The stars had come to a complete halt. The only word she could think of that would come close to describing the place they were in was eternity, and every inch of it was pregnant with infinite expectation. The eyes moved. Regina wished she could tear her gaze away. Do anything but look into those limitless eyes. These eyes didn't change. She had the absurd thought that if the earth had eyes, they would look like the Elf Queen's eyes.
When the scrutinizing eyes left her, she took in the first breath she had taken in what seemed like forever. It was as if a great weight had lifted from her chest, and in its absence she felt weightless, almost euphoric. By the tension radiating from Robin at her side, she knew he was the one bearing the weight now as the dead Queen probed him to the depth of his soul. With the sound of tectonic plates colliding, Maev lowered the hand holding the long sword. It hit the midnight soil with a thunderous clash that made Regina's teeth rattle. Even that quake was nothing compared to when she took her first step toward them. The tree roots fell away from her body as she laboriously moved, putting one foot in front of the other, her sword and spear digging deep furrows in the ground as they dragged beside her.
The half-wooden Queen stopped in her tracks, and the grinding noise blessedly died. The pent up breath left her aching lungs and the fist around heart eased. She made herself look up from the grooves in the ground to see the eyes. They had latched on with such fevered intensity onto Robin that they made all her warning bells start ringing in her ears.
A wind began howling in the emptiness of all things around them, its force plunging the stars into a frenzied whirlpool of light. It began to pick up pace, ruffling Regina's hair, and moving passed that to a point she felt the need to get a hold of Robin, afraid that the damn wind would snatch them away from the ground and scatter them like so many leaves in the boundless expanse of nothingness.
There was no doubt in her mind that this wind was bad for them. It was anger made manifest, pure and simple. And the object of that anger was none other than her companion.
The queen spoke out a single guttural word. She thought she should recognize the word, but it was mangled with such intense hatred that it was unrecognizable. The force of it drove Robin back a step, the tight lines of his body quivering as he struggled to keep his ground and not fall down .
The queen was not going to relent. Throwing off the roots that shackled her in one giant heave, she brought the sword and spear to bear on Robin. Feeling as an ant must feel when confronted with the giant heel of the unseen foe, Regina gathered to her all the magic she possessed in every cell of her body and soul. She might be nothing but an ant compared to the immensity of power that radiated form this being, but she was not going down without a fight. And neither was her thief.
Sweat was running down his downturned face, and he had gone as white as a ghost. Her magic crackled in her hands, and she readied herself to stump on the lions foot. But before she could, Robin, finally managing to raise up his head, shouted a defiant word almost as guttural as the one the queen had used. She still couldn't understand the word, though she was sure she had heard it before. The queen however, didn't seem impaired like she was. The word had hit her like a physical blow, the sword and spear wavering in her hand almost imperceptibly, enough for Regina to stay her hand.
He shouted the word again, and as if taking heart by its simple utterance, he did it again. With each shout his posture straightened a little bit more. And he wasn't just shouting random words at her. He was talking.
The words. He had called them that, when he told her the story of his people. The ones he had let flow from his soul to her in the In-between, when they started this journey. The ones that gathered to her images of people and places she never could have imagined existed in such vivid beauty. He had shown her Maev and her Arabolan Army; the countless legions of Aerwynians Alfhild led; the thousand years war that devastated the lands and hearts of all those people. And she had understood him. But why wasn't she now?
She was so preoccupied with the remembered words and images it took her a second to realize the queen's sword was descending toward Robin's defenseless neck. Denial tore through her mind and out her throat, and she threw all the magic she had gathered to her at the armored queen. It didn't even manage to throw a display of firework as it hit its target. All the magic the evil queen could muster, and this wooden queen absorbed it like it had been mere droplets of water.
The razor edge found its mark, kissing the neck Robin had exposed as if in a show of deference toward a monarch. But monarchs pillaged. They took what they wanted, hurt who they wanted. They killed, and they didn't care. Didn't care that they took someone's father, child, or lover. She should know. She had been one.
Time had stretched again, in the way eternities are prone to do, and she watched as Robin's legs gave out from under him, watched red coat the blade and start to dribble down in pomegranate drops, looking like tiny hearts falling away to get crushed in the heartless fist of death.
A tiny hand came to rest on the blade. Maybe the girl wanted to have a part in driving the blade deeper. Regina didn't know and didn't care, she only wanted to get to him, but the distance between them never seemed to end.
The tiny face was pressed to Robin's, the girl's body wrapped around his kneeling form, for all the world looking like a little girl hugging her father. The little girl with Robin's blue eyes and Regina's face. The lie felt all the more cruel now, but she didn't even want to rail anymore.
The girl's cupped hands over the blade gathered the droplets to her, and in her hands they seemed to be turning into solid rubies. She looked up at the queen and offered her hand to her. She said a single word too, and even though it was not in any language she had ever heard, Regina knew what the word meant: Family.