Sequel to In the Darkness, and using that as the background for this plot. (So, essentially, AU from 3x22 onwards.) If you haven't read that or (reasonably) don't remember it, don't worry about it. Basically think of this as an AU where Marian was Marian, they got past it, (Marian's not dead), and now they're together. They are happening to go to the Underworld, but nothing much else from the show will be used post 3x22.
I've had notes for this hanging around my computer for over a year, and I think I'm just too attached to the idea not to write it. So…if people actually want to read it, I'll write it. A thousand thanks to Nina for agonizing over details of the premise with me until I felt like it worked. Your insights are truly invaluable.
Chapter One
Storybrooke, June 2021
Regina groans as she turns over in bed. Her head feels like it's taken a beating. Her temples throb and her eyes ache in the stark white light of the overcast day.
She blinks heavily to clear away some of her grogginess, and reaches a hand over to Robin's side of the bed.
It's cold.
She turns to look. There are no creases in the sheets, no indents in the pillows. She realizes with a slightly anxious jolt that it's not been slept in.
"Robin?" she says, looking around the room, suddenly alert. Something seems off; something she can't put her finger on, like someone's come in the night and rearranged items on her vanity, or shifted the furniture to different positions.
The whole room itself has a decidedly different air to it, an emptiness in its blank surfaces and pristine cleanliness that brings to mind the time of Henry's early childhood and life under the curse.
She looks again, trying to recall details, her right hand unconsciously raised and gathering magic should it become necessary in this suddenly less familiar place.
Robin's clothes are not on the lounge chair, nor are his glasses on the bedside table. The vanity mirror hangs to the left of where it used to and has a new frame. She doesn't recognize the grey blanket folded and draped across the foot of the bed, and the cream rug faces the wrong way.
She searches for a phone on the bedside table, lifts the sheets to check for one there, scours the floor beside her, but finds nothing. The only personal item sitting out in the room seems to be a standing frame containing two photographs. One is very familiar: Henry, age ten, wearing his grey and orange scarf and smiling at the camera. But the one beside it—her heart begins to pound, a flush of adrenaline rushing through her tense neck and shoulders. It's Henry, all right—his light brown hair and brown eyes and toothy smile, but he's older—a teenager, almost fully grown and so much taller than in the familiar photo of the little boy. And there's someone else in the photograph with him: a boy of about ten, with long limbs and wildly curly dark hair and dimples and—is that Roland? But it can't be. He's barely six; she'd made the birthday cake herself.
Oh, whoever did this is going to regret it—Her memory must have been wiped clean again—a curse, or—
Mother was there, she suddenly recalls. Wherever she last was. The echo of that voice tenses each muscle in her body, and she has to force her jaw open when she realizes she's nearly drawn blood biting her lip. She tries to remember who else—Robin, she thinks. And Snow, Emma, Charming—the Underworld, wasn't it? They were trying to protect the town from the curse of Pandora's box. Had they succeeded? She feels lighter, like the weight of all of the curse's dark emotions might have lifted. Her mind feels less clouded with those impulses of anger and fear and hopelessness and depression. But—Henry was years younger, Roland barely school-aged, and—
Where are they.
"Henry!" she cries, throwing off the blankets and tugging on the grey silk dressing gown at her vanity. She checks her vanity for a phone, but sees only a statuesque black lamp and the gold earrings she or—someone—must have worn yesterday. "Robin! Roland! Henry?"
She makes her way into the hall and toward Henry's room, hastily tying her gown over her pajamas.
Henry's room is still his, at least, unlike when they came back from the Enchanted Forest after the second curse. Blue, and full of books and pictures, including the one that was on her dresser. But older, too, with pairs of shoes too large to fit him, and jackets too long for his arms. She has never seen the NYU banner hangs above the bed before.
Regina turns, perplexed, to check Roland's room, when she meets the boy himself in the hall.
She was right before. It was him. He's much taller—only a few inches shy of her shoulders, with stronger, older features, and even more curly, unruly hair. He's lost the baby fat around his jaw and cheeks, and his limbs are more proportional and less lanky than she remembers. He's rubbing his eyes tiredly as he looks at her. "Is something wrong, R'gina?" he yawns, "I thought Henry's at school, and Papa isn't coming to get me 'til tonight, when they get back from the forest."
Regina blinks. "School?" she murmurs.
Roland nods, looking at her like she's gone a bit mad.
"In New York."
And—"Coming to get you?"
"Like he always does," Roland says with an air of indulgence for a silly question, so like his father that Regina can't help the way her lips twitch into a momentary grin. "Are you sure you're all right?" he repeats.
"What?" She looks around, her words distracted and almost automatic as she struggles to direct her feet in any one direction, to decide who she should call first. Robin's phone never works where they camp in the forest, so that'll be of no use. "Oh. Fine, sweetheart. I'm fine."
"You don't look fine," he insists.
"Let's go downstairs," she requests, "I have some calls I have to make."
Storybrooke, January 2018
"Who found this?" Regina extends one hand over the orange-red crack in the ground.
"I did." Little John steps forward, nodding at two or three Merry Men gathered around him. "We were out this way, last night, and everything looked normal. But when we walked by this morning, it was just…here."
Regina bends closer to inspect the ground. A rift about two feet wide has opened in the dirt, and the gap between oozes with a red-hot substance that reminds Regina of picture's she's seen of active volcanoes. Its heat warms the general area, making the space an odd temperature for Storybrooke winter. With her hand this close, it swelters.
"And you're sure this wasn't here yesterday? You're sure it's the same spot?"
Little John looks peevish. "I believe we know our forest."
Regina does not dignify him with a response, but she does lift her eyes to glare.
"Do you think it's safe to cross?" Charming asks.
"Only one way to find out," Emma replies, stepping forward.
"Emma, no, wait," Snow cautions her daughter.
Regina sighs heavily. "Be careful, would you?"
Emma stretches one arm over the gap, and when nothing changes, jumps over it. "Seems fine," she observes from the other side, before jumping back to join them.
Flames flicker and then grow from the oozing-warm substance, leaving a wave of heat in their wake. "You sure about that?" John inquires. They all step back.
A searing-hot metal box flies from the gap, crossing several yards in seconds. Nobody sees it until it slams into the dirt and falls open with a metallic clunk.
Regina gasps in pain, and looks to her throbbing arm to see a red streak across her skin, and the singed edges of her coat and blouse around it. It had burned her.
Her pained breath goes unnoticed in the clamor that follows.
Distressed cries fill the air. Screams, whimpers of pain, voices begging for help. The sky goes dark.
A wave of nausea floods through Regina, and after it a rush of rage so strong it takes her breath away, then fear that makes her hands shake and her jaw tighten, hopelessness that leaves her struggling to stand, weakness that makes her eyelids droop, a deep sadness that pulls at suddenly tired muscles. When she can see again, her face feels hot and flushed and there are tears in her eyes. As she becomes aware again of Robin and his men, Henry, Snow, Emma, Hook, Charming, Belle, standing around her, she sees a similar reaction in all of them as well.
She tries to catch her breath and steel herself against it, bewildered for a moment by the force of it, the way dark magic races through her veins like strikes of lightning, angry and fierce and of a time in her life that's never far away, no matter what those standing around her may think. In the momentary stillness after, she catches Robin's eyes, and though their exterior is calm, she sees in them that he saw it, too.
"What was that?" Henry asks, looking around.
The flames have died down and left only the oozing red-orange in their place, but the gap is now several feet wider than it was before, and far too wide to jump.
Snow takes in everyone's still unsettled features. "Did everyone else feel—?"
"Horrible?" Emma supplies.
Everyone nods in agreement.
"Is everyone all right?" Her hand is white where it grips David's. Snow turns her questioning gaze to Regina. "Regina, your arm!"
All eyes turn to her, and it is only then that the stinging, throbbing sensation returns to her right arm, just below her shoulder.
She recalls that an object had struck her, and searches the ground to find an iron box with intricate detail work. It has fallen shut and lies behind her.
Emma comes over and holds up a palm, growing frustrated as wave after wave of magic does nothing to change the wound.
"Emma, Emma, stop," Regina orders, looking down at the angry red flesh. "It's a magical wound. There's no point. It's likely not possible to heal it this way. Let's focus on figuring out what's going on here."
Regina turns her gaze to the Merry Men. "So, again, you didn't see anyone or anything to explain this?" She flinches as Robin smoothes her hair over her shoulder and tugs the damaged fabric of her coat and blouse out of the way.
"Robin."
"It needs bandaging," he insists.
She sighs but doesn't resist.
"No, nothing," Friar Tuck confirms. "It was just, there."
Odds and ends rustle in Robin's sack.
Charming looks into the distance in one direction, then the other. "And you don't know where it stops?"
"No."
Regina grimaces as Robin smoothes some kind of salve over her burn, the lets out a breath when its numbing and cooling qualities take effect. "I'm going to need that arm for magic," she reminds him when he takes out a spool of bandages.
Snow looks between them, and then at her husband and Hook. "We'll track the rift as far as it goes. Maybe we can find something at the end, and at the very least we'll know how widespread it is."
"You take one direction," Robin pauses in wrapping gauze around her wound to nod at John and Alan and Tuck, "we'll take the other." He secures the bandage into place. "Okay?" he murmurs, his hand sliding down her arm to squeeze her hand.
"Fine."
Henry looks up hopefully, but Emma and Regina shake their heads in unison, as Emma bends down and cautiously picks up the box.
"Why don't you and Belle see what the two of you can dig up in the library?" Regina suggest to Henry.
"Mom," he whines, looking at Regina first, then Emma, "Really?"
"Henry."
He sighs heavily, but walks over to join Belle.
"Should we open it?" Emma suggests.
Regina shakes her head, swallowing a hiss of pain as she moves her arm too quickly and it throbs. Robin looks at her sharply. "I don't think we should be opening it before we know what it is. Or have you forgotten how playing with unknown magical objects typically goes in Henry's book?"
"Fair point."
Regina gestures at the box. "Let's see what we can figure out in the vault."
"Right," Emma turns it over one last time and hands it over, clearly having found nothing enlightening on its surfaces, "fine."
.
.
.
Regina sets the box in the back seat of her car, then slides into the driver's seat with a sigh. "So you didn't see anything else."
"No it just…stops after a couple of miles. You and Emma didn't think of anything?"
"Nothing."
"And has Henry called?"
"Yes. No luck at the library either."
Robin frowns as he sits beside her. "I wish we could leave that in the vault. I wouldn't relish feeling like that again."
She glances in the rearview mirror. "I'll put it in the basement, but I want to keep working on it tonight, after we get the boys."
"I can walk to get Roland from Marian's in a couple of hours, and I'm sure Henry can find his way home." He gestures toward the bandage wrapped around her upper arm. "Driving cannot be comfortable."
She catches his gaze briefly as she pulls onto the road. "I'm fine. And it'll be freezing tonight."
"We did live in the forest for a long time, M'lady, before you upgraded us to a mansion and silk sheets and running water in heated tanks."
"And yet, Robin Hood, man of the forest, just used the word 'upgrade' correctly in a sentence."
He chuckles. "I am a man of many talents, M'lady. Although, perhaps you should finally teach me to drive. That's one talent that would actually be quite useful."
He presses his lips together thoughtfully as he sees that his teasing seems to have succeeded only in darkening her mood.
"What is it, Regina?"
She's still shaken, he thinks, from the rush of negative feelings, from the anger and sadness and hopelessness that must have flooded into her chest as it did all of them, and from the impulse those things draw on in her, the muscle memory of feeling them, and burying them, and lashing out.
"Nothing."
But she knows as readily as he that he doesn't buy it.
He watches her hands, tight on the wheel, and reaches for her, brushing his fingers against the back of one hand.
She relents, sounding bitter, "If only there were ever time for that." The tall trees beside the road throw her face into light, then shadow. "There's always some imminent threat trying to destroy us," her voice is stern and calm right up to when it cracks over the edges of words. "Something we have to deal with. We can't ever just…be…."
"These past few months have been lovely."
Her voice cracks in a way that would be indistinguishable to most. "Yes."
"Without all of that…noise."
"Yes."
He strokes her wrist as she allows one hand to fall from the wheel and join with his. "We're going to figure it out, soon," he promises.
"Perhaps, but then there'll be the next thing, and the next…"
She's not wrong about that, not really, and so he does not object, but he grasps her hand more tightly.
He can feel her magic, and has ever since those three days this past winter when she'd been frozen and he'd thought her dead. It sits at the tips of her fingers, buzzing like electricity, like the searing poison once used to try to end her life before they'd even met. His eyes search out of habit for the raised, whitish scars that lie along her hairline at both temples, and he fights the urge he so often feels to trace them with his fingers, to try to soothe them. Some of her scars run too deep, he knows, for a simple word or touch to heal.
He leans back against his seat, hoping that his presence does what his voice may not.
.
.
.
"It still isn't working," the woman says coldly to no one in particular. She is all the more terrifying for her calculating tone, her eerie lack of visible anger. She turns from her reflection in the dark and murky water, sweeping her blood red skirts after her. "Why?" she demands, this time of the two servants staring blankly at her.
"It violates the way of things," one speaks quietly. "We are meant to stay here, in the Underworld, and they are meant to remain above."
"That's why I used the spell, you imbecile," she bites out, calm and collected and threatening, "to trade places."
They stare at her blankly, all of them.
"I have no time for this." She turns, throwing magic at them so that they stumble back. "Leave me. Now!"
.
.
.
A few days later
Regina looks at Robin over her shoulder as he deposits a grey wool peacoat on her shoulders, his footsteps loud in the crisp snow.
"You brought me a coat, but you're not wearing one?"
"I'm wearing a sweater," he replies, teasingly defensive, as he comes to stand beside her on the back patio, "and for that matter, my arms are completely covered, unlike yours."
"It feels good on the burn."
Steam wafts up from the mugs of tea that he's brought as he shifts one from his hand to hers. Her skin is freezing to the touch after the quarter of an hour that she's spent in the brisk winter air. "But not on the rest of you, surely?"
He takes a sip of his tea and rubs his free hand up and down his arm. "You know, I could use some of that ominous magical fire right about now," he observes. "It's bloody freezing out here."
Her answering gaze gives him pause, despite what are clearly her best efforts to be teasingly stern.
"You're not worried about dealing with that, are you?"
She shakes her head, almost too quickly. "No, of course not."
"Then what?"
She sighs, taking a sip of tea and then resting the mug on a chair's arm beside her. She tugs the coat more firmly around her shoulders, gingerly avoiding the bandage still wrapped around her arm.
She does not continue for several long moments, but he knows her well enough to wait.
"It's not that, exactly, but…what if," she turns to look at him, and the pain gathering beneath the surface of her eyes cuts to his core, "what if it never stops?" Her voice cracks, just barely, on the last word. "What if things just get worse and worse until…"
"We were together today, Regina. We woke up in the same bed. We had dinner with the boys. It wasn't all bad."
"For now," she whispers, and he recognizes the fear in the changing cadence of her voice and disrupted rhythm of her breathing. "What if these things are…the world, trying to remind me that I wasn't meant for—and I'm not listening."
He deposits his tea on a small patch of patio table not covered with snow, and crosses the few feet of space between them, joining his warm hand with her cold one. "I refuse to believe that. And you don't really believe that either."
She lets out a broken laugh. "Maybe I should."
"Regina, love," he sighs. He draws her into an embrace, shivering as her cool hands and arms and face press into his body. He tugs her even closer.
He would remind her that they had all experienced the dispiriting effects of whatever that had been in the woods, but he knows better. For after the life she's lived, he thinks bitterly, she has a right to these feelings, and to argue that she is wrong, that they are merely the effect of magic, is to dismiss what she has lived through.
"I don't think I can say anything to make you worry less," he tells her, dropping a kiss in her hair, "and I don't know about the whole world, but I, for one, want you to have as many good days as possible."
He can't see her face with it pressed into his shoulder, but he feels her features shift, and hears her take a few deep breaths.
When she moves to pull away a moment later, he lets her go. Robin shivers at the loss of her body heat. "Gods, it's cold out here." He holds out a hand. "Come inside with me?"
A deep sadness flickers in her dark and slightly damp eyes, and in the way she holds her arms around herself. "In a minute," she replies.
He sighs and half-smiles at her, disappointed but not surprised. "All right. I'll be there when you're ready to come back in." His lips land briefly on her temple, and then he retrieves his tea and turns back to the house.
.
.
.
"They're both sound asleep," Regina says softly as she enters their room.
He looks up from his book, pulling off his glasses so that he can see her. "Good."
Tears leak out of her eyes, just visible in the moonlight.
"Regina," he breathes.
Her answering smile is tender, but unconvincing. Their eye contact, however, goes deeper, revealing a warmth, a closeness that sits beneath her armor.
"Come here," he offers, holding out his hand.
When she reaches the side of the bed, he grasps her hand and tugs her to sit with him, shifting until he is beside her. Although she's clearly changed into pajamas and readied herself for bed, she must have come inside very recently, because her skin is cold to the touch.
He tangles fingers into the ends of her hair, sweeping it behind her shoulder, smiling at the light fragrance of the creams she rubs into her hands and face each night.
She turns ever so slightly away from his gaze.
He used to think it odd, how close and yet closed off she could be. They'd had a long series of moments, back in the Enchanted Forest, when she'd stopped them at the brink of something, because they'd both known, always, no matter the times they'd tried to forget or evade the fact, that once they were open to each other in earnest, the connection between them would be irrevocable.
She'd put barriers between them out of fear just when they had grown closer, and he'd always thought it was because she knew that physical closeness would open the floodgates, would allow him entrance into a heart that was too broken to be vulnerable again, and too resilient not to open to him anyway.
But it seems that no matter how long they are together, no matter how certain he is of her trust in him, it is nearly impossible for her to trust in herself.
He would not, could not wish that Marian had not came back, is thankful every day that she's alive and well, but in moments like this he wishes with all of his soul that it had happened another—any other—way. Because he fears that Regina's faith in herself, broken cruelly just when it had been so beautifully reborn, will never be the same as it was in those heady few hours between their rescue of baby Neal, and the party at Granny's when it fell apart.
He searches for words, but settles on none that satisfy. "I know that you know this," he hums, pressing a kiss behind her ear, "but I love you."
Though she is still tense, she leans into him, and searches out his lips herself. Her fingers tangle in his cotton shirt, and her kisses are insistent for several moments until she pulls away with a sigh that speaks as much of stress as of released tension.
"We have to be awake soon," she says softly, skating one finger over his stubble and onto his lips, and moving to lift the covers and rest against her pillows. "We should get some sleep."
Still, when she settles on her side, she reaches behind her and tugs his arm until he's nestled just behind her.
"Goodnight, love," he murmurs, dropping a kiss in her hair.
"Goodnight," she returns. Her grip on the hand that covers her waist still feels tense to him, but he decides to let it go for now, and drifts towards sleep. They'll talk again tomorrow.