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There's too much noise here.

It's not just that Seattle is a bigger city than Storybrooke – although it is, and she finds herself increasingly irritated by traffic snarls, and the seemingly never-ending construction, and quite frankly by how much she's currently paying just to live here (she lives in a shitty apartment a few blocks from the bar, a "flex one-bedroom" that she thinks doesn't even deserve to be called that, and it costs her more than a mortgage on a modest house in that little town in Maine).

No, it's not just real estate, and people who don't know how to drive, and a new detour all the damn time, it's also… Roni.

Regina's curse had remade her mind much like everyone else's – she'd known where Regina Victoria Mills, small-town mayor, had been born (Camden, Maine; they'd moved to Storybrooke when she was four), and gone to school (Holy Cross Primary and Secondary, then Wellesley), who her first kiss had been (Aaron Mannis, behind the chapel pews at Holy Cross, on a Tuesday afternoon when both their parents had been late to retrieve them). She'd known how both of her parents were supposed to have died (Daddy, a heart attack at age fifty-two; Cora, from a one-two punch of seasonal bronchitis followed by a rather virulent strain of flu that became pneumonia and eventually felled her), had even had an ex-fiancé who had passed on (Daniel's face, but his name had been Toby Clarkson; he'd died in a boating accident, not at her mother's hand).

It had all existed there in her head, like a movie she'd seen so many times she'd committed it to memory. A long list of names and dates and experiences that had blossomed in her mind, had simply been there waiting for her when she woke up that first morning in Maine.

But it had never felt hers. She'd known, always known, that it wasn't real. She'd known all the facts of this Regina Mills, but there had been a detachment. An Other-ness to the life that was supposed to have happened before her glorious curse brought them here to this Land. She could tell you how she felt when she got the call about Toby, but she can't recall feeling it. She'd known all along that it was a lie. After all, she was the one who'd set the lies in motion to begin with.

But Roni, well… Roni wasn't her doing. Despite her involvement in casting the curse itself, she'd had no say in it, no control over the outcome. It wasn't hers, and she was a victim of it as much as anyone else.

And Roni was supposed to last. Roni is supposed to be a victim to this curse that still holds, but she's not. Not anymore.

Now she's awake, and it's hell.

It's too much noise, all of Roni's experiences, her thoughts, her fears, her broken hearts (and boy, did she have plenty of those), her traumas, they're all there inside of Regina. Wedged in alongside the moment Toby Clarkson proposed, and the day she married Leopold the Good, she has memories of Roni winning the 6th grade spelling bee and the day she got kicked out of her step-dad's home at fourteen.

She used to wake in the night in a cold sweat, shadow memories of Leopold, of being eighteen and scared and resigned to what it meant to be properly married to a king. Now she wakes with her heart in her throat, just below the memory of a knifeblade pressing threateningly above her choker, her jeans ripped at the button and fly, someone's hand too strong, bruising against her skin, and thank God for those thick, chunky-soled boots she'd loved so much in her late-teens because they were heavy and hard, steel-toed for when she'd had to wriggle her way free and kick the bastard in the balls before she ran until she was in a different, much safer back alley than the one she'd been squatting in just hours before.

It's a memory, and a strong one. One she can't shake. She can still remember the smell of him, Jim Beam and mothballs, and stale breath. Can still remember the bloodshot eyes, the slope of his nose, the fake electric blue of his hair.

Can't remember his name.

But she remembers the assault, and the fear still haunts her.

It never happened.

None of it happened, it's not real, but this curse, this one, it feels real.

The elation of the day she'd signed the deed on Roni's Bar. She remembers the bubbling thrill of it in a way that she'd never felt for her first Mayoral win in Storybrooke.

And now, she has the rest. The truth. The heavy sadness and gripping panic that comes with the thought of what happens if this curse breaks; the breaking agony of living her whole life with Henry (her little prince, her sweet boy) as just a friend. Just some guy she met in her bar, when they were straddling either side of their thirties. What if they drift apart? What if they have some stupid argument and he cuts her off?

What if she can't keep the truth of this bottled up inside of her and starts blurting crazytalk like, Lucy's right, and I'm your mother, and Everything in your book is real, it really happened, to me, to us, it's all real, please wake up, Henry, please wake up.

It's all just too much noise.

She wonders sometimes if this is what it was like for Snow. For David. For Ruby, or Whale, or Granny, or any of the hundreds of citizens whose minds she cursed away and wrote anew. Did they feel this when the curse broke? This tension? This pressure? This torn-in-two feeling?

She hopes they didn't. Hopes that the breaking of the curse made it all feel a little less… wrong.

She hopes that they could find some way to that memorized-movie place, and not this constant noise.

It's awful. She hates it.

Sometimes, she thinks the only way to shut it up is to swallow enough Maker's Mark to quiet at least one of the lives inside her.

It's not healthy, she knows that, but it gets the job done.

Today is one of those days.

It's Henry's adoption day. The day she brought him home, the day he saved her life, saved her soul. He'd brought her donuts, out of the blue.

"No reason," he'd told her when she'd asked why, her suppressed emotions a hard knot in her throat that she could barely swallow around. "Just woke up thinking of you; thought you'd like a raspberry-filled."

She'd rasped a thank you, and taken the jelly donut. The powdered sugar coating had tasted like chalk dust.

There's too much noise.

This is all too much.

She'll endure it – she always does – and she'll suffer this raw, aching pain forever if it means he'll live. Safe. Whole. Without poison coursing through his veins.

She'll chew chalk dust and cloying sweetness and act like everything is fine while it feels like her heart is breaking. She'll do that. It's fine. He's worth it – so, so worth it.

She just wishes she didn't have to do it alone. That she had someone, some kind of solace. She'd even take cold comfort at this point, something empty, something meaningless. She'd take the heat of a warm body for just an hour if it would mean she could quiet the noise.

But all she has is this bar, and all these lies, all these fake people wedged in her brain (she has no right to feel lonely, she supposes, not with Regina Mills and Roni Cope for constant company).

The second Henry had left, she'd reached for the bourbon, poured herself a shot and washed away the sticky-dry taste of her mouth with the burn of promised oblivion. And then she'd poured herself another.

They've barely finished the lunch rush, but she doesn't give a damn. She can run this bar half-drunk; hell, she'd knocked back a stiff whiskey once or twice before a town hall meeting and Storybrooke still stands to tell the tale.

She just needs a little bit of quiet.

She faces the back of the bar for a moment, feels the spread of liquor under her skin, a pleasant little hum (not drunk, not yet, not even a buzz, just warmth), the shot glass cool in her grip.

It falls to the floor, hits the rubber mat there with a dull thunk when she hears a voice behind her say, "I've always appreciated a woman who can daytime drink."

She knows that voice – would know it anywhere. She's heard it again and again in her dreams. Milady, you're injured and I doubt I'd ever forget meeting you and Use that on me; let her go, and a million other words in between, but still far, far too few.

For a minute, she stays stock still. It can't be him; she's hallucinating. Robin is dead, has been dead for a decade and a half. She's mourned him (she mourns him still, quietly, now and then – especially now when she spends so much time in this bar that Roni Cope had filled with arrows without even knowing why).

She's going to turn around, and there will be only empty air – like every time she catches sight of a particular leather jacket from across the bar, only to double-take and realize it's not that particular leather jacket. Or when she hears a laugh that sounds so much like his, and squints from table to table only to hear it again from some silly hipster as he tosses back a Rainier longneck.

Or, she realizes with a start, she'll turn around and it will be that other Robin. The one they accidentally wished into existence, the one who married her other half all those years ago. She hasn't seen him – either of them – in a long, long time (too painful, too many memories, too much green-eyed envy she hates to admit to), but he's there. He exists. God, she's an idiot – of course there's an explanation for Robin's voice in her bar even after he's long dead.

Telling herself she's being stupid, Regina takes a breath, prepares herself for the inevitable disappointment, and turns to face her ghosts.

And there he is, standing on the other side of her bar. She smiles pleasantly at him, a reflex, cursing herself for the way she drinks in the sight of him. It's pathetic, but she misses Robin – her Robin – and maybe this other Robin is just a poor shadow of the man she loved, but it feels so good to see him alive and breathing. To pretend for just a moment.

And it only takes a moment. Just one, or maybe three, for her to realize that this isn't Locksley.

She notices the hair first – not the darker color of her wished-for not-quite-love, but that softer brown her Robin had had, his temples flecked with grey (she used to run her fingers through them, those little strands of silver catching moonlight as they lay in her bed late at night). But men age, and hair silvers, and so she dismisses it even though her heart knocks a double-beat at the sight. Maybe that other Robin is finally catching up, that's all.

But his gaze sweeps her quickly, down and up, and he smiles, his eyes crinkling at the corners in a way that makes her heart ache. Locksley never smiled like that, not at her, anyway. Not with that warmth and affection. Not with those eyes.

There's a scar on his neck; it's new, or at least it's unfamiliar to her, creeping up from under the collar of his red-checkered flannel as he leans against the bar. It looks like a river delta, or like—lightning, she thinks, her head doing a single dizzy pirouette.

But it's the voice that does it. It's warmer, teasing, without the slight chill of Locksley's, the edge of not-quite-rightness. He teases her, says, "Ah, so she's not a pillar of salt. I was starting to worry you'd been petrified."

It reminds her of that day in the farmhouse, the little edge of flirtation, and the newness. He tips his head just the same way he had then, but he doesn't speak to her like he knows her. He flirts with her like they've just met, and that— that —is when she knows it's him.

Robin.

Something in her middle just knows.

This is him, her Robin, her soulmate, somehow here after all these years – looking just as she last saw him, except for the faint silvery creep of that scar on his neck and the fact that he is very much alive. And from the sound of it, very much cursed.

The revelation strikes her dumb, steals her speech, and for a moment all the noise in her head falls silent. She hears nothing, not the din of the bar, not Regina Mills or Roni Cope, not anything, as if her senses are all rerouting for a moment, funneling all their resources to her eyes in order for her to take him in properly (she doesn't need touch or smell or sound, not yet, she just needs to see him standing there in front of her).

Her eyes start to burn, but she's afraid to blink and lose him.

And then her ears are working again, they must be, because he tilts his head a little further, his eyes narrowing slightly, and she hears him ask her, "Do I have something on my face, or perhaps I've grown a second head I'm not aware of?"

Regina's brow knits. "What?"

Robin tells her, "You're staring," and she is suddenly very aware that she's gaping at him like a fish. Regina snaps her jaw shut just as Robin starts to don that all too familiar smirk and tease, "I'm not used to women being so stunned by the sight of me. I am flattered, though."

She'd be embarrassed, but damnit, she's earned her shock this time. Still, she recovers, clearing her throat and shaking her head a little, but her gaze never strays from him, even as she makes excuses:

"I'm sorry, you just… look like someone. Someone I knew."

"Someone you liked, I hope," he tells her, and oh, Regina could just melt into the floor at the sound of that accent again. "You looked at me like I was a ghost."

He doesn't know the half of it.

"Someone I haven't seen in a long, long time." She holds out a hand for him, desperate for him to shake it if only for confirmation that he's real, that he's solid. That this isn't another dream. He takes it, his fingers a little cold from the dreary Seattle air as they wrap around hers. But he's alive, warming under the heat of her thumb, and it's all she can do to keep her voice steady as she introduces herself: "Roni Cope. Nice to meet you."

( Again, she adds in her head, thinking of arrows zinging past her – into a flying monkey in the Forest, her quick fingers in Storybrooke, landing with a thunk into Queen Snow's carriage, or sinking deftly into a log in a realm that wasn't real. No arrows this time, but she feels the whizzing rush of his introduction just the same.)

"Abe Warner," he tells her, the name foreign and unexpected.

It seems… not very Robin. She tries not to wrinkle her nose at it, tilting her head instead and asking him, "Abe? Let me guess—"

She starts, but he cuts her off, holding up a warning finger and telling her, "If you're about to ask me about my honesty, I have to warn you, I will walk right back out that door. Immediately. Personal policy of mine, you see."

Those so-blue eyes are dancing with humor, deep dimples popping out to reignite memories of his smile. They pop like flashbulbs, one after the other – sarcastic, across a council table during the year they all forgot; warm and sweet in the back hallway at Granny's, his fingers in her hair; wide and easy and open, looking at Roland with pride; sly and sexy, his teeth biting into that lower lip as she'd fought to catch her breath beneath him in Camelot, both of them sweaty and jelly-limbed in that canopied bed. It's almost too much for her to bear, this assault of memories long shoved into the quiet places amongst the cacophony of noise in her head, but she never wants to give it up. Not if it means he's real, somehow, and here, somehow.

She's not sure how she's even managing to keep up her end of the conversation, but she is, telling him, "I was going to say ' Let me guess, it's short for Abraham.'"

Robin has the decency to look a little sheepish at that, telling her, "Ah," and then. "No. Abel. But I've never really been a fan, so Abe."

Abel️, she thinks, struck down by Cain. Zelena flits across her mind, but she pushes the thought away, shoves it down deep under all that noise. She's forgiven her sister, she doesn't blame her. And she's been telling herself that for fifteen years so it must be true.

"Abe suits you," she tells him, and then she goes for the easy mark, because she can't think of what else to do: "Although I hope for your sake, you don't have a brother named Cain."

Robin (not Robin, she thinks, Abe ) smirks, a wry twist of one side of his mouth that knocks the breath out of her with its familiarity and says, "Thankfully, no. But I do have a twin – Seth."

He says it knowingly, assuming she'll get the significance. And after twelve years at Holy Cross (they weren't her years, not really, but she remembers them), she does. Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve, born after Cain murdered Abel. God's gift to Eve after her loss.

How fitting.

"Identical or fraternal?" Regina can't resist asking.

"Identical," he tells her, and Regina doesn't bother to fight the wry chuckle that escapes her.

There's no way that Abe, this man with Robin's face but none of his memories, can appreciate the sheer irony of him sharing a face with a man named after one given as a replacement to a woman deep in her grief.

Regina is no Eve, and it's surely just a coincidence, just one of those wry little tricks these dark curses like to throw in. Still, she thinks of Robin of Locksley, off somewhere with the Queen, and wonders how they're faring these days.

Roland, she thinks with a start. His father is back, standing right in front of her, and he doesn't know. He should know, somehow, she should find a way to send word. (If only the Sound had one of those realm-hopping mermaids when she needed one…)

Abe hasn't missed a beat, is still flirting (is he flirting? Yes, she thinks, he is) with her: "Luckily for you, we're estranged – imagine how speechless you'd have been if there were two men this handsome sitting across your bar. You might never have been able to give me your name. Roni, short for…?"

He's expecting a name in trade, and she doesn't disappoint.

"Veronica."

"Middle?"

"You first."

"Jude."

"Beatriz," she tells him, a little thrill rippling through her at their quick back-and-forth. She's missed him, God, she's missed him, his quick wit, his laughing eyes. The way he can draw her in with something as simple as trading names. She doesn't want it to end, doesn't want this little fever dream to break, so she teases him some more, asks, "Do you want my date of birth, last three addresses, and my social, too?"

His smile widens, dimples winking, eyes bright, and she could just about weep when he digs his teeth into his bottom lip for a second. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed that.

And then he tells her, "A menu will do, thanks," and she remembers where they are, who she's supposed to be, and what this stranger in her bar is expecting her to do – namely, her job, not staring at him like he's the second coming of her dead soulmate.

Regina shakes her head and laughs dryly, reaching for one of the plastic-coated menus beneath her bar.

"Oh, God. Of course." She hands it over, and says, "I'm sorry, I don't know what I was thinking."

Abe smirks at her, amused that she's frazzled, no doubt – she can add that to the list of things that remain unchanged. "You were dazzled by my pretty face, of course."

"Yeah, that must be it," she drawls, a little thrill flickering through her at the thought that she gets another chance to flirt with him. "Flag me down when you're ready to order."

"I'll start with a whiskey," he tells her, eyes on the menu. He glances up at her to add, "Or whatever it was you were having. Nobody should have to daytime drink alone."

Regina stares at him for a second too long, remembering standing at a different bar, Robin with a lowball in hand and hopeful eyes. Remembering the flutter of nerves and attraction in her belly as she'd insisted she didn't daytime drink. And then she turns for the back bar, a higher shelf, pulling down the Makers 46 and two glasses, eyeballing them each a pour. She doesn't ask if he wants ice – if she knows him, he'll take it neat. He always had.

She settles his bourbon on the bar just beside his right arm. He's shed his coat and rucked his sleeve up a little, and even the slim edge of black ink peeking from beneath his cuff makes her heart ache.

"This one's on the house," she tells him, and he reaches for it, lifts it and tips it slightly toward her in a toast.

"Thank you," he says, and then, "It's a pleasure to meet you, Veronica Cope."

Regina lifts her glass to clink against his.

"Likewise, Abel Warner."

If she smiles at him a little too long then, well, at least she's not alone.

.::.

He orders fish and chips, and a Ruud Awakening IPA (she'd almost laughed when he said it – almost, but not quite) to chase that bourbon, and Regina tells herself to leave the man alone and let him eat. Or to at least not stand right in front of him and gawk.

But she can't leave him alone, not really. She can't bring herself to walk where she can't see him, where she can't keep glancing his way and assuring herself that he's real. What if she ducks into the back for a second, and he leaves, and she never sees him again? She's been here in Hyperion Heights for months and never seen him, it could easily happen again.

So she putters around the bar like an idiot, fixing this and that, straightening bottles, wiping down surfaces. She makes a sweep of the room herself, and liberates every empty-or-nearly-so drink to refill and run the glass washer. She pops the register and bank faces the bills.

And all the while Abe sits there, munching on thick-cut fries with malt vinegar, and sipping his beer, watching the Mariners play a day game on one of the TVs.

He doesn't bother her; she doesn't bother him. But she doesn't think about anything else.

Everything she does, every move she makes, is some sort of autopilot. Her body carries her through all of it, but her mind is buzzing with questions: How is he here? Why isn't he dead? Is he even real? How long has he been alive? Has he always been alive? Did the crystal just boot him out of his body and into some new one on the other side of the country? (She knows that last one isn't true, she'd tried to find him, to trace him, she'd done magic, it would have known if he'd just left town. He'd been dead and gone, she knows that.)

Can she kiss him? she wonders. Will it break this curse? They're in love, they were, she has no doubt of it (he'd died for her – what's a bigger expression of love than that? ). They're soulmates, for God's sake.

He'd definitely been flirting with her, there was definite interest, so what would happen if she indulged it? If she let it go on, and flirted back, and if he came back again and again, and… Would it jeopardize this curse she so loathes? The one keeping Henry from her but also keeping him alive?

Would her own selfish need to have Robin again be the thing that damned her son?

She won't do it, she thinks. She won't even try, won't let it happen. Abe Warner will be just like this too-grown Henry Mills. Someone she loves dearly and deeply, and privately. She'll be his friend, and nothing more, and hope she can sustain it as long as possible – and she will give thanks for every single breath that comes and goes from his body because of it.

It'll be hell, but she'll do it. She'll have to.

The thought weighs heavily on her as she stares from the far side of the bar, watching as her soulmate slugs back another mouthful of ale, his throat bobbing with a swallow. He's still watching that TV, and the line of his profile makes her heart ache.

She wants to touch him again; she shouldn't.

But then, Snow and David had been True Loves, had broken her curses with a touch of their lips back in the Enchanted Forest, and then macked all over each other in Storybrooke to no avail, hadn't they?

It was the curse. It had been in the way. They hadn't truly loved each other there, so their illicit kisses didn't hold enough magic. Too much guilt in the way, she supposes (and she has that in spades when it comes to Robin).

This man, this not-Robin, he doesn't love her, not yet, he barely even knows her. And she doesn't love him either. She loves what's hiding beneath Abel Jude Warner – the man she can't see, can't quite touch. She's loved that man quietly for the last decade and a half, carefully stitched up the wound in her heart and let it slowly mend. But it had never fully closed, not really. Not truly.

And now he's here, breathing her air and drinking her whiskey, and every carefully placed stitch on her heart has been popped and left to bleed like it was fresh.

She doesn't think she could love Abel Warner if she tried. Not knowing how close she is to her second (third, fourth, fifth?) chance with the man she was destined to love.

It's a thought that should hurt, but it doesn't. It brings an odd sense of peace, a welcome little bit of quiet.

Regina has never been more thankful for this stupid curse, and for stupid wiped memories, for him looking at her without all that love in his eyes.

There's too much noise in her head, and too much quiet in his, and that, she thinks, will be the thing that saves them.