strangetrip | [EP] I am made of stars

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[EP] I am made of stars - OTA

It was night and everything smelled like the sea.

Snow White lay spread-eagle in middle of the parking lot, staring up at the stars. Her hair fanned around her head, inky black and, seeing as she hadn’t bothered to cut it since her arrival, growing almost absurdly long.

The sun had set over an hour ago and the sky was full into the black. The moon, not quite full but still nearly so, shone down silver and cool like a single huge, impassive eye. The sight of so much sky and so little horizon left her feeling dizzy, as though if she could forget the feeling of pavement under her back she might float upward and be lost in that eternity up there. It reminded her distantly of Mrs. H’s mirror and how it had caught the moon in its glass. But not enough to spoil the view. Not enough to make her afraid.

She’d had the nightmare again last night, the one where she was caught in the room full of fire. In the beginning it came every night. Then slowly but surely, it became less frequent. She hadn’t burned through the night in months. Logically, it would be months again before the fire, but she still couldn’t quite face going in, lying down, and closing her eyes.

She thought of Sansa and--because she had never asked--wondered if the stars in Westeros were different from the ones above her now. She wondered if that velvet black had a texture, and then if it was stupid to wonder that. She named all the constellations and stars she knew, some from her childhood observations, some from books she’d read in the library. Her gaze fixed for a time on Polaris.

She didn’t think anybody was around to hear her. “It’s so far away that no matter where we are, that’s still north.” It was a wild thought.

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Snow allowed herself a rare smile at the thought of the dog. "Poor puppy." She may not be very good at being openly affectionate toward people, but animals were another matter entirely.

"Poor old wolf." Regina winked at Snow, her mood lightening and growing buoyant just from the company. Also from thinking about Dyson, but that was inevitable.

"Yeah," Snow agreed. "He's probly the most wrapped about that dog's little paw out of all of us."

Regina laughed at the assessment. "Don't tell him that. He thinks he's 'training' the pup."

She leaned up on one elbow to look at her daughter. "You like him, don't you? Dyson." It wasn't a question, so much as an observation. "More than Robin."

Snow studied Regina for a moment, biting back a comment about Robin being insipid. She simply said, "Yes."

Regina thought about what Snow hadn't said, wondering for a time, and then decided it didn't matter. "I'm going to tell you a secret, my love. Just between the two of us." It wasn't something she'd said to anyone else that she could think of, nor would she, but with Snow, she couldn't lie. "So do I."

Snow's eyes went very wide at that.

She had tolerated Robin best she could mostly for Roland's sake, because she boy (whom she loved fiercely she realized, and she wished she'd understood that sooner) wouldn't understand her not caring about his papa. But she hadn't.

Finally she nodded. "Good." Good because it wouldn't help to like Robin better when he wasn't and would probably never be here. Good because Snow had never liked the man. But only 'good' because Mama had loved him, and she wouldn't be cruel about that.

Again, Regina let that pass into quiet for a time. There were a lot of things that might be said about this, but Snow wouldn't ever say them, even if she knew how. Was it worth opening the particular can of worms so that Regina could simply let them out?

Her decision, when she made it, wasn't really a decision to talk about Robin so much as a decision that she didn't want to have to make calculations like that with Snow. Her daughter was also her best friend and the only one she had left who'd known her before.

"Robin and I never had a choice about loving each other," she ruminated, as much to the stars as to Snow. "That's the way True Love works in the story. Before you've even met, there they are, this person who makes your heart do stupid things when you see them and their kisses taste like ambrosia. I thought Robin was a ridiculous, rude peasant when I met him, and if it weren't for knowing he was my second chance at True Love, I wouldn't have given him the time of day."

He had changed that, teaching her to love him with more than magic, but... "We did like each other, Robin and I. But what Zelena did to us, pretending to be Marian, and making us choose to give up what we had to save her for Roland, I don't think either of us really got over that. I forgave him for not being able to tell them apart, but he had a daughter with my sister when I could never give him that."

These were words she'd been thinking a long time she realized now, and it did feel good to get them out. "Do you mind me talking like this with you?"

Snow shook her head. She may not entirely understand everything, but she didn't mind. "No."

And after her trials with her stepmother and the apple, she knew how important it was to get clear of story. She had been trapped in that fairy tale from the time she had first seen the moon coming on in Mrs. H's mirror, and she had not been able to free herself for years. When Regina had woken her from the curse, there had been a relief that she hadn't been able to quantify. Something she recognized now as I can go now.

Regina reached over for Snow's hand and squeezed it once. Thank you, daughter, she thought warmly, and then sought the next thread in the story she wanted to snip.

"Mother tried to trick me into getting pregnant once with a man she claimed to be my Man with the Lion Tattoo." Regina remembered that incident with all of the appalling hurt, disgust and vile vile clarity of all her mother's cruelties. "She'd tracked down Tinkerbell, wormed the truth of Robin being my second chance out of her, and then picked Robin's loathsome nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham, to impersonate him."

There was something intensely therapeutic about mentioning all of these people by name to Snow. Because if anyone was going to know who Tinkerbell was, or the Sheriff, or the Miller's Daughter, it was her own daughter. She would probably love the inanity of the Disney versions as much as Regina did.

But there would never be anything that could ease the hurt of her own response: "I poisoned my womb rather than let her get her hands on any child she could control." No irony, there, in how she'd used dozens herself and then come to love one child enough to start her own redemption.

"Zelena knew that when she seduced Robin as Marian and got pregnant." And how much did it make her stomach clench to say that? "Maybe at home we worked through all that, but he had a child out there in the worlds. Another child. Who also wasn't mine. And part of him always wanted to go get that baby.

"He loved me, even beyond the magic. But he never loved me enough to accept my daughter as his own, even though I'd already accepted his son and whatever child my sister gave him." She bit her lip to stop the sudden, quick welling of tears over something old and unfixable.

"I forgave him for everything, except--" She lifted her hand again, this time to stroke Snow's hair. "For not loving you."

Snow was reasonably well read for a girl who had little in the way of a formal education, and she did indeed know all of these stories and names even if she hadn't really heard Regina speak of them like this before. She knew that Robin was Robin Hood, but it hadn't really meant anything.

At the end she looked away. "Didn't exactly make myself easy to love," she said.

Regina caught Snow's chin on her fingers like she had done the day that they met in Gotham. "Listen to me, daughter. He failed you, not the other way around. He was my partner, you are my daughter. There should never have been a question.

"A parent doesn't get choose whether to love the children in their life, they choose to love, period."

Once that was said, she let her fingers fall away and brushed the back of her knuckles against her cheek. "But you're wrong, anyway," she said softly. "You're very easy to love."

Snow looked doubtful. "She always said..." Her breath caught, and she stopped.

"She was wrong." Her tone brooked no argument. "If I hadn't come, you would still have a family with Kashaw and Vex'ahlia. You have friends, and a girlfriend. And unlike Robin, Dyson thinks the world of you."

Snow felt her face grow hot, and she immediately looked away, mumbling something under her breath that might have been words. It was certainly attempting to be words, though perhaps not to be audible or clear enough to be understood.

She would certainly have reprimanded Snow, told her to speak clearly and offered a threat for if she failed to do so. Regina made a point of reinforcing how loathsome Mrs. H had been by simply stroking Snow's hair and inviting her into a hug.

Snow White allowed it in a way she would not--perhaps could not--have done some years ago, letting Regina draw her close and tucking up against her.

Pleased by the physical affection, Regina kissed Snow's hair and then let out a quietly contented sigh. After a few quiet moments, she stroked Snow's back and said, "When I was a young queen, I used to stand on my balcony and stare up at the stars. I couldn't take off on a horse for a mad gallop across the fields, because it wasn't proper, and Leopold wouldn't let me go anywhere without guards, or his daughter. But the sky and what lay beyond was so vast, it gave me a few treasured moments of peace and perspective."

Snow nodded, though she didn't say anything for a moment before finally admitting, "I couldn't sleep."

"Red room dreams?"

It wasn't entirely a stab in the dark. Both of them still had them sometimes, and there was no telling what might trigger one.

Snow nodded. There was no point in lying about that. "I had another one last night."

"You know you can come to me," Regina reminded her. "Dyson and I both want you to be able to come if you need me."

"I know," Snow assured her. "I just..." She scrubbed a hand over her face. "I wasn't scared exactly. Just tired."

A feeling she understood only too well. "And you thought if you weren't going to sleep tonight or not rest when you did sleep, you thought you might as well enjoy the night sky instead," she suggested, one part question, one part understanding, all parts invitation.

Snow made a soft sound that implied this was close enough. "I thought maybe it might help. Looking at the stars."

[EP] I am made of stars - OTA

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