Regina hadn't gotten much sleep the night before. She'd been thinking about Hansel and Gretel and their refusal to move in with her and abandon their father. The more she dwelled on it, the angrier she became.
It wasn't that she'd wanted to think of such unpleasantness. It was that the memory had flitted into her head without a proper invitation. Once there, it refused to leave. She couldn't seize it, stuff it in her oven, and burn it to a crisp.
Regina had heard of some punk reindeer whose nose glowed red—whether from lying or rage, she wasn't sure. What she did know was she'd been so incensed last night that she'd felt like her nose was glowing.
Once she thought of Hansel and Gretel, next thing she knew, her mind switchbladed to include Owen's brutal rejection. Then Snow White leading Henry to discover Regina was the Evil Queen the Grimms Brothers had tooted about (though they'd thought she gave birth to that dolt—ha!) and betray her by running off to his birth mom like some insipid sap obsessed with blood rather than the woman who changed his stinky diapers with her bare hands.
She'd bet anything Emma hadn't changed a single diaper in prison. Not even the first, which according to what Whale had told her when she was trying to eat, they are tarry. Couldn't he have kept that to himself? No wonder he had such weird luck with women. Regina didn't judge Ruby for not wanting to date him. Regina wouldn't have minded learning more about newborns than she technically needed to know, but she didn't appreciate having her meal ruined.
Regina sneered sinisterly at her lawn gnome that had once been an opposer. Gnome, dwarf, hobbit, she neither knew what it used to be nor cared.
She hoped her rotten attitude would be infectious. Marching up to her car with a scowl doomed to wipe out an entire population, she wished her cleaning lady was here. Regina would have loved to berate Joanna for positioning her pillow incorrectly on her bedspread—even though the affable and sweet woman hadn't. The thought of Joanna stuttering out an apology morphed the Evil Queen's scowl into a smirk.
Dropping into the driver's seat, Regina proceeded to buckle up then evade her property. She preferred teleporting with magic to the gas-burner, but she had to admit driving gave her more time to calm down than magical teleporting.
Her teenage self and the twenty-year-old who'd so naively and purely loved Daniel had preferred making horses run wildly beneath her when she was in a nasty mood but that'd always had the potential drawback of being scraped off the horse with one of Cora's invisible spells when Regina had gone to an area that was "too far from home". The barrier had been maybe twenty miles from the heart of Cora's home. Each time Regina hit the barrier, fury siphoned from her like flashing steel flecks.
Twenty years old and trapped like a penned horse. She'd often felt less like Cora's daughter and more like her pet. At seven, she'd been convinced she was adopted. It had been Henry, her father, who had helped her child brain dismiss that notion. In spite of Cora treating her like a parrot, she had given birth to Regina.
Regina was so full of hatred at every human in the world except Daniel and her father, both dead. A part of her cared about her adopted son, but as she drove through Storybrooke's streets, she had to admit to herself he was more of a parrot than a person. She was beyond livid that he'd found his birth mother and that she'd broken the curse. Regina's parrot had been the one who had pecked to destroy Regina's flawless reign, not the daughter of True Love. The Evil Queen was reeking with remorse over her shiny idea to adopt. Purely thanks to that insignificant hole in her heart and the fact Jiminy Cricket (of all saps) had led her to realize sixty seconds of Owen had made her happy.
Did she learn nothing? She'd been desperate to keep Owen—so desperate that she'd poisoned him against her. Obviously, the tradition would continue with her adopted son. She couldn't trust children not to turn on her. Only Daniel and her father had seen her at her worst (of course, that had been a lot tamer when Daniel was alive) and still loved her.
She didn't like the saying, "You don't deserve me at my best if you can't love me at my worst," because it had nothing to do with her. The reality was her evil side arose from the hole in her heart watching her mother murder someone who loved her wholesomely. The pain that haunted her, the bond that couldn't heal.
She could've had love again. Tinker Bell had offered it to her. But she hadn't wanted "someone to love me at my worst". She'd wanted Daniel. Alive.
It was why she loathed Snow.
She didn't feel half as lonely for her father as she did for Daniel. Though she certainly missed him and the hole in her heart had swelled a bit. It felt difficult to be alive without Daniel. Like being a slave.
Snow's father had only wanted to marry her to give his daughter a mother, for Pete's sake. She hated him more than anyone except her mother, though she pretended Snow was Undesirable Number One.
As she entered the main road of Storybrooke, Regina got a whiff of something that set her senses aflame. She changed direction and drove to the asylum.
Belle's distinctive scent hung like a red painting of betrayal. Regina's eyes bulged like a toad's when she stepped out of her vehicle.
"Nurse Ratchet," she spat as she wrenched open the door and met the gaze of the woman flipping through a horror magazine at the reception desk. The pale woman met her dagger-infused gaze without flinching, almost carelessly indifferent. "Has she had a visitor?"
The creepy eyes dropped to the magazine. Without really looking, Regina accidentally noticed she was reading an article of "amusing" things to do to a dead body. Her lipstick-smeared lips puckered. No longer giving Regina her facial attention, she murmured, "Yes. And she is gone."
Regina screamed as if someone had flayed her with a burning iron. "Gone?" she repeated, her chin wobbling like rubber. "Who did it?" Mouth drying, she had a moisture vacuum draining her of hydration. "Was it Gold?"
Nurse Ratchet pressed her long red fingernails to the page, keeping her spot with the tip of her forefinger's nail. She moved her face to stare at Regina's wrists as if she wanted to chop them off and hang them from the wall. "Not the Dark Lord. A handsome one. Mad as a Hatter is what they say." She studied Regina's wrists a bit longer, scanning them as if measuring them. At last, she appeared to deduce they weren't long enough because she lost interest and resumed her reading.
Regina's fist slammed on the desk. "Jefferson!" she roared, merging into a lioness. "The deadbeat with a deference problem. What a baby." Crossing her arms over her chest, she wasted precious moments fuming.
When she stopped, it was because confusion lapped at her. "Wait," she muttered to herself, pursing her lips. "If Jefferson let her out, why am I alive? Why didn't her lover kill me?"
She neither knew nor cared what had become of Grace after she'd tricked Jefferson into abandoning her in the Enchanted Forest. While he'd been trapped in Wonderland and slowly earned the nickname The Mad Hatter. Plainly, the child had survived, though she'd missed her father. Regina would have felt no remorse if she'd learned the brat had died. After all, it was her own selfishness that would have caused the child's death.
No, what concerned the Evil Queen-turned-small-town-mayor was her own life and the eerie fact Rumple hadn't done her in for enslaving Belle. And lying about her committing suicide.
Her blood formed sheets of ice as her imagination burdened her with fantasies of Rumplestiltskin's gruesome plans. Pain was cracking her heart.
Someone grabbed her forearm. "Your Highness." A medallion greeted her palm. Then it was gone.
Her hand felt odd. As if it burned painlessly. A portion of it was dead. She brought her palm up. Stared silently at the red mark. Recognition made her dizzy. "You," she snarled, meaning Rumplestiltskin. But looking up, it wasn't Rumple's snakelike eyes that greeted her. Scrunching her face with disgust, she growled, "You snake."
Jefferson chuckled in such a diabolical way it was a wonder he didn't own a moustache to twirl. "And what are you?" He grimaced and smiled triumphantly at the same time. "Is a demon in the place to judge a snake?"
"You…do not have the moral high ground," she insisted scathingly. "You filthy creature abandoned," she gritted her teeth and leered maliciously, "your daughter," her eyes were coolly sneering, "to flirt with my mother."
She got exactly the reaction she'd hoped for. Wrenching his head back as if she'd lassoed his neck and yanked it back, remorse and shame consumed Jefferson's beautiful face. He was crushed and hating himself.
"I never should have helped you," he whined sorrowfully. Eyes glazed, he stared right through her. Which partially irritated her because she knew she was attractive and worthy of a man's full attention. "Grace was right."
Saucily, Regina retorted, "But if you hadn't, I would've ripped your heart out and crushed it. Or," she rubbed her eyelid, "if I'd been feeling frisky, I would've ripped your daughter's heart out, crushed it in front of you, then forced you to eat it."
Patting her shoulder, Jefferson mused, swinging the medallion string around his finger, "Thank you for reminding me I was justified in what I just did. The world is better off if the Qui Shen removes your soul" Then he strolled off, whistling. A dwarf had taken over his body, one who had finished his work and was heading home.
"Come back here!" she barked. "I am not done with you!" But he was gone, and no amount of snarling would bring him back for her to torment.
The cold-hearted queen/mayor studied the mark on her palm with self-centered disgust. It always amused her when she was cruel to people who'd done nothing to her—she had that in common with stalkers and maybe psychopaths. In fact, she was a psychopath.
But she absolutely despised it when someone else spun a noose around her throat. It made her seethe. She never considered it "retribution" but rather "an action taken only by the most mentally ill."
She wished she were in Wonderland, whacking off the Mad Hatter's head with a nice, firm axe. After she'd dismantled the head, she would love to juggle it. Snottily refusing to return the head to his body, she'd enjoy his discomfort at eyeing his headless body from several yards away. All while smirking haughtily into his stupid face.
She didn't have her magic back as strongly as she wished, but her wayward defense—it had been nearly thirty godawful years without it. Besides, Rumple had helped her get her mental mindset back, but she still found she lost power easily due to the years of not practicing. It had taken her time to build her strength up, tons of practice. No matter how hard she tried in this land, she currently could only do one powerful spell or five minor spells a day. She had attempted to push herself to no avail.
So she could hold fire in her hands five time in one day or use her magic to slam someone against a building and kill them. Decisions decisions. It usually was the fire, for she felt naked without being able to conjure that up. Before her Storybrooke days, she'd held fire in her hands roughly twenty times a day. Getting her magic returned to her was bringing that desire surging to her chest.
She was highly depressed, but somehow, holding fire in her hands always drenched her in a semblance of bliss. It wasn't that she'd forget about Daniel…it was about power. She'd felt powerless when her mother had pretended to be welcoming Daniel only to crush his heart whippet-fast. With the fire, she felt powerful and like nobody could take that away from her.
Chest heaving from rage, she was sharply aware that though fireballs were her thing, she'd rather hurl butcher knives at Jefferson than fire. Or perhaps arrows with horribly pointy ends. A flesh-eating virus coated on the tips…
Leaving the asylum, Regina held her palm at an angle to avoid notice. In sync with her sour mood, Jefferson was waiting, a crooked smile on his lips.
Cheerfully, he asked, "How does it feel to know the Qui Shen is going to suck your soul out and remove that ghastly personality so no one else will witness that destructive thing?"
She used her elbow to jab him in the ribs as she strutted past. The man ought to be thoroughly ashamed of himself, not hulking about like…a Myrddraal.
She hissed, "Filthy, ungrateful fool." If they were in the Enchanted Forest, she'd turn him into a lawn gnome. Maybe she'd forfeit her fireballs tomorrow to personally see that the deed was done. After all, she didn't have long left before she was doomed.
She flounced off to rub Rumple's nose in that his maid was no longer safe from her fangs. Then she'd go to Snow and Charming and—ick—Emma—the thing they had to have adult relations to create, blech—and beseech their pathetic heroism to help her. The dumb saps were no less naïve than Jefferson. She was sure she could gaslight them into helping her skirt out of the Wraith's predicament.
After all, what were heroes for if not to help damsels in distress? Especially evil ones like her who were most certainly not a victim.