Quick ficlet for Sarah, based on spoiler pics for 6.02.


Short Hair

- Post 5.23. Insight of Regina cutting her hair, Disney-Mulan style.

They have some quiet days, sometimes. Pieces of calm breaths where they can just be, tidy themselves, before falling again into the newest threat. This day is one of those.

She has destroyed the Queen, attempted to go after Hyde with Emma, but he's flown away, in that perverted hide-and-seek he's so good at, leaving his scared half into Archie's care.

This day is one of those days, and she wakes in the morning, mind all too tied up to that time Ursula and Cruella came to town, and they had one or two days of a sensation of impending danger, and her heart was aching, as well as today.

But today is worse.

At least, that time she thought he was alive – in New York and forever lost, but alive. Today he's just forever lost, but for real.

She wakes in the morning, and it's starting to get hot in her town, and her neck is already sweaty and sticky. He used to say You're like fire, love, always so hot, and she would answer And you're always so cold, like winter wind, thief. And he was – warm, but not too much, like a night spent camping outdoors.

Henry is at Emma's, today. Because she has insisted she was fine. Maybe, with Henry there, she wouldn't have done it. But today it's hot, her heart aches and she's not thinking straight.

She doesn't want to make a big deal of it. But it's a small ritual, something to make her feel better, so she borrows Robin's knife – she steals it, but he's not here to reclaim it anyway – and slips through morning sunrays, made of dusty light, she slips through the graveyard (avoids his grave, not yet, she tells herself), until she reaches her vault, bare feet soaked in humid grass.

And the smell is always there, and it reminds her painfully of that morning after their first time. She finds that spot submerged in light, where he has told her of her smile and of the best sleep in a very long time, and stops in her tracks.

She doesn't meet her own eyes in the mirror. Lifts the knife, and cuts. Dark locks fall swirling into the ground – her long hair, he loved to trail his fingers there, loved it, he would think it's a shame – but honestly, he's gone. He's gone.

Angry tears fall with her hair, tears and rustic fragments of tresses.

The Evil Queen is gone, her soulmate is gone.

When she glares at the mirror, she doesn't recognize herself. The hair is short, a bit longer than her hair during the curse. But gone are the silky waves, and she's not the woman in love he knew anymore. She thinks he wouldn't recognize her either, because half of herself is gone.

She has the hard gaze of a warrior, now.

She's sharp like his knife, and void, and she won't cry anymore.