Chapter Text
Regina rarely ever has trouble falling asleep; this is a well-known fact these days. Many joke that she can actually fall asleep anywhere, and that she could likely fall asleep while standing up. She highly doubts the latter, but whatever.
Tonight, however, she finds herself staying awake well past her usual bedtime, but not because she wants to. She’s just got far too much on her mind to even think of going to sleep.
Her Dad’s words from that morning continue to run through her head, and while he’d effectively shot her theory out the window, Regina just isn’t sure if she can believe that her theory is impossible… or that it’s not important.
She groans in annoyance as she sits up and goes to her nightstand. She opens the drawer and pulls out the object she kept there for safekeeping until she could figure out whom it belonged to. Once she had it in her hand, she plopped down on the bed again and regarded it.
It looks like a locket from afar – which, by the way, it actually is – but the style of the locket is far different from anything she’s ever seen on anyone in Lucis. Most lockets she’s seen on people were either plated gold or pale silver, but they never seemed “metallic”. This one, however, was definitely not made of either gold or silver, because it’d been rusted shut when Domi had found it purely by chance, and rust doesn’t form on either gold or silver. Also, she knew from watching through shop windows that most lockets had some sort of “lovey-dovey” design… but this one seemed far more… well, “technical”, she supposes is a good word for it, with all its gears and almost jagged patterns along the front and back.
It had taken them a bit initially to get it to open up for them, but now it flips open effortlessly.
Inside the locket, behind cracked glass, is a picture of a family of three; a father, mother, and a baby, securely swaddled up and held securely by the mother. The crack goes right over the father’s face, obscuring all but a smile that doesn’t strike her as completely genuine… maybe a bit, but not a lot. The mother appears to be almost ecstatic, though, with her smile so bright Regina’s convinced she could’ve lit up a dark room with just her smile…
But the mother is the one who drew Regina’s attention to the object in the first place…
Regina’s not sure how old the woman is here; if she has to guess, somewhere between 20 and 30, but certainly no older than that. Her blonde hair is worn in a style she doesn’t recognize; most of it hangs loose but she wears some of it in braids from her temples to the back and two small braids frame her face, highlighting the sparkling blue eyes that are surrounded by like two dozen of freckles dotting a naturally (or so she believes) pale skin.
Silently, she then pulls out her wallet, flips it open and takes out the picture she’d taken out from the album earlier that day, without her Dad knowing – she makes a mental note to put it back in the morning. The picture is of her Dad, Ignis, Gladio, Iris… and herself, as a baby (fuck she was tiny!). The first “family photo” ever taken since her Dad admitted to everyone that he was planning to raise Regina as his daughter, from what Iggy’s told her.
After a brief moment of hesitation, she lifts both the photo and the locket, holding them side by side… or more specifically; holds the locket next to the image of her Dad.
He’s holding her exactly like the woman in the picture is holding her own baby, and while that’s not that big a deal (there’s only so many ways you can hold a baby without causing irreparable harm to the fragile neck), it only makes it easier to see the rest of the similarities.
The blonde hair is the same color (as in exactly the same), the eyes are the same shade and hell, even the same shape, and the freckles along the pale skin, primarily the cheeks, are another damning similarity. The only thing that’s off is the shape of the face, except for the round cheekbones that are definitely the same.
Regina doesn’t believe in coincidence… not really. Sometimes it happens, sure, but this? This is not a coincidence. Her Dad will likely say otherwise, but no, Regina is not convinced that this is a coincidence.
What worries her, though… is the broken chain the locket hangs from. All the chain’s links had been stretched out, as if to accommodate for something, before one of the links had caved in to the pressure and snapped. And that shouldn’t have happened under any circumstances. Well… normal circumstances.
If you’d pulled the locket off by force, only one link should’ve snapped and the others should’ve been fine. But here, all chain links were stretched out to far beyond what their maximum should’ve been…
Even if everyone else tells her she’s looking too much into this, she’s 100% sure her theory is correct…
She’s sure that she knows exactly who this woman is… and what happened to her…
…She just needs the proof to back up her claim.