[For Vax] On Crop Day

[st_oriedqueen]

Hands on her hips, Regina surveyed the farm she, Vax and Piotr had cultivated. To the men, it probably seemed as though she scrutinized it for imperfection in the harvesting, but in truth, she was enjoying a fleeting moment of satisfaction in having done something good. Two things good -- preparing for crisis, and putting others needs ahead of her own. Perhaps four if one considered allowing Vax and Piotr to help her, but Regina didn't.

She tipped her face up to the setting sun, and for just a minute indulged in the sheer pleasure of being alive. How often in her life had she done that?

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[st_abby]

His throat tightened around the answer, a little, though it was so much the better for being able to remind himself that Vex was here now. And that he would do everything in his power to keep her close to him.

"Never," Vax explained quietly. "A day or two, at most. And by agreement, with planning. Not... Months. And not like this," he told the surface of the table rather than Regina herself.

[st_oriedqueen]

His hand and the rest of him out of convenient reach for motherly patting, Regina saved herself the awkwardness of last time and gave him a sympathetic, knowing look. But her mind flashed back on Hansel and Gretel, how they'd clung to each other when she asked for their help. Now, as then, she saw the weakness and vulnerability of such a close connection; now, unlike then, she also knew the strength and support and love in it.

"She's here now," Regina reminded him gently, sure he was doing the same, but knowing it for the most useful thing she could say at the moment. She remembered too well the powerlessness of being back in the Enchanted Forest without Henry, thinking she'd never see him again, knowing he didn't remember her at all, and how hollow she'd felt inside.

[st_abby]

"She is," he agreed, drawing a smile both relieved yet wistful. "And Vex'ahlia has always been-" The things that I haven't. "Charming and clever. Hopeful and good. I don't like to think about who I would have been without her."

Not then, as youths with no one but each other. And now now, either.

[st_oriedqueen]

"Love can make a person do terrible things," Regina replied, her voice rich with knowledge, certainty, and history. She could never say she regretted what she'd done, because it had brought her Henry, and Snow, and Roland. But she did hate that she'd hurt so many people out of thwarted love.

[st_abby]

His smile strained around the edges, the quality of it, the fine lines around his eyes and mouth changing.

"I know," he said after a long beat. "Not...what you meant, probably," Vax admitted. "But I was different, as a younger man. The only person I knew how to love for a long time was my sister. ...I don't like that person I used to be anymore."

[st_oriedqueen]

"I'd say you're hardly old enough for that kind of regret," she told him, tone mild, and somehow at once amused and deeply tired. "But I'd already made a mess of my life by the time I was your age."

And because Vax was almost certainly too polite to ask, she said, "I stopped counting when I hit sixty."

[st_abby]

Vax was barely polite, but he had lived his whole life with Vex, who had taught him to know better than to ask unless he especially wanted to be hit.

"I would say you're pulling one over on me, but I've seen stranger things," he retorted.

[st_oriedqueen]

"I don't doubt it." In most of the stories, elves were long-lived. She was probably not the first woman he'd met whose age didn't match her appearance.

Regina's shoulders came down a notch and some of the tension bled out of her neck. So far, she hadn't shoved her foot down her throat and Vax hadn't made her feel threatened or angry. And wasn't it pathetic that she measured conversational success in those terms?

[st_abby]

Vax wasn't thinking about what made their chat successful or not, so much as just having the chat. Though he did let a long beat pass, expression going thoughtful. He often said more in his silences than the often ridiculous words stuck between them.

"I was a... Very angry, flippant youth," he tried to explain a bit more, though the words nearly stuck fast, like a weathered old door that didn't want to budge from its frame. "And I thought that it was either them or us. That made my decisions easier, to think of them that way. But when I stopped to reflect on what I'd done later, when I reconsidered that maybe being a selfish asshole wasn't the best way to live - there are mistakes you make, actions you take, that can't ever be undone."

[st_oriedqueen]

Regina all but choked on the bitterness of hearing herself mirrored by one far too young to have done nearly the damage she had, even if he had done similarly. She gave a rough, painfully self-knowing laugh and fixed him with her gaze--only slightly softer than the one that had made guards, courtiers, and peasants piss themselves.

"I believe the appropriate expression here is 'preaching to the choir'."

[st_abby]

She looked like a noble matriarch, not a murderess. Except... Something in her eyes and in her voice was at odds with the motherly concern she'd shown before. Barbs and rough edges surfaced from the should-be richness of her laughter, and a bit of a chill went down his spine.

Vax looked back up at her, his own dark eyes haunted and tired well beyond his years where hers flashed hard and sharp as steel. If he'd once been flippant and angry, he radiated a tangible sadness now.

"Maybe," he supposed quietly, "that's why I'm telling you." He wasn't sure, honestly, why he had started down this road with Regina. He didn't talk about that time of his life anymore, not unless he felt there was a need. There were things that even Vex'ahlia didn't know.

[st_oriedqueen]

"Like calls to like," Regina confirmed and pressed her lips tightly together again to stop the inadvertent tremble at the thought of coming close enough to that core of herself to touch it. "I wasn't just angry and misguided. I was Evil, capital E, very nearly unredeemable."

She expelled the tension in her chest with a slow exhale and then lifted her glass to sip from it. "My mother ripped my boyfriend's heart from his chest to teach me that power conquered love. She forced me to marry the man she'd once loved after killing his queen. Once, I might have told you that everything I did, I did for Daniel, but the truth is, I did it for me. I did it to make everyone else suffer as much as I was suffering from my lost love."

[st_abby]

Vax wasn't sure if he believed she'd been truly Evil, by virtue of that fact that here she was now, obviously redeemable - concerned and matronly and clearly working to better their queer home for all, for whatever she might have been. And that was what made Evil wasn't it? The bone-deep intent to hurt others?

...But then, maybe it was thinking of it as black or white or gray that was trouble. People changed and struggled over time, and they weren't so simple as only three (or even nine?) set ways to be.

He watched Regina thoughtfully. "What changed for you? What made you think they shouldn't all suffer?"

[st_oriedqueen]

There were a lot of ways to answer that question, Regina reflected, and all of them true. After all, she hadn't needed to hurt them in Storybrooke, once they'd had their memories and loves and lives torn away. Or at least, not continue hurting them. But she'd gone back to it easily enough when Miss Swan showed up to try to take Henry away. And having Henry had been the beginning, but it wasn't until much later that it had been conscious and began to stick.

On balance, she decided, in this instance at least the right answer was, "Almost losing my son."

[st_abby]

Across from her, Vax nodded slowly. "...My sister, for me," he admitted.

In a way, it had always been about Vex. They'd still been children when they'd struck out on their own, and he'd started putting the dagger techniques they'd taught him in Syngorn to use as self-defense. Then it turned out he was really very good with his daggers, and he'd started slitting purses. There was a lot more coin in slitting throats for hire, and once he'd started in on that, people left them well enough alone either by reputation or by proof of skill.

But he'd given it up for Vex, too. The way she looked at him, the sound of her voice when she insisted he was taking things too far. He didn't always agree with her, especially not at first, but he'd never risk pushing her away.

He'd given himself over to the Raven Queen for Vex, too, when he'd almost lost her in a different way.

"I had to wonder, when I'd got here, if I was going to see her again. And if not... What had been the point of everything?" Not to say Vax would've gone back and done things different, because he wouldn't have. But it hadn't left him much in the way of hope for the future.

[st_oriedqueen]

That, Regina understood. Although, she never wondered what the point of this was. She was paying for the harm she'd done and whether or not she would ever see her boys and Robin again, she had no doubts about what she needed to do. Still, when she'd lost Henry the first time, given him up to protect him and Emma, she remembered how devastated she'd been.

"Which everything?" The killing or the not-killing, her question implied. "A life without disasters is a life without excuses. The point or me was to learn to face pain without taking vengeance."