Mildly spoilery for S4, based on a BTS photo of Regina. I apologize for the angst of this one. It hurts.
Long strides, back straight, balanced on her heels, she will look poised to anyone who watches her walk away (She doesn't. Not to him, she doesn't. He knows her too well.) Her hands may one day have balled into fists, but she cannot now force them to do anything but hang limply at her sides, the hands that had tugged at his waist minutes before everything turned to ashes, the hands he'd cradled against his chest as he said "use mine for the both of us", the hands that waved off the plaintive cries of his wife as Regina sent her to her death. The hands he will never bear to touch again, they feel like weights that pull and pull until her shoulders slump forward.
She watches her feet take each step, and for a moment she hates her body. This worthless, mortal, human form that holds nothing but a dark and worthless heart and a tortured soul that has lost, has destroyed its mate.
He'd followed her out, and for a moment some treacherous part of her soul had ignited with hope, but she hates that part of her even more than she hates the darkness. That part of her is the reason she let this thing between them happen in the first place, it's the reason she always ends up heartbroken in the end. She should never have tried.
Her chin wobbles and she clamps her teeth shut to stop it, a monster, his wife had called her, she'd been right, and monsters do not cry. Self pity is unacceptable, self pity will not do, this is what she deserves, watching Marian grab Roland as if he needs protection from Regina, listening to an expression of the horror everyone else in Storybrooke must have been feeling for weeks, that someone so good could possibly be involved with someone like her. She would snatch her own son away from herself if she were not so selfish.
When she reaches her mansion (not home, home implies love and family, things she was never meant for) she allows herself a moment, just a moment, to place a flat palm on the wall of her foyer and breathe. A moment becomes two, three, ten, an hour, minutes pass as she rests her forehead against the cold wall and tries to find that within her, cold and flat and emptiness, but it filled up long ago.
An hour becomes two before the anger breaks her, anger at her life, at him, she loves him, and he had promised her—but most of all anger at herself for letting this happen. For making this happen she corrects herself. She's done with all of it, loving and trusting and believing because I just never thought I'd have this, and she doesn't , didn't, she never should have presumed.
She takes determined steps up the stairs, rips off her heels, scarf, and jacket, considers throwing them to the ground, out the window, puts them away angrily instead. Her nightly routine, alone, she has done this for thirty years, and she will do it for thirty more, or however long she has left to suffer in this miserable world, because no matter how much it beats her down, no matter how many times she comes to the brink of falling she always picks herself back up because that same treacherous and hateful part of her that believed (believes, God, how can it, but it does) in love desires to live.
Regina pushes her bedroom door open, pulls out her earrings, flips the light switch angrily, and that's when she sees them, and remembers, the wrinkled, rumpled sheets and a pair of indented feather pillows. We'll get them later he'd said as he pressed a kiss to the back of her neck. She hadn't needed to turn to see it, but there it was when she did, his goofy grin and exaggerated wink, and her scowl had lasted for perhaps a second before it, too, melted into a grin.
Regina rips the sheets off of the bed angrily, nearly chokes on the scent of pine and damp, lifts her right hand with a ball of fire burning at its center, and incinerates the lot of them. She will sleep elsewhere tonight. (She will not sleep tonight.) She must sleep tonight. This is what she deserves, what always happens, what should happen, what was meant to happen. There should be nothing to upset her.
(There is everything to upset her. She is devastated.)