Writing Challenge: Breaking Point, Chapter Eight (8/12)

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: The Henry/Emma dynamic is really fun, and Henry just kind of writes himself. I love when characters do that; it makes my job so much easier, hee. August/Emma is also kind of a blast. I love how August is one of the only people that Emma feels she can really bounce her ideas off of. Having August be the one to help her figure out her next step was a natural choice, and I thought his suggestion was a neat little Easter egg for his true identity.

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Henry Mills had called his mom at her office to tell her he was going to the playground after school--a perfect alibi, if he did say so himself--before stopping by Mr. Clark’s store to get a snack or two. He’d stowed the candy bar in his backpack and munched on the bag of chips as he headed down to the hospital. The only thing he had left to do was wait for Miss Blanchard to arrive for her visit with Emma.

His teacher had told him that morning that hospital policy didn’t allow children to visit people on the floor where Emma was staying but something about that explanation didn’t sit right with him. He didn’t want to say that Miss Blanchard had lied, exactly, but he didn’t think she was being one hundred percent honest with him, either.

He felt bad about having to ambush his teacher like this but he really wanted--no, needed--to see Emma. His mom hadn’t said a single thing about her since telling him he wasn’t allowed to see her anymore, and after a day or so of not getting answers to his questions, he’d stopped asking. He had no idea what had really happened between them but he did know that he had to see for himself that Emma was okay.

Plus, he hadn’t talked to her in just about forever and he missed her. A lot.

A grin formed on his lips when he finally spotted Miss Blanchard. He hurried across the street and caught up with his teacher at the hospital’s entrance.

“Henry!” she cried when he greeted her. “What are you doing here?”

“I was just wondering if I could come with you to see Emma.”

“I told you this morning, Henry--”

“Please, Miss Blanchard?” He wondered if he should clasp his hands under his chin but ultimately decided against it. Way too dramatic. “My mom won’t tell me anything. I want to make sure she’s okay.”

“She is okay. I promise you.”

He frowned. This was proving harder than he thought it would be. “I just need to see her. Please?”

Miss Blanchard was silent for a long moment, clearly weighing her options. Then she looked down at his pleading face and sighed; she didn’t have the heart to tell him to go home. “All right, come on.”

Yes! Mission accomplished! “Thank you,” Henry grinned as he followed her through the doors.

She led him to an area of the hospital he didn’t even know existed. The rooms on this floor all had thick doors with a tall rectangle of glass, kind of like the classroom doors at school. But unlike school, the doorknobs here all had keyholes. A quick peek behind one of the doors told him that they couldn’t be unlocked from the inside.

His heart started to race. Why had Emma been kept here for the last couple of days?

They drew to a stop outside the room at the end of the corridor, right next to the stairwell. Miss Blanchard told him to wait in the hallway and she’d come get him in a minute. He nodded but couldn’t help tiptoeing up to the curtain shielding the doorway and peeking around it. What he saw made him gasp.

Emma was sitting in a chair beneath the window. Her hair was limp and there were dark circles under her eyes. Red marks that reminded Henry of a burn he’d once gotten when he slipped while climbing a rope ladder circled her wrists. Even though she was whispering with Miss Blanchard, he could hear the defeat in her voice.

“What did she do to you?” Henry asked.

“Henry!” Miss Blanchard cried. “You were supposed to wait outside!”

Oops. He’d forgotten that part.

Emma’s eyes widened when she saw Henry. She shot Miss Blanchard a glare, and he shakily stepped forward. “Don’t get mad at her, Emma. I made her bring me here.” He walked up to her and took one of her hands in his. She flinched at the contact as she once again focused on him. “Did my mom do this to you?”

Her eyes flicked to Miss Blanchard, who just gave her a helpless shrug in return.

“She did, didn’t she?” Henry continued. “She told me that you attacked her, but I know you wouldn’t have done something to her if she hadn’t done something to you first. What did she do?”

Again, Emma looked up at Miss Blanchard. This time, the teacher nodded at her and turned to address Henry. “We only have a few minutes, so when I come and tell you we have to go, you can’t argue with me. All right?”

“Okay,” he agreed. The teacher gave both mother and son a smile and headed out to the hallway to give them some privacy.

Once they were alone, Henry squeezed Emma’s hand and then let it go. “I’m sorry for making Miss Blanchard bring me here, Emma, but I needed to see you.”

“It’s okay.” Her voice was quiet, which unnerved him. “I just … didn’t want you to see me like this.”

He swallowed hard. Seeing her now, he understood why she hadn’t wanted him to come. “What happened?”

“Your mom said something to me that made me angry. What it was isn’t important, not right now. What’s important right now is that … I’m sorry, Henry. I should have believed you. About the curse, I mean. About her being evil.”

He started to tell her it was okay but then what she said actually registered. Did that mean … no. It couldn’t mean what he thought it meant. Could it? “You believe now? You really, truly believe?”

“Yes,” she said with an emphatic nod. The tears glistening in her eyes provided all the proof he needed. “And I should have done so sooner.”

Grinning, he wrapped her in a tight hug. After a moment, she hugged him back. “Henry, I have to ask you something,” she said, softly but firmly.

He pulled out of the embrace and met her eyes, an overjoyed smile on his face. “What is it?”

“Do you feel safe with Regina?”

He furrowed his brow at the sudden panic in her eyes. What the heck? She’d never asked him anything like that before. “Yes. I mean, she’s never hurt me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Okay.” She nodded but she didn’t sound as if her mind was set at ease.

He wanted to press her on it, but Miss Blanchard had said they only had a few minutes and he had a lot more ground to cover with her. “When are you getting out of here?”

She gave him a half-hearted shrug. “I don’t know. It was supposed to be tomorrow, but I might have accidentally screwed that up.”

“What do you mean?”

She sighed and ripped her gaze from his. She didn’t say anything, and it took him a moment to realize that she was trying to figure out how to explain her predicament without scaring him. “I think your mom is trying to make me look bad by making me look … unstable. And I’m afraid that my behavior since I’ve been here is only helping to prove her point.”

He didn’t understand. What could his mom have done to make Emma look unstable? What could have made Emma all of a sudden believe?

All at once, it hit him. “She told you! That’s why you believe now. She told you herself!”

“Yes.”

“And she knew you couldn’t talk about it without sounding crazy!”

“It was a pretty smart plan,” Emma had to admit, “and I completely fell for it. I didn’t realize what she was doing until it was too late.”

“But you realize it now,” Henry interrupted. “That’s what’s important.”

“You don’t understand, Henry. I’ve played into her plan every single minute for the last two days.”

Henry gave her a sly grin. “Then you need to stop playing into it. It’s like you told me before, the best way to break the curse is to pretend we’re non-believers.”

Emma smiled, one that actually reached her eyes. “It’s a good plan, kid, but she’s not the one I have to convince. I’m in the doctors’ hands, and I haven’t exactly made the best impression in here.”

“Then make a better one now.”

“Henry, it’s not that easy.”

He didn’t have a chance to ask her what she meant because right then, Miss Blanchard came back into the room. When she told him it was time to go, he frowned but he remembered his promise not to argue. “You will try, though, won’t you, Emma? To make a better impression now?”

She looked him in the eye and gave him a little smile. “Yes, I’ll try.” Then she glanced up at her roommate. Henry could see the flurry of emotions on her face when she looked at her now that she knew her roommate was actually her mother. “I guess we’ll, um, play tomorrow by ear.”

Miss Blanchard nodded. “After I read them the riot act over your door being locked for three and a half hours, I asked them to call me one way or the other about tomorrow.”

Emma smirked at the mental image of the teacher reading anyone the riot act, and the three of them said their goodbyes. Miss Blanchard led Henry out of the room. As they made their way down the hall, Henry said, “Thanks for taking me to see Emma. I’m really glad I got to talk to her.”

“You’re welcome, Henry,” she smiled.

He said goodbye to his teacher at the hospital entrance. His original plan had been to go to the playground after the visit so that he wouldn’t really be lying to his mom. But now he had another stop to make before he could go play. He dug into his backpack, pulled out the candy bar he’d bought seemingly forever ago, and headed for the bed and breakfast.

-----

August Booth cursed the fact that he only had fifteen minutes with Emma. Fifteen minutes to help her come up with a Get Out of the Hospital Free battle plan.

Fifteen minutes was practically no time at all.

Which was why the first thing he said to her was, “Who would have guessed that the Evil Queen herself would be the one to make the savior believe?”

A half-smile tugged at her lips. “Henry’s been to see you.”

“Kid’s persistent.”

“He gets it from me.”

“Although, regarding Regina’s little plan,” he said, his tone teasing, “I’m surprised you didn’t put two and two together sooner.”

“Hey, I’ve spent the better part of the last couple of days on one mind-numbing drug or another. How about cutting me a little slack here?” The smirk on her face softened the bite of the words.

He chuckled and sat down in the visitor’s chair. She sounded a bit more like herself than she had during yesterday afternoon’s visit; at least she was joking with him. But her face was more drawn, the circles under her eyes darker, a paler tinge to her skin. Whatever Regina had done, whatever floodgate this scheme of hers had opened, it was clearly doing a number on Emma.

“You know,” she said, bringing him back to reality, “when you put it like that, why would she confess to me at all? I’m the one who can supposedly break the damn thing in the first place. She has to know that when I get out of here …”

She trailed off, finally piecing together that Regina never intended for her to be released from the hospital. “Son of a bitch.”

“And now you see why you have to get out of here,” August told her.

Her head was spinning. When she figured out that Regina had wanted her to look crazy, she’d assumed it was just so that she’d lose her credibility in the court of public opinion. No judge in his or her right mind would award custody of a child to a woman who had just been placed on a mandatory psychiatric hold after attacking the child’s adoptive mother, birth mother or not. Now she realized that this little plan was far more sinister than she’d imagined.

Regina had wanted her to languish here, only seeing her friends for fifteen minutes at a time, growing more and more despondent with each passing day until pretty much everyone gave up hope on her.

No, she couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t let Regina win, but she had no idea what to do. She needed help. She needed help badly. “I’ve royally screwed up, August. I haven’t exactly been a model patient, and I can’t fix that by tomorrow.”

He leaned forward in the chair, resting his forearms on his knees. “The world isn’t going to end tomorrow, Emma, so stop worrying about that deadline. The only thing you need to know is they can’t hold you forever unless they have reason.”

She got it in an instant. “I have to stop giving them reason.”

He nodded. “Stop fighting them on every little thing. Remember, they don’t know that you’ve been tricked here and they honestly think they’re trying to help you. Start talking to Archie when he comes by, really talking to him. He wants to be able to clear you for release; he doesn’t like seeing you in here any more than the rest of us do.”

“But what the hell am I going to say?” she asked, giving a sad shrug of her shoulders. “Anything I tell him will just make me sound like I’ve lost it.”

“Then make something up,” August shrugged.

“You mean lie.”

“If you can’t tell the truth, then you’re going to have to lie.”

She wrinkled her nose. Playing along with it all certainly made the most sense but tricking everyone on staff at the hospital didn’t feel right. As August said, they were genuinely trying to help her. She had no problem lying her ass off to save a life and she’d bent the truth plenty during her time as a bail bondsperson, but lying to good people who were just doing their jobs? And besides, wasn’t resorting to trickery what Regina had done in the first place? “What about the nightmares? I can’t do anything about those.”

“No, you can’t,” he agreed. Honestly, he understood about the nightmares. Her entire world, everything she’d thought she’d known, had just been turned upside down and before she’d even had a minute to process it, she found herself on an Evil-Queen-engineered seventy-two-hour psych hold. It would have been odd if she wasn’t having nightmares. “So acknowledge them. Yes, you’re having nightmares but you’ve had a lot of upheaval in your life recently and nightmares are pretty standard stress reactions. You’re sure they’ll go away in time, when things calm down.”

“But I’m not sure they’ll go away when things calm down.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

She looked at him, her uncertainty etched on her features. He was expecting a rant but she simply said, “I don’t like it.”

“I know you don’t, Emma, but you need to understand something. You’ve been plunked down in the middle of a maze that’s been designed to keep you trapped. If you don’t start looking for hidden passageways and trap doors, you’re never going to find your way out.”

For a long time, Emma didn’t say a word. She sat there in the chair, staring down at her hands, considering what he’d said. Finally, she looked up at him, a hint of the old Emma Swan determination in her eyes. “I’ll try.”

“That’s all I can ask for.” A glance at his watch told him that a nurse would be coming in to kick him out any minute now. He stood and smiled down at her. “Besides, I trust what happens when you try. After all, you’re where Henry gets his persistence.”

He was rewarded with a full smile.