Chapter 2

The sound of the rain falling against the pavement of the outskirts of Storybrooke hid the ragged breaths of the lanky figure that tried to outrun one of the many shadows that seemed to hover at both sides of the road dimly illuminated by the copper light bulbs.

Ashley muffled a scream as she fell, her ragged clothes muddling as she fell into one of the many poodles that covered the trail, the lamp she was closed to blinking once before dying, its reserve of ink and dust failing it. Ashley shot a scared glance to the bulb, commanding it to illuminate again as the first droplets of ichor started to slide down her face. The bulb followed her desires.

With shaky fingers, she raised her hand towards her cheek, narrowing her eyes as the view of the first droplet of ichor against her skin came into view.

"No…" She whispered as she looked at her back, the sound of the rain deafening anything else but her steps on the storm. Swallowing the sweet taste of the ichor, she felt her sight beginning to swim, her whole body heating up as it started to generate more ichor, short rivulets beginning to escape the corners of her mouth and eyes.

Shadowed by the cloak of the trees a figure eyed the whole scene while approaching the girl, a hum rumbling on its chest as the girl elevated her hands again towards the bulb, eyes closed, as a fog enveloped her, leaving nothing but her footprints behind as it disappeared. The shadow swallowed down a scream.

Regina closed the drawer that held her supply of Mix and sighed inwardly as she saw the oven turning back to life. She should have checked the levels of the mix before trying to cook and she would have usually do just that but as she turned towards the door of the kitchen through Henry's steps started to enter, she could do anything but admit that ever since she had seen the report her mind had been elsewhere.

Emma, she admitted to herself, had been right; she had lied and White was a little puny man that deserved a fireball right up…

"Mom!" Henry's voice had started to change, turning deeper and breaking at the most unexpected moments. The teen found it horrible but it never failed to make Regina smile and this time wasn't an exception as she broke into a grin.

Both mother and son stared at each other for a fraction of a second before the boy lunged forwards, hugging Regina tightly and resting his temple against hers. Something that had turned easier ever since his last growth spurt.

"I missed you." Declared the boy before taking a step backwards, his fingers stained with drying ink. At Regina's worried glance he hid them away behind his back, casting an apologetic look towards the woman. "I was trying to make the quill Emma gave me to work but…"

"She is coming tonight." Regina replied, smiling warmly at him. She had missed him as well and had despised the fact that thanks to the report they had needed to give to Leopold she hadn't been at home back when he had returned from school. "Perhaps you can ask her, see if there's something you should be doing."

Henry nodded and jumped, into the kitchen's counter. A trait he had acquired from Emma and

one Regina would have preferred for him not to. "Great! How was everything? Did you manage to catch that mad inventor?"

Regina felt her smile turning brittle at the memory of the empty laboratory and hours upon hours of investigation turned into dust but she cleared her throat, unwilling for that to be sawn by the boy.

"Everything…" She started, turning towards the oven when it dinged. "was more difficult than what we had thought it would. Leopold has given us a new case."

"So, you two will be discussing it later?"

Regina narrowed her eyes at the innocent look Henry shot in her way.

"You would think" She drawled "That a son of mine would lie better. Or just try to not snoop on me."

Henry snorted but held his hands up, admitting defeat.

"I just wanted to know, that's all."

Regina grabbed plates and glasses and pointed them to the boy who jumped off the counter and gingerly grabbed them.

"How was school?" She asked over her shoulder as he turned towards the door.

"We had that History exam I told you, remember?"

Regina hummed, closing her eyes. True.

"How was it?"

Henry returned and smiled at her, shrugging as Regina pointedly eyed his ink-stained fingers.

"I think I did it okay… I didn't remember the date when the Authors disappeared though but I linked that to the disappearance of magic so I think I got it covered."

"Did you get asked on the Dust?" Regina asked, her mind going back to the young John Doe.

Henry frowned but nodded, opening the faucet and cleaning his hands on it.

"Yeah, of course, the remains of what we have of magic. That and the ink of course, thanks to that we can use machines. Why?"

Regina blinked, snapping out of the feeling of uneasiness she had been feeling on the back of her throat ever since she had returned home.

"Just thinking outloud dear… And you should have remembered the date, you told me everything last week."

"I just got distracted… when is Emma going to arrive?"

The mansion stood just in the middle of the street that did its job as working as a line between the richer quarters and the middle class' and as Emma eyed the entrance of the place, generously bathed in the light of perfectly oiled lamps, she swallowed. She always had felt apprehension near

the mansion, feeling that she truly didn't belong there. The thought, deeply embedded on her psyche, had started to ease off but the feeling of uneasiness pervaded and so she stood for a couple more seconds in front of the place, hands on her pockets and still feeling as it mud covered her now pristine leather jacket. She still carried the badge with her, albeit hidden, and for a second she caressed the polished surface before knocking on the door three times.

The answer was almost immediate and so a boy was soon opening the door with the echo of Regina's voice trailing behind. "I'm going to start to get worried that you like her more than me."

"That would never happen." Emma replied to the scream, smiling at the kid and winking at him. "You're the one capable of feeding him something more than just grilled cheese."

"That I do." Regina answered back, exiting the kitchen and holding Emma's smile with one of her own.

At first these interactions had been difficult, tainted by the fact that four years ago, Henry had discovered that he had been adopted. Fear had mostly darkened the well-meaning jokes the two of them tried to get through the boy's sulking feelings through those times. Now, however, the tension had disappeared and as the three of them went to the living room Emma finally felt at ease.

"So… what we have for dinner?" She asked, grinning cheekily.

"Definitely not grilled cheese." Regina replied, smirking as Emma feigned to be wounded by her words. Henry, who had already taken his seat, rolled his eyes at them both before looking at Emma, rubbing his left hand absentmindedly in where several splotches of black ink still stained his fingers.

"How was Hades?" He asked as the two adults entered on his field vision again. Emma eyed Regina, arching both browns to the question and nodding as the brunette shook her head ever so slightly.

"It could have been better." She finally answered, sitting on the seat she usually took and smiling at Henry as the boy glanced at her. "Obviously because of me, your mother was…"

"Don't start." Regina replied, narrowing her eyes at the blonde before glancing at Henry. "As I've just told you everything turned out to be more complicated than we had thought; it wasn't Emma's fault."

The blonde grumbled a quick "fine" before jumping to the smell of lasagna, eyes twinkling as she eyed Regina and muttered a quick "thank you" that made the brunette smile. It was in quiet nights like this the ones where she felt more at ease with the blonde. Something, she quickly thought, would probably never actually tell to the blonde herself. Swallowing and giving Henry his first she laughed as Emma wolfed down her own plate.

Ashley could feel the cold starting to seep through her bones, her sight turning blurrier as the dust inside of her consolidated, creating connections on her brain that shouldn't be there. The smoke had carried her all the way to the northern side of the city, a place she had heard about but had never truly visited and if it hadn't been for the characteristic brass lamps with the city's symbol engraved on their base she would have thought that the Dust had carried her further away.

Coughing, she glanced at her back, at the empty streets flanked at both sides with well-lighted houses. The gold ichor hadn't stopped its fall and as she moved droplets of the substance kept on

falling to the road, leaving a trail she glanced at, nauseous.

She didn't have a lot of time, she knew that, she had seen others in similar situations but never this strong; beggars that drank the smallest amount of unadulterated dust found deep on the mines that were scattered around the whole forest and who were able, for a short amount of time, to reconnect with the fallen magic, the very one that was constricted, they used to say, by the machines they had created in order to control it. It deserved to be free, they said, and by taking the dust they were able to see the world as the Authors had once been.

Once you took a sip, however, your soul was lost to that dream and between the drug being persecuted and being lethal, fewer and fewer actually got away with it. There was always someone, though, that was stupid enough to consume it to the point in where the amount of energy the drug needed to keep the brain from functioning started to turn every liquid into ichor. That, Ashley thought, was the state from who no one returned.

Frantically, she briefly wondered if she could ask for help in the nearby houses but she quickly abandoned the idea; no one would help a stranger who was obviously about to die. Sobbing, she closed her eyes, feeling the tendrils of magic, the ones that had once run freely but she could now see coiled around the cogs of every lamppost, writing in gold their will to freedom.

She collapsed, she needed to ask for help, a part of her brain shouted, tell someone, tell anyone….

At the end, however, it was already too late.

"You really thought that you needed to explain to him what the exams are to enter in the Division?" Regina asked as she closed the door of her office with a huff. Upstairs the sound of Henry's shuffling around got muffled by the wooden door but Regina knew her son enough to know that they boy wasn't planning on sleeping any time soon.

"He wants to enter." Emma answered, shrugging and going to Regina's cider, pouring two fingers of the liquid into a tumbler and offering it to Regina as the brunette turned to look at her. "Is better if he goes knowing what's going to encounter. Wouldn't you have preferred that?"

"That's not the point." Regina replied, snatching the tumbler away and taking a seat in the small couch that dominated the center of the room. In the far end of the place a desk neatly kept was illuminated by the golden light, on its surface Regina's badge staring back at the two of them as Emma sat in front of her, elbows on her knees.

They knew what the point was; Regina didn't want for Henry to have the kind of life she had and Emma's attempts on easing the gruesome parts of their job whenever Henry asked about it got on her nerves. The boy, however, had been enamored with the idea of working for the team that ensured everything worked as it was supposed to do since he had been a toddler. Regina could remember him looking at her –by then- still new badge with shiny eyes and shaky fingers, asking Regina how had been her day back when all she did was take care of minor cases with several of the high-socialite of Storybrooke, the Mills surname still holding an echo than through the following years it had started to fade away. He, however, hadn't started to talk about actually becoming part of the force until Emma arrived.

Emma, the newbie at Storybrooke's office, the girl with a troubled past and a surname that had the same heat hers hold. Emma, the one who had found Henry when he had tried to escape the house, the information of him being adopted too strong, too brusque. Regina had been resentful of Emma at first, of this stranger that was paired up to her without any kind of explanation after Graham's

retirement. Resentful, at the end, of this blonde who kept on trying to make her smile and be there, no matter what. Until she, of course, had fallen for the blonde.

"I can talk to him if you want." Emma said, waking Regina up from her revering. "Tell him something about staying in school."

"He will probably answer that he is fed up with it." Regina replied, sighing before taking a sip of her drink. "He is coming more and more often from there telling me that he feels trapped there."

"I understand the feeling." Emma muttered under her breath. Shrugging when Regina eyed her worriedly. "Sorry, too deep?"

Regina sighed and shook her head, pointing at desk in where the badge glinted at them, defiantly. "Is this new case. White is many things but stupid is not one of them."

"I don't know, he seems very stupid to me." Emma answered beneath her breath, eliciting a small chuckle from Regina as she perked up. "Have any ideas of where we should start? I think this is the kind of case Leopold would want us to finish as quickly as possible."

Regina nodded, taking another sip from her glass before going towards the table. Pressing a panel, a small whirring was heard and a drawer opened at the right corner of the desk.

"He will but I think that this is more complicated than just a growth of the usual black market for the dust. Did you finish reading the report?"

Emma shook her head and picked the copy Regina was offering her. "I didn't have the time. Why? Is this about what you said back at White's?"

"Drug dealers are not stupid, Emma, they only offer a dose big enough to make their clientele wanting more. This boy though? His body reacted as if he had drunk ten times the usual doses."

Leafing through the report Emma glanced at Regina, noticing the dark circles and posture that spoke of the tension the other woman was probably feeling.

"If its drunk too many times…" She started, carefully but Regina interrupted her, sitting on her previous spot as she did so, hands intertwined and back completely straight.

"It lowers the natural defenses we have and the result is the same. I know, I remember."

Emma let her hands fall lax between her legs, looking sympathetically to the brunette who pinched the bridge of her nose before starting again.

"Look at him, Emma, he is nothing but a child. Too young to have started with Dust, definitely too young to have started to drink the amount necessary to reach this state. The samples of his blood came packed with the drug. No one with that amount on their body is able to drink so much before their body starts to collapse."

"So… he was forced to take it?"

"At the very least he wasn't conscious when the last few doses were administered."

Emma bit her thumb's nail, reading the details of the boy's body. A John Doe, it wasn't a mystery where he was from though; the almost torn to pieces shirt and jeans that their color had faded so much they couldn't be called blue anymore but some short of greyish in where splotches of blue signaled him as a worker on the docks. Everything on him seemed to be faded and Emma looked at his description imagining very well the same feeling of helplessness he could very well had felt.

"For someone to have that much they should have needed to buy it first to someone. We can ask around, see if anyone has bought big amounts of Dust even with those unspoken rules. If there is someone we can work from there."

Regina shot the blonde a grateful look; she had known Emma would trust her instincts being her the one who usually followed her gut whenever a complicated case was involved. Regina's link to the dust, however, made everything feebler and as she finished her drink she finally felt at ease as her clinical mind began unfolding a course of action.

"We could go to the docks first. Ask around; find who the people that found him were."

"They won't tell you who they are. You know the docks, everyone minds their own business… and if they don't they won't talk with us, Divisioners."

The use of the slang word for them floated in the air and still seemed to hover as Regina opened her mouth, ready to consider any other option. Her voice, however, was quickly drown by the heavy knocking and a feminine voice calling for Regina's name.

"Regina! I'm Ruby, open the damn door!"

The two women eyed each other before opening the door of the studio's door, the knocking becoming louder as they approached the main door of the mansion. Regina could hear Henry opening his own door upstairs, obviously intending to listen what was happening. Straightening her clothes, she put her hand on top of the handle, nodding imperceptibly at Emma who was already pressing the inner side of her own bracelet, a soft click floating towards her ears.

When they finally opened the door, Ruby Lucas looked at them before sighing exasperatedly, her enhanced glasses that let her see better during nighttime glistening against Regina's doorframe. She was wearing her badge prominently, the plaque dangling from her chest and tresses of her half-dyed hair shone red as she shook her head.

"Finally. I was starting to think that you were too busy to open, Regina. See I wasn't wrong."

Shooting an annoyed glance to the lanky brunette, Regina crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes as Ruby winked at her.

"There was nothing going on, Miss Lucas, may I ask you why are you knocking on my house at such hours?"

Ruby eyed Emma quickly who merely nodded, smiling slightly at Regina's tone but saying nothing that would dismiss the rumor she was sure that were going to end up on the bullpen by tomorrow morning. It wasn't that they hadn't been made fun of before after all. Leroy seemed just as interested on being sure that she hadn't ended up with a "Mills" than Ruby appeared to be. Albeit the blonde suspected Ruby's reasons were more about a possible bet than the fact of Regina's mother being a madwoman focused on using every being at her disposal; her daughter included.

"There's been a murder. Young girl, a couple of blocks from here. That's why I got permission from White to alert you. You're with that case, right? The one of the boy from the docks."

Emma could almost feel Regina getting paler at her side and so she took a step forward, sharing a quick glance with Regina who merely sidestepped, walking back inside and already calling for Henry who came down the stairs just as Regina was entering inside her office.

"Were you on patrol?" Emma asked to Ruby, trying to feign she wasn't mentally counting backwards, the trick she knew Regina used to do whenever too many stressors came into her way.

Ruby nodded earnestly, narrowing her eyes as the glasses on her forehead glowed, reflecting the light. "But don't worry." She said salaciously. "I won't tell on you, how you were with her majesty herself hours before the two of you arrived from a mission outside the city."

"Rubes…"

Emma's warning, however, got lost as Regina reappeared at their side, bracelet already on place and copper filaments fastened on her fingers, the contraption protesting on Emma's ears as Regina brushed against her right arm in where her bracelet also was. She looked frazzled, worried as Henry's earnest "Take care!" echoed at their backs. By the time Emma turned, however, the boy was already gone.

"Lucas." Regina started, her tresses falling around her eyes that glowed as she eyed the taller brunette as if she was the one hovering her and not around. "How does it look?"

Ruby easy demeanor changed right before their eyes and for a second Emma saw the girl Ruby didn't let many to see, the one who had come to the city trying to make something of herself.

"Bad, Regina. Pretty bad."

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