Chapter Text
Fifteen Years Ago
“Promise me this isn’t it for us.”
Regina’s boyfriend, Robin, is crying, and she is too - big, fat tears that blur her vision and slide down her cheeks in streams, only to drip off her chin and stain her shirt before she can even try to wipe them away.
“This isn’t it,” she immediately swears, clinging tightly to his neck, trying to hold him as closely as possible, despite having her heavy backpack strapped to her and her shoulder bag strung across her chest. They only have a few more minutes before she has to go through the security line, or she’ll miss her plane, and her mother will be furious.
“We’ll talk every day,” Regina tells him. “It’s only an eight-hour difference, so we can talk before school, and after. And I’ll make my mother send me over for a visit soon, I swear. She can’t keep us apart, Robin. You’ll see, it’s –” she sniffs and tries to ignore the tears that fall harder as she tries, “– it’s going to be okay.”
She tries to be strong as she says these comforting words to him, tries her best to reassure him with every ounce of her sixteen-year-old heart that they can do this, even though everyone has told her that long distance relationships almost never work. It doesn’t help that her mother, Cora, is being completely unreasonable, that she hasn’t made any attempt to understand Regina’s protests or her need to stay in California. No, Cora has been totally inflexible, has made it abundantly clear that Regina won’t be coming back to the States anytime soon, no matter how badly she needs to see Robin.
It's so unfair.
One would think that Regina's mother would get it, that since she's getting re-married next week, she would understand Regina's need to see the boy she is in love with. The man her mother is marrying lives in England, which is the whole reason they’re moving there, so if anyone should understand, it should be Cora. But all Cora will say about it, is that Regina is being dramatic, and that once they get settled in London she will be “far too busy starting her new life to be worrying about some silly boy.”
Never mind the fact that Regina doesn’t want a new life. She wants this life, where she is completely in love with Robin Locksley, who, from the moment she met him, has become her best friend in the entire world. He’s the only person she could open up to after her daddy died this year, the only one who cared, the only one who truly gets her. Even the fact that she has been dating Robin for seven whole months - which is longer than her mother dated Leopold before they decided to get married - doesn’t matter.
It’s bullshit.
“Right. And it won’t be long before I’m back in England for good,” Robin reminds her, hope shining in his teary blue eyes. “I’m only here until this bloody exchange program ends, then I’ll get to go home, and I promise you, I’ll take the first train to London to find you.”
“I know,” Regina nods, trying to keep her perspective, even though five months apart seems like a lifetime from now. “We just have to make it until then.”
“We will,” Robin wraps his arms around her and hugs her tightly, kisses her forehead and snuggles his nose in her thick black hair in that way she loves. “Our story isn’t over, darling,” he murmurs in her ear. “Far from it. I have faith in us, we’re going to get through these next few months, and then we’ll be together, for always.”
Regina nods, trusting him, twisting her fingers in his shirt, and not bothering to fight back her tears anymore. She just sobs against him, hating her life, hating that her father died and that her mother is getting remarried, that she’s moving, that she’s leaving her friends, her home, her country, and her best-friend-slash-boyfriend behind.
Everything about her life sucks.
“You’d better go now,” Robin’s voice has gone gravelly, and he holds her closer for a long moment before he starts to pull away.
But Regina isn’t ready – she’ll never be ready - and her emotions overwhelm her.
Suddenly she panics, clings to him as he tries to separate them – she won’t allow it, no - this can’t be happening, she can’t lose him, too! She throws her arms around his neck and desperately begs, “No, no! Please, Robin - please don’t make me, please don’t make me go!”
Robin immediately wraps her back up in his arms, and he’s crying again now too – she can feel his chest shaking as he holds her in his fierce embrace.
“Please let me stay,” she pleads against his neck. “Let me stay. I love you, please, I’ll do anything to stay, please, Robin. There must be something - anything - we can do.”
“There isn’t,” his voice cracks in the middle. “I love you, Regina, but you know there isn’t anything we can do. We’ve gone over and over it.”
Regina sobs harder, and Robin strokes his hand along her hair, trying to calm her.
“Why can’t we just run away together?” she argues, already knowing the dozens of reasons why that won’t work – they have gone over it so many times she can practically recite them by heart. But she doesn’t care about those reasons right now. Right now, she just wants to stay. “Please, Robin,” she softens her tone and tries to collect herself. “Please tell me we can. Tell me I don’t have to go.”
“I’m sorry.” Sobs are wracking his body against hers as Robin chokes out, “I know, my love, I know. I don’t want you to go either. And I swear, I’d walk through hell and back to be with you. I… I would do anything for us to be together.”
He pulls back just enough to press his forehead to hers – he’s trying to look in her eyes but they’re so close, and their tears are falling so fast, that everything is just blurry. “But you can’t, we can’t run away. Your mum - she’ll kill us. She’ll find us and she’ll kill us.”
“I don’t care!” Regina grabs the back of his head and kisses him - it's wet, and tearful, and painfully desperate. “I don’t care what my mother does! We’ll run forever, Robin. It doesn’t matter – as long as we’re together, nothing else matters.”
“Darling, please,” he’s the one begging now, before he softly kisses her once, twice – it’s moist, messy, and completely heart-wrenching – but she doesn’t care. “Please,” he repeats. “Please just… you’ve got to get on your plane. We can’t – we’ve been over this, you and I, and we, you’ve got to –” He cuts himself off and just falls to pieces, starts sobbing again, his hands shaking as he threads them through the thick tresses of her hair. Robin pulls her in close and buries his face against her neck, where he presses quick, needy kisses, and she can feel his hot tears smearing against her skin as she clutches him to her.
“Robin,” she rasps, grabbing for his hands and holding them tightly in hers, squeezing until he pulls back enough to look her in the eyes. “Please, just, just ask me to stay here with you. Ask me to stay, and I will.”
That’s all she needs to hear right now. All Robin has to do is to ask her, and she’ll do it, she’ll stay – consequences be damned. Her mother will have to come all the way back from London herself, then she’ll have to find them, and she’ll have to fight them, because she’s not going.
She.
Is.
Not.
Going.
Robin pulls her hands up to his lips and peppers her knuckles with kisses, then hugs them tightly to his chest, before he suddenly, violently wrenches himself away from her - with so much force he stumbles.
Regina is stunned.
“Go.”
And then she is crushed.
“What?”
“Go,” he repeats, tears positively streaming down his face. “Go, Regina. Get on your plane.”
“Why are you saying that?” She feels breathless, like she’s just been kicked by one of her father’s horses. This is not how this is supposed to happen.
Robin shakes his head, scrubs his hands roughly over his face, then curls them into fists.
“Go,” he repeats, squeezing his eyes shut and swiping in vain at the tears that flood down his cheeks.
“But I…” Regina feels like she’s in shock. “I thought…” She looks around the airport, and for the first time, she notices people bustling by them in a hurry to get into the security line, hears the announcements as they come over the loudspeaker. She feels so confused by everything in her life, that the words just sort of fall out of her mouth without her even thinking. “I thought you loved me.”
Robin makes this awful sound - some cross between a hiccup and a yelp, like he’s just been stabbed - and he stares at her with wide, blue eyes for a moment that stretches on for infinity.
“I do,” he argues, and she can see him clenching his jaw in that way he does when he gets really angry. His eyes flicker away from her for a split-second, then he jams his hands deep into his pockets, and when he looks back to her, he seems furious as he grits out, “And that’s exactly why I can’t ask you to stay.”
And now she is angry.
“Then you obviously don’t love me,” she snaps. “If you loved me, you’d never let this happen.”
Robin’s face crumbles at her words.
“Don’t you know you’re supposed to fight for love, not let it slip away at the first chance?” Regina allows her anger, her frustration, her absolute grief over the situation to consume her. She lets it fill her head with lies and terrible, hurtful words as she accuses, “You don’t love me. You don’t care about me at all.”
“Regina, I do love you,” he battles back. “You know I love you. I will always love you - more than anyone, anything - forever and for always.”
“Well, your definition of forever isn’t very long,” she curls her lip in disgust, growing more upset with each passing second. “You’re already throwing us away.”
“No I’m bloody-well not!” he barks, clearly offended. “Regina, that’s not fair. This isn’t right,” Robin scowls as he argues, “We had a plan, and we agreed that even though it was going to suck, it was our best shot. We agreed, Regina, and now you’re saying I don’t love you because I want to stick to the plan? Because I don’t want your mother to go mad and ruin your life when she comes looking for you? How does that make me the villain here?”
“Because you’re only worried about yourself,” Regina growls. “You don’t give a shit about what happens to me.”
“That’s a lie and you know it! I don’t give a damn about your mother; I don’t give a damn about what happens to me. My only concern here is for you! How can you not see that? I thought you knew me better than that!” He’s getting really heated now, his temper is starting to match hers, and she’s glad.
She needs it - his fury, his pain, and his grief – she needs it to rival hers so that she doesn’t feel like the entire world is on fire and she’s the only one burning up in it.
“Regina, you know that running away isn’t going to solve this,” he softens his voice, and – damnit - now he has that pleading look, that reasonable, patient expression that always calms her down. And she doesn’t want that, she wants the exact opposite of that –
“There’s nothing to solve,” she glares. “You won’t ask me to stay because you don’t want me to stay.”
“That’s not true – that’s not what I said.”
“You’re afraid of my mother and you won’t take a risk for me,” she accuses. “If you really loved me, you’d do anything for me. But you won’t even ask me a simple question.”
“Regina, you know it’s not simple,” he tries to reason with her.
Robin is patient, always so patient, and right now, she can’t stand it.
“Where would we even go?" he challenges. "What would we do? We’re still in high school, and I haven’t got any savings. We- oiy! Where are you going?!”
Abruptly, Regina turns and starts for the security line. She doesn’t want to hear it - she doesn’t want to listen to his reasons and excuses for why they can’t be together. The only thing she wants to hear him say is Stay, and if he’s not going to, then she has a fucking plane to catch.
“Regina, wait!”
She keeps walking.
“Regina, stop!”
She’s nearing the security entrance.
“Darling please, just listen!”
She’s pulling out her ticket and her passport.
“Regina, please just wait a second. I’m sorry! Please! I love you, Regina, you’re-” he sobs loudly, and it breaks her whole heart in half - “You’re everything."
His voice is positively shaking with anguish as he starts to plead with her. "Please come back! Please Regina! How am I supposed to live without you?” She can hear him positively weeping now, openly and with so much sorrowful despair that it makes her chest positively burn.
“Please, Regina, please don’t end it like this!”
End it?
Is this the end? she wonders. Is she ending it?
And in her temper, in her pain and misery, all she can think is, If it is the end, then so be it.
She hands her information to the TSA agent, then moves into the security line, and she can hear Robin somewhere behind her, still calling out to her. She doesn’t acknowledge him, doesn’t even turn her head in his direction, but she knows he must be making quite a scene, because even though she’s ignoring him, he won’t shut up.
“Regina, I’m sorry!”
“Regina, I love you!”
If he loves her, then why won’t he ask her to stay?
She refuses to acknowledge that she’s crying too as she passes through the x-ray machine, and by some stroke of luck, the TSA agents are kind enough not to draw any additional attention to her. With a bowed head, she grabs her things, shoves on her shoes, and heads off down the terminal toward her gate.
The last thing she hears Robin yell ends up haunting her for the next decade to come.
“Regina! Wait! Don’t go! I, I made a mistake! Please, come back! Please st-”
It could have been what she wanted to hear, but his plea comes a second too late for her stubborn pride to allow her to do anything but turn the corner at the end of the corridor, and she never hears the last part of his sentence.
When she makes it to England, she doesn’t call him, but she finds out from her mother that he’s been calling her non-stop since her plane got in. So she’s forced to return his calls, mostly to tell him to stop calling, because it’s irritating the life out of her mother, and she doesn’t have her internet set up yet to receive email.
The time zone difference between them is more difficult to navigate than she thought it would be, and with so much to do, what with moving, her mother’s wedding, gaining an annoying, eleven-year-old stepsister, and starting at a new school, Regina really doesn’t feel like talking to Robin. When they do talk, it’s awkward and strained in a way it’s never been before. He won’t stop apologizing, won't stop talking about the next time they see each other, or how much he misses her, or how he can’t wait to hug and kiss her, but she can’t even bring herself to imagine looking him in the eyes ever again. Not when he didn’t want her to stay in the first place.
They last three weeks before she breaks up with him.
Robin is terribly upset, is adamant that they’re making a horrible mistake. He vehemently argues that they can fix it, that they can at least still be friends. But Regina doesn’t agree. She wants a clean break; she wants complete separation so she can get over the anguish and absolute devastation she feels over losing him. When he contends that she hasn’t lost him, that he’s right here trying to be with her, she reminds him that there is an entire ocean between them because he put it there. That they could have walked out of the airport together three weeks ago – that this never needed to happen and it’s all his fault.
Then she tells him she hates him for ruining everything, that she never loved him - that she only told him that because he said it first and she felt obligated to say it back. She tells him if he really cares about her, then he’ll respect her decision and he'll never contact her again, and that shuts him up, gets him to stop calling her, gets him out of her life - for good.
She ends up hating herself for all of it; for spinning such a nasty web of lies, for being so cruel to Robin simply because she was hurting, and she wanted him to hurt too. She assumes that after the things she said and did, he must hate her now, so she never seeks out an opportunity to apologize - some things are better left alone.
After a few weeks at her new school, Regina meets Daniel. He’s funny and full of energy, the life of the party, and the most extroverted person she’s ever known. He immediately falls for her, he can’t seem to resist spoiling her, and after a while, she can’t resist his charms either. Within a couple of months, they start dating. Their connection doesn’t start deep, but over time, it grows strong and true.
Daniel is a risk taker, and Regina loves this about him. He attacks life and lives it to every extreme; he’s an adrenaline junkie – skydiving, bungee jumping, free-diving with sharks – Daniel does it all. His very presence makes Regina forget how sad she is about losing her dad, forget how angry she is with her mother for forcing her to move. He even makes her stop missing her old life in California, though no matter how hard she tries, she can't quite forget Robin.
Being with Daniel makes Regina feel alive; he makes her smile, makes her laugh, makes her happy, and that's something her broken heart never thought she'd have.
When they finally turn eighteen and Daniel suggests one night that they should elope, it’s everything Regina has been waiting to hear. He wants to be with her - for life, forever – it’s a promise and a risk he wants to take, and unlike some people, he’s not afraid to take the leap.
So they elope.
When her mother finds out, Cora is beyond furious. She can’t understand how Regina could do this, how she could "rush into getting married.” She accuses her of being too young, tells her that she, “Can’t believe she’s throwing her life away on some man she barely knows.”
To which Regina tells her, “I guess I learned that from you, Mother.”
Somehow, Daniel wins Cora over. It takes a lot of perseverance, time, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that he comes from a respectable family that has even more money than Cora’s new husband, Leopold. When Daniel’s parents pass away within the same year – his mother from an aggressive form of cancer, and his father, from a sudden heart attack – Cora fully accepts him as one of her own. They’re as close as any family can be, and Regina can say that she’s happy - that she loves Daniel, and she loves her life.
Until the accident.
That’s when everything changes, and nothing can, or ever will be the same, ever again.