The handcuffs loop around her arms and then Graham's dragging her out of the door, his grip on her shoulders strong but not bruising. She knows there's no point in trying to persuade him to let her go. The Queen has his heart. There's nothing she can do to stop this.
There's nothing she could ever do.
Regina's barbs are still stinging her, a terrible pain that burrows itself under her skin and whispers thoughts of guilt and anger that block out everything else. How strange to think that only this morning she was talking to Ashley in the familiar comfort of the diner. How strange to think that in the span of a single day, a mere candle to the eighteen years of light and darkness through which she's lived, her world could come crashing down around her and leave her clinging to the edge of a cliff.
Nicko and Eva, dead. Gone.
She'll never see Eva's knowing smile again. She'll never catch Nicko's easy laugh when the three of them are alone and he lets the walls the world has forced him to build melt away. She's alone now.
She always will be.
And that breaks her.
It breaks her because they could have had so much. They could have grown up, arguing and laughing and learning as the years swept by, turning them into adults who could have had the world. It breaks her because all of that- every single moment of happiness and sadness and anger and life- was stolen from them in the blink of an eye. And it breaks her because Regina may have pulled the trigger, but she was the one who pointed the gun.
Emma doesn't know if she'll ever be able to put herself back together again.
But she has to.
She has to because she is the last hope for her parents, for her kingdom. The thousand souls shackled by the curse are now depending on her and she can't fail them, can't let the Evil Queen win. Because if she did, it would mean that Nicko and Eva died for nothing.
And that's not something she can accept.
So she takes a deep breath. Squeezes her eyes shut for one second- one second where she can be selfish and broken, where she can mourn all that's she's lost- and then she folds everything away into a corner of her heart that will always be an aching reminder of the pain it held today. She is here, she is now. The past will always have a hold on her, drawing her into the darkness, but Emma won't let it drag her down. Not today.
She opens her eyes, ready to take up the fight again.
As she's pushed through the colourless corridors, Emma studies her surroundings with new intensity. She can't let Graham lock her up. Maybe if she calls out to Mary Margaret - but no, Graham's taking her by a different route, so that option's out. There's no help coming; she needs to figure something out herself. Fast. The seconds are ticking by.
Her furious thinking is interrupted by the jangling of a key against the sheriff badge at Graham's belt.
Oh.
The beginnings of a plan emerge half-formed into her mind, the pieces crashing together into a strategy that might just work.
Now all she has to do is wait for the perfect moment.
She's lucky it's so late that there's almost no one around to stop her when she escapes.
Which, as soon as they reach the lobby, she does.
She stumbles, unobtrusively grabbing Graham as best as she can with her hands tied together to stop herself from falling. In the split second her hand brushes the smooth metal of the key she deftly unhooks it and hides it between the palms of her hands.
A calculated second later, she wrenches herself out of the sheriff's grasp; then she's running towards the doors, sprinting as fast as she can, but there's someone there blocking her way- and it's Leroy- why is it Leroy, he's supposed to be on her side, he was her mother's friend in the old land, but that's what the curse does, she thinks even as she skids to a halt mere metres away from escape. It turns friends into enemies and family into strangers.
And for some reason, the latter is the more painful of the two.
She casts a pleading glance at the dwarf, aware that with every second Graham is getting closer and closer and then he's going to catch her and take her away against her will, against his will, even if he doesn't know it, but she's fighting a lost cause.
"Not a chance, sister," Leroy says.
She doesn't wait for him to finish. Instead she whips around and sprints down another corridor, startling the solitary nurse taking her rounds. So much for her brilliant plan. She had expected to be out of the hospital and running towards the forest by now. She can't go into town; who knows how many eyes the Queen has there. Once she's in the woods, she can unlock the handcuffs and hide for a bit while the search dies down.
There has to be another exit somewhere.
A memory drags itself up from her laboured breaths and the solution almost makes her stop in her tracks.
There is another way out. Nicko and Eva told her about it. The door's right beside Dad's ward.
The only problem? Every exit is watched by cameras. Unlike the main doors where people won't know where she's heading once she's out, this one leads right into the forest. And Emma knows only too well from her mother how good of a tracker Graham is.
She runs around a corner and slides into the first open door she finds. Carefully, agonizingly slowly, she inches the door shut, trying to stop her panting as she crouches down beside the frame. Hold your breath. She pushes the key into her mouth and works on opening the cuffs, twisting and turning her head until the lock clicks open. Even as she's doing it, she waits, dreading the moment Graham's footsteps behind her falter to a stop in front of the wood as he hears the clinking of metal against metal. But it never happens. He keeps on running, no doubt thinking she's further along the corridor. Letting out a breath of relief, she slides the bothersome objects away.
She has maybe a minute before he figures it out.
There aren't many options. She can't hide here; if Graham checks the video feed, he'll see that she hasn't gone out and then she'll be trapped. Plus, there's always someone at the main entrance who might set off the alarm.
That leaves the back door.
And there is a way she can use it without being detected. Her days at the hospital recovering from her wound have told her that the staff shift for the night changes at 3:00 am. It's a quarter past midnight right now. If she manages to hide inside the hospital somewhere near the exit for another couple of hours, as soon as the light on the camera blinks off, she'll be out of the door. No one will be the wiser.
But she still needs a diversion; something to make people think she isn't hiding inside the building so when the time comes she can make her escape more easily.
It takes a few seconds, but the answer comes to her in a flash of realization.
Magic.
She reaches her hand out and concentrates harder than she ever has before. For a single second, nothing happens.
And then the windows of the room crack, thin spidery lines branching out from where her fingers point towards the glass.
It'll work.
But the noise has betrayed her, she can hear the pounding footsteps coming back, becoming louder and louder and this time there are more than one. She adjusts her position so that she'll be behind the door when it opens.
A second passes.
Two.
Th-
The door bursts open, and she spins out from her hiding place, taking the sheriff and Dr Whale by surprise. They don't have time to react; she swipes Graham's feet out from underneath him and then slams the door onto the doctor's head; they both crumple, but Graham's already clambering to his feet, and so she runs, heading for the next corner and the little hiding place that she knows sits across from it. As she runs she concentrates, imagining that she can feel the window that is just beyond the corner- the window that very obviously faces the hospital parking lot and not the forest- feel the way cracks are slowly spreading through its delicate face, feel how in a few seconds a single push will break it into a million pieces.
(It isn't hard. After all, it's exactly how she was feeling in the white-death room.)
She rounds the corner and feels a wash of success as her eyes catch the honeycomb of cracks that work their way across the window she was focusing on.
Graham is still out of sight, but only ten feet behind her and gaining fast.
She levers herself into the janitor's closet across the window, scraping the door shut till only a tiny gap remains.
Eight.
It can't be too early. It has to be just when he can't see the glass, just when it's enough to fool him.
Six feet.
Now.
Shatter, she thinks as forcefully as she can, and watches with satisfaction as the glass breaks with an ear-splitting shriek, each individual shard flying out into the night.
"Bloody hell!"
Graham skids to a halt, his face aghast. She almost expects him to jump after her, but he stands there for a minute, rubbing his eyes tiredly as he tries to peer out into the dark.
"Take her away and lock her up," he mumbles suddenly, going rigid, and Emma knows that Regina is watching him, telling him not to abandon the chase.
There is a moment where she lets herself feel a heart-wrenching sorrow for him, but then she pushes it down. For now, he is her enemy. After she's escaped she can worry about the rest.
The sheriff sighs, but puts his hands on the low sill and clambers out.
"Can' believe she jumped out of a window," Emma hears him mumble as his flashlight clicks on, and allows herself a moment of reprieve.
Step one complete.
The silence is eerie as she makes her way through the corridors. Half of the hospital lights are off, so she slips between the shadows and the light, trying to stay in the darkness for as long as she can. She needs to get somewhere safe to wait, somewhere she won't be discovered, somewhere close to the door but far enough that it's outside the camera's range.
She stops for a second, closing her eyes and trying to visualize the exit- but she only caught a fleeting glimpse of that area on the day she was wheeled in; she's been avoiding it from that time on. It's not enough, she'll have to figure it out once she's there.
When she opens her eyes, someone is staring at her.
It's Mary Margaret.
The brunette has just come out of a room, her gentle movements making so little noise that the eighteen year-old hadn't registered a sound at all, and for a frozen moment, they stand there, neither saying a word. Emma's eyes flick from Mary Margaret's shocked, tear-stained face to behind her, checking to see if anyone's followed.
What she sees instead makes her heart thud painfully and her throat tighten to the point of tears.
It's the white room. Where Nicko and Eva are.
No. No.
She can't think about the implications. She can't. She's holding herself together so she can escape and finish what the three of them started, and why doesn't Mary Margaret understand that, why is she torturing Emma with the knowledge that their mother just saw the lifeless bodies of two of her children and failed to recognise them as who they were?
Emma can feel herself fraying at the edges again. This is too much. Too much to bear, too much to carry on her eighteen year-old shoulders without cracking so completely that there'll be nothing left in the end. Anyone else would.
But she can't.
She owes it to her siblings.
She owes it to the mother she lost.
She owes it to them to be everything they were and everything she failed to be.
To be good.
In the end, that's all that matters.
Mary Margaret finally decides to end the tense silence.
"Emma, what's happening?" Her voice is low, but there is a fire behind the words that Emma hopes will never go away again. "Everyone's saying you attacked the mayor-"
Emma's ears catch faint footsteps coming down the corridor and she cuts off her mother's words by pushing them both into the only available hiding place. The white room. She can't bear to glance in the beds' direction as she pulls the door shut.
Mary Margaret's mouth opens in protest, but Emma holds a finger to her lips, trusting that what's left of her mother will understand.
The brunette nods, and they both wait as someone- maybe a nurse, maybe poor Dr Whale going to fix up the nasty bruise on his head- walks past the door unaware that the fugitive the town is searching for is mere feet away.
They wait until they can't hear anything, and then Mary Margaret grabs Emma's shoulders, forcing the girl to look into her eyes.
"You have to tell me what's going on."
Emma sags against the door, trying to hold herself together. She won't be able to help if she breaks down now. Don't look at the beds; don't look at them.
"It's true," she mumbles, not able to bear telling another lie after the thousands that weigh on her. "I was angry, and..." she trails off, a horrible thought coming to her.
If anyone finds both of them here, Regina will have no qualms in locking her mother up after learning that Mary Margaret didn't set off the alarm when she saw Emma. Hell, even if they check the hospital tapes after she escapes and figure out that Mary Margaret was in the same area of the hospital, she'll be a suspect.
Mom needs to get out of here.
She meets her mother's eyes. "You need to go home before anyone sees you."
Mary Margaret shakes her head, letting go of Emma and pulling her cardigan tight around her. "No, Emma. What I need is answers. First, no one tells me how your brother and sister are doing so I come in here to check on them, and there's no one in the room. Then I go to the reception and Mr Gold tells me you've been arrested for assault, and when I come back here to find out if it's true, Walter says you attacked Graham and escaped."
Emma stiffens. "What did you say?"
This is the white room, isn't it? Nicko and Eva should be here, sleeping with their blank faces and cold limbs, indifferent to the world.
Mary Margaret's brow creases with confusion. "I don't-"
"Nicko and Eva were here! What do you mean, they're not?"
Her mother's face softens. "Look," she says quietly, pointing to where they lie.
She doesn't want to. She can't. She can't bear going through that again.
But her eyes betray her, flicking to the beds, and oh, oh, oh it's true and she feels a whirling relief Mary Margaret didn't see them, she doesn't know, Mom doesn't know, but there's also confusion and the beginnings of the raging anger she knows too well.
Because on each bed, right where the unmoving mockeries of her brother and sister should be, is a snowdrop, their delicate white petals still flecked with teardrops of dew.
And she thinks that this is Regina's final revenge.
She doesn't know how, but she's suddenly standing at the beds, the two tiny flowers gathered into her hands, and she's almost squeezing them, crushing them in her fingers, and she's feeling so much that she doesn't feel anything at all.
She won't let this break her.
She won't.
Slowly, robotically, she tucks the flowers into her pocket, her movements gentle as she straightens out their petals. A reminder of the task she still has in front of her.
She turns around, leaning on the bed, taking deep breaths as she sorts through what she needs to do.
Mary Margaret is still standing by the door, asking with a heartbreakingly hopeful face whether she knows what happened to Nicko and Eva, but Emma won't say it. Because she doesn't want her mother to suffer any more than she already has.
And because she's too afraid to say the truth.
She interrupts her mother again, dragging a shaky hand across her face. She's so tired. But she has to finish this. "Mary Margaret, listen to me. That's not important. If anyone sees you here, you'll be in trouble. Please, go home."
Mom shakes her head incredulously. "What do you mean it's not important? Emma, they're you're brother and sister. You're supposed to take care of them!"
"You wouldn't understand."
Her mother sucks in a breath and looks down. "You're right. I don't." After a few seconds she gives a shaky laugh without looking up and Emma sees with horror that there are tears in her eyes. "But after all these days, I would have thought I had the right to know."
Guilt overwhelms her as she watches her mother head towards the door. This is all wrong. This isn't what she wanted. She doesn't care that Mom is agreeing to go home, she doesn't care that letting her go is safe, doesn't care that with each bit of information she reveals her mother is more in danger.
This isn't how she wanted it to end.
"Mary Margaret-"
"It's alright, Emma."
"No, wait-"
"Emma," her mother sighs without turning around. "It's fine. I won't tell anyone you're here."
She starts to open the door.
"Mom, please listen to me!"
Her mother freezes, her hand tightening convulsively on the door.
Emma winces at the slip but doesn't wait for her to turn around. "You're right. You do deserve to know, you deserve to know more than anyone because you are our family. You took care of us and you gave us a home, and I never thanked you, I never appreciated what I had until I didn't have it anymore. I want to change that more than anything. And I wish I could. It's just... please trust me when I say I can't tell you everything right now. Please trust me when I say I'm trying to protect you."
An awful moment of silence follows, and Emma wonders briefly if she's ruined it all, if Mary Margaret doesn't believe her, doesn't trust her, doesn't feel the aching loss hiding behind her daughter's words.
But then her mother turns her head the slightest bit to look at her, and what Emma sees on her face makes the girl brighten with hope.
"I do trust you," her mother murmurs. "More than anything."
Emma smiles at her gratefully, and for that one beautiful moment they are mother and daughter again. Then Mary Margaret slips out of the door, becoming nothing more than a silent shadow in the quiet night.
The stairs are deserted as she runs up to the first floor. She had waited half an hour after Mom left before going out in case anyone was still around. It's now nearly 2:00 am.
Less than an hour to go before she's out.
She moves silently, checking around every dark corner for the lone doctor or guard making their rounds, and only once does she have to duck aside behind a shelf of supplies. Her cautious steps slow as she nears the ward and spots the camera.
Now she needs a hiding place.
Her eyes scan the area and her heart sinks as she spots what must be the camera's only blind spot. No. She doesn't want to go there; there has to be another place. But there isn't.
And so she slinks silently around the edges of the room, darting into the one place that's safe (but she's not safe here, all her fears are in this room, all the doubts that she's carried for three years are in front of her, mocking her, taunting her).
"Hi Dad," she whispers.
But he doesn't reply.
She walks over to the other side of the bed and sits down on the floor so that she's hidden from view, trying not to look at her father's face because it's not right; he's the one who always had faith, who always believed things could get better. Now he's trapped in unconsciousness because of the Queen's curse, and she's still here, alive and whole. And she was still too scared, too weak, too cowardly to face the truth.
"I'm sorry."
The words hang there in the hospital room along with the beeping of monitors and the steady drip-drip-drip of a tube that empties itself into her father's arm, and she wants Dad to whisper You've got nothing to be sorry for like he always used to when she was small, but he doesn't, he's so still and silent he might as well be Nicko or Eva, dead and gone.
Because of her.
Here, where there's nothing to distract her, nothing to focus her, she finally allows herself to think, think about what her brother and sister must have felt like, the rocks coming down, Nicko shielding Eva, his frame taking the brunt of the force in the hopes that Eva would live, but his sacrifice for nothing, they're both dead, and now she doesn't even have the cold not-Eva who lay on the bed in the white-room. The soft damp flowers that press against her are all that remain.
And she finds herself gasping and sobbing and biting down on her knuckles to stop herself from crying out, because it's all her fault. If she had never brought them into this battle, they wouldn't have to have paid the price. If she had never injured herself fighting the dragon, they would never have come running to the mines. If she had never decided what she did in a thousand small choices, maybe they would still be alive. She knows Regina killed them; maybe they weren't trapped in the cave-in at all, maybe they were murdered and all her underground imaginings are only a fraction of the horror of what the Evil Queen could have done, but she'll never know and it'll never detract from the fact that she knew Regina was a threat, knew the bloody trail left behind her mother's stepmother wherever she went, and still she didn't think of the danger.
It's her fault.
And her guilt goes still beyond that, still deeper.
Three years ago, her parents were taken, and she let herself believe they abandoned her. She let a burning hate fester inside her for their choosing their kingdom over their children and when she saw the beginnings of the same resentment in Nicko, she didn't stop it. She let herself hate her parents for being who they were. Heroes. Leaders. People who put others' needs above their own.
She hated them for being good.
And once she saw the curse, saw how people were suffering, she couldn't bear to face them, to admit that she had been wrong, that three years of closing herself off and shutting herself in had achieved nothing but more pain; for Eva who was brutally beaten in her foster home, for Nicko whose constant enthusiasm was replaced by a wary distrust.
She has let them down in so many ways.
So she cries there, in the dark of the night as she waits for her chance to escape. She cries until she has no tears left and she is heaving with silent sobs, and all she wishes is that she could go back, go back to being a little girl whose mother held her close and whose father gave a goodnight kiss and told her everything would be okay.
"How touching."
She jumps up, her heart thudding in shock.
The lights flicker on across the room, showing the row of people who stand outside the glass. Regina. Graham. Dr Whale, a bandage wrapped around his head. Two of the dwarves. A nurse in her starched white uniform.
"I never would have guessed you were here, Ms Swan," Regina says, smirking. "According to the hospital staff, you avoid this wing." She leans close to the glass, knowing full well they have Emma trapped. "Scared of facing dear old Dad?"
After the initial moment of shock is over, determination courses through Emma. The queen may think she has her surrounded, but she's learnt that there's always a way. In the instant Graham lunges for the door, she brings her hand up and forces her magic out, sealing the glass doors shut.
Regina looks furious, and this time Emma is the one who smirks.
"Break it," the mayor hisses, and the dwarves and Graham go to work on the door.
For a few precious minutes, while her strength holds, Emma has the upper hand. And before she escapes she's going to take her time to show the queen that she's not afraid.
She turns her back on the crowd and goes to her father, sitting on a corner of the bed. She couldn't say a proper goodbye to her mother, to her brother and sister. At the very least, she'll do it for Dad.
"I'm sorry, Dad," she whispers, ignoring the melee outside. She hopes he can hear her- coma patients are supposed to, aren't they, but then again, this is a cursed coma, so her hopes aren't high. "I could have done so much more but I didn't. I failed you." She stops for a moment because her magic is starting to ebb; she forces it to stay strong, to hold the barrier.
"You would have been so proud of Nicko and Eva. They grew up so much." She's crying again now, soft tears that hold her together. "Did you know that they had magic? Little Eva was a healer, and she fixed us up so many times while we were travelling. She looks- looked- like Mom. And Nicko," she lets out a huff that's somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "Nicko protected us just like you asked him to and he still never won a swordfight with me and he had this power that he wouldn't tell us about and he was so brave, so brave in the end, Dad. He grew up to be just like you."
She doubles over in pain as the first cracks appear in the door. It won't be long now.
"I'm going to go now," she whispers. "But I'll be back soon."
She stands up, one hand pointing at the door, holding it together, the other at the window. It's one floor up; she's jumped almost as far while climbing a tree and Mom taught her how to roll while she landed. It'll work. The window breaks, and she barely glances at Regina's expression of dawning horror.
"I told you you were going to lose," she says to the Evil Queen.
Then she turns around and presses a kiss to her father's forehead, just like he used to after finishing his stories with happily ever afters.
"Goodbye, Daddy," she whispers before running to the window.
The door shatters, Graham and the dwarves and the Evil Queen all pouring in, trying to catch her, but they're not going to she thinks as she climbs onto the sill.
She jumps.
And the man in the room behind her opens his eyes.
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