Knowing Little Notes

accio-ambition:

For those, like me, who are only interested in the Super Bowl for the commercials and the halftime show, I come to you this overly commercialized day with my contribution to @captainswanbigbang‘s CS Little Bang. A super special shout out to @technicallysizzlingcloud for beta-ing this monstrosity and @mrs-emma-swan-jones for a lovely art piece. Hope you enjoy!

Summary: Emma Swan doesn’t do kids. Or, more accurately, she hasn’t done kids. But when a friend in need asks her to do kids – more specifically teach them – Emma dips her toes into the education field. Her first foray into substitute teaching is for Mr K. Jones, who proves to be a great asset in this whole “learning to teach” thing. It helps Emma understand what her friends get out of the job: that the best life lessons sometimes come from students and a nice little note.
Rated: T for language
Read it here or on AO3, whatever floats your boat

By trade – if you could call it that – Emma is a bail bondsperson. She chases after skips who’ve failed to pay her back: an irony in the fact that she has nothing, money or otherwise. She’s got an apartment the size of a comfortable closet and enough to eat takeout on occasion. Still, it doesn’t  require a college degree that she doesn’t have and it’s active enough for her. It’s great for the lifestyle she leads. She can find a gig in any city, no matter where she might find herself. It’s awesome.

Until it isn’t.

She’s sprained her ankle one too many times and this time around she’s got a broken wrist to accompany with it. Her skip decided to get a little rougher with her than usual, slamming her wrist into a granite counter. She’s lucky it was only her wrist with the heels she was wearing.

Still, a broken wrist means a cast: which means she’s out of the bail bonds game for at least the next two months, probably longer. Her office won’t pay her rent or her bills, to the surprise of no one, and she’s not moving out of the only little square of the world she’s ever been able to call her own.

That’s how she falls into substitute teaching.

Mary Margaret tells her about it one evening soon after Emma gets her cast on, taking on the role of pseudo-mother caring for her healing daughter.

(She even signs the cast, and Emma can’t quite quell the feeling of a little girl excited to have everyone at school sign her cast.)

It’s an easy way to make money, Mary Margaret insists – solid hours, a schedule that changes, yet stays the same and the properly-trained regular teacher comes up with all the plans.

“All you have to do is follow them,” her friend tells her.

She helps Emma cut the plastic bag off her arm after showering all the sweat and hospital grime of her body. A timer goes off in the kitchen, Emma’s rickety oven on the verge of catching fire with the casserole Mary Margaret’s got cooking away in it. With an thrilled little noise, she goes off to check dinner.

(Emma is consistently surprised she isn’t actually Mary Margaret’s child with her husband David. With the way they all act around each other, they might as well be.)

“I don’t know,” Emma shouts into the other room, ripping the remainder of the shopping bag off her arm. “I don’t really do kids.”

“You haven’t really done kids,” Mary Margaret corrects her. The top of her head pokes from around the door jamb to glare at the other woman. “That doesn’t mean you can’t do them.”

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