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worryinglyinnocent · 4 years

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Fic: Everything Money Can Buy (3/12)

Summary: The Greatest Store in the World AU. When misfortune strikes and leaves Emma Swan and her son homeless just before Christmas, the ever-resourceful Emma has a ready solution. They’ll move into Mills Department Store, a place they can only dream of affording to buy from. It’s not easy, having to deal with a perpetually grumpy doorman, a nasty assistant manager, and an extremely suspect Santa, but Emma and Henry soon learn that the kindness of strangers is something money can’t buy.

Swan Believer centric, with eventual Swan Queen and background Rumbelle and Dwarf Star.

Rated: G

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[One] [Two] [AO3]

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Three

The first thing to do, of course, was to navigate Gold. They loitered on the corner for a while trying to catch a time when he wasn’t watching to sneak inside, but since he was a doorman and his entire purpose was to open the doors, that was going to be easier said than done. In the end, Emma decided that taking refuge in audacity was going to be their best course of action, and she marched smartly up to the doors, Henry in tow.

Gold looked at them, one eyebrow quirked.

“You’re a little heavily laden for a shopping trip, don’t you think?”

Emma shrugged, trying to keep her manner as blasé as possible. “We might be buying a lot of things. Save the environment, bring your own bags, you know the kind of thing.”

Gold didn’t believe a word she was saying, that was quite clear, but then some other customers, ones who looked far more like they were going into the store for legitimate reasons, came along, and he was distracted by opening the doors for them. Emma noticed that he was limping a little as he walked, and she wondered if he’d always done or if this was a recent injury.

She shook the thought away from her head; they needed to get inside, and they needed Gold to let them in, and he currently wasn’t doing because he thought that, laden down with very large bags as they were, the two of them were potential shoplifters. Emma could quite see where he was coming from, but she couldn’t exactly explain their circumstances to him in an effort to get him on side. Stealing from the shop was one thing. Living in it was quite another, even if they weren’t taking anything that wouldn’t be thrown out anyway.

“So, what are you looking for today?” Gold asked, the polite tone at odds with his suspicious eyes.

“Christmas presents, of course,” Henry said. “What’s everyone else looking for at this time of year?”

Gold didn’t have a ready response to that one, and Emma smiled to herself. Maybe if she and Henry tag-teamed then they’d be able to wear him down.

The door opened from the inside and Gold went to grab it as the woman from the customer service desk rushed out, skittering a little in her sky-high heels on the wet steps. The frost overnight had been thick and heavy, and although the steps had been thoroughly salted, the melted ice was still slippery. Gold threw out his arms to catch her before she could trip, and she blushed.

“Thank you, Mr Gold.”

“You’re welcome, Miss French. You shouldn’t be running about in those things; they’re lethal.”

“I know, I know, but I’ll be lost in the crowd otherwise. I’d get trampled underfoot. And I’ve told you, you can call me Belle.”

“Very well, Belle. As long as you call me Alistair.”

Belle smiled. “Alistair.”

It was at that moment that they both seemed to realise that Gold still had his arms around her from where he’d broken her fall and they sprang apart as if they’d been stung, brushing themselves down and attempting to look professional once more. Belle’s face was beet red by this point, and she looked around, saw that Emma and Henry were watching the proceedings with interest, and turned back to Gold with a cough.

“I, erm, I just came out to give you these, actually.” She held up what looked like a couple of teabags. “You just scrunch them up like this and they get warm, you see. I thought you could put them in your gloves. It’s so cold today. I know it won’t do much for your ankle, but at least your hands won’t freeze.”

“Oh.” It was Gold’s turn to go pink around the ears now. “Thank you, Miss French. I mean, Belle.”

He slipped the handwarmers into his gloves and flexed his hands a couple of times. “Yes, that’s much better.”

Belle darted in and pressed a peck of a kiss against his cheek, the movement so sudden that one could have been forgiven for thinking that it hadn’t happened at all.

“Merry Christmas, Alistair.”

She turned to go back inside, and Gold went to get the door for her, at which point she saw that Emma and Henry were still standing around outside the shop.

“I do beg your pardon,” she said. “Distracting the doorman and blocking the doorway. After you, please.”

There was nothing that Gold could do to stop them this time, having been practically invited in, and Emma gave Belle a wide smile and Gold a triumphant nod.

“Thank you very much.”

They hurried inside and slipped up the sweeping staircase in the foyer before Belle could speak to them again. Emma peered through the balustrade, watching as the other woman went back to stand behind the customer services desk again. There was such a sweet little smile on her face; the few moments she’d spent outside with Gold had obviously been the highlight in a day of dealing with irate and overprivileged customers. Emma had lived long enough in a cruel world to know that love was a strange and fickle thing, but she wasn’t so jaded that she couldn’t see the beginnings of a grand romance when they were playing out right in front of her; for Gold definitely returned those feelings.

“Mum?” Henry tugged at her sleeve. “Where are we going now?”

She left Belle to her own devices and stood up again, dragging their bags to the top of the stairs.

“Like I said. We’re going camping. Actually, first of all we’re going to stationery. Find me some pens and tester post-its, Henry, I’ve had a brilliant idea.”

Henry duly raced on ahead to get the requested items, and Emma hoped that continuing to be audacious would work for them in the long run. Since this was going to be their permanent home over the Christmas period, they should probably settle in as much as they could.

Henry ran back through the shoppers with a Sharpie and a tester pad, and Emma tore off a few sheets, writing in neat block capitals “DISPLAY ONLY, THIS ITEM IS NOT FOR SALE” on all of them before sending Henry to return the pad and pen to their rightful places.

“And now,” she said when Henry came back, “we camp.”

They took the bags down to the basement, where the camping, outdoors and luggage department was housed, finding the department blessedly quieter than the rest of the store. No one in their right mind bought a tent and other sundry camping equipment in the middle of December. They almost had the entire department to themselves, aside from some people looking at high-end luggage in the corner, talking to the sales assistant about their plans to spend Christmas skiing in the Pyrenees. It was all right for some.

Now at a slight degree more leisure, Emma poked around the display tents until she found one that looked like a good bet, in the far corner of the store and covered in camouflage netting. The display stand next to it said that it was the perfect hide for bird and animal watching, but Emma didn’t care about such things. What she cared about was the fact that it was out of the way and that hopefully, the shop assistants wouldn’t think to come this far back into the tent section with any regularity. She bent down and shoved the bags inside the opening, ushering Henry in after them.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Are we going to stay here?”

“Seems like as good a place as any. I mean look – we’ve even got ready-made beds.” The tent had been set up with airbeds and sleeping bags, and although the little gas stove obviously wouldn’t work, the heavy-duty battery powered lanterns would, meaning that they didn’t need to worry about when the store lights went out at the end of the day.

Henry nodded his agreement. “Yeah, I think it’s good. So, what are the post-it notes for?”

“Well, as Gold said, we are rather heavily laden for a shopping trip. So, in order to look a little more inconspicuous, we’re going to have to dump the bags. Where better to hide a walking stick than among other walking sticks? Hide the luggage in the camping section. It won’t look too out of place.”

That was a blatant lie; their holdalls were several years old, worn and patched in so many places that hardly any of the original fabric remained, and the suitcase covered in stickers from their travels all over the country. Against the sleek new luggage in the department, theirs stuck out like a sore thumb, but it was better than nothing. She piled the bags in one corner of the tent that they had earmarked as theirs and stuck the notes all over it. Whilst they didn’t exactly look official, Emma knew from experience that polite people, like most of the ones who shopped at Mills, would generally always respect signs, even if they looked somewhat amateurish.

And no one would want to buy their luggage anyway.

“Right.” She sat back on her heels and surveyed her handiwork. “Shall we go and browse, Henry, like all serious shoppers?”

Henry just looked at her in admiration. “You know Mum, I think you have the best plans.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“I still don’t think that we’re going to get away with living in the store though,” he added as they made their way back up the escalators towards the main foyer. Emma glanced around to check that the coast was clear; Belle was tied up with a rather angry-looking customer at the desk and wouldn’t notice them go past. Emma began to rethink her previous assertion that most of the people that shopped at Mills were polite. It seemed that gaining money seemed to bring with it an equal loss of manners.

Her theory was proved spectacularly right just a moment later when, still absorbed by people watching in the foyer, she managed to collide with someone who was coming down the stairs at a run.

“Hey, watch where you’re going!”

The woman, sharp-suited and exuding efficiency from every pore, reminded Emma a little of Zelena, and immediately her hackles were raised.

“Since I was standing pretty much still and you were the one running down the stairs, maybe you’re the one who should watch where they’re going.”

The woman seemed taken aback for a moment, as if she wasn’t used to people questioning her, and Emma felt a little smile quirk up at the corner of her mouth. On the one hand, getting into a fight with another customer was definitely a way to firstly be noticed and secondly be kicked out of the store with no way of getting back to their stowed luggage, but on the other hand, Emma had not had a very good day and she was looking for someone, or something, to take it out on.

The other woman’s mouth pulled up in a sneer.

“Well, maybe if you weren’t so caught up in gawping like a fish, you wouldn’t be blocking the staircase. Someone should have a word with Gold about keeping the riff-raff out.” Her eyes tracked Emma from top to toe and back again, and Emma found herself doing the same. She wondered if the woman worked here and would need to be kept an eye out for like Zelena; she wasn’t wearing a coat, so it seemed likely that she wasn’t a shopper, but she also wasn’t wearing a name tag.

“Yeah,” she said eventually, meeting the woman’s eyes, unable to back down from the challenge. “Maybe they should.”

They stayed in silence for a moment, just staring each other down, but there was something in the air that wasn’t just the charged tension of an argument. This woman wasn’t used to being questioned, but she had respect for her challenger, and Emma in turn had respect for that. For the briefest of moments, the sneer turned into a genuine little smile, but then the condescending manner was back.

“Enjoy your shopping trip. If you can afford anything more than pressing your nose up against the display cases. Please don’t do that, though. The cleaners work so hard to get the smudges out every morning.”

Emma raised an eyebrow as the woman stalked on past, and turned to Henry, who was watching her with an expression that was far too shrewd for any ten-year-old to be wearing.

“Rude, huh?”

“Yeah.” Henry wasn’t buying it. “I couldn’t tell if you wanted to punch her or kiss her.”

“Henry!”

“I’m just saying. It was like something out of a film. You know, when the couple who’ve been fighting the entire time stop arguing and just kiss at the end.”

“I need to stop taking you to the cinema.” Emma shook her head in disbelief. “Or at least, find a way to make sure we only see kid-friendly films.” She’d learned to sneak into the cinema without paying from an ex-boyfriend, but it came with the disadvantage of never knowing what you were going to be seeing until you got there. The number of times that they’d crawled into a hiding space only for Emma to turn them straight back around when the film turned out to be completely unsuitable for a ten-year-old was ridiculous. Who showed that kind of film at ten in the morning, for crying out loud?

Henry continued to have a knowing smirk on his face all the way up to the tearoom. Emma wasn’t quite sure why she’d taken them in the direction of the tearoom since they certainly couldn’t afford to have tea there until after everyone else had gone home. Perhaps it was out of a desire to keep moving, and the tearoom being on the top floor of the building, it was naturally the place that they stopped in since there was no further to go. Although, the place didn’t look like its normal haven of genteel tranquillity. There was a rather longer queue than normal, and the waitresses were looking much more harassed than usual.

With a twist of guilt in her stomach, Emma remembered the broken microwave from the previous night, and she and Henry looked at each other, grimacing. They inched their way around the edge of the tearoom, getting as close to the kitchen area as they could. One of the waitresses was holding the broken plug with an utterly forlorn look on her face as a maintenance man in dark blue overalls unscrewed the socket from the wall.

“I swear it wasn’t me this time, Leroy,” the waitress was saying. “I know I’m always the one to break these things, and I know I don’t know how I do it – the coffee machine exploding was as inexplicable to me as it was to everyone else – but this one really wasn’t me. It was broken when I got here this morning, I swear.”

“It’s ok, Astrid.” The maintenance man finished with the socket and took the plug from the waitress’s hands, beginning to fit a new fuse into it. “I believe you.”

“You’re the only one,” she lamented. “Sometimes I think trouble just follows me around.”

“That’s ok,” the maintenance man – Leroy, evidently – said. “If trouble follows you around, I’ll just follow the trouble around.”

“Oh Leroy… You can’t keep cleaning up after me.”

Leroy shrugged. “It’s no bother. It means I get to spend time with you.”

The waitress gave a shy little giggle, and Emma smiled. As horrible as she felt that someone else had got the blame for breaking the microwave, at least it seemed to have brought two people together, and Leroy the maintenance man and Astrid the clumsy waitress who made coffee machines explode seemed to be getting on with their tentative romance a lot more easily than Belle and Gold were getting on with theirs.

Well, it was the season for it after all. Mistletoe and goodwill everywhere. And hey, it was free entertainment. Emma shrugged. It was amazing what you saw when you looked closely.

Now, why did her mind keep coming back to the woman they’d bumped into on the stairs?

#Swan Believer #Swan Believer Fic #Emma Swan #Henry Swan #background rumbelle #background dwarf star #Fic: Everything Money Can Buy

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