Everyday Magic

Robin weeps when Regina shifts their newborn daughter into his arms.

Tears stream down his face, their little girl squirming as he presses his lips to her forehead, and then to Regina's.

She reaches up a hand to wipe away his tears, smiling herself, and she can't resist adding, "I thought I was getting one baby today. Not two."

Robin laughs, and she laughs, and if she's crying a little bit, too, as he crawls onto the bed beside her and bumps his head into hers, both of them staring at this perfect child they made, well, she's never been able to keep her emotions in control around such beautiful everyday magic.

OQ + Freedom

She should feel trapped, Regina thinks as her high heeled boots fall heavily against the wet dirt. She should feel as though some greater power is forcing her every step, as though to turn back would be to defy some universal law that makes Snow and Charming cry "I will find you!". She should feel obligated to do this, should be resenting the fact people think some ridiculous thing called destiny can know what she feels in her heart.

But somehow that last step, the stumbling one she takes towards her soul mate as her fingers curl around his jacket and she crashes his lips onto hers, feels like her first step towards freedom.

Lips

Regina sometimes wonders if her lips are poison. It would explain it, after all—how they've destroyed everything they've ever touched.

She's watching him now, as he strolls down Main Street alone, hands in pockets, unaware of the way her eyes follow him from inside the diner, and wonders if Robin regrets it now, that she has kissed him.

He must.

(He came to her house two nights ago, said I want you and I love you and several other things she didn't, doesn't believe.)

A frantic cry sounds beside her, She's here! On Main Street!, and everyone in the diner stands and runs outside. She almost doesn't follow them, but then she thinks of Robin, ahead of this group and unaware, alone, or perhaps with Roland behind him, and she's sprinting.

When she makes it past the crowd, at first she thinks it must be a statue, the blue-grey, shimmery form.

But it isn't.

It's Robin, frozen.

The Snow Queen.

She spins around, calling Roland's name, but he's nowhere to be seen, and the Snow Queen has a vein of blue magic suspended over his head, the shape of a hammer, about to smash the living, breathing father who she's rendered into a mere ice sculpture.

Regina does not even stop to consider the decision, shoves the dwarves in front of her out of her way, grasps his freezing shoulders, takes a leap of faith.

Presses her red lips to his frozen ones, seconds before the magic would have crushed him.

Yanks him to the side, scrunches her eyes closed, hopes against all hope that his feelings for her still exist as she knows hers do for him, that they both believe in this magic enough for it to work, because if they don't he'll shatter on the ground as surely as he would have under the Snow Queen's magic.

His body, warm and well again, cushions her fall.

And her lips must mean something, she thinks as he leverages his palms against the ground so that he can kiss her some more, gasps her name over and over like a prayer. They saved him.

"What if I love you, and you die? What else do I have to live for?"

prompted by thiefqueeen on tumblr

I'm taking the sentiment from your quote, and incorporating parts of it. This is a follow up toSpilled Coffee.

Robin says I love you first.

Well, Robin says it, and Regina doesn't say it back.

He doesn't mind at first, that she isn't ready. As long as she keeps smiling and squeezing his wrist at the words whispered in her ear as she pours them both mugs of steaming coffee, keeps nestling closer to him when she hears them as she wakes, keeps gasping out his name when he pants them as he comes. I love you.

But then weeks stretch into months, four of them, and even though he knows she's as in this as he is, even though it's in every touch and smile, in the way they have both grown to love each others' children, he wouldn't mind hearing it. He tries to keep himself from thinking about it for now, doesn't mean to push her.

It's during a fight, their worst yet, that it comes spilling from his lips. They were discussing it calmly at first, whether to keep his place or hers, but they both live in the homes they once shared with Daniel and Marian, and it ran away with them and turned nasty. Robin thinks Regina might have a valid point—Henry has memories of Daniel in this house, and Roland's too young to know Marian in any way but through stories.

But her insistence and continuing silence stings, more than he'd like to admit, and words she doesn't deserve tumble between them. "Are you going to spend the rest of your life living in the past, or will you someday find the guts to tell me how we both know you feel?"

Her face hardens, but he doesn't miss the way her lip trembles as she opens her door, cries Get out! and slams the door in his face.

His hands ball into fists, and he stomps down two flights of stairs, one away from the ground floor of her apartment building, before he's spinning and hurrying back up.

She opens on the third knock, eyes red, mascara smudged, tears running down her cheeks.

"I'm so sorry," he says, voice breaking, and then she's in his arms, her face buried in his neck, sobs wracking her body.

In all their time together he's never seen her cry like this. "I never meant to imply—" he lets her weight rest on him, turns them and shuts the door, "your memories of him are so important to both of you, and I would never want to—"

"I know. It isn't that," she manages, fingers digging into his shoulders.

"Then what…" He guides her to sit on the leather couch just inside the entry, then drops down beside her, a hand threading through her hair.

"If I say it, that makes it real."

He taps her cheek gently with one thumb. "If you say what?"

"If I tell you I love you, I can't go back, and what if I l-lose you and then I'm all a-alone again," she breaks into sobs again, and he's dragging her to him, halfway onto his lap as her hands scrabble to hold onto his shirt.

He kisses her forehead, the top of her cheekbone, behind her ear. He knows better than to promise he'll never leave—they both do—but they also both know something else, and that is what he reminds her. "You know as well as I do that love is worth the risk of pain."

She nods weakly.

Eventually, her breathing evens out, and her head stays on his chest, rising and falling with his lungs. "Let's get a new place," she suggests softly, her voice rough. "New memories. There isn't really enough room for all four of us at either of our apartments, anyway."

"You're sure?"

She sighs, nods, and he feels her smile against his skin before she pulls back and holds his jaw in her hands. "I do love you."

His stomach does cartwheels. Several of them. "I know." He runs the pad of his pointer finger down the vein in her forehead. "I love you, too."

Imagining the future

(anonymous prompt)

It should've happened like this.

Prince Neal turns two months old today, and Snow sees it as a reason to celebrate. "With the family," she says, avoiding the mentions of how they've missed so many milestones, those little jabs Regina knows aren't meant to reprimand, but still have her feeling like she gets invited just to be scorned. "We haven't had the chance to celebrate these things for so long," Snow says, and however unfair it might be, Regina hears an if it weren't for my evil step-mother tacked onto the words and it makes her want to avoid these little family gatherings at all costs.

But somehow today Snow has reigned it in, and Regina's feeling generous, Robin's hand splayed on the small of her back, so she says she'll come.

"Both of you," Snow adds with a firm smile at Robin.

To Snow, David, Emma, and Henry, it would have been an intriguing, though beautiful, sight, Robin dropping a kiss behind Regina's ear and whispering something that colored her face with a gentle blush and had her turning her face to his in shock, her fingers curling around his bicep.

("I love you," he'd breathed in her ear, the first time in so many words, and then, "you'll say it when you're ready. I just want you to know.")

But it really happened like this.

She runs from him, after he has realized that he put his feelings for Marian to rest years ago, after he has come to her and pleaded for a second chance.

And one day, they literally run into each other,both of them out for solitary walks in the forest, and as she lifts him from the ground and they exchange awkward words she suddenly halts, starts to back away, asks why he bothers.

And his words cannot be held in any longer.

"Because I was falling in love with you! Because I am in love with you!"

There is a shocked pause, and at its end she is in his arms as he cries into her shoulder and digs his fingers into her back to bring her closer, and she finds she feels brave enough to accept her future in all its vulnerability and possibility and beauty, and whisper it back. I love you.