Title: Expense Account
Summary: Mary Margaret had been on the verge of mounting a foot search for her missing roommate herself when one of her cast lines had finally gotten a bite. Unfortunately, that nibble coming from Ruby could only mean one thing. "Do I want to come down there?" "Probably not," was Ruby's amused reply, "but you should get down here anyway."
Spoilers: Post-"Fruit of the Poisonous Tree"
Characters: Emma and Mary Margaret, with a guest appearance by Ruby.
Rating/Warning: T, for language.
Disclaimer: Once Upon a Time and its characters were created by Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and are owned by ABC. They left the toy box open, but I promise I'll put everything back the way I found it.
Author's Note: So, I have no real idea where this came from. I started typing to ease some boredom and a rougher version of this is what came out, so I figured I'd polish it up a bit and post it. Since I'm still new at this, feedback is very much welcome. Enjoy!
Author's Note, Part the Second: Had a slow day at work and decided to use the time to fix some awkward wording here and there. No huge changes but the rewordings soothed my OCD, heh. My apologies if you ended up seeing this twice!

Mary Margaret Blanchard practically leaped for her cell phone when it rang. She didn't even glance at the caller ID, just hit the Send button and pressed the phone to her ear. "Emma?"

"You'd better get down here," a voice murmured, a voice that was clearly trying very hard to be furtive.

It took her just a moment to recognize the voice as belonging to Ruby. Oh, thank goodness, Mary Margaret thought, shutting her eyes in relief. Someone had finally found her missing roommate.

Well, "missing" might have been a bit of an overstatement. Emma hadn't come home for dinner, which wouldn't have been odd except for the fact that the two of them had made plans that morning to eat together. Mary Margaret had even prepared one of Emma's favorite meals for the no-real-occasion.

When Emma was half an hour later than normal, Mary Margaret had called the sheriff's station and got no answer. Then she'd tried Emma's cell. She'd left a message and waited another thirty minutes before calling again. She still hadn't gotten an answer on either of the numbers, so she'd started placing calls to pretty much everyone she knew.

On some level, she knew she was overreacting. Emma was probably fine. Caught up in something that required her undivided attention, obviously, but fine. Emma didn't need protecting; as matter of fact, as sheriff, she did the protecting. Even still, she couldn't help the visions of Emma hurt out in the woods or in a crashed car in a ditch somewhere from filling her mind.

Mary Margaret had been on the verge of mounting a foot search herself when one of her cast lines had finally gotten a bite. Unfortunately, that nibble coming from Ruby could only mean one thing. "Do I want to come down there?"

"Probably not," was Ruby's amused reply, "but you should get down here anyway."

She sighed, thanked Ruby, and disconnected the call.

For the briefest of moments, she considered walking down to the bar instead of driving. Forcing Emma to stumble all the way back to the apartment would serve her right for all the worry she'd just put Mary Margaret through. Then she thought about the immaturity of that plan of action and decided to do the responsible thing and take her car.

She could only imagine what had set Emma off this time. A confrontation with Mayor Regina Mills typically left her spitting mad, as evidenced by their poor unsuspecting toaster. The drinking, Mary Margaret had learned, came from emotional upset rather than anger, but the rare you'd-better-get-down-here drinking was a combination of both.

When she entered Granny's, she found Emma seated at the bar with a pyramid of upside-down shot glasses in front of her. She was attempting to balance the tenth one on top, and Mary Margaret hoped to high heaven that they were not her empties.

She approached slowly, afraid of startling Emma and causing the whole pyramid to come crashing down. Emma spotted her before she'd even made it halfway to the stools. "Oh. Hi."

"You missed dinner," Mary Margaret said by way of a greeting. Emma looked away, ashamed.

Mary Margaret let out a breath through her nose; guilt-tripping Emma wouldn't accomplish anything. She crossed the room at normal speed since she was no longer afraid of the Great Glass Pyramid Crash of Storybrooke and sat down next to her roommate. "Do you want-"

"Rule number one," Emma interrupted. "If you're going to sit there, you're going to drink."

"Emma, I don't want to drink."

"And I don't want to talk." She at long last managed to balance the final glass on the top of the pyramid. She drew her hand away slowly, waiting for a crash. When the structure remained steady, she leaned back with a triumphant grin. "Hey, Ruby? Can you get her one of what I'm having?"

"I'm fine," Mary Margaret said to Ruby.

"Nah, she's not." Ruby's eyes darted back and forth between the sheriff and the teacher. "Actually, can you make it two? One for her and one for me, and can you put it on my tab?" When Emma gave Ruby a nod, the younger girl shot Mary Margaret an apologetic look and went back to make the drinks.

Mary Margaret stared at her roommate. "You're running a tab?"

"Don't give me that horrified Pollyanna look," Emma teased. "Yes, I am running a tab, and at the end of the night, I'm charging the whole damn thing to my expense account."

"Since when do you have an expense account?" Mary Margaret asked. Ruby returned with two vodka cranberries. Mary Margaret thanked her and then smiled in relief; the shot glasses weren't Emma's.

"Since today. And that was the problem."

"What was the problem?"

"I needed toner."

All right, just how inebriated was Emma? Her speech was too clear for her to be wasted but she wasn't making even a tiny bit of sense. "I'm afraid I don't follow you."

"Well, I'm not the one who needs some fancy-pants six-in-one copier/printer/fax thing, am I? Me, personally, I mean. So when the damn thing needs toner, why should I have to spend two hundred goddamn bucks of my own money to get some? I mean, what's the shit made with, twenty-four-karat gold? Not to mention that W. B. Mason had never even heard of Storybrooke. I know we're small, but really?" She leaned forward and rested her forearms on the bar as if the rant had drained her.

Mary Margaret flicked her eyes to Ruby, who simply shrugged her shoulders while biting back a smile. "So you decided to give yourself an expense account?" she asked, trying to figure out how it all connected.

"Damn straight, I did. Everything the sheriff's office needs will get paid for out of petty cash, and then weekly, I'll submit all the receipts to the mayor's office for reimbursement." She grinned, obviously quite proud of her little solution.

"I don't think it really works like that, Emma," Mary Margaret said gently.

"Well, it's working like that tonight."

"And what exactly is your justification for this tab? Toner is a legitimate expense, but the drinks kind of aren't."

"Pain and suffering caused by the mayor herself."

Ah, now they were getting somewhere.

Emma squinted at the full glass in front of her and cocked her head, as if trying to figure out either where it had come from or how long it had been there. Then she shrugged, raised the glass, and took a large gulp. She set the glass back down and regarded her shot-glass pyramid with a pensive frown. "How many more would I need to do another row?"

"Five," Mary Margaret answered automatically. Teacher habit.

Emma turned to Ruby and gave her a conspiratorial grin. "What do you say? Think you can trust me with fifteen of your shot glasses?"

When Mary Margaret opened her mouth to try to save Ruby from having to trust a more-than-tipsy Emma with fifteen of her shot glasses, Ruby winked at her. She furrowed her brow but let the girl take over.

"Speaking of pyramids, have you ever played the Tower of Hanoi?" Ruby asked Emma.

"The what?"

"Tower of Hanoi," Ruby repeated. "It's more of a puzzle than a game, I suppose. There's a wooden base with three spindles and a tower of disks on one of the spindles, biggest disk on the bottom and smallest at the top, kind of like a pyramid. The object is to move the tower from one spindle to another, but the catch is that you can't put a bigger disk on top of a smaller one."

Emma was silent for a moment and then narrowed her eyes at the younger girl. "I didn't follow any of that. Are you sure you're describing it right?"

"Pretty sure," Ruby shrugged. "Why? You've never played it?"

"Doesn't sound familiar," Emma frowned.

While Emma's was attention focused on her description of the game, Ruby had dismantled the pyramid and removed it, glass by glass, from the bar. Mary Margaret caught her eye and mouthed, Nicely done. Ruby gave her another wink.

Then she nudged her roommate and stood up from the stool. "Come on. Pay your tab and let's go. Ruby wants to close up."

It was actually nowhere near closing time but Mary Margaret was banking on Emma being too out of it to challenge her on the point. In truth, she could see that Emma's buzz had started to wear off and wanted to get her home before she crashed.

Emma nodded and hopped off her own stool, which turned out to be a huge mistake. "Oh, whoa."

She latched onto the edge of the bar with a death grip. Mary Margaret grabbed her other arm in an effort to steady her. "What's the matter?"

"Too much motion too fast. Just give me a second."

"How many of those vodka cranberries did you have?"

"Two or three," Emma answered with a shrug. Behind her, Ruby held up six fingers.

Another sigh escaped Mary Margaret's lips. She gave Ruby a quick smile in gratitude before returning her attention to Emma, who had removed her hand from the bar. "You all right now?"

"Yeah." She dug into her jacket pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. From the looks of it, she'd brought along the entire bank of petty cash from the sheriff's station. She ruffled through the wad, trying to pick out the larger bills so as not to leave a mountain of ones on the counter. "How much do I owe?"

"Give me it," Mary Margaret said as she snatched the money from Emma's hand. She settled the tab and handed everything over to Ruby.

Ruby couldn't hide her sly grin as she printed Mary Margaret a receipt. "For her expense report," she said softly before giving the teacher a third wink.

And that right there was why the girl deserved every bit of the generous tip Mary Margaret made sure to leave her. She tucked the receipt in with the bills and handed the pile to Emma, who stuffed the whole wad back into her pocket. "You think you can make it out to the car?" she asked, reaching down to take Emma's hand.

"I'm not an invalid," Emma grumbled, shaking her hand out of Mary Margaret's. "I'm not even all that drunk."

Mary Margaret sighed yet again and stayed one step behind her roommate as Emma unsteadily made her way out the door and down the stairs.

They were almost home-free, but then Emma misjudged the width of the second to last step and lurched forward. Mary Margaret grabbed her left arm as Emma's right hand shot out to latch onto the railing. Between the two of them, she managed to stay upright. "Oh, sure," Mary Margaret said, "you're not all that drunk."

A rush of pink colored Emma's cheeks. "Maybe I'm a little drunker than I thought."

"You think?" Mary Margaret asked.

The pair made their way to the car in silence. Mary Margaret didn't let go of Emma's arm, and Emma made no move to wrench out of her grip. She opened the passenger door, helped Emma into the seat, and told her to buckle herself up.

As she closed the door, she felt a sudden rush of anger course through her veins. After all of the phone calls and the worrying only to find that Emma had been indulging in liquid comfort this whole time, Mary Margaret felt she deserved some kind of explanation.

When she settled behind the wheel, she put her key in the ignition but didn't turn it. Instead, she shifted position and faced her roommate. Emma had already leaned her head back against the seat and shut her eyes, and she was now absently running a hand back and forth across her forehead in a meager attempt to ward off her mounting headache. Mary Margaret rolled her eyes, poked her finger into her roommate's arm, and waited for Emma's bleary eyes to focus on her. "Are you planning on telling me what happened tonight?"

Emma winced at her roommate's irritation. "I'm sorry I missed dinner."

"Frankly, Emma, dinner is the last thing on my mind at the moment. You didn't call and you didn't answer my calls. Do you have any idea how worried I was? I was on the verge of getting all of Storybrooke looking for you."

"I'm sorry. I should have called."

Her tone was that of a teenager trying to get an overbearing parent off her back, which, for some reason, sent Mary Margaret's frustration soaring. "You know, simply parroting back the reason I'm angry does not an apology make."

Emma squinted at her, as if she didn't understand at all why she was so upset. "What do you want from me?"

A sudden thought struck Mary Margaret. Had no one ever cared enough for Emma to make her explain herself? Had all of her caretakers simply leveled punishment when she misbehaved or got into trouble without trying to figure out the reasons behind her actions? The thought of the sheer loneliness of a life lived under such conditions made her heart ache. "I want you to tell me what happened," she said, softening her voice a little. "You only do this when you're upset, and we're not leaving until you tell me what made you this upset."

Emma's hand automatically searched for the door handle but Mary Margaret locked the doors before she could even think about making an escape. Not that she could have gotten that far anyway, as her trip down the stairs proved. "Emma, stop. I'm not going to let you run away from this conversation."

Emma fixed her roommate with a glare so cold that it made her cringe. "What the hell do you care why I'm this upset?"

"Because I care about you, Emma," she replied, her voice gentle yet unyielding.

Emma narrowed her eyes and then turned to stare out the windshield. Mary Margaret did the same, facing forward, but she did not turn the key in the ignition. She'd told Emma she wasn't leaving, and she meant it. They would sit there until Emma either spilled or passed out, whichever came first.

They sat in silence for a full seven minutes. Every so often, Mary Margaret would glance over at Emma to make sure she was still awake and then look away before Emma caught her.

Eventually tiring of the silent standoff, Emma heaved a sigh and shifted in the seat. She didn't exactly face her roommate, but she positioned herself so that she was speaking in Mary Margaret's direction instead of at the windshield. "The meeting was an absolute disaster. And if that wasn't bad enough, after it was over, she banned me from seeing Henry and then left it for me to tell him." She looked away again. "She made me tell him."

"Oh, Emma, I'm so sorry," Mary Margaret whispered, her voice filled with sympathy.

Emma gave her a small, uncomfortable nod. "Look, I'm really sorry. I know I'm not the easiest person to live with, and I'm honestly surprised you haven't kicked me out yet."

That statement pulled at Mary Margaret's heart in a way she'd never felt before. How many people in Emma's life had simply turned their backs on her when the going got tough?

She suddenly wanted nothing more than to wrap Emma in a tight hug and tell her that everything was going to be okay from now on and that no one would ever hurt her again. The way a mother would comfort a small child, she thought.

Which was a rather odd response, now that she thought about it. Emma quite clearly did not need a mommy to kiss her little-kid injuries to make them feel better.

But she did need someone. Someone to care, to take an interest. Since she couldn't wrap Emma in that tight hug for fear Emma would go running in the other direction at the uninitiated contact, she did something else she was pretty sure no one else had ever done for her: offer her unconditional support. "No matter what happens, Emma, I'm not going to kick you out. We just maybe have to think of a way to avoid … this."

"I could call you," Emma offered. "And return your calls."

"That'd be a start," Mary Margaret smiled. She faced forward and buckled her own seatbelt. "Come on. Let's get you home."

"Home," Emma whispered. She had leaned her head back against the seat and was looking out the passenger side window. Mary Margaret had a funny feeling she hadn't meant to be heard. "I have one of those now, don't I?"

A well of emotion burbled up from Mary Margaret's chest, and tears pricked her eyes. A sober Emma would never have let something like that slip, but that didn't make the sentiment any less touching. "Yes, Emma," she murmured, her voice just as quiet as her roommate's as she finally turned her key in the ignition. "Yes, you do."