OQ prompt: Set right after the season 3 finale, while being isolated from everyone and Robin picking Marian, Regina finds out that she is very ill, and she hides it from everyone…you can pick what happens after that
Combining with bits of this prompt: little prompt? if that's cool :) regina leaves the diner, her heart literally starts breaking (like if you pull it out it's cracked). Robin feels it but marion won't let him leave. henry & tink hurry after regina and find her with her heart in her hand, unconscious from pain, and bring her and the heart back for help :)
The door to the diner slams shut as Robin runs after her, grabs her elbow, stops her flight.
She yanks her arm free. "Steal away, thief, back to your little family."
"Regina, these past few weeks—"
"Have been a joke. A cruel, ironic joke. It was nothing. I should be used to that by now."
"You were not nothing to me, Regina. You are not nothing."
She laughs at him, a sickly, twisted thing. "Oh, Robin, you act as though it matters."
He opens his mouth to answer, and some equally sickly, twisted part of Regina hopes he'll argue back, keep arguing, fight her, but then his wife and son join them outside.
Roland greets her.
And everything goes to hell.
"You let our child near that woman?"
"Marian, wait, I can explain. Regina isn't like that anymore. She's changed."
"Regina?" she screeches, "She's a monster!"
"Marian—" Robin grabs Regina's wrist, keeps her there as he turns to his wife to defend his (now ex, Regina supplies in her mind) girlfriend. But Regina thinks she might be able to live with this, letting him go, letting him be happy with the love of his life. It's enough of a gift, these past few weeks, the way he's shown her that he believes she can be something more, something better than the monster. If that's all she gets, Robin defending her and then walking away, she'll live. (She'll keep breathing. She's not entirely sure she'll live.)
"She was about to have me executed!" she cries.
And there Robin's defense ends in speechlessness.
Horror.
Of course.
Inescapably a monster.
She should've known.
And so she does what she always has, what Zelena knew and Tinkerbell knew and she even knew herself when she cast a curse to get away from her old world. She runs.
—
Regina hides out in her house for a week. She talks to Henry on the phone. No one else. Learns that Snow has taken over her job, by the town's orders.
She lets nobody into her home.
Ten days in and she needs groceries, so she slides into the highest, pointiest black heels she can find, wraps a black scarf around her neck and a black coat over her black suit, and hopes that everyone, in fear of her, will give her a wide berth as she buys the smallest amount of staples she can manage and gets back home.
Her magic won't let her create food right now. It won't let her do anything. She's terrified, and it's essential nobody know.
Her plan fails spectacularly, because outside the store is an ice cream truck, and outside that truck are Roland, Robin, and Marian.
She turns her gaze away, tries to ignore them, but then the three of them are backing away in fear of someone, Robin holding his son to his chest protectively.
The Snow Queen bends out of the truck window, snarling. Reaches a hand to touch that perfect little boy.
Regina's light magic springs to life as she runs towards them, focuses on that hand, and a shimmering white wall protects the boy, knocks the woman back. It had not worked in weeks. None of her magic had.
The Snow Queen lunges again, and this time Regina's purple magic flares, throwing her back before the woman vanishes in a cloud of pale blue.
Regina runs to them, gasping from the effort of so much magic when she hasn't used any since Zelena. "Is he okay?"
"Fine," Robin answers, checking his boy up and down to make sure.
And then Roland is tearing up and burying his face in Regina's legs, and she's squatting down to hug him. "You're okay. You're safe," she soothes. "Remember, my magic can protect you."
"I was sc-sc-scared," he cries. Regina lifts him without a second thought, bouncing him in her arms.
"It's okay to be scared. But you're okay. Shhhh." He hiccoughs, and his sobs still. "Can I hand you back to your daddy?"
"O-okay," Roland mumbles.
Regina stiffens her shoulders in preparation for it, does her best to avoid any contact with Robin's hands or arms. Manages it.
"Thank you, Regina, for saving him."
She sighs. As if there was ever a way that she wouldn't have. "Of course."
Marian speaks. Finally. "Thank you, Your Majesty."
Regina gives her a terse smile that is not at all a smile. "I prefer Regina."
Turns.
Walks away.
—
Her chest physically aches a little, unpleasantly. Has since she restrained the Snow Queen.
At first, Regina passes it off as a side effect of changing weather and too much liquor after the exact sort of meeting she'd been wanting to avoid. Her forehead burns, and she sleeps (tosses and turns) under a second comforter that hasn't come out of her closet yet. It's the winter that's sweeping through the town, she tells herself, confusing her body when it expects the first whispers of spring and not the sub-freezing, damp cold that's taken over now, two weeks past Elsa's arrival.
(Not that she's left the house more than a handful of times in all of those days.)
So when she fishes out the thermometer she last used when Henry had the flu a few months before Emma Swan came to town, she expects a solid 98.6F, or 99F at worst. A beep alerts her to check, and she finds she can no longer deny that something is wrong. 101F, it says.
She downs a few tylenol and a mug of tea, and at Henry's next visit, when he asks about her red face and the way she's leaning against the doorway as if standing requires too much effort, she tells him it's just because she's been out to run an errand, and the wind has made her face raw.
But when she checks her temperature again after he goes to bed, her head pounding, her lips dry and cracked, the thermometer reads 102F.
She swallows another couple of tylenol, and crawls in to bed, shaky and exhausted.
Perhaps her body is doing what her heart has done in the wake of Marian's return—ignoring her wishes to shut it down, and working even harder instead.
—
She sends Henry back to Emma in the morning with the excuse of having work to get done. It doesn't fool the blonde, who eyes her suspiciously, worried perhaps that she's about to do something dangerous.
"I have the flu, Ms. Swan," she'd told Emma to pacify her, though when she dressed this morning there was a red mark in the center of her chest, int he vague shape of her heart, and she's almost certain that's not a common symptom of influenza.
"Call if you…need anything," Emma trips over the words, and takes Henry away.
Once she closes the door on them, Regina stumbles back, delirious and feverish, throws back another few pills, though they've done nothing for her so far. Sheds her clothes, collapses into bed.
She falls into fitful sleep, and dreams of tender touches and warm skin and breathless kisses, and when she wakes they are gone. And it is nighttime again.
She stumbles out of bed, shivering, her skin burning up, throws water on her face, manages to drink a little of it as well. She thinks to use magic, just to give her a little energy boost while she gets cleaned up, tries to figure out what's going on, but she's been standing for too long, and she tells herself she's going to sit on the ground, leave the tap running for the soothing sound and lean against the wall for just a moment.
A moment becomes several, and she's fading, falling asleep, her body aching and burning up and cold all at once. The world goes fuzzy as she blinks. Then black.
—
Robin pounds his fists on Regina's door for a fifth time. He pauses to listen and observe, sees no lights on, but he can hear water running, and when he goes around to the side of the house he can tell it's from her room, gushing and loud.
He almost leaves, as she's clearly telling him to do in ignoring his knocks, but something in his chest stops him, a clenching, burning sensation that has his legs carrying him to the back door, knocking again, then picking the lock easily and slipping inside, calling her name tentatively.
No answer.
He tries again. "Regina? Henry called me because he was worried about you."
Nothing.
He moves to the bottom of the stairs, about to call again, when he hears that the water is still running, gurgling, splashing noises loud even at this distance…that isn't right.
He climbs the stairs, slowly at first, then half-running by the top.
The door to Regina's room is open. And he can see her. Passed out on the floor, her face red, her breaths quick, eyes shut.
"Regina!" He runs and kneels beside her, and the ground wets his knees—her sink has overflowed all over her tile and onto the carpet just outside her bathroom, which is where she has collapsed.
"Regina, wake up, come on!"
But she doesn't, doesn't even stir. He cradles her face, and her skin burns beneath his.
"Hold on," he gasps to her, well aware that she cannot hear, and then he runs to the phone on her bedside table, strains to remember the numbers Snow told him to push if there were an emergency.
Each ring is like a twist of the knife in his stomach. David picks up on the third.
"Regina?"
"It's Robin."
"Oh, err—"
"She's unconscious." He bites back a sob, the guilt, she did this because of him, because of them, though making it that simple seems to ignore the rest of her pain, and loss. She willfully ignored something, didn't take care of herself. He forces the words out, a few at a time. "She has a pretty significant fever, and she must've passed out a while ago because her tap was on and her bathroom's flooded."
"God," the man gasps. He calls "Snow! Emma!" where he is. "I'll come get you; we'll take her to the hospital."
"Quickly," Robin begs.
"She'll be okay. She's a fighter."
Robin hangs up, runs back to her, loathe to leave her alone. Lifts her into his arms, peels off her wet sweater and replaces it with his dry one.
She may be a fighter, but being too much of one is what got her in this current predicament, and it's not something he's certain will save her.
—
They can't find anything wrong with her, Dr. Whale tells him. But they hook her up to machines, give her medicine for the fever that brings it down to safer levels, though doesn't erase it completely, get her rehydrated and warm.
Henry brings Gold.
Somehow, the boy managed to be convincing, and his deal was, "You come help her. Now."
Her magic did it, he tells them as his magic crawls over her body. It was trying too hard to reconcile light and dark, and that led to her symptoms, to her body working too hard. Broke a rift in her heart, one that this world's medicine cannot find or heal.
"But you can help her, right?" Henry pleads his grandfather.
"I can try," Gold replies, "but it isn't more magic she needs."
"What is it?" Robin begs, holding one of her hands between his.
"I think you know."
—
So Robin stays, all night, holds one of her hands while Henry holds the other, grateful her son lets him.
For some of the night they just wait, silent and worried and hoping.
But for most of it, they talk.
Henry tells her stories of them. Happy ones from when he was a laughing toddler, and sadder ones too, reminds her that he has forgiven her, that he loves her, that she knows he does. That she's strong now, so strong and loving. Promises that their past is part of them, but it doesn't mean there aren't more good times to come.
When the boy grows quiet, Robin takes his turn. Laughs a little tearfully at all the silly, witty arguments they had in the Enchanted Forest, says he misses holding her, has loved her for a long time, wants to be with her. But more than that he wants her to be happy. To know that she needn't have a heart as pure as snow for it to be worth loving, and worth being loved by.
Her fever breaks.
Her hands squeeze theirs.
Half an hour before dawn, she opens her eyes.
Henry climbs halfway onto her hospital bed to give her a hug, and Robin kisses the back of her hand.
And she begins to heal.