Hi All, here's a small filler chapter to bridge that gap and start your weekend. Thank you to all of my awesome readers and reviewers! I can not explain how much your feedback means to me! As always, please tell me what you think! Oh, I also wanted to add that if there is another site out there that you know of that links to stories, please feel free to share! I don't mind!

Chapter 22

I woke up in a hospital bed. I lifted my left hand only to wince in pain. I looked down to see an IV stuck in the back of it. I wanted to rub my face, but I couldn't because my hand had a needle stuck into it. I closed my eyes and my head bounced back onto my pillow. I tried to pick it up again, but it just seemed to be so heavy. I was so disoriented. I felt someone holding and rubbing small circles the back of my right hand. It was a dainty; I followed the trail from the fingers up the arm and to the face of the woman. My head was in a fog; was that my mother that was sitting next to my bed? "Mom?" I croaked out barely above a whisper.

"Shh..take it easy, sweetheart." I heard her say. Her voice was calming. It made me feel content. I nodded and closed my eyes, squeezing the hand that was holding mine just a little. I tried to lift my other hand to my face again, but the pinch from the IV shot through my hand and up my arm.

"Wh…what happened?" I stuttered. The confusion and cloudiness was so overwhelming. I couldn't remember what had happened or how I had gotten to the hospital. I looked around the room, looking for a clue; any clue. I saw someone sitting on the chair in the corner. The lights were dim and my head was pounding, I wasn't coherent enough to decide who the person was, but it looked to be male. "Dad?" I guessed.

The figure moved to my bedside, "I'm right here, baby." He brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes.

"What's going on? Where's Kil..Killian?" I couldn't talk without some kind of hitch or stutter. But I didn't have the energy to move let alone care about how I was talking.

"Killian went to pick up Henry from school. You passed out at the station. JC called the ambulance and they rushed you to the ER." She explained it all to me but I still did not comprehend her words.

"JC?" It barely came out of my mouth. Bits and pieces of what had happened started to fill in the gaps of my memory. I remembered him showing up at the station and us talking. But right now, I just couldn't recall the conversation.

I followed my father with my eyes as he crossed the room toward the door. "I'll have the nurse call Dr. Whale," he announced and my mother nodded.

"I don't feel good…" I muttered. "I think I'm going to…" I didn't get the words out of my mouth when I began to dry heave. My mother was quick to hold an appropriate bag to my mouth. My head was pounding and the whole world seemed to be spinning.

"It's ok, sweetheart, just rest. Dr. Whale will be by in a minute." She began to run her fingers through my long hair. It was a gesture that I had wished for a million times when I was sick as a child and it was one that I reveled in now that I was an adult with a mother to comfort me.

"Well, hello there, Sheriff Swan." Dr. Whale had just entered the room followed by one of the nurses and David. The nurse was pushing a cart that had all of the normal equipment to check vital signs. Dr. Whale pulled a stool close to the bed as the nurse began to use her tools from the cart. "How are you feeling?" he asked looking down at his clipboard with a pen in his hand.

"Like I was hit by a truck," I responded; words were coming easier now as was the sarcasm. How did he think that I felt?

I saw my mother raise the bag before she dropped it in the trash, "she just a…"

"Uh, yeah…that is to be expected after a shot of glucagon." Dr. Whale explained. "Miss Swan, can you tell me what you ate today?"

I had to think about that for a moment. I didn't remember eating much that day, I know that I called in an order in to Granny's, but I never picked it up. "Ah, I had a bowl of cereal this morning…"

"Anything else?" he asked as he scribbled notes on the clipboard.

"Actually, Dr. Whale, she had about three bites of cereal before she pushed the bowl away and left for day." I looked at my mother; her recollection of my breakfast was true. I did only have a few of bites.

"And what about lunch?" Dr. Whale prompted. "Did you have lunch?"

At this point in time, much of the day was a blur, but I didn't remember eating anything for lunch. I gently shook my head.

"That's what I thought." He wrote a few more things down on my chart and turned to my parents. "It seems that Emma has had an episode of hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. Just a few bites of cereal were not enough to keep her blood sugar level up for the day and she passed out. We gave her a shot of glucagon, which was able to raise her sugar levels. As your blood sugar rises you will begin to feel well again. Have you ever been hypoglycemic before?" He directed the question back to me, I shook my head. "Is it often that you go an entire day without eating anything?" Again I shook my head and he jotted down the notes.

"Ok, I have ordered a tray for you from the cafeteria; I want you to eat all of the food when it arrives. In an hour we will check your levels again, if your sugar level is good then you can go. No more skipping meals. This is not something to mess with, Miss Swan. Although I am not going to require daily blood checks yet, I am going to order blood work on six month intervals to monitor your Hb1Ac. Take the remainder of the day to rest; you should be fine to resume normal activity that includes eating, tomorrow." I nodded, my mother thanked him.

Things were rapidly becoming more coherent. The fog in my head had lifted and energy was seeping back into my body. I was able to push myself up in my bed a little and finally rub my face. Although, I would have much rather had my grilled cheese from Granny's instead of the hospital food that was now going to have to choke down.

"Mom!" Henry came rushing through the hospital room door. He rushed to my side and put his arms around me the best that he could manage. I returned his hold the best that I could with the top half of his body lying across mine. My left arm was still attached to the IV so rested my chin on the top of his head and held him with my free hand.

I could see the panic in his eyes as he rushed in, "It's ok, Kid." I reassured him. "I just learned the hard way that I need to eat more than three bites of cheerios in a day."

Henry finally lift his body from mine and took up residence on the stool that Dr. Whale had abandon as Killian approached the other side of my bed. Killian leaned down to give me a quick kiss. I wrapped my hand around his neck and pulled him into one a little more seductive. After I let him pull away, I mouthed a quick thank you to him for getting Henry from school. He nodded with a smile, "how are you feeling, love?"

"Much better, now that you're here," I said as I shot him an alluring look followed by a wink. Of course, I cracked into a mischievous laugh when I heard my father groan. "Payback is a bitch, Father…" I teased without moving my eyes from Killian's face.

"That's not payback, that's fighting dirty," he pouted. I couldn't help but laugh. He looked like a little kid who was going to take his ball and go home because he didn't get his way.

"So who is this guy who brought in? Who called for help?" If I didn't know better, I would have said that Killian's question was laced with jealousy. But then I remembered, he had never met JC. In all of the times that JC was in Storybrooke it had only been immediate family who had the pleasure. He didn't know JC, Lily, or the horrible story.

"JC is my foster brother…and apparently…cousin." I blurted out.

Oh that one blindsided David and Mary Margaret too. "What?!" they both shouted at the same time. "Henry, go ask JC to come in here please." Henry jumped to David's command and exited the room. "How is that possible?" he asked as he turned back to me.

Killian, who was holding my hand, gave it a gentle squeeze, "Would you like me to take leave, love?" he asked.

I shook my head, "No, you need to hear this as much as they do." I waited for JC to enter followed by Henry before I began to tell the story of our conversation at the sheriff station.

Over the next twenty minutes, while I nibble on the delicious hospital food, JC told my family the same story that he told me at the station. To say that they were shocked would have been an understatement. He explained it all; James being his father, the magic bean, the task of him and I bringing together the brother's bond, and resetting one single event in time. The only problem was that his answers to our questions only led to more questions. Everyone sat in my hospital room silent. Eerily silent. It was Henry who finally broke that silence.

"What's going to happen to me?" He asked. His question was innocent. And I honestly had only one answer.

"Nothing…" The group gave me puzzled look. They all knew what the outcome of changing one single event in time would be. It would change everything as we knew it. And quite frankly, I screwed time up before, I wasn't about to do it again. "Nothing is going to happen to you Henry, because JC and I aren't going to do it."

"But how can you stop it? You don't even know what it is. You can say that you're not going to do it, but if you don't know what it is that you're supposed to do, how can you avoid accidentally doing it?" Henry made an excellent point. We couldn't avoid something when we didn't know what we had to avoid. The problem was that I didn't know how to find out either. JC knew what we supposed to do, but not how.

"I guess we just need to sit down and put together all of the clues that we have." I didn't know what else to say. I didn't have the answers, and oh God, I wish I did.

"And what event is it that you're supposed to reset?" That question was the first thing to come from my father's mouth since he sent Henry to fetch JC.

I looked at David like he had just spoken a foreign language and I didn't understand a word. I had never thought about the event itself. I was so determined that I wasn't going to do the job that I never took the time to think about the event. This one little task was huge. There were a million events that could have been reset and each individual little thing could change, no would change, the course of everything that we have known to be true in our lives.

The tension in the room was mounting so high that I was relieved when Dr. Whale entered the room. "I'm sorry. Am I interrupting something?" he asked. He obviously felt the edginess as he moved further into the room. How could he miss it?

"No, you're fine, Doctor." Mary Margaret answered for all of us. "Can we take Emma home now?"

"Well, I am here to test her level now that she has eaten," he lifted my hand and rubbed an alcohol swab across the pad of my index finger before he gave a quick prick with a needle, "if her number is ok, then yes." It only took a couple of seconds for him to have his formal answer. "97…perfect. I will have the nurse bring in your discharge papers and instructions and you are free to go."

"Thank you," I said to him as he removed the IV that was stuck into the back of my hand. That stupid thing had been causing me discomfort all evening. But when he finally left, I looked to my parents for advice. "What do we do next?" I was truly concerned over this latest prophecy. I was literally afraid to make any move especially any move that included JC. With my luck, something as simple as a hug could have sent us all reeling back in time. For only being 14 years old, Henry gave me a lot of shit to think about. And shit was the only way that I could think to describe it.

"We call Regina to meet us at the loft and we go through everything that we know so far," my Dad offered and we all silently agreed. I doubted that Regina new anything more of the prophecy than we did, but she was knowledgeable in the ways of magic.

I let a small tear escape from my eye and roll down my cheek. My mother was the only one to notice and she quickly wiped it away with the pad of her thumb, "I'll go ask for your paper work, honey," she smiled.

I smiled back a thank you as I pushed myself up into a full sitting position. Because I was brought into the ER and wasn't admitted I was lucky to not have to put on one of those drafty hospital gowns. I looked around for my boots while the rest of the group followed my mother out of my room.

"You ok?" My father held my boots out in front of me. I thought that he had left as well, but I was thankful that he didn't. I nodded but it was lie and he knew it.

"I don't know what to do," I confessed. I was scared, but I was trying to hold a brave face, especially in front of Henry.

"We'll figure it out, together." He lifted my chin to force me to look at his face. "You are not alone in this, understand?"

I nodded. "Thanks, Dad." I gave him a slight smile then slipped on my boots. He reached for my hand to pull from the bed.

He took my face into the palms of his hands, "Together, okay?" I nodded and he placed a kiss on my forehead. "I love you, baby," he gave me the wink that he reserved only for me then offered his arm to escort me from the emergency room. Our work was just beginning.