first time, she rose from the table before her husband. Snow almost gasped because she had yet to learn from Regina that a wife didn't need to be thoroughly subservient to her husband after all (later, Regina would regret that she'd helped mould Snow to become so strong because that was the very quality the people resented in their Queen and loved in their Princess). The noise made Regina feel unsteady, and she fought to keep her face from scrunching with the expectation of physical punishment.
Nothing.
She chanced a glance at Leopold, who, if she had to pick an emotion for him, seemed vaguely entertained. 'Regina.' He inclined his head. It was part question, part challenge, part farewell.
'I don't have to explain myself to you,' she blurted, even though he would never ask her to, even though he would not stop her. She felt reckless and stupid, but sounded sure and strong. She left the room swiftly so neither husband nor step-daughter had chance to see the anxiety about her own stupidity ghost across her features.
- x -
She watched herself rip the innocent's heart out. She was glad of the gloves which spared her the sensation of the organ struggling against her flesh. If she had felt the blood straining, the muscle grinding and then halting, she knew it would have forbidden her this cool, unfeeling, uncharacteristic detachment.
She heard herself demand Daniel's body of Rumplestiltskin, selfish and blinded by desperation even as the heart's ashes continued to fall from her fingers. His laughing response that it was fruitless, and a fire in her chest adjacent to where her heart thumped lazily. She watched her steely stare present a challenge to his diagnosis. It said you're wrong, I will find a way, we will be happy, we will be a family.
He ignored her.
- x -
It was several hours later; night. Still dark, cold, hollow, but a little less numb. The magic glided through her veins, spitting and growing in her blood and muscles and bones, pushing itself towards the void left by the stable-boy. It made her shiver with the delight of someone possessed by a force that was neither benign nor malevolent, but one that was infinitely more powerful than its vessel. When she saw her reflection, her painted face long dissolved by sobs and exertion, something stirred, but this time it felt less attractive and more like infection. She wretched over the chamber-pot until the sky was watery again.