Chapter three
Emma raised her mug of coffee to her lips as her eyes scanned over the diner, searching for something, though she wasn't quite sure what it was that she was looking for, she was sure that there was something missing.
Could it be Neal?
No, it was his decision to leave only a note saying that he wasn't ready to be a father or live in a town with magic and his own father. Even Henry told her to stop looking for him a couple days after he left, apparently he held a similar 'good-riddance' attitude to Bealfire at this point.
She had her parents and her son so it didn't make sense that she would have this feeling of complete emptiness. What could possibly be causing it?
"Are you okay, mom?" Henry asked from his position opposite the saviour in the booth.
Emma was interrupted from claiming to be fine, by the sound of the bell over the door and looked over to see a brunette gliding across the diner and over to the counter.
"Who are you looking at, mom?" Henry asked and craned his neck to try and figure out what was causing the look of devastation on her face.
Emma tore her eyes away from the counter and pointed at the woman, "do you know who that is?"
"Never seen her before," Henry replied with a shrug.
Emma frowned and just slipped out of her seat in spite of Henry's protests.
Once she was close enough to the counter, she heard, "your coffee, Mayor Mills."
"Thank you, Miss Lucas," the mayor replied as she placed a few bills onto the counter and turned to leave.
Emma was about to open her mouth to talk to the woman, but was cut short when someone else shouted the name that she was having a hard time remembering.
"Regina!"
Emma turned to look at a man she definitely recognised brandishing a gun, to which no one reacted.
Even Henry was embroiled in his comic book and was clearly not aware of the danger.
The saviour swallowed hard and whispered, "Jefferson?"
The Mad Hatter ignored her and shouted, "you took everything away from me you bitch!"
Regina barely reacted, just standing still holding her to-go cup.
Emma's hand snapped to her holster but found that there was nothing at her belt to stop an enraged gun man.
No one batted an eyelid when the bullet left the chamber with a bang, but for Emma, time seemed to stand still as red started to spread through the fibres of Regina's shirt and her body crumpled to the ground.
Emma slid onto her knees the moment that Regina hit the floor and she placed her hand underneath her head to provide some cushion and started to inspect the gushing wound while Jefferson turned to leave with no resistance.
She thought about going after him, but instead decided to look back to Regina and said, "it's going to be okay."
"No it won't, Emma," Regina replied.
The saviour shook her head and dug her hand into her pocket to pull out her phone to call 911 but it was already ringing, showing 'Dr Whale' as the caller ID.
Emma's eyes flew open and she pushed herself up onto her hands and took a moment to look around the living room.
Her mind caught up with the fact that she had offered to sleep the couch to give Henry some privacy and it was in fact her phone that was ringing.
She glanced over to make sure. That her parents hadn't been woken up by the sound before she grabbed the device and saw that it was 1.12 am in the morning.
Emma pressed 'accept' on the final ring and groggily croaked, "hello?"
"Sheriff Swan," Whale's voice came through the line, he sounded genuinely distraught and Emma clutched the phone tighter as she waited for him to continue, "as we feared, the sutures we placed near Regina's aorta were not enough to stabilise her heart."
Emma was pretty sure that she knew what he meant, but she still asked, "what are you saying, Whale?"
The doctor took a deep breath and replied, "at 12.30, a nurse arrived in Regina's room to do her observations and she discovered that the heart monitor had malfunctioned. When her heart stopped, we had no way of knowing so it was too late to perform any extraordinary measures. I pronounced time of death at 12.42."
Emma took some deep breaths of her own and sat in silence, thinking over the implications.
The obvious thing was that she was now Henry's only parent.
However, the biggest revelation was that this meant that she would never get the chance to tell the infuriating woman that she had feelings for her since the day at the mines when she was first sure that she cared about Henry.
It hit her that she'd been too stubborn to admit it to herself until now.
Would Regina still be alive if she'd admitted these feelings to her?
"Sheriff?" Whale asked when the silence had passed for too long, "do you have any questions?"
"What am I supposed to do now?" she asked, knowing full well that Whale wouldn't understand how deep the question really went.
S
-One week later-
Emma propped her head up on her hand and pressed play for perhaps the 100th time.
As she had seen many times, Jefferson entered the room with a syringe and injected Regina directly into the heart. Emma stared at the heart monitors, wishing that they would start blaring, but as Whale's paperwork proved, the equipment had never been serviced so she couldn't really look further into the claim that they were 'broken'.
The footage showed the exact moment Regina flatlined while Jefferson activated his hat to take him god-knows where.
The rest of the video was Regina laying motionless for an hour which Emma had started skipping once she established that it yielded no new information, until the nurse finally entered at the exact time Whale told her he would.
The nurse was calm for a few moments until her eyes connected with the heart monitor and she launched forward and checked the pulse for confirmation before her fist smashed against the call button and it wasn't long until nurses and Dr Whale swarmed into the room soon after.
Emma watched again as Whale did some checks and then announced time of death.
She pressed the spacebar with her clenched fist to pause the video and then leaned back in her chair and ran her hand over her face.
Once again she learned nothing new other than she was sure that Jefferson had help to pull it off.
It seemed very unlikely that he would become so calculated after being shot considering that he had decided that morning to just bring a gun to the school not long before.
There were so many questions:
- How did he get out of the handcuffs?
- What was in the syringe? Testing it multiple times had yielded no results
- Where did he go?
Unfortunately there were no cameras in Jefferson's room and Grace wasn't really prepared to suggest what his current location could be so Emma literally only had this video for her investigation.
She had been carrying out this 'investigation' since Regina's funeral, which had been a very small affair.
Regina had been laid to rest next to her father in a clear glass coffin since Rumple had offered to ensure that her body would remain in an embalmed-like state.
He claimed it was for when Henry inevitably wanted to see her and get a proper goodbye to his mother for a sense of closure, but Emma had a feeling that there was an element of guilt here. After all, it was his decision to make her his protege and mould her into the Evil Queen, meaning that everything that happened after was at least, in part, his fault.
As for Henry, he didn't even attend the event, instead deciding to spend the day pretending that it was like any other.
Snow and David did attend but didn't so much as mention Regina afterwards, which did not particularly help with getting Henry to come to terms with what happened.
The only person who she was absolutely sure cared about what happened to Regina was Archie.
It wasn't a well kept secret that she had been attending therapy sessions in there last six months and Emma found herself infinitely grateful for the fact that the woman wasn't completely alone for all that time. Though she was now actually aware that she wished she had spent those six months with Regina Mills in anyway that the woman would have allowed her to.
The biggest advantage to Archie's presence was that he had some good things to say about Regina during the service, Emma had tried to write an eulogy but felt wholly unprepared to put the former Evil Queen into words. No collection of words felt adequate.
Archie simply said that in the end, she was a 'hero'.
Emma swallowed hard and blinked away some tears as she remembered the service but forced herself to put it from her mind.
She wasn't supposed to be sad right now, she was supposed to be finding out exactly what sequence of events led to Regina's death and how the hell she was going to find Jefferson when he could be in literally any realm.
She was about to lean forward to press play again, but a knock at the door distracted her.
She opened her mouth to reassure her mother that she'd already had lunch, but found someone else had opened the door.
"Gold," she sighed and leaned back in her seat.
"That's not a very inviting 'hello' Miss Swan," he replied, but walked into the office anyway and took a seat opposite the sheriff without permission.
Emma just sighed and forced herself to remember that he had been nothing but helpful since the school incident. It wasn't his fault that there was currently only one person she wanted to interrupt her investigation and considering that she had attended this person's funeral a few days ago, it was less likely than ever.
"And why do I need to invite you into my office?" she asked more rudely than she usually would. Thankfully the people she had been snappy with lately seemed to understand that she was profoundly sleep deprived.
It was for this reason that the pawn store owner made no terse reply and just said, "I thought you would appreciate an update on the town outside of these walls…"
Emma nodded, it couldn't hurt to take a break from her video for a while.
"Well, the council voted that Belle will be appointed as temporary mayor until we can arrange for a formal election."
Emma wanted to protest but it wasn't really the most mature argument to say that Mayor French didn't have the same ring to it as Mayor Mills, so she just said, "okay…is there anything else?"
"None of the tracking spells that I've tried yielded any real results, but I've said before, if Jefferson is in a realm without magic or somewhere magic works differently then there may be no way of finding him from Storybrooke."
"Could you please just keep trying?" Emma asked and it didn't escape Gold's notice just how desperate the question was.
"Of course," he replied and paused a moment before he reached into his bag to pull out a pile on papers which he placed onto the desk, "there is one more thing…"
Emma leaned over to look at the top of the paper and instantly started shaking her head vehemently, "I didn't signed these last week, why would I sign them now?!"
The man held up his hands to placate her and launched into his explanation, "this may surprise you, Miss Swan, but Henry is a registered person in the USA, as is Regina Mills. I ensured that she would be recognised by the state when I arranged the adoption. Regina's death has been logged on the system so eventually some social worker will realise and rush to town to find out if he is safe. I believe it would be in everyone's best interest if when a social worker eventually stumbles across Henry's information, they see he is in the care of his birth mother. If anyone from the state came to Storybrooke, there would be quite the investigation opened up, don't you agree?"
Emma sighed, Regina would definitely be pissed if Henry ended up in foster care because she didn't sign a form.
"Fine," she forced out of her mouth, "but I'm not signing this, his name is Henry Mills."
With that, she threw the 'Change of name form' across the desk and pulled the adoption dissolution papers towards her.
Mr Gold rolled his eyes and picked up the discarded form. If Henry wanted to change his name, he could always arrange for it himself when he got older.
Emma methodically went through all of the pages until she had finally signed next to all of the post-it notes contained within it and she pushed it over to Rumplestiltskin.
"I'll get those notarised," Gold said and rose to his feet and added, "if you change your mind about the name, I can redraft these whenever you ask."
Emma just nodded and the man was about to turn away, before she said, "thank you, Gold…for all of your help."
The Dark One looked over his shoulder and nodded back, with a small but genuine smile.
He wouldn't say it aloud, but he had recently found himself missing the former Evil Queen's presence in Storybrooke. So what harm could helping a little do? He could go back to setting his prices again soon enough.
Emma's shoulders sagged as Gold left.
She was considering how long it was until she would need to tell Henry that he was now legally her son. Would he really care?
She decided to deal with it later and was about to reach over to play the video but was interrupted by a sound from the doorway.
"I've never known him to be so helpful."
Emma's eyes shot up to the familiar voice and her mouth promptly dropped open at the sight of a brunette woman leaning against the entrance to her office:
"Regina?!"