In which Robin is Regina's favorite pillow. Based on a tumblr post by il-etait-une-fois-nos-reves. Intended to potentially have happened in canon or in any au world you want.

Robin laughs, the first time it happens, before he remembers that his stomach shaking with laughter will probably wake Regina up. And so he twists and turns and contorts his body until he can put his mug of quickly cooling coffee on a coaster, manages to bump only one of his elbows into her ear (Shit, he yelps, did that wake her? It did not. And fuck, he breathes. Well, neither did that. Tired, apparently. She's no deep sleeper.) He settles back on the sofa cushions, her head in his lap.

When she wakes half an hour later, it's with a sleepy blink and then a blushing "Sorry," as she shakes her head at herself, scoots a foot or two away on the couch, "why didn't you wake me?"

He smirks at her, raises an eyebrow, reaches to push a clutch of hair behind her shoulder. And then she's smiling back, though she couldn't say why (she could; he's ridiculous and a little bit wonderful). He slides an arm around her shoulders, encourages her to rest against him once more. She goes willingly.

…

And when they're in bed (or on the couch, or in front of the fireplace, or that one time against the kitchen wall—an early morning rendezvous Robin only brings up when he wants a petulant shove to his shoulders and a badly hidden smirk), when they're exhausted and sated and still breathing a little heavily, she always wedges an ankle between his and nestles her head on his chest.

Thinking his slightly sweaty chest might make a much poorer resting place than the fluffy down pillows she has en masse on her bed, he once tries to place one on his stomach before she lays her head there. She pushes his hand away with a grumbling "Don't get in my way."

"It's your favorite pillow."

She shakes her head into his skin in disagreement, slides an arm around his stomach, fingers coasting over his ribs.

"All right," he allows, a bit perplexed as he presses a kiss in her hair, adds a teasing, "I wouldn't dream of it."

(She grins. Perhaps he's her favorite pillow now.)

…

She barges into their room one night, anger battling indifference in her set shoulders and clenched jaw and the way she yanks out her favorite earrings and casts them carelessly onto the dresser (pain beneath all of it; he can always tell.) He sits up in bed. "Are you all right?"

Her eyes flash to his.

And collapse. She shakes her head.

Robin fixes the pillows on her side of the bed with a dull twack and pats them. "Come here?" (A question. Sometimes she needs him, and sometimes she needs space.)

She hesitates for barely a minute, then trips towards the bed, leaving her heels behind. She slides palms onto the duvet, bypasses the offered seat and lands right in his arms, her head on his neck.

(Later she will tell him that as she picked the boys up from school there was a group of mothers who flinched when she took Roland's hand. She will not say that it makes her feel unworthy as a parent, that she worries sometimes it will make Roland afraid of her, that perhaps he should be. Robin understands these things, anyway.)

Those soft eyes, her breath on his neck, her hands twisting in his shirt, hold me, that's what they say. She's just too afraid to ask. (He understands that, too.) And he holds her. He thinks that for too much of her life, there's been nothing real there to catch her when she falls. The soft creases of a pillow, 80% air, that's all there's ever been.

"You're here," she breathes, and he loves the wonder in her voice, and hates it, tugs her closer.

"Of course."