Standard Disclaimer: The characters ain't mine, I'm just borrowing their strings for a while, so don't sue me please! Please point out any errors in grammar or spelling privately and I will correct them.
Chapter 12 – Coming To Terms With Reality
The next day, Regina barged in through the doors of the Pawn Shop, a woman on a mission. All morning long Red's suggestion that she consult Rumplestilskin had been weighing on her mind, robbing her of any attempts at concentration, which left her feeling compelled to seek resolution. At first blush, approaching her former mentor was a terrible idea that she'd dismissed out of hand, as personal exposure to Rumple's devious tendencies had taught her that there was no divining the motivation behind his offer of help. Hell, for all she knew he could be plotting to use the consultation as an opportunity to gain an advantage in their old game of one-upping each other by learning more about this most recent chink in her armor, namely the dreams that were plaguing her to the point of weakening her normally stalwart mental barriers.
While most would not utilize such an underhanded move, Rumple was not the kind of man to be sympathetic. Quite the opposite, he was the kind to ruthlessly exploit any vulnerability he discovered no matter the consequences to the person he was manipulating. This fundamental feature of his character was one he'd diligently ingrained into Regina when she was his pupil, so she knew very well he was likely to use any point of attack the situation might provide to great effect. To what ends, she could not guess, but his track record dictated that it would not be good.
With that the case, she figured her very presence here at the Gold's Pawn Shop must be an indication as to her present mental state. It was such a preposterous idea to think Rumplestiltskin might actually want to help her that it should be a certifiable offense, and yet here she was, so desperate for answers that she was willing to take aid even if it came at a cost she otherwise would be unwilling to incur.
Truth be told, Regina was more than a little worried by her inability to cope with these dreams. As a person who had a long history of suffering nightmares, she could normally handle them by pushing them to the back of her mind until they faded for a while, giving her a temporary reprieve in which she could rebuild her defenses. The strategy worked for years. Yet these most recent dreams kept coming back time after time, even when she tried medicating herself or magicking herself to sleep to stop them from reoccurring. It was only out of a desire to protect Red that she had shrugged the dreams off as inconsequential when confronted about them, but in truth there was no denying that they were becoming problematic.
Not only had Regina been reduced to existing on little to no sleep most nights – it had been almost a month now since she had slept for more than two hours at a time – but even during the day she was haunted by what she saw in them. It was as if the visions were ghostly specters sent to harry her every waking moment until she was consumed by the emotions that accompanied them. The entire month had been a harrowing trial, but over the past few days, things got progressively worse until she found herself teetering at the point of resorting to extreme measures. It was the last in the series of nightmares that finally pushed her over the edge, and thus the grudging visit to her former mentor.
As Regina stepped through the doorway into the shop, the bell that alerted its proprietor to incoming customers sounded wildly from the force of her entrance. She hated the sound of that blasted bell. Every time she visited the shop, its jingling was a cacophony that rang in her ears and reverberated through the open albeit cluttered room, reminding her she was yet again somewhere she did not want to be. Ignoring the knickknacks and baubles that littered the musty old shop, she headed straight for the counter where Rumplestiltskin was working, bent over an antique clock with a small pair of tweezers in his hand.
"To what do I owe the pleasure, your Majesty," he greeted without bothering to look up, an annoying habit he'd always flaunted because he knew how much it annoyed her.
Regina scowled, forgoing pleasantries she felt he did not deserve. "I hear you've been talking to my son about things that don't concern you."
"Is that so?" Rumple chirped, tipping his head up from his work to smirk at her. "Far be it from me to intrude on private family matters, but it was not I who brought up your troubling dreams. Henry volunteered the information."
"Yet that did not stop you from offering your two cents, did it?" she sneered. "You never did learn when to butt out of my life."
Rumple hummed, his eyes gleaming. "I wouldn't characterize my interference in such contemptuous terms. I assure you I meant no harm or disrespect. I merely informed my grandson that I had my theories concerning your...troubles, which Henry was all too interested to hear due to his belief that they are distressing you."
Leaning forward, Regina rested her palms on the surface of the counter until her flesh was pressing into the aged wood there. "And I'll just bet it thrilled you to no end to hear of my nocturnal torments."
"Believe it or not, I take no pleasure in your pain, Regina," he answered, dropping his tools to the counter to focus on her. "I only suggested to Henry that I had a theory because I believe it might bring you some measure of relief."
Regina didn't believe him. Not even a little bit. When he wanted to, Rumple could be very convincing with his words to the point he sounded sincere. There were times that Regina actually thought he was, though even then what decency he retained from when he was a human being was never enough to prevent him from acting every bit the cruel and unmerciful opportunist. Given the chance he was currently being presented with to rub salt in the wounds of a protege who had betrayed him more than once must have seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. She wondered, then, why he was not doing so, why he was being so patient and seemingly understanding.
Of course, this was not the first time Regina had been on the receiving end of Rumple's impressive attempts at sincerity. On rare occasions during her training, he would intimate that he cared for her in some almost familial way beyond her being his star pupil. Looking back, Regina was fairly certain it was a tactic to elicit compliance, but even if wasn't, that sliver of genuine feeling hadn't stopped him from ruthlessly crushing what little remained of her hopes and dreams. Rumplestilskin had taken a broken, depressed, and bitterly angry young woman and molded her into something she never wanted to be, a monster without a conscience that she hated every bit as much as she came to love. Regina had been foolish enough to believe the Dark One once but never again. Her lesson was too dearly bought.
Deciding to hear him out if nothing else for the sake of the time she'd lost traveling to his shop, she quirked an eyebrow, her face painted with a healthy amount of skepticism. "I'm hesitant to ask, but because I'm feeling generous today, I'll bite." She wasn't feeling generous but he didn't need to know that. "What is your theory?"
The look Rumple gave Regina sent a shiver down her spine. It was the same one he got when he was about to teach her about a convoluted property of magic or an abstract principle that required a great deal of open-mindedness to grasp. Those lessons often ended with Regina nursing a splitting headache while trying to wrap her mind around the endless applications of the lesson. The worst of them were the detailed discourses concerning the mind-twisting mechanics of how magic actually worked, and while Regina was a gifted learner and of keen acuity there were some things he revealed that were so difficult to comprehend that they seemed utterly impossible.
Yet as she always was back then, she was so stricken by curiosity that she leaned in a bit to listen more closely.
"There's a particular set of theories," he said, "that physicists in this world call the multiverse. Have you heard of it?"
Regina wracked her brain for a moment, trying to recall if she'd ever heard such a thing, but came up empty. She'd never been one for reading highbrow science fiction or watching programs about such things on television. That was more up Henry's alley than hers.
"Can't say that I have."
"Well, then, let me enlighten you," Rumple then said in his most professorial tone of voice. There was a time long ago when Regina had loved hearing it because it meant she was about to be taught something of supreme interest. As he talked, Rumple walked out from behind the counter, his cane now in hand, clicking on the hardwood floors as he moved much like Red's had. But unlike with Red, the sound of Rumple's cane produced an eery feeling of discomfort, as if it were connecting her from past to present with the stupidly naive girl she'd once been. "These physicists pose that our universe is not alone, that we are merely one among many, many others. There are, they say, an infinite number of parallel universes, some very similar to our own while others diverge dramatically.
"For instance," he gestured with his hand, "in one parallel universe, you may never have allowed yourself to feel love during the Curse, causing it to persist until the Savior broke it as was prophesied."
It didn't take a magnifying glass for Regina to read between those lines. Rumple had chosen that example for the sole purpose of expressing his displeasure at her throwing a wrench in his carefully laid plans.
The Curse he had crafted was intricately detailed down to the last letter, so imagine his surprise when he discovered Emma had not broken it as he had devised. The look on Rumple's face when she broke the news to him of how the Curse was truly broken still made her tingle with gratification. Regina had thought rubbing Snow's face in her True Love's kiss with Red was fun, but it was not nearly as satisfying as when she'd casually mentioned it to her former teacher. So to see that it was still sticking in his craw made her inordinately amused. Choke on it you old goat, she thought, crowing inwardly with delight, though outwardly she remained impassive.
"While only one small choice made by one person," Rumplestiltskin went on without indicating he perceived any reaction from her, "the results would have wide implications, as you might imagine. Yet in another, things may be vastly different because many different choices were made, resulting in a reality as foreign to our own as a daisy growing on the Moon. Who knows, in one of those worlds you might well have run away with your stable boy. Perhaps there, that other version of yourself might be with him now, old and happy with her children and grandchildren around her."
At the mention of Daniel, Regina stiffened in place. If Rumple's theory were true, in another world she might never have been forced to marry Leopold, never lost Daniel, never turned to magic to cope with the phantom pain of his death and the agony of being married to a man she loathed. Somewhere out there in the infinitely complex cosmos, she might be happy with Daniel and living out the life she had dreamed of since the moment she met him. The very thought made her ache with conflicted sadness.
The source of her conflict came from the thought that suddenly struck her: what if that scenario were to be offered to her? She didn't have to think it through to know what she would do. If she was ever presented with a choice between giving up the life she now had with Red for a chance at happiness with Daniel, there was no question in her mind that she would choose Red. While Regina had loved Daniel with all of her heart, the untainted girl that loved the winsome and innocent stable boy was long gone. All that was left in her place was a woman with scars on her heart that had hardened her and experiences that made her skeptical. Yet that very same callous, cynical woman had fallen in love with an equally damaged girl who did not let her sorrow define her as Regina had.
Red brought light back into Regina's life, and it was a light she was better able to appreciate because of her long acquaintance with the darkness. With Daniel, she had lacked the perspective that suffering through so much tragedy afforded her, and with that perspective came the realization that what she had with Red now was precious beyond compare, even more precious than the young love she once shared with Daniel. Though it pained Regina to admit it, not even her stable boy – as wonderful as he had been – could measure up to that.
Crossing her arms over her chest to hold in the discomfort she was feeling, Regina cut her eyes over at Rumplestiltskin. "And you subscribe to this theory?"
Shrugging, he meandered over to a shelf and picked up a snow globe depicting a little girl and a faun standing next to lit lamp post in the middle of a snowy forest. He gave it shake then watched the artificial snowflakes fall, a sideways grin on his lips. "In a sense."
Regina sighed with exasperation. "Is this going to be one of those conversations where you take pains to be as ambiguous as possible?"
His smile intensified into a sardonic grin. "Perhaps."
Growling, Regina stepped up into Rumplestiltskin's face, her restraint slipping. "Listen, I don't have the time or the patience for this. Explain yourself in a concise and timely fashion this instant or I'll have to reconsider giving my approval for Henry to apprentice with you."
Though she wanted to forbid it with every fiber of her being, Regina had been powerless to resist the pleading in Henry's eyes when he'd broached the topic of that particular offer. Henry had the most trusting, beautiful heart, but sometimes it made him blind to the truth. Right now, she wasn't sure he was capable of seeing beyond the doting mask of his ambiguously aligned grandfather to the imp lurking beneath, so it seemed wrong of her as a mother to even contemplate allowing her son to work with a man who had reeled in a more innocent version of her with pretty words and then crushed her into dust. But the more Henry argued his case, the more she became aware that this was one of those things that she needed to let him do because controlling his life had not worked out so well for her in the past. It was time, she realized, to let Henry start making decisions of his own.
When she talked to Red about it later that night, Red proposed that Regina allow Henry to apprentice with his grandfather so long as someone trustworthy was were present for the first several weeks. He would only be helping for a few hours after school and on the weekends so Red volunteered to chaperon when she was off work and indicated she thought Belle would agree to fill in when she couldn't be there. Because the proposal was a logical one, Regina agreed, though she stressed to Red that it was to be a probationary period during which they ascertained whether or not Rumple had an agenda he was working at through Henry.
It was tragic that they even had to go through such elaborate pretenses. That Henry's own grandfather might use him in such a petty way shouldn't even be possible, yet Rumplestiltskin had proven himself quite capable of such loathsome behavior before. For hundreds of years he had worked his agenda through all who served his interest, whether innocent or not, young or old, rich or poor. Rumple was not biased in his chicanery. To him all that mattered was his objective, and to hell with anyone who got in his way. Regina supposed that was where she got it from...well, that and her mother.
With Red's promised support, Regina next reached out to Emma, who also agreed with the added amendment that she or Neal would help keep watch over Rumple. Though Regina was not quite sure as to how much Neal could be depended on where his father was concerned, she took Emma's word that they wouldn't allow anything to happen to Henry at face value. After that, since all relevant parties had been consulted, Regina informed Henry of her decision.
To say he was happy was a sore understatement. He was beyond thrilled not only that his family seemed to be patching up old hurts but that his mother trusted his judgment enough to know he would not be corrupted by his wily grandfather's schemes. While Regina didn't have the heart to tell him that she wouldn't be making amends with Rumple any time soon, the part about her trusting him was true. Jumping into her arms, Henry proceeded to squeeze Regina's waist for all he was worth, just like he was a young child again and she had given him the toy he wanted most for Christmas. The buoyancy of his joy was infectious, lifting her spirits and helping to dispel her worries for at least a moment.
That said, her agreement was wholly dependent upon whether or not Rumple helped her with her current situation without attaching strings to his aid. This was his first test and up until that fit of mischief that had prompted him to try her patience he had been doing rather well.
At her threat though, Rumple's cocky expression staggered and he leaned back, clutching his cane in a death grip. "You were going to agree to that?"
"I was," she replied, brandishing her leverage like a loaded gun, "but now I'm not so certain. It seems as if you're enjoying playing games with me through my son a little too much. And I don't really care if it offends you or hurts you because you're his grandfather, but I won't have him caught between us. Henry is not a pawn on your chessboard, Rumple."
Clearing his throat with wide almost fearful eyes, the Dark One nodded. "No, he isn't. Very well, then, I'll cut to the chase."
Regina gave him a saccharine smile that was dripping with sarcasm. "I would appreciate that very much, thank you."
Almost imperceptibly, Rumple rolled his eyes. His annoyance at her having gained an advantage over him, however small, was showing through such a juvenile tic. It was a small win that made Regina disproportionately pleased.
"As I was saying," he then continued, "I can't say I accept the current theories held in this world because I know very little as fact from experience. What I do know, however, is that such parallel universes do exist."
With narrowed eyes, Regina replied, "If you know so little through experience, how can you be certain of their existence?"
"Sharp as ever," he commented with a proud grin, though it was restrained. "I gained knowledge of them when I took the gifts belonging to a seer I encountered during my early days being the Dark One. I won't go into details, but in accordance with catching glimpses of the future, I also was given brief windows into the present, though it was always different from what I was experiencing in reality. Still, I knew they were real because I could see myself and my other self could see me as well, but there were subtle differences that told me it was not really me but another version of myself. Do you follow me so far?"
In a more overtly infantile reaction of her own, Regina scoffed as if insulted. "Of course. I'm not some simpleton unable to grasp complex concepts. You wouldn't have chosen me to cast your precious curse if I were."
"Very true," Rumple conceded. "In any case, while I could glimpse the future through meditation with the gift, those windows into the alternate present only came to me in dreams. For a while, I thought that's all they were, simple dreams, but when I looked into my memories I realized to my great surprise that they lacked that shimmering foggy nature of dreams that is always present when viewing them with magic, meaning they were not dreams but actual memories of another plane of existence."
"Okay," Regina drawled, shifting her weight to her other leg. "So what does that have to do with me?"
"I believe you're experiencing something very similar to what I did," he said simply.
"But I'm not a seer. How can I see such things if I lack the gift?"
"That I can't explain," Rumple shrugged, "but I would like to suggest that you test your memories to find out for sure whether what you are seeing is real or not."
Seeing as his suggestion made sense, Regina nodded and gave a deep breath, then released it slowly. Alright. I suppose it couldn't hurt." And there's no time like the present, she thought.
Waving her hand, she summoned her magic to search her memories, feeling it begin to swirl around the edges of her mind. It was not unlike the magic used to power a dreamcatcher, but being more direct in nature, such a spell tended to be quite uncomfortable. Ignoring the slightly sharp sensation of magic entering her mind, she commanded it to search for her dream from the night before. It obeyed immediately and within a second, the dream was popping up in her mind's eye.
Like a flood, the vision filled her conscious thought until she was reliving it. There in the near distance she could see her family mausoleum with a crowd gathered around it dressed uniformly in black. Feeling strangely attached yet absent, Regina followed her own movements as she pressed through the mass of dour faced people holding Henry's hand, talked to Emma, and then went inside to stand next Red's casket. With her heart pounding a blistering rhythm in her chest, she then watched Snow break down, felt herself lose control, and then all hell broke loose.
Bursting from the grip of the magic, Regina pitched forward, her breath stolen from her lungs. She'd seen no indication whatsoever it was a dream. "It was like I was really there," she panted. "It was so real. I could feel everything, see everything, smell everything."
"It's as I thought then," Rumple nodded sagely. "What you have been experiencing are not dreams but glimpses of an alternate reality. May I ask what it is you've seen?"
Staggering a bit from her magic exertion, Regina leaned heavily on the counter. Her head fell limply into her hands. "Only terrible things." Clenching her eyes shut, she battled to pull herself together. Out of a sense of respect and fear that still persisted due to the power her former mentor wielded, she didn't want to appear weak in front of him.
When she was recovered enough to straighten up again, Regina caught Rumplestiltskin's eyes. "I've only had three such dreams." Her voice was even deeper than normal, rough with emotion. She wasn't sure why she was sharing this information, particularly when she'd lied about her dreams to Red, having done so out of an irrational need to keep her lover from finding out that there was more than one dream rather than a single recurring one. She'd wanted to keep Red from worrying about her, but where Rumplestiltskin was concerned, her motives for hiding the details of the dreams were even more abundant and well-founded.
Regina was well aware of the Dark One's penchant for keeping score and using what means he had at his disposal to manipulate people, so it was not difficult to predict the valuable information he might glean from what she'd seen. He would learn that not only was she going soft, but that she had developed a vulnerability that left her ripe for attack. The reaction she had at the mausoleum after Red's death only served as evidence of how fragile her hold on redemption was. Surely as clever as Rumple was, he would realize that Red was a target he could strike at in order to disable her, knowing that she was the only person in Storybrooke who knew enough about him to combat him openly. Armed with that knowledge, Red would be in constant danger of landing in the Dark One's crosshairs.
Still, while Regina was aware of that, she felt like she had to tell him. Red was right, after all. She needed to talk to someone about this before it was too late and even though he was admittedly dangerous, Rumple was the only person qualified to both understand her predicament and help her resolve it.
"In the first, I was with Red on the couch," she began, her voice almost far away as if dreamlike in quality. "We were discussing how well Henry was doing in school when she mentioned that she'd come to love him as if he were her own, that he was a part of her pack like I was, and that even though it was already so to her, she wanted to make it official to the world. She proposed and I accepted." Her voice hitched at the memory of watching the joy play all over Red's face when she accepted the proposal.
After Leopold, Regina had never wanted to marry again for obvious reasons. To Regina, such social constructs had lost any positive value. They were a means of control, a man made method to define or restrain a person's sense of worth, but while she had long ago lost her favorable view of the institution, Red did not have such an experience to taint her view of it. Red, unlike Regina, still believed in fairy tale endings even though she had gone through nearly as much hell in her life as Regina had, which was one of many things that made her so special. She had a dogged way of clinging to hope that made her an admittedly fit companion for Snow, a woman whose own relentless optimism had once sickened Regina. Being with Red had shown her the error of the kind of callous dismissal of hope as something that could not be feasibly maintained. Every morning she woke up to the sight of Red's face, she was reminded that hope was real and it was worth holding on to.
But that didn't make it any easier to process what she had seen in that first dream. The day after she'd had it, she sat down and really thought about why her brain might have conjured such a scenario. In examining the evidence, all the times they'd walked by Storybrooke's lone bridal shop began to play through her mind, and with those memories, she gained a new understanding of the look Red would get in her eyes whenever she spotted a particularly beautiful dress. Whenever that happened, Regina wrote off the interest as one of those things a young woman like Red might be prone to display, but with the limited perspective the dream offered, she realized that in those momentary views into Red's most private thoughts, she was seeing a woman no longer in the present with her but had traversed the length and breadth of her imagination to somewhere else far away, a place where hopes and dreams still came true, a place that she would have believed Regina would not want to go with her.
It was with startling clarity that it finally dawned on Regina that Red actually wanted to get married. The thought was initially so abhorrent that she worked late for a whole week to avoid her partner. Her previous experience had all but ruined her where marriage was concerned. Conspiring together, Leopold and her mother had stripped Regina of the vital power of choice, assigning to her a similar value as the breeding stock her father sold to supplement his inherited fortune. In one fell swoop, she lost her freedom, her innocence, and her virtue by marrying a man old enough to be her father, and the subsequent experiences numbed her to the point that she lost the ability to love for a long, long time.
But to Red, marriage was not the symbol of an abusive relationship. Her unblemished heart still viewed things optimistically, so to her marriage would not seem like an imposed definition on her intrinsic value as a woman, but rather an outward expression of what she felt in her heart for the person she loved. Red's desire to marry was not a claim of possession on Regina or an effort to construct yet another prison in which a skittish and broken woman such as she was might be confined; rather it was a public proclamation of her love and a ceremonial representation of her wish that their fortunes and happiness be inextricably and forever intertwined. Red wanted to get married because she believed in what they were building together and that it would last, but also because she trusted Regina implicitly with everything she had to offer.
So while Regina would never be a big fan of marriage, when she looked at things from Red's point of view, she could at least understand enough to begin entertaining the possibility that such a sacrifice was one she was willing to make, if only for Red's sake. After all, how was it fair to deny Red something she desired after she had made sacrifice after sacrifice, even to the point of laying down her own life? What kind of relationship was that? A one sided one, that's what. When thinking about things that way, Regina realized that without even meaning to she had become her own mother, imposing her beliefs on Red just as had been done to her, though to a much less brutally invasive degree. Even so, it gave her enough pause to reconsider her position.
"Well, that's interesting," Rumple commented, drawing Regina out of her own headspace. "What about the second dream?"
Regina looked away with pain evident in her eyes. This dream hadn't made sense until the final nightmare in the series interrupted her sleep. In light of that, however, it became all the more disturbing.
"I was in the hospital. I had blood all over my clothes and I went into a restroom to wash it off. But no matter how hard I scrubbed, it wouldn't come off. Still, I tried and tried until I became so distraught that I lost all sense of time and bearing. Some time after, I went looking for Red but was unable to find her. Finally, I wound up walking down a corridor, and when I rounded the corner, Emma was there, crying and holding her mother in her arms. I couldn't see Snow's face but I could tell something horrible had happened. I opened my mouth to speak but woke up before I could say anything."
"I can understand why that might be disconcerting," Rumple said. "And the last?"
"The last was the worst," Regina stated, shuddering at the thought of replaying the memory for a second time in such a brief period. Instead of torturing herself, she decided to give Rumple a succinct summary. "Red was dead and Henry and I were at my family mausoleum for the funeral. I was standing next to the casket when I just lost it. I started screaming and my magic went haywire. I think I collapsed the building on myself and everyone else in it. It was ghastly."
With a deep breath, Rumple furrowed his brows, grimacing at the description of her dream. "That does sound terrible. May I ask if you had the other two dreams multiple times?"
Regina indulged the curiosity only because she was suddenly so tired all she wanted to do was go home and curl up on the couch until Henry got home. "Yes, I did."
"Very interesting, indeed," Rumple replied, and then began tapping his pursed lips with his index finger while in intense contemplation.
For almost a minute, Regina waited on him to elaborate, but when it appeared he was not soon to do so, she audibly sighed and pinching the bridge of her nose. "As I said earlier, I haven't got all day," she groused, "so tell me what it is you think these 'glimpses' mean, and do so plainly."
Dropping his finger from his lips, Rumple nodded once and then shuffled back behind the counter, laying his cane atop it. After placing his hands over the cane, he said, "As I stated earlier, I believe you were seeing another reality where those things really happened. Why? I can't be absolutely certain, but if I were to wager a guess, I think you've been wrestling with something or several things in your life recently that have triggered these visions. What that is remains for you to discover on your own, but I suggest you do so quickly or else they will continue until eventually driving you into madness."
With frightened eyes, Regina replied, "Do you really think it will go that far?"
Rumple nodded sadly. "Indeed. It almost happened to me. I had to expend considerable effort to expunge myself of that ability, but with the way magic is behaving here, neither of us have access to anything potent enough to block your mind from these visions. Since that is the case, the only recourse you have is to reconcile yourself to what you're struggling with and no one can do that for you."
Straightening, Regina brushed a hand over her clothes and assumed a regal posture. "Very well. Whether or not I consider your advice, thank you all the same." The words tasted just a little bit like crow but she meant them.
Cocking his head to the side, Rumple smiled, a not totally unpleasant expression from the usually slimy man. "You're welcome."
With their business concluded, Regina turned away promptly to leave. She had no more need to be in the presence of one of the three individuals most responsible for her dramatic fall from grace. Being in the Pawn Shop always made her apprehensive, but with so much on her mind, the effect was amplified. She needed to get the hell out of there before a stress-fueled migraine hit her.
Making her way toward the exit, she paused just before grasping the handle. However much she distrusted Rumple and however much bad history there was between them, he had passed his first test. She hoped it could be the beginning of a better life for him but doubted it severely.
Still, since she had herself been given her chance after chance, she felt obligated to at least try one last time with her former teacher. Glancing back at him, she said in parting, "Have a good day, Rumple, and do tell Belle that Red and I said 'hello', won't you?"
He nodded, seeming to understand the tentative olive branch for what it was. "I'll do that."
And with that, Regina walked out of the shop and into the warmth of the sunlight. Rather than alleviate her burdens, what she had learned only left her more conflicted. She hadn't wanted to say anything but Rumple had convinced her that his theory was actually not just a theory but reality. She could feel it in her bones. In the light of that, she already knew why she was having these visions and it was, as Red would say, freaking her out. What she was going to do about it, however, was a whole other problem.