Chapter Text
Chapter 1-The day before
Regina stared at the calendar on her desk.
Every mark. Every line. Every crossed-off day.
Each seemed to carry the weight of every self-loathing thought her mind had ever learned—and countless others she still refused to name.
It wasn't just a date.
It was a verdict.
The eve of her curse's anniversary.
The anniversary of her father's death.
The sacrifice that had finally led her to what was supposed to be her happy ending.
She tried to focus on the city's budget reports scattered across her desk, but the voices had returned.
With a practiced motion, she straightened the stack of documents for the third time that morning. The edge of the paper had to align perfectly with the corner of the desk. Only then did she allow herself to look back at the numbers.
The voices remained.
Whispering truths she had chosen to bury:
Her worst act.
The cruelest one.
One of her greatest betrayals.
Her deepest shame.
And yet, she did not regret it.
She never could.
Everything she had done, everything she had survived, had led her here. To him. To her little prince.
Still...
Even though the reason she got out of bed every morning for the past eleven years was right there, breathing beneath the same roof... he barely seemed to acknowledge her existence anymore.
Her own space.
Her own home.
Home.
The word echoed strangely in her mind.
Foreign.
Dry.
Wrong.
Rationally, she understood what the word meant. But somewhere deeper, in a place she rarely allowed herself to examine, she wasn't sure she had ever truly known one.
Had she?
Had she ever known what a home was?
Her thoughts drifted to the dark corridors of her grandfather's castle. A childhood spent among servants who cleaned quietly and disappeared into shadows. It hadn't taken her long to learn that hiding in those shadows was safer. To be invisible. Silent. Spine straight. Face expressionless before her mother's magic, which dominated her in every possible way. Love given only under conditions. Approval offered only when earned. And her father's quiet passivity.
— No — she whispered.
Her parents had loved her. In their own way. They had. They had been her family, her home...
She feared that kind of love. Feared that it was exactly what Henry saw when he looked at her.
No, no, no.
Her fingers found her own wrist. She pressed it lightly.
Counted.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The steady rhythm of blood beneath the skin offered her something solid to hold onto.
She wondered, brooded, questioned herself:
Had she merely learned to imitate what she thought a home should be?
Could it be that over the last ten years, what she thought she had built was nothing but an illusion?
She was so immersed in her thoughts that she barely noticed the movement past the office door.
Her baby had come home.
Henry was here.
Her little prince was home.
Regina found him leaving his shoes carelessly thrown on the stairs, casting her that look which, little by little, she was learning to endure.
"Henry..."
Her voice was calm, controlled. Inside, however, she was tight with apprehension. She didn't want to startle him. She carefully searched for the right words, just as she used to do before her mother or the king.
The thought cut through her, fast and sharp.
No.
Never.
She could never place Henry in the same category as those two.
The boy ignored her. He dropped his backpack on the floor and walked up the stairs, his steps heavy.
Regina felt a sting of defeat.
She tried to rationalize it. Henry was no longer a child. He was growing up, becoming a teenager. Distances open up at that age, don't they?
With a sigh, she headed to the kitchen.
Perhaps preparing his favorite food would make him open up today.
While grating the cheese on the counter, she watched the backyard through the window.
The grass was high.
Without realizing it, she centered the salt shaker between the two spice containers below the window.
Then she adjusted the sugar bowl.
Then the napkin holder.
Only when the three formed a perfect line did she allow herself to look back out the window.
The grass... yes... The grass was high.
It had been weeks since Graham had shown up.
For years, he had taken care of the mansion's small chores: roof tiles, gutters, yard work. Always smiling, always making jokes about the "Madam Mayor." Always flirting shamelessly whenever Henry wasn't around.
Regina had pretended not to hear.
Twenty-eight years.
Twenty-eight years of constant presence.
But just like Henry, Graham had also distanced himself.
She still didn't know how to define him.
Lover?
Partner?
Companion?
Perhaps.
Not that it mattered.
Long ago she had stopped wishing for anything that resembled romantic love. What she had with Graham was something else. The quiet company of ordinary days. Someone to share small, banal moments with. Moments to fill a void that never ceased—but which, nonetheless, she reluctantly admitted she missed.
Regina rested her hands on the counter.
Something had changed; the air in the town felt different.
She felt it with increasing strength.
The town no longer seemed to move to the same rhythm she did.
She tried to convince herself it was just the growing distance between her and Henry. That she was imagining things. At least, things that shouldn't exist in this world.
But she knew better.
Decades of practicing magic had taught her a simple truth:
There is no coincidence.
Something had changed.
Something was changing.
The thought exhausted her.
How long had it been since she last referred to Storybrooke as "this world"? How long had it been since she allowed her mind to wander, even for an instant, to that place infested with magic and memories?
Pull yourself together.
She straightened her shoulders.
Took a deep breath.
Everything would go back to normal.
It had to.
She approached the refrigerator to put the cheese away.
Then she stopped.
Another calendar. A calendar stuck to the door.
It wasn't today's page, nor yesterday's, or any other day she might have forgotten to remove—not that she would ever do such a thing.
It was tomorrow's date, printed in large, bold numbers.
She blinked hard.
She checked the date on the microwave clock.
Then on her phone, which lay on the table.
Then on the wall calendar.
Three sources.
The same answer.
Tomorrow.
"Heavens..."
She wanted to rip the page off and tear it to pieces.
For a second, she imagined someone playing a prank—cornering her, haunting her, mocking her. For another, she feared she knew exactly who was capable of it.
An uneasiness washed over her. The distinct sensation of being watched made her look quickly over her shoulder, as if expecting to find a certain little imp lurking in the corner.
There was nothing.
No one.
Still, thinking of the pawnshop owner as her old master left her vulnerable.
Her hands trembled.
Small, electric shocks ran down her arms.
When she blinked, it felt as though more than seconds passed—minutes, even. The atmosphere grew heavy, thick with the torpor of that fleeting threshold between sleep and waking, where dreams fade and, no matter how hard you fight, you cannot recall them.
Regina closed her eyes.
Counted to three.
One.
Two.
Three.
When she opened them, the kitchen was still there.
The refrigerator.
The counter.
The dishes on the drying rack.
Nothing had disappeared.
Nothing had changed.
And yet...
She felt it.
An old, familiar pulsing in her core.
Regina placed one hand over her abdomen. The other closed around her own wrist.
She counted her breaths.
One. Inhale.
Two. Exhale.
Three.
Four.
The exercise used to work.
Today, it failed her.
It was there.
Faint.
Constant.
Like the distant tolling of a clock.
A calling.
In a way far from graceful—far from resembling a queen or a Madam Mayor—she bolted up the stairs, almost tripping on the worn sneaker her son had left on the steps.
She reached Henry’s room nearly breathless. She hesitated for a second. Her worry was immense, but she had long since lost count of how many arguments they'd had over it.
Raising her hand, she knocked once.
Twice.
She waited exactly five seconds.
Counted every single one of them.
When the fifth second ended, panic won.
She threw the door open.
Relief hit her with embarrassing force.
Henry was there. Lying on the bed, reading a massive book in front of him.
Safe.
The damn voice whispered:
Is it real?
"What is it?"
Her son's sharp voice hit her. His furrowed brows and deep scowl left no room for doubt about what he thought of her intrusion.
She ignored it, focusing entirely on the rise and fall of the boy’s chest.
She counted the movement.
One breath.
Another.
Another.
Regular.
Normal.
Alive.
Alive. Safe.
For a moment, she wanted to say everything. Wanted to confess how much she missed him. How much every inch of distance between them cut her. She wanted to tell him that he was the only star in her sky. That no victory, no power, no life she had ever lived could ever compare to the love she felt for him.
But she didn't dare.
The weeks of tension still hung heavily between them.
"Lunch will be ready soon — she said. — We’re having lasagna today. Don't forget to wash your hands."
She began to close the door, but there was still something there, pulsing, calling, vibrating. She added a final note, still unwilling to take her eyes off her son, needing to prove to her treacherous mind that he was right there, alive, well, healthy, and safe.
Henry just stared at her. The impatience on his face was palpable, and she didn't want another conflict, another fight.
"Why can't you be a normal mom?"
The memory invaded her mind. Or perhaps it wasn't a memory at all.
Regina blinked.
Her son stared at her in silence—distant, taciturn.
Perhaps he hadn't said anything.
Perhaps.
She didn't have the energy for another battle so soon.
" And take your shoes off the stairs, Henry."
Her Madam Mayor voice sounded firm.
Controlled.
She closed the door.
He was there.
Safe.
Healthy.
Protected.
Alive.
Everything was fine.
Everything was well.
Regina returned to the kitchen.
She finished grating the cheese.
And went to open the refrigerator.
The container slipped from her hands.
Glass exploded across the floor.
She froze.
The page was still there, stuck to the refrigerator door. Tomorrow's date was now circled in an aggressive, angry red. Impossible to ignore.
Her heart raced.
No...
It was just a reminder. An activity of Henry’s. Nothing more.
She rushed to the whiteboard in the corner of the kitchen. Searched. Found it.
Math test with Mrs. Blanchard.
Of course. That was it.
In her worry over Henry, she simply hadn't noticed the red circle before. Just that. Nothing more. Nothing more.
It was there before. Wasn't it?
But even as she tried to force herself to believe it, an uncomfortable certainty grew inside her.
Something didn't fit.
Something was wrong.
Her perfect life seemed to be falling apart like an old jigsaw puzzle.
And for the first time in many years, Regina no longer knew where to find the missing pieces.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Her pathetic attempt to connect with her son during lunch had been in vain; silence had reigned throughout the entire meal.
She remembered watching Henry eat. Counting his forkfuls. Adjusting the silverware so it remained perfectly parallel to the edge of the table. She did not remember touching her own food.
The detail only occurred to her now,
Though it seemed insignificant.
She catches the aroma of the glass of cider she holds between her fingers.
Henry had eaten.
That was enough.
The first sip was bitter. The second, less so. By the third, the absence of a meal no longer mattered.
The silence of the house is oppressive. There is no TV playing superhero movies, no loud games in the living room, no sizzling from the stove, no childish laughter in any room of the house—though she hears it in her mind, loud, sharp, but distant. So far away. Like an echo.
And as she sits there, in her office beneath the dim twilight, surrendering to the old habit of drinking cider until the world loses its edges, seeking in the sweet numbness a brief form of silence within her own mind... she grips the photo album tightly. The images of the little boy have become a dichotomy in her routine; though looking at her son's face pressed onto those pages seems to be the only thing anchoring her to reality these days, it also drags her to dark corners of her mind she hadn't dared visit in years.
The light, innocent laughter of her son blurs and twists in her mind with another childish voice, from another time, another life. Not even laughter, but a lament. A wail of pain and pleading. Her own childhood voice crying out for her mother...
The words leave her lips:
Home... Mother...
She leaned back in her chair, the leather groaning under the weight—not of her body, but of what she carried inside.
...Magic.
The word comes with anger, hatred even, and it seems to awaken something within her that should have never been awoken.
Even in a land where there should be no magic, she feels it. Inaccessible, like a shattered mosaic, but she feels it. For twenty-eight years she had felt it tingling, anxious, waiting for its release.
The true magic.
Not the simplistic kind.
Not the tricks.
Not the cheap illusions that enchanted peasants.
The kind that demanded.
The kind that collected.
The very kind she had so vehemently denied and repelled in her youth, before letting herself be consumed by the darkness.
But now, it feels further, deeper. The stir in her core is greater, volatile, as if a small tornado were forming inside her, and the tug comes hard, like a rope stretched to its absolute limit. She brings her hand to her stomach, covering it. She feels it. It's there. And all her mind can utter is:
Protect yourself.
Protect yourself.
Even before her first lessons in magic—that true magic—
before ever hearing Rumple’s basic, raw jargon,
before even fully understanding that all magic comes with a price...
She already knew. She had lived by that law.
Price.
There is always a price.
There are always conditions.
The word was not foreign to her.
It never had been.
For she had been the price.
Always.
To her mother.
To her old master.
To the king.
In those early years, she had learned many laws that govern magic, many concepts that would help her manipulate the elements of nature, but there were some she had learned too soon.
And too deeply.
She thinks of her mother's magic... strong, cruel, short-tempered, and compares it to her own... analogous? Similar? Identical?
No. No. No. Her lips tremble... her little prince will never pay the same price she paid for her mother’s magic.
The concept itself was simple, yet realistically terrifying:
You only recognize what already exists within you.
No matter how distant, how hidden, how denied.
If you see it...
If you feel it...
If you recognize it...
It is because, at some point, it already lived in you.
At some point, the seed was planted.
She had known the darkness too soon, introduced to the side of the shadows when she couldn't even distinguish whether what was happening to her was right or wrong.
She hated that concept.
Because it betrayed her.
Because it explained things.
Even though, according to one of those damn voices in her mind that had refused to shut up for nearly half a century now, it would tell her that
it explained it,
but it didn’t justify it.
It would never justify it.
Her descent,
her transformation,
her fall,
her old persona,
that name that had crossed realms,
the name she had tried to forget, that she didn't even dare to utter,
a name that
had fed legends,
had built an empire,
and had destroyed everything it touched,
in that hateful place once called the Enchanted Forest.
She pours herself another glass of her beloved apple cider.
The album remains open.
She adjusts the corner of the cover.
Then rotates the picture frame a few millimeters.
Straightens the stack of reports.
Aligns the pen with the edge of the desk.
The world remains wrong.
Another glass finds her lips. She feels her mind clouding and wonders if she has lived through too many solstices just to obsess over the old scars that shaped her.
The sensation returns, sharp, cutting, vibrating in her core.
Another calling.
She feels that golden thread that seems to bind her to her son snap taut,
And she knows.
Henry is restless. More so than usual, even for recent times.
She has already exhausted her worried-mother cards for today; she cannot disturb him again.
For now, she will have to settle for the certainty that he is in his room.
Safe.
There was no magic here.
No spells.
No enchanted mirrors.
And yet...
She would say certain aspects of magic had never left her. She couldn't remember exactly how or when it happened, only that after those fateful weeks of incessant crying and the anxiety of not understanding him—the doubt of whether she was doing the right thing and meeting the needs of that tiny baby—something simply happened. Looking at the baby's frail little face, she knew she would dedicate her life to that small being. And then she felt it: a surge of energy binding her to her new son, a golden thread that pulsed, vibrating according to the emotions of her little prince.
In the privacy of her mind, she liked to call it her superpower—always knowing when her son's emotions shifted, even without seeing him, even from a distance.
It hadn't been easy in those early years. When he cried at night, she felt his torment; the teething months, the first days of school, the conflicts with classmates. There was that glowing pulse, leading her straight to him.
And now, for months, she had felt this bond between her and Henry—a golden thread, invisible and strained, vibrating with his every withdrawal, reminding her that she had become the source of his torment.
Just as her own mother had been hers.
The photos blur on her desk.
Regina doesn't realize when she begins organizing them.
First by size.
Then by the borders.
Then by the exact distance between one another.
Only when they all form a perfect line before her do her eyes find the little boy's smile.
The little boy's smile disarms her.
Preserved.
Immutable.
Exactly as she remembered.
A smile for her.
More than pure.
More than light.
An exact polar opposite to her own.
Pure simplicity: a boy on a swing, on a sunny day, at a picnic with his mother. A red blanket on the grass, toys scattered on the ground.
Simply mother and son.
No burdens.
No baggage.
Only joy.
No complications.
No anger.
No fight after fight trying not to drown in a river of regrets.
He was her opposite.
She was darkness.
Shadows.
Bringing chaos to everything she touched.
She
had thought it would be different.
That her happy ending would be different.
That she would have this chance.
To do it differently.
To have a home, a family... no more prices, no more conditions... just acceptance, love... everything she truly yearned for.
But the heavy sound assaulting her ears—the slamming of doors every time her little prince takes refuge in his room—belies that claim.
Another child hiding from his mother.
No...
She wasn't different.
She had never feared what she had become in the old world.
But now she feared who she had become here.
Or rather: whom, in such a familiar way, she had become like.
Mother.
Another word that intoned the dichotomy of her life.
A synesthesia of the senses.
Mother...
So sweet.
Her only true value in life.
But Mother is also
so bitter on her tongue.
She remembers those first times she heard her beautiful boy utter that word.
The love overflowing from her, fighting the terror her mind conjured by bringing back memories of her own cries for her mother, while the restrictions of her mother's magic bound her body and her agonizing lungs desperate for oxygen.
She closed her eyes for a moment.
Another sip. Her cider is no longer sweet.
And then, her hands began to tremble again.
She remembered these same hands, firm and resolved, pushing her own mother into that enchanted mirror.
She thought of the mirror's image.
The lack of impact.
The euphoria of the feeling of freedom after her success.
Her own smile reflected at the end.
The silence afterward.
She remembered the hatred.
Remembered it precisely.
With clarity.
With... pride.
There had never been regret.
But now...
Now there were questions.
When had it begun?
When had the seed been planted?
When had it sprouted inside her?
When had it stopped being survival... and become a choice?
She knew the answer.
And she refused to accept it.
The thought came like a blade.
She clenched her fists tightly.
Until her knuckles turned white.
Until the pain tore at her skin.
When her nails—so perfectly manicured—left cuts and droplets of blood in the shape of half-moons in her palms,
Even so...
The word remained.
That word.
The one she refused to say.
Even after nearly half a century, she still couldn't name it—not with the correct vocabulary of this world, not with the word that truly conceptualized everything that had been imposed on her.
Everything her mother called lessons.
To be queen.
To be perfect.
To reach her full potential.
She denied the word.
Denied it even in thought.
Another lesson of magic, so deeply embedded in her being that it had become instinct:
Every word has power.
If thought shapes the spirit of an idea, evoking it with sound—giving voice to concepts, ideas, thoughts—is to bring them to life.
Sound evokes.
Sound gives form.
Sound molds the physical aspect.
Sound animates and materializes.
And she would not do that.
She would not give life to it.
Not now.
Not ever.
She would deny it until her last breath.
Because to recognize it... was to accept it.
And she was not.
Never had been.
And never would be.
A victim.
Of nothing.
Of no one.
She was strong.
She survives.
She triumphs.
She is...
She was...
She is...
Survive.
Triumph.
At any cost.
She will not lose this love.
She will not lose her little prince.
Not now.
Not ever.
She believes this.
She believes it...
Believes it.
— I believe it... — she murmured, her voice low, insecure, nearly unrecognizable.
But the echo didn't answer.
It never answered.
She opened her eyes.
And then it came.
The name.
Not as a memory.
Not as a choice.
But as inevitable.
As poison.
As truth.
As a sentence.
The Evil Queen.
She was the Evil Queen.
She is the Evil Queen.
The term made bile rise in her throat. She stood up.
Poured herself another glass of cider.
The bottle, once full, was now nearly empty.
Two fingers remaining.
Sweet.
Bitter.
Like everything.
Mother...
Sweet.
Bitter.
Mother...
The album turned.
Another chapter.
Another time.
The first weeks.
The crying.
The exhaustion.
The fear of loss.
She recalls the countless hours of vigil, merely watching the rise and fall of his breathing.
And when she reluctantly let herself drift into sleep, she would wake with a start instantly, placing her hand on that tiny being to make sure he was still breathing.
One breath.
Another.
Another.
Alive.
Still alive.
The pure terror of his first choking fit.
And how she wished she had magic in this realm, if only to protect her precious boy from all the evils of the world—from the simplest things, like fevers, cramps, the first reactions to vaccines—which, to her, were more terrifying than facing deadly sorcerers and changelings from the other world.
Her little prince.
So small.
So fragile.
So... impossible.
But alive.
Always alive.
She didn't sleep.
She didn't breathe.
Didn't think.
Only existed.
And doubted.
Herself.
As a mother.
Her total and complete ineptitude to be a mother, because
she doubted herself
as a woman.
Since she had denied herself the greatest gift, the greatest attribute that any living being of any realm, dimension, or universe could ever dream of having.
She had purposely afflicted herself with the greatest pain.
A pain that not even her mother, nor the king, nor Snow White dared to cause.
Nothing compared to this pain.
This void.
Her inability to generate life.
To feel within herself grow and give birth to the purest and truest love: a child.
And there she was.
Against so many variables.
Holding her son.
Someone to love unconditionally.
And to hold the hope of receiving a love so great she couldn't even express it.
But still...
She doubted.
Doubted herself.
As a human being.
As someone capable of loving something so pure without corrupting it.
Being a mother...
So sweet.
So bitter.
She wondered...
If it wouldn't be her...
The darkness that would destroy that light.
The glass in her hand explodes.
Glass across the surface of the desk.
Shards of the glass still in her hand.
The cider stains her precious photos.
She stares at her hand gripping a sharp shard of glass.
An old, familiar sensation courses through her veins while her hands holding the cutting object insist on trembling.
Not from fear.
Not from weakness.
But from something worse.
Recognition.
Magic.
She feels another piece of the puzzle dismantle.
Pure magic.
That should be impossible...
She forces herself to find logical answers, for even the magical world was always governed by the basic principles of alchemy. No magic escapes the ancient, invisible, inevitable laws—the laws that govern all realms.
Regina learned that whatever the magic, from the purest to the cruelest, everything begins with a thought.
But the phrase doesn’t hold.
It unravels before taking shape.
It wasn't mind.
It had never been just mind.
It was deeper.
More primitive.
She knows her greatest strength had always resided in her heart; the driving force of her magic is emotion.
Fear.
Love.
Loss.
Anger.
Hatred.
Magic is emotion.
And emotion does not obey.
It pulses.
It responds.
It demands.
Emotion is the fuel that burns in her veins so her will can do more than grow fertile roots in barren soil, transmute lead into gold, water into wine, destroy a kingdom, and transport pieces of that kingdom to another.
Where there's a will, there's a way...
Magic always finds a way.
But ways also close.
They also distort.
They also get lost.
And she fears her heart, and perhaps something more, has been betraying her. Not now, not today, but for years—perhaps for decades.
No enchantment remained intact forever.
No, no, no...
She declares firmly.
She forces herself to franticly repeat:
not now,
not today,
not ever.
She slides the sharp edge of the glass she holds across the desk's surface.
Wood.
More sharp, cutting glass.
Paper.
Solid.
Real.
It's real.
It's real.
It's real.
She repeats frantically, over and over,
Like an anchor.
Like someone trying to stop their own world from unraveling.
Because there is a law she doesn't dare face.
She closes her eyes,
And then the thought comes—not as an idea, but as an echo.
Correspondence.
If something changes here... something changes elsewhere.
If something breaks... something responds.
Regina opens her eyes.
Doesn't finish the thought.
Cannot.
Not now.
Not ever.
But she knows, the damn voice echoes in her mind:
Emotion always finds a form, even when it shouldn't.
Cause and effect.
The simplest of magic's laws.
And yet...
For the first time in many years, Regina was no longer sure where magic ended...
And where reality began.
She fights, she pushes back. It took nearly three decades of life to learn, but she learned. So she responds with every ounce of her being:
She has the
will of a queen.
A will so strong it drives a blade into stone.
The will of a mother.
She will bend the laws of magic to her will, for her home, for her son.
Son...
Her fingers dig in.
There is no pain.
She looks at the desk.
The precious images of her son are stained, perhaps irreparably lost to her forever.
The pain comes,
strong,
searing,
overlapping everything.
She doesn't want to feel.
She wants to forget.
Son...
The images are lost forever.
Lost.
Forever.
The stained images flicker under the yellowish light of the lamp—or that is what she wants to believe is happening, while everything seems to vanish from sight for seconds, time and time again...
Another electric shock courses through her body, the sensation of tiny hairs standing up on her neck and arms.
Momentarily everything goes black, all sounds cease, except for the sound of falling glass. She looks at the polished surface: the photos of her little prince, the crisp letterhead papers from the mayor's office, everything now tinged with red. So red.
But it isn’t cider.
It isn’t cider.
The lamp lights seem to flicker incessantly, as the red before her turns dark and bright consecutively. There is a smell of smoke in the air; she can only see red.
Red, everything is so red.
The symphony she once heard becomes muffled, while the clinking of clashing blades grows. The crying of children and widows, the rustle of her magic sprouting in her hands like the sound of a thousand birds at war, bodies falling, the sound of hundreds of hearts beating in the same rhythm, echoing like drums to her war anthem.
Thump.
Love is weakness, she hears her mother's cutting voice.
Thump.
Magic is emotion, the little imp whispers in her ear.
Thump.
All magic comes with a price, dear.
The air was becoming dense, seeming heavy with ozone.
Unbreathable.
She tried to draw breath—but it wouldn't come.
The room spun.
The aroma of gunpowder, so characteristic, her own essence announcing itself to the world—something she felt had been absent for nearly three decades. Seconds seem to drag like hours. She fears looking at her hands, fears what she will find. For decades she had been responsible for the shedding of so much blood; no, it is definitely not the blood she fears. What terrifies her is feeling those small tentacles of her life essence, her innate, latent, dormant magic, swirling in her hands.
Time seems to stop, everything seems suspended.
"Mother."
She hears in the background, distant, muffled, her son calling her.
"Mother."
Then, as if a button were pressed, everything returned to motion.
The breeze came through the office window.
The fresh smell of grass.
The rhythmic sound of the sprinklers turning in the yard.
Splashes of water hit the open panes.
She reached for the small chain of the lamp to turn on the light—when had it gone out?—and see her son better, illuminated by the last rays of sun.
Ping.
Mommy, catch me!!
Ping.
And looking at him there, golden, glowing like the sunset, his hair wet and messy, Regina felt herself drown in the love she felt for him.
Ping.
“Mommy, I love you.”
Ping.
"Mother..."
She watched him for too long.
Long enough to notice the restlessness growing on his face.
Ping.
“You’re not even my real mom.”
Ping.
Henry pointed at her.
No.
At something on her.
Regina slowly followed the direction of her son's finger.
First to her hand.
Then to the desk.
The sharp shard of glass from the chalice was there.
Fallen beside the documents.
Reflecting the golden late-afternoon light.
There was blood.
Her stomach sank.
She didn't remember letting go of it.
She didn't remember dropping it.
She didn't even remember the last time she had held it.
Ping.
Magic always finds a way.
Ping.
She closes her eyes.
One,
Two,
Three.
When she opens them, the glass remains there.
The blood too.
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
Nothing disappears.
Only then did her gaze continue down to her own arm.
Red.
Everything was red.
Thick drops of blood fell onto the municipal letterhead papers.
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
Her cream sleeve was soaked.
And on her wrist was a deep cut.
Too deep to have gone unnoticed.
Too deep for a common oversight.
But not impossible.
Regina stared at the wound.
Trying to remember.
Trying to find the exact instant when it had happened.
She found nothing.
Only the red.
And voices.
And then, a void.
"Mother! "— Henry called again.
She raised her head.
The panic in the boy's eyes hit her harder than the pain.
" Everything is fine, Henry "— she said quickly, as she hurried to reach for a handkerchief and press it against her wrist. "It was just an accident."
The words came out automatic.
Like a memorized response.
Like something she had said before.
Almost like a déjà vu.
As if saying it could stop what had happened from having happened.
Henry didn't answer immediately.
His gaze went to the blood.
Then to what was left of her glass—the sharp, cutting piece of glass.
Then to her wrist.
The worry was there—quick, instinctive.
But it didn't come alone.
It came with something else.
Confusion, perhaps.
But
there was something older there, something familiar. That look that had followed her more and more over the last few months.
Frustration?
There was something in his look that no longer just accompanied the blood.
He was trying to understand something else.
Something in her.
Something she didn't know how to name.
"It was just a silly accident "— she repeated, as if insistence could reorganize reality. " I got a little distracted, it’s nothing serious, I’m fine."
But now, she no longer knew if she was trying to comfort her son or convince herself of it.
Henry let out a breath through his nose.
" Henry..."
He pointed lightly at the desk, hesitant, but without taking his attention off her.
" Your... your... arm... mon.
The word "mon" came heavy.
It had been so long since her little prince had avoided calling her Mother. She had become Regina to him, not Mother.
It was no longer a sweet, soft, pure word.
"You're bleeding, Mother. "
He repeated, lower now.
As if he were holding something inside him, he looked to the side for a second, as if trying not to tell her what was troubling him. His face, still possessing childish features that reminded her of baby fat, betrayed him. He seemed to want to tell her something more, something much bigger.
" And even so, you're still pretending it's nothing."
He bit his lower lip—a nervous tic she had noticed was more present every day.
"I see it, okay? I see all of this — he says as he gestures with his arms, making a wide arc in the air."
Silence.
When he looked back at her, the irritation was there—but mixed with something worse:
disappointment.
The worry disappeared behind the irritation.
Or perhaps it was just hidden.
Now his voice cracked a bit—but not from soft weakness.
From contained rage.
"I see what's happening! I see everything!"
The silence fell heavy.
" Stop lying to me!"
He turned his back.
But he didn't leave quickly.
He walked out heavily.
Like someone who didn't want to go, but didn't want to stay.
Regina remained motionless.
Watching him leave again.
Watching the blood seep through the fabric of the handkerchief.
Watching the piece of glass abandoned on the desk.
Trying desperately to remember.
But her memory ended at the instant the red had taken over everything.
And that terrified her more than the wound.
Only one command echoed in her mind, loud and imperative:
Spine straight.
Face neutral.
Do not cry.
Do not complain.
Do not show it.
Hide the bruises.
Hide the cuts.
Hide the wounds.
Hide the questions.
Hide yourself.