Part of a revenge plot against Sarah. Short fic about Regina's PTSD.


My Heart Will Go On

love can touch us one time
and last for a lifetime
and never let go 'til
we're gone

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..

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She dreams of him.

She dreams of him ever since she flies away from the tavern that night, beautiful like a broken angel. He's faceless, it's a mere presence in the deepest recess of her soul.

When she finally meets him, the pain for Henry intertwines with strange nocturnal adventures – horses, her fingers touching lightly the feathers of one arrow. Sometimes, a brush of blue eyes. Her soul is now bleeding, because she may have found her other half, but she's not ready.

When she finds him again, her dreams are red, fire, slow kisses and happiness. Her dreams are ice, glasses, mirrors, and the tiny flame of a battered page. Her dreams are pitiful pain, vodka shots, the smell of a book. Memories.

When she finds him again, her nightmares are memories. Her periwinkle dress making her beautiful, hair curled loosely on a shoulder, leaving her free, maybe this time Mother cares. Her nightmares are memories of her poisoned womb, they are nurtured from her sister's satisfied grin, and she repeats herself that it's alright, but it hurts.

She dreams, for some nights, of being someone she isn't, of being an orphan. She cries herself to sleep in a trunk, calling it home, feeling she doesn't deserve to be happy.

When she finds him again, she's brutally forced out of his arms by the ancient darkness. She wakes in his arms, in a far land, mind still full of black and gripping shadows, of black and desperate cries and a white soul tarnished to save hers. He soothes her, caresses her guilt, repeating her she can do it. It's stolen strolls, afternoon teas, and a sword. And she forgets.

When she loses him again, the shadows have stated she has to pay, and pay she does. Those nights, if she sleeps, he's there. And she doesn't know, yet – it won't last much longer. Those nights, she wakes to whispered songs, a double pair of blue eyes, and she sits next to father and daughter. She doesn't have to dream.

She dreams, in the red land of her punishment, but only once or twice. It isn't a land for sleeping. His arms are hot around her waist, her heart is fast, his heart is even faster, but they are still alive, in the red land of the dead.

When she loses him again, she doesn't sleep for days.

When she loses him again, she knows she won't have his arms around her, if she wakes screaming.

She dreams, that night. Her soul is little and scared, her soul is split, fuming, scratched.
In her dream, they are dying in the sea. In her dream, he tries to keep her warm, to find her a way to continue, to exist. He tells her to go on, to be happy.

He presses his forehead against hers. There's urgency, a need to make her see. There's broken dreams, moments that could have been and never were.

The sea goes on fire, but he gets colder, doesn't react to her screams. There's music, far away, like a litany. The waters wash her skin. She's burning with fever, holding on to him. The fire hurls around them. And that's when the flashes of lightning start. Thunderbolts splashing all around the fallen bodies, the dead who are slowly sinking. The black waves are studded with sudden stars, pure energy.

Her fingers can't hold him anymore, and he falls. Down, instead of up – when he died, he went up, like an angel, his soul fading slowly.

He goes away, down in the depths of nothing. He saves her, in every way a person can be saved.

And she dreams. Because it's the only way she can see him again.

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..

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I'm afraid I'll never see you again.
In the gardens of memory, in the palace of dreams. That is where you and I will meet.