Work Text:
When she was a little girl, a mad woman with a blue box crash landed in her backyard. It had seemed like a dream, a wonderful, exhilarating dream as this raggedly dressed person talked of time and space over fish sticks and custard while a seven-year-old Regina Mills stared at her, wide-eyed and captivated. The thought of being able to go anywhere in space, in time itself, was a grand idea to a child, especially one stuck in small town Storybrooke.
Especially for a child that had Cora Mills for a mother.
“Regina Mills,” the mysterious woman had said upon asking Regina her name, exaggerating the syllables, smacking her lips as if she was savoring the words. “Regina means ‘queen’; did you know that? Awfully big name for such a little girl.”
She hadn’t known what to say to that, and then the woman was continuing on anyway, “Do you have a nickname? Reggie, maybe — no, that’s a terrible nickname. How about Gina? No, no, that’s much too common for a girl like you, I can tell.”
She moved so quickly, carrying herself with a surprising sort of grace considering her clothes were in tatters. Her white blouse was stained gray with dirt and hung off her shoulder, top buttons torn off, revealing her camisole; the black trousers she wore were hardly better. Yet Regina hardly noticed as she swept past her, heading straight for her house, climbing the steps and stopping at the door.
“Coming, Your Majesty?” she asked over her shoulder, smiling at her with an adventurous twinkle in her eye.
“You haven’t told me your name yet,” Regina had pointed out, and the woman’s grin widened.
“Some people call me the Dragon, but… you can call me Mal. Now, regenerating makes me awfully hungry. Burns up quite a lot of calories, going from one body to the next. Do you have anything to eat?”
From there, they’d sat in Regina’s kitchen, trying an assortment of foods until Mal found one she liked, and Mal told her about her travels. And that had been when Regina begged her for the chance to go with her, to travel, to be taken away from this life and the woman had promised. She would return for her, she just had to pop away in her big blue box for some repairs, and then she’d be back.
Twelve years and four psychiatrists later, Regina’s “imaginary friend” came back.
And it would still be another two years before Regina got her wish, got out of Storybrooke and into the TARDIS.
~ | ~
It’s been a whirlwind of adventure since, cracks in walls that were really cracks in time, trips to countries that take up entire starships, England during the Blitz, fish aliens in Venice and statues that move when you’re not looking at them, even a meeting with Vincent van Gogh, and Regina still wants more. She can’t get enough of it, of traveling with Mal, of seeing everywhere and everywhen. The more places they see, the more times they go to, she feels like she’s almost run far enough. She’s almost gotten out enough, gotten away, broken free of Cora’s web. She’s escaped, almost, so long as she keeps going.
“Don’t you want to go back for a bit?” Mal asks her as they lounge around the TARDIS. She’s at the console, as usual. Fiddling with levers in that way she does, trying to mask what she’s really doing.
She’s concerned. Nearly a year together, and Regina can read that much of her.
“Go back where?” she responds coyly, looking up from the jumpseat. “To France, maybe? I wouldn’t mind it. But maybe we could do Rio, instead. You still haven’t taken me there and you promised!”
“To Storybrooke. It’s been a while,” she remarks with too much casualness. “We haven’t gone to see your parents once since you started traveling with me.”
Regina scoffs. “I’ve seen all Storybrooke has to offer. I’d much rather go somewhere new,” she says matter-of-factly. “Besides, we’re in a time machine. They’ll never even know I was gone.”
Mal stares at her for a long moment, before she’s asking in a way Regina finds particularly leading, “And there’s… no one else you’d like to see, Regina?”
It’s leading, and yet, she has no idea where she’s trying to go with this. “No. Why?”
“Just checking! Now, let’s see…” Mal dances around the console, flipping a couple of switches, dragging the scanner over to her and examining it carefully. “Where and when could I take you this time, hmm?”
“Mal,” Regina starts, waiting until she looks over at her, blonde brows raised in curiosity, to continue, “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Mal blinks at her, a perfect picture of innocence. Too perfect; her expression does nothing to put Regina’s suspicions at ease. “Of course not, dear. Why would you ask?”
“Because you just called me Regina and you never do that, unless you’re worried about me,” she points out, but Mal just smiles, calm and collected.
“Oh, I’m always worried about you,” she tells her with a little wink, and she must ignore the way Regina narrows her eyes at her. “Now, Your Majesty, what say you to a little trip to the oldest planet in the universe? It’s got cliffs made of diamond and an indecipherable message etched into the face of one…”
“Oooh, and you think the TARDIS’ translator can decipher it?” she deduces, perhaps a bit too easily distracted by the thought of new, exciting places. “Let’s go!”
“As you wish, Your Majesty,” Mal grins, pushing a lever down as the TARDIS whirs to life.
~ | ~
Lily Page is as much an enigma as the woman they call the Dragon, if not more so judging by how absolutely frustrated Mal gets whenever she pops into their time stream. Regina has only met her once before, but it was long enough to discover she quite likes the way Lily can get under Mal’s skin. The Dragon is used to knowing everything, and she gets ever so vexed when something is unknown to her, and Lily, the girl she never meets in the right order, is exactly that.
“How do you know Old High Misthavenic anyway?” Mal barks, glaring at the girl in question. “And how could you just go around defiling cliff faces?”
“Archaeologist! And how else was I supposed to get your attention?” Lily retorts, raising an eyebrow in an uncanny expression that reminds Regina of something, for a moment. “There are only so many museums I can leave clues in, you know.”
“Oh! Like with the Homebox!” Regina says, and Lily’s face pinches into a confused stare. “You leave it in a museum for her to find, while you’re on the Byzantium.”
“Spoilers!” Lily brings her finger to her mouth, pressing it to her lips in a keep quiet gesture. “But good to know, I’ll remember that.”
“Lily,” Mal sighs, exasperated, “why are we here, anyway?”
Here is Roman-occupied Britain in the 2nd century, with a Roman legion in tow and Stonehenge nearby.
“Because you don’t answer your phone, and I have a present for you. I don’t think Liz X will miss it much, even if it is a Van Gogh original,” she replies with a fair amount of sass, snapping her fingers. A Roman centurion steps over, handing the woman he believes to be Cleopatra a rolled up canvas, and Lily promptly gives it to Mal.
“What is it?” Regina asks, exceedingly curious, trying to peer over Mal’s shoulder as she rolls it out.
“Vincent called it The Pandorica Opens,” Lily tells her, and Mal scoffs a laugh.
“The Pandorica is a fairytale,” she points out, though her expression looks more than a little troubled when Lily says an almost too-casual, Aren’t we all? It only worsens once she sees the painting for what it is.
“Mal, is that—” Regina starts, only for Mal to interrupt, a tone of finality in her voice: “The TARDIS exploding.”
~ | ~
Upon that discovery, Mal goes into what Regina can only think of as The Dragon Overdrive, where she becomes a flurry of activity and technobabble and Time Lord speak that she cannot possibly hope to understand. Lily is no better, somehow capable of matching Mal step for step, steps that take them to Stonehenge with scanners scanning for… stuff.
Regina doesn’t really get it, and as fascinating as it can be, watching Mal and Lily dart between tall pillars waving scanner wands around trying to find something is not really high on the list of things she enjoys. Even the story of the Pandorica, something Mal still talks about as if it doesn’t exist, even as she looks for it, has Regina nodding along without really paying attention.
So she stands back, letting them do their thing, trading banter and teasing one another in a way that is so familial and yet, Mal insists she has no children. That whoever Lily Page might be, she’s not her daughter because that is Not Possible.
Fair enough, Regina thinks with a hefty amount of skepticism, as she watches them with rapidly fading interest.
She barely notices the centurion approaching her, not until he’s at her side with a kindly, “Greetings, milady.”
Regina looks up at him, her cheeks heating when she feels her jaw drop at the sight of him. She never really thought much about what a centurion might look like, but he’s gorgeous. The clothes should look silly, but he pulls them off with a certain sort of… swagger none of the others in his legion possess. His eyes are amazing, too, a blue that reminds her of the ocean back in Storybrooke, and then there are those dimples, peeking out at her underneath a few days’ worth of stubble.
She’s taken aback though, by the way he looks at her. He’s drinking her in just as she’s doing to him, but it’s different. She’s perusing him, shamelessly taking in the attractive view before her. But his gaze is… more. She can see the intensity in his eyes, like he’s seeing her not for the first time, but for the first time in a long while. Like she’s something familiar, something he saw everyday, something he wants to see for an eternity.
“Hello,” she says slowly, nervously glancing over her shoulder at Mal and Lily. They’re engrossed in Stonehenge, in some reading the scanner has picked up, and she’s uncertain of what to do. Normally she has very little fear in interacting with whoever she and Mal stumble across, but right now, her skin is tingling, little hairs on the back of her neck and her arms pricking up in a way that has her on high alert.
“Hi,” he breathes out, reverent and just a little creepy, to be honest, since she has no idea why he looks so… happy. So relieved to see her.
“Have we — have we met before?” she asks, despite it being a ridiculous question. They couldn’t have met before. He’s a Roman centurion in the 2nd century; she’s from present day Storybrooke, Maine. Even in her travels with Mal, they haven’t gone anywhere or anywhen that she might have met this man.
He smiles at her, wide and knowing, and cryptically says, “I doubt I’d ever forget meeting you.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that, but as she opens her mouth to come up with something, Mal is shouting for her, “Regina! Are you coming?”
A quick glance at her and Lily show they’ve unlocked some sort of secret pathway; Lily’s already halfway down the stairs, delving into the belly of the earth beneath Stonehenge, while Mal stands on the top step, looking back at Regina and her new centurion friend.
Sparing a glance at him, she shouts back, “Be right there!”
Mal mutters something, if it can be called muttering when Regina can hear it from this far away, but then she’s disappearing down the steps. Regina looks back at the mysterious Roman, the one who looks at her with such feeling it takes her breath away. And then she’s tearing her eyes away from him, jogging toward the entrance to what lies beneath Stonehenge. It’s as she’s heading over there that she realizes he’s following her, striding after her until he’s matching her pace.
“What are you doing?” she asks, coming to a stop before she reaches the entrance.
“I’m going with you,” he says in a tone so sure that she almost doesn’t want to argue with him.
But she wouldn’t be Regina Mills if she didn’t argue, so she retorts, “Why would you do that?”
“To protect you,” he tells her, as if he’s telling her the weather or time of day.
“I don’t need protecting. And what would you be able to do anyway? You’re just a centurion. You have no idea what we’re getting into,” she says, not cruelly, but as matter-of-factly as he spoke.
His face does something — the expression doesn’t last long enough for her to identify it, but that cockiness falls away, morphs into something else for a split second and then the confidence returns. “Well, I do apologize, Your Majesty, but I’m coming along rather you like it or not. It’s my duty as a soldier.”
Distantly, she hears Mal bellow her name, and she itches to get down there and see what lies below. So she scowls at this man, and says, “Fine. Just don’t get in my way.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he smiles at her, dimples popping in his cheeks, and her heart flips, her hand reaching up to shove a lock of her hair back.
“What am I supposed to call you, anyway?” she asks, and he extends his hand.
“Robin the Centurion, at your service.”
And she can’t help it, can’t contain the little burst of laughter that escapes her. “Robin, really?” She shakes her head, even apologizes as she adds, “It’s just so — Robin the Roman? Shouldn’t it be something a little more… Roman sounding? Like Robinicus or something?”
There’s that smile again, and her knees feel a little weak. “No, just Robin, I’m afraid,” he says, and then he gestures to the steps. “After you, milady.”
“Regina,” she corrects immediately, though she doesn’t know why. “I prefer Regina.”
“Regina,” he murmurs, and it sounds as if he’s savoring her name on his tongue, and again, she is struck by familiarity.
Shaking it off, she descends into the Underhenge, eager to see what could be down there. She tries very hard to not look back at Robin as he follows her down.
~ | ~
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the legendary, fairytale Pandorica turns out to be a real thing. An actual, real prison carefully constructed to contain the worst evil in all the universes, whatever that evil might be. Apparently, they’ll find out very soon, since Lily’s scanner thing reports that the locking mechanisms inside the Pandorica are slowly undoing themselves, bit by bit. Furthermore, the box is giving off a signal, summoning anyone — meaning most of Mal’s enemies, apparently — to this very location.
All of that happening, and Regina’s more concerned about the way Mal had stopped dead at the sight of the centurion following her into the chamber. She didn’t say anything, not at first, anyway. Simply tilted her head as if she were studying a problem, and then she looked back at Regina.
“Who’s your friend?” she had asked, and when Regina had said, “He’s just some centurion. Says his name is Robin,” Mal had hummed, fixing that piercing look at him once more, and then went back to the Pandorica like nothing was amiss.
Regina knows better, though. She knows that look meant something, and considering her own itching skin over this mysterious Roman, she thinks Mal owes her some sort of explanation. So as Mal studies the box, she approaches her.
“Mal… is there something you want to tell me?” she asks, and Mal Hmm?s in response. “Earlier in the TARDIS, you were acting strange and then when you saw that centurion, you… continued to act strange.”
“I always act strange; you humans tell me that all the time.”
“You know what I mean,” Regina scowls at her back. “Do we know that centurion? I’ve never seen him before but he seems… familiar.”
Mal pauses, but doesn’t turn around to look at her.
“And he looks at me as if he knows me, as if I should know him…”
“Regina, didn’t you tell me once that Greek and Roman mythology was one of your favorite things to study?” she says, and Regina blinks at her.
“What?”
“Your favorite myth, what was it?”
None of this is making any sense, but Regina has been with Mal long enough now to just go with it when she does this. “Pandora’s Box.”
“Mmhmm,” Mal nods, reaching out and tapping the stony surface of the Pandorica. “Pandora’s Box. Almost sounds like Pandorica, doesn’t it? And what was in Pandora’s box?”
“All the evils of the world…”
“And when it opened, all that was left inside was hope,” Mal finishes, finally turning around to look at Regina with a smirk, her hands on her hips. “I wonder what will be left inside when this thing opens, hmm?”
“Mal, I don’t understand. What’s happening?”
“I don’t understand either, Regina,” she says, but flippantly. “Do you remember when we visited the planet Olympia?”
“How could I forget? I nearly died thanks to that crazy fake god trying to kill me so he could make me his Persephone,” she points out, scowling at the memory of the so-called God of the Underworld.
Mal nods, looking pensive as she muses, “And how did you survive that? Do you remember?”
“Of course I—” she cuts herself off, her brow knitting as she thinks back to that particular adventure. “I — I don’t — you did a thing, or something, like you always…” But no, that doesn’t seem quite right either, because Mal was so very far away, her back was turned, opening up the door to the TARDIS while Regina was making a run for it. Hades had rounded the corner suddenly, glowing weapon in hand, extended and pointed right for Regina. “How did I—?”
Her memory simply from Hades to Mal pulling her into the TARDIS, arms wrapped tight around her as Regina cried and — why was she crying then?
A tear rolls down her cheek, unbidden, unexpected, and Regina touches it with confusion. “Why am I crying now?”
Mal gazes upon her sympathetically, the face of a woman who has seen and experienced more loss than she could count in her nine hundred years of life and regeneration. She turns back to the Pandorica then, and says, “Go above ground for a bit, Regina. I’ll be there in a moment. I don’t think it will be long before we find out what’s inside here.”
Regina obeys without question, caught up in her sudden emotions, and she doesn’t know why, but her feet carry her up the steps and straight to the Roman centurion, the one who barely let her out of his sight once he saw her.
“Regina,” he greets her warmly, all that familiarity shining in his eyes.
She feels more tears welling up, and she’s angry at herself for crying, for being confused, and the way he looks at her only makes it worse, ignites her ire further. “Who are you?” she shouts at him, reaching out and shoving him.
He says her name again, his mouth tipping down into a frown as he reaches for her. “I’m Robin,” he tells her, but she shakes her head, because that means nothing to her.
“No!” She pulls her arms free of his loose grasp, shaking her head. “Why do you look at me like that? Like you know who I am? I’ve never even seen you before today!”
“Oh, my love,” he says, and this time he’s the one shaking his head. “You just don’t remember me.”
The endearment stuns her, has her mouth gaping open at his audacity. “What did you just say?”
“It’s me, Regina. Robin. Robin Locksley,” he says, as if it should mean something, like he’s imploring her to understand. “We’ve been friends since we were little kids, since you claimed a mad woman dropped out of the sky and into your garden and no one else would play with you. Your mother hates me because she thinks I’m beneath you, but fortunately for me, you loved me more than you wanted her approval. We’ve been together since high school, we’ve lived together for two years, and I proposed last year.”
She shakes her head, a trembling hand pressed to her mouth, because she remembers none of this. She was always alone as a child, no one wanted to be friends with the girl who insisted her imaginary friend the Dragon was real long after she should have been too old for such nonsense. She’s never had this, never had someone who loved her like this, there’s only been her and her parents, it’s why she ran away with Mal, to find where she belonged, to feel safe and loved and—
Robin reaches for the bracer covering his right wrist, tugging it off and showing her a tattoo there. It’s a roaring lion emblazoned on a black crest, and Regina stares at it, at him, unable to grasp the significance even as he explains, “When we graduated, we both got a little too drunk and decided to get the tattoos we’d always joked about getting. I got this for my father, and you…”
He steps closer to her then, into her personal space and she inhales sharply, her emotions riotous as everything about him standing so close feels so right. “You got a crown, your own personal rebellion and declaration that the only one ruling your life is you, right here,” he murmurs to her, her eyes drawn to his mouth because he’s near enough she could kiss him if she wanted, she always wants to kiss him when he’s this close but she’s never met him, never kissed him, this makes no sense—
His hand grasps her hip, his thumb rubbing over the fabric of her pants, right where her little secret hides from everyone except those she allows to see her naked body.
“Robin,” she breathes out, a dam breaking in her mind, memories spilling over and she gasps, heart twisting as she realizes just what she forgot.
The memory Mal had called up plays out again, but properly this time, Robin jumping in front of her as Hades used that weapon of his, lightning shooting out of it and hitting him. And then there had been a crack, one of those cracks in time that Mal says have been following her, and Robin had fallen into it, been pulled into it, erased from existence.
But he’s here now, and she doesn’t know how, he shouldn’t be here, Mal had said anything touched by one of those time cracks couldn’t be recovered. “How can you be alive?” she gasps, sobbing, and he’s holding her now, wrapped her up tight in his arms, a hand in her hair to cradle her head to him.
“I don’t know,” he says, pressing a kiss to her hair. “I don’t know, I just… appeared here, a Roman centurion.”
Regina has no idea what that could mean, she’d have to ask Mal, but right now, she clings to Robin. “I — I forgot you,” she babbles, still unable to accept that she forgot someone who means the world to her. “How could I ever forget you?”
He kisses her then, a desperate press of his lips to hers, and she thinks perhaps he’s looking for as much reassurance that this is real and true as she is. “It doesn’t matter, we’re here now,” he murmurs against her lips, pulling back to stare into her eyes. “And I have something of yours…”
Robin reaches into a hidden pocket of his armor, drawing out a small box and giving it to her. When she opens it up, it’s her engagement ring, the one he hadn’t let her wear once he discovered her adventures with Mal. He worried about her losing it (she wonders if he worried about more than that, about her maybe one day giving it back to him since she had taken off with Mal the night before their wedding).
“How did you — have you had it all this time?” she asks, and he shakes his head.
“Mal found it in the TARDIS. She said it just appeared, after I had…” Regina’s thankful he doesn’t say the word died. “She’s been holding onto it for me, gave it back when she and I had a little talk in the Underhenge.”
“That explains all of her cryptic looks and statements,” Regina mutters as Robin slides the ring onto her left ring finger, can’t help her shy smile as he presses a tender kiss to the back of her hand. “I can’t believe I lost you and forgot you.”
“It’s okay now, love,” he says, cupping her cheek in his hand. “We’re together now and that’s all that matters.”
Her smile grows as she nods at him, her hand coming up to link her fingers with his as he holds her cheek.
The tender moment is interrupted by a shrill screech, Robin crying out in sudden pain as he doubles over, and Regina looks around, confused as the other legionnaires follow suit.
“No!” he screams, stumbling back from her, shaking his head. “Stay back, Regina! I’m — I’m dangerous!” He sobs, shaking his head frantically, crying out, “No, no, no! I’m Robin, please, I’m not — I’m Robin!”
“What’s — Robin, what’s happening? What hurts?” she says, completely thrown by the change in demeanor and the high-pitched sound that hasn’t stopped ringing through the air. “How can I help you?”
“You can’t! You have to — you have to go!” Robin is trembling, falling back away from her, staring up at her with tears and terror in his eyes. “Please, you have to — ahhh — you have to leave! I can’t hold it back much longer! Run away!”
“I am never running away from you ever again,” Regina declares, grabbing his face and hauling him to her for a searing kiss. “You would never hurt me, Robin, so please, tell me what’s wrong!”
“Regina!” he sobs again, once more telling her to leave him, that he’s going to hurt her, but she’s insistent, stubborn.
She’s demanding he tell her what’s hurting him, why he thinks he’s going to hurt her, when a pain sears through her gut. Her mouth falls open, her eyes dropping to Robin’s hand. Except it’s not a hand anymore, the tips of his fingers have popped off like caps, revealing the smoking barrel of some sort of gun.
He’s shot her.
Her eyes flick back up to his face, because she wants that to be the last thing she sees. She wants to tell him it’s okay, that she knows this isn’t really him, but all she manages is to smile at him as her hand reaches for his cheek.
She never makes it.
~ | ~
The screeching sound has stopped now, leaving the fields around Stonehenge still and silent. The rest of the Auton drones have moved beneath it, into the Underhenge to haul the Dragon into the Pandorica, to declare victory for the unholy alliance formed by all of Mal’s enemies. Robin knows this, because he’s supposed to be down there with them. Because he’s an Auton drone, controlled by the Nestene Consciousness. He’s a mannequin, a duplicate, not really Robin at all but he feels like the real Robin.
Surely a bit of plastic wouldn’t be able to feel pain like this, to experience grief as he cradles Regina’s dead body in his arms.
“The universe is ending now,” he murmurs to her, reaching up to brush her hair out of her face. Above him, the stars are going out, and though he doesn’t really understand all this time and space nonsense the way Mal does, or even the way Regina seems (seemed) to be learning to, he knows that’s a bad sign. Imprisoning Mal in the Pandorica was supposed to save everything, according to the alliance, but the stars are winking out of existence, leaving the night sky an inky black void above them.
“Soon we won’t even exist,” he says, sighing. “That’ll be twice in my case. It’s almost funny, when you think about it. Don’t you think?”
Regina stays silent, and he nods. “Yeah, I don’t think so, either.”
A loud cracking noise splits the silence, a puff of gray smoke coughing to life as the smell of ozone permeates the air.
“Robin,” Mal says, looking somewhat frazzled in her usually impeccable pantsuit. It reminds him of the Mal he met two years ago, when she saved Storybrooke and the world from Prisoner Zero and the Atraxi before disappearing again. “I need you to listen very carefully to me, there’s not a lot of time.” She’s carrying a mop, and wearing a fez, and honestly it’s not even the weirdest thing he’s ever seen with her.
“What?” he says, blinking in confusion, tears still in his eyes, drying on his face.
“Hold that thought.” She disappears in that same loud crack, ozone-smelling smoke cloud, and reappears in the exact same way. She’s lost the mop and the fez, holding up her sonic screwdriver instead. “You have to take this and use it to get me out of the Pandorica,” she tells him.
“You… are out of the Pandorica,” he points out, and she rolls her eyes.
“Yes, I am, but the me that is in the Pandorica in this time is still in it. Timey-wimey — you should really know this by now. I’m crossing time streams, okay, which I shouldn’t but this is a special circumstance, I think, what will all the universe ending happening right now… Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, go let me out, and then put my screwdriver in Regina’s jacket pocket, okay?”
Before he can respond, she’s disappeared again, and this time, she doesn’t come back. He’s loathe to leave Regina like this, but he settles her as respectfully on the ground as he can, venturing down beneath Stonehenge. Once he gets into the inner chamber with the Pandorica, he sees the Autons and the rest of the alliance turned to stone.
Holding up the screwdriver, he points it at the giant box and presses the button. It whirs to life; the Pandorica makes a great noise as it rattles open, revealing Mal sitting in the seat, looking more than a little bewildered at her rescue.
“Robin,” she says primly, tilting her head as she studies the screwdriver in his hand. “Where did you get that?”
“You gave it to me,” he tells her with a shrug, unsurprised when she pulls out her own screwdriver from her pocket.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You will do,” he sighs, adding, “timey-wimey,” as his only explanation.
Fortunately, Mal’s response is to nod and accept it, before she’s asking after Regina. Unable to put it into words, Robin takes her to… the body, asking, “Can you help her, Mal?”
It’s a ridiculous question, he knows, because she’s dead. He killed her, held her in his arms as the life drained from her body. Nothing can save her now.
Mal scans her with her sonic screwdriver, tilting her head in that way she does when she’s considering something as she reads the results of her scan. She stands up, brushing the dirt off her pants. “I could, if I had the time. As it is, no one has time anymore because time is ending all around us, so I need to get to saving it instead.”
Robin gapes at her, stunned by her casual dismissal of Regina after how much faith she had in her. “What?” he says, because he must have misheard. “How could you say that? After everything Regina’s done for you? The way she waited her whole life for you to come back for her? And you’re just going to throw her away?!”
“There are more important things at stake than your girlfriend, Robin. Regina would understand,” Mal says with a shrug, pocketing her screwdriver and typing something into the device on her wrist.
“Well I don’t! I know you’re an alien, and that you had different morals than us because of your Time Lord nature but to just throw Regina away like this? After everything? How could you be so callous, so cruel! No wonder you’re called the Dragon!”
Mal simply raises an eyebrow at him. “Regina is not more important than the universe.”
“She is to me!” Robin roars, and he’d never strike a woman, not even a Time Lord, but he’s pacing the ground angrily, wishing there was something he could hit instead. Something to let his anger and grief out.
“Good,” Mal says after a moment of watching him pace, her tone softening. “Now, here’s what we’re going to do. I need you to carry Regina to the Pandorica; we’re going to put her in there.”
Robin frowns, thrown by her sudden change in demeanor. “What?”
“It was a test; you passed,” she tells him, walking past him and toward Stonehenge. “I had to be sure you’d beaten your Auton programming. Looks like Regina managed to construct a plastic duplicate with a soul. Never seen anything like it, but I’m glad you’re back, Robin. Come on with Regina, we don’t have much time.”
“What… what are you talking about?” he asks, but does as she says. As he follows her down, she explains her theory about the crack in Regina’s wall, all that universe and time energy seeping into her brain so that when the Nestene used her to make their Autons, they got a bit more than they bargained for with her memory imprint.
“She loves you so much, Robin, she managed to put a bit of your soul into your replica without even knowing she was doing it. If I believed in such a thing, I might even say you were soulmates.” Mal watches as he settles Regina into the Pandorica, slipping the screwdriver the Mal from the future gave him into her pocket as instructed. “The Pandorica is the best prison in the universe, completely inescapable — it won’t even let you die just so it can keep you inside. And it’ll keep Regina the same way, on the brink of death until it gets an external sample of her DNA in, say, about nineteen hundred years. Once that happens, it’ll restore her, and we can open it up.”
“So she’ll be okay?” he says, hope blooming in his chest.
“Yes, she’ll be okay,” Mal replies with a surprisingly kind smile. She raises her wrist once more, typing into it again, and then she motions for him to come closer. “You’ll want to hang onto me for this. Nasty business, time traveling by vortex manipulator, but one makes do with what one has. Let’s skip the waiting around for a couple of millenia, hmm?”
Robin looks from Mal to the Pandorica, shaking his head. “No,” he says, and when Mal repeats it, he nods. “I’m staying here. With Regina.”
“Robin, that’s ridiculous, she doesn’t even know you’re here right now. She’s in a box.”
“I won’t leave her unprotected and alone. She’s been left alone enough in her lifetime, and I promised I would never do that to her. I broke that promise once when I died. I intend to keep it this time,” he says, stepping closer to the Pandorica. “And I’m plastic, right? It’s not like I’ll age or anything.”
“You’ll go mad. You know you’re not real, so you won’t sleep or eat,” Mal warns. “Your systems might start to fail, you might start breaking down…”
“I have to do this, Mal. She’s my future,” Robin tells her, ignoring all of her well-reasoned arguments. “I have to stay with her. Always.”
“You humans and your love,” Mal says with something that might be disgust, but when he glances back over his shoulder at her, he thinks she’s smiling. “All right. Stay here, Robin the Roman. I’ll see you in a minute.”
Robin smirks at her. “See you in nineteen hundred years,” he confirms with a tip of his head.
She disappears in a puff of smoke, leaving him alone with just the Pandorica and Regina inside of it. He sighs, resting his head against the wall of the box for a moment.
“See you soon, my love,” he murmurs, turning around so his back is against it, taking a deep breath.
It’ll be a long wait, but he knows without a doubt that Regina is worth every second of it.