YEAR OF THE SNAKE
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing but Reina and Paulus. This is not wrtitten to profit from either Once Upon a Time, or Harry Potter in any way. It's a product of my own febrile imagination, inteneded as amusement. That said, thank you great and mighty powers for letting play in your sandbox.
A/N: Sorry it took so long to get this up, this and several other chapters have been ready to go for more than a week, delayed only by my pursuit of a cover. I recently got a new computer and I couldn't find my Photoshop disk, so naturally I tried other programs. GIMP is awful. isn't much better.
That said, I've always hated that Regina got railroaded, abused, tricked, backstabbed by everyone and then blamed for it all. Yeah, I know, she was the Evil Queen, but absolutely no one in that show has clean hands. I could rant on for an hour, but I won't. This popped into my head a while back. I wondered what RM would be like if she were given some support to go with her choices. This kind of bubbled to the top. I've tried to stay true to the characters as much as possible. Please let me know how I did.
Chapter 1
Kylesley House was not a happy place. It might have been once upon a time, but all that had changed. The first house ghosts and been 'born' in the earliest part of the twentieth century, when there had been plague in the land. After that the high walled house had passed to a new family. They had been happy-ish for a while. Then The War had happened. Loneliness and sickness had turned to madness and one fine day the lady wife of the estate took a shotgun and three shells and put an end to sickness forever. But not to loneliness. Never to loneliness. Mother, daughter and son joined the spectral residents and the house passed again, this time to a very powerful witch and her husband. It hadn't been happy since.
"...Yes, I know that I should probably go as well," Cora Mills' impatience echoed into the high walled atrium, wringing a sigh from the girl who was standing behind the door. That note was something that Regina had long ago learned to take for granted as her mother's normal tone of voice. "...But someone in this family has to live up to their social responsibilities." Her husband's murmured 'yes dear' wasn't even a speed bump for Cora's caroming diatribe. "If it weren't for me, our family name would still be the scorn of the wizarding world."
"Yes, dear."
"Both of you should be grateful for my efforts." The woman's heels clopped sternly onto the wooden floor, probably near the French doors. "After all, I'm the one who has managed to raise us from absolute anonymity, while the pair of you are apparently quite content to muck around in the stable yard all day. I was the one who secured her admission to Hogwarts. I will not have my daughter become a... a... a hedge witch, or a fortune teller, or something equally vile."
"I doubt that would happen dear, Regina's really quite..." Henry's attempt to put a positive tone in his voice was brutally squashed by his wife's next words.
"Do not use the word gifted." Somehow the disdain of Cora's hiss penetrated the wood of the door much more than her previous volume. "I'm the one who has worked for the last decade to keep her from being some shire-born nobody. Me. If it weren't for the dance instructor or the elocution tutors..." The clop sounded again as her mother moved even further away. "If it were up to you, she'd probably be attending Hogwarts as a... a... Hufflepuff. Regina barely knows a dozen charms and hasn't mastered any of them. My efforts are the only reason she has a chance of becoming Slytherin."
Regina's chin settled on her ruffled collar as a hot coal of shame settled into the girl's throat as she considered her failures. She couldn't even do the mundopurium charm right yet and she did it four of five times a day. Granted, there was never any stable dust on her riding boots or loose bits of hay, but stray hairs still managed to escape her careful braids and her bows were never quite crisp enough, always choosing the wrong time to droop.
"...And for heaven's sake, don't let her get a toad," Cora's quite vitriol ate its way back into Regina's ears. "Any fool can pick one up in any swamp. No one after the age of three is frightened of those silly things anyway. And a cat would be even worse. They're not merely common, they're cliché. I won't have Regina carting about something that could have been found in a barnyard or duckpond. A witch's familiar must be something that contributes to their total presentation."
"Yes dear."
"So far, through no effort of her own, Regina has managed not to mar herself in some way. Since she hasn't any noticeable magical aptitude, we must capitalize on her appearance," Cora's voice didn't need to grow louder to strike harder, but it did and out in the wide entry hall, Regina sighed.
"Cora,' Henry's soft baritone derailed the next wave, "Regina's quite a lovely girl and carries herself like a little queen. She lives up the name..."
The hiss returned. "Henry Mills, do not speak to me about her name. Ours is a joke in the wizarding world. Mills? Mills? It's positively bucolic, a shack powered by waterwheels and grindstones." The hard sound of her heels carried her back, fading to a clomp when she reached the carpet. "Our world spins on an axis made of names and reputations and by heaven, I'll have people tremble at the name of Mills, even if I have to..."
"Dear, don't you have a meeting?"
Regina stared at the back of the door as if she could see her father standing in the room. He'd managed to interrupt her mother a few times, always smoothly, always carefully, but this time may have been the one too many. Cora Mills could shift instantly from throwing barbed words to throwing magic in the blink of an eye, especially when her temper was waning.
"You don't want to miss it, do you?" Henry continued in an almost hurried voice. "You've been talking about it for days. Something about the Flamel estate?"
"You're right." Cora's sigh was the equivalent of an angry jay ruffling and then smoothing its feathers. "I've let this little distraction take too much of my time already." She clomped towards the door. "I should go too, if for no other reason than to keep the pair of you from getting yourselves taken in by every charlatan with a pushcart."
Regina's eyes grew wide as the hoof-like clip of Cora's shoes trotted towards the door. Mother could be quite wroth with eaves-droppers and spies, unless she was the one doing the spying, of course. The woman paused at the door, giving her a chance to move behind a nearby floor vase.
"I've already had her uniforms and miscellany delivered. It shouldn't take all day for you to procure two little things," Cora concluded. "The longer you're out with her, the more chance the both of you have to get into trouble and if you do anything to damage our already precarious..."
"I understand, dear," Henry said mildly. "Oh. Look at the time. It's nearly eight-thirty..."
Cora grumbled. "Yes. I've got to go now or the others will leave us nothing but a few homeless spiders and unused bedclothes."
The door swung open and Cora gave no backwards look, hurrying by with a flutter of turquoise colored robes and an impatient lift to her chin. Regina watched the woman storm away, her face painted with a strange mix of emotions; relief and sadness. Love and disappointment. Shame. In a way it really did bother her to feel glad that her mother wasn't coming with them to Daigon Alley, but she also knew nothing she found or saw would be interesting or good enough. Besides, her mother was going to secure more treasures for the family...
"Regina?" Henry's voice sounded right beside her, making her whirl. "I was just coming to find you. You didn't hear all that, did you?"
Regina gave a deprecating little nod-shrug. "Part of it, but it's not important." Her brown eyes turned upwards to her father's. "I'd rather go with you anyway."
"Well thank you," Henry sketched a little bow and put some cheer into his voice. "It's always a joy to spend time with my favorite queen."
Regina's expression brightened at once and she returned a quick curtsey-bob. "I really wasn't trying to listen in. I was really coming to find you, daddy. It's already past time for us to go, especially if we want to beat the crowds."
"So it is, so it is." The mutton-chopped man made a show of checking his pocket watch. "We should get a move on then, shouldn't we?" he held out his hand and Regina claimed it happily. "I've got a few surprises for you."
"Really? What? Tell me?"
Henry made a show of looking both ways before kneeling in front of her. "Now, you can't tell your mother..." Regina's grin broadened and she crossed her heart. "Very well. I shall give you the first now, but only the first. We can't have little ears overhearing."
Regina giggled and shook her head. It wasn't as if the house elves were about to tell Cora anything, she terrified them. Still, the woman did have a way of knowing things.
"Since you're going away to school, I thought it might be nice to be able to come home... if you really needed to," Henry stood and cleared his throat. "So, I've spoken to Mrs. Stewart about this and she's agreed to let the house elves connect the oak room to the flu network..."
"But daddy," Regina looked up wide-eyed, "That's one of the rooms that's always belonged to the ghosts. It used to be Anna and Nicolas' bedroom. They sleep there."
"I know, I know, princess," Henry patted her arm gently, "but Mrs. Stewart and her family are rather fond of you. They understand that sometimes... life isn't easy. She and Anna and Nicolas and Mr. Tuttle, Lydia and the other Mrs. Mills all agreed that if you needed a quiet way back into the house, that you should have it."
"That's very kind of them," Regina observed.
"It is," Henry agreed, "so you must not misuse their trust." He led the way to the broad staircase that would take them to the second floor.
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Regina marched along beside her father, careful to maintain a straight spine and fixed, neutral expression. Mother had always told her that ladies don't complain, they endure, but enduring the air of muggle London was very, very difficult indeed. It was an invisible but jagged miasma, wretched with a thousand different smokes and chemical stinks that burned her throat and made her eyes tear. It took real effort not to complain.
One of the sources of her current torture zoomed by only a few yards away. According to her father, the colored metal coaches exhaled poison, making the air even worse every day. The girl found herself growing more and more apprehensive as he led her to the edge of the sidewalk. She glanced up when they'd stopped, comforted somehow that his eyes seemed to be giving him trouble as well.
"I may have made a mistake asking to come this way," she said as she watched the weird machines grumble by.
Henry Mills smiled and looked down into the red veined eyes of his daughter. "Perhaps, but to tell the truth, I'm rather glad that you did."
"What? Why?"
"Lots of reasons." Not far away the orange man-rune in the sigil box turned into a green one and he squeezed her fingers with an unspoken signal to come on. "It shows adventurous spirit, courage and the willingness to see new things."
She held his hand and tried harder to ignore her misery as they stepped off together. "I don't feel very adventurous," Regina's replied timidly. The chrome-lined grins of the machines were very close by and their glass eyes seemed to follow her hungrily. "I just wanted to do this because mother wouldn't ever let me see the city before." One of the cars further back in the pack honked and she turned her eyes quickly to see how far away the other side of the road was. "I'm starting to think she was right."
Henry chuckled. "She was. But so are you."
"I don't understand."
"The muggle world is a dangerous place," he swung her up playfully onto the curb, "but it's far more dangerous if you're totally ignorant of how it works. Think of it like a jungle; if you understand what the noises mean, you have a better idea of when it's safe..."
"The way Radagast knew when he could pet the lion, in Southron Journeys."
"Exactly so." His hand gestured to the cars that were beginning to roll past again. "These are incredibly dangerous machines, yet millions and millions of people drive them every day, all over the world. Only a few are killed and as a rule, they're usually unobservant or careless." He knelt and grinned into the face of his watery-eyed daughter. "Unfortunately, a few minutes in the course of a single day will not be long enough to teach you very much. So that said, how about we accept our ignorance and soothe our frayed nerves with a glass of pumpkin juice at the Leaky Cauldron? It'll be our little secret."
"Another secret, you mean," Regina grinned.
When they set off again, the horrid air seemed almost bearable. After a few short minutes more, they turned off the main street and though the air didn't improve, they were further away from the machines.
Henry pushed black door to The Leaky Cauldron open with a slight creak and the pair stepped inside, hurrying, but trying not to look like it. Warmer, yeasty air brushed their cheeks and settled on their clothes as they stepped into a dingy, somehow older light. When her father closed the door behind them, they both felt that he was shutting a strange, foreign world out, instead of shutting them inside.
Regina looked wide-eyed around the shadowy room. This was the real Leaky Cauldron. She'd heard about it from her tutors of course, but now she stood in a place that had been one of the secret meeting places for the resistance when He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was terrifying the world. She shivered with excitement, imagining the amazing stories absorbed by the plain whitewashed walls. And the people...
'Well, maybe not the people,' she reluctantly conceded.
It was very difficult to imagine the mild-faced older man behind the bar fighting anyone, nevermind raising a defiant fist against the darkest of the dark wizards. As for the dark-haired younger one who had charmed his spoon to stir... Well, perhaps sitting and reading quietly was just a disguise. Maybe he was some sort of secret agent for the Ministry of Magic...
The only remaining man in the place did look the part. Iron grey hair shorn short seemed to accentuate the broad scar on his right cheek. Once upon a time flame must have kissed him and made his flesh run like heated wax. His clothes were provincial, but immaculate and well-fit. All in all, he had the broad-shouldered look of a soldier about him.
He sat at a back table, beside a girl about her age, though there was little way she could have been his daughter. He had a hint of tan, probably from laboring under the English sun, but her skin was more the dusk of mysterious Egypt and her hair was as midnight black as Regina's own. The man's features were somewhat broad and somewhat common looking, but he had a noble nose and his eyes were black. Her features were finer somehow, but it was her eyes that were most out of place. They were nearly almond shaped, wide as a doe's and fearless, but it was their color was that commanded attention. They were iceberg blue and they were fixed on Regina.
For long seconds they just stared; Regina Mills' curiosity tilted her head slightly. The unknown mirrored her. Regina offered a small smile. Once again, the strange girl mimicked her exactly. A temptation to walk over and speak to the strange girl settled heavily on her and she was just about to yield when her father called out.
"Regina dear, I've gotten us some pumpkin juice."
The olive skinned glanced over to see her father gesturing for her to come to the bar. When she looked back, the two at the table had turned their eyes to each other and where talking quietly. Regina gave a little shrug and walked over to the tall seat her father stood beside.
"Now remember," he said, as he helped her up, "you mustn't tell your mother I let you get a drink from a bar. She'd skin us both alive."
"I won't," Regina grinned as he slid her seat forward.
