A/N: A little theory about who the stranger might be. Catherynn Valente's Deathless had a hand, too. Spoilers, I guess.

lines

The stranger takes his motorcycle and typewriter to her when she is minding her own business in her own house, and tells her she is out of line.

Stories are written in lines, my Queen, he says when he sees her again. He sees right through Regina Mills, madam mayor of Storybrooke; he sees right through to the Queen who once had a father, and a husband, and a stepdaughter, and a huntsman. There is a line and you have crossed it.

You should not have underestimated me, Regina responds, at once both mayor and Queen. It is a relief to not keep up the illusion for once. Her shoulders relax, her mouth curls up, and her lips are again as red as the rose and hair is as black as ebony. You were going to leave me in ruins. Leave me to watch as she destroyed my life. Was I supposed to let her be happy?

She is virtuous, and fair, and good, the stranger says, and for a terrible moment, the way he speaks of that awful Snow White, he reminds her of her son Henry, with all his naïveté about the grey in between the white of good and the black of evil. She is good, and you are wicked. I had meant to teach you a lesson. You were to dance in red-hot coals at her request until you dropped down dead.

Do not blame me for your carelessness, Wilhelm—or are you Jacob? Over the years the brothers' faces have changed, blurred together, and she cannot tell which brother is which anymore—only that they had this unwelcome control over every step she took. Only that she wanted to be free of it.

Does it matter? Jacob, or Wilhelm, or whoever this Grimm is, stands righteous, nonplussed. My brother and I wrote these stories for children. To show them what happens to wicked people. What will they learn if you win?

That life is not always fair, says the Queen.

And with a small smile that does not express how happy she truly is, she rips out his heart too and crushes it in the same way she destroyed Graham's, her huntsman, and the Grimm brother sputters and squirms, blood foaming around his mouth like ink, and collapses.

His other brother, Wilhelm, or Jacob, or whoever, will be here soon. They're connected at their hearts and their heads, brothers in blood and bond and ink and words, who thought they were so special because they wrote in straight neat lines. And the other will come crying over his lost brother and try to raise him, and try to damn her.

And she'll take his heart too, and that will be that until perhaps Andersen if he wishes to leave Denmark, and then with the three of those writers in the ground, she will be safe.

She examines his corpse again from underneath her boot. It is a tangle of features from the multiple features history has given him. She snaps her fingers and with a long, horrible yawn, the earth swallows him.

This is her story now. Hers.

What can they do to touch her?

What can anyone do to touch her?