In your dreams there is a beautiful woman who stands just out of reach. You see her every time you close your eyes, you hear her voice as she whispers to you in the darkness. She always stands so that she hovers in the corner of your eye, right in your peripheral vision. In the air around you there is a scent of apples, it's a scent that both makes your mouth water and your muscles tense all at once. You know she's not real, she's not really here with you. She is just a memory or a figment of your imagination, but the important thing is that when you dream of her, as you do every night, she reminds you that you have hope.
As you sit in the darkness you know you have to hope that they will find you. You have to hope that your family will come for you as you have always come for them. The women you see in your dreams is Regina, and you know that she is coming for you. Whoever took you will be more than sorry for it when Regina is through with them. All you have to do is keep on hoping, hoping that she will get here and hoping that she is not too late. You hope against all hope, and you hope that this is enough.
It has to be enough. You don't have anything else. You're sat in a dungeon hundreds of feet underground. It's freezing and it stinks, not to mention that you're covered in your own shit and piss, it's not your fault, you're chained to a wall so it was inevitable. Still the idea of being found like this is almost enough to make you not want to be found. You don't even know how long you've been down here, or where here is, or even why you're being kept here. Hell, you don't even know who your captors are.
All you want is to see Henry and Regina, then you could die happy. You don't doubt that if they don't find you soon then they will find you dead. It's been a long time, long enough for you to grow so thin that there is no padding between the manacle on your wrist and your bone, only paper thin skin. You face is so hooked out that if now hurts for you to smile, it makes it feel as though the skin of your face is going to split it half, though you're pretty sure if was a grimace, not a smile because you have no reason to smile when you are awake anymore. Most of the time you don't even have the energy to stand anymore, your legs are just too frail to want to support your drastically reduced body weight anymore.
What irks you about this whole situation is that you don't have any idea who your captors could be. Since you had returned to the enchanted forest everything had been moderately better. There had been no wars and a truce had been called throughout the realms. You, Henry and Regina had settled into a routine together, you and Regina had been talking about getting married and having another baby. Everything was going so well and then one day you woke up to find yourself here, in this dark hole, all alone with no idea of what had happened. You're pretty sure that whoever put you in here either planned to leave you to die or they have forgotten all about you. That makes hoping for Regina pretty damned hard. Then again, you're used to being forgotten about, so maybe it's a repeating pattern that you should just get used to again.
You're dreaming again, but this time something is different. This time you can look at Regina, and you mean really look at her. There is something off about her complexion, she is too pale under her
perfect make up and her eyes seem more glossed over then you've ever seen them before. This scares you enough, but it is not what makes you startle awake with your heart racing. No, the thing that does that is that you can no longer hear her voice whispering to you through your dreams, she is no longer murmuring endearments and assurances of how much she loves you. When you awake, you lay on your back staring into the blackness above you and awful thoughts course through your mind. Thoughts that you try to dismiss immediately and yet you find them lingering in the back of your brain.
When you hear a door above you creak open and a person cursing as they trip down the stairs, you know that death is not far away. You can see it on the edges of your vision, much like you saw Regina in your dreams, except this is in reality. You know from the gruff tones that it's not Regina that has come for you, it is a man, for a start. The heavy footsteps wind round a staircase until the noise is almost unbearable after the only noise you have heard in forever is your own thoughts. You can hear the boots scuffing against the ground with each step almost straight ahead of you. When the man reaches the bottom, you try to speak but you find that you are too weak. It's sort of ironic, that your voice is failing you when you need it and yet you had no filter in real life when it was needed. You don't know who he is or why he is here when he comes to loom above you. You try to raise your arm to protect your eyes from the ever so bright light of his torch but you can't. You can barely flutter your eyelids to make your eyes close. Even when you manage that, the light is still there.
The man doesn't speak, and if he wasn't examining you with such scrutiny, you could Ray to forget he was there. Eventually he moves closer to you and grabs your manacled wrists between one of his own. His action is rough and you're sure that it bruises your bone thin wrists. Once you are unbound, he pulls you up by the hair at the nape of your neck, and you don't even wince at the pain. He sets you on your feet and when you stand there with your whole body shaking from the effort of staying upright, he pokes you hard in the back. You topple forward and you can't bring your arms up to protect your face, so the side of your head hits the cold stone floor. You know that Regina would kill him just for that no matter whether he was a friend or foe. The man sighs and roughly picks you up and swings you over his shoulder so that you are in the fireman pose.
Slowly but surely he starts up the stairs and you note that he can't be a very strong man because you can't weigh all that much after being starved for such a long period of time. As he carries you up, you bang into a wall and you're pretty sure you hear something snap but you can't bring yourself to care. It doesn't hurt all that much anyway, you know for sure he wasn't sent by Regina by now. If he had been he would have been far more careful with you, he would have known that the penalty for hurting you would've been a very slow and painful death. You don't even really care who sent him now, all you want is for it to be over.
You don't have any hope left, you lost it all when you saw Regina in your dream with her eyes so empty. The man reaches the top of the stairwell, as he pushes open the (presumably) heavy wooden door you feel rather than see the light as it burns your eyes. You don't even have the energy to blink to help your eyes adjust. He carries you along the corridor and turns a corner. Up must be in a castle but you're not sue which castle yet. He enters a room and walks forward, you can sense another persons' presence in the room. The man places you down in front of marble steps, you can feel the cold from the unforgiving stone floor seeping into your bones and ebbing your life force away, what was left of it anyway.
You know that you have only minutes left at the most, you want to know who was behind the splitting up of your family after you found happiness at last. It's not a curiosity any more but a need.
You turn your head to the side, and the effort robs you of your breath. It leaves you on your back gasping soundlessly for air like a fish out of water, but you do it anyway. What you see at the top of those stairs makes you wish that you hadn't looked, that you had somehow died in peace on the cold marble floor in ignorant bliss. What you see makes a tear slide down your dirt encrusted face and your heart break. It makes you wish that you had both a dagger and the strength to use it, just to put yourself out of your misery. It is down to what you see that your final moments in your world are haunted.
When you turn your head to look at what is at the top of the stairs you find yourself face to face with none other than Snow White. Except it isn't quite Snow, her eyes are bulging and her face is morphed into a grotesque form of a smile as she watches you. She's been swallowed up by both madness and darkness, two things that make the most dangerous combination. What is worse are the bodies lying scattered around her throne, the bodies of your friends from Storybrooke. Ruby, Belle, Grumpy, everyone. You know that they are here somewhere. You know that David is here, possibly your little brother as well. Then you see him, your father's body is right beneath Snow's feet and when you see him you know he didn't put up even any form of a fight. His mouth still looks as though it were forming the words I love you Snow as he died. In your guts you feel something tightening, something clenching, and you begin to search the bodies again.
When you hear Snow give a mad cackle of delight, you look at her. All she does is watch you intently and motion upwards with her head. You can't breath, it feels as though there is no oxygen and you are suffocating, but slowly. You raise your eyes and what you see there brings a silent scream to your lips. Above where Snow sits amongst the bodies is a lifeless and bloody Regina, her body is hanging there, her throat cut open and although you want to you can't tear your eyes away. The only relief you feel is that you know Henry and Neal aren't here, you hope that Henry took him and ran as fast as he could, you hope your beautiful little boy got away.
You hear Snow get up and she comes toward you, when she is above you she stops but you just stare at Regina. You hear her whisper something and she almost sound like her old self, except you know that that isn't right. She says something about power and the hold of darkness and that she couldn't let Regina win. Then she slips farther into the madness and laughs softly but manically to herself as she mutters something about how close Regina got, and how she gave in so quickly.
You die with your mother stood over you, except she isn't really your mother at all anymore. You die looking at the mutilated corpse of the only woman you ever loved, you die and leave your body hoping against all hope that you will get to see her again and hoping that Henry has run both fast and far enough. What else can you do in the end, when all else is lost, but wish for small mercies?