Writing Challenge: Breaking Point, Chapter Five (5/12)

Title: Breaking Point
Summary: Emma leaving town was out of the question, and that was perfectly fine with Regina. As a matter of fact, Emma absolutely must stay in Storybrooke for a long, long time. And she knew just how to accomplish that.
Spoilers: Up through 1x19, "The Return."
Characters: Mostly Emma, Regina, and Mary Margaret, with special appearances by Henry, August, Archie, David, and Dr. Whale along the way.
Rating/Warning: PG-13, mostly for language.
Disclaimer: Once Upon a Time and its characters were created by Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and are owned by ABC. I'm just playing in someone else's sandbox. Please don't sue me! You won't get much.
Author's Note: I wrote the first section of this chapter at 11:30 one night and truthfully, I didn't change it all that much during edits. I mostly added clarifications because whipping something out in twenty minutes at 11:30 pm does not lend itself well to clarity. Trying to get a handle on poor Emma's emotional state after a night like that for the second section was a blast.

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Emma wasn’t at all prepared for the nightmares. She should have been, what with all the emotional upheaval, but the medicated haze she’d been entrenched in since that morning had kept her blissfully unaware. Until now. She didn’t know what had changed; they were still pumping her full of drugs. But something had changed and now she had to suffer through the nightmares.

Some of them had a storyline she could follow--not that she wanted to--but most were just a series of images, rapid-fire, one after the other.

Graham telling her he remembered and then falling down at her feet, dead.

Regina, a human heart in her hand, squeezing, blood coursing down her arm, dripping from her elbow, and pooling on the floor.

Mary Margaret taking one of the apples Regina had given Emma her first few days in town, biting into it before Emma could stop her.

Henry, his eyes wide with fear, his mouth open in a silent scream as Regina advanced on him, cackling like a Halloween witch.

Every time she woke from one of her nightmares, the sedative Dr. Whale had ordered would pull her back under in seconds and a new one would begin. More images, more flashes, each more intense and more awful than the last. Each building on the one before, compounding it, making it worse.

Graham unbuttoning his shirt and showing Emma the hole in his chest where his heart had been.

Henry running towards her only to have Regina step in between them, grab Henry, drag him away, and lock him in a dungeon.

Mary Margaret lying in a coffin, her eyes closed, her hands crossed over her stomach.

Regina, a glittering silver crown on her head, standing over Mary Margaret’s (or was it Snow White’s?) coffin with a triumphant smile on her face.

“No, no, no!” The cry woke her and it was a few seconds before she recognized the voice as her own. She became aware of the nurses in her room then, heard their whispered conversation, caught something about upping her dosage.

No. Upping her dosage meant they wanted her to sleep more, but she didn’t want to sleep. She couldn’t bear it, couldn’t handle any more terrifying images. She tried to speak, to plead with them not to up her meds, but the words wouldn’t come. She was whimpering, she was crying, but she couldn’t speak.

Please, please, don’t make me go back to sleep, she wanted to beg but still nothing came. Her lips wouldn’t--couldn’t?--form the words

Frustrated, terrified, she began pulling at the restraints. At first it was just to try to get the nurses’ attention but her panic grew, and soon she was kicking her legs, thrashing her arms. She barely felt the leather chafing her damaged skin. Please, stop! she cried, but only in her head.

And then she felt herself drifting as the medication began pulling her back into a world filled with perversions of the truth. No! No, not again! But even as she tried to struggle, she couldn’t make her limbs comply. She longed to kick but her legs remained still. She tried moving her arms but they, too, had lost their fight.

Emma whimpered, finally managing to murmur a barely audible, “No” as the sedative drew her back into her nightmares.

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Dr. Archie Hopper took a seat in the visitor’s chair in Emma Swan’s hospital room. The patient--and he could barely analyze his own feelings on having to regard Emma as a psych patient--was seated in the chair across from him, staring out the window. What she was looking at, he had no idea.

Bright red abrasions ringed her wrists and ankles from her struggle against the restraints. Dr. Whale had informed him that they’d had to remove the restraints during the night to keep her from bruising or rubbing her skin raw.

“Emma, do you want to tell me what happened last night?” he asked.

Slowly, she shifted her gaze and focused her bleary eyes on him. She was still medicated, though not quite as heavily as the day before. “I had nightmares.”

“Pretty violent reaction to some nightmares, Emma.” A shrug. “Do you remember fighting with the nurses?”

She gave a barely perceptible nod. “They wanted me to go back to sleep. I didn’t want to. I couldn’t tell them, but I didn’t want to.”

“Because of the nightmares.” Another nod. “Do you remember what they were about?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I think it might.”

“Maybe, but I don’t want to tell you.”

“Can I ask why?”

She shrugged.

Archie let out a breath through his nose and decided to let the conversation drop. He wanted to observe what she did in the silence.

Her gaze again drifted to the window. Her eyes searched for a moment and then focused on something in the middle distance. He surreptitiously glanced out the window himself, but unless she was watching the leaves in the trees across from the parking lot flutter in the breeze, he had no idea what could have been capturing her attention.

He cleared his throat, trying once again to draw her into conversation. “If you don’t want to talk about the nightmares, let’s talk about why you’re here in the first place.” Although he could tell she’d heard him, she did not turn away from the window.

Archie leaned forward, tapped her knee to get her attention, and lowered his voice. He shouldn’t be telling her what he was about to tell her, but he needed her to understand what was at stake. “I don’t know if you know how these things work, Emma, but the seventy-two hours is a minimum. If the doctors here aren’t convinced that you’re not a danger to yourself or others, they won’t release you. Do you understand?”

She gave a slow nod.

“So you really need to tell me what happened at breakfast yesterday.”

Emma took a deep breath, set her shoulders, and looked Archie in the eye for the first time. “She made me mad.”

“What did she do to make you mad?” He was losing her again; her gaze shifted, this time to inspect her hands in her lap. “Did she do something? Say something?” A flinch. “What did she say?”

“What does it matter?” Her tone was flat, a side effect of the meds. Still, there was a sense of hopelessness in her voice that Archie found troubling. “I’m going to tell you what she said, she’s going to say she would never say such a thing, and which one of us is going to be believed now?”

“I’m not here to be judge, jury, and executioner, Emma,” he told her. “All I want is to understand.”

For a long moment, she didn’t move a muscle. Then she pulled her feet off the floor and hugged her knees to her chest.

All right, so he was going to have to dig a bit. He did have to wonder, though, how much of her reticence was actually her and how much of it was the medication. “At the diner, you kept saying that Regina killed Graham. Is that what she told you?”

She didn’t respond. Just as Archie was getting ready to rephrase the question, she mumbled, “She said she crushed Graham’s heart. In her hand. She crushed it to dust.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Why would she tell you something like that?”

“Ask her,” she shrugged. “You’d probably have a field day with her.”

Archie bit his lower lip to hide his smile. At least her sarcastic sense of humor was still there somewhere under all the meds.

“Archie, can you do me a favor?”

“Depends on the favor.”

“Will you let them know about the nightmares? Tell them that’s why I was fighting them? Every time I woke up, the sedative would knock me out again and the next nightmare would be worse. I just … can’t go through another night like that again.”

“I’ll let them know,” he assured her.

She nodded her thanks and, after a moment, shifted her focus once again to the window.

He let the silence stretch out for a full minute before asking, “What’s out there, Emma?” She looked back at him with a confused frown. “Your attention keeps going to the window. What’s out there?”

She gave a small sigh as she got to her feet and walked over to the window. She crossed her arms over her chest and stared out at the bright blue cloudless sky. “Freedom.”