DISCLAIMER: Once isn't mine.

Just a quick thing I dashed off after I saw by "Regina and Snow: Last Breath" by H20RocksMyWorld on Youtube. I highly recommend it.

Fury.

It's a word I've always associated with you ever since the day that a man I didn't know handed me a whistle and told me to run.

Years and years of fighting and hatred and blood and yet I've never stopped loving you.

Even when your eyes were so dark and so cold that I felt like I was suffocating when I looked into them,

I remembered you.

I think I destroyed that young woman when I aimed an arrow at her and told her there was no way for her to ever redeem herself.

Would you believe that I hate myself for that even now?

Because I do, Regina. I really do.

Everything you became was at least partially my fault.

I refuse to take the full blame, but I will gladly accept my own role in what I've done to you.

I meant what I said that day; what I said about you being in so much pain that all you wanted was to make everyone else feel the same.

And yet when you begged me to forgive you all I could think of was the pain that I felt myself.

After the curse broke, as foolish as it was, I hoped that somehow you could finally be happy.

I hoped we could be a family.

But then Cora came and we were enemies again and she was threatening everyone and everything I loved, and in my fear and desperation I made a terrible choice.

I suppose you could call it justice of some sort that I killed the woman who murdered my mother.

But she was your mother too.

And you trusted me.

You trusted me; you took the heart that I had cursed in the hope of finally finding something you'd spent your entire life searching for.

I stole it from you.

Again.

When I ran into Gold's shop and you looked at me, I wanted you to kill me right then and there.

That cold fury was back in your eyes except this time there was pain and betrayal too, and I remembered the forest and the way you'd looked at me then.

I can't decide which is worse.

I know there's no way I could ever expect you to forgive everything I've done.

Just know that I love you so much, and that I will always love you in spite of everything.

Because I have never forgotten.

You love me still even after my hands are stained with blood and I would have gladly slaughtered your daughter had I been given the chance.

I will never understand you.

Or maybe I understand too well.

It's hard to say which one frightens me more.

Were our lives fated to be like this?

Was I always simply a pawn, a piece to be used and disposed of at the whim of those more powerful than I?

And were you always destined to be my enemy?

Because I loved you, Snow.

Once upon a time, I did.

I was happy the day that I met you.

Had I known what would become of us, what you would do to me…..

I'd like to say that I would have let you die.

But I'd be lying.

Even in the depths of my hatred, when I thought of you dying, my stomach turned.

At the time I thought it was because I wanted you to stay alive, to suffer the loss of everything you held dear as I had.

Now…

I'm not so sure.

Henry taught me how to love again—how to love the right way—but as hard as I tried, I still lost him.

And yet you've never left me.

I could laugh at the irony of it all if my whole life wasn't some sort of ironic joke.

I have spent so much time hating you, and for what?

For my life to be as empty as it always was?

Actually, it would be easier to pretend I hated you from the moment I found out what you had done.

I didn't.

My mother was a manipulative, lying snake; how could you, so innocent and young, have known?

You hadn't spent your life as I had; bound by magic in more ways than one and living in the knowledge that you would never be good enough for your mother.

I think part of me wanted you to fight Mother in ways that I couldn't.

I was foolish.

And now here we are at a crossroads and I want more than anything to keep you away from me.

But you just won't leave me alone!

Will you always be so blind and foolish as to insist that I can still be good?!

….

I hope so.

Because I no longer want to be the Evil Queen.

I just want to be Regina.