When Roni Cope was twenty-three, she'd gotten a phone call. Her step-father had died (may he rot), succumbing to lung cancer at the ripe old age of forty-six.

She had felt a lot of things about the bastard's passing, but the starkest had been a sudden awareness of her own mortality. She'd been half his age exactly at the time, and the idea that her life could be half over, well… that hadn't sat well.

She hadn't gone to his funeral (wouldn't have even if she'd been invited), but she had thrown her Lucky Strikes in the trash.

And then she'd fished them out again immediately, because damnit she'd spent good money on them, and the four cigarettes left in the pack weren't what stood between her and dying of busted lungs like Sal had.

But once those four cigarettes were gone, she'd told herself, she wasn't going to buy any more.

She'd made that pack last another whole week, but she'd kept to her word. Mostly.

She doesn't smoke anymore, not really, not regularly. She's lit up a couple of times in intervening years, but she's never picked up the habit again.

Regina has never smoked a day in her life; her lungs are pristine.

All of that – the death and the Lucky Strikes and the infrequent indulgences – it's all noise. All static in her brain, lies the curse had told her. The little punch of that first cigarette in the morning, the settled feeling of lighting up during a bad mood, the taste of tobacco mixed with whiskey or black coffee… She remembers those things like she lived them, but it's all just noise.

And yet she stops off on her way home tonight, ducks into an all-night smoke shop around the corner from the bar and asks for a pack of Luckies, her heart pumping hard in her chest.

Cigarettes are awful. They're cancer sticks. They're disgusting. She'd have lit into Henry if he'd ever brought a pack home, if he'd ever done something so stupid and reckless with his health.

But it's his adoption day, and Robin had walked into her bar with a stranger's name and eyes that were so familiar but didn't recognize her at all, and Regina needs something.

She could drink it away like she usually does, but she doesn't want another damn bourbon (she's already had half a bottle since noon; later she might blame that buzz she's been maintaining all day for her poor decision-making). She wants a goddamn cigarette.

But she shouldn't, she really shouldn't. This craving isn't real, it's just noise.

"Wait—"

The girl behind the counter turns with the pack of Lucky Strikes in her hand, snaps her gum, lifts a pierced brow.

Regina shakes her head; what is she doing?

"Never mind," she tells her.

But when the girl repeats her, Never mind?, Regina thinks of smoke in her lungs, of the soothing ebb of that first inhale after too long without and says, "Give me the American Spirits instead."

If she's going to indulge in someone else's vices, she's at least going to do it with a pack that says NATURAL across the front.

(They're still cigarettes; this is still stupid. But she's done a lot of very stupid things in her lifetime. On the list of Regina's mistakes, indulging in a pack of cigarettes falls far below murder and mayhem, so she'll allow herself this one.)

She tears the cellophane off the pack before she's even out of the store, crumples it in her fist and pitches it into the trash can on the curb, flipping open the pack and tugging out the white paper inside as well. And then she thumbs out a cigarette with a practiced ease she has no right to, holds it in her lips as she tucks the pack away in her jacket pocket and lifts her newly purchased lighter to flick it into life.

The first inhale is familiar and wrong at the same time – the flavor isn't quite what she remembers, but there's a comfort to the action that has her releasing the first lungful of smoke on a sigh.

Her chest burns a little, and she remembers that this isn't her, she's never done this before, despite how vivid the memory is. And yet…

She savors the cigarette for her whole walk home, feels the hit of nicotine in her veins, the way her heart beats a little harder. It reminds her of late nights, and long talks, and that girl she'd loved at twenty-one who'd looked suspiciously like Mal. She'd always tasted like smoke, like fire, and Regina takes a deep drag and relishes the flavor of a memory that shouldn't fucking exist.

This is maddening.

She stubs what's left of the cigarette into ash on the bricks of her building, stepping the butt out for good measure as she fishes out her keys.

Her apartment is two flights up, and then three doors down; two sets of deadbolts click and tumble open before Regina can shut out the world with a little sigh of relief.

She's tired. Wiped from a long day of work and too much high emotion, she leans her brow against the door for a second and breathes. An echo of tobacco rises up her throat, and she tells herself she's not going to smoke another one. (She feels less agitated than she had before, and that shouldn't work. She's never smoked a day in her life, all of this is wrong…)

It's still dark in her apartment, but Regina shuts her eyes anyway, drawing in another deep inhale. She sees Abe's face in her mind again, and tears well behind her lashes.

She'd closed the book on that part of her heart, shut the final page and left Robin there on a shelf, tried not to think about him too often. Just enough to keep him dear to her, but not so much that she'd drowned under the weight of her grief.

And now, after a day spent watching him, she can admit that she'd started to forget things.

She'd had photos – a precious few of them, and a single cell phone video of him talking with Henry in those weeks after Camelot. He'd been telling him about how to properly aim an arrow, something to impress Violet with, and she'd felt so ridiculously soft-hearted at the sight of them that she'd subtly shifted her phone to video and caught the moment.

She knows every one of the fifty-two seconds by heart. Every modulation of his voice, every shift of his shoulders, the shape of his quarter-profile when he'd turned to look at Henry.

He'd been facing away from her, something she'd been regretting for a decade and a half. She'd wanted his face, his smile, those dimples in his cheeks, the stubble, the blue of his eyes, the lines around them.

But they'd been gone, buried under the dirt, and over time… they'd muddled. Gone soft at the edges like a watercolor painting.

Until today, when there he'd been. Right in front of her, every bit of him, and she curls her fist against the door as a fresh wave of emotion rises like a tide – grief and relief and self-loathing for every little feature she'd let fade.

Her shoulders shake; her breath hitches.

And then she hears a plaintive mew somewhere near her foot and feels the warmth of a soft furry body against her ankle.

Regina has never kept pets. Horses, sure, but they'd had their own space. She'd never let Henry get the dog he wanted, had never tried to fill the empty rooms of her mansion with a furry friend to keep her company. It had seemed like too much work, too much mess. Cats were for barns, dogs were for herding or hunting or yapping, and God knows she couldn't stand that last one.

But Roni, Roni has Ladro. He'd been a stray, or at least a wanderer. Had shown up on her fire escape again and again, yowling for entry. Hungry. She'd let him split cans of the tuna fish she'd been eating regularly to offset the price of getting her bar up and running. Had left him little bowls of water – always on the fire escape. He wasn't hers to keep, and she didn't have time for a cat anyway.

But then one night it had been cold and rainy, and he'd been there again, mewing and shivering and wet, and so inside he'd come. He hasn't left since. She steps on crumpled tin foil balls and stuffed catnip mice more often than she'd like to admit, and as she finally flips on the light of her apartment, she catches sight of his favorite toy, the battered squeaky fox that she's replaced at least three times since she took him in.

That wet, chilly night had been years ago now, which means it hadn't happened at all, and Regina has no goddamned idea where this cat actually came from.

Still, he's sweet, and it's nice to have someone to talk to.

Tonight, he's looking up at her with those icy blue eyes of his, letting out another little meow. If she was more cynical, she'd think he's just hungry (she gives him a can of food when she gets home from the bar every night, refills his bowl with kibble, refreshes his water). But he's winding through her legs now, rubbing up against them and purring, and Regina thinks maybe he just knows she's upset and wants to comfort her.

There's no one else to do it, nobody who knows her anyway, so Regina wipes the tears from her cheeks and bends to lift him.

Maybe she'd been wrong about pets for all these years; she thinks she'll miss him if she ever has to leave him behind.

Ladro rubs his head immediately under her chin, his purrs rumbling even deeper, and she presses her face into his soft grey fur and sighs, "Boy, do I have a story for you…"

He may be Roni's, this scruffy little guy, may be part of the curse, part of the noise, but at least she has one soul she can talk to without having to filter out all the static. Someone she can be honest with, about everything. No filtering out what's Regina from what's Roni from what's Mayor Mills. No having to keep her story straight, or bottle up all the painful, wrenching truths that are ripping her guts apart right now.

With Ladro, it's all just… honest.

So she begins to tell him everything as she carries him the five feet to their little kitchen, plopping him onto the floor there as she cracks open a little can of food and puts it into a bowl for him. She starts with the story of how they met – the first time: flying monkeys and scraped arms, secret passageways and sleeping curses, and the way he'd managed to make the gnawing, gnashing grief of her separation from Henry just a little bit less painful.

She keeps talking as he chows down, and as she washes her face, the bathroom door open so he can hear her (he's a cat, she always thinks talking to him like this is ridiculous, but Roni had done it, and it's a hard habit to break). Tells him about finding each other in another curse, about how nervous she'd been when she'd kissed him, how when he'd kissed her back it had felt like fireworks popping in her chest.

She gives Ladro the Cliff's Notes version of their separation, of baby Robyn's conception, and those weeks in Camelot, and after, when they'd tried so hard to knit back together what Zelena had managed to tear asunder.

Ladro curls up in bed with her when she climbs beneath the covers, tucking himself against her side, butting his head into the cup of her hand for more pets. (Roni had tried to curb that particular behavior – the bedsharing. It hadn't worked, she'd always woken up with him beside her anyway, so here they are.) Regina lies in the dark, staring at the slant of light through her blinds on the ceiling as she tells Ladro that Robin had died, that he'd been taken from her too soon, and then all about today. His reappearance.

"I don't know what it means," she says. "I don't know why he's here, how he's here. I don't know if I can wake him like I did Zelena, or even if I should. What if I do, and we can never kiss, because it breaks the curse and Henry dies? It would probably be worth it anyway, even if we can't kiss. At least I could talk to him again. I could have someone other than you who knows who I am – no offense, you're good company." She glances down toward the rumbling purr beneath her touch, scratches at a silky ear. "You're just not great at conversation, and your advice is a bit… lacking."

For a minute, she's quiet, and then she whispers, "What if he's angry at me? I let his children go – I let Zelena raise Robyn; he'd have hated that. And Roland left, and I never got him back – I never tried. He'd hate that I split myself; I know he would. I think… I think if he woke up, maybe he wouldn't… be very happy with me. And it's been years; I've changed. What if he was right all those years ago, and it is all about timing, and we had our time? What if it…"

She sighs into the dark again, and says, "Maybe it's better like this, at least for a little while. Or am I just being a coward?"

Her only answer is Ladro's steady purr.

The light of a dreary dawn builds up slowly; everything grows greyer, muted shapes coming to life around her. The dresser, the nightstand, that Bowie painting on the wall opposite her bed. (Roni had painted it; Roni used to paint.)

Regina finally falls asleep with the scent of cigarettes clinging to her curls, and the rumble of a warm body against her side, under her palm.

She dreams of Abe, of the Enchanted Forest, of smitten kisses in that red dress at Granny's.