A/N:Happy New Year! I hope you have a good upcoming year.
The Ex
Five years ago at Stanford….
Emma walked back onto campus determined. She needed to get her girl back. She wanted her girl back. The school year was almost over and they all were just decompressing after a long exam week. Keedss were outside of their Greek houses celebrating.
"Hey, Emma!" One random student said as he passed her by. She blinked and smiled giving a little wave. And as she kept walking she heard him say. "That's the girl that got kicked out for cheating."
Emma turned and shouted back. "Yeah, I didn't cheat it's…" She sighed thinking what's the point of arguing? And kept walking to her old sorority. There was a beer pong table set up out on the Lawn and she stopped to look. "Oh! Hey, I'm just-" She took three ping pong balls and a paddle. "If you guys don't mind, I'm just gonna borrow these. Continue with your game." She looked at the boom box and turned it off. "Gonna have to turn this off, too." She turned to the window and hit it with several ping pong balls using perfect aim and physics. "Lilly !" Emma shouted.
"Come on." Someone complained that the music had turned off.
"Lilly! Hey!" She continued to shout. "It's Emma. Please, I-I want a chance to explain my side face-to-face."
Then her friend Shari opened the window. Emma's hopes rose then fell when she saw that woman's squished face. She was always telling Lilly to dump her. "If Lilly wanted to speak to you she would have returned one of your 28 phone calls," Shari yelled down at her.
Emma sighed. "Hi, Shari… Is she up there?" Shari only turned around and left her standing there. Though she left the window open so she spoke anyway. "Lilly … I, uh, I was on break at-at work. I'm actually working at an Apple store. Of all places, yeah." She shook her head, she was so embarrassed to be working at this store. "And I drove, you know, 346 miles straight from Burbank to see you and to tell you that I still love you."
A chorus of groans and "Loser!" Arose around her, and Emma blushed furiously. This was her grand gesture. She turned to leave when she heard. "Emma!"
Emma turned and smiled seeing Lily at the window. "Hey, hey, Lilly !" She said in relief. "Hey, um, I think I've thoroughly publicly embarrassed myself enough, so you think maybe we could go talk over some coffee or something like that?"
Lilly shook her head. "It's too late, Emma. It's over."
"When you say "it's over, " you mean, like, this conversation's over, right?" Emma hoped. "To be continued at the Starbucks?"
Shari then popped her head out of the window and said. "She's dating Daniel Colt now, Emma." Lily looked at Shari like she couldn't believe she had said that. Emma's heart broke.
"Daniel…" That sexy asshole struck again.
Shari smirked at Emma. "Deal with it."
Emma watched Lily, was she seriously not going to confirm or deny this? "Is that true?"
Lilly shook her head. "I'm sorry, Emma." She said stepping back into her room.
Emma sat at the Genius Bar, lost in a memory of Lily. Her music playlist had just hit a mix she had made for Lily, and her mind was flooded with the day she found out Daniel had taken her girl, just like he had taken Regina from her. If Emma herself hadn't found him so sexy, she could have placed the blame on the girls, but she couldn't compare with that man.
There was a loud "ding" in front of her.
The new assistant manager, Emmet, was being an asshole. Didn't he see Emma felt like wallowing in her lonely single status? Fuck, she needed to get laid, but in her life, there had only ever been two, and one of them left her for Daniel Colt. That man was a thorn in her side. "Oh, I hate to disturb your reverie there, Emma," Emmet said. Emma looked at the new annoyance in her life and tried not to glare. "I'm going to need you to get down to the Sheraton Conference Center for a tech-support call… Pronto."
Emma maintained facial neutrality and said, "Sure thing, Emmet." She looked at the box of doughnuts and tried to be friendly. "Got any Boston cream in there?"
The new assistant manager smiled at her and said, "Oh, yeah, several," then walked away to Marco's office.
"Brown-nosing jerk," Emma mumbled and reached for her keys, glad that her Genius Bar supervisor role allowed her to leave the store most days. She couldn't deal with people like him on days like these. She often imagined if the intersect would teach her how to fight and become a deadly weapon of sorts. They ought to count themselves lucky that it doesn't.
She walked out of the Apple Store and made her way to the Apple mobile.
Emma arrived at the conference and looked around at all the science nerds. This was not her field. She didn't study any of these things, but science nerds and computer nerds like her always seemed to link up at school. This was another thing that reminded her of Lily. She was a scene nerd. "Huh, BioScience conference," she said to the person she was hooking up the Mac system for with a flirtatious smirk. Maybe she could get laid for a change. "I bet these things get pretty wild, huh?"
The nerdy dude smiled at her, and she got back to her task. "All right, the networks should now be all set up with ten-based T Ethernet, connecting all the servers for the conference with a firewall in place…" Emma looked up and saw her. Lily Paige was at the conference. Her confident stride, different from that in college, she was a woman, and what a woman. Suddenly, Emma panicked and dropped under the table. She couldn't let Lily see her here. She was still working at the Apple store. She couldn't let her see that she hadn't done anything with her life in the six years since she had left her.
"Is there a problem?" The man she had just been flirty with asked after she dropped to the floor.
"Can you tell me if the attractive brown-eyed, slightly egg-headed brunette with an extremely cold heart is still here?" Emma asked.
The man looked around and spotted her. He smirked. "She's here." He looked down at Emma and smirked. "Why? Who is she?"
"Lily Paige, my ex-girlfriend. She broke my heart," Emma replied then looked around for something, anything. "I need a diversion. Would it be a terrible imposition for you to pull the fire alarm?"
The man didn't get a chance to answer. Not that he would have helped. He thought that he might flirt with the very attractive tech girl, but then she said that she was gay, and he was only slightly turned off. Girls like her never let guys like him watch anyway, let alone join in. And the brunette coming over to the table was just as attractive as the one hiding under it. "Hi, I'm Dr. Lily Paige. Is there someone that can help me with the tech requirements for my lecture?"
"Under the desk," he said, hoping for fireworks but knowing that he pretty much lost his shot.
"What?" Emma whispered, as Lily dropped down to look under the table.
"Hi," she said and was taken aback at seeing a beautiful blonde pretending to fix something under the table. "Emma?"
Emma jumped and hit her head on the table. "Ah!" she said and crawled out from under the table, rubbing the back of her head. "It was the flange just there," she said, talking to the man who had been standing there before, but had walked away.
She sighed and turned to Lily. "Emma Swan."
Emma raised her eyebrows as she removed her work badge from around her neck and into her pocket. "Present. Yes, that's me."
"It's me, Lily," the brunette said excitedly.
"Lily, oh, my gosh! Of course!" Emma said, as if she didn't dream of this woman sometimes. As if she hadn't been thinking about her just before she had shown up to this job. As if she still wasn't quaking with want for her because her hormones were telling her she needed to get laid right now. "Hi," Emma said, and they reached out to hug each other over the table.
"Yes, Hi," Lily said, still looking Emma over. She flipped her hair flirtatiously and tilted her head.
"Hey, you!" Emma said awkwardly. "How are you? Good. So good to... see you."
"You, too. How long has it been?" Jill asked with a smile radiant as if she hadn't broken Emma's heart at all.
"Five years, four months-ish, give or take, kind of in that neighborhood," Emma said, pain still evident in her eyes. "Uh, what have you been up to?"
Lily's smile faltered a bit. "Uh, well, after Stanford, I got my Ph.D. in biomedical engineering."
"Did you?" Emma asked, a bit jealous… She had a Stanford degree too, but what was she doing with it? Absolutely nothing.
"Yeah. I'm giving a presentation at the conference on infectious diseases."
"Lovely." Emma said, starting to understand Regina's reluctance to go to her high school reunion.
"And you?" Lily asked.
Emma faltered. "And me? And me…" What could she say that didn't make her sound pathetic? Emma, forgetting she does have an awesome job she can't talk about, has gotten so much better at lying, though. "Uh-uh, still in the computer game, you know? Yeah, I-I-I work my own, my own little, little-little company. 16, 17- I can't remember which- stores. But every once in a while, I like to do the installs myself, you know, don the uni, kind of get my hands messy."
"I'm really happy for you, Emma," Lily said with a smile. Her brow furrowed a little. "The last time I saw you, you were- you were working at an Apple Store."
"Ah!" Emma said, wishing that Lily didn't remember that. "That was a wonderful growing experience. Really, really character-building. And I wouldn't- wouldn't change it for the world."
"Well... there's definitely some things I would change," Lily said, frowning. "Especially about us." Emma's green eyes met Lily's brown eyes, and her heart raced. Maybe this could happen. It had been so long since Lou.
"There you are," an accented voice interrupted their conversation. Emma turned to look at the handsome man that had walked up to Jill, and she thought, Of course, she left me for a man. Maybe I had been just an experiment in college. "We're running late."
"Oh," Lily said, smiling at the man. "Guy, this is my old friend Emma Swan- Emma, this is my boss Guy LeFleur."
Emma sighed in relief to know this was her boss. "Hi. Nice to meet you," Emma said, extending a hand to the man.
Guy recoiled from her hands and did not touch them. "I work with germs, so, you know." His voice and the sight of him then triggered a flash in Emma's vision. Of several different biological weapons. "I'm sure your friend's busy. Has, uh, computers to fix. Shall we?" the man said, and Emma was mute.
Lily smiled at her boss. "Sure." Then she turned to Emma, who was like a stoic statue. She was getting really good at masking her flashes. "Emma, I'm staying at the Hotel Waldron, so give me a call if you want to grab a cup of coffee."
Emma smiled as Lily and Guy walked away. "Yeah, uh, well, you know, I'm busy… I'll check with my people."
She had to check with her people, alright. Emma pulled out her phone right away and called Castle.
She met the other two women in her team and awaited General Mills' call. Emma avoided Regina's eyes. Because that's just how they have been the past few weeks. They weren't anything and too much to each other. Emma knew she had to cut the infatuation with Regina. But she still had to pretend for her sister's sake, and it was driving her insane.
"I just need to get laid. It's my hormones, nothing else," she told herself as she sat on the table in front of the communicator. Finally, the general called in, and they began the debriefing. "Your ex-girlfriend's boss, Guy LeFleur, is the head research scientist for the European company Cole-MacGregor Pharmaceuticals. MI6 has reports that he may have developed a weapon that he plans to sell to the highest bidder."
"Is Lilly involved?" Emma asked.
"It's your job to find out, Emma," the general said. Regina shifted uncomfortably. "Mal and Regina will surveil Dr. LeFleur. We need you to reconnect with Lilly. Find out what she knows about Guy."
Regina watched Emma's reaction to the news. The blonde stiffened, then she smiled somewhere between nervously and delighted. "Right, right, right, right," Emma said to her mother, "When you say 'reconnect,' you mean send her an e-mail or invite her to be my new Facebook friend, right?"
Regina looked back to the screen. Her mother looked bored, as if she was tired of having to remind Emma that she was a spy. "Call her at her hotel and make a date. See if you flash on anything she says or anyone you meet."
Emma's eyebrows met her hairline. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, a date with my ex? No, General, that is a terrible idea." Emma interjected, sliding off the table. "You see, she broke my heart. She destroyed me. She took all of my confidence, my mojo."
Mal quirked a brow. "You had mojo?"
Emma glared at the older blonde. "I was on my way." Then she turned back to the General. "Oh, and by the way, she slept with Daniel Colt."
"Hmm. Who hasn't?" Mal said with a roll of her eyes.
Regina glared at the older blonde and turned to Emma. "Look, Emma, I know that Lilly hurt you, but maybe seeing her again will give you the closure that you've always wanted." She said kindly. "You have done a lot for the CIA, and we're gonna make you look good."
"Yeah, look on the bright side," Blaize said coming closer to the younger woman, "Now you can get your mojo back." Then she tapped her on her cheek and kept moving toward her post.