Chapter Text
It’s late at night and the mayoral mansion is silent and full of shadows. Robin doesn’t know what he’d expected when he’d been invited to stay there by the dull request of a woman whom he’s barely seen in her own home since. The boys playing, perhaps. Regina downstairs with some cider and a welcoming smile.
Instead, he’s alone with Roland in what feels like a death house, sometimes, like something is sick within it and slowly fading away. It had been like this when Marian had been pregnant and ill, and their camp in the woods had gotten grimmer and grimmer with the shadows of mourning. Regina comes home to cook breakfast for Henry in the mornings and then leaves again, and none of this is as he’d imagined.
He opens the door to the bedroom and Emma Swan says from the corner, “Tell me about Regina.”
Robin drops the book he’d been holding and stumbles backward.
“Regina,” the mirage shrouded in darkness across the room repeats, and Robin can only gape at her in surprise. He’d barely known Emma even when she’d been Regina’s friend, a sheriff he’d actually liked who’d eyed him around Regina as though it hadn’t been mutual. He takes a careful step back as the Dark One speaks again. “Is she happy?”
There’s no answer he can give to Emma but, “Yes,” even when it’s a deep, deep stretch of the truth. Of course Regina isn’t happy. Regina is holed up in the author’s house with Henry every hour of the day while he’s alone in her mansion. Regina avoids his touch and hasn’t so much as kissed him since the moment Emma Swan had vanished into a whirling tornado of dark energy. Regina is red-eyed and frail now, and when he suggests food or a break, she looks at him like he’s the enemy. “She’s happy.”
He’s hurled across the room in the next moment, Emma dark-eyed and furious as gold energy ripples across her skin. “Let me tell you something about me,” she hisses, and her hand is trembling at his throat now as though it’s an effort not to strangle him on the spot. “I always, always know when people are lying to me. Now, why the fuck aren’t you making Regina happy?”
“She’s…” He chokes against a hand that only seems to be getting tighter by the minute. “She’s grieving,” he manages, and Emma drops her hand and takes a step back, brow furrowing.
And she looks genuinely concerned and bewildered at once when she says, “Grieving for who?”
Robin nearly laughs before he sees how her eyes darken at his smile. She’s volatile in a way he’s never seen before- had Regina been like this, once, murder in her eyes at the drop of a hat?- and he has to remind himself to be cautious. “You vanished, Sheriff. They’ve tried summoning you with the dagger and you never came. They all thought you were dead.”
Emma’s eyes clear. “Oh. She’s taking care of Henry. He must be devastated.”
“No, she’s…” He sighs and gives up. “Yes. They’ve been inseparable.” He’d walked into the author’s former home a few days before and found them both on a couch together, clinging to each other with the dagger resting unsheathed on Regina’s lap. Another failed summoning. “Why is it that no one can summon you?”
Emma looks down. “After all that darkness went free, it took…time before I was fully tethered to the dagger. I couldn’t do anything for a long time. Now I can.” Her eyes are haunted when she glances back up, piercing him through as sharply as an arrow. “And I need your help now.”
“My help?” he repeats.
“Two things.” She raises two fingers. “You’re a thief, yeah? I need you to steal something for me.” She steps forward again, close enough that she can touch his chest right over his heart. He sucks in a breath and her eyes gleam an inhuman shade of blue. “And you had fucking better make sure that Regina is happy the next time I visit.”
“I want to make you happy,” Robin tries when he’s seated in the author’s mansion with Regina and Henry. He’s brought Roland along in an attempt to not be shooed out of the room at once, but even Roland isn’t enough to keep Regina from jerking up and walking to the bookshelf, away from him.
He follows her. She says, “Emma wanted to make me happy.” Her hands are trembling against the bookcase and Robin can’t see her expression from his angle. “So maybe let’s put a cap on our quest for my happiness, shall we?”
“Regina…”
Regina twists to face him, looking very irritated and tired. “You know what’ll make me happy? Emma, safe and sound and not under the influence of this…dagger.” She waves it at him and then shoves it back into the sheath she’d magicked up for it at her waist. “I care very little about anything else right now.”
“You still think she’s alive,” he says, relieved at that step forward. “I thought you’d given up.”
Her eyes flash with the same fury as Emma’s do, for a moment, the two of them mirrors of unstoppable force in their protectiveness for each other, but Regina contains it better. “I am never going to give up on her,” she says, her voice cold, and he takes a step back.
She softens, as though she’s remembered for the first time in days who he is to her. “I spent decades keeping Daniel’s body intact in case I could someday bring him back,” she murmurs. “I will spend decades searching for Emma if I have to.”
Daniel had been her first love, the boy who’d launched her vendetta, and Robin wonders at the comparison to Emma and how deep Regina’s friendship had gone. Emma had always looked at Regina as though she'd been about to drown and Regina had been her lifeboat, and Regina had looked at Emma the same way in New York.
He feels a prickle of doubt, remembering too a hoarse shout of Emma! No! and Regina’s eyes horrified on Emma as the inferno of dark energy had taken the other woman. No. He’s just inventing twists where none had existed.
He says, “I’m sorry. I’ll go,” and Regina gives him a tight smile and turns away, never noticing the new weight in his boot as he calls Roland and walks out.
He is, after all, a very, very good thief. It's the one thing about himself that he's still sure of.
He doesn’t remember the woods here as well as he once had. He’d been here too briefly and away too long and his men had settled down, found more acceptable homes and pastimes than robbing carriages in the woods. It’s a challenge to find a place rarely touched by people, and so he winds up in the woods a mile from the town line, far from civilization, before he takes out the dagger.
Emma’s replacement had been a cheap copy, one Regina will realize is a fake soon enough, and he can already see the differences in their make with the practiced eye of a thief. “Dark One, I summon thee,” he ventures, and Emma blinks into existence with a puff of gold.
She stumbles in place, staring around in alarm, and only after she twists around to see him does comprehension register in her eyes. “You.”
“Me.”
“You got the dagger.” She moves forward, hand outstretched, and he says swiftly, “Stop.”
She freezes, her face twisting with frustration and then rage as she understands why she can’t move. “You–! I shouldn’t have trusted you.”
“You can trust me,” he says carefully. “But I don’t think it’s a good idea to give you this.” He isn’t a fool, though he’s felt like one more and more over the past few months, and he knows better than to underestimate the Dark One.
Emma sneers. “So, what, it’s better for someone else to have absolute control over me? Bullshit.”
“What do you do when you aren’t here?” Robin persists. “What did you do when you were finally able to do something?”
Emma’s face is suddenly devoid of expression. “I wouldn’t hurt anyone I’m here to protect. I don’t even…” She shrugs, uncomfortable. “I was looking for Merlin and some people pissed me off.”
“So you killed them.”
“Whatever.” Robin had preferred the barely contained rage to this indifference, the bland implication that Emma has changed irrevocably and will break Regina’s heart all over again. “Give me my dagger.”
"You've been so persuasive about that being a good idea." He dodges the punch as it fires out but it still nicks him on the side of his face, hard enough to have his head spinning for a moment. "Don't-" She's watching him, eyes narrowed, and he realizes suddenly that this is a test. "I won't use it to control you," he says instead. "You have my vow."
She cocks her brow, her fist speckled red with his blood, and laughs. "Your vow? You cheated on your wife while she was in a coma. What's your vow worth?"
"That was-" I was in love with Regina, I didn't think Marian would ever wake, it wasn't even truly Marian... A dozen retorts run through his mind, a dozen excuses he tells himself that have never been good enough, before he thinks better of antagonizing Emma anymore. "You wanted Regina and me to be together!"
Emma scowls at him. "You aren't even making her happy. What good are you?" Her fist twitches again and Robin squeezes the dagger.
He opens his mouth to speak and sees the fear in her eyes. But he doesn't command her. "If you want Regina to be happy, let me return this dagger to her. Let her summon you and see you and I swear, she'll be happier then."
The fear is magnified tenfold at once, Emma closer to alarm than he's seen since she's first appeared to him. He thinks of her shouting into a whirling void about Regina's happiness, certain that somehow this is worth sacrificing her soul for. “No,” Emma says quickly. “No, they can’t see me like this. Especially not Henry and Regina. Regina tried too hard to keep me from…” For the first time, Emma looks ashamed. “Hold onto the dagger,” she decides. “Never let them know you have it.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Emma leans forward, the uncertainty gone from her face. “You’ll do better than that,” she snarls, back on the offensive. “And if you abuse it for one instant, you’d better hang onto it forever or I’ll make you wish you’d never been born, dearie.” She spits out the final mocking word, sucking in a breath and then releasing it, and she rubs her eyes with an irritated groan and says, “Root beer.”
He blinks, unsure that he'd heard correctly. “What?”
“Root beer. Regina loves root beer. From a bottle, not a can.” Emma bites her lip, mournful with the admission. “She’ll never admit she likes it- she calls it a kiddie drink- but she’s lying. Bring her some root beer. Rekindle your…whatever. Make her happy.” The same missive in place again, Emma vanishes as quickly as she’d come.
As per Emma’s instructions, Robin waits until Henry and Roland are in school and then drops by the author’s mansion with two bottles of root beer. He holds one out to Regina, trying for a smile. “A little bird told me you’re a root beer fan?”
Regina stares at it, her mouth opening and closing as though she’s out of words. Robin says, “Regina–?” and she takes in one shuddering breath and vanishes in a cloud of purple.
He’s drinking hard at the Rabbit Hole and doing his best to forget the way Regina had clutched the fake dagger in its sheath when she’d stopped by the house a few hours before to urge Henry to sleep. There’s a man next to him and the bartender flits from one of them to the other, the last two customers for the night, when there’s a flash of light behind him and both the man and the bartender are suddenly dropping to the ground, sightless with red streaks across their necks. Emma says jokingly, “That’s one way to clear a room.”
He nearly falls off his chair, scrambling for the boot where he’s been hiding the dagger. “Emma!” Her skin is positively sallow now, lighter than Rumplestiltskin’s had been but still with early signs of scaliness. She grins at him like a grimace and he says, tucking the dagger away lest she assume he’s commanding her, “You can’t just kill anyone in your way!”
“Why not?” She shrugs moodily, darkness flitting in and out of her eyes. It’s the life that still shines in them in this moment that makes her so terrifying. “They don’t mean anything to me. I have no use for them.”
“So…you plan on killing everyone who means nothing to you? That’s most of Storybrooke. That’s me,” he says, and regrets it as soon as he does.
Emma grins again, the humor returned to her face. “You, I still have use for. You’re Regina’s happy ending, right? Do that okay and you survive.”
It’s only then that it registers that this is a threat. Those two men were killed to teach him a lesson. His heart pounds in his chest. “I’m doing what I can,” he says irritably, as frustrated with his efforts as he is with Emma.
“It isn’t enough,” Emma says with equal heat, and it’s more forceful than usual, more desperate. His brow furrows and she says, by way of explanation, “We’re going to see her.”
“Wha–“ But they're already in another place, standing in the sheriff’s station, and Regina shows no sign of noticing them. She’s curled up in a chair behind the desk, staring blankly at the computer screen with one hand on the mouse, clicking every few moments.
He darts a glance in Emma’s direction and is momentarily stunned at the devastation on her face, the terror-sorrow-yearning that writes volumes across it and freezes something in her eyes. “Regina,” she murmurs.
“Emma,” Regina whispers across the room, but she’s still looking at the computer screen. Emma crosses the room swiftly, moves past him in a flash and is standing behind Regina before Robin can follow. Regina’s head turns slightly, her forehead furrowed as she studies what must appear to be empty air in front of her, but she turns away as Emma stands in place.
Now both women’s eyes are glued to the computer screen, and Robin stands behind Emma and peers at it. Regina had been flipping through pictures in one of Emma’s folders and she’s stopped at one that must have been taken while Robin had been in New York. It’s a selfie, Robin thinks they’re called, Emma’s face squashed next to Henry’s in the frame while Regina tucks her head over Henry’s, mid-eyeroll.
“That was the only time she’d ever willingly taken a photo with me,” Emma laughs, and it’s different than the cold laughter of a murderer. It’s wet and rueful and Emma shifts back and forth between the Dark One and Regina’s closest friend the moment she’d entered the room with her. “I have a few Sidney snapped of me with her back when she had him on stalker duty, but they don’t count. This one…why is she…?”
She moves closer to Regina, standing just behind her in the seat, and Regina is crying silently now, tears slipping down her cheeks in a moment of unrestrained weakness. Emma kneels at her side, eyes wide with comprehension, and she reaches out with a single finger to catch a stray tear that escapes from the tip of Regina’s chin. “This?” she whispers. “For me?”
“For you,” Robin agrees, and Emma whips around as though she’d forgotten that she’d brought him here. He tries for a smile but thinks he must look sick instead. “She misses you.”
“No.” Emma shakes her head. “No, we weren’t even…I don’t even know if we were friends.”
“I’d think that jumping into eternal darkness for another woman might make you at least friends.” More than that, even, he thinks and then dismisses.
Emma leans forward, her forehead resting against the chair seat just below Regina. “She tried so hard for so long. That couldn’t be her ending. I didn’t want her to lose anymore.” Regina’s tears are still falling and Emma’s hand is cupped beneath where Regina is resting against the back of the chair, catching little droplets in midair. Robin imagines them glistening and vanishing to Regina’s eyes, gone as surely as Emma herself. “Everyone deserves a happy ending,” Emma breathes, and she gazes up at Regina as though she’s the sun.
Regina manages to pull herself away from research to join him at Zelena’s second ultrasound, which Robin thinks is an indication of commitment that he hasn’t seen since the sacrifice. He’s relieved, in a sense, even as dread suffuses him at a return to his last great mistake.
The nurse is absent when Regina stalks through the hall of the asylum, Robin trailing behind, and Regina’s heels resound and echo in the silent hallway. “Here,” she says, yanking open the door. “Hello, Si–“
The room is covered in blood. Robin gapes for a moment and Regina lets out a strangled gasp.
Zelena is bent out at impossible angles on the floor, her eyes sightless and her skin streaked with blood. It’s still oozing out in some places, fresh and raw, and her face is bulging with bruises as though it had been beaten hard with a fist before she’d been killed. “No,” Regina whispers, looking horrified. “Who did this?”
“It’s what she wanted,” Emma says stubbornly from behind them. Regina doesn’t turn and Robin can feel his eyes red and angry as he twists to see her. Her knuckles are caked with dried blood and her eyes still gleam with murderous intent. “She might not admit it, but deep down, she wanted that baby dead and gone. Deep down, you do, too.”
He forgets that he’s supposed to be subtle about Emma, that he’s keeping her a secret, that had been his baby, and he clenches his fists. “That was our baby. You killed our baby.” Regina doesn’t seem to hear anything he’s saying. She’s crouching beside Zelena, devastation on her face.
“Please,” Emma scoffs. “I think you’ll do just fine without your rape baby.”
“My…” Rape baby. Rape. “I wasn’t…” He shakes his head to clear it.
“Yeah, see, I’m not from the Enchanted Forest. Here we care about things like…oh, consent.” Emma grins humorlessly at him. “I got rid of your rapist and the baby you were going to raise with her. You’ll both thank me later.”
Regina hasn’t looked up yet once, touching Zelena’s jaw with delicate fingers that might have indicated something like care- or the beginnings of it- and Emma flickers out of existence as Regina reaches for her sheath and slips out the fake dagger. “Dark One, I sum- I summon thee,” she whispers, her voice cracking. “Dark One, I summon thee. Emma.”
“Regina?” His voice comes out too high and the real dagger is a guilty weight against his leg. “What are you doing?”
Regina turns to look up at him at last. “Emma did this,” she says, her voice rough with unshed tears. “I know it. She’s alive out there and she…” She gazes down at the dagger again, traces the curve of it, and studies it as though she’s looking at it for the first time.
Regina takes approximately thirty seconds of actually staring at the dagger before she knows it’s a fake, and they’re storming through the streets of Storybrooke moments later, Regina with blood still wet at her knees and palms as she moves ahead of him toward Rumple’s shop. She throws open the door and snarls, “How many times are you going to kill my sister?” and Robin loiters in the doorway apprehensively as Rumple casts an alarmed look at Regina.
Regina hurls him backward with magic and branches sprout from the wall and hold him in place as Belle snaps, “Regina! Regina!”
“Where’s the dagger?” Regina demands. “What have you done with Emma?”
“Emma?” Rumple repeats. “You’ve found her?”
“Don’t play innocent with me.” Regina thrusts the dagger at Rumple and Robin winces. There’s no reason to believe that he’s the guilty party here, that he has any connection at all to Emma Swan, but he also knows better than to underestimate Regina Mills on a mission.
Rumple frowns. “Well, that’s obviously a fake. You never noticed before?”
“I don’t particularly enjoy looking at it!” Regina is frantic, nearly wringing her hands, and the branches tighten around Rumple. Rumple chokes.
Belle says again, “Regina!” and Regina drops Rumple back to the floor. He’s gasping for breath and Belle glares up at her. “He didn’t do anything. He doesn’t have the dagger.” Rumple wheezes in agreement.
“Maybe we should go,” Robin says carefully, and Regina takes a step back, her eyes narrowed as she turns on her heel and marches out.
There are group research sessions at the house after that, and those are the ones where he doesn’t quite belong anymore. Snow and David have been clinging to each other and Neal since the sacrifice, Hook sits alone radiating murder at anyone who talks to him, and Regina and Henry are curled up together flipping through books. He earns a cold look from Henry- one he’s never gotten before- when he tries sitting next to him, and instead he moves across the room to turn pages with Roland looking at the pictures over his shoulder.
He steps outside late at night, muttering something about a breather, and when he’s in the woods behind Regina’s house, he finally whispers, “Dark One, I summon thee.”
Emma appears, scowling fiercely. “You shouldn’t be summoning me now. They’re all right there!”
“Yes, and they’re going to find out eventually that I have the dagger. Regina has a spell–“
“Shut up.” Emma wheels around, a hand pinching her forehead. “Let me think.” She turns around a moment later. “You can’t leave Storybrooke. Not again. Regina needs you. But you’ll need to…” She vanishes without warning.
“Emma?” he says, and then he hears the low laugh behind him, bitter and caustic.
“Well, well, well,” Hook says, and Robin tucks the dagger away a moment too late. “Look who’s got the dagger.”
“It isn’t what you think-“ Robin begins, but Hook is already hurtling toward him, his hook thrust in Robin’s face so it’s all Robin can do to throw him off. Hook is smaller than him but wiry and determined with an appendage that can slice him open, and he can feel the pain of the first cut somewhere near his knee.
He grabs his crossbow but Hook is already swinging a gun around to point it at him. “Give me that dagger, thief,” he orders.
“It isn’t yours to have.”
“I’m in love with the Dark One,” Hook snarls. “She loves me. If anyone has a right to it, it isn’t fucking Regina or you. It’s me. It’s mine. She’s mine!” He fires a bullet and Robin dodges just in time, his finger releasing a bolt into the side of Hook’s arm.
Hook howls with rage and throws himself at Robin again, shouting now, It’s my right, she’s mine, she’s mineminemine until Robin is bloody-faced and Hook is on top of him and he thinks he sees Emma framed between trees in the woods but his eyes are blurring and Hook’s hands are yanking at his boot and seizing the dagger within.
He gasps out a laugh, high and triumphant, and then, abruptly, there’s a flash of white and red and the laugh turns to a gag. There’s a hole in his chest, a bloody mess of leather and skin and muscle that’s bleeding out onto Robin, and Emma stands over them both with the dagger in her hand and her mouth parted as she watches Hook bleed out.
“Emma,” Hook groans.
“No one controls me.” Emma’s voice is unsteady, and when she laughs, it sounds less malicious and more shaken. Robin had been there when Emma had told Hook that she’d loved him, and he can’t imagine what capacity that had been in when Hook hasn't even warranted a mention from her since, but it must have been something. “Oh, god.”
She stumbles backward, leaning against a tree as she keeps laughing, high and shrill like a parody of the last Dark One’s laugh, and someone who isn’t Robin breathes, “Emma?”
And oh, they’ve all half-assed this thing, because Regina is standing on the patio and Emma is still holding the bloody dagger and Robin is half under Hook’s corpse. Regina takes a step forward and Emma takes a step back and Regina says, “Emma,” again like a command. Emma stills as though Regina had ordered it with the dagger, her laughter growing more and more hysterical as the tears start streaming down her face.
Regina steps across the yard in a flash, stepping over Hook as though she doesn’t notice either of them are there, and she reaches for Emma. “Emma,” she whispers a third time, hand outstretched to her.
They’re close enough to touch when Emma lets out a strangled, “I can’t-“ and Regina’s hands pass through Emma’s as they fade out of sight.