Green eyes scanned the view from the top of the Empire State Building. Emma had forgotten how overwhelmingly enormous everything in any city anywhere was. Back in Storybrooke, everything was so quaint and small that you didn't feel so insignificant. New York City, however, with the hustle and bustle of eight million people and buildings that touched the sky, was a whole different story. The city could easily make you feel like a nothing, a tiny speck of dust on the table of the Earth that wasn't even worth being bothered for the duster.
Emma sighed. She had come to the massive building in the middle of a Tuesday, so there were only a few people milling about. She glanced at a man and woman pointing things out to their three-year-old son; cars that looked like ants, buildings, the whole view in general. She didn't want the kid to see what she was about to do, so she made her way over to another side of the building. The only people over there were adults, thankfully.
As the new Dark One, Emma knew she couldn't technically die without the dagger. She was in a land without magic, though, so did that negate her immortality? If she took a knife to her throat, would her lack of magic allow her to die, or would she heal instantly? It was all so confusing. Emma didn't know which rules of magic applied to the real world and which didn't. It all seemed to be a crapshoot to her.
Emma nervously ran her hands along the wires designed to make people not jump off the Empire State Building. She didn't know why she'd chosen to come here, of all places. The building was over a thousand feet tall, for God's sake! Couldn't she have picked something where the fall wouldn't take so long? But she needed to test the limits of the Dark One, and fast. This was the first place she'd thought of. She ran on impulse, not logic.
She took a deep breath. If you do die, she thought to herself, at least the Darkness will be gone forever. If you really can die here, then the Darkness has no power in this world; you would live if it did. So either way it'll be okay. Either it'll never be able to harm anyone again, or you'll get a chance to live without the darkest thing ever inside of you.
Being that she was about to jump off a one-thousand foot building, her thoughts weren't very reassuring.
The wires and bars blocking the building from the sky looked hard but not impossible to climb. Emma betted she could do it. She hoisted herself onto the ledge and placed an unsteady foot on the crisscrossing wires. It didn't take long to reach the bottom of the curved bars, but when she did, she wasn't sure what to do. She glanced back. No one was watching her. Emma held on to the curved bars with one hand and reached for the top of them with the other. The pointed edge was so sharp that it sliced right through her palm. "Shit," she said, pulling her hand back in time to watch a drop of blood fall to the ground below her.
Deciding to ignore the pain, Emma reached back up and grabbed the edge of the pole again, this time by the side instead of the front. She jumped up and stretched for the adjacent pole, but she missed. Her feet slipped off the wires, leaving her hanging on by one hand. The ground was only feet below her, but she was terrified. How the hell did she expect herself to jump off of a building if the thought of falling no more than twelve feet frightened her to her very core?
Emma knew she had to do this now, or she was never going be able to gather the strength to get up here again. With the last ounce of her strength, she seized the bar she had been aiming for, brought her feet onto the bottom of the curved poles, and climbed awkwardly until her legs were high enough to swing over the curved edges of the bars. She was now hanging upside down, blond hair in her face, her legs dangling over the edge. If she wasn't so high up in the air and about to jump, Emma would have laughed at her odd position.
She struggled to sit up and breathed a sigh of relief as the blood rushed away from her brain and the intense headache disappeared. She hadn't expected it to be so hard to get up here. Emma hadn't expected it to be like a child's rock wall, but she was surprised when she got the feeling like she had just climbed Everest.
She was so proud of her efforts to get up there that she almost didn't want to let go. But she did.
She slid no more than an inch or two down the bars before she felt a tug on her red leather jacket.