She'd never looked at me like that.
In the split second it took my brain to register what I'd done– synapses connecting, some region way back there reading the images my retinas were sending to brain tissue, another region making sense of the images, and somewhere beneath it all, my heart making the emotional connection– I couldn't remember seeing a smile like it. Not when I was four and I made her a daisy chain for her birthday. Not when I was ten and I won my first riding competition. Not even when I was eighteen and I did what she told me to do by marrying– no. I didn't think about that. I didn't think about that ever. I felt it probing at the back of my brain, threatening to claw its way to the surface again and cloud my thoughts until my vision swam red, but I squashed it before it could rear its ugly head. I didn't want to think about that right now. I was concentrating on my mother. And how she was smiling at me.
It was heavy in my hands. The heart. It was heavy when I carried it back to the imp's shop. It was heavy when I lifted it out of the box it had lived in for too many years. It was heavy when I shoved it into her chest before she could bring down the dagger in her hands. But I didn't see the dagger. I didn't even see the imp as he lay dying from an ugly poisoned wound. All I saw was her.
And even now, as I stood a few paces in front of her, I couldn't make sense of what my heart was feeling. Years of denial and walls and fences and barriers upon barriers had taken logic and emotion and muddled them together in my mind. When I allowed myself to feel, it was consuming. Heart-stopping. It pulsated through my veins and radiated in my fingertips and I could feel it in my skin. I looked at my mother and how she was smiling a beautiful, breathtaking, real smile at me, all for me, and I could feel it. There was light in my blood and something in my heart I hadn't felt in years but had longed for ever since I drew up memories on the thin paper of time. Love. More than love, even. Hope.
"Mother..." I whispered, feeling my lips stretch into a smile that mirrored hers. She leaned forward and laughed, and moments before, I hadn't thought her smile could get any wider until it did. She was smiling. She was laughing. She was smiling and laughing and reaching for me. Me. I rocked back on my feet a little, something I used to do when I was little, smiling and feeling the love course its way through my body. I didn't realize something was wrong.
Her face turned paler than the moon and that smile I had worked my entire life for faded from her face until she grimaced. She gasped. Doubled over. My blood ran cold. Icy cold. I could feel the imp stirring on his cot beside me but I paid him no mind. She staggered forward, looking down at a sudden red stain blossoming across her shirt. She closed her eyes and doubled over. She stumbled. Instinct took a hold of my brain and I rushed forward, catching her before she hit the ground. I cradled her in my arms, shifting my weight to support hers. I put my hand over her heart. The heart I'd just put back into her body not moments before. The heart that gave me my smile.
"Mother...?" The voice that came from my lips sounded like a frightened child. "Mother, what's wrong?"
She was fading fast. I could see it. But I didn't understand it. Her head rolled back before she opened her eyes and, with great effort, smiled a weak smile reminiscent of her radiant one before.
"This... would have been enough." Her lips formed the words carefully and painfully. "You... you would have been enough..." Then her eyes closed. And her head rolled back again. And suddenly she felt heavier than she had moments before. And I still didn't understand.
"Mother?" I shook her gently. I even turned to the imp, who was standing behind me looking down and watching. I could feel tears pricking my eyes. "What's going on?"
I whirled around to face me. It wasn't fair. She was smiling and laughing and reaching for me– all for me– and now she was lying in my arms and she wasn't talking or moving or stirring.
"Mother?" Tears spilled onto my cheeks, blurring my vision and garbling my speech. "Mother, please..." I held her more tightly, searching my mental filing cabinet for something, anything that would bring her back to me.
"Don't leave me please..." I whispered. "What am I gonna do?"
I vaguely remember the imp saying something. I think I even responded. But I remember little else. I remember the sharp sting of words on my lips as I told him to shut up. I wanted him to shut up, I wanted him to die, I wanted him to be the one lying on the floor with a poisoned wound in his chest. But most of all I wanted my mother to come back to me. I rocked her gently in my arms, not even caring that the imp was there to witness my tears and the sobs that wracked my body and left me hollow.
I heard footsteps.
"Regina! Stop!"
I jumped. That's funny. I thought I heard someone who sounded like Snow White calling my name. The door burst open and I snapped my head up to see the two idiots standing in the doorway. Looking at me. At my mother. At my mother in my arms. My dead mother in my arms.
"You..." I hissed, feeling the words on my tongue like venom. "You did this..."
Snow looked horrified and Charming stood there like a dolt. In the many years I'd spent in my world and this one, through everything that I had been through and experienced, I don't ever remember feeling a hatred so strong as I felt in that moment. Had Mama not been in my arms I would have blown everyone on the block to kingdom come and watched them all burn. The red was back. It clouded my vision and I saw them standing there like the miserably self-righteous oafs they were and I couldn't breathe. I fixed Snow with a glare that would have frozen the fires of hell itself and continued rocking my mother, who was heavy in my arms.