It's a terrible idea to drink the night before starting a new job, but Emma Swan finds herself wandering into a bar called The Rabbit Hole anyway, intent on finding a way to calm her nerves and escape the stillness of her too-quiet apartment.
The bar is loud, teeming with patrons drinking and laughing, taking turns playing darts or shooting pool. Despite the number of people in the bar, the bartender – a small, portly man wearing a red toboggan hat – is quick to deliver her drink.
"Rum is my drink of choice, as well," comes an accented voice to her left.
Emma looks over just in time to notice a man sidle up next to her. He's the picture of 'tall, dark, and handsome', with his hair an artful mess, his scruff well-manicured, and his eyes twinkling with promise. It would be a terrible decision to continue talking to him, to entertain his small talk until one of them suggests heading home and they inevitably fall into bed with one another. But tonight seems to be a night to make terrible decision, so Emma takes a sip of rum and smiles at the man.
"Well, why don't you order one and sit for awhile?"
-/-
Emma insists on no names, and he doesn't seem to mind, because hey, he's getting laid. He takes her back to his apartment, where they don't even make it to the bed. Instead, the stumble over and onto the couch, not even bothering to remove to her jacket.
"I like the red leather jacket," he mouths against the column of her throat. Any teasing response she has is lost when his fingers slide under the waistband of her panties, and he thumbs at her clit.
Eventually, they end up in his bed. She rides him, reveling in the slow drag of him inside of her. He grips at her hips, and she knows she will have bruises in the morning. Emma finds she doesn't care. Later, after they are both sated and exhausted, he tries to hold her, but she pulls away.
"You can stay, you know," he offers as she climbs out of the bed to retrieve her clothing.
"I have work in the morning," she replies, ignoring how enticing he looks sprawled out in his bed.
"So do I, but that doesn't mean we can't continue the fun before breakfast." He leers at her then, his expression full of promise as flashes from the previous few hours flash before her eyes.
"Sorry, buddy, but this was a one-time thing."
It's always a one-time thing. It's how she operates.
Without so much as a kiss goodbye, Emma leaves.
-/-
Barely five hours after leaving bar guy's apartment, Emma pulls her yellow bug into the hospital's parking lot. It's the first day of her internship, and she's eager for this new chapter of her career to begin, to finally be called 'Dr. Swan' and take the last few steps required to become a surgeon.
She's proud of herself for making it this far, terrified too. Who would have thought that the baby left on the side of the road, the one who grew up into a kid that no one wanted, would go on to graduate top of her medical school class and land an internship at one of the most prestigious programs in the nation?
Emma takes a deep breath. She's ready. Or so she thinks she is.
-/-
"So who did you get as your resident?" A perky brunette with a pixie cut asks as Emma attempts to stuff her jacket into her locker. "I have Regina Mills."
"Um, same."
"Ooooh, you have the Evil Queen!" A male voice calls out from somewhere behind her. "Sucks to be you!"
"Wait, Evil Queen?" The perky woman who had started the question looked somewhat uneasy at the revelation. "Why would anyone call her the Evil Queen?"
"From what I hear, she's hell on wheels. I guess because her mom runs the hospital and is, you know, the greatest living Cardiothoracic surgeon, she feels entitled to treat everyone like her peasants," a different intern explains with a shrug. "Anyway, don't fuck up, or it's off with your heads."
Emma tries her best to ignore the burst of apprehension knotting in her gut.
-/-
Whether or not she is a queen, Regina carries herself as if she is one. When she summons Emma and her fellow assigned interns, she practically commands the attention of everyone else mingling or working in the hallway. It's equal parts inspiring and terrifying.
"Now, I have five rules," she begins with an unerring smile on her face. "Number One, there is no point in sucking up to me. You're interns. I already hate you, and I doubt that will change. I do hope you're memorizing this."
Regina appraises the group before continuing on with her rules, each becoming more insane than the last. Now that Emma is more awake and slightly less overwhelmed, the name Mills rings a bell. Cora Mills, Chief of Surgery at the hospital, had blazed trails early on as a female surgeon back in the day, shattering glass ceilings and saving hearts, earning her the nickname the "Queen of Hearts." It seems Regina has carried on that legacy.
Emma doesn't have a legacy to lean on. She doesn't have a legacy for anything, except for maybe being abandoned. She wonders how it feels to be in Regina's shoes, to have a mother, a legacy, a history to hold onto.
But the Regina's pager buzzes, and they rush off to save someone's life.
-/-
It's a girl, and she's having seizures and no one knows why. Emma takes her to get a CT scan, but gets lost somewhere along the way. She's a doctor, she has multiple degrees, but she can't find her way around the hospital. It's embarrassing, which is what the girl says, and Emma can't help be silently agree.
Eventually the tests come back and the parents have questions that Emma doesn't know how to answer. It's her first day, and though she's had training – she's a doctor, you know – she doesn't want to say the wrong thing.
"What do I do?" she asks Regina, who gives her the most put-upon look in response.
"You go find your attending, Dr. Jones," Regina tells her, exasperation evident in her voice. "He's just down that hallway."
So Emma goes out in search of Dr. Jones, and the she sees him. And he sees her.
Fuck.
-/-
She's hiding in the stairwell, doing her very best to prevent a panic attack, when he finds her. He's wearing a bemused sort of expression, and Emma wants to yell "how can you be so blasé about this?" because he's an attending and she's an intern, making him more or less one of her bosses – and she fucked him.
"Hello there, love."
"Not your love," she replies, and the words come out harsher than she imagined. But this is bad, and she has every right to be a little bit standoffish.
"You didn't mind me calling you that last night."
"Last night, I didn't know you were my attending." She huffs even as he sways into her space. He smells the same way he did last night, of spice and leather, and she tries not to wonder how he gets the leather smell to stick despite wearing scrubs. "You should have told me you were a doctor."
He shrugs. "You're the one who insisted on no personal details, what is it, oh, Doctor Swan. Swan, that's a lovely name. I wish I had known it last night."
"Can we not talk about last night?" Emma groans. This can't be happening, she thinks. There is no way this is happening. "How about we instead talk about the case? Wendy Darling, grand mal seizures, needs a neuro consult?"
"Good thing I'm a neurosurgeon then, right, love?"
He has the audacity to wink at her before whisking out of the stairwell and toward Wendy Darling's room.
"This is going to be terrible," she sighs.
-/-
Later, after chasing after Dr. Jones, and spending a few hours doing scut, she joins her fellow interns for a late lunch, despite not having an appetite of which to speak. Emma has never really been great at the whole 'making friends' thing, but she's willing to try, and with this mess with Dr. Jones hanging over her head, she knows she might need them. Her table conversing about Regina Mills when Emma sits down, their gossip learned from nurses spoken in hushed whispers over their sandwiches in salads.
"Apparently, she used to not be so bitchy," Ruby Lucas says, "but her boyfriend died a year or so ago after stroking out from heart surgery, and she's been the 'Evil Queen' ever since. Tragic, right?"
"That's so sad," Mary Margaret Blanchard replies. Her previous perkiness from the morning has since evaporated after having to perform sic back-to-back renal exams. "No wonder it seems like she hates the world."
"I mean, my high school boyfriend died, and I'm not a total bitch, so it's not like she should get a total pass," Ruby responds with a shrug before taking a generous bite from her sandwich.
"People deal with grief differently. My parents died my first year at Stanford, and I shut down for a bit," Elsa Arendelle comments. Emma remembers how Elsa had been hanging pictures of her family in her locker that very morning. "People started calling me the 'Ice Queen' because I was apparently so cold to everyone."
"Does everyone here have a tragic backstory?"
Emma listens as her co-workers debate and gossip, doing her best to abate the queasiness rising in her stomach. Is this how they would talk if word got out she slept with Jones? Would they judge her, or share their own inappropriate sex stories?
Emma doesn't want to find out.
-/-
She's barely tossed away her lunch and begun more paperwork when Dr. Jones appears out of practically thin air, his teeth flashing in a wide grin. "Our friend Wendy needs surgery."
"Please tell me you weren't smiling like that when you told her family," Emma replies in a deadpan. He is unfairly hot when he smiles – a thought she certainly shouldn't be thinking – but she doubts Wendy's parents would be fond of said smile when he's delivering the news their daughter needs brain surgery.
"Oh, Swan, that would bad form. I don't do bad form," he explains, schooling his face into a solemn expression. "Besides, my moral code is not up for discussion. I'm here to talk to you. No worries, Swan, it's about the case, not any of the dirty thoughts you might be having."
"You're full of yourself, you know that?"
"I would say that you'd be surprised by the number of people who've said that, but I somehow doubt you would be," he tells her. "Anyway, enough about me, this is about you. And Wendy. You and Wendy. I want you to scrub in with me on her surgery."
Emma's jaw drops. Interns don't scrub into surgeries on the first day. She's too new, too green, and out of the all surgeries she could be asked to scrub in on, it's freaking brain surgery. An adipectomy, sure, but a brain surgery?
"But it's my first day," she argues. She shouldn't be arguing against this. Scrubbing in on a brain surgery is dream, but now she's second-guessing herself.
"And Miss Darling is your patient." Jones replies. "If you don't want to scrub in, fine, but you're the one who wishes to be a surgeon, and that includes performing surgeries."
Emma takes a deep breath. Her first instinct is to run. Her first instinct is always to run – away from uncaring foster parents, away from her feelings, away from hot doctors she meets in a bar. But she's going to be a surgeon. She wants to be a surgeon. She want's to do good, save people.
"Okay, I'm in."
-/-
It's only after he's gone that Emma begins to second-guess herself. From what she's gleaned, none of the other interns have been asked to scrub in on surgeries. She's seen the board, and most of the other attendings have surgeries scheduled for today. But her fellow interns aren't scrubbing in. They're to renal exams, or scut, or working in the clinic.
Emma's the only one with a surgery on the docket – the woman who fucked her attending the night prior.
She feels like she is going to throw up.
-/-
It's Mary Margaret who finds her. Mary Margaret, who stands to the side as Emma pours out the limited contents of her stomach onto the ground. It's Mary Margaret who offers her a bottle of water.
"I heard Dr. Jones asked you to scrub in with him," Mary Margaret says as Emma takes on a long drink from the bottle. "I'm a little jealous."
"Don't be." Emma hands her back the bottle. "I'm not doing it."
"But why? It's brain surgery. You'll be right there when he's cutting into that girl's brain." Emma can hear the incredulity in Mary Margaret's voice. She gets it. If it had been Mary Margaret telling her that she would be bailing on a surgery, Emma would feel the same way.
"It's…complicated," Emma says. Complicated by the fact that it's very likely Dr. Jones wants to get into her pants. Complicated by the fact that he already has, quite thoroughly. Complicated by the fact that if he wasn't her boss, she would almost let him.
Fuck her life.
"I know neuro can be somewhat daunting, so if you're worried—"
"I'm not worried," Emma snaps. Because she isn't worried. Not about the surgery. She knows she'd be able to handle whatever it was that Dr. Jones asked of her in the operating room. Emma is smart, and talented, and is going to be a damn fine doctor. She's not weak, and she doesn't want Mary Margaret to see her as such. "Like I said, it's complicated."
"Okay." Mary Margaret is quiet for a moment, until, "You know, if you want to talk about whatever it is that makes things complicated, you can. I'll listen. We're going to be around one another a lot the next few years, so we might as well rely on each other sooner than later."
Emma doesn't answer, and Mary Margaret leaves.
She's never been good with the friend thing.
-/-
She corners Dr. Jones in a stairwell.
"Why did you ask me to scrub in with you today?" she asks, placing her hands on her hips and doing her absolute best to send him a glare that says she means business. It's probably not professional, but he's not being professional, so Emma reasons it's okay.
What isn't okay is the slow quirk of is brow – did she really think it was unbelievably sexy last night? – and the confusion written across his face. "Because you're a surgical intern, and in order for you to be a surgeon, you need to scrub in on surgeries."
"And that's all? Because here's the thing, buddy, just because I slept with you once, it doesn't mean I'm going to sleep with you again for more surgeries. Nor does it mean that I want surgeries because you want in my pants," she huffs out.
Dr. Jones is quiet for a long moment. Then, he laughs. It's somewhat infuriating, but god, does he have a beautiful laugh. (Another thing to add to the list of things she should not be thinking.) "Swan, lovely as you are, what transpired between us last night has nothing to do with you assisting me later."
"It doesn't?"
"No, it doesn't," his voice turns serious. "Dr. Swan, I looked at your file – top of you class at Dartmouth, glowing recommendations from your professors and supervisors, brilliant test scores. You're seemingly unafraid in the face of adversity or challenge, fiery as you all. Everything I know about you tells me that you'd be a brilliant surgeon. Now you tell me, why wouldn't I want you to scrub in with me?"
Emma opens her mouth, but no words come out. Dr. Jones grins again, his expression smug. She wants to slap it off him, and a not-so-small part wants to kiss it off of him.
"I'll see you in the operating room, Dr. Swan. I'll be the one in the skull-and-crossbones skull cap."
-/-
She participates in a brain surgery, and actual brain surgery. She doesn't do much. She's only an intern, after all, but she's there. She's in the operating room, and she's watching as Dr. Jones drills into an actual living human's head.
And Wendy Darling makes it through the surgery. It's amazing.
Emma doesn't think she's ever felt more alive.
-/-
To Emma's surprise, Mary Margaret is waiting for in the lobby.
"You scrubbed in." If Emma's not mistaken, Mary Margaret almost looks a little proud. She doesn't know why. She doesn't even know why the other woman is still here.
"You waited."
"Well, yeah, that's what friends do," Mary Margaret replies as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. And maybe it is. "And speaking of friends, a few of the other interns are at the Rabbit Hole tonight. I thought I would wait to see if you wanted to join?"
Emma's exhausted. She should go home, go to bed, prepare for tomorrow. But right now, Emma feels alive.
"Sure. Let's go."
-/-
Unlike the night before, Emma doesn't order rum. Instead, she nurses a pint of beer, smiling as Ruby and Elsa take turns draining shots. She laughs. She bonds. And for a moment, Emma feels as if she is fitting in.
It's nice.
"We did it ladies! We survived out first day!" Ruby shouts in jubilation, pumping her first into the air. "We only marginally got our asses kicked by the Evil Queen, Emma over her helped save a girl's life, and we're closing the night with some great drinks."
"You're drunk," Mary Margaret teases, tossing a peanut at Ruby. "You need some water."
"I'll get it," Emma volunteers. She's the one closest to the bar anyway. Besides, though she's enjoying this whole bonding thing, it's still so new. She needs to a moment to catch herself and take the entire day in. It's been a rollercoaster.
At the bar, she waves down the bartender for water. Much to her chagrin, he's taking much longer than he did the night previous.
"Rum again?"
Just as he did last night, he slides onto next her. Emma rolls her eyes.
"Water, actually." She tosses her hair over her shoulder, indicating to the table behind her where Elsa, Mary Margaret, and Ruby are conversing animatedly. Dr. Jones hums in amusement at her answer.
"I found something out today," he says. His expression is dangerous. "Did you know that the hospital holds no fraternization policy?"
Emma eyes him skeptically. "It doesn't?"
"Not a such, no. From what I can tell, anyone within the hospital can fraternize – assuming it isn't a patient, of course."
"Of course."
The bartender brings the glasses of water just then. She manages all four of the glasses, the years she spent serving in undergrad aiding her.
"Have fun with your friends, Swan. I'll see you soon," he tells her as she goes. Emma thinks she can hear a hint of promise in his voice.
It worries her how much she likes it.
She's screwed.