A/N: this chapter is a bit shorter than normal (more of a filler chapter than anything) so I decided to post it early to make up for it :) hope you all enjoy! x

Chapter Three

'You look like crap, Emma.'

The sheriff raised her eyes from her hot chocolate, arching her unbruised eyebrow as sardonically as she could manage.

'Thanks so much,' she said as August slid into the booth opposite her. Other than the elderly couple who always seemed to be sat in the same spot by the window regardless of what time she arrived and Granny herself, Emma and the newest resident of Storybrooke were the only two people sat in the diner.

'It's barely seven o'clock,' August said, gesturing to the watery sunlight that was struggling to make its way through the restaurant's half-opened shutters. 'Why are you here so early?'

'I could ask you the same question,' Emma said dryly.

'Early riser,' August said with a crooked smile.

'And what makes you think that I'm not one?'

'Generally people who wake up at this time tend to look like they've actually been to sleep in the first place,' the man said, leaning forwards across the table. He was still smiling, as he always seemed to be, but it was strained. 'Have you slept at all?'

'Not recently,' Emma said, taking a sip of her cocoa. The taste of cinnamon inexplicably made her wince, but she forced it down.

'And, food?' August asked in a low voice. 'When was the last time that you ate something?'

'What are you, my father?' Emma asked, rolling her eyes. She leaned back in her chair as Granny approached the table with August's order, smiling wryly at the both of them.

'No,' August shrugged. 'I'm just concerned.'

'I'm fine,' Emma replied. Her automatic response to everything.

August observed her thoughtfully, taking in the marshy greyness beneath her eyes, before he spoke again.

'You don't have to do that, you know,' he said, holding his takeaway cup loosely between both of his hands. 'You're not okay. And no one's expecting you to be – I don't know if you're avoiding mirrors at the moment as well as sleep and all other forms of sustenance, but you look terrible. You can excuse me for being worried about you.'

'With all due respect, August,' Emma sighed, tugging a hand through her unwashed hair, 'I don't know you. You only told me your name last week and, yes, I do know that you're still talking to my son at every possible opportunity. You're still suspicious. So, thanks for the concern – but I can do without it.'

'And yet,' August said, his lips quirking upwards once more, 'you're not telling me to go away.'

'I'm sorry, but I kind of thought that that was implied.'

He laughed coolly, shaking his head.

'Ah well, what can I say,' he said as he stood up to leave. 'I've never been very good at doing what I'm told anyway.'

Emma raised her chin to watch him go, her forehead creased.

'I get the impression that I'll be seeing you here again,' he said, rapping his knuckles on the table. 'Next time, I'm buying.'

Emma raised her eyebrows. 'I thought that you already took me out for a drink?'

'I did,' he said, his blue eyes flashing. 'But, sometimes, I do like to treat a girl to more than just free water from an old well.'

Emma laughed in spite of herself. August's face creased.

'I'll see you tomorrow, Emma,' he said, walking back through the diner and disappearing through the door that led to the hotel, not turning back to look at her as he went.

Just outside of the diner, Regina sat in her black mercedes watching them. She had decided to go into work two hours earlier than normal that Monday morning in an attempt to get some of her own paperwork under control: she knew that she would be spending the majority of her day at the sheriff station, standing over Sidney's shoulder and trying to fully gauge just how much of Emma's job he was actually going to be capable of doing. As she had driven past Granny's, however, she had caught sight of a flash of blonde through the window. Blonde that had been talking to suspicious, bearded brown.

She too watched as he left Emma alone at the table, her face a watercolour wash of green and grey in the sickly morning sunlight. She didn't turn to look out of the window, and so she didn't see the darkness that clouded the mayor's face. Glaring at August's leather-clad back, Regina tightly pursed her lips. That's two people, then, she thought. Two people that he shouldn't be taking an interest in.

'Emma,' Mary Margaret's voice drifted through the haze that was filling the blonde's head. 'You're not eating again.'

Emma blinked, looking up to where her roommate was watching her from across the table. 'Huh?'

'You haven't eaten anything.'

Emma glanced down at her plate: although the majority of food on it had been cut up and moved around a dozen times, it was still undeniably full. She sighed.

'Oh,' she said, reluctantly reaching for her fork. 'Right. Sorry – it's good. I guess I'm just… you know.'

'I know,' Mary Margaret said, quickly reaching across the table to squeeze Emma's hand. 'I get it, I promise you. But you need to try, Emma – you're never going to get better if you end up so weak that you pass out any time you try and walk down the stairs.'

Emma offered her roommate a tight smile, picking up a forkful of chicken and forcing it between her lips. It tasted like lead, and it dropped like a heavy weight in her stomach as if it were made of it too. Forcing herself not to grimace, Emma cut off another piece and braced herself for a second bite. The plate before her seemed endless; an interminable landscape that had defeated her before she had even started to wade through it.

Mary Margaret watched the anxious pulsing of the muscles in her jaw as she tried to psych herself up for the next mouthful, her shadowy green eyes creased with pain. Eventually the brunette found herself reaching out once more, pushing Emma's shaking hand back down to the table just as she went to force the fork back up to her lips.

'It's okay,' she said softly, taking the piece of metal out of her hand and removing the plate from under her nose. 'Don't force yourself. Let's try and find something else for you – does anything seem appealing right now? Do you want some ice cream?'

Emma let out a tiny snort of laughter, leaning back in her chair. 'I'm not six, Mary Margaret. And I haven't had my tonsils taken out.'

Her roommate stood up, carrying both of their plates across to the sink. 'I know. But it seemed as good a place as any to start. What do you fancy?'

'I fancy a drink,' Emma muttered, running a fingernail along one of the ridges in the table's dented surface.

'Emma,' Mary Margaret sighed. 'I'm not giving you alcohol – you haven't eaten more than a mouthful since Wednesday. One sip and I'd have to take you to the emergency room.'

'Good,' Emma said, closing her eyes. 'They might give me a sedative while I'm in there.'

'You won't need one if you've gone into an alcohol-induced coma,' Mary Margaret said sharply, piling the empty dishes into the sink before sticking her head into the fridge. 'I can make you some mac and cheese?'

'Mary Margaret. I'm okay. Really.'

'We have chocolate pudding. And leftover meatloaf.'

'I'm really not hungry.'

'Bacon?'

'Mary Margaret, please,' Emma said, her voice gradually getting smaller. She forced herself to turn around in her chair, one hand clasping hold of her ribs as she looked over at where her roommate was still surveying every cupboard and drawer that held any kind of food. The brunette had her back to her, but Emma could already sense the anxiety that was streaked across her round face. She heard a sigh.

'I don't know what to do.'

Heaving herself up from her chair, Emma approached her roommate with her bottom lip caught between her teeth. 'You don't have to do anything.'

'I have to look after you,' Mary Margaret said, her arms folded across her chest and her thumb unconsciously spinning her green ring around on her finger.

'No you—'

'Of course I do,' she said, turning to look at her roommate's face with an agonised expression. 'Emma. You're broken. And, honestly, sometimes I can't bare to watch you – you're still trying to convince me that everything's okay, but I'm not an idiot. You haven't smiled in days, you haven't slept in even longer, and any time there's a knock at the door or the phone rings or even a bird flies past the window, you jump so hard that you nearly break another rib. Of course I need to look after you – I just wish that you'd let me.'

Emma stood silently for a moment, her arms hanging awkwardly by her sides. Mary Margaret's hazel eyes darted across her face, taking in each and every bruise for the umpteenth time as she waited for her to respond. She braced herself for an angry retort and the slamming of the front door.

What she got, however, was unexpected tears welling up in glassy, green eyes.

'I've…' Emma swallowed, looking down at her feet. 'I've never had anyone look after me before. It just… might take some getting used to.'

And then a pair of arms were around her, squeezing her as tightly as they could without hurting her even further. Emma closed her eyes, letting her hands slip around Mary Margaret's waist as she rested her chin against her warm shoulder.

'You'd better get used to it,' Mary Margaret murmured, smiling sadly into her blonde hair. 'I'm not going anywhere any time soon.'

Emma sat cross-legged in the centre of her bed, listening for any sounds coming from downstairs so as to check that Mary Margaret had definitely gone to bed. The apartment had been silent for almost twenty minutes before she finally crept over to her bedroom door, peering around the corner and down the stairs. The kitchen was dark. Emma pulled the sleeves of her thick jumper down over her hands, taking a nervous step out into the hallway with her breath held in her lungs.

She padded down the metal staircase, her feet silent in her thick socks. By the time that she had reached the wooden floor of the kitchen she could hear the soft snoring of her roommate from beyond the thin white curtain that shielded her bedroom. Emma slipped across the room towards it nonetheless, peering behind the fabric to see that Mary Margaret was fast asleep, curled up on her side with her hands clasped beneath her pillow. A tiny smile came over the blonde's face for just a second as she watched her wrinkling up her nose in her sleep.

Emma tiptoed back across the kitchen a few moments later, her breath catching at the back of her throat as she walked towards the front door. Reaching out for the handle, she found herself pausing. Her hand fell back to her side and she bit at her lip.

'Come on, Emma,' she muttered to herself, taking the deepest breath that her broken ribs would allow. She reached out once more, grabbed hold of the door handle, and pulled it towards her. She automatically closed her eyes.

When she forced them back open again, the space outside the door was empty. Just as it had been every night that week. A sigh of relief escaped from her trembling lips and she shut the door with a faint snap, turning the lock shut. She pulled on the handle once more to make sure that it was secure, and then she turned back to the rest of the apartment.

Beneath the kitchen table was her first stop, then the space behind the couch. She kept her breath held securely in her lungs the whole while, her sharp hearing waiting for a creak or a scrape from anywhere in the apartment other than below her own feet. Both of those places were clear and so she quickly moved onto the bathroom, checking behind the shower curtain and, quite inexplicably, in the tiny cupboard beneath the sink. Each place was empty. She returned to the full expanse of the apartment, stood in its centre with her hands tugging at the bottom of her sleeves, surveying it one last time. She forced herself to accept that it was definitely empty: she was safe.

And still she crept back up the stairs and checked under her own bed, in her wardrobe, behind the curtains. She tugged on the locked windows, gently at first and then more fiercely, feeling the old paint flaking off beneath her fingers. The window remained firmly shut and, finally, she let herself sit back on her bed, casting one last look around the room that up until that week had seemed far too small for her: now, suddenly, it was cavernous. Part of her longed for the tiny shoebox of a room that had been her home for the eleven months that she'd spent in prison.

Reaching for her nightstand, she picked up her gun and checked that it was fully loaded. She placed it back onto the wooden surface, easily within arms reach if she woke up needing it. Then she took a deep, shuddering breath, feeling her flinty ribs creaking around the walls of her lungs, before she finally forced herself to turn the light off. The shadows grew, their eyes watching her. Emma slipped her body beneath the sheets, huddling up with only her eyes and forehead visible over the top. The silence of the apartment cackled at her.

The digital clock on her nightstand read 1:03am. For the next five hours she laid in the same spot, motionless, and watched the minutes as they walked away from her. Her chest hurt slightly less with every millimetre of watery sunlight that began to creep its way over the horizon.

When Mary Margaret got up for school at half past six, the front door was unlocked and Emma's bed was empty. Across town, her roommate sat at her now regular table in Granny's, her eyes swollen and sleepless, with a hot chocolate that she couldn't bring herself to drink clasped between her fingers.