A/N: So this little fic is based on a prompt created by regallymaiden on twitter. I can't post the prompt since it was a picture but it's on her twitter page. It basically is about the events that follow the end of 4x19 with the prompt line "DON'T YOU TOUCH ME" and then an OQ make out. Hope I did it justice—it was cathartic nonetheless. I went for the cheap fluff, judge me.
I do accept prompts. You can send them to my twitter or tumblr which are in my bio. Enjoy!
It is like a broken record, the words just keep repeating in her head so long now that they've lost their meaning, but they haven't lost the sting that came with them. Little knives had kept on jabbing into the thick skin that she'd built up but Zelena finally pierced her way through, going for the jugular and making the kill. And even after Regina feels her end, those knives keep skewering her.
She knows that she's standing there dumbfounded in front of her sister and now the father of their child and—oh god, the savior too—of course she'd be here to see Regina's undoing, even if she would no longer be the cause. But she can't find the anger, not at the savior or even at Robin and Zelena. She's numb, colder than Marian—Zelena when she was frozen. Oh what she would give to be frozen now, to let the physical ice rather than her emotionally crippling hail storm freeze her until she withers away into nothing.
She sort of is frozen though and she should move, she knows, but she can't get the never ending song out of her head. It keeps going and she only wants to clutch her head and scream. It is a nightmare. This is truly a nightmare and she is desperate for someone to wake her up and end this, to stop the noise, stop the spinning—is the room spinning? And it does pause briefly, just long enough to let in a new sound, something that had equally lost its meaning, her name. Someone is saying her name and she isn't quite sure at the moment who's saying it, Robin or Emma, maybe even Zelena but it doesn't register, all it does is free her mind long enough for her to realize she has to get out. She needs to move.
Finally, her feet are now facing the door and she's back in her robotic state, but she doesn't need cognition to put one foot in front of the other, moving more briskly with each forward motion. A voice is still calling her name behind her but she's yet to have taken a moment to find the owner of that voice.
It's cooler in the hall; she realizes it'd been so stuffy in the apartment. Why had it been so stuffy? But it nevertheless made her breaths clearer now, easier, and she feels as though she can walk faster, so she picks up her pace, falling into a sort of half-run as she goes for the stairwell.
It's even cooler in outside, the March air pricking at her skin. Spring would come soon but for now it's cold and Regina finds it mildly comforting because it's begun to pick at her numbness, chipping away and making her understand that she's still alive.
But then it truly hits her and it isn't so comforting anymore. The words finally register as a conscious thought.
"She's pregnant."
Zelena is pregnant.
Oh no—she's going to be sick, she can feel the bile rising and she knows she's going to blow. She scurries to the side of the building, which reeked of formaldehyde and garbage and only induced her vomiting further. But when she allows herself to let go, all she feels is emptiness. Nothing comes out; instead, she just stands there dry-heaving with no result except an irritation in her throat—probably because she hadn't eaten properly in days due to fretting endlessly over her lover in the clutches of the woman who was now carrying his child.
That woman should be her.
And that does it but instead of vomit, something else explodes from her chest, a sound that drowns out the first two. It is a sob, a loud one, the kind that makes someone feel how heavy their chest truly is. Regina's unsure how she survived with such pressure in her chest, but it's dissolving now into the chocked up sobs that she chokes out.
How could she have been so foolish to think that Robin would wait for her as she had for him? How could she have been so stupid as to believing that she could simply march down here to New York and just expect Robin to envelop her in his arms, trusting her and ready to take her home? Instead, she is standing outside in the middle of an alley in New York City, hundreds of miles from her home with a stranger she no longer knows, several feet away from her in an apartment where he conceived a child with the one person Regina thought Robin would never choose to "stay" with.
How had she let it get this far? She had known that it wouldn't end well and yet she let Robin with his hope worm his way in and let her believe it was true. She's such a fool and as she clutches at her chest and feels it swell greatly and deflate, she curses herself, again not with anger for Robin or even Zelena but for herself, for letting this happen, for allowing herself to get her hopes up when she knows she is a villain and she isn't meant to have a happy ending; the happy ending that she could have had, had she gone into that damn bar, but she ran away like a coward just as she is now, although, this time not without good reason. She shouldn't need a reason, though. She shouldn't even be in this position because had she walked in that tavern and kissed her soul mate like she was supposed to, she would be happy now, Zelena would be irrelevant and everything would be ok. She feels sick again, her stomach a tumultuous wave, lobbing its contents back and forth against its walls.
What is she to do now? Go back in there and accept defeat, tell Zelena that she's won and return home with her tail between her legs and Emma and Lily in tow? Why won't her nausea succumb to her desire to vomit? Her sobs have gotten even choppier now as the pressure in her chest breaks up and she begins to find her calm. Despite its disgusting appearance, she rests her back on the cool brick of the building while closing her eyes and letting in the first sound again.
She's pregnant.
Then that other sound follows right after it, her name, who keeps saying her name? And she finally plucks up the courage to find the owner of the sound. When she sees who it is, the anger that she had so desperately been waiting for, comes and plows its way out of her chest.
"Regina," he pleads with her, "Please listen."
But Regina doesn't want to listen, she just can't hear it. She doesn't want to have to hear him say it again. It's bad enough hearing it in her own thoughts but watching as it spills off of Robin's lips might just shatter her heart. She would give just about anything at this point to rip out her heart right now and stop the pain, just as she had the first day they'd met when Zelena's simian minion attacked her in the Enchanted Forest.
What she would give to go back to that moment and do it over again. Maybe this time she'd take his hand and make up for the lost time. They could've been together much sooner had she not been so stubborn and she loathes herself for wasting that precious time that could have been theirs .
All those months they spent together, yelling away senselessly at one another for stupid things, when instead they could've been together and happy. She and Robin and Roland could've become a family and added Henry back to it once they'd returned home to Storybrooke. Even months they had been together, she felt had been wasted. They could've done so much more, she could've stopped being so damn pessimistic and she should have told Robin how much she truly loves him.
She realizes now that her sobs have grown louder and taken over the melody and Robin's hushed tones become the harmony. And she hates herself even for that. She doesn't want him to see her cry. He shouldn't be allowed to see her cry; he doesn't get that right. Regina Mills, a woman of strength and resilience isn't going to let someone see how much they've hurt her.
So her rage takes control, burning through every vein and artery and turning her blood to poison. Robin moves in closer so she screams and begins to kick and slap her arms against his chest while adding another sound to her symphony of pain, "DON'T YOU TOUCH ME!" She yells it over and over again, flailing her arms and kicking her legs, fighting Robin as he tries to embrace her. Despite her valiant struggle though, he finally envelops her in his arms, squeezing so tightly so that she couldn't move or combat him anymore. She takes a moment to revel in the comfort of being wrapped up in his arms but she writhes still, trying anyway to fight him back. He struggles too as he's pushing her backward.
"Don't touch me, Robin," she hisses out again, this time far more weakly with a crack in her voice, before her back is against the cool brick again. Then Robin's body is tight against hers, pushing her firmly into the wall while his hands delicately trail up her shoulders and onto her face, palms flat on her cheeks and fingers threading desperately into her raven locks. The chill of the brick and the March air fades away as his lips take hers, pressing hard and needy to them. Regina is stunned for a moment and his lips keep mashing hungrily into hers but then her eyes flutter shut and her sobs die away as she reciprocates, ferociously devouring the lips she'd loved and missed for so long.
He breaks the kiss now to pepper tiny ones all over her, one on each landmark of her face; ears, eyebrows, cheeks, eyelids as they flutter shut, her nose and finishing with a soft suckling to the scar on her upper lip. But with each peck, he pauses just enough to say a single word, all when strung together say, "It was all a lie. I'm so sorry. It was all a lie. I love you so much, Regina."
Finally his lips are back where they belong and soft moans erupt from them both. Regina feels his tongue skate across the seam of her lips as she feels her back slide against the brick when Robin lifts her. Her calves hitch up on his thighs and she lets his tongue slip in, tangling with her own. And they go on like that, satiating their hunger for one another.
A new song has taken over now, one of kisses and full promises and the warmth of him in the cold drizzle. And she thinks to herself to add one final sound to the melody, to stop wasting time as she had been doing. So she pulls back, letting her chocolate brown irises fall onto those of liquefied sky blue, and it feels as though her heart could burst out of her chest which is how she knew her next words to be true. So she sighs softly and presses her forehead to his, saying, "Robin, I love you."
He takes a beat since it was the first time that Regina had uttered that phrase to him but she knows in her heart that he knows it's true. So he smiles brightly with eyes twinkling and dimples making craters in his cheeks, then skims his lips up her nose to plant a solitary kiss between her eyebrows before dropping his forehead back to hers and whispering, "And I love you."
And just like that all the other noises had finally died away and Regina found the record she'd keep on repeat.