Author's Notes: This is my first-ever Once Upon A Time fanfic! While Emma, Hook, and Henry are the main characters of this story note that others will appear as well - eventually leading to the town of Storybrooke too. I also invent a few realms for my story, so some places and characters may or may not have stemmed from actual fairy-tales or be familiar to you. The Captain Swan romantic pairing is the main one throughout this fic, though Outlaw Queen, Rumbelle, and Snowing will also be shown in due time. I have a video made for this story, but am having complications with my sound so it unfortunately will not be uploaded at the same time as this chapter. I'm working on it. Anyway, enough from me - enjoy!
~ Enchanted ~
The lonely cries of an infant had haunted her for years.
Emma was almost glad when she went to sleep one night, nearly a year ago, to find her dreams filled with something else entirely. At first, she'd brush them off in relief to no longer having her own mind mock her for past mistakes involving a child she couldn't keep. Then, the new dreams increased, and the strange things she saw refused to fade from her mind the next morning.
In a matter of months, Emma was ready to swear off sleeping completely.
Sword-fighting princes, enchanted forests, fire-breathing dragons, huge castles, and magical spells – none of it made sense. The places and sights soon included faces of people she'd never met - yet the strangest part of all was the lack of sound. Emma never heard a whispered name, the collisions of opposing forces, or roar of a hungry beast. The images she could see weren't always clear, either; the more she had the dreams, the blurrier they became.
Emma held onto the hope that with time they'd merely fade away altogether.
She reluctantly endured the confusing fairytale dreams, until one night almost exactly a year since they'd begun – Emma woke in a cold sweat, as the clock struck midnight. Her apartment chimed loudly with the sounds of a grandfather clock she didn't have - while her small bedroom flooded with beams of moonlight, which was supposed to be trapped behind dark curtains adoring her windows, and the rain clouds filling the night sky outside.
Sitting up in her bed, Emma gasped for air, as a flush of warmth and fear jolted through her entire form. Emma swung her legs over the side of the bed, and touched her feet to the floor. The moment her toes contacted with the wooden flooring, the clock chimes stopped and the moonlight vanished. The apartment was as it had always been while she'd lived there - dark and hollow.
Panicked, Emma rushed to her window and roughly threw open the curtains. The outside scenery was further darkened by the hidden moon and downpour of rain. The lights in the street flickered rapidly, then remained on in perfect synchronisation with each other. She could only stare, barefoot and shivering, in confusion towards what was going on. With her dreams, and now the sounds and lights she shouldn't be experiencing, Emma wondered if she was finally going insane. Was this outlandish payback for not being able to provide for her baby, and thus giving him away the moment he was born? Or was it for the stealing and lying she'd done for years prior to her stay in jail?
Was it for her sheer existence in itself?
Exhaling, while raking a hand through her blonde hair, Emma slowly made her way back to bed. She lay down underneath the covers and closed her eyes. Emma reminded herself she'd had quite a bit to drink earlier, Emma soon willed herself back to sleep with the assumption that she simply wasn't thinking clearly. However, unnoticed by its recipient, a brass compass now sat on her bedside table to shine in the tiny amount of light able to naturally enter the bedroom.
The arrow spun aimlessly, then halted to point in the direction of Emma - the moment every clock in her apartment ticked one minute after midnight.
~ NH ~
Emma didn't have time to notice the compass the following mid-morning, when she was pulled from her fretful sleep by a knock at her apartment door. With a groan of protest, Emma emerged from underneath her sheets and glared in the general direction of the door. The knocking continued, giving her little choice other than to rise from her bed and drag her feet across the apartment, with the intention to confront whoever was at her door during her day off from work.
'What?' She complained, unlatching the locks to yank the door open.
It seemed to be a prank, as her tired and grumpy eyes scanned the empty space in front of her, until Emma lowered her gaze to the little boy standing before her. Relief shone in his smiling features, as he tilted his head slightly to look upwards at her.
'Mummy?' The boy spoke, with wide eyes aimed in her direction.
'I think you got the wrong person, Kid.' Emma swallowed stubbornly.
She felt a swarm of emotions flood her, along with the distant sound of a crying infant from the depths of her memories. The sniffles of the present brought her from her past, and Emma looked over to see the boy was crying. His small form shook, and Emma winced with uncertain discomfort. Unable to stand his distress, she invited the boy inside and warily closed the door behind him.
She had to figure out who he was so she could make him go away.
'Who are you?' Emma asked.
The child stood in front of her, still watching Emma with his sad eyes, and regained himself enough to respond to her questions. Emma tried to ignore it, but there was something forming within his eyes that was eerily familiar – the look of someone who was lost and alone in a world they didn't understand yet.
'My name is Henry.' He told her. 'I know you're my Mummy. Please, I'm scared!'
The boy moved quickly forward, as if to launch himself at her, and Emma instinctively stepped backwards in wariness of being clung to. Henry didn't hug her, but positioned himself right in front her her – somehow, it made it much harder for her to look away from his pleading eyes. Emma glanced the child over, noting his knee-torn jeans, black sweater, then brown hair, and dark green eyes. He looked about seven, which Emma nervously knew would be the same age as the son she'd given away that many years ago.
'Did you mean to leave me behind?' Henry asked, staring up at her still.
His gaze penetrated hers, giving the impression he could read her mind if he tried hard enough. His sadness remained, but curiosity began to swell, once the boy realised she wasn't about to make him leave.
'What?' Emma struggled to work out what she was supposed to say, while her mind became an intelligible jumble of panic.
Her job required her to handle a lot of inter-changing situations, but this one child was unravelling all her confidence and coherent thoughts. It was unsettling, yet Emma wasn't sure how she was supposed to react to the situation.
'You gave me away when I was a baby.' Henry pointed out, solidifying further proof that perhaps he really did know who he was talking to – his birth mother.
'I...' Emma stuttered. 'Where are your parents?' She asked instead of providing him the answers he surely sought.
He was adopted, therefore Emma tried to reason that he must belong to someone – just not her.
Henry's curiosity was clouded by his frown, as the boy looked downwards at the floor to consider her question. He blinked and quickly returned his eyes to meet hers, though with a considerable height disadvantage, and shrugged.
'I...I don't remember.' Henry said.
He'd stated it as an uncertain fact, yet she could tell his mind was flushing with renewed worries the boy hadn't considered moments earlier when he'd knocked on her door.
Emma was about to call him out on his lie, when she saw the honestly riddled in his young gaze. The boy had showed up at her doorstep early that morning to say he was her son, and yet appeared to have no clear recollection of where his parents were. It didn't make sense, except Emma always knew when a person was lying – and the boy was telling her what he perceived to be the absolute truth.
'I'm gonna call the cops.' Emma decided, and walked to her phone across the room.
Emotions aside, the situation was far too strange for her to deal with anymore. The boy claimed to be her son, and that was startling enough, but surely no one would forget their adoptive parents the second they met a biological one? The child could be sick, or misinformed, but either way Emma was determined to make it someone else's problem because she continued to feel ill-equipped to handle it.
Lifting the phone receiver, Emma halted her hand over the keypad when she heard a strange sound coming from nearby. It whirred, like something mechanical spinning too fast, and she had no idea what could make a noise like that. She turned to look at Henry, but the boy didn't seem to hear it – he watched her with desperately sad eyes, considering how he could possibly convince her not to send him away again.
'Do you hear that?' Emma wondered, as the sound got louder.
'Hear what?' Henry looked around the sparse apartment. 'I don't hear anything.'
Emma followed the noise to her bedroom, where she noticed a compass resting on her bedside table. The needle inside spun so fast it appeared to give off a blue glow. Emma heard Henry join her side, while she walked to the object with the wonder of where it had come from.
'Cool.' Henry commented.
Emma lifted it into her hand, and sat on the bed to examine it, while the boy climbed up beside her. The each stared at the strange object, though neither quite knew what it was doing.
'Did you put it there?' Emma asked him.
She was certain it hadn't been in her room the night before, or any other night previous, and thought it could only have appeared there now if the child had put it there. Her logic wavered when even Emma could not deny that she hadn't let the child out of her sight for a second, and so he couldn't have possibly dropped a compass beside her bed without her knowing.
'No.' Henry shook his head. 'What is it?'
'A compass, but I...' She inhaled a breath of air, her mind whirling with suspicion.
The sound and speed increased. With alarm, Emma moved to drop it back onto the bedside table, but the object remained with her; when she tried to release the compass, the thin chain snaked forward in mid-air to wrap securely around her left wrist in the form of a bracelet.
'Whoa!' Henry's eyes lit up with entertainment. 'That's so cool.'
'No, not cool.' Emma grumbled, trying to detach it. She couldn't figure out why the compass needle was spinning so fast, or how the item had latched itself onto her wrist, but she wanted it gone. Now.
'What's happening?' Henry inched closer to her side with renewed anxiety.
The floor trembled, and the compass needle abruptly stopped. The tiny arrow pointed directly at Emma, then a wave of air burst from the transparent screen. It spread through the room like an expanding force field - the glass of her window gave a shuddering sound, though it remained solid and unbroken. Emma didn't have time to answer the boy, or even theorise on what was going on, when the chain around her wrist glowed a bright blue to match the inside of the compass. Henry clung to her side fearfully, and the light enveloped him as well.
Emma wanted to grab a weapon or try again to discard the compass, but the light was hurting her eyes too much to see. Henry squinted against the blindness as well - the pair closed their eyes tightly shut, until a burst of blackness overcame them.
When Henry and Emma blinked, they both yelped with surprise. The bed and apartment were gone – replaced with a cleared patch of grass no bigger than Emma's bedroom had been. Surrounding them were tall trees in all directions, although a not-so-distance shoreline could be seen ahead through the mass of nature. The area was about as far from civilisation as geographically possible.
'What happened?' Henry panicked.
Emma couldn't speak. She could barely arrange her thoughts enough to realise she very much awake. She grabbed at the compass, which had become motionless and ordinary again, but was still unable to remove it from her wrist. Henry was more concerned about where they were, while Emma struggled to work out how it was possible that seconds earlier she'd been in her apartment and was now stranded on a tiny oval of land in the middle of an abundant forest.
'It worked.'
Emma and Henry turned their heads rapidly towards a stump, where a scruffy man with well-worn clothes sat to watch them. He looked pleased, yet his presence triggered a level of alarm in Emma's mind. She had no idea why.
'Who are you?' She demanded to know, glad to find someone to blame for whatever was going on.
She got to her feet, and kept Henry secured to her side – the boy eagerly allowed it, as he wrapped his arms around her and trusted Emma to keep him safe.
'Marvin.' The stranger said. 'But my name don't matter. It worked.'
'You did this?' Emma glared. 'How?'
'Magic.' Marvin shrugged, his face colouring with a smirk.
'No, that's not...' Emma couldn't deny the glowing, and now being stranded in a forest, but magic? No, that was something only in her nightmares – right? She refused to believe otherwise, as there simply had to be another explanation.
'Magic is real?' Henry, however, was far more open-minded about the concept.
'Of course not.' Emma rolled her eyes. 'Magic isn't real. It's only in fairytales, Kid.'
'Magic is real!' Marvin hissed, getting to his feet.
Emma clutched to Henry, and moved him slightly behind her, defensively protecting the boy without realising her own actions. All her instincts told her this man could not be trusted, and not just because he must be insane to babble that magic was real.
'What did you do?' Emma narrowed her eyes at the man.
'I sent that to you.' Marvin pointed to the compass weighing on her left wrist. 'I will be changing things, but I've seen things...Change is necessary. You'll see. You'll understand with time.'
'Okay.' Emma drew out her word, wondering just how insane the man was; he made less sense with each sentence. 'Whatever it was you did – reverse it. Take this stupid thing back.'
'No, no!' Marvin stumbled backwards when she raised the compass in his direction, as if it would burn him if he got too close. 'It's too late. You called it.'
'Called what?' Emma grumbled. 'Enough with the riddles.'
'The ship, of course.' Marvin chuckled. 'That compass is a beacon for stranded members of his crew. Time is frozen here, because of the curse, but it worked – you're here so it must have worked. There is an exception to the makings of the curse. Now, I can leave again, and you...'
Emma wanted to punch the man, but he spun on the spot and vanished right before her eyes in a puff of black smoke. No matter how rational she tried to be, Emma could not deny that something certainly wasn't right about this place. Glowing objects that couldn't be removed, being in her apartment one second and a forest the next, and now a man vanishing into smoke – if magic didn't exist than she was out of ideas.
'I have to get you home, Kid.' Emma said.
She knew, even if she'd somehow unintentionally gone from one place to another, surely someone would be looking for the child? She had to get him back to wherever he lived – it wasn't the law she was afraid of, but rather the fact she was content to use the child as a way to focus on forming a plan of action.
'Hold the boy close.' Marvin's fading whisper reached her ears, while Emma subconsciously tightened her protective grip around her son regardless. 'There - now he's where he belongs. He's home.'
Author's Notes: Hook will be brought into the story next chapter. Thank you for reading! Please leave a review as I would very much appreciate any feedback or thoughts you have to offer.