Finding You Always

Miracles or Magic?

Chapter 2: Miracles or Magic?

Five Years Later

1993

Little Emma Swan looked up at the hospital entrance with scrutiny. Five years of her young life had culminated to this moment. She clutched her backpack closely, which held her storybook. It was her most prized possession and truthfully, Emma didn't have much of anything to call her own. But she had read her book from cover to cover. No one, especially adults, believed her, but Emma knew she was the baby in the book that had been brought to this world. Something had gone even more wrong though and her father had ended up in this hospital.

Finding the hospital hadn't been hard. There was an old newspaper article from the night that she had found at the public library telling everything. But it had taken her time to gain the opportunity to run away from the horrible group home where she lived. It wasn't easy at only ten-years-old and she knew it was dangerous too. But if she could just wake her daddy, she knew everything would be okay. He was Prince Charming, after all.

Emma trotted into the hospital and toward the elevator. She would search all the floors if she had to, but she would find him. She was reluctant to ask an adult, because they would just find out she had ran away and they would return her.

The nurse quietly made her rounds and entered the next room.

"Good morning Mr. Nolan," she greeted to the comatose patient. Mr. Nolan was a bit of a mystery to everyone on the floor. In the ten years he had been there, not only had no one come looking for him, but he had not changed at all. The hair on his face or head hadn't grown an inch. None of the doctors really knew what to make of it. The nurses on the floor were fond of their sleeping prince as they liked to call him and none of them could figure out why no one had come to claim this handsome stranger. As the nurse left, a little girl peeked around the corner and smiled brightly. She rushed to the bedside and glanced down at the page in her book. It was him, she just knew it. Settling in the chair beside his bed, she began to read his story to him. It was some time later before she finished.

"You found me," Snow said.

"Did you ever doubt that I would?" Charming asked.

"Never...though the glass coffin did give me pause," she teased. He smiled and kissed her passionately.

"I will always find you," he promised.

Emma had lost track of how long she had been reading and the nurse entered the room on her rounds.

"What are you doing in here young lady?" the nurse scolded.

"Please don't make me leave," Emma pleaded.

"Where are your parents, honey?" she asked calmly.

"This is my daddy," Emma said innocently. The nurse sighed.

"Oh honey, that's not possible. This man has been here for ten years. I know, I was here the night he came in," she replied, as she caught a flash of white in the little girl's backpack. She then remembered the baby girl brought in with him, wrapped in a knitted white blanket. But it couldn't be...it was too impossible. How did this little ten-year-old find her way to her real father, whom she had never actually met. She took the blanket out to look at it, finding the name embroidered on it just as she remembered.

"You're Emma?" she asked. The little girl nodded eagerly.

"Oh honey...I know you want to be with your real father, but he's been like this for years. He can't care for you," the nurse protested.