David jerks his right hand free of his riding glove and thrusts it into the river. Cool water sluices over his palm, threads between his fingers, and he sighs, surprised and a little relieved as the burning sensation dulls.
He hates magic.
Humidity chokes the night's reprieve from the sun, slicking sweat down his back beneath the black leather of his uniform. He tugs his handkerchief free with his left hand and swirls it below the water before draping it over the back of his neck.
He has to be getting close, he thinks, scowling at the two large boulders jutting from the riverbed downstream like a jagged miniature of the northern mountains.
"Damn moths," he mutters, one hand perched on his knee to propel him upright.
Queen Snow may be fond of her pixie dust-addled friends, the tiny, winged creatures she keeps caged in the aviary with her bluebirds and sparrows and one bright red robin who's become somewhat of a favored pet of late, but he shares none of her fascination. Especially when their advice leads him on a snipe hunt through the southernmost corner of the Enchanted Forest while the kingdom is nestled snug in the armpit of late summer.
"Find a stump," he mocks as he shakes river water from his hand and shoves his fingers into his glove once more, "Where the rocks split the river thrice. The Bandit Regina lies there, they said."
It's nonsense. A desperate gamble from a desperate fairy with wings pinched between a cruel thumb and forefinger. But he's here, tramping through the woods in the middle of the night, nearly a hundred leagues from where the Merry Men were last seen, compelled by his queen's command.
The old, nearly forgotten pain of Snow's hand slicing into his bare chest, tearing his heart out as his body cooled next to hers screams into focus, the empty space in his chest lurching as if it remembered how to feel, but only for a moment. His pseudo-pulse drops into a dull, reluctant dun-dun… dun-dun before the memory is even half-lived, a deep ache punching his breath away with the rapid deceleration of his heart rate.
Yeah, that still hurts like a sonofabitch. He rubs his sternum. Strange to have it happen after all these years, an emotion strong enough to jerk the shadow of his heart out of its apathy.
He yanks his torch from the forked knot of tree roots spilling over the riverbank like a snarled waterfall, and turns his scowl east, toward the area the blue fairy pointed out on the map with a trembling hand.
Nothing about this situation makes sense.
Regina's been on the run for almost two decades, now, slithering through the cracks in Snow's plans like a clever eel in a grotto, but to align herself with a group as entrenched in the Enchanted Forest as the Merry Men feels off, wrong. His last good intel on her indicated she was intending to leave the kingdom, not establish roots of a sort.
He tightens his grip on his torch as he half runs down an embankment, feet skidding breathtakingly for a moment until he bottoms out on an overgrown game trail. Overgrown, but perhaps not abandoned. David toes the wilting, broken branches of a small bush, spies bark missing from a tree trunk further down. The Merry Men never were terribly active in this part of the forest, but even dogs tend not to shit where they sleep. Perhaps this is where they based their operations, though he's not one to claim to understand the group's methods.
Six months ago, the Merry Men shifted their focus from robbing nobles to plundering shipping lines, creeping across Sherwood until they slammed into the western seaboard with a furious, concerted effort. Sightings of Regina faded shortly thereafter. She'd disappeared completely, consumed by the thick, green folds of Sherwood's endless forest. Whispered sightings burned through the kingdom, each as fleeting as a golden flash of sunlight on a ripple of water, and all nearly as insubstantial. Until now, perhaps.
The thought streaks a swath of bitterness across his tongue with a sharp, sweet tang of regret. He swallows hard to keep the faint flicker of emotion alive, but it fades into nothing as he steps over a fallen tree.
The ground here borders on treacherous, and as he continues down the path, he's glad he'd left his horse stabled in the village a few miles north of here in favor of combing the area on foot. A lame horse would only prolong this fool's errand.
For the first time in ages, a slight breeze picks up, cool against the sweat beading across his upper lip, and with it arrives a faint whiff of woodsmoke. A campfire, perhaps, smothered some time ago. A rush of gratification floods his body for a stilted second, heart slamming out of rhythm and then back as he trips over a thick, tangled patch of underbrush and an eerie whistling rushes through the trees.
David extinguishes his torch and remains still, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness before he presses onwards, listening carefully. When no other sounds reach his ears, he rotates his ankle a few times, checking for injury, and then presses onward. Someone is, or was, nearby, and even if it's not Regina, they may have seen or heard of her whereabouts.
Not ten paces further, an enormous stump looms in the darkness, turned on its side and half-submerged in a hilly slope, roots gaping into the night like a medusa frozen in time.
"I'll be damned."
Perhaps the fairies deserve more credence after all.
Minding his step, he approaches the unassuming domicile. Last thing he needs is to be strung up a tree in a net again. His backside and his pride sting in remembrance of the unfortunate incident from two years ago. Though now that he thinks about it, the strange rustling in the trees a few moments ago could have been some kind of alarm he'd tripped. His sword won't be of much use against the bandit's bow if she's lying in wait, but he draws it all the same. Just in case.
Hidden in the shadows, behind scraggly garlands of the parasitic gray moss decorating the frozen tendrils of wood, lies a small tunnel. David crouches as he enters, keeping one hand on the rough-hewn walls for balance as he descends, goosebumps prickling down his arms like an icy rash.
The air is thick with blood and sweat, piercing his sinuses. A knobby stalk of a candle burns on a small table next to a heap of damp cloths streaked with crimson. Someone in here's been hurt, badly, and recently. Regina's collected enough enemies to string a necklace to be sure, but how the devil had someone beat him to the punch?
He hears her before he sees her, the shuffling scrape of feet on hard packed dirt lurching toward him, but before he can raise his blade to halt their advance, the tip of a dagger pinpoints his carotid as a large, solid form presses him against the wall, wrenching his wrist at a violent angle until he drops his sword.
"What the hell are you doing here? Is Snow with you? Is she?!" Regina's voice cracks, rough like a pebbled river bed as she twists his arm again, checking his hips and his knees as he tries to break free, decidedly ignoring the small measure of relief that she's alive, if not well.
Rip it out.
His relief evaporates, and the itchy, warm buzz swarms across his palm again. He struggles against her, biting his lip til it bleeds as she digs her thumb between the tarsals of his hand, and frowning when she shoves him harder against the wall. Regina's been slight since they were children, but the form pressing him to the wall is larger, almost harder than he'd expected her to be. Her body tenses, and she blows a low groan against the back of his neck as her grip on his wrist slackens.
No.
No, no.
He's heard that sound before.
David tries to turn his head to get a better view of Regina, but her hold on the dagger remains firm and she presses the tip further until a warm, thin line of blood springs from his neck, tickling lightly as it trails toward his collar.
"Answer my question," she grits out.
"No, I came alone. Everyone else is concentrated on the shipping lines the Merry Men have been raiding these last weeks."
Regina laughs, a harsh, reckless thing edging on hysterical as the knifepoint slides away from him. Free to move, David scoops his fallen sword from the ground and levels it at a bedraggled and heavily pregnant Regina.
He stares, a bit dumbfounded as she slides to the floor, curling around her burgeoning belly as staccato, sucking breaths hiss between her teeth.
This cannot be happening.
"You're in labor," he says.
"What was your first clue, halfwit?"
David tugs off his gloves and thrusts them between his belt and his hip, praying she's too distracted to see the way his fingers tremble. "You're always making my life difficult."
Regina glares from the floor before screwing her eyes shut and dropping her jaw in a twisted, silent scream. The contraction ends, and as her belly relaxes, David's churns.
Rip it out.
Of all the possible scenarios he'd considered, this one never crossed his mind. That she'd been coerced into joining the Merry Men, yes. That she'd joined for added protection, safety in numbers, yes. That she'd fallen in love, perhaps. But to be with child? No, he hadn't considered that at all.
Phantom tingling creases his palm again. He flexes his right hand, Snow's enchantment twinging and burning below his skin.
Rip it out.
"If you truly are here alone, you're here to capture me, not kill me," Regina says, panting as she catches her breath, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand.
Let her body hit the floor.
If he took her heart now, it could kill her, couldn't it? The trauma of childbirth atop the trauma of a ripped heart? And if he kills her accidentally, he has no doubt Snow will crush his heart next. There's no room for error here, but he'll be damned if he allows Snow's unquenchable thirst for vengeance to demolish this last, fraying thread of his humanity, his past.
The burning fades, and he fists his hands behind his back. "Snow does like to play with her food," he says, aiming for casual disdain, and not quite pulling it off if Regina's quirked brow is any indication.
"I remember, vividly," Regina says. "But I'm not going anywhere like this."
"Neither am I."
"Then I need your help." She lurches forward onto her knees and grabs onto a thick, knotted rope dangling from the ceiling over a rumpled pile of blankets. "The baby's coming. I need you to check to see if her head is crowning."
"I'm sorry, you want me to what?"
Rip it out.
"Do I need to hold your hand?" Regina groans, pulling herself into a deep squat. "I know for a fact your fingers have been down there before. You should be able to find your way."
Rip it out.
"That was a long time ago," David mumbles, cheeks flushing momentarily before paling as he crouches before her. He hadn't thought the awkward fumblings of a summer solstice ale-drunk sixteen-year-old worthy of her remembrance.
Let her body hit the floor.
"David, you put your hand between my legs and tell me if you can feel the baby's head or I will slit you from navel to nose with your own sword once she's born."
"Fine!"
Neither looks at the other as he reaches his left hand below the looming curve of her belly, fingers slipping and sliding until he meets resistance. He swallows hard.
"I need to push," Regina says, her voice crackling in her throat. "Please, I need to—I have to be down . But if—"
"I felt her," David reassures, shifting back, giving her more space, but her hand clamps on his shoulder, taloning into the thick muscles pulled taut with tension and shooting a crossbolt of pain down his arm. "It's Robin's, right?" he asks, not unkindly as he readjusts their position, settling closer in front of her as he was a moment ago, and he sighs as she relaxes her grip. "The leader of the Merry Men?"
Regina nods, lips pressed together as tears stream down her cheeks. "He's supposed to be here," she whispers hoarsely. "John sent word he left the port almost a month ago."
Red feathers preening behind thin brass bars flit across his vision.
"Well, Snow doesn't have him," David says, though the words crumble to ash in his mouth.
Rip it out, rip it out.
"You're a terrible li—"
He squeezes Regina's knee, painting a wreath of bloody fingerprints around her kneecap as a new contraction wracks her body. No, he doesn't know with certainty that Snow's new pet isn't his former friend's lover, but that's not something he has any control over right now.
"Push, Regina," he encourages, hands flitting from her shoulders to her waist, trying to help keep her balance as she bears down. It's not the easiest position for either of them, there should be another person or two there to keep her upright while someone catches the baby, but they manage alright given the circumstances.
Things move quickly after that, time melting like candle wax as she labors. Sweat clings to her body like a second skin, a vein pulsing and bulging above her brow as the soft hardness of the baby's head presses warm against his palm.
There was a girl in the castle who'd given birth too quickly, David remembers, back when the four of them were still young and relatively unscathed by life. The screams she'd unleashed echoed down the hallways, spurring him to his feet from his game of cards with James, Regina, and Snow. Stupid girl, the midwife berated her apprentice. You were to hold your hand against her to keep the baby from tearing her open. Now we have more work to do. He hadn't seen what had happened next, drug off by a greenish-tinged Regina.
And now here they are, more than a decade later, and it's him with his hand cupped between her legs, cradling the head of Regina's soon to be born child, and his fingers twinge and ache as Snow's command burns in his blood and pounds in his ears.
Rip it out.
"If I ever pictured this day," he says loudly, taking care to support the baby as Regina catches her breath between contractions, back pressed up against the wall now, "The day I got a chance to redeem myself between your legs, and I'm not saying I did, it involved fun bodily fluids, not potentially life-threatening bodily fluids."
"And no babies," she growls, knocking her knee against his arm, and it rests there, heavy as she closes her eyes. "Why are you yelling at me?"
Rip it out.
"No babies," he agrees, attempting to modulate his voice as the spell's insistence grows. "The next one should do it. Are you ready?"
Let her body hit the floor.
Let her body hit the floor.
Let her body hit the—
David slouches in a chair dragged near the fire, fist propped against his temple as his other hand taps a quiet tattoo on his thigh. His fingernails are stained a rusty red, and though the adrenaline rush has thickened into a dull webbing of exhaustion, his mind jumps and skips like the embers crackling in the warmth of the hearth.
Regina sleeps not three feet away, curled around the child he'd held in his hands not three-quarters of an hour ago. Eighteen years without a heart, and the sight of her collapsed on the ground, weeping and clutching the baby to her breast as she swept gore and fluids from the baby's face moved something inside his chest, an abrupt settling that pitched his stomach and strangled his breathing.
Rip it out.
He should go. If Snow were to realize he'd located her, even if he didn't return with her heart, she could command him to do anything, say anything.
He taps faster.
Rip it out.
His hand burns and throbs with the phantom echo of his heart, the sensation crawling under his skin as if he were being submerged in a pit of liquid fire. He stands abruptly, striding to the door, but two steps from the bed the pain surges the rest of the way up his arm, capping his shoulder and dipping down into the empty well of his chest, the magic of his once beloved branding and scorching his innards with icy ferocity. He turns back to the bed, each footfall that brings him closer lessening the pain in his arm, his hand, but his breath comes in quiet, halting gasps as he stands over his friend.
"Forgive me," he whispers.
Regina's eyes flicker open as he looms over her. "Don't," she pleads, recognition a sorrowful companion to exhaustion in her eyes. "Fight it, David."
"You know that's not the way this works."
Rip it out.
"But I wish it was," he says.
Rip it out.
She doesn't scream when he plunges his hand into her chest.
They almost always do.
Her heart beats wildly against his palm, a slippery, warm lump strung from the rafters of her ribs by thick arteries and veins. This is the second time tonight his hand has slipped inside her, but the violent intimacy of his fingers curling around the swell of her heart rather than cradling the crown of a baby's head turns his own blood to ice.
Or perhaps it's relief at carrying out the queen's orders.
Rip it out! Rip it out! Rip it out!
"Release her, or my arrow flies true," a gruff growl of a voice thunders.
David turns his head, finds the Prince of Thieves himself standing in the doorway with an arrow leveled at his neck, and closes his eyes. Not captured. Not transfigured into his namesake. "Shoot me," David says, sweat dripping from his chin onto the bed as he tries to relax his hand inside Regina's chest.
Let her body hit the floor.
"Robin!" Regina hisses, her hand shielding the baby's face as she glares at him, pain etched in every shadow the fire throws onto her face. "He's under a heart command; he can't help it."
The arrow pierces his shoulder, a new, refreshing agony splashing through his body as his enchanted arm goes numb, his fingers falling slack inside Regina's chest as his balance teeters toward the bed.
Regina stops him with a palm flat against his chest, pushing him backward with a firm motion, gasping as his own hand slips heavily from her chest.
Rough hands grab him from behind, shoving him toward the door and divesting him of his sword. "Is the queen here?" Robin demands. "Does she know where we are?"
"No, not yet. Only me." David tries to flex his right hand, but nothing happens. The burn of Snow's magic is gone. He looks to the thief, says, "The second I step outside, she's in danger, though. You're all in danger."
"Then perhaps I should finish you off." Robin advances toward him with the sword, but before he gets close enough to do any damage Regina stops him with a word.
"Robin," she says, "Let him go."
A heart command of a different kind.
"Let him go, and come meet your daughter."
He's considering it, the thief, serene thoughtfulness teetering on the cusp of joy, warring with rage still pulsing off his shoulders in waves, threatening to drown David long before he would have to defend himself.
"As soon as she can travel, you need to leave," David says.
"And how do we know you won't follow us?" Robin demands.
David twitches his shoulder in a deprecating shrug, and his stomach drops into his shoes as his ears roar and his vision blurs. "Won't be an issue," he grits out, steadying himself with his good arm against the wall. "Even if I don't drop before I get back to the village, I'll still need someone to take care of this before I could do anything useful."
"Then be off, and know that next time my arrow flies without concern for your life."
David nods, once, and backs toward the doorway.
Robin keeps the sword trained on him until his feet cross the threshold, but as soon as he thinks he's left, he drops it and rushes to the side of his beloved. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," the thief murmurs, one hand buried in Regina's hair as the other flutters over his child, tracing the soft, newness of life with reverent fingertips. "The wildfires in the north blocked my passage. I got here as quickly as I could."
Regina mutters something that has the thief barking out a laugh which quickly turns to tears as he scoops his daughter into his arms with a gentleness that belies the brute force he'd handled David with minutes ago.
David hovers in the shadow of the doorway, watching the lovers reunite with a greediness that pangs in his chest and clangs in his ears, and then quietly, painfully, slips away as the ghost of his heart commands.
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