A/N: Another cut-out snippet from an Evil Snowing Missing Year. If I ever finish editing and get the ridiculous thing posted the Snow&Regina dialogue comes from a conversation in what should be Chapter Three: 'Mary Margaret', but this is standalone. It's basically just headcanon for why a royal family tree of hispanic actors speak nothing but English, and a wish to see more of Regina's childhood family dynamics.
We don't know (as yet) how Regina's father went from being a crown prince to a fairly minor noble, so for the purposes of this story I'm assuming that the kingdom itself collapsed (straw-spun gold collapsed the economy or proved pixie-like to disappear at inconvenient times?) and they are a monarchy in exile, and Cora is bitter enough about this that they minimise that royalty (and culture) rather than trade on it (because otherwise why on earth doesn't Cora trade on it in Stable Boy etc?).
Regina is not, ironically enough, a woman who tends to dwell on the past.
Or at least, not in any detailed, specific sense. She carries past miseries forwards because her present state is persistently miserable, and even her infamous vengeance on Snow White was more fuelled by the embrace of hopelessness and a long-built habit of hatred than on any individual betrayal.
Nor is she a woman who worries about what others have that she might have reason to expect. She did not look at Snow and long for the easy love shown her, nor did she look at Snow's True Love and see what might have been with Daniel, she looked at what Snow had and was infuriated because it made Snow happy while Regina could not think how to be, and she saw in Charming only a weakness to exploit. It was destruction that she strove for, not theft or replacement, and she's never much bothered with regret.
When she returns to the Enchanted Forest without her son and broods on Zelena she cannot really grasp her motivation – though her older sister is her younger copy in many ways, envy is not a vice they share.
She asks Snow one day, "What would make someone so envious they'd turn their life around it?"
And Snow smiles, puzzled, replies, "Wouldn't you know?"
But she doesn't.
There are only two things Regina has been ever truly, persistently, envious of:
That Emma and Snow and Charming should have got on with Henry so easily and happily in their loft without her, obviously.
But also, and somewhat unexpectedly, of the people she saw intermittently on the television who could speak Spanish. She was envious of them with a passion.
There is a language like Spanish in the Enchanted Forest, spoken a lot in her grandfather's kingdom before it fell, and Regina thinks she knew it for a time.
She thinks that as a small child her father spoken it to her behind closed doors where her mother could not hear, her memories writing him more confident and more talkative. He was always a quiet man in general but he would tell her long stories about his childhood or grand adventures he knew she'd like, and though nowadays she remembers them hazily in English she thinks they were Spanish originally. She thinks, maybe, she had loved to do sound effects for the favoured retold stories, had been a leading child expert in animal noises she was never allowed in mother's domain, and that her father had beamed when she had giggled and they had been happy to share this secret language where strictness and high expectations never dwelt.
She had known that it must be kept a secret (her life has always been ruled by secrets) and had understood the weight of a confidence at six in a way Snow White would still not at twice that age. But one day she had been stuck for a word and mother was clear even then that ladies shouldn't stutter and pause in their speech, so she had substituted the Spanish word quickly, unthinkingly. The word for 'fast', perhaps.
At least, she thinks she had. She can't really remember, she was very young.
She remembers her mother's face to hear it though, still like stone with lips pursed, and the sudden heart-thumping realisation that she had brought the full light of her mother's displeasure on something that grew safely only in the shadows.
She remembers her punishment, too, and remembers that she was kept from her father for what seemed like forever but was probably only a couple of weeks. Long days with only the walls of her nursery and a silent strict nurse and the horror that she might never see him again and that it would be all her fault. She remembers missing him so terribly and promising her mother she'd never speak the bad words ever again if she could only have her father back, please Mother, when might she be allowed to see father?
Mother had smiled and stroked her hair, and told her that she could speak one language so beautifully, there was no need to keep secrets from mother and learn a second that could only confuse her. Father encouraged bad habits but Regina was cleverer than that, wasn't she, darling girl?
What it was her mother held against the language she cannot be sure, but thinks there must have been echoes of her royal grandfather and the kingdom that was lost, of hazy recollections of servants named María and not Mary, of Princesa and of Infanta, and everything that disappeared so quickly and felt imagined and dream-like even back then.
It could have been merely that mother herself couldn't understand it, of course. It would have been enough.
She doesn't remember seeing her father again for the first time afterwards and doesn't know what that time apart had meant for him. She thinks maybe that her father tried to speak the forbidden words with her again but that she shut him down. Imagines she must have been the very image of her mother if she had, and that he must have shrunk back from his own daughter as had long become habit with his wife. Thinks she set her young chin against one of his last attempts at hidden defiance and taught him as he should have known that it was wrong to speak such a language and wrong to keep secrets from Mother and it was his fault for risking it and his stupidity to think they could get away with it.
She thinks she must have learned to despise weakness fully for the first time that she at six and three-quarters had to keep them both safe because he would not. Or because he could not.
She was kind enough, then, to know it a terrible thought and to love her father all the greater for it.
He certainly didn't speak anything but English by the time she was a little older and her memories more reliable. Or if he did she ignored it. Her father became less assertive and easier to discount with every bigger and more important conflict she had with her mother - her newly teenage backbone making her more both more resentful of her mother's 'guidance' and also less willing to hide it – and with every escalating backlash she learned more deeply that her mother's wishes could make her father's words nothing.
His stories of horses and a narratively-fair universe – and the language he used to tell them – soon faded from her thoughts, and by the time Daniel came to fill her head with tales of love and happy endings it didn't occur to her to miss them.
It was only in Storybrooke that she remembered.
There had been a night when Henry was very young and in bed, when, telling him a bedtime story as he learned to follow the words, he decided he was in charge of sound effects and she in charge of dialogue, and the memory of those early stories had come back to her in a rush. She listened to Henry's animal noises and had thought them wrong, and for the first time in her adult life knew for sure that her father's stories had not originally been in English.
It's too late, of course. She can't speak it anymore.
She hesitated on Spanish-language channels but all that was left was a deep nostalgia at the accent and a comfortable knack with the phonemes, impressions sometimes but actual meaning escaping her. Her mind spat out the occasional English word as though playing word association but so disconnected from conscious knowledge that she couldn't trust it to be correct. It's all just passive, random, useless. She never bothered relearning it because she knows no one who speaks it and it wouldn't be the same.
It should have been hers, though. The language is as dead and inaccessible to her now as her father is.
When the absence and murder of her father pressed too strongly she idled on those channels, temporarily lulled by half-forgotten memories but left angry and rattled in the wake, missing him as she ought to have missed him all along. She resented these strangers who never knew him but shared something with him and tried to remember that his sacrifice had given her her son.
She remembered him, though, the accents reminding her not only of the cowed man whose love was constant but unsupporting but of the man that man was just the shadow of. Of a time when her father had defied even her mother to make her happy, telling her of great horse-riding heroes, picking her up and swinging her round and telling her that this was what riding was like, flying like the wind, and she had laughed and hadn't thought to hate it because her mother didn't start picking her up with magic until she was eight.
Is this what Zelena feels?
It makes her no easier to fathom - whatever trapped her gaze to Regina?
It has been only weeks since Snow White killed her mother, strange though that thought is, and with Zelena's shadow and revelation it's hardly surprising that her mother's loss should bite again. It's a wounding and inescapable grief, discolouring her mending accord with Snow and leaving her struggling against the hypothetical of what might have been, Zelena not the only one who never really knew their mother.
It's a lasting injustice, though, that Zelena will never understand, that though their mother's heartless words still ring in her thoughts her father will be silent forever. She misses him like the language she forgot she ever knew: it means nothing for months on end and then she'll misstep and think, there used to be something here, but cannot think what.