Deposition [Evil Charming, 2/3]
Regina is downstairs in the kitchen, tearing through the groceries for something appropriate to fix for dinner.
Damn him! Damn him to hell!
She pulls a pot roughly from a cabinet and slams it onto the gas stove, metal against metal zinging a high-pitched tune through the room.
She has to do something.
Regina hasn’t stopped moving since she awoke this morning, a sore and exhausted bag of bones engulfed by an all but withering mortification. The more the memories of the night prior leak into her brain the more frenzied movement and chores she throws herself into, a whirlwind of forced domesticity. The less she moves the more she thinks and she absolutely cannot think - not now, not ever.
Twenty minutes of raiding her pantries and the only solid thing Regina has come up with is the fact that the man has particularly substandard taste in groceries. Potato chips, macaroni and cheese, potato salad, pop-tarts… it’s almost as if he let Henry shop for her, without any rules to boot! Frustrated, Regina slams her hand on the marble counter with a resounding smack. How is she expected to cook dinner when all she has to offer is junk food and kid snacks? Sometimes she forgets how childish James is - rather, how childish David was, and how the remnant of that Storybrooke incarnation bleeds through to James’s true self. Whatever that is anymore.
Regina stares, defeated, at the array of foodstuffs arranged on her counter, and many minutes pass before she finally resigns herself to the task of boiling a pot of water for the macaroni and cheese.
The water’s on the stove and she needs to give it ten minutes before it’ll boil, so Regina collects napkins and silverware for place settings. After everything is arranged perfectly in the dining room, she returns to the kitchen and stands in front of the stove.
They caution, in this world, never to watch water boil.
This is her private rebellion.
Within time, though, the water does begin to bubble and simmer. Taking that as her cue, Regina dumps in the stiff yellow noodles and swirls them around a turn or two with a plastic spoon.
She will not let herself remember that this is Henry’s favorite.
She will not permit herself to accept the dizzy rush of nostalgia slackening every muscle in her body.
Regina locks her knees in place and stirs - stirs compulsively, stirs gently, stirs mechanically; stirs, just stirs. The bustling world behind her eyes is shut down, swallowed by suffocating blackness until no thought, no memory, no feeling, no matter how bright, can shine through. After last night, Regina decides, there will be no more useless emotion in this household so long as she is in charge of it.
When the macaroni and cheese is completed she covers it and places it in the oven to keep it warm while she readies herself for her guest. She’s thought long and hard about what she ought to wear, wanting to convey a façade of strength and stability to James after what he witnessed last night. A suit, then, is the most obvious choice, and she has already mentally selected the perfect one: her favorite, naturally. Crisp, simple, emotionless, black. Exactly how she feels.
She wends her way up to her closet and dresses herself in said suit, freshly pressed and cleaned this morning, relishing its secure familiarity on her skin. She chooses a white blouse to wear beneath, for nothing more than a basic contrast. Basic. Plain. That’s what she desires. In that vein, she peers at her reflection in the mirror and applies an appropriate amount of make-up; a sheer, natural look, coupled with her characteristic dark red lipstick. As for her hair, she is undecided. It’s grown longer these past few weeks and she feels uncomfortable leaving it down, even though she had long hair for the majority of her former life. It is different now. Then it was soft, thick, heavy. But now it is thinner, coarser, limper. It is as if she is decomposing in this catacomb of a home, slowly deteriorating with every passing minute like she is being eaten alive by earth and worms and death. Eyes fix on eyes that look back at her from the sunken vantage of an ashen woman with harsh, skeletal architecture and she realizes, she is not a woman and she is certainly not a queen. She is a wraith, at best; a hateful specter that gorges itself on long lost regrets and stale hatred.
Numbly, Regina coils her hair into a tight, round bun at the back of her head and decides she is ready. She slides into a pair of black heels and slowly descends to the kitchen once more, where she removes the pot from the oven and sprinkles the cheesy pasta with a few herbs - it’s the least she can do, after all.
Everything is perfectly arranged according to proper decorum and Regina is mildly pleased with herself. She takes a seat at the table and waits, drumming her fingers lightly on its mahogany surface.
She hates waiting because waiting allows her the luxury of contemplation.
God, but she doesn’t want James to be here. At the mere thought of facing him her heart sinks to her feet and she can’t reclaim it. If she had any pride left, she would never let him step foot in her house again. But, naturally, that goes against the terms of their little bargain, and she was told not to be ornery. For once she follows their rules. Perhaps she has finally relented. Perhaps the dreadful Evil Queen has finally lost her cause, once and for all, as well as the will to fight along with it. For all intents and purposes she has given up, hasn’t she? She has surrendered.
Snow White won a second time and it has cost Regina everything.
And here’s Snow’s true love, ringing the doorbell, his presence a persistent reminder of all Regina has lost, all she still has yet to lose. She briefly considers leaving him standing there at her doorstep but she’s made the macaroni and cheese already and she can’t eat it all herself.
She pulls back the door and he smiles at her, a smile that says, “I promise I won’t bring up what happened last night, so let’s just have a civil dinner,” a promise that sneers and condescends and makes something evil and hateful snake its way around Regina’s stomach. She looks at him with lusterless eyes and allows him entry, ignoring the guilt on his face because she doesn’t want to be reminded of its source for the umpteenth time today, not really, not after she’s spent the better half of the day baking him macaroni and cheese and putting on a power suit.
James walks into her home and immediately feels an aura of trepidation and opacity sink around him, settling like a thick dust. He wades through it only to see Regina on the other side, a concrete barricade surrounding her with such high and impenetrable walls that he cannot hope to climb. She is terrified, this much he can tell. After last night she opened up to him past her level of comfort and now she is taking ten steps backward, pushing him out completely and insulating herself from further penetration. He’s never dealt with this kind of person before, much less in the form of a woman. Everything he’s ever had in life has come to him easily, in terms of love, in terms of friendship. He can’t imagine what it’s like to be Regina. He can’t imagine or even conceive of her loneliness and despair, and he feels that he only got to see half of it last night - that there is even more she’s kept at bay.
“Wow, you made dinner,” he remarks, stuffing his hands in his pockets and feeling rather underdressed in his jeans and button-up, “What’s on the menu?”
“Well, seeing as you didn’t give me much to work with…” Regina’s voice trails off and she lifts the lid off the pot on the dining room table, revealing the lightly seasoned macaroni and cheese. “This will have to do.”
James rubs his hands together and grins, and for a moment Regina sees Henry in him - those same, wide, hungry eyes that stare at a plate of sub-par noodles smothered in fattening cheese sauce as if it’s a dish of gold. “Great! I love mac ‘n’ cheese!”
She responds to that with a flat smile and seats herself.
It’s quiet for too long. Awkward clinks of fork against plate chime through the room and neither of them are eating, they’re just poking at their food like road kill and avoiding each other’s eyes like the plague.
Regina buckles first.
“So, are you going to narrate your life over dinner, or shall we save that for the bedroom?”
She’s angry. She feels cornered. She doesn’t know why.
James’s fork hovers over his mouth and he stares her, mouth agape. “Uh, Regina, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, I just - ”
“The wrong idea,” she echoes, numbly. “What is the ‘right’ idea, then, Charming?”
Here it is. He braces himself for impact.
But when he braces himself for impact, he didn’t think it would be of a physical kind.
In seconds James is suspended in the air by a thick purple rope of glittery smoke, immobilized and helpless as Regina, below, stares at him with a look that can only be classified as frenzied and demonic.
“I think you get a sick thrill out of it, don’t you?” It isn’t a question. It’s an accusation. She twists her fingers and James is struggling to breathe. “You and your little hero complex. It’s precious, really, but as you can see, I am no damsel in distress.”
There’s a smile on her face that isn’t quite hers and though his vision is spotted with black he can still see it, and it frightens him.
“But you were a damsel in distress, once - ” he manages to choke out, “ - and no one came to save you. Snow told me, she - she told me everything, Regina - ”
“You will not say her name in this house!”
James is drowning. He can’t feel his limbs and he is floating, floating off somewhere, dragged by his middle. Pain shoots through him threateningly like a lightning cloud about to strike and all he can see is Regina’s face, Regina’s hardened face, and he thinks to himself, “She’s actually going to kill me,” because he can see that primal urge in her, buried dimly behind her eyes. “Regina, please - I’m sorry - just listen to me for one minute!” His plea comes out like a wheeze and he curses his lungs for it, dampened and strangled though they are.
He doesn’t have any further opportunity to beg for his life because within seconds his body hits the ground hard and he is gasping for breath, greedily filling his lungs with air before she can suck it back out of him.
When he gathers enough energy to stand and look about, she is backed against the wall with eyes wide open and face as grey as stone. She isn’t breathing; or if she is, it is with a different set of lungs that are not her own.
Though James is the one who very nearly lost his life, she is the one with terror paralyzing her face.
“Regina,” he ventures, timidly, afraid to get any closer than he already is. “I - don’t understand.”
Her voice, when she finds it, is a whimper.
“You did this to me.” He can hardly hear her. “You made me use my magic. I couldn’t use it before just now, so you had to have done something. I couldn’t even,” she breaks, fumbles for the right words, “I couldn’t even control it. That’s never happened to me before.”
James has no idea how magic works so he remains rooted to the spot, clueless and stunned and utterly unhelpful. “I didn’t do anything,” he defends, words slow and harshly articulated. “You tried to kill me!”
She shakes her head. “I got angry, and it just happened. I’ve been trying to use magic for weeks with no result and then you waltz in here and my magic uses me.”
He doesn’t know what to say so he doesn’t say anything. He lets her try to work it out for herself.
“I don’t understand.” She’s talking under her breath now; he has to strain to hear her. “Strong magic requires strong emotion.” Her gaze is on James now, filled with confusion and repulsion. “I feel nothing for you, nothing. You lock me up in my house, you take away my son, you intrude upon my privacy, you treat me like an invalid, and what’s worse is you think I care about you, you think I care about your history, when all I really want is to set you and that wife of yours on fire until you are nothing but ashes at my feet.”
“Well,” he says, lifting his brows, “that sounds like strong emotion to me.”
He can’t help it, even though his insides are squirming.
“Look, Regina, I don’t know how this stuff works, but emotion isn’t all bad. You’re human. You can’t block everything out. Hearts don’t work that way.”
“I don’t have a heart.”
“No, don’t give me that. I know you have a heart. I saw it yesterday.”
That unsettles her. “You saw a lot of things yesterday that you shouldn’t have seen.”
“Yeah, well, I saw them and you can’t take them back.” He’s getting frustrated now, he just wants her to open her eyes, he just wants her to let him in. “Stop being angry at me for being your friend.”
Friend. The word hits her as heavy as an anvil. No, Regina doesn’t have any friends. No, Regina has betrayed all of those. No, she doesn’t want any more. She rejects this. She rejects him. He is not her friend and he never will be.
“Let me help you.”
Help. No, she doesn’t need any help. She doesn’t need anything from anyone; she’s lived most of her life on her own and she prefers it that way. She won’t let him in. Not ever again. He’s acting entitled, like he has the right to pity her, like he has the right to want to fix her. He’s Snow White’s Prince Charming, not hers.
“I should hate you, but I don’t.”
He’s so close - when did he get so close to her?
“You have enough hate in your life. You’re made of hate, Regina.”
He’s too close.
“But you weren’t always like this. Which says to me, you don’t always have to stay like this.”
He might have had more to say but he swallows his words when Regina’s magic flares a second time.
“When will you and your demented wife get it through your thick heads?” she asks, rhetorically, flattening him against the ceiling.
“I can’t be saved.”
She lets him fall and when he looks up, she is gone.