♛ (yourqueen) wrote in welcomethreads, @ 2013-07-24 00:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | henry mills, regina mills / the evil queen |
Who: Regina and Henry Mills.
What: Reunion.
Where: Town hall, her office.
When: Afternoon, following his miraculous return.
Ratings/Warnings: Low rating, but wow Regina is the saddest puppy ever, so there are some mentions of her forced marriage and a whole lot of misery.
Status: Incomplete.
It was funny that after all this time, Regina hadn't lost her taste for apples.
She sat at her desk, peeling a Honeycrisp with a knife in one long curl of red skin. The apple that Snow White had eaten was a similar blaze of red, the same fruit Regina had unknowingly fed to her son. The two memories had commingled long ago, so that every bite of apple she took after the Dark Curse broke tasted intensely bittersweet and not quite like fruit, but they had been bittersweet to her before - long before.
She had grown her tree in Leopold's palace, her one true pleasure when she was married, and apples had been a constant for her. She enjoyed the security of the sturdy, heavy fruit, the distinct taste singing notes of pleasure on her tongue. Apples tasted like stolen happiness, sweetness snatched from between the bars of her prison.
Apples also tasted like the lonely days under Leopold's thumb, friendless, alone, guarded constantly. They tasted like sunny afternoons she spent indoors because Leopold had read her diary again, and locked her into her rooms as punishment for her private thoughts. After Snow, apple tasted of triumph to Regina; after Henry, they tasted of even more pain.
Yet, she couldn't stop eating them. She craved the fruit, a tangible reminder of how far she'd carried herself from the garden at the foot of her place of captivity. (And maybe it a kind of masochism or penance - for what she'd almost lost then and had lost now.)
A ribbon of peel dropped onto Regina's plate. She'd almost worked from home that afternoon, a concession to her grinding headache, but had decided not to - better not to appear weak. She leaned forward, peered at her laptop screen; the light coming in from behind her made it hard to read.
She began to slice the apple, eating each slice off the knife as she read. A memory passed over her in a sudden frisson, her subconscious playing behind-the-scenes Connect the Dot: When she packed Henry's lunch for school, she never peeled his apple slices, because of the health benefits of...
She shook her head as if to fling the thought away, agitating her headache. Thinking about Henry directly accomplished nothing more than to worry the raw wound inside her. It was a jagged place that had opened after Archie's so-called murder, that had worsened with her mother's death, and that seemed to have been hurting continuously ever since Henry had been taken.
The next apple slice dropped off the knife when she jolted at the sound of her office door flying open. Apple and knife spilled from her hands, forgotten; the half-eaten fruit dropped to the floor, the knife clattering on the keyboard of her laptop.
Regina wondered if it had finally happened - if she had, as the "evil" often did, completely lost her grip on reality. There was no other way to explain what she was seeing.
"Henry?" she said, her voice unbelieving, close to frightened. How was it possible? After all, nothing that left her ever came back.