Unhappy -


They have their first proper huge couple blowout and in the end it's nothing to do with anyone else - it's not search fate or karma or past wives or a storybook that ruins them, it's just themselves. It's just her that causes him unhappiness, her bitter words and her stony look that make his jaw clench and his mouth flatten, that cool the love in his eyes and make him a stranger.

And a stranger he is indeed, in her anger, a self-made shattered sight that makes her doubt him, dissect him. Not hate for such a love, not yet, never so easily, she never did hate where she loves easily, but in her rage he is a stranger before her and it's the thought of the aftermath that he can, too, make her unhappy, just by being himself.

As anyone could.

Robin is moved in, already, but what does he know of sleeping on couches? What does she? Is it a thing he ever need learn? (Is it a thing New York never required?) In any case he comes to bed late, no doubt staring long into her fireplace in a way that irritates her while she sits upstairs, lost in glass and the reflection of herself.

It makes her unhappy to have him in her room, in her bed, in a bed that was so recently joyfully theirs but is now in annoyance only hers. It's her space, and she feels smothered as Snow White once smothered her, because she never learned to deal with such things but by running away, or by pushing it down, and she will always love him but right now she could happily strangle him.

(She never could.)

Dinner had been awkward, the eyes of two children and unhappy chemistry in the air, and Robin is not a good liar, and that irritates her too.

Only the unhappy worry for happiness, she knows, and worrying for it in turn makes them unhappier. She'd hoped this tenor of thoughts firmly behind her, and yet -

She'd learned to love him ('learning', little learning was required she was such a prodigy, for him) for a good many reasons but most seductive among them the easy way she made him happy, the way in turn he made her so.

It is a soft, rocking blow to know this, too, is inconstant.

The thing is, she thinks, a night call from Snow and then a follow up from Emma sending her scrambling into clothes and muttering for Storybrooke as a trouble magnet, the thing is, she thinks, as Robin dresses silently, as she pauses about to deny him but watches knife and bow find their readied spaces and pauses, sticks her head around Henry's door and asks if he'll be alright with Roland for a few hours, the thing is that she doesn't actually need Robin to make her happy.

Happiness is a goal she's chased her entire adult life but with him it was as easy as believing, seductively so, but even driving awkward in still-strained silence it's better to have him there, together. That's enough, and it softens the clip from her tone and the distance from her glare, just to think it enough, and far more than enough.

They leap from the car almost before she's parked it, and though Robin is more drawn than usual he gravitates towards her still, around the hood, a reassuring half-step behind her as they hurry to Snow's aid.

Only the unhappy worry for happiness, and she's finding her way to more important things - she's not that person, anymore.

She's not unhappy.