A/N: Depression triggers!
This first chapter is a little sad, but unfortunately it's neccesary for the background of the fic, but if you just stick with it, it'll get better, I promise! :)
(But, if you really don't want to read the sad part, skip down to the triple lined page break and start from there.)
My life before working at the Mills Hotel was a sad blur.
My long-term girlfriend, Anna, and I had been together for two years. I loved her. I had thought that we were going to be together forever.
But one night, on the way back from the grocery store, her bicycle was hit by a drunk driver, and in a heartbeat, my life was changed forever.
I don't remember much about the months after Anna died. I suppose that i got up as I always did, got dressed in my green apron and walked the two blocks to the little boutique grocery store, Rosa's, on the upscale side of town where I worked. I would go through my shift as their produce manager, which involved a lot of ordering different vegetables, arranging them in pretty, enticing rows and disposing of the rotting ones.
After my shift, I'd come home, back to my too-empty apartment with a bag of slightly wilted vegetables that were still edible, but now too ugly to sell.
I'd go through the motions of making dinner, of forcing myself to eat it.
I'd curl up on the bed.
Our bed.
And I'd cry myself to sleep.
I did that for six months, but I don't remember hardly any of it.
I'd ask myself on really hard nights, nights when I wondered where my life was going, what I was doing with it, how had this all happened, this radical departure from how i'd assumed life was supposed to be.
On the darkest, hardest nights, I wondered if I'd really loved Anna.
The thing is, I knew I had. I'd loved her deeply.
I'd been hoping to spend the rest of my life with her.
But in really terrible moments of weeping over the spaghetti at the now too-big kitchen table, far too big for only one person, I wondered if - when Anna died - she'd taken the best parts of my life with her.
That's the thing. Without Anna, I was just Emma Swan. Boring Emma Rose Swan who wore her boring blonde hair in the same ponytail since high school. Who had worked at Rosa's since graduating from college.
I was a produce manager with a useless bachelor's in art history. I had no dreams, no aspirations. It was pathetic.
I was pathetic.
Life had come up too fast and too quickly, and it had hit me broadside.
Part of me thought that I was still in college, dreaming of the time I'd graduate, that I'd do something exciting with my degree, perhaps move to New York and work in a museum finding interesting and beautiful new discoveries from famous painters. Change the world, if only a little.
But I was never going to change my life that drastically. I was never going to move to New York. Adventurous people moved to New York.
And I had never been very adventurous.
I'd lived in Greensprings all my life. Greensprings is in New Hampshire, close to the border of Massachusetts, and it's very beautiful here. But it's a town that people drive through on their way to more beautiful and more interesting locations.
No one knows where Greensprings actually is and no one sets out to find it.
It's one of those very quaint towns that on TV, people set wacky sitcoms in, and growing up, I'd had more fantasies that I'd get a condo in the upscale part of it, live a bohemian lifestyle that involved a lot of painting and wine and women. But I couldn't paint. And before Anna, I couldn't keep a girlfriend to save my life.
I was pretty good at the wine part.
Sometimes I hated how boring I was, my safe decisions that meant that I'd live in Greensprings all my life, that I would continue to live in Greensprings probably until the day I'd die.
Anna was going to change that. She'd wanted to move to New York too, and we'd been saving money together for just that purpose. We were going to move together, rent a probably much-too-small apartment and then...we didn't know. But we often talked about that dream long into the night.
Let's be honest: it was mostly Anna's dream. But I was so happy. Glad to go along with it. Anna had that way about her. A big, wide smile and twinkling brown eyes that promised that if you'd trust her, everything was going to be all right.
But Anna was dead now. And everything was most certainly not all right.
I knew that I was spiraling into a depression that I might not ever recover from, but I didn't know how to stop it. I didn't know if I even wanted to stop it. What was my life without Anna?
.
.
And then, one day, Ruby called.
I hadn't seen her since the funeral. My best friend since college, Ruby was always the brave one, the one who took risks, went to exotic, daring places. When I saw her name on my cell's caller ID, I wondered, as I pressed the phone to my ear, where she'd be calling me from. With Ruby, you could never be sure if she was down the street, in another country, or even on this planet (she'd reminded me more than once on an all-night cramming session in school that someday they'd probably sell seats on a rocket to the moon: and she'd be first in line to buy one. I didn't doubt that for a second.)
"Hi, honey!" Ruby said, the line crackling with all the static of a terrible connection. "It's been forever, how are you?"
Oh, that question.
People ask you that question all the time, but they don't really want to hear the real answer - they're just doing it because it's something we're taught to say. Every day, regulars at the grocery store would brush past me in the aisle to get their stalks of brussels sprouts and their kohlrabi, and they'd ask me that question.
And if I broke down, if I told them that I was doing terribly, that my girlfriend had been hit by a drunk driver and died and I was falling to pieces because of it, they'd back away slowly, maybe never come to the grocery store again.
So I always lied to them, told them I was "fine." They didn't really want to know how I was doing. Few people in the world cared enough for the truth.
But Ruby did.
I broke down, trying to keep the majority of my tears in check, but she heard my little hiccup-sob on the other end of the line, even over all of the static, and she made a little gasp of her own.
"Oh, honey, I'm so sorry," said Ruby, and I knew that she meant every word of it. "Please don't cry. I'm so sorry. Is it really bad? You're not even a little okay?"
No. I wasn't. I was falling to pieces. I took a deep breath, the sound of it catching in the back of my throat as I grappled with words, trying to figure out what exactly I could tell Ruby that would convey...everything.
"Things are pretty bad," is what I settled on, then.
It wasn't much, but it was all I could say as I wrestled with the tears and the sobs, trying to keep the last bits of myself together. And failing.
"I wish so much that I could be there right now, You don't know how much I wish that," she said softly, her words as soothing as a cool cloth to my forehead.
I sighed, holding the cell phone tightly to my ear, like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man at sea. "That's...actually the reason I'm calling honey," she said then. The words were still sincere, still soft and gentle. But they were beginning to take a slightly wheedling quality that made me blink.
Ruby wanted something.
"What is it?" I managed, taking another tissue out of one of the ten boxes on the coffee table, wiping my nose, my eyes, my face. I crumpled the tissue in my hand as silence continued on the other end of the line.
Until: "I want you to come to Maine."
They were absolutely crazy words, but she'd said them so sincerely, one might almost have taken her seriously.
I snorted into the phone, lying back against our couch.
My couch...I tried to swallow the sob that escaped my throat, but didn't quite manage.
"Look, I know you're going through a really rough patch right now. But you and I both know that there's nothing in Greensprings to keep you there, and to be perfectly honest, I think a little change in scenery would be really good for you. I read a book about grieving - you know, the one that I recommended to you that you wouldn't read? It said that getting out of your usual patterns will help you make some sense of the tragedy, might help you get back to living your life -"
I would never be able to make any sense of the tragedy. And I was honestly uncertain if there was any life to get back to living. I was shaking my head, wanted to change the subject, but she couldn't hear that on the other end of the line. So I said, clearing my throat: "What are you doing in Maine?"
Ruby snorted a little. "Haven't you been reading any of my emails?"
I stared at the laptop on the kitchen table, untouched for weeks. "No," I sighed truthfully.
"I got a new job," said Ruby then, her voice dropping a little in excitement, as if she was telling me a secret. "Em, It's the best job I've ever had. It's unreal. I'm working at this old hotel in a really cute little town - It's right on the ocean. In Maine! It looks like an old black and white movie should be set here, seriously. The hotel is this gorgeous old building right on a cliff face overlooking the water - it's just too pretty for words. I keep thinking I'm going to run into Scarlet O'Hara or the Queen of England or something in the hallways, and -"
"Wait, wait, wait," I finally manage, holding up my hand the clutches the tissue. "What are you doing working in a hotel?"
"I work the front desk, It's the easiest job in the world. The hotel's kind of in an out-of-the-way town, and -"
"Where is it?"
"In Maine, silly! I just said, and -"
"Where in Maine?" I persisted.
"It's kind of a stupid name for a town," said Ruby with a little laugh. "It sounds like a soap opera should be set here or something. It doesn't sound real. But the hotel is in Storybrooke."
Storybrooke. She was right. It didn't sound real. But when Ruby said that word, a little chill ran through me - the kind that made the hairs on my arms stand up, my shoulders give a little shake of their own accord.
My mother used to say that this was the kind of feeling you got when someone walked over your grave. I never knew exactly what she meant by that. I wasn't dead yet. I didn't even have a grave. But there was such an odd chill that moved through me in that moment, it felt as if I did have a grave. And someone had very deliberately waltzed over the top of it.
"Huh," was the dubious response I gave into the phone.
"The thing is, the place is normally completely dead, so not that much help is needed, even though the hotel is huge. Because, really, we maybe get like a guest a week. But there's some conference or other that's coming to Storybrooke this next month...October," said Ruby.
On the other end of the line, I could hear her shuffling through some papers. "And my boss needs to take on a few more staff, she tells me. And she asked me if I could recommend anyone to her, and I..." There was a very long sigh through the phone. "To be honest, I recommended you."
"What?" The floor began to roll beneath me. "But I...I already have a job. I work at Rosa's," I spluttered. There were so many reasons why this was ludicrous; I almost didn't even know where to begin. "Ruby, I mean, I've worked at Rosa's for so long, and..."
"And? It's a grocery store, Em. You're not exactly on the fast track to success at a grocery store." She didn't mean to sound condescending, but it had come out that way, regardless.
"That's rotten. You know that's rotten," I told her softly. A snort came from the other end of the phone.
"Honey, if I don't tell you this, no one's going to tell you this. So it's sort of my duty as your best friend to tell you that if you, Emma Swan, don't leave Greensprings now? You're never going to leave it.
You're going to stay there forever with your grief." She said these words gently, but there was a hard edge to the last few of them.
"I know Anna's death was very, very hard on you, and I'm so sorry. But it's been six months. Anna died. You didn't. You've got to keep living, honey. You've got to decide that you want to keep living, and you've got to make the decision right now." There was a long pause, and then she finally said, simply, "Anna wouldn't have wanted this for you, honey. All Anna ever wanted was for you to be happy."
I didn't know what to say.
So I said nothing. After another long moment of silence, Ruby sighed again. "Look, it's the easiest job in the world. It's such a beautiful town. I know your apartments lease is on a month-to-month basis, so that would be insanely easy to get out of. I know that if you absolutely hated it here in Storybrooke, and went back to Greensprings, Rosa's would take you back in a heartbeat, so that's insanely easy, too."
"Em, honey, you have absolutely, positively nothing to lose, and pretty much everything to gain. And I could help you get through the rough spots; get you to start living again. Aaaaand..." She trails off, her voice dropping to a whisper again. "I wasn't going to bring it up, but I'm pulling out the big guns of convincing here."
She cleared her throat, and I could hear her smile through the phone. "If you ever are ready again, for...well. I just want you to know that there are some ridiculously gorgeous ladies here."
I couldn't believe that she'd said that. It had only been six months. And I was fairly certain that I was never going to date anyone else ever again. But as I opened my mouth to tell her "no," that the whole thing was a terrible, no-good, rotten bad idea, I took a deep breath.
I looked up.
I looked up at the apartment. At what had been our apartment.
Every last thing here reminded me of Anna. The now-empty peg on the wall by the door where she'd hung her jean jacket. Her set of car keys with the ridiculous Pooh Bear keychain, sitting in the pottery bowl by the door. Her old plaid work shirt that she'd left on the counter the night of the accident that I'd never had the heart to move.
I knew what I was doing, had done, to the place where we'd lived.
I'd turned it into a shrine of her.
I was never going to move on with my life while living here.
I knew that.
And Ruby knew that, too."
"Please" Ruby says quietly. Softly. "Please, Em. Give this a chance."
I couldn't believe it when I said it. But I'd said it, and there was no going back now.
I whispered, simply, "Okay."
A/N: Sorry for all the sadness! More about Regina in the next chapter! And some Emma and Ruby cuteness, friendship wise of course :)
DISCLAIMER: I own none of the characters mentioned, and most of the story belongs to Bridget Essex who wrote the Novel, Eternal Hotel, that I'm basing this off of. The only thing that I own is how I decide to incorporate all the OUAT characters within the storyline. I just thought that this story could be a cute twist when mixed with SwanQueen. :)
