She is always there in his nightmares.
Sometimes, it is only the horrible, awful truth that he relives, how he threw her out and how she died.
Sometimes, it is worse. He hurts her in these dreams. He smiles as she tries to kiss him, casts a spell and takes away her mouth. Or, worse, still smiling, he conjures up a knife and makes sure she will never be to do anything but smile.
He kills her in some of them. He tortures her in others. In one, he takes a bit of his own shadow and creates a monster. He shows it to her, knowing she will see the same gentleness she thought she saw in his own eyes, knowing she will go to the wounded creature to try and heal it.
But it was never wounded, only crouching and waiting for her to come in reach of its claws. It tears her apart.
In the dream, his laughter drowns out her screams.
He wakes, shuddering. His stomach twists as he feels the tears on his face. They are part of the shuddering sobs that wrack him, but he can only remember how his nightmare self laughed till he cried.
There are dreams worse than that, where he delights in crushing out any love she could have felt for him.
The worst thing about these dreams is that they are true.
He knows - he knows – even if he kept the madness of his curse under control till he had locked her in a room with thick walls of stone and a door of iron and oak, as safe from him as anything in his castle could be, even if he had fled as far from that cell as he could, spending all his inhuman anger on trinkets of metal and clay – he remembers the fury that burned towards her, towards himself. He remembers the mad whisperings, the manic laughter of his dark soul telling him all the ways he could make her pay.
He sent her away.
For her safety as well as his.
He told himself that and knows it was a lie.
Because he sent her back to those who killed her. He sent her back to people who knew him, knew the true face, the monster she refused to see.
They knew, if she did not, he never gave anything away for free. They knew, if she did not, the monster would only return his prey if he had some greater evil in store.
They knew no gift of his was ever to be trusted.
He knew – he must have known – what they would do to her.
But it was her father who had done it to her, her own father. For all the grief he and his own son had caused each other, how could he know her father would destroy her?
He remembered his son's eyes the last time he saw him, the anger, the accusation – and the fear.
He knew.
And, still, he let her go.
So, the dreams are true. He destroyed her. He crushed her. He tortured her. He blotted out her light forever because that was the solution that served him.
But, sometimes, there are other dreams.
Sometimes, she comes back to him, whole and unharmed.
Sometimes, he is there to rescue her, to catch her when she's falling.
Sometimes, he never needs to rescue her and she never needs to come back because he never sent her away. He trusted her, he loved her, he let her rescue him.
And these dreams are worse, because he wakes knowing they are lies.