TW: sa (This chapter is fully skippable if you want to move on to the rest of the story, I only wanted to include it to show Regina's perspective as she grew to become the "Evil Queen." But, if you're an avid OUAT fan, you probably already get the idea.)
. . .
Regina wanted to kill the King. So much that it was a new feeling for her. Regina loathed her mother, she despised Snow, she abhorred everyone in the whole goddam castle. But she didn't fantasize about killing them the same way she did with Leopold.
She hated everything about him. The look in his eyes when he saw her first thing in the morning. The lust when she was called into his chambers at night. The dryness of his hands, the wrinkles under his nose, his withered lips. She hated when he watched her like he had won her as his prize, the same way he would look at the dinner he had won in a hunt. She even hated the memories of her that he had.
When she cried, she would recite every detail about him that she hated. And she would sob with her whole soul and hit things, very nice expensive things, and shatter them on the floor. And she would imagine picking up a shard of glass and plunging it into his chest, tearing open his heart. She would imagine thick crimson blood spilling on the floor and she would think about how much she would hate the shocked, horrified look in his eyes until the moment that he died. And while she was thinking about that, she would take her shard of glass and rip it through her pillow until there were feathers and strands of silk covering her bed.
And then, once she was too tired to express her anger, she would feel sick to her stomach until the next morning.
And so, before she had derived a plan to get rid of her husband, she had been thinking about it a lot. It was unscrupulously premeditated.
The night that the genie had agreed to murder the King, Regina had been called to Leopold's chambers. Regina had expected this- The kingdom sat in suspense as they waited for Regina to claim an heir. She had professed her pregnancy twice before, and she had believed it too. But in the end, she had realized it to be nothing more than wishful thinking and missed period, her belly swollen from missing meals that she didn't want to share with the King.
The thought of this being her last night with her husband did nothing to calm her nerves. If anything, she was more tense and frigid than usual.
His hands were cold and clammy. At the beginning of their marriage, he had been gentle and thoughtful. He had assumed Regina was a virgin and touched her like she was made of chiseled glass. As the years went on, and Regina had grown more courageous against him, he became annoyed with her. He was irritated that she didn't love him, irritated that she wasn't ecstatic to be in the bed of a King in the same way that the servant girls were, irritated at her continued insolence against him and ignorance of her queenly duties. He was frustrated at how long it was taking for Regina to conceive. The more irritated he became, the more harsh and angry his touches were. And then when it was all over he would roll over on his side and snore without dismissing Regina, leaving her to get dressed and slip back to her own chambers in the dead of night.
This night, the last night, he had said nothing to her when she arrived at his room, only pulled her over to the edge of the bed and pressed her face into a pillow. There was no sacredness to their meetings anymore. He hadn't bothered to undress her like he used to, only flipped up the slip of her nightgown and shoved himself between her legs. In the first months of their marriage, he had tried to talk Regina through the experience. He'd call her his love, his beauty. And now, if he addressed her during the night at all, it was to call her Queen Eva. His Eva. The name of his first wife.
Regina knew from recent experience not to resist. He would just hit her in the same way that he would hit the disobedient dogs. A few times before, he had kicked her in the back of the knees to trip her before he pinned her to the bed in a position she couldn't counter. If she would have told her younger self about those encounters on the day of her marriage, she wouldn't have believed it. She hadn't wanted to marry King Leopold, but he had seemed kind. He still seemed kind, though his niceties didn't extend to her anymore. She knew that he would never treat someone else in the way that he treated her, even the servants. But she had become a dismissable token to him. The thought that she deserved the same respect he gave to others had probably never crossed his mind because she wasn't really like his wife. She wasn't really anything to him. During the day they didn't even associate with each other.
When the King was finished, he pulled her up off of his bed with a bruising grip on her arm. He waved for her to go away and collapsed onto his blankets without a word.