♛

"What?!"

That had been Regina's knee-jerk response the moment Henry suggested the idea. That he brought his girlfriend round for a festive dinner.. with her father.

That in itself, didn't sound so bad, but Regina knew this would be no straight forward dinner. After all, his girlfriend was Grace, Jefferson's daughter. The daughter of a man who hated her guts and had done so for a long while. It had taken Regina some time to come to terms with the fact Henry had a girlfriend at all, let alone it was Grace; but now it seemed she was about to confront it head on. It had been just fine when kept at a distance, but now they wanted them to sit in the same room, share the same table. 

It was a terrible idea.

Which is why Regina still doesn't quite understand how Henry's convinced her to lay on dinner that's currently dominating every available work surface in her kitchen. She hasn't spoken to Jefferson in years, despite being in the same town. What was left to say, after all that had happened? Apparently, she was about the find out, when she heard the front door open and Henry call her name. They were here.

Wiping her hands down on a towel, Regina quickly checks herself and her outfit in the mirror - old habits - and heads towards the kitchen door. She takes a deep breath before she makes her way into the hall, ready to face what she's undoubtedly sure is going to be the most uncomfortable Christmas dinner she's ever had - and that includes the one after Emma Swan crashed into their lives.

A smile painted on her face, she does her best to look welcoming, even if it's tinged with uncertainty when she sees Jefferson there.

She can still feel it inside her grasp. That young girl's heart, thudding and glowing with life and possibilities, until she'd crushed it to nothing. The memory of it haunts her, as she sits trying to pick through her breakfast, that is once again, taken alone. Usually, the King has matters to attend to and she's left by herself. That usually frustrates her, but right now, she doesn't feel like she can face anyone ever again.

After she committed that act, Rumplestiltskin had showered her with praise, before cruelly abandoning her back at the palace, and the moment he was gone, reality sunk in. Rage and frustration had consumed her so easily in that moment, that she was able to accomplish the dark deeds Rumplestiltskin had been urging her to do. But now she's left alone, she can't bear her thoughts and fears, knowing that she's let darkness into her heart and wondering where it would lead. She knows she has enough anger in her heart for it to consume her whole, and then what would she be left with?

Her eyes close and she tries not to think about that. She pushes away her plate and without needing instruction, the servants swoop in to clear it away and leave the Queen in peace. Only, she'll never be at peace, and she hasn't been for a long time. She's been Queen for almost a year now, and what does she have to show for it? She's a prisoner within her own home, with her only company being Rumplestiltskin and his so-called lessons. She's allowed out now, but only with the King's permission, and even then, who does she have to visit?

With a tearful sigh, she makes her way back to her own quarters, trying not to let the weight of all that had passed break her down entirely. She's stronger than this, she knows she is. She just wishes she had someone, her father doesn't come as often as she needed him to, and even then, he's a stark reminder of what she did to her mother, wherever she is now. She just wanted a friend, someone who could make her laugh, tell stories, someone so far flung from the only life she now knows.

And then it comes to her. The man with the hat. They'd only known each other a short time, and true, he was an associate of Rumplestiltskin's, but.. he seemed decent enough, if a little strange. And with her life being the monotonous routine that it is, Regina felt she could do with strange.

An idea strikes her, to send for him, arrange a meeting of some kind in hopes that she could spend time in his company. Later that day, the letter goes out, to track down this Jefferson and summon him to the palace by the order of the Queen.

That should do it.. she hopes.

It had been an emotionally exhausting day, between facing her sister, travelling by twister, and finding herself in a new land, Regina's glad for the momentary peace and quiet she finds when they're shown to their quarters in King Arthur's castle.

It takes her back, being in a place such as this, so ornate and impressive, everything making a statement about the ownership. It's not that she misses her old life, but perhaps she does miss some of the finery now and then.

Taking in the room, she makes her way towards the dresser, where she sets down Emma Swan's dagger. She looks at it for a long moment before at her reflection in the mirror in front of her. Regina's learnt a lot about herself today, about how she's really seen by the others now. As a hero, and not a villain. Someone who can save Emma. Someone who was no longer dark enough to wield the magic of the wand.

She exhales a deep breath as the weight of the day settles on her, closing her eyes a moment and allowing just a little of that facade to slip. She has to be strong in front of the others, but here, with only Robin present, she has no fear of letting that go. Even Henry and Roland, who are safely housed a room away, can't afford to see her weaken now. This day has been strange and terrifying, for all of them.

Name: Nicola
Contact: comealongsong

Character Name: Queen Regina | unhappilyeverafter
Fandom: Once Upon a Time

Current Canon Point: “Pilot.” The moment the curse is about to take her to Storybrooke.
Current Debt: 32,427 years, 4 months

New Canon Point: End of 3x16 "It's Not Easy Being Green."
Debt Added: 88 years and 6 months.

Summary of Events:

Curse is Cast
Regina sends herself and everybody else to Storybrooke, to the place she believes holds her happy ending. Nobody else can remember who they are, and are kept apart from their true loves - most importantly Snow White and Prince Charming. Regina believes that in making others unhappy, she creates her own happiness, and she lives each day watching everybody blissfully unaware of the prison they’re in. This is her victory.

Adopting Henry
After living eighteen years of day by day monotony, Regina begins to wonder if this is truly the happy ending she wanted after all. She feels something is missing in her life, realises she wants a child. It’s Mr Gold who puts her in touch with an adoption agency, and Henry is soon brought home to Storybrooke. At first, she struggles to adapt to being a mother, but in time, she discovers something she has been without in so long - love. Henry has brought to her something she has needed so desperately, and fills the hole in her heart. It’s this that sets her on the path to becoming a better person, although she’s still a long way off. With Henry, she has someone to live for, and to die for, and for the next ten years, she does everything in her power to keep him safe.

The Saviour
But the arrival of Henry’s birth mother threatens all that. Piece by piece, Regina can see her happy ending falling out from under her, as Emma not only threatens her role in Henry’s life, but the entire curse her happiness is built upon. Immediately Regina goes on the defensive, unable to cope with the implication that her life may change out of her control. Many times Emma and Regina clash, with Regina fighting tooth and nail to keep her away from Henry. She considers Emma to be little more than the woman who gave birth to him, while she’s the woman who brought him up. But once Emma had stepped into Henry’s life, there’s nothing she can do, and she gets more and more tied up in methods of keeping them apart and keeping her control. With a near dictatorial hold over the town and its inhabitants, Regina rules through fear, meaning she can quietly make things happen the way she wants it. She splashes stories across the newspaper, creates rumours in the town, but when she reaches her limit, she decides to put Emma under a sleeping curse. However, this all goes drastically wrong, when it’s Henry who is poisoned, and Regina almost loses her son entirely.

The Curse is Broken
With Henry being kept away from her and the newly-restored townsfolk turning against her, a devastated Regina goes into hiding. She’s lost everything - her magic and her son, but she vows that when she gets one back, she’ll get the other. Because she believes that through magic, comes power, and that way she can keep Henry with her. Using her mother’s spellbook, Regina restores her magic to its entirety, before she terrorises the town to hand Henry back over to her. This is a glimpse of the Evil Queen she had once been, brought back by her need to fight for what she believes is rightfully hers. It’s only once she gets Henry back, that she realises what she’s doing is wrong, that she can’t hold him against his will, and has become more like her mother than she had ever hoped. She wants him to love her, just as Cora did to her, and she accepts that she can’t force him. And so, she lets him go, thus creating the turning point that sees Regina breaking free from her past, and becoming the person she wants to be. She wants to be a good mother to Henry, and this means a promise not to use magic. To better herself, she starts seeing Dr Hopper for therapy, and only ends up using her powers in dire circumstances - the return of Daniel, brought back from the dead by Dr Whale. For one small moment, Regina gets everything she’s ever wanted - her fiance back - but he begs her to let him go, to love again, and so she uses her magic to finally let him turn to dust. Devastated, but finally ready to leave her past behind her, she returns to Dr Hopper, in hopes that she can continue to progress and earn back her son without magic.
Recognising her efforts, Emma begins to allow her to spend more time with Henry, even inviting her to a party at Granny’s Diner. While Regina has a few moments which might tempt her to revert, she manages to restrain herself, and even apologise when she snaps at Emma. This shows a huge development from the woman once known as the Evil Queen. It’s her love for Henry that enables her to let go of that hatred, to try her hardest to be the good person he believes she can be.

But all her hard work is threatened by the return of her mother, Cora. She frames her daughter for the (faked) death of Dr Hopper, turning the town against her once more and worse, Henry. But even when everyone refuses to believe her, Regina doesn’t revert to her dark ways, maintaining her innocent stance. But when Emma is wrongly convinced, Regina fights back against her and by then, it’s too late. People see everything she’s worked for as an act, and she has no choice but to flee. Crushed, she can only watch as Henry is told what’s happened, knowing he’s lost faith in her and all that she’s tried to prove.

It’s then that Cora moves in, knowing her daughter needs her now more than ever. When Cora offers to help reunite Regina with Henry, Regina With everybody else having turned against her, Regina slips back into using magic, standing alongside her mother as she once again tries to fight for all that she has lost. It’s only when her mother is killed that Regina realises her she could’ve never truly loved her without her heart.

This only starts a fresh wave of hatred from Regina to Snow, who she realises is to blame for her mother’s death. Despite all the progress she’d been making, this knocks her back a step, and she once again begins to try and devise ways to get Henry back, and make everybody suffer in the process. Upon finding out that the others are growing magic beans, she destroys the crop and takes a cutting for herself to cultivate her own beans - intending to get out of Storybrooke with Henry, and leave everybody else to perish. Because she feels she’s run out of options, and that’s the only way she can truly be with him. She’s lost sight of what Henry wants, and is blinded by her own needs, just as she has always been.

But before she can enact on her plan, she is tricked by Hook and led into the grasp of Greg and Tamara, a pair who believe that magic should be destroyed, and everyone with it. Greg in particular wants to find out the whereabouts of his father - who Regina killed when he was just a boy. He subjects her to unimaginable torture, and Regina refuses to yield, showing incredible resistance. She refuses to relinquish her control even when put through her own suffering, and she considers every defiance against Greg a victory in her own right. When he goes to kill her, she shows no fear, and simply relishes in the fact that she killed his father. Even in the face of her own death, Regina will not bow to weakness.

Thankfully, she is rescued, by the very people she’s been looking to hurt all this time. It’s this that helps them tentatively unite against the impending destruction of Storybrooke, with Regina finally getting the affirmation she needs that Henry loves her. With something to fight for, Regina uses her magic to try and stop the trigger, but when it’s too powerful, Emma steps in, and together they save Storybrooke.

Neverland
However, it’s a short victory, as they soon discover Henry has been kidnapped by Greg and Tamara. Regina is hot in their heels to get her son back. Here, she allows herself to ally with her once sworn enemies, to work together to save Henry. She manages to put her differences aside (if not her biting sarcasm) to do everything within her power to defeat Peter Pan. Having once focused her energies on harming people, now it becomes quite the opposite. This is about rescuing Henry, and her formidable magic is even more frightening in the hands of a desperate mother.

During her search, she meets Tinker Bell, revealing a past the two shared in which Tinker Bell introduced Regina to a man who was the love of her life, and could’ve guided her from the path of hateful revenge. But now, Regina admits that she had been afraid of what she would’ve been without her anger, and she knows now that she chose hatred over love. This decision didn’t just cost her her happiness, but her true love’s too - a man she knows no more than ‘the man with the lion tattoo’ as that’s the only glimpse she got of him so long ago.
It mirrors the choices that Regina is making now, choosing love, choosing Henry. She made a mistake back then, and it’s not one she’s willing to make again. However, that doesn’t mean she isn’t entirely reformed, for she shows no mercy for the Lost Boys and Peter Pan. Even Peter Pan tries to use Regina’s past against her, using his enchanted tree to try and attack her using her own guilt - but it doesn’t work - because Regina doesn’t regret any of the terrible things she’s done, because without them, she would’ve never met Henry.

When Henry is finally recovered, they set sail back to Storybrooke, where for the first time in a long time, she is celebrated. Snow makes a point of announcing her part in rescuing Henry, much to her surprise. It’s this that begins repairing the tenuous relationship she has with Snow, as well as the rest of Storybrook’s inhabitants. While nobody realises that Henry is in fact Pan in disguise, ‘Henry’ is now allowed to spend time with her, and Regina even goes as far as to ask permission from Emma - a situation that would’ve never have happened pre-Neverland.

This impressive development of character continues as Pan threatens their very existence in Storybrooke by casting another curse. Regina makes the most important decision any mother can make - she sacrifices her own happiness for Henry by reversing her own curse to return the Enchanted Forest’s inhabitants back to their home land - thus leaving Henry behind because he wasn’t part of the curse.

In these final moments, Regina says goodbye to Henry and admits her regret for casting the curse in the first place. She finally acknowledges all that she’s done wrong, calling herself a villain but Henry apologises that he never believed she loved him. He tells her she is simply his mother, and with this, they part ways. He loses all memory of her, and Regina is taken back to the Enchanted Forest, believing she’ll never see her son again.

The Enchanted Forest
Unable to bear the loss of her son, Regina goes as far as to ripping out her own heart, burying it in the woods so that she might no longer feel the pain. Snow finds her and convinces her not to do it, because she needs her heart to find happiness again, for Henry’s sake. And it’s not a moment too soon, because minutes later, they are attacked and rescued by Robin Hood - the man with the lion tattoo.

Regina doesn’t yet know this, of course, and the pair embark on a tenuous working relationship. When Regina decides to venture into her own palace to take down the magical shield, she is determined that no one should go with her, for reasons unknown to the others. Robin decides to follow her in regardless, as he owes her a debt since she saved his son’s life.

It’s only once they’re in the palace that Regina’s real reason for venturing in is revealed. While she will still help the others, she doesn’t plan on returning, and sets about preparing a Sleeping Curse to use upon herself. She doesn’t want to die, but she doesn’t want to continue existing without Henry, and she knows that if she puts herself to sleep, she would only ever be awoken if Henry found her again.

She is interrupted when Zelena arrives, whom duly announces they are half-sisters, and that she wants Regina to suffer a ‘fate worse than death’ - it’s this that stops Regina from casting the curse upon herself, because now she has something to fight for.

In the ensuing days in the Enchanted Forest, Regina is much more amicable with the other inhabitants. She gives Robin a set of gold arrows, attends celebrations, and is present when Snow White announces that she is pregnant again. When Zelena turns up, Regina even steps forward to defend Snow, a remarkable feat that truly showcases the changes Regina has gone through. Now, she protects them, rather than hunts them, and this continues when she helps Snow and Charming to find a way to protect their baby.

Discovering they need Emma to defeat Zelena, she’s asked to cast another Dark Curse, to take them back to Storybrooke. She refuses to pay this price, and watches on as Snow sacrifices Charming to cast the curse instead. She finds herself moved by their plight, tearful when she would’ve once been relishing in their suffering. However, when Zelena ensures they’ll lose their memories, Snow begs for Regina to share her heart with Charming, so that he can live, and Regina manages just in time for the new curse to envelope them.

The Wicked Witch
Regina loses all memory of what passed in the Enchanted Forest, and has no idea who cast this new curse. She carries on, as does everyone else, until Henry returns, without his memories. Shocked as she is, Emma believes that she didn’t cast this new curse, for it doesn’t benefit her in any way. However, the rest of the town isn’t so eager to see that, and Regina and Emma use that to that their advantage, working together to put on a performance that might bring the real culprit out of hiding. Their plan works, but unfortunately they don’t get a good enough look of the person - it’s only later, when a resident is turned into a flying monkey, that they realise they’re dealing with the Wicked Witch. But Regina doesn’t remember who she is to her, or why she’s done this.

While she’s struggling with the lack of recognition from Henry, Regina spends time with him, taking him for ice cream and finding out more about his life in New York. She’s happy to learn he’s doing well in school, and that he’s had a good life since leaving Storybrooke. It’s hard for her not to react to him the way she did as his mother, but she does her best to keep herself in check, and spends time with her as the Mayor rather than his Mother - for her, that’s better than nothing at all.

Meanwhile, Regina is getting to know Robin once again, and the pair share playfulness and banter they once displayed in the Enchanted Forest. It’s during one of these moments, when the pair are flirting and experiencing an almost-kiss, that Regina catches sight of the lion tattoo. Overwhelmed, she flees from him, still scared of the prospect of rediscovering true love, and what that might mean.

It’s Robin who works at getting close to her again, particularly once he finds out who the Wicked Witch is. He finds her emotional over a letter she’s recovered from her vault, a letter that describes Cora’s first born glowingly - that she’s the most powerful sorceress he’d ever encountered, and that she was stunning in every way. Devastated, Regina admits to Robin she had often turned to that letter in times of need, for comfort, for she’d always believed it was about her. Knowing Rumplestiltskin doesn’t regard her as highly as she once thought knocks her confidence, and she’s genuinely upset that he’s never viewed her that way. In a time when Regina had little, that letter had meant a lot to her.

This trust she shows in Robin continues when she asked him to protect her heart for her, for she knows it’s safer out of her chest when she’s facing a witch like Zelena. In fact, her relationship with all of them has shown great progress, her willingness to protect them, to spend time with them, all hugely contrasts the woman we started with. Even without Henry, she continues to be the person he’s always wanted her to be, and in time, will perhaps allow herself to find the happiness he’s always wanted her to have too.

Why this Canon Point?:

The transition to this canon point almost makes Regina seem like a different person entirely, but by studying the events that have happened to her since the original curse was cast, one can see how she’s slowly redeemed herself. Though retaining all the flair, confidence and sarcasm of her former self, this Regina is kinder, more trusting, and willing to do the right thing rather than the painful one. Rather than trying to scheme her way through Teleios, she’ll start to live amongst others as a citizen rather than a Queen. For once, she will do her work willingly, spend time socialising, and more importantly, stop trying to kill everybody.

Those who were once enemies with Regina will be surprised by the transformation their former Evil Queen has gone through. This doesn’t make her a pushover, however, and when crossed, she can be equally formidable, particularly if it involves somebody she cares about.

After having spent the past few years of her life moving from land to land, Teleios won’t be as big an upheaval as it was the first time. This time around, she has a support network of family, friends - and perhaps even partner - enabling her to settle in much better than she did the first time around (or is that second?) Restrictions on her magic won’t make her quite so aggravated, and if offered a favour, her powers, for once, won’t be the first thing she asks for.

With everybody she cares for all in one place, and more importantly, away from Zelena, Teleios will finally seem like a place Regina will enjoy.