Sorry for the delay with this one. I wasn't happy with how Emma was coming across, so I had to make some changes to it.
"Is everything okay?" Zelena asked, as Emma shouldered her way back into the library, and deposited the armful of snacks she was carrying onto the large table for them to pick through. "You were kinda gone for a while."
"Yeah, sorry. I um… I got a little distracted. Is everything okay here?"
Before Zelena could say anything else, the door to Gold's office opened and the three teenagers stopped what they were doing to turn and face the librarian.
"Well?" Emma prodded, when he had remained silent for a beat too long.
"It's true," he stated quietly. "The Council have confirmed that Storybrooke is built over a Hellmouth."
"And they didn't think that this would be important information to tell you before you came here?" Emma snapped back, folding her arms over her chest. She knew it wasn't Gold's fault that his employers had withheld crucial information from them both. But as she'd never met the Council, (who seemed to know and withhold far too much information, in her honest opinion), so Gold would have to suffer the brunt of her ire.
"They weren't expecting someone to try and open it so soon," he shot back at her, before deflating a little when he realised that he'd just snapped at a teenage girl. "As for the rest of the legend, they can neither confirm nor deny it. But they have heard about the vampire in question. He's known to his followers as 'The Master.' There may be books here I've not yet unpacked that could help us work out more about him, but the official records indicate that if he does exist, he's never faced a slayer before."
"So after all of that, all we know for sure is that there's a Hellmouth somewhere under our feet. But we don't know if there's some kind of über-vamp down there, trapped in a church, who's gonna try and kill us all?" Emma asked, just to clarify how much shit they'd found themselves in.
"Yes. That seems to be the gist of it all."
"Great. So what do you suggest we do now?"
"We hit the books," Gold declared, a little too gleefully for Emma's liking.
"And what if we can't find anything in them?" she pressed. "Look, I'm not trying to be difficult, okay. But Killian says it's chaos on the streets tonight. And my father's out there trying to control it, unaware of what's going on. I can't just sit here and do nothing, knowing my dad is out there unprotected."
"You saw Killian again?" August asked, as he took a step closer to the table. "Does the guy just follow you everywhere you go? Because that's a little creepy."
"Does it matter?" Emma snapped back, turning the full force of her glare onto her friend. "At least he's trying to do something right now. That's more than anyone else is doing around here."
August raised his arms in surrender, before dropping down into the seat she had previously vacated, next to Zelena.
"I understand that you're frustrated, Emma," Gold began gently. He seemed to realise that his young slayer was close to her breaking point that evening, and that he needed to handle things carefully for the rest of the day, if he had any hopes of keeping her on their side. "But in situations such as this, we need to proceed with caution. A few days of research to confirm that this Master is actually a foe we need to be concerned about, is beneficial to us all. Killian informed us that the legend speaks of him being one of the eldest of his kind. If that's true, then it's entirely possible that he will have some kind of skills and abilities that we won't be prepared for. A little research will help us avoid running into a situation we don't know, and aren't ready for."
"That doesn't change the fact that someone needs to be out on the streets, making sure people aren't getting hurt," she countered. "Look, I'm not opposed to researching this Master guy if it needs to be done. I get it. I get the whole knowledge is power angle that you're going for here. But I also need to do something, Gold. I need to be out there stopping things from happening. And I need you train me to make sure I can do that."
"Okay," he eventually agreed. "We'll begin your training tomorrow evening. Tonight, I need to finish unpacking the books I had shipped over with me, so I can try and find any that may be useful for our research."
"I can't do tomorrow night," she sighed, flicking a glance down to the table top between them. "I'm meeting Kilian. He promised to work on my training with me if you wouldn't."
Gold didn't look too happy about the idea of his slayer working with someone else. Especially not someone he knew so little about, and certainly didn't trust at that point in time. But if he'd learned anything about Emma since he'd first met the feisty slayer, it was that expressing his displeasure would only end up causing a bigger rift to open between the two of them.
And that was the last thing he wanted to do.
"So be it," he declared, before turning his attention back to where Zelena and August had been watching the entire exchange unfold. "If you two have the evening free and wish to help, I could certainly use it."
"I'll be here," Zelena assured him, as August nodded reluctantly along with her.
Emma spent the rest of her Saturday evening working with August to unpack the remainder of the books Gold had shipped over to the USA with him. While the two of them unboxed everything, Zelena and the librarian worked to sort through each of the texts, arranging the books into three piles; one for general use, one for slayer work, and one that looked like it might contain some kind of information on either the Hellmouth, or the Master.
"Good morning," David greeted, as he leaned down to press a kiss to his daughter's head. "I'm sorry I was so late back last night. The earthquake brought out all of the crazies in town. You're definitely okay, right?"
"I'm fine," Emma assured him, as she stood to fetch the warm plate of food she'd placed into the oven for him, when she'd been preparing breakfast for herself. "What about you? You didn't get hurt last night, did you?"
"I was fine," he chuckled. "I've been doing this for years, remember? A couple of high schoolers looking to cause trouble aren't going to get the best of me any time soon."
Emma forced herself to laugh at her father's joke, while she blinked away images of fangs sinking into his neck. She was already counting down the hours until she could leave to meet Killian. As much as her instincts told her that Gold could (and should) be trusted, she got the feeling that the much younger British man would be far more effective when it came to the physical side of her training, than the school's librarian would ever be.
Killian exuded an air of confidence and experience when it came to the actual slaying of vampires. Whereas Emma still wasn't sure if Gold had ever faced one in person before.
But that didn't stop her from feeling bad that she was basically abandoning her watcher and friends for the evening. So after spending a relaxing morning with her father, alternating between watching episodes of their favourite TV shows, Emma packed up her stuff to head to the library once more, when David left for work.
She wasn't surprised to find Zelena and August already there, sat on opposite sides of the large conference table with laptops and books spread between the two of them, as Gold worked quietly at the far end.
"Anything yet?" she asked softly.
"Emma?" Zelena exclaimed, as she lifted her head from the book it had been buried in. "You're here?"
"Yeah, well… I'm not meeting Killian until after sunset. So I thought I'd come and give you guys a hand with the research before that. Knowledge is power, and all that jazz."
Gold pulled his own attention away from the frankly ancient looking text he was reading to offer her a small smile, as August began clearing a spot for the slayer opposite her watcher.
"We've um… we've found a few things that look promising," Zelena explained, as she pulled one of the books from the center of the table to show to her friend. The double-page spread consisted of one drawing, which looked like a large crater in the ground. But there were a lot of tentacles spilling out from inside of it.
"Yeah," August chuckled, as he took in the disgusted look on his friend's face. "That was exactly how I felt too. That's probably the strangest one we've seen so far. But there are a fair few of them."
"What am I looking at?" she asked, as she pulled another book towards herself, with yet another illustration on the page. This time, it depicted some grotesque looking creature that her brain was struggling to comprehend. There were far too many arms and eyes coming from what should have been a human body.
"The Hellmouth," Gold answered. "Or at least, artist renditions of it. So far, from what I've been able to translate, nobody's ever survived entering one to give an accurate description of it. And of course, nobody's ever succeeded in truly opening one before."
"So these are just suggestions?" Emma was kind of relieved to hear that the giant tentacle monster and forty-three eyed, twelve-armed creatures didn't actually exist.
"They're artist depictions of translations of some of the many legends regarding the Hellmouth. And there are plenty more that have not yet been translated." Gold pushed his glasses up to rest on top of his head as he pinched the bride of his nose. Emma hadn't realised how tired he looked until he did.
"Did you get any sleep last night?" she wondered softly.
"I haven't left the building yet," Gold chuckled bitterly. "But don't worry about me, Emma. I'm sure with you here to help, the process will go a lot faster today."
Emma pulled her own laptop from her bag to plug it in and switch it on, before she asked, "Okay. So where do I start?"
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Special thanks go to Luna and the other guest reviewers for their kind words.