Chapter Text
Emma was an absolute wreck. Her night had ended in a painful silence of her mind as she’d picked up Henry from Regina’s car and two policemen took them home. She’d put him back to bed and talked with the officers, sitting at the kitchen table. She’d told them everything that had gone down like the story didn’t belong to her. The whole time, she felt like she was floating above herself, staring down at those cups of burnt coffee she’d mechanically offered to the policemen.
Eventually, the first rays of light had filtered through the window, and the officers had left. They’d told her to call if she could remember anything else, but she was barely listening. She managed to drag herself up the stairs and climb into bed fully clothed. She cried herself to sleep, salty tears dampening the white sheets to the point they stuck to her face.
She woke up after a couple of hours to a dry throat and the itchy remains of her sobbing etched onto her cheeks. She stumbled into the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face, and she thought about calling in sick for a second. It’s not like anyone would expect her to come in after what happened anyway. But the prospect of staying alone in this apartment all day was unbearable.
She woke her son up and prepared his breakfast like it was any other day. He tried a few tentative questions, but she avoided them all, claiming he needed to hurry up and eat before school. Still, he noticed the way her shoulders tensed up when he asked about Regina.
“Eat your breakfast,” she just choked out with the weakest smile he had ever seen her wear.
Emma dropped Henry off at school after an uncomfortably silent drive. He waved, but she didn’t wave back.
As soon as she stepped foot into the hospital, she felt everyone’s gaze fall on her shoulders. She hurried through the main hall before their eyes could burn through her coat and reach her exposed skin. There was no trace of yesterday’s incident anywhere—no more police tape, no more officers roaming the halls—nothing. Like none of it had ever happened. But the looks—the heavy, loaded looks of the whole personnel—remained.
The deserted locker room thankfully offered her a short respite. Away from the crowd of curious nurses and doctors, she could finally breathe again. Sadly, the reprieve was only temporary.
“Emma?” Belle’s voice arose from behind her, soft, caring, careful—like she was talking to a wounded animal. “Can you follow me, please? Gold wants to see you.”
Emma sighed, letting her forehead hit the metal door of her locker. Of course, she knew she would have to go through his office at some point. After all that happened, it was unavoidable. But right now? She wasn’t sure she could survive it.
Still, she obediently followed in Belle’s footsteps and they headed to the dean’s office. Before she could enter, the administrator took her hand in hers, gently squeezed it, offered her a supportive smile. Emma didn’t manage to give one back. She left her at the door.
The doctor was a little surprised to see that Mary-Margaret and Aurora were already there, sitting at Gold’s desk. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t bear the thought of not coming in to work today. The dean pointed to the last remaining chair on the other side of the large wooden desk. She sat down between her two friends.
“First of all, let me tell you that I am really sorry about what happened to you yesterday,” he stated, but there was no warmth behind the words, just the cool cadence of professionalism. “You will, of course, be offered counseling sessions with the head of our psychiatric department, Dr. Hopper. Free of charge.”
“How generous of you,” Emma scoffed.
She didn’t believe for a second in that fake sympathetic look he tried to put on. He didn’t care. He probably didn’t even notice Mary-Margaret’s dark circles from her sleepless night, or that Aurora still hadn’t changed out of the scrubs she wore the day before, the ones that were stained at the hem by drops of Mulan’s blood.
“I’ll consider myself lucky—your death would have cost us way more,” Gold wouldn’t give in to anger this time. The situation had already been dealt with in his mind, and seeing the collateral damage in front of him was nothing more than the next step in the crisis control he was so used to. “Now that formalities are out of the way,” he resumed, “It goes without saying that this ordeal puts our entire hospital in a very delicate situation, and I’m counting on you not to make it any worse. A bonus will be added to your next paycheck, to reward the bravery and dignity you’ve shown through this.”
For the first time since the previous night, Emma felt something rise in her stomach, make her limbs tingle, and she didn’t know if she was about to break or bite. Luckily, Aurora broke first.
“Is that why we’re here?” she blurted out through a voice shaken by hours of crying, eyes focused on the tissue in her lap that she kept twisting around. “So you can buy our silence?”
“Let’s just say that I hope this small compensation will encourage discretion towards the media and deter you from considering suing this establishment,” he raised an eyebrow, searching for any trace of rebellion on their faces. “We don’t want to escalate the situation any further, do we?”
Emma boiled inside. This hadn’t been a “situation”, this wasn’t an “ordeal”, this had been the worst moment of their entire lives. And he just kept downplaying it, like the three of them had just slipped on a wet floor somewhere and broken their legs. A man had come into the hospital with a gun, held them captive, shot Mulan, and all he could care about was lawsuits and newspapers. Emma opened her mouth, but Mary-Margaret stopped her right before she could make things worse, slipping a soft hand over her wrist.
“I think I speak for all of us when I say that there’s nothing we want more than to put all of this behind us,” the nurse stated, and though she concealed it well, Emma knew her too well not to hear the hint of bitterness in her voice. “All that matters to us is that this doesn’t ever happen again, and to know that our friend Miss Fa is doing well. We’ve been without any news since yesterday.”
Mary-Margaret remained calm, but her hand over Emma’s arm was shaking, just a little bit—from exhaustion, from worry, from the primal fear that wouldn’t leave her stomach since the previous night.
“I can assure you, Miss Blanchard, that our security measures are going to be greatly reinforced,” Gold immediately offered. The hiring contracts of a dozen more security agents were already on his desk. “As for Miss Fa, I’m happy to tell you her surgery went well. You can thank Dr. Mills for her extra hours. For the rest, you’ll ask her yourself—she’s in room 702 of the ICU. Second floor.”
“Thank you, Mr. Gold,” Mary-Margaret stood up, grabbing Aurora’s hand to help her move through the worried fog she was drowning in. “Have a good day.”
She started heading out, Aurora obediently following behind her, still too far out of reality to do anything more. Emma stood up too, ready to follow the nurses. There was nothing else she could say to her boss that wouldn’t get her killed or fired anyway.
“Swan,” he called out before she could cross the threshold of his office.
She turned around, a hand on the doorframe, eyes devoid of all her usual fighting spirit Gold hated so much.
“On a more personal note,” he resumed, his eyes narrowing. “I do hope you’ll shed this habit you have of being involved in every problem that comes through my office.”
“Believe me, sir,” Emma sighed, “that’s all I’m asking for.”
XXX
When they stepped out of Gold’s office, Mary-Margaret was a little surprised to see that Emma headed straight back to the ER without a word, head hung low. She thought about going after her, ask her why she didn’t want to head up to see Mulan with them, but Aurora was already leaving too, almost running towards the elevators. She made her choice and jogged to catch up with the nurse. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t deal with everyone’s feelings today.
They silently rode the elevator as Aurora twisted her hands around. God, how slow could that machine be? As soon as the doors opened, she bolted towards the ICU. Mary-Margaret struggled to follow her desperate pace — with her pregnancy, running was becoming harder each day. Aurora stopped at the nurses’ station. The ICU was one of the few departments you couldn’t just walk in and out of, and she needed to give her name before entering.
“Hi,” she greeted the man standing behind the counter, nervousness overriding her usual politeness. “We’re here to see Mulan Fa. Room 702.”
“Are you family?” the nurse asked, leaning over the visitor’s log.
“Not really,” Aurora admitted, hands gripping the edge of the counter. “We’re—we’re friends, colleagues...” she stumbled over her words.
“I’m sorry…” the young man gave them an apologetic look. “She hasn’t woken up yet, so I can only let family go in.”
Aurora wanted to yell at him that it didn’t matter—that she was closer to the intern than any of her biological family members had ever been, that she needed to see her now, to know that she was safe and sound, or else she would break—but Mary-Margaret’s hand sliding over hers stopped the words from flowing out of her mouth.
“Her family’s unable to come in right now,” the head nurse explained in the soft, velvety voice she only used when it was absolutely necessary. “We just don’t want her to wake up alone.”
The receptionist sighed. Of course, he’d heard about everything that had gone down yesterday, about Mulan’s courage that had earned her a bullet in the stomach. For that courage, he could bypass hospital protocol for once.
“Listen, I’ll make an exception,” he leaned in, lowering his voice. “But I can only allow one person in as long as she’s unconscious.”
“What? That’s unfair!” Aurora lashed out, unable to contain the mess of emotions flowing through her.
“One person,” the nurse repeated, and he looked truly sorry about it. “That’s really the best I can do.”
Mary-Margaret gently pulled on Aurora’s wrist to force her to turn towards her. She took a deep breath in, and her friend instinctively imitated her.
“You should go,” Mary smiled through the slight quiver in her voice.
Of course, she wanted to go see Mulan too, but she knew that the place next to her bed wasn’t hers to take. She could see her later, once she’d woken up. For now, Mulan needed Aurora there. The young nurse nodded, and she left her friend at the desk, following the receptionist through the locked doors of the ICU.
The entire department was deathly quiet, and it contrasted so much with the chaos of the ER Aurora had inevitably gotten used to. She followed the nurse through the long hall, the only sound she could hear being their own footsteps and the steady beeping of the machines behind the glass walls. They stopped in front of a closed door.
Aurora could see Mulan laying in bed on the other side of the glass. She’d never seen her look so vulnerable, and that made her breath catch in her throat. Her escort gently slid a hand over her shoulder, telling her she could go in anytime, and left her alone. She waited until she couldn’t hear him walk away anymore before pushing open the dreaded door.
Everything in the room—from the sterile sheets to the painfully blank walls—felt like a tomb. Aurora walked around the bed with hesitant steps, afraid to disturb the quietness. She pulled out a chair, and sat next to Mulan.
She spent hours shifting on her uncomfortable seat, staring at her friend, laying in that hospital bed, in that ICU room that felt too cold for her warmth. It hurt to see her like this, and it hurt even more to be unable to do anything about it. Things hadn’t been easy between them lately, but still, Aurora cared so much about her. And she wanted to do something, needed to do something, but there was nothing to do.
The nurse didn’t exactly know when she’d started crying, but she was soon faced with the stain of tears that kept spreading over the blue sheets. She scooted her chair closer to the bed and intertwined her fingers through Mulan’s still hand. She let herself be overtaken by the sobs, gently squeezing her friend’s hand. She was surprised to feel her fingers slowly close around hers.
She thought about getting up to call the on-shift doctor, but Mulan’s fluttering eyelids stopped her. They could tell she was awakening from her closely-monitored vitals anyway. She didn’t want to leave her side. Aurora gently stroked her hand as Mulan’s eyes slowly opened, immediately landing on her.
“Hey…” the patient whispered in a hoarse voice after a few seconds.
“Hey…” Aurora greeted back with a weak smile, her face still soaked by tears.
“Am I that ugly to see?” Mulan mocked, seeing the glistening over her red cheeks.
“No, you’re not,” the nurse chuckled, pulling on the sleeve of her cardigan to wipe her face. “I’m just happy to see you again. Thought I wouldn’t for a second…”
“You won’t get rid of me that easily,” the intern promised, attempting to sit up.
“Don’t,” Aurora forbid, gently pressing down on her shoulder to force her to lay back. “Your injury’s pretty serious. You—You’ve lost a lot of blood…”
“Well, that tracks,” Mulan groaned in pain as the anesthesia kept wearing off. “It hurts like a bitch…”
She reached for the bloodied bandage around her stomach, memories slowly coming back to her.
“I’ll go get a nurse for some painkillers,” Aurora tried getting up, but Mulan grabbed her wrist before she could go anywhere.
“No, please stay.”
That simple, vulnerable plea willed Aurora to sit back down. They stayed silent for a few minutes, listening to the steady beep of Mulan’s heart monitor. Their hands had found each other’s again, resting on top of the covers. The way the nurse stroked her fingers with her thumb almost made Mulan forget about the sharp pain that twisted in her stomach.
“So, will you tell me what happened during my little nap?” she ended up asking.
“Not now,” Aurora shook her head. Now was really not the time to relive the entire ordeal. “You need to rest.”
“Oh, don’t make me beg,” Mulan grinned, and Aurora almost caved in to that cheeky smile.
“No way,” she still put her foot down. “We can talk about all of this later.”
“Okay, mom,” the intern mocked with an exaggerated eye roll.
“How can you still think about making fun of me right now?” Aurora smirked.
“I’m just trying to lighten the mood…” Mulan smiled back.
The nurse let her eyes trail around the room. It was so lifeless it made the ER look like a funfair.
“God, this room’s depressing….” Aurora confirmed with a sigh.
“It’s a little less with you here,” the patient assured. She wasn’t even looking at the room anyway. Just Aurora. “Thank you for coming. Again.”
It was hard not to notice that the nurse did, in fact, spend a lot of time sitting next to her friend in a hospital bed. Still, she’d take it over the weird silent treatment she’d been giving her in those last few weeks. Of course, she knew why Mulan had pulled away from her. The shame from her confession must have weighed heavily on her, and it weighed on Aurora too. But through the embarrassment, she had to admit she missed her friend.
The Mulan she’d seen in the last few weeks, cold and detached, wasn’t the Mulan she knew and loved. She wasn’t the girl she’d gotten to know, full of fire and courage and determination to the point it sometimes made her reckless. But yesterday, when she’d reached for the gun, she’d seen that girl again.
“Why did you do it?” Aurora blurted out.
“Do what?” Mulan pretended not to understand, because she didn’t really have an answer.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about…”
The intern sighed and looked up at the ceiling, still not letting go of Aurora’s hand.
“Truth is, I don’t know…” she shrugged after taking a deep breath. “I saw the gun, I saw Mary-Margaret, I saw you, and… I couldn’t think, it’s just—it’s like there’s something in me, a pull, some kind of unknown contract I didn’t sign… Something that makes me always want to take care of you.”
Peeling her eyes off the ceiling and turning back to Aurora was considerably harder than reaching for that man’s gun the night prior. The nurse was looking at her with her mouth slightly open, looking for words she obviously wouldn’t find. Mulan didn’t leave her a chance to anyway.
“I know I should stop loving you, but—I can’t.”
Aurora’s mind was going at full speed, and those desperately in love brown eyes that kept staring at her didn’t help. She was thinking about everything at the same time—her fiancé, herself, the gun, the blood on Mulan’s shirt, the times they’d shared that felt like the closest thing to true happiness she could imagine… And those eyes of hers that made her doubt everything she was sure of.
She leaned towards her without realizing she was. The kiss was quick, unplanned, just a brush of lips before Aurora sat back down. She was so surprised at her own action her eyes widened.
Mulan didn’t get time to react either—she heard the glass door open behind her. She turned around to see Mary-Margaret, David, and Killian barge into the room with excited smiles and happy cheers.
“Mulan!” the pediatric nurse exclaimed as she threw her arms around her, squeezing tight. “God, we’re so glad to see you!”
“Sorry to barge in like this,” David apologized, putting down the huge bouquet of flowers he’d brought. “A nurse told us you were awake, and we just couldn’t wait.”
“Hope we’re not interrupting anything…” Killian added. Mary-Margaret and David might be blinded by the joy, but he could feel the heavy tension that hung in the room and Aurora’s shifty eyes.
“Nothing at all!” she lied, quickly getting up from her chair, making it squeal against the linoleum. “I—I was just about to go,” she added, grabbing her bag from the floor.
“Are you sure?” David raised an eyebrow. “I gave you the day off, you can stay a little longer!”
“Oh no, don’t worry,” Aurora brushed off with an awkward gesture. “Besides, I think there’s enough people for such a tiny room… I’ll swing by later!”
She hurried out of the room and kept running down the ICU’s hall. Mulan’s colleagues’ cheers and well-wishes picked up, but she couldn’t quite focus on their excitement. The only thing she could hear was her own heartbeat pounding in her head, and the echo of that kiss against her lips and everything that was still unsaid.
XXX
Emma had been on autopilot all day. She treated patient after patient without ever being truly present in the room alongside them. It was unlike her, but her mind was too busy replaying what had gone down the previous night to really care. The only thing she could think about was that cold look in Regina’s face, the fire leaving her eyes on that parking lot, and every time she pictured it again, her guts twisted in her stomach a little more.
Finally, that awful shift came to an end, and it felt like it had lasted an entire week. Emma dragged her feet back to the locker room. She almost had a heart attack when Killian zoomed past her, stopping just a few feet away from her in a hiss of plastic wheels on linoleum.
“Hey, Em!” he greeted with a huge smile that did not match Emma’s state of mind.
“Fuck, Killian!” she scolded, putting a hand against her chest to calm her racing heart. “Why the hell are you on a scooter?”
“Cool, isn’t it?” he grinned, pointing at his brand-new vehicle. “Thought it’d be great for time-saving purposes.”
Of course, they both knew this had nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with this being Killian’s latest way of annoying his colleagues.
“Guess David still hasn’t seen it?” Emma theorized. She could already picture the full breakdown the chief of ER was going to have when he’d see his employee zoom through the halls on a scooter.
“Not yet,” he confirmed, crossing his arms over the handlebars. “I just started my shift.”
Emma sighed at his eternal immaturity. But looking closely, she could see that there was something else to it. That ecstatic grin couldn’t stem entirely from his dumb idea. No, there was something else.
“What’s with the good mood, Jones?” she decided to ask, raising an inquisitive eyebrow.
Without answering, Killian reached into the pocket of his white coat and pulled out two movie tickets. He brandished them towards Emma, and she quickly understood that it probably had something to do with Ariel finally accepting to go on a date with him. It wasn’t hard to guess, the nurse was all he’d been talking about for months. What she couldn’t guess however, was why the hell she felt her stomach twist a little at the sight of those movie tickets.
“I can’t believe it…” she sighed.
“You should know I always get what I want by now,” Killian boasted with that charming smile of his.
“Does she know what she’s getting into?” Emma scoffed.
“You’re saying that like I ambushed her!” He put on a falsely offended expression, but that grin that kept tugging at his lips was betraying him. “The only thing she’s getting into is a lovely evening in great company.”
“Yeah, I’m sure she’ll love babysitting you,” his friend mocked.
“Laugh all you want, you’re not putting a dent in my good mood tonight!” he shot back, putting the tickets back in his pocket. “On another note, have you seen Ruby anywhere? I have a file to give her.”
“She hasn’t shown up for her shift this morning,” Emma explained. “Belle has tried to reach her all day but she’s not answering her cell.”
Emma wasn’t that worried about it. Ruby probably needed some time off after everything that had gone down yesterday, and she could take care of herself anyway. Plus, she just didn’t have the bandwidth to worry about anyone but herself and Regina for now.
“She probably needed to cool off after the lockdown,” Killian supposed as well, but there was a little nervousness behind his words.
As self-centered as he tried to appear, he was a pretty perceptive man, and he could easily tell that all of his colleagues had been affected by yesterday’s mess in a less positive way than himself. The way everyone’s feet dragged on the ground, the anxious, shifty looks… He’d been lucky, but that wasn’t everyone’s case, especially not Emma.
“How about you? How are you feeling?” he asked genuinely, and there was no more grin as he observed the dark circles around her empty eyes.
“I’m managing,” she put all her strength into offering a reassuring smile, but it didn’t land right. “I’m just really tired…”
“Is your shift over?” he pushed a little. She indeed looked very tired.
“Yeah, just have to drop off some files and swing by the locker room and I’ll be on my way home,” Emma pointed at the charts in her arms.
“Want me to do it for you?” he suggested. “Since I’m like, lightning fast on this thing…” he looked down at his scooter with a chuckle.
Truth was, he was uncomfortable with just how exhausted and sad Emma looked. She was his friend, and he wanted to help, but he wasn’t good at these types of things.
“I’ll be okay,” Emma lied, squeezing the files against her chest. “Don’t worry about me.”
He would.
“Okay,” he reluctantly accepted the unsatisfying answer. “Well, I won’t hold you any longer Swan, you probably just want to catch up on some sleep.”
“I do,” she chuckled wearily. “Have a good shift Jones.”
She watched him kick off his scooter and disappear at the turn of the hallway. She kept walking towards the main hall with a slight grin on her face. The conversation they’d had was the first normal thing that happened to her since yesterday, and for a second, he’d managed to make her forget how shattered she felt.
When she arrived at the admissions desk, Belle was alone there. She’d buried herself deep into work, because that was her own way of dealing with things. But Emma could tell from the speed at which her nervous hands flipped through files that it wasn’t working. She dropped her charts on the counter.
“Here you go,” she smiled.
“Thanks, Em’,” Belle quickly put the files away, because she couldn’t let the mess override her system or she’d shut down. “Any news from Ruby?”
Emma’s heart ached at the tentative hope in the administrator’s eyes. She was obviously worried to death. Truth was, Ruby was probably dealing with her pain the only way she knew how: drinking, partying, being reckless. She’d reappear eventually, hungover, and ready to get over it all. But she didn’t want to remind Belle of that.
“No, not yet,” it hurt her to have to crush that hope.
Belle seemed like she was about to cry, so she just went back to her work. Emma left her behind hating herself for being unable to help her. She made her way to the locker room without a single thought going through her disconnected mind. She felt like she wasn’t really there, like she was still somehow in that parking lot, watching the love draining from Regina’s eyes.
The persistent vibrations of her phone in her back pocket finally pulled her out of her trance. She groaned as she pulled the cell out, hoping to god it wasn’t David asking her for overtime tonight. But it wasn’t David, it was Ruby.
She picked up, ready to make a joke about her best friend’s habit of disappearing like a ghost for a whole day, but Ruby spoke first.
“Emma?” Her voice was shaky on the other end of the line, and it immediately sent a cold wave of panic down her friend’s spine. Suddenly, the joke died in her throat.
“Ruby, are you okay?” she immediately inquired, her brows furrowing. In the years she’d known her, she’d never heard her sound like that.
“Emma, I need you.” She wasn’t asking—she was begging.
“What’s happening, Ruby?” Emma was starting to panic now. She could tell from the purr of the engine that her friend was driving—fast.
“I—I can’t explain,” she was stumbling all over her own words, “Meet me in 5 at the west service entrance. Don’t tell anyone.”
Emma wanted to ask more questions, but Ruby had already hung up.
She ran.