It started with a storm, one that rumbled in from the west and kicked up the sea, and Regina welcomed it as an opportune turn in a week that had been rather relentlessly filled with town meetings and family dinners and criminal activity in the dead hours before dawn.
It was cleansing, really, to wipe away the hard lines of her makeup and hunker down with Henry over popcorn and board games as the rain lashed the windows, the evening made somehow cozier – safer – under the guttering of the lights. Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard circled each other on the board, moving between ballroom and hall and conservatory, and Henry looked at his papers intently each time, so studious and watchful that Regina couldn't help thinking that he had as much right to the sheriff's office as the crack team of Charming, Swan, and Jones did.
Hell, he'd probably improve it.
A ripple of lightning hit close, and the power hummed to black before the thunder could answer. She sighed, hoping it was just the neighborhood and not the entire grid, and started sending fist-sized fireballs into the air to softly illuminate the room again.
"Isn't that cheating?" Henry asked, but he had pitched back to marvel at the bobbing lights, the same way he had watched fireworks as a little boy. "Not everyone gets stars in their house when the electricity goes out."
"You'd rather sit in the dark?" she asked back, pointedly, stretching out her foot to prod his as she laid herself down too, careful to not upset the Clue board as she settled.
"I didn't say that."
They listened to the storm and felt its vibrations buckle through the floor beneath them, and Regina had a sudden wave of gratitude for all the pieces of home surrounding her in that moment – for walls and soft carpeting and stars pulled to earth and, most of all, for Henry – Henry, who had grown tall and thoughtful and just now rolled his head towards her to grin.
"By the way: Mrs. Peacock, revolver, billiards room."
She threw a pillow at him.
…
Regina woke to the plinking of rain and odd numbers flashing on her alarm clock and knew that the worst must have broken overnight – calm enough now, thankfully, for someone to have restored the power without calling her in – but the sky was the same, steady grey on the other side of the curtains.
She groaned, kneading her shoulders back against the mattress, and wondered how long she could delay the rest of the day. She was used to feeling drained, to not really being rested even when she did manage to fidget herself into a deeper state of sleep, but the rain was sapping her more, down past her reserves to the dry bones beneath, and soon those too might crack, and she would be left with nothing.
She was too awake to be anything but restless, and Henry needed breakfast, and she more than likely had reports of storm damage waiting for her at the office, so she stood under the shower, whisked eggs into omelettes, and followed Henry out to the school bus when he forgot his umbrella, letting the routine of it all drive her forward when her mind faltered, slipped away to other places.
The rain was a pleasant distraction, at first.
It caught at her ears while Leroy argued for new, completely impractical generators, an argument she had to squash each storm season because the 'disaster prevention and relief' budget applied to all disasters, and she'd rather the town lose electricity for a few hours than have to live with the fallout from visiting ice queens or dragons or the other magical incidents that seemed so inevitable these days.
It filled the spaces around her as she worked late (and past late, reaching towards another morning) and gave her empty streets and wet reflections, the only company she was up to keeping on those drives back to the house.
It stayed gentle and constant, never building back to a storm, and three days passed in stasis before she realized the wrongness of it.
For all the time she spent at her window, attentive to the changing patterns of clouds and the course of each runaway drop over glass, she had been listening for sounds underneath the rain – and, despite its motion, she had found a terrible stillness within that she could no longer blind herself against.
(This was a string to pull, too destructive to resist, and she watched it unravel in her hands with dull fascination.)
Her apple tree had been plucked clean, blossoms falling heavy to the lawn in gusts that never touched her but chilled her all the same, and, through the colors in the grass, she read absence everywhere.
The birds had been missing for days, and her robin with them.
She knew better, she told herself, even now.
Wild things didn't stay, by their very definition, and he – he had always been wild, and never hers, and (but still) what had she offered, really, except muffin crumbs and a window ledge and her own rough birdsong?
Leaving, being left, was a cycle Regina couldn't seem to fall out of, and each new loss shuttered her ribs a bit more firmly around her heart though she would deny it to her last breath.
There was a feather twinned with an old page (elsewhere: a ring, a grave), and she would let them be no more than exactly that. Lifeless things that were, had been, and gone.
But she wondered about the birds, and the rain, and turned the question in her head until it became another sound she couldn't shake: what shelter had they sought, and where?
(Robin built out his idea of home from whatever he found, and, once, it had been her.)
…
She went to the loft to pick up Henry, and it led into an invitation to stay on for dinner while Hook finished quizzing him on the major naval victories of the Napoleonic Wars. She might approve of the study session more if there were fewer digressions into detailing the human gore that cannonballs created, but Henry turned his eyes on her, and she sighed, nodded.
The Charmings waved her out of the kitchen, insistent, and she ended up at another window, staring listlessly at water and glass until Mary Margaret touched her elbow.
Regina saw the soft eyes and the proffered wine, and she knew that a conversation she didn't intend to have lay in wait behind both.
And she stalled, asked, "Where do they go, when it rains? The birds."
"Uh."
She smirked at Mary Margaret's bewilderment and took the wine, drinking more deeply than she should on an empty-but-for-coffee stomach and deciding not to care.
Mary Margaret sipped at hers, too, with a pinched look of deliberation that Regina still associated with secret-telling, and, oh, how this moment between them might have darkened even a year ago.
"They're still out there," Mary Margaret said, as if she must first convince herself of the words. "They keep to the trees a little more and make use of their feathers to hold in heat, and they wait until the moment is right."
"To do what?"
"To find their way back, I suppose. To hunt – and to fly."
One lost to the woods, one to the city, and she was likewise stranded (all stories must end) in the distances that spanned worlds for all they might be counted in miles.
Stranded, but not alone, and it was a concession she could make, however achingly: to stand in a place of warmth and will the same for them.
She thought of Roland and leather boots and a map of the stars for all seasons, constellations painstakingly traced out on her palm in the dark, the sound of wings, and, above all, forest.
This was home too, these things she carried with her, and maybe it was one they still shared, making meeting places of their memories and stealing away to them in odd moments, in the knowledge that they would always look out on the same sky.
Later, she would regret the wine and the rain and the way it quietened her into belief, but she let herself sink through it first, amending each thought of endings with a great perhaps – a for the time being and not a forever.
…
She wasn't sure when the rains faded out, but they did.
Gone, soft-footed as a thief, before she placed what was missing, though the trees and grass and she herself hung dampened in their wake.
Everything was crisp and vital, renewed by this second spring, and it was hard not to smile at the sight of girls splashing into puddles with too-large boots, or at tulips turning upwards to the light again, and Henry saying they didn't have to save board games for stormy nights.
There was part of her still caught in the pause, waiting for things that might never come, and it pulled until she gave in and snapped the lock over, raising the window sash a few inches (for the fresh air, she thought firmly) and sitting back, leafing through the memos on her desk for something she could lose herself in.
Perhaps he had never needed her, after all.
Perhaps he had forgotten.
She swallowed – nothing, her coffee downed this morning at the house, and she should go put a pot on – and leaned onto her elbows.
She didn't know what to do with her hands, with nothing to hold on to but papers, and it all wanted shredding, scattering to the winds; but that lesson was learned and paid for, and she was tired of chasing down the pieces only to cut herself when she tried to fit them back together.
Coffee it was then, brewed strong, and she'd hide each tremulous thought in the caffeine.
She took her time, measuring out the grinds and watching the filter drip, and everyone else carefully ignored the oddness of the mayor standing about in the kitchenette. One secretary backed out of the doorway before her second foot even touched the threshold, and it was so like the old days that Regina hurt not to laugh.
She walked into her office, intent on work this time, and clicked her tongue at the signs of disturbance there, the reshuffled papers (the window, she thought) and runs of wet ink, spreading slowly –
But the prints were too measured, four-pointed, tracked like mud over her desk (in another life, Robin shuffling his feet over the welcome mat and managing to leave streaks on the floors anyway and what are we going to do with you, thief? as his eyes crinkled) and it was mud, and splats of bird poop, over her budget sheets and her chair and the window ledge where someone had finally found his way back.
"Shouldn't have let him in in the first place," she grumbled, lips drawn thin, as she barreled into the hallway with a basketful of wadded paper towels. "Shouldn't have let the damned thing in."
She spent a good part of the afternoon researching how to clean bird droppings from leather without ruining the grain, discreetly swabbing at her chair and glaring outside because she was sure it would leave a mark – noticeable only to her, but a mark, and the robin hadn't even stuck around long enough to be smug about it.
She saw him, once, wheeling past her apple tree with all the color of his throat open to her.
It could be any bird (it could be), but she knew him, followed him with the eye of one looking homeward, and watched him pass out of her vision with a steady heart.
Partings and returns, and she was learning the sorrowful sweetness in both.
