Chapter 2 – Clash

"Doctor Towers?"

Doctor Rachel Towers –or Rapunzel to her post curse friends- didn't even look up from the chart she was scribbling over with the distinctive illegible writing of doctors no matter which world they came from. She didn't recognise the voice speaking to her but she was far too busy with the shambolic ward around her to waste time with silly things like introductions.

"Whatever it is, speak to the matron about it and she'll tell you where to go." Rachel dropped the chart into the appropriate slot and lifted another from the hands of the nurse at the station. She didn't notice the way the nurse was staring wide eyed behind her at whoever was speaking.

"But…"

"No, I don't have time to deal with you right now, yes, I realise that's terribly rude, no, I don't care, yes, you ARE stuck with a mere woman as a doctor, no, Doctor Whale is currently very much unavailable so –yes- you really ARE stuck with me…" Rachel began to reel off the answers she had tallied up from the FAQ's of the day and stopped only when she had gathered the files of her next ten patients and set off to find them only to find an incensed brunette blocking her path instead.

"You will help him now or I will rend you limb from limb."

Regina, the Mayor, Evil Queen and all that jazz, stood braced on those ridiculous heels for whatever resistance Rachel might sling her way. She was almost disappointed when the younger woman just blinked large green eyes at her.

Her voice hadn't been a shout but it had cut through every other sound in the waiting room of the hospital and everyone looked back at Rachel and the Queen wondering how the princess was going to deal with her.

Rachel frowned. She wasn't a princess anymore, she was a doctor, she was useful. Her eyes landed on Prince Charming, and she tossed the files she held over her shoulder onto the desk with a scatter when she saw the man hanging off Charming's shoulders.

"What happened?" Rachel stepped forward, her hands going to the man's neck and checking for a pulse. She found it –wow- that was strong. Lifting his head, she measured his breathing with the old world technique of holding the bright metal of her stethoscope under his nose and watching it fog with the heat of his breath.

"Gurney!" Rachel bellowed suddenly when it became clear she was being left to deal with this patient being held up by the sheriff by herself.

Nurses scrambled into action and a gurney was produced to lay the man down on in a matter of seconds, Rachel's eyes landed on the head nurse and narrowed when she found the woman watching the Queen rather than focussing on her patient.

"We're all going to have words about your conduct as medical professionals later, ladies." Rachel's voice held a frosty chill to it. "I promise you're not going to enjoy it."

The nurse snapped back around, they all did, to focus on the strange man. They hurried to wheel him away to the ward and out of the waiting room.

Rachel was satisfied that he wasn't about to die off since his vitals seemed so strong. The steam rising from his skin was a cause for concern but Rachel knew magic when she saw it. She rounded on the two who had brought him in and slipped to full on Doctor mode.

Unlike most here in Storybrooke, her curse memories included having grown up elsewhere and moving to the small town for a quieter life. She knew she wasn't supposed to know exactly which city, but she remembered doing her residency in a heaving ER, learning to do triage on the fly, developing an iron thick skin and a disturbingly practical attitude.

Those memories clashed with the ones from the Enchanted Forest where she had been a battlefield medic in the war between the Charmings and King George. Exacerbated by the Blackguards of the Evil Queen who had seemed intent on causing as much bloodshed as Rachel had been preventing it and neither of them had cared which armies they had tended to.

"Who is he? What happened? What did you do to him?" She directed the last at Regina.

"I saved his life!" Regina took a step forward and stalled herself when Rachel didn't even blink.

"Wonderful. How?"

"I…magic."

"Evidently, he's exhaling it."

"Shouldn't you be helping him?!" Regina took another step forward and it was only Charming's hand on her shoulder that stopped her from doing something inadvisable.

"His vitals are steady, he appears to merely be unconscious. I won't know more until I run tests and my nurses –despite a stunning portrayal to the contrary- are actually more competent than a bag of flatworms and can manage it themselves. I'll look in on him when I have a better medical history. Which I can get from you, yes?" Rachel reached up and loosened the tie on her hair. Pushing it back and tying it up once more in a new tail.

With the curse broken and magic once more in Storybrooke, Rachel's hair had once more returned to its magical state and had gone from a feathery jaw length style to a streaming cascade down to her middle back in a fortnight. She was also rocking the fade to dark. The crown of her head a shining platinum blonde and gradually growing darker through gold, caramel, chocolate until a deep coffee brown at the end.

Wonderful. She couldn't wait to try and do her rounds dragging seventy feet of hair.

"I don't know anything like that." Regina said. She kept looking beyond Rachel in the direction they had taken her patient.

"Start with his name. Who was he in the Enchanted Forest? How did he come to be this way? What exactly did you save his life from? Take your pick, Majesty."

"His name is Daniel." Regina fidgeted a moment which caused Rachel to cast a look Charming's way.

She couldn't say she was overly fond of the man, she tended not to like royalty in general despite her own heritage, but she was surprised at his apparently allied status with the Queen. She couldn't imagine his wife would be enamoured with that.

If she ever got back to feel any way about it.

"He was a nobody in the Enchanted Forest. A stablehand. As for what was done to him…Doctor Whale experimented on him. He hurt him. I repaired the damage…I think."

"Experimented how?" Rachel wasn't sure who Whale was from the other side, she didn't know of anyone else that did either, but she had the feeling that this information might become very pertinent to her.

She also knew that Whale had been down in the basement ward that Rachel wasn't supposed to know about doing who knew what and why…well, looked like it had come back to bite him in the ass, didn't it? Not that Rachel could summon much sympathy for the man, but having his arm torn off was a cause for concern when it could happen to her or –more importantly- her patients.

"Daniel was dead. He brought him back. He used an enchanted heart to do so." Regina spoke coldly, clinically.

"He…for real?!" Rachel burst out. "Back from the dead? Enchanted hearts? Are you freaking kidding me?!"

"Language, Doctor Towers." Regina rebuked her mildly and the doctor, who was really too young to be so, snorted. "Surely this isn't outwith the realm of your sphere of influence being from the Enchanted Forest as we all are."

"Sphere of influence?" Rachel demanded and stepped forward, her hands fisting in the pockets of her lab coat. "Let's break down my sphere of influence, shall we?" She ground out.

She'd had a hell of a shitty day putting up with the chauvinistic ass backwards view of half the people of the vaunted Enchanted Forest that women couldn't really be doctors –only faeries could be healers- verbally bitch slapping reluctant nurses into doing their damn JOBS without getting ensnared in their damn vendettas from their other lives and then dealing with the shambles that Whale had left when he'd fucked off apparently to raise the dead and now –NOW- she had the Evil Fucking Queen telling her to suck it up when it was all her fault!

"I was raised, according to my cursed memories, as a scientist, an atheist. I believe in science, logic and fact. Gods, magic and royalty never factored into it. Now I have my old memories back, the ones of being raised by a witch, having sunlight-flower-nonsense hair, so long it has several ZIP codes, and being hip deep in magically inflicted wounds such as the charming enchantment of throwing up one's own internal organs." Regina flinched a little at that but Rachel didn't let it hinder her stride. "So one part of me is saying 'just wrap him in your hair, sing a song and he'll be fine' and the other half replies with 'are you on glue?'. Thanks for that –by the way! So NO this is NOT in my sphere of influence and I would appreciate you getting over yourself for two damn minutes and offering up any information you might have that would alter this unhappy arrangement and help my patient!"

Rachel stood, toe to toe with Regina, her chest heaving with every breath and stilled when a soft clapping reached her ears.

Looking over, she saw the occupants of the waiting room and a few of the nurses had heard her entire diatribe and showed their appreciation and support with a quiet round of applause.

Pressing her lips together, Rachel seized Regina's arm without a thought to the consequences and led her down the corridor towards Daniel's room.

"I apologise. That was unprofessional." She halted outside the room and didn't notice Regina's attention switch to the unconscious Daniel inside. She watched with an intensity that belied her words of Daniel being nobody.

He was certainly someone to the Evil Queen and Rachel's mouth twisted. She stepped between Regina and the glass so the nurses couldn't see Regina's face anymore and spoke in a low tone that only the queen would hear.

"Control yourself."

Regina blinked and suddenly focussed the full weight of her regard on Rachel who –admirably or stupidly- didn't flinch.

"I get why you might not want people to know that you care about someone but –if you really do care- I need to know more about what Whale did to this man and how it might affect him."

Regina's jaw clenched and Rachel studied her. This close, looking as a doctor, Rachel saw how hellish Regina looked. Her eyes were red with the charming accompaniment of dark circles surrounding them, her skin was paler than it should be, she looked grey in places. Whatever she had done to help Daniel, it had cost her dearly.

Rachel's eye caught on the shadow on Regina's neck and she reached out without thinking and tugged aside the collar of Regina's shirt, buttoned higher than it really should be for the style. She studied the scorches –like bad sunburn- on Regina's cheek and ear.

"What the hell happened here?"

"It's nothing."

"You have handprints on your neck." Rachel gave her the 'really?' look.

"Daniel wasn't himself when he came back. He…he was dangerous."

"He did this to you?" Rachel jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the man lying insensate on the bed surrounded by nurses. "Is he a danger still? Does he need to be restrained?"

"I don't know." Regina looked suddenly vulnerable. "I don't know if…what I did, really brought him back. I don't know if it stopped the pain."

"Pain?"

"What Whale did to him hurts. Crossing the death barrier…those are Old Laws. Broken at the offending party's peril. The forces Whale has brought into play here…" Regina shook her head and looked at Rachel again. "He had no idea what the repercussions will be."

Rachel digested that a moment. She wanted to know what the repercussions would be, but she didn't want to get drawn off topic either.

"So…we have no idea if it will be Daniel in there when he wakes up or something else entirely?"

"Doctor."

Rachel turned to find one of her nurses standing in the doorway to Daniel's room. She pointedly kept her full attention on Rachel and didn't even glance at Charming or Regina.

"I think you should see this."

Rachel frowned at the tremor in Janice's voice. The nurse was a veteran of the wars and the wards of the hospital alike. It must be a hell of a thing to rattle her.

Rachel nodded and followed the nurse into the room. She approached Daniel's bed and considered ordering the restraints put on. Hmm, probably best not to do that when overprotective royalty of questionable sanity was loitering in the background.

Regina was there too.

Rachel made a mental note to send Regina off with one of her less flappable staff to have her neck looked at and she'd cuff the unconscious man then.

Rachel stalled when her brain finally cottoned on to what her eyes were reporting. She blinked several times and stared.

"…the hell?" She rounded the bed quickly, snatching up a pair of gloves and snapping them on. She leaned over the patient to get a better look.

Daniel lay on the bed, unconscious still, hooked up to the monitoring machines with wires and sticky tabs, an IV inserted in the back of his hand and his Enchanted Forest clothes unbuttoned so that he could be changed into a hospital gown. His waistcoat and cravat had already been removed and his shirt unbuttoned…to reveal the Y-incision scar running the length of his torso.

Rachel reached out to touch it, running her fingers over the seam of flesh, incongruously alive and warm despite the association of Y-incisions and cold grey bodies that sent her little scientific mind to boggling. It was real. Very real.

From either end of his clavicle to his sternum and then running down the centre line of his chest and stomach to stop just above the navel. The scar was deep as made evident by the silvery scar tissue that ran the length of it. Rachel leaned in even closer and stared, incredulous. Whale –if he really was the one that had done this- had stapled the wound closed rather than stitched it shut and the staples appeared to be made of silver rather than the conventional stainless steel and they…they had bonded to Daniel's skin and tissues.

Rachel's stomach flipped over uncomfortably when the scientist in her was left floundering for an explanation. If left long enough –as long as the scar tissue suggested they had been left for- then the staples would be consumed by the flesh surrounding them. The body's defences against foreign bodies demanding that they be coated in a padding of cells as a barrier to the rest of the body. Similar things happened with bullet fragments or shrapnel that couldn't be safely removed from the body but metal did NOT fuse with flesh.

At least, not with any medical practices that Rachel knew of.

Good gravy, Whale hadn't just added a heart to this body –this man- he had opened him up like a gym bag and rooted around in the contents before zipping it closed again.

Rachel's face hardened with revulsion and a fury that she couldn't fully comprehend. Regina was right. This was wrong what had been done to this man.

"What is it?"

Regina's voice brought Rachel back to the real world with a thump and she turned to look at the other woman, blinking a moment, gathering her thoughts.

"Is it hurting him?"

"No." Rachel could have slapped herself when she realised she had no basis for that answer other than feeling. "At least, I don't think so. It appears, for all the world, as if this scar is years if not decades old. The flesh has completely knitted together…as has the metal of the staples. I don't think I could take them out without removing the surrounding tissues along with them."

"Will it cause him any problems?"

"It's ugly," Rachel shook the tail of her hair back over her shoulder when it slithered around, "I've seen neater jobs from butchers, but it's straight. The flesh has been joined levelly if not prettily. I see no reason why it should affect his mobility."

"But you're not sure."

"We'll know more when he wakes." Rachel measured the readouts on the monitor and leaned closer, studying the figures. Holy crap. "His vitals are off the scale."

"What does that mean? Is he getting worse?" Regina stepped forward, fully prepared to intervene with magic if science didn't yield the results she wanted.

Rachel glanced at her and realised how close to the edge the other woman was skating. With a look around the room that made her unspoken command clear, the nurses vacated with a graceless speed that would add at least another minute to the tongue lashing they were all going to get later for their unprofessional conduct.

"I simply meant that his body –for all intents and purposes- is incredibly alive. His heart is BOOMING, his breathing his fine, his blood pressure is uncannily good for a man his age and his EEG readout tells me that he's simply sleeping off…whatever it is that's been done to him."

Regina's face darkened at the reminder of how she had come to be in this situation and Rachel sought to distract her before she had a walking natural disaster rather than an exhausted woman to deal with.

Then again, with Regina, they might be one and the same.

"I want to get a look at what the weather's like inside him. I don't want to do an MRI without knowing what kind of metal this is," Rachel indicated the silver staples joined to Daniel's chest and stomach, "would you consent to me giving him an ultrasound?"

"Like for a pregnancy?" Charming piped up and both women looked at him, apparently resigned to him having appointed himself resident conscience for the proceedings.

"Yes but the technology doesn't just work on uteruses and infants." Rachel was somewhat surprised that he didn't flinch like most men from the Enchanted Forest did at the mention of 'women's business'. "I can use it to read his internal organs just as easily."

"It won't hurt him?" Regina was watching Daniel again, looking like she was repressing the fierce desire to go to him.

"There's nothing to say that it will." Rachel gentled her tone.

"You're not certain." It wasn't a question but Rachel answered anyway.

"We've been over this. I've never come across anything like this before. This is a blending of magic and science that should not be." Rachel shrugged. "The best I can do is use the tools available to me to try and figure out what's going on. You brought him back. He's stable. I think he's going to make a full recovery. Let me figure out how to best help him do that."

"Alright." Regina nodded.

"Good." Rachel felt the relief pour through her. She wasn't afraid of Regina, per se, she certainly didn't hate her like many of the people in town did (that was a whole other kettle of fish), but she was incredibly aware of how dangerous the queen was.

Rachel had seen first-hand and in full lurid colour –most of it being red- how destructive Regina could be.

After Snow had captured the queen and lost her nerve at the execution, the rumour was that something had been done to the queen that meant she couldn't kill the Charmings.

Which had the effect of sending her completely off the deep end.

She rallied her Blackguard and cut a bloody swath through the realms. Attacking Snow and Charming's army with a ferocity that had been terrifying in its scale. She apparently hadn't cared at all which soldiers she massacred, quantity seemed to be the flavour she most craved and George suffered losses as heavy as the Charmings had.

At the height of her reign of mayhem during the war, Regina had been referred to as the Red Queen…because her habit of being surrounded by a fine mist of it.

Regina had never left survivors. Not intentionally anyway, so accounts of what exactly it was that she had done to the soldiers she came across were sketchy at best. Usually because said survivors were often missing limbs and a great deal of their sanity by the time anyone got to them.

Apparently she'd created some kind of monster and unleashed it upon the world. It would appear amongst the soldiers without warning, seemingly from nowhere, and lay waste to all it came across. It had the power to devastate entire battlefields, reducing both sides of the skirmish to nothing but red splatters and stinking wet ropes of innards.

The queen's arrival would herald the end of the battle and the monster would disappear.

Rachel tried to shake off the memory of the small terrified man that had related all of this to her. He had clutched at her hand, desperately trying to get all the words out before he choked on his own tongue, he was so frightened. He hadn't been a soldier, which had apparently saved him from the monster, but he had been terrified out of his mind.

Rachel shook free of the memories and saw Regina recognise exactly what the doctor was thinking about and something very much like shame flickered over her face before she squared her shoulders and quashed it ruthlessly.

"Go on then," Regina waved at the bed with Daniel on it, "do your job."

Rachel opened her mouth to tell the queen where to stow her attitude and was cut off by a soft moan. She whirled to the bed, her primary thought that she had no idea what would be waking up and that the restraints were all the way down the hall in the storage closet, the next being that he was a patient first and a potential killing machine second.

"Daniel?" Rachel stepped closer to the bed, lifting a penlight from her pocket and shining it into his eyes as he opened them.

He squinted and grimaced at the bright light, his pupils contracting to pinpoints and expanding again when she took the light away.

He tried to sit up and Rachel gently but firmly pushed him down again.

"Easy now, you've been through the wringer." She kept an eye on the readouts. His heart rate had increased, not unusual when the body woke up, and was already settling back to its slow but steady resting beat. "Let's take it easy, hmm?"

"Where…?" Daniel looked about himself and tried to sit up again, Rachel gave in and helped him sit instead of potentially injuring or stressing him by pushing him down again.

"You're in the hospital. You crashed for a while there." Rachel reassured him in her best bedside manner she could muster. "How are you feeling? Any pain?"

"No, I…Regina!" He lunged suddenly and Charming swept forward having slunk closer cautiously, ready to whip Rachel back out of reach should Daniel decide that he'd rather crush necks than talk.

"Where is she?" Daniel gripped Charming's sleeves because he was the closest available target. "I hurt her, I was going to kill her, she's not…?"

Rachel was surprised at the horror in his face at the thought of Regina being hurt. He looked devastated at the very prospect. Horrified that he had caused her pain. If Rachel had needed it, his reaction was certainly enough to convince her that Daniel certainly wasn't a nobody, least of all to the Evil Queen.

"Hey, she's fine," Rachel hurried to reassure him before he became more agitated, "look she's right…where'd she go?"

Charming twisted to look too and all three of them stared at the empty spot where the queen had stood not a moment ago.

Rachel felt her brows rise in surprise.

Of all the reactions she had expected from Regina upon the waking of the man she had so fiercely protected, fleeing had certainly not been one of them.