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"I…" and it’s strange, so strange hearing the words passing through his lips, "I don’t know what to say."
“Then don’t,” she grumbles, her back is completely rigid and set as she stands looking out the mayoral office window over the town she created but no longer controls. She can hear Robin shuffling behind her, an action not usually associated with the calm, collected archer she knows. Robin doesn’t fidget but he fidgets now, which makes everything so much worse. She wishes Snow hadn’t graciously, pointedly, left the two of them alone in this room - her attempts at helpfulness and democracy only creating a more painful situation for the receivers of her generosity. She doesn’t want to be in the room where she thought she earned the one thing she sought for and then had it so cruelly ripped away, and now she’s returned here to be mocked by having to save the completely innocent woman who ruined her life. “Any thanks you give me will be a slap in the face so get out.”
“I can’t just -” he struggles she can hear it in his voice and she can imagine his expression. She’s saved his wife from a curse and in doing so cursed herself to a life of loneliness because it is clear nothing will stop him from saving Marian, not even sparing Regina’s feelings, and, therefore, the notion of him leaving Marian voluntarily seems impossible now. All this he knows just as well as she.
“If you want to thank me leave and never speak to me again.”
“She’s my wife,” he utters in a single breath as if the omission is painful, “it’s the honorable thing but you, Regina, I owe you for this and so many things.”
“I am nothing to you. You owe me nothing.”
“Regina I cannot in good faith accept that,” and she hears him take a step forward, one that will inevitably lead to a second until he is able to touch her. A devious tactic because he knows that she can hardly think coherently when he offers her a morsel of affection and he gets to say what he wants without opportunity for her response. So she freezes him, her tactic, to stop him from having the last word, again, because she hates him for it. She hates that he got to air his feelings, to receive the meager dregs of closure, but left her no space for her to say hers, left her wanting, because once said such words would bind them. The acknowledgment of her true feelings would bind his honor to two women and then he would have to make a choice not based on vows or rules or obligations but based on the actual true, fully acknowledged, emotions of three injured parties, a much pricklier path that does not bode well for men with an exacting moral code.
“Today I saved the life of woman who abhors me,” she says to her reflection, “who called me a monster, because you asked me to. Because I want to be a hero for my son’s sake and that means more to me than the agonizing reality that I live where I am always the other, where no one spares or acknowledges my feelings in this wretched town. So my question to you is, if the situations were reversed if it was I that needed to be saved and you who needed to do the saving but Marian asked you not to do it for the aforementioned reason. Would you save me?”
“That isn’t fair.”
“Neither is what you made me do today. Would you save me if it meant betraying your wife’s will? The honor that binds you to her?”
“You cannot expect me to answer such a question!” There is a desperate edge to his voice because his code knows the answer already and he does not want to voice it. Does not want to poison their relationship any further by providing her with the answer that will most likely crush them both.
“If you do not answer I will not release you.”
“You’re asking me to give you an answer to a completely hypothetical situation!” He stalls, eyes digging into her back. “Regina, please.” He wants to spare her feelings but there is nothing left for him to spare. He’s already hurt her in every possible way and if losing Daniel was devastating this nightmare she lives in is horrendous, because she must live, and see, and breathe with the man who chose his code over something real.
“Your answer?”
He lets out a frustrated sound from the back of his throat and she can imagine his expression, one she saw all too often in the Enchanted Forest when she pushed him too far. “No. If Marian asked I would not save you.”
“There then,” she says sadly, “I am nothing.” With a flick of her wrist he is gone, returned to his precious family and revered honor. She looks down wistfully at her slowly icing fingertips as a chill seeps into her veins.
“Not so hypothetical now.” And the hideous framed picture of a blue parrot, that Mary Margaret had placed on the wall to cover the mirror, froze over and shattered.