So...here we are with the long awaited Hunting Queen that i've been threatening people with for a while. Those of you that follow my Stable Queen story will have seen that i've been chatting about this and will know that it will be updated as and when the mood strikes me. Which shall hopefully be often :D

So here's my Christmas present to all you guys, it's a lot darker than my last outing but i'm going to keep plenty of that Regina snark in here that you all love so much :)

So merry Christmas, hope you have a good one.

Read, love, review.

Chapter 1 – Satisfaction

WHAM!

Regina allowed her face –for just a second- to show the unutterable glee she felt at finally planting her fist into the vaunted deputy's face.

That wet meaty sound of knuckles meeting cheek. She'd misjudged it –years out of practice- she missed her nose and the stunning blow that would have allowed her to follow up with a killing strike…still, it was satisfaction defined to watch Miss Swan reel away from her with a commoner's grunt of pain and surprise.

Regina watched her, head tilting. She read the body language, saw the dumb rage flash in the younger woman's eyes. Oh please, how had she ever made a living as a bonds person if she telegraphed everything as if it was in Vegas neon? The shift of the weight, pivoting on the ankle, hand balling.

Regina very nearly rolled her eyes but her own body was already twisting, her jaw turning. She took the hamfisted punch like a pro and staggered the bulk of the force off with a shrug. She dropped the flowers and stumbled, not having counted on her heels. She sighed when Miss Swan cinched her arms around Regina from behind and dragged her towards her father's mausoleum. Stars burst behind her eyes when her skull rapped off the stone pillar. She could taste blood in her mouth and she felt the bloodlust rise.

So long. It had been so long since she'd killed someone. Not since the curse had first began and even that had been more necessity than anything else.

But then Graham.

He was snarling at Emma, dragging her away and Regina shrugged it off. Dusting her jacket off and sloping down the steps back to where she had dropped her father's flowers. She scooped them up and felt Emma's approach. She tensed, half turning.

Do it, Regina's tongue slithered over her teeth, do it.

Give her an excuse, any excuse, the next time Swan touched her it would be her last. A punch gone wild, that would be the story. Whoops, had that been her trachea? How clumsy.

Henry would likely never forgive her but –in that moment- Regina didn't care.

"Not worth it." Emma huffed at her and yomped past Regina with that pounding dinosaur gait of hers.

Not worth it? What the hell did that mean? Of course Regina was worth it. According to Miss Swan's whole damn destiny, Regina was the meaning to her entire existence. Without the Evil Queen, who had use of a hero?

Regina turned, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, her jaw aching pleasantly, and saw her Huntsman watching her carefully.

"Graham…" Had he seen?

Had he finally seen the mask slip? Had he remembered? Did he see her as he once had? As his…owner.

Graham's eyes were empty. He shook his head, barely acknowledging her, and stepped around her. Trailing after Swan like he had once trailed after her.

Yet another thing stolen from her by the precious Swan.

Regina stood and watched them go. For a long time after they had disappeared from her field of vision, she observed the gloomy trees of the cemetery. The sentinels of the tombstones standing over empty graves keeping vigil to her latest humiliation.

Regina reached up slowly, absently, and smeared the blood from her mouth. It stained her skin, leather gloves being a poor tool to clean up with, but she licked the copper taste from the leather anyway. She remembered the first time she had tasted his blood, remembered how he had arched under her as her teeth had scraped the skin of his throat raw.

All she had to do…was squeeze.

Spinning on her heel, galvanised in the sanctuary of her rage, Regina powered up the steps to her family's tomb and threw open the door. She stilled, calming almost in the face of her father's marble coffin. She sucked in a deep breath, steadying herself, and closed the door behind her with a quiet click. Resting the flowers reverently on the coffin, Regina slid her gloved hand over the smooth marble. The blood she hadn't swept away with her tongue left pink streaks on the stone. It would stain.

She didn't care.

Regina rested both hands on the coffin and –with a sudden heft- threw her weight against it. The sound of stone grinding over stone rumbled through the tomb and her bones. Blue light spilled up against her from the stairway brought into view.

Cautiously, Regina picked her way down into the vaults beneath. The tunnels spread beneath the tomb in a labyrinth only she knew the full extent of. She had an entire subterranean network down there. With connections to the larger tunnels of the sewer system, Regina could feasibly traverse Storybrooke from one side to the other without ever stepping above ground.

Though the chamber she sought was considerably closer than that.

Regina listened to her heels clip against the stone floor as if from very far away and tried to identify this curious quiet that had frozen in her chest.

She'd always had an internal rage, having learned from a young age that having feelings –any kind of feelings- were only weapons to be used against her. Smiling at the wrong person, laughing at the wrong joke, comforting someone beneath her station –all of them had been used to punish her in some form or another. She had learned fast. Feel nothing…or by the gods look like you didn't.

She had never actually felt nothing though.

She always felt something. All the time, without surcease, she knew the full extremity of every emotion. Serenity was a foreign concept, apathy a pipedream, solace as alien as this world she had brought everyone to. Everything beat in her head like a drum, a siren song in her ears. She'd learned that the only thing that drowned out her mental screams, staunched her pain, was that of others.

It was cruel, she knew it was, but it was the only thing that gave her some modicum of peace. The only thing aside from…from using Graham.

Well, that ship had sailed.

Regina was aware her face was doing something strange. Her mouth downturned, her eyes burning.

No matter.

She stalked the hallway, to her vault of hearts, and admired the golden walls. The thump of their little gleaming lights glowing in the dim. The light was warm both in colour and actual temperature. All those hearts, all that power, was quite pleasant. She didn't collect them for nothing after all.

Regina worked her hands free of her gloves, this was a thing better off done skin to skin as it were.

Her fingers tapped against the golden boxes. Fifth down, third to the left…a Huntsman's heart. Regina scooped it carefully out of the box and held it in her palm. She was always surprised at how small they were. Such a large man as Graham and she was able to encompass the focal point between his body and his soul in even her small fingers.

Betray her? Leave her?

All she had to do was squeeze.

Across town Graham's lips burned from their contact with Emma's and he staggered away from her, dimly aware of her hands on his shoulders, asking if he was alright. He was a little too far away to answer her right then.

Everything.

He remembered everything.

A torrent of memories washed through him. The wolves, the forest, learning to clothe himself, take on their speech, take on their mannerisms, walk human, talk human, but never be one. Never be one.

Graham sagged against the desk and gulped in great heaving breaths. The Huntsman. He was the Huntsman.

"Graham? Graham, are you alright?" Emma shook his shoulder and he blinked at her as if seeing her for the first time.

"Emma, I remember."

"What?"

"I remember. I remember everything." He grinned then, his eyes shining.

"Uh…okay?"

Graham couldn't stop smiling, he cupped her face in his hands, feeling free. Feeling so free. He kissed her, because he was happy, because he really knew why he couldn't feel and that he wasn't crazy.

Then pain.

Graham choked, sagging in Emma's arms. Agony exploded throughout his chest. A familiar clawing sensation, a lump of iron in his chest where his heart should be. Graham gasped, clutching at his chest and sinking to the floor, Emma clutched at his shoulders, calling his name, trying to get through to him, but Graham couldn't hear her rightly over the shrieking of his own body.

Then it stopped.

Graham took long moments to come back to himself and –when he did- it was to the soft patter of Emma's tears dripping down onto his face. Her face floated over his and his breathing began to slow, his thundering heart (because now he could certainly hear it) dropping from a gallop to a canter and finally slowing to something regular.

It had stopped.

He had felt her. Felt Regina on the other end of the connection. She had been about to kill him, to destroy him for leaving her, just like she had promised…but she hadn't. She had stopped. What did that mean? A threat? A warning? Did she not have enough magic in this world to finish the job? Should he look forward to a knife in his back instead?

What the hell was going on?

Regina was asking herself that exact same question deep in the vault. She stared down at the heart lying on the floor.

It lay there, rocking minutely in time with its slowing pulse, glowing softly. She watched it intently, her eyes wide and black, and looked at her hand. Her fingers shook, her entire hand and arm trembling.

What…?

Regina stooped and picked up the heart. She cradled it in both hands, examining it like she had never seen it before. It pulsed, strong and steady, thudding its magic and strength against her skin as if in defiance of her ill will towards it.

She hadn't been able to do it.

Not that she'd been physically unable, her fingers had caged and crushed the heart easily, but that she hadn't the will to fulfil the task.

The will was important. Enchanted hearts were incredibly strong and powerful. Just one had powered the entire curse, after all. It wasn't enough to crush one in the hand –no one would be strong enough to do it, it wasn't just a physical thing- it had to be mental too. You had to want it.

Regina hadn't hesitated since the unicorn. She'd never not had enough will to crush someone's little heart in her delicate fingers. Not a human's anyway.

Impossible.

Regina shook her head sharply and held the heart between her palms, raising her elbows and preparing to squash it between her hands but…but…her arms shook instead and she became aware that her cheeks were cold. Closer examination showed her scarf to be damp, tears staining it.

Tears?

What use had she for tears?

She'd crush his heart and leave, letting the dust decorate the floor, leaving nothing of her unfaithful pet save the ash on the ground and the empty husk of flesh no doubt cooling in the good deputy's hands.

Yes. She'd kill him and be back in time to battle with Henry into putting that damned book away and actually getting a good night's sleep…yes.

…as soon as her hands would obey her command and crush the heart in her palm.

Any minute now.

It hit Regina then. The heart hadn't changed. It wasn't stronger, no more indestructible to her wrath than it had been back in the Enchanted Forest. They were magical in and of themselves, as was she, the entire town along with her. She might not be able to tap into the blanketing spell that encompassed the whole of Storybrooke and manipulate it to her will, it was still set to the prerequisites of the curse when she had cast it (though they were certainly deteriorating since Swan had arrived), but she should still be able to crush one if she so desired. They hadn't changed at all in that sense.

No, it was her heart that had changed.

Regina finally identified the freezing cold that had become an arctic winter in her chest. The desolate pain that clawed at her from the inside.

The choked sob caught her completely by surprise.

"No." The word was ripped from her in a growl that would have been more at home in the chest of the Huntsman's dear wolf. "I do NOT love!"

Regina's treacherous hands cradling his heart oh so gently belied her denial.

No. She was strong. Love was weakness. She had outgrown that need decades ago. Graham was a pleasure toy, a dalliance, a pet. She cared nothing for him beyond what he could do when her back met the sheets at night. She didn't love him. She had loved one man and he was dead. Gone forever. She was ruined, her heart deadened inside, she couldn't possibly have it within her to feel that again.

Please, anything but that.

Regina looked down at the heart in her hand and began to shake. She trembled so violently her teeth rattled against one another. She shook so hard that she barely managed to stuff the heart into her pocket before she dropped it again. It was a dull roar to begin with. The rising tide of madness.

No, she hadn't done this in years. Not here, not now, not where she might escape. Not where she might happen to someone.

Not here, not yet, not where someone might hear.

Regina staggered forward. She careened off walls and stumbled on uneven flagstones, disappearing deeper and deeper into the catacombs. She searched for the door, her haggard reflection cast back on her a hundredfold with each mirror she passed. Her hands scrambled, she couldn't remember which one. Which door, which mirror, which one?!

Click.

The mirror swung out and Regina threw herself through the door. She still shook, barely able to coordinate herself long enough to close it all the way. As soon as it shut, she spun and leaned heavily back against the wall. She felt the lock tumble into place, a lock that had a combination that only a lucid mind could release. Tumbling and tumbling, she listened to the gears moving with well oiled precision over one another and –when the last pin locked in place- she raged.

The scream roared from her, tearing her throat with its ferocity. Her pupils blew, engulfing the coffee dark of her eyes into the mad yawning black of a shark's frenzied stare. Her lips peeled back over her teeth and her hands curled into claws.

The room was her royal bedchamber. Blue and soft, not black and harsh like the rest of her castle. She had transported it here with the Curse. It was filled with trinkets she had collected over the years, nearly every available space occupied with an elaborate mirror and it was those she fell on first.

It took seconds to ruin her hands.

She smashed them. Every mirror, every reflective surface, beaten to shards beneath her frenzied fists. She tore the frames from the walls, crushed the panes beneath her heels, watched the mercury bead across the plush carpet of the floor. When she was done, when she couldn't see the warmask her face had twisted into, she moved onto the furniture.

She screamed all the while, in languages long dead and those not yet written. Her rage had to go somewhere and it would escape into the sound housed in her lungs until her throat gave out. Had she still had her magic, she'd have destroyed the room in a maelstrom of force, splintering everything apart with nothing more than a concussive blast of her personality but she didn't so she had to make do with the old fashioned approach.

Which had a satisfaction to it in and of itself.

It took a long time for her to wear herself out. Miss Swan might have said Regina was unfit from ten years of sitting behind a desk but the little chit didn't know the half of it. Regina, mad Regina, could and had lain waste to entire platoons of soldiers with nothing more than a fit of pique and a dagger.

When it was done, when the rage bled away with some very real blood into the carpet, Regina surveyed the damage.

Annihilation.

Everything. Everything she had meticulously brought with her from the Enchanted Forest, her most prized possessions, the dearest things she couldn't bear to part with, gone. Torn, ripped or crushed into smithereens. The carpet had been shredded in places and even the walls bore the marks of her fingernails dragging the velvet paper away and scoring into the stone beneath.

She ached. Even her hair hurt. Every bone and muscle felt every single one of her years and decades beyond that. She was exhausted.

Regina was slumped against the wall with nothing but the destruction of what remained of her haven in the Enchanted Forest and the hoarse sounds of her breathing for company. Slowly, torturously, she drew her knees up to her chest and hugged her arms about them. Letting her forehead drop down onto them, Regina let out a slow breath.

She did not love.

Love was weakness.

She was not weak.

She did not love.

Then…why couldn't she crush that stupid beast's heart?