On the Nature of Lady Justice
"Justice is truth in action" – Benjamin Disraeli
Part Two
It's a good half an hour before Gold takes his face out of his hands in favour of staring into the middle distance towards the emergency department and the door that leads to the operating theatre, probably longer. It's odd, thinks Emma, that such a comparatively short time ago their positions were reversed – she with her guard down and distraught and Gold providing an odd sort of companionship and comfort. She supposes, grudgingly, that they are more alike than she will ever admit to anyone, and that's the reason why Gold hasn't pushed her away like he seems to do instinctively to all others. Loners stick together. Neither is comfortable with vulnerability, but she let him see her at her lowest ebb, and now he is returning that subconscious trust.
But neither of them are good with emotion, really, not when it comes down to it, and this is an incredibly awkward moment. After a few more minutes of tense silence, Emma decides to make her presence felt and holds out the tissues. Gold takes a handful, turning away whilst he mops up, as if he's only just realised she's been there all this time whilst he broke down. She'd offer him back his pocket square although it's slightly less pristine than when he gave it to her.
"Do you want to tell me what the hell just happened?" she asks softly. Tact was never her strong point and she's never pretended it to be, but she likes to think that from what little she knows of Gold, he wouldn't appreciate pussy-footing. That is his domain, his game for a different time and place when he can control the rules. She's always been blunt with him and has no intention of changing that now, not when she needs honest answers from him in order to get anywhere.
He finally meets her eyes for the first time since she came into the waiting room. He looks exhausted, as if all the fight has gone from him. Something momentous has taken everything and he has no will left. Emma knows that whatever has happened, whoever the Jane Doe is and whatever she means to him, his world has turned on its axis completely.
"Do you want the short answer or the true answer, Sheriff?" he asks.
Inwardly, Emma rolls her eyes. She can already see him closing the mental doors and battening down the hatches against intrusion; as composure returns so does his familiar demeanour.
"The truth, preferably," she says. "Considering you did just threaten to kill the mayor. I need some kind of legitimate ammunition against her if we're going to stand any chance of winning this time." She needs him to understand that however grudgingly, however weirdly, she's on his side, fighting his corner like he has always done hers. Because when it comes down to it, he has always been on her side against Regina, even if it is for his own purposes in the end. Emma pauses, trying for the right way into what she wants to ask. "How do you know her? Jane Doe, I mean," she adds hastily. "Not the mayor."
"Belle." The name is barely above a whisper. "Her name is Belle."
His voice is measured and considered as he continues, as if he needs time to choose exactly the right words.
"She used to work for me. A long time ago. There was an argument and I terminated her employment. I never saw her again, until now. Someone informed me she had committed suicide."
It's not the whole story, by any manner or means, but Emma knows that what he has told her is the truth, and he won't tell her anything more if he doesn't want to. So she leaves it, privately amazed she got as much as she did. It's enough to be going on with, although she makes one blatantly obvious observation.
"She clearly means a lot to you."
More than merely an employee.
"She was a brief flicker of light in an ocean of darkness."
The words seem familiar, stirring a memory in the back of Emma's consciousness, but she's not sure where she's seen or heard them before. She pushes the thought to the back of her mind and focuses on the present. Regina, it appears, has a rap for kidnapping and death faking. Perhaps if she can get to the bottom of what happened to Belle, she can get to the bottom of what happened to Kathryn.
There's not much to go on, that's certain, but now that Emma has time in hand, she is beginning to see the clearer picture, the pieces are beginning to fall into place. Her only clue is the fact Belle was wearing typically hospital issue clothing under the massive coat. However she ended up on the main road, she evidently came from here.
Emma glances at Gold, who has resumed his previous gaze at the door. He won't be moving for a while, not until he receives news of Belle. Emma's torn between leaving him with his thoughts and staying to provide moral support, on the off chance he might divulge some more information that could lead her somewhere.
"I'm going to get coffee," she says, settling for a halfway house, because she needs to be properly sober if she's going to start investigating anyway. "Want one?"
Gold shakes his head, then nods and gives her a couple of coins for the vending machine without a word. Emma gets the drinks and returns to the waiting room, to do just that. Wait. Although she's not quite sure what for yet.
She has no idea how much time passes before something happens.
"Sheriff…" A nurse pokes his head round the waiting room door. "Mrs Nolan has just woken up. She wants to speak to you urgently."
X
Dazed and confused don't even begin to cover how Kathryn's feeling right now, but they're a pretty good place to start. As she waits for Emma to arrive, she takes in the drips and monitors that surround her and wonders for the umpteenth time how exactly she ended up in this position. At least she's safe now, which is perhaps more than can be said for the other girl, the girl who had called herself Belle. This is why she needs to speak to the Sheriff as a matter of urgency. She blinks, trying to clear away the fuzziness in her head that so many drugs have given her.
Emma comes round the corner into the room and Kathryn is immensely grateful to see her.
"Hey," says the Sheriff. "How are you feeling?"
"Not my best," Kathryn admits – Christ, when did her voice get so croaky? "But I'm not worried about me; Emma, there was another girl, you've got to find her, she's terrified…"
Emma's brow furrowed.
"What do you mean, another girl?" Her voice is wary, like she's reserving judgement or knows more than she's letting on.
"The place where I was taken… There was another girl… I think she got out at the same time as me but she ran off into the woods, something spooked her." Kathryn pauses. "She called herself Belle, but I've no idea if that's her name."
The Sheriff looks sombre.
"Dark hair past her shoulders, standard issue patient scrubs and a greatcoat?"
"Yes, have you found her? Is she all right?"
Emma gives a little nod. "We've found her. She's being taken care of."
Kathryn notices that Emma did not exactly answer her second question, but she doesn't push it. At least they found her. Emma sighs and indicates the chair.
"Do you mind?"
"Not at all," Kathryn replies. "Nice to have a friendly face."
"Are you up to telling me what happened?" Emma asks. "Not an official statement or anything, just so that I can try and get my head round what's been going on… You have to understand, we thought you were…"
"You thought I was dead," Kathryn finishes for her. "It's ok, I gathered. Was Mary Margaret really found guilty of murdering me?"
The sheriff nods. "Yes, just this afternoon."
Kathryn looks away. She doesn't like the school teacher, how can she after everything that has happened, but she would never wish that on her, never.
"I don't understand it," she murmurs. "I left a note saying I was headed to Boston; I told Regina. But then…"
A memory stirs, and Kathryn is not quite sure she trusts her friend any more.
"Yes, well…" Emma's lips are pressed together in a thin line. "We'll cross that particular bridge when we come to it." She leans forward and rests her arms on the edge of the bed. "Do you feel like talking?"
Kathryn ponders. It's been the worst two weeks of her life, but they were not unbearable, and she's very awake now. Originally she had just wanted to find out what happened to Belle, but she may as well start talking if she's compos mentis enough to remember, which she is, and if Emma is willing to listen, which she evidently is as well.
"Ok," she says eventually. "I can't remember much, I was out of it a lot of the time, but this is what I do remember."
Kathryn closes her eyes and thinks back as far as she can.
The car spins out of control and ends up in the ditch at the side of the road with an almighty squeal of brakes and tires and the crunch of sudden impact with the bonnet. The airbag goes off and Kathryn blacks out…
The room she wakes up in is cool and smells slightly damp, and she's lying on something marginally less cold than the air around her. She's on her side, which is not how she normally sleeps, and it takes her a moment to realise she's in the recovery position. Her head is killing her. She opens her eyes and takes in her surroundings as much as she can without moving her neck. She's in a little room, a cell almost, lying on a narrow bed and staring at a dripping sink. High up on the wall above her are windows covered with safety mesh; she's in a basement somewhere.
"Ah, you're awake. Are you all right?"
The voice is little more than a whisper, and it sounds as if its owner hasn't used it in a very long time, but it's still quite close to her ear. Kathryn turns her head minutely to see that she isn't alone in the room. A young woman is sitting on the bed beside her, knees drawn up to her chest with her head resting on them, watching over her. She smiles, tentatively, nervously, and Kathryn tries to return the gesture but has no idea if she's successful or not.
"Did she lock you up too?" the girl asks.
"She?" Kathryn manages.
The girl nods over Kathryn's shoulder, and the older woman turns a little to see the door of the cell, with a closed panel in it.
"Scheming eyes, cruel mouth, lips too red." She pauses. "She looks in from time to time."
"I… I don't know," Kathryn says. "I don't know how I got here."
"A man brought you in," says the other woman. "Never seen him before. Not one of the usual ones." There's a long pause."What's your name?" she asks presently.
"K-Kathryn." She's feeling woozy again, a heavy sort of sleepiness, like she's been drugged. With a jolt, she realises that she probably has been. "Yours?"
"Belle. I think."
"You think? You mean you don't know?"
Belle-I-think shakes her head.
"No-one's called me anything for as long as I can remember." She shrugs. "But Belle… it feels right. It's what he calls me in my dreams, and they say dreams are just memories, really, memories of another life."
Kathryn doesn't have time to wonder at her strange cellmate before she's surrendered to oblivion again…
When she next wakes, she can hear voices outside the cell. Belle is still in the same position as before, curled up with her head on her knees, and she looks to be asleep herself. She twitches every now and then, frowning in her slumber. Kathryn tries to tune into the other voices she can hear. Their speech is barely audible, but she tries nonetheless. It's a man and a woman, talking in hissed whispers outside the door.
"…You fool! You put her in with her…"
The female voice sounds slightly familiar, but Kathryn's too foggy to place it.
The male voice is lower and she can only make out one word.
"Grace."
The woman replies with a single syllable.
"No."
"We had a deal," says the man, his voice louder now, raised a little in anger. "I made her disappear, and you gave me Grace."
"No, because you screwed up. You failed, Jefferson. The deal is void. Now fix this mess!"
If Kathryn didn't know better, she'd say the voice belonged to Regina.
She sees the panel in the door begin to lift up and shuts her eyes on instinct, pretending to be asleep. It slams back down and Kathryn hears Belle wake with a little squeak before high-heeled shoes click away into inaudibility as she drifts back into a narcotic induced sleep…
When she next wakes, she is in a different room, alone, but the smell of damp and disinfectant still lingers – she's evidently in the same place, just elsewhere within it. There is food and water on a tray beside the bed, and after a while, Kathryn trusts her pounding head enough not to collapse as soon as she tries to get vertical. She sits up gingerly and nibbles the plain bread; the last lingering effects of the drugs are making her queasy, but at the same time she feels faint with hunger.
She wonders how long she's been unconscious for, and whether she is being constantly dosed in her sleep to keep her under. Feeling less likely to fall over at any given moment, Kathryn gets up and tiptoes across the room towards the door, trying it for want of something to do but it's locked, of course. There was never any doubt of that, but she can hope for a miracle. She doesn't know why she feels the need to be so quiet; by all accounts she should be screaming her head off for someone to come and rescue her. But she gets the feeling that no-one would hear, and if there's no-one to hear, why make any sound?
She thinks of Belle and her cracked, squeaky voice, out of use for so long. There's no point in talking if you've no-one to talk to. Kathryn wonders why the other girl is here. She wonders why she's here. What has she done to deserve this? Who did she fall foul of? Is she being held to ransom?
She wonders if David would pay if she were. She wonders if he's looking for her. But then again, he should think she's in Boston. Maybe no-one even knows she's missing yet. After all, the car crashed right on the boundary, and no-one seems to leave town much. Perhaps they don't even know she's gone.
Kathryn wonders where she is. Something in the back of her mind is convinced it's a hospital – she can't quite pin down the strange smell to anywhere else. Is she in Storybrooke, though, or elsewhere? She can't see anything out of the window, only the sky.
Cautiously, Kathryn pushes open the little flap in the door with her fingertips, peering through the little hole to see if she can see anything. Nothing, just more cold concrete walls and heavy doors.
"Belle?" she whispers "Are you there?"
There's no reply, She didn't expect one, really, but it would have been nice to have someone to talk to. Maybe that's the reason they were separated. Kathryn shakes her head to try and clear the fuzziness, but it won't go. She's been drugged again, probably in the water. At least she knows the warning signs now, and makes it to the hard bed before she swoons…
The next days blend into each other. Kathryn can't tell whether or not she's dreaming most of the time. Day and night seem to be the same, and she never sees another soul. Her food is brought in whilst she's asleep, and although she pours away the water and gets fresh from the sink, she never seems to be able to shake the feeling of the surreal, she's still evidently being dosed in another manner.
Every so often, she peers out of the door to see if there's anyone there. She no longer thinks she's been kidnapped for ransom; surely she would have at least seen her kidnappers by now. Don't victims usually make tearful pleas on video for their relatives to save them? Or at least speak to them on the phone to make sure they're all right?
It's at this point that Kathryn wonders, with a jolt, if she's about to die, abducted by a mad scientist and made into part of an experiment – too many horror films catching up with her. The fear is clawing and oppressive. She pushes open the little flap and looks round as much as she can, looking for someone, anyone.
"Belle?" she calls, a little louder than the first time. She can hear the panic in her voice. Oh dear god, what if she's not there because they've already killed her? She begins to feel light-headed, but then there's a little click, and Kathryn sees pale fingers push open a flap in the door across from her, and she can just make out blue eyes in the gloom beyond.
"Are you all right?" Kathryn asks, for want of a better question, just overjoyed to see the other girl alive, to have some company in this place.
The eyes incline slightly in a nod.
"I'm not used to hearing other people say my name," she says. "Huh. Don't even know if it's my name."
She stiffens suddenly.
"Someone's coming."
And then she's gone, the flap dropped back down, and Kathryn too can hear the footsteps. Someone's muttering under their breath, again she makes out that single word. Grace. It's the man from before, the one who had been talking to someone who could have been Regina.
Why would Regina want to lock her up?
Kathryn rushes back to her little bed as the footsteps get closer, curling up and pretending to be asleep. She hears the lock of the door scrape open and then the door itself.
She watches the man who enters through narrowed eyes; he doesn't notice it. He continues to mutter to himself, and Kathryn is too foggy and too scared to try and work out what he's saying. She feels a prick in the crook of her elbow – drugged again…
The next time she wakes up she can feel the wind on her face. She's lying on her back at the edge of the woods on the outskirts of town. She's free. She's back in Storybrooke where she left off. For a brief moment, she wonders if the past days have been simply imagination, a fevered dream of the unconscious mind, but no, as delirious as she may have been, she knows it was real.
"Ah, good, you're awake."
Kathryn looks around as she sits up, gingerly. Belle is with her, just as she was when she first woke up in the basement – Kathryn's now more convinced than ever it was a hospital building she was held in. This time, though, Belle is not curled up on herself, immobile and resigned to her fate. She is crouched on the ground swathed in the huge coat that the muttering man had worn, and her face is a picture of blind, helpless fear. In the distance, Kathryn can hear the cars on the main road, and Belle flinches visibly every time one passes. The poor girl has obviously not been outside in a long time.
As soon as she sees that Kathryn is awake and comparatively well, she bolts into the trees, fear finally overcoming her. Kathryn is too woozy and weak to try and follow her, but she calls out.
"Belle! Belle! Come back!"
There's no response, and Kathryn gets to her feet unsteadily. There's only one thing to do.
Get home.
X
"And that pretty much brings me to now." Kathryn concludes her tale. "I walked back into town and went into Granny's as the first building I saw."
Emma nods, dumbstruck for the moment, appalled and outraged in equal measure that something like this could happen in real life as opposed to a film.
There's no doubt in her mind that Regina's voice definitely belonged to Regina, and the hospital building that Kathryn was held in is the very same one in which they currently sit. She had been right under their noses the whole time… No wonder Regina was so very assured of her victory, and so very shocked when it all came tumbling down. When she'd been able to keep such a close eye on everything for so long, it still managed to unravel before her eyes.
Regina's hold on Storybrooke is slipping. It began with Emma's election as sheriff. And now, this.
Emma thanks Kathryn for her time and lets her get back to sleep, an unmedicated one this time. She sits in the corridor outside Kathryn's room and makes a list of everything she needs to do once she's had some sleep and the sun is up – she's performed enough damage limitation now, she thinks, that Regina will not be able to undo all her good work in the few hours she will be away from the hospital. All the same, she makes another note. Tomorrow she will investigate the crash site as a matter of procedure; she will comb the hospital from top to bottom (enlisting Leroy's help if necessary) and find where Kathryn and Belle were held, and if there are any other poor, unfortunate souls. She will find something that links Regina to this whole mess, and she is taking the bitch down if it's the last thing she does.
Madam Mayor has ruined enough lives.
But first she must eat and sleep, to be fresh for the morning's tasks. There are just a couple of things to be done before she clocks off to begin again tomorrow. Emma can't help feeling that Belle is the key, the catalyst to the whole affair, and she is determined that there will be no long-lost relations or spouses suddenly popping up out of the woodwork this time, not when she has seen the devastation that was wrought in the wake of David coming out of his coma. No, this time Emma has learnt Regina's modus operandi, and she intends to beat the mayor at her own game. She has Mr Gold on side, at least, and he should be able to help her.
So even though she is under no obligation to, Emma returns to the ER waiting room. Gold is gone; Emma's brow furrows until an orderly informs her that Jane Doe pulled through her surgery (she's s tough little thing, apparently, even though she arrested on the operating table, they got her back despite the odds) and she is in intensive care. She must have been talking to Kathryn for longer than she realised.
The orderly shows her the way, and sure enough, Gold is there, standing outside the room, one hand pressed up against the glass that separates him from the woman he thought dead for God-knows-how-long. She comes up beside him.
"Go on in," she says. "She needs a friendly face."
"Hardly friendly." Gold snorts. "The circumstances of our parting were rather acrimonious, Sheriff. I believe I am the last person she would want to see."
"No, the last person she would want to see is Regina," Emma says plainly.
She doesn't tell him that Regina locked Belle up for seemingly no apparent reason, after all, he's probably figured out as much for himself. She doesn't want him going on a one-man revenge mission, they both know how the last one turned out. (The thought of Moe French brings her full circle and she has an idea, one that might be hard to execute, but will hopefully be fruitful.) He's already threatened Madam Mayor once; she does not need him making Regina into the injured party when Emma may well need to call upon his help to bring the woman down once and for all.
Gold looks through the glass at Belle, with an expression of such hurt and longing – Emma and the rest of the town hadn't thought him capable of such emotion. But at the same time, the shadow of the very dangerous, very powerful man is still there, fighting through the broken pieces, and there's something else that Emma recognises as fear, unused as she is to seeing it on him.
"I'm working on Regina," she promises him.
Gold nods, slowly.
"You know where to find me should you require my assistance, Sheriff," he says, and begins to push open the door. "I will be all too happy to give it if it ruins the witch."
Emma nods. Allies again, however mismatched they are, once more unto the breach. This time, they will not fail. This time, they are prepared. This time, they know what they are up against.
"Oh, and Emma… Thank you."
"No worries. I'm Sheriff. It's my job to catch the bad guys."
That's not what he's referring to, they both know that, but neither says anything to contradict it. Gold gives the very briefest of smiles, and tentatively enters Belle's room. Emma watches him; it takes him a few moments to move any further than the door, but after a while he goes across and sits in the chair beside the bed, carefully and gently taking Belle's limp hand in his.
She goes to leave, determining to check on Belle (and Gold, since he shows no signs of leaving her proximity any time soon) first thing in the morning. If she knows Regina, this will be her first port of call as well, and she needs to pre-empt her.
Emma grabs the nearest nurse.
"If the Mayor comes within twenty feet of that room, call me immediately," she says.
She will not let Regina gain the upper hand again. Not this time. Not ever.
To be continued