A|N For htoria. All the thanks to black-throatedblue for her time and thoughts and wisdom, and to herardentwish for such stunning art.

Dusk

She's been gone far longer than a routine patrol through the woods should entail, and as the sun bathes the land in a slow-burning orange, Robin begins to worry. It's entirely like Regina to disappear at odd hours without warning, but she had already promised to spend this particular evening with Roland, and it is entirely unlike her to let his boy down.

The lad had unearthed a new collection of stories earlier that day, its leather worn and bearing the rather vague title of Once Upon a Time, the weight of it nearly toppling him over. Regina had stared strangely when Roland, wide-eyed and hopeful, hauled it all the way to supper with him, and Robin found himself wondering whether she'd seen a book or a ghost.

Still, she had agreed to a proper reading of it from cover to cover, once she'd seen to securing the castle walls—a task that promptly swept her from an untouched dinner, and that was the last either of them had seen of her that evening, though they waited well past a four-year-old's bedtime.

It's with a kiss and a vow that Robin finally tucks his boy in for the night—"the Queen has just been a bit delayed," and "I'm certain she will read you twice the usual number of tales tomorrow." Terms he's no doubt she'll agree to, once she learns of the spectacular way in which he'd bungled up her voice in the story. ("No, Papa, Regina doesn't sound like that at all," he'd been scolded; "she'd never say that to Princess Snow, you're reading it wrong!")

Presuming he is able to find her, that is.

"Maybe she's looking at her apple tree," suggests Roland, muffled beneath a mountain of pillows. "She always does that when she's sad."

Robin doesn't have the heart to argue that she's not sad, simply running a bit behind schedule; nor is he inclined to admit that he has, in fact, already looked there, several times over.

Though perhaps just once more wouldn't hurt.

But the courtyard proves itself unoccupied, save for the ground littered in just-fallen fruit. His nerves are too far frayed to consider snagging a bite in the hopes that she, in her indignation, might suddenly come out of hiding and incinerate him for it.

He briefly contemplates whether he ought to enlist Snow White in his search, but only briefly; the more Regina sees on the other side of her walls, the heavier she'll guard herself with venom and fire when she finally deigns to be found.

Which, as he's discovered, is the worst occasion for trying to kiss her, when the matter of his own reassurance regarding her safety seems to further ignite her ire and make it a smoldering, untouchable thing. Previous experience has taught him to patiently wait out the flames despite his every instinct to run right to them, until the smoke has cleared enough for her to see he'd never allow her to burn alone.

He can only hope that this time, it isn't something else entirely that's set her ablaze—or, worse, smothered her somehow.

Regina doesn't often leave her eyes so open to his careful reading, but there in the banquet hall, he'd seen the look of the haunted in them. It's a look he's known to afflict her before, on the first day of many when they met in the wood, where he'd glimpsed her hollowing the ground for her heart and its pain (and every day since, when he's stood in her way).

Pain his boy has proceeded to dig back up, with that mysterious book of stories ending in ways she doesn't deserve.

It's the thought of such cursed ends—of assassins' arrows, of hair pins dipped in poison, and of things winged and clawed, descending upon a heart so exposed—that has Robin's strides lengthening into a sprint to the forest.

He knows the preferred way of her nighttime patrolling, from the rare times she's tolerated his company (and the times rarer still that she's let him delay their return to the castle); he follows the path of it now, making landmarks of his memories. That drooping willow, where he'd occasionally pull her aside and kiss the both of them senseless. The thorny bramble he'd plucked of its blooms for her to sneer and scoff at, only to tickle her nose with their scent when she thought he'd looked away for a moment.

He reaches the familiar trunk of a maple, stripped beige and bare in places where ecstasy had once dug her nails into its bark, but there's another color staining it now, dark and foreboding.

Robin's fingers draw back tacky, warmed with the smell of rusted iron.

Blood.

Pulse drumming into his throat, he staggers upright, senses too wild to be silenced, and he's lurching forward, the need for stealth utterly forgotten. He stumbles over roots and branches and things too small, too motionless to be a body, to be hers, though the air itself tastes of metal and someone else's suffering. Droplets of blood thicken to patches, painting a path of the wounded for him to trace next, and he can't allow himself to think on what he'll find at the end of it.

If she's hurt—if she's come to any harm, by way of beast or witch or otherwise (or, heaven forbid, her own), by the gods above he'll see to their violent end if it's the last thing he—

Her back is to him, when he spots her at last.

She's kneeling over ground, spine straight and moving firmly at the shoulders with each breath, with life. Robin wouldn't consider himself a devout man, but he murmurs a prayer of thanks, that he never need know the truth of what would become of him, were he to ever lose this woman.

"Regina," he gasps, though she must have heard his approach long before he'd lent it voice. "Oh thank the gods," and relief gives way to an anger far easier to stomach than worry alone, "do you have any idea how—"

She seems to retreat from the very sound of him as he nears, not on account of any physical damage he can visibly identify, but as if to hide another kind of pain altogether from him. Panic resurfacing, he reaches for her, always reaching, arms encircling her waist from behind, frantically searching for things he can't see. Her heartbeat thrums at the touch of his palm before she twists and pulls herself out of his hold.

The familiarity of her rejection is oddly comforting to him at the moment.

He starts again, gently this time, "Regina…" Are you all right? he means to know next, but she's shaking her head before he's a chance to ask it, gaze drawn someplace downward. Sufficiently satisfied that at least she's not been injured, he spares a glance to the ground and sees the fawn, resting sideways at her knees.

Robin thinks it couldn't be much larger than Roland when he's curled into bed for the night.

The deer is blinking enormous, glassy eyes peacefully up at Regina, as though awaiting something crucial that's yet to pass between them. Its legs lie at unnatural angles where they've come to collapse, fur tarnished with the fatal-slow seep of a careless hunter's aim to its belly.

"Oh, darling," Robin murmurs, knees dropping to sink the earth beside her now, and his fleeting glimpse of her face before she angles it elsewhere again devastates him beyond whatever words of comfort he'd been about to offer.

Regina's hands are the first he can clearly see of her then, caked in the same blood as his own. A glimmer of brighter red sits delicately cupped in her palms, some stone of immeasurable value casting a glow to rival the sun's while it sets.

He strains to hear it, the thump-thump, thump-thump, a steady fade while she holds fast.

Her breath shudders out, ragged and shakier than he's ever known it to be, though she's stiff and detached when she finally speaks. "I'm sorry I'm late."

"You were missed," Robin tells her in the simplest way he can, then, "I read him a bit of the Evil Queen's story. He was…fairly indignant about the whole thing."

"Oh?" she wonders, looking carefully away.

"He didn't see much of a resemblance to the Queen he's come to know."

"And who is it that he does see, exactly," she asks without bite, "if not the Evil Queen?"

"Someone quite the opposite of evil, actually," is his mild reply. "Someone heroic."

Regina almost smiles, but a shadow falls to obscure it when the fawn begins to tremble and whimper, pulling her back to a place too dark for Robin to follow. "I—I wanted to…"

"Help?" he supplies when she trails off, transfixed once more by the heart in her hands. He longs to draw her close again, to relieve her of the weight of this moment; but there's an unfocused, faraway look to her now, too far to reach by hand alone, so he carries on talking with the hope that he can guide her back to him in other ways. "You found something in unbearable pain, and you wanted to help it pass."

"I tried to heal it," Regina says, low and unnerved, like she's just admitted a terrible thing to him. He marvels at the strength holding the surface of her together, when her voice, her very insides, can sound this broken. "Clearly I couldn't even manage to do that right." She huffs out a dubious, not-quite-laugh, and it seems to splinter the instant it meets air.

"You've no reason to feel ashamed," Robin insists, with a heat he can't quite contain, "you've done nothing wrong," but frustration pinches her brows together, as though he's being purposely slow.

"It's hurting," she grits through her teeth, the tension of it audible, her own pain a palpable thing. "It's hurting and I don't know how to stop it. Some hero that makes me." Her words are sharp-edged but frozen through to the middle, easily shattered, and her eyes speak instead of other torments, of things loved and lost forever.

He thinks he understands her now, better than she may ever know—this woman who will never not be a mother, even without her son.

"I can't…" Glaring intently at her hands, she attempts to force them into submission, looking distressed and betrayed when they cradle protectively around that luminous red. Of all the hearts she's claimed and crushed, this is the one to have repaid the favor.

He murmurs her name, but she's no longer listening.

"If I could just…" Her fingertips run along the grooves, hooking there and tightening, but whatever resolve she's recovered is gone again when the deer lets out a feeble bleat. Regina's grip slackens, spent.

She watches in some sort of agonized trance as Robin moves gently forward to cover its light with his palm, the brightness of it ever-fading, pulse dimming to his touch. His free hand retrieves the dagger secured to his boot, and the fawn's gaze flickers to his now, as something hushed and still comes to settle between them.

He sinks the blade's tip to its throat, in quiet passing.

The light disintegrates, crumbling to ash through the cracks where their fingers haven't quite joined.

Regina's eyes are dry when they finally lift to meet his, her jaw tight to defy the weakness she thinks she's shown him. But he won't have that, can't have that, telling her so with a firm kiss to her brow.

He may not be able to lessen the hurt, but he'll certainly never let her hurt on her own. That much he can promise her, if not a world where she can be with her son.

She loosens slowly to his touch, the slightest tremor in her shoulders when he gathers her into his cloak to guide them home. The way back is considerably darker, but he knows it easily, and he steadies Regina when large, stubborn roots attempt to disrupt her balance.

Dusk has come to sit at the land's periphery by the time they emerge from the treeline, and it mutes the color of her—corset feathered black, knuckles flattened white to her belly, her expression fading into shades of grey.

Robin clasps her closer, lips tender across her temple, but he'll not utter a word while she's still too far to hear them. Their footfalls fill the silence instead, mere whispers in the grass, sharpening once they've encountered cobblestone, and he softens their pace, wishing their return might go unnoticed.

It's not until he's safely escorted her back to her chambers, and they hover at the threshold together, between the end of one moment and the start of another, when Regina finally speaks again.

"Please let Roland know I owe him two bedtime stories tomorrow," she tells him formally in lieu of good night, and he dips his head, giving her time to dismiss him.

But she seems to find the strength for something else, knotting their fingers together, drawing him in with hands and eyes, as the door becomes one with the wall behind them.

Encased in relative darkness, with little help afforded by way of twilight breezing past an empty hearth, they lead each other forward now, steps shuffled and halting but breaths ever-steady.

She stations them at her water basin, and he presses himself along her backside while she rinses clean the night still tainting their skin. Her hair, half-unraveled, comes completely undone with a studied nudge of his nose, and her quiet huff is hardly convincing.

He fits her fully into his embrace, folding them both between soft sheets and softer sighs, and she lets him hold her long enough to welcome back the sun, painting horizons beyond her balcony ledge. The sky beams blue alongside them, cresting amongst the clouds, inviting them to fall higher, higher, the hours quickly left behind though each second stands unhurried and still.

The world will again turn its back to the light, as it is wont to do, contours once more thrown into shadow.

But while the day begins to vanish, the warmth of it doesn't leave Regina's gaze. It flickers to his above wrinkled blankets, the arm she slips back into its sleeve at the sound of the dinner bell; above spoonfuls of stew, and a tin cup rimmed with the trace of a smile. Her protests lack their usual edge when Robin, twining their fingers beneath the tablecloth, casually volunteers Little John's services as keeper of the castle gates for the night.

She doesn't flinch at Roland's plea for a do-over at bedtime, adamant as he is for a book with a different sort of ending this time (he'd been so very unimpressed by the stories his papa had read him the evening before, you see). So Regina tells him a tale by heart, one free of both queens and villains—a tale of a lost little prince and his mother, who's starting to learn that the way back to him need not be a lonely one.

And when she finds him, the sun need never set on that day again.