Chapter Three

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"How is she?"

"She's...she's...struggling."

"It's been three days."

"She won't eat, she won't speak-"

"And your mother?"

"She just holds her close and allows her to cry." Zelena sadly explains, eyeing her father closely. "Dad, I-" and her voice cracks so roughly that his big brown eyes immediately snap up from the ground to meet her gaze. "I think you need to go see her now," she confesses, her eyes sparkling from the thick tears coating her piercing blue eyes.

Her father doesn't say a word. Instead, he presses his fist firmly against his mouth, averts his eyes to the ground again and nods just once. It's curt and emotionless and reminds Zelena so much of her damn sister, but she takes that as a yes. So, she spins around on her heels and leads the way back to Regina's room, her father's presence heavy in her shadow without another word spoken.

Zelena doesn't bother with knocking, she never did when they were little and she's certainly not going to start now. She waltzes right through the room, but her heart squeezes painfully from the gut-wrenching sobs pouring from her baby sister.

"Henry," Cora gasps the moment her eyes land upon her stoic husband closing the door behind himself.

He nods politely, his feet slowly shuffling closer, but it's so painfully obvious how apprehensive he is about seeing his daughter so utterly broken. Regina doesn't even bother looking up from the pillow her face is buried in, soaked from her persistent tears.

"Regina, I would like a word," he softly states, encouraging Cora to vacate her chair rather quickly.

Her mother presses a kiss to her temple and whispers her love before she escorts Zelena out the door. The moment Regina hears the door softly clicking shut, she decides to speak before her father has a chance.

"Daddy, please, I don't have it in me to talk about all of this," her distorted voice hardly escapes her throat before she buries her face even deeper and releases another agonizing cry that sounds like she's being ripped apart from the inside out.

"Regina, I'm not going to pretend to understand what you are going through and I'm not going to try and give some speech to cheer you up. I know nothing I can say will fix this, but sweetheart, you have to start trying to move forward in life. We need you to eat and to regain your strength, so you can get out of this bed, out of this hospital and go home."

"Go home? To what? A place that will only remind me of Naveen? Our home is filled with our love, with our memories. It will only be a prison where I'm forced every day to live with his ghost," she hysterically sobs, her body automatically curling up tight to alleviate the pain tormenting her from within.

And she can feel her father lingering closely before she hears him claim the seat her mother has been glued to for the entire time she has been shunned to that hospital bed. Very tentatively, her father reaches out and places his hand upon the left side of her face. He's warm, he always radiated heat and it seeps into her skin and somewhat settles down her spasming muscles.

"It doesn't have to be a prison, my dear," he gently whispers.

"I lost every-thing," she stutters through her heavy sobs that she no longer has any control over. "The love of my life. My happiness, my future. It was all ripped away in a blink of an eye, a blink that I can't even remember. My everything is gone, just like Naveen."

"You still have a future, Regina. I promise. You still have so much of your life ahead of you. I know it seems impossible now, but you can learn to love again."

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