Walking in Darkness

Chapter 7

Emma

I decide to stop at the coffee place where we found Lily to wait for Regina. Hopefully she's only ten minutes behind me. I walk into the shop and sit down at the first table I see, feeling a huge sense of déjà vu.

I hear the sound of a car engine in the car park and turn, smiling as I recognise Mercedes pulling into the parking lot. I grab my coffee from the table and put the cash on the table before going out to meet her. We decide to keep going in my car, so transfer all of her stuff. She leaves me with the task of checking with the staff that we can leave her car here for a while. They agree, albeit reluctantly.

We carry on our journey, stopping in Boston for the night. We use my old apartment, which is still somehow miraculously under my name, and I take the sofa so Regina can have the bed. She tries to argue, saying that I need it more than she does, but she is my guest, so I insist.

Once she has finally admitted defeat and retired to my old room, I grab my phone and look through the old photos, feeling nostalgic. I lean back on the sofa, resting my heavily bandaged head on the arm rest. I'm very glad we didn't have to find a hotel, because I'll probably end up in surgery in a hospital somewhere if anyone sees what I look like.

I am just drifting off to sleep when my hand reaches for my phone and starts dialling a number that I don't recognise. I yell for Regina and she comes running.

"Regina, what's going on?" I ask, just as my finger hits the call button. She shrugs and sits down next to me, waiting for the phone call to finish.

"Hello?" A voice from the other end speaks, sending shivers down my spine when I realise who the owner is.

"Gold?"

"So it does work. I wanted to check if I could control you now that you're in the land without magic and I can. I'll leave you to your mission now." He hangs up and I pull my phone away from my ear.

Regina

The look of horror on Emma's face and the worry in her voice when she says Rumple's curse name tells me something is definitely wrong.

"Emma? What is it? Why did you ring Rumple?" She lifts her eyes up from the floor to look at me, then replies.

"Because he ordered me to." I gasp in shock.

"But he can't control you outside of Storybrooke. There's no magic."

"Apparently, he can. I was falling asleep but then my hand picked up my phone and started dialling his number as if it had a mind of its own." Well. This complicates things. "You do realise this also means that I'll have no idea what I'm doing until I've done it, though? Because I can't hear the orders he gives me, I just have to obey them. It also means I can't resist them, because I won't know which actions to resist. What if he makes me do something horrible?" Her voice breaks as she finishes her question, and I look at her in surprise. Apart from when she took the darkness, I've only ever seen her cry from anger. She's always had at least one wall up. Now they've all tumbled down, and I'm not sure I know how to deal with it.

Her eyes widen as she seems to realise something else.

"Regina, we have no way to stop the darkness. If I can be controlled, that means I might still go dark, but we have no dagger and, even if we had the cage, it probably wouldn't work. You'll have to, like, tie me up or something." I sigh and stay silent, trying and, so far, failing, to formulate a plan. I try thinking out loud to see if Emma can help.

"Maybe, I could drive and we could tie you in the passenger seat. Hopefully, you won't have magic, but if you do you can summon the cuff before you go completely dark. Will that work?" She nods her head in reply, gulping to try and stem the tears flooding from her eyes.