August woke with a start from his doze. He shook his head, trying to remember where he was and pinpoint what had woken him, when he heard it again. The screeching of wheels on the track. He blinked and turned his attention out the side of the open car, which confirmed what he suspected. They were slowing.

He sat up straighter and reached for Neal.

"Neal, wake up," he said, shaking Neal by the shoulder. Neal inhaled sharply.

"Ow!" he hissed, flipping over. "Gun shot to the shoulder, remember?"

"Oh crap, sorry," August sputtered, helping him sit up with gentler hands. "How are you feeling?"

"Could be worse," Neal said. Then he shrugged as he winced and pulled his arm to him. "Could be better, I suppose."

The conversation had roused Snow, who had fallen asleep leaning against the wall of the diner. She did not know how long she had been asleep. She looked to her side and found her husband had also fallen asleep, his head leaning back against the back of the booth seat and his mouth slightly open. Snow roused him. A noise came from behind the diner they both turned. Mr. Gold was standing behind the counter, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Snow turned her attention back to the mirror.

"We're slowing down," August said. "We need to get off the train before we get to the check point and they come looking for hoppers. Emma, we gotta get up," he turned to her, "we gotta go… Emma?"

Emma had not responded, and Neal wheeled around at the silence. She had not woken, but as they looked at her they realized that it wasn't because she was simply deeply asleep.

"Shit, Emma!"

Emma's face was flushed and splotchy. Her breathing was labored and uneven, and while droplets of sweat were sprouting on her temple, she was shivering uncontrollably, her lips chattering and blue. Her eyes remained closed even as she tried to respond to the sound of August's voice, although all she could manage was a semi-conscious cough. Snow grabbed Charming's hand. Just when she had thought they were in the clear.

"Emma?" Neal asked, trying to keep the panic from his voice. She struggled to inhale and did not respond. He reached out and first touched her arm and then her face. He recoiled at the heat he felt there. "Oh, God."

"She's burning up," August noted, feeling her cheek for himself.

"What the hell happened?" Neal asked as he took her hand. Her body was trembling with shivers and unsteady breathing.

"I have no idea, she was fine last night," August said, his eyes searching her body for any injury or explanation for Emma's rapid fever. "Or as fine as a person can be after being abducted by nut jobs intent on killing her."

"Emma, can you hear me?" Neal asked in a desperate whisper.

August's eye caught a washed out stream of blood at the bottom of Emma's pant leg. He rolled up the hem and inch and saw an unsettling mixture of dried blood, and blue bruise. "Oh, no," he murmured, taking a stronger hold of the fabric and tearing it down the seam, exposing her lower led. He stared for a moment. "Neal."

Neal tore his eyes from Emma's sweating face and followed August's gaze. Emma's leg sported a long gash up the side. Snow gasped, remembering the wound she had gotten on the fence when she was running from the police the day before. It no longer bled freely, but was clearly very badly infected.

"She never said anything," Neal breathed.

"Why does that not surprise me," August said, wiping his face as he sat back on his heals.

"We have to disinfect it," Neal suggested desperately. "Is there anything left in the flask?"

"Even if there were, the infection's already reached her blood stream," August said, further inspecting the injury and then glancing concernedly up at Emma's flushed, semi-conscious face. Neal crawled up to beside her head and pulled it into his lap, stroking her hair as she continued to shiver and gasp sporadic breaths.

"We have to get her to a doctor," Neal said. "To a hospital."

"We go to a hospital and she goes back in the system," August reminded him aggressively. "And you and I go to jail for kidnapping."

As the pair sat in silence, the desperation of their predicament bled through space into the room in the back of Gold's shop. Snow and Charming and Gold all got a vague picture of what the trio's life must have been like since they ran away from the system. From what Snow had seen of her foster father, she could not imagine life any worse for her daughter than living under his roof. However, running away had come with dangers all their own. The constant looming fear of being found, of her going back to the system, of Neal and August going to jail for it, of them being separated. No adolescent should have to live under that threat, she thought to herself.

"We'll get her back to Storybrooke," August decided. "Get her to the hospital there, to see Dr. Whale."

"Will there be enough time?" Neal asked desperately.

"There will have to be," was all August could respond. "We'll hop off at the next station, hotwire a car."

The first station came into view a few minutes later, and while the train had slowed down some, it was still painful to watch the three descend from the moving car onto the rough ground. Neal helped a semi-conscious Emma, who looked as if it were about all she could to hold herself upright, jump off as carefully as possible in August's arms before disembarking himself and grunting with the pain of his shoulder. The three of them made their way to the parking lot, where there were only a few cars to choose from. It was very early in the morning, and many people would still be at home, just waking up and readying themselves for the day. They chose a severely outdated yellow bug.

"It won't have an alarm system," August said, carrying Emma in his arms. Neal punched open the window with his good arm and then settled Emma as gently as possible in the back seat. August crossed the wires underneath the dashboard with ease and hopped in the driver's seat as the engine started. Snow had to remind herself to breathe the entire car ride back, which took a little over an hour. They met the car right out front of the hospital, Charming reaching to yank the door open before the bug had even screeched to a full stop. Snow was at his shoulder. Neal emerged with a shivering, feverish Emma in his arms and gently laid her in her father's.

"Get her to the hospital," Snow demanded. "She needs antibiotics, she needs them now, get her to Dr. Whale."

Charming turned to go, but Neal stopped him with a hand on his arm.

"Wait," he said warily. "Whale, he won't… I mean, Emma won't get sent back to the system, will she? Because we promised her…"

"Don't worry," Charming assured him. "We're never leaving her side again."

Snow had never been so furious at anyone as she was at Dr. Whale when he had insisted that she and Charming remain in the waiting room while he treated Emma. She swept that fury aside, however, as he came through the doors from the back of the hospital some time later to report on her progress. She didn't know how long she had been waiting - it felt like hours, but she imagined the time was just passing slowly - when the doors opened automatically and Whale walked out looking tired. Snow and Charming stood and rushed towards him.

"Is she…?"

"She is going to be fine," Whale assured them. Snow felt a huge weight leave her chest. "The infection was pretty far along, but I have her on the strongest anti-biotics I have and I have put given her something to knock her out so that she can get solid and uninterrupted rest to help her body recover. But barring any complications, she should be alright. She's still asleep, but you can come and see her if you like."

Snow and Charming followed Whale back into the hospital. Emma lay asleep in a bed in a room at the end of the hallway. The room had a window along one end so they could see her as they approached. When they entered the room, Snow surveyed her hungrily as they did, try to memorize everything about her, every feature. She was tall. And skinny. The blonde hair she got from her father. But her chin…

"I need to talk you both about Emma's condition," Dr. Whale said. Snow looked up, concerned.

"I thought you said she is going to be fine," Charming challenged, perhaps a bit too aggressively, but his nerves had been on edge for over a day now watching his daughter face danger after danger.

"She will be," Dr. Whale assured him. "The medicine will work. I meant…" Whale seemed to struggle with words for a moment. "With every patient that comes in here, in addition to treating what ails them, we do a routine examination."

Snow nodded her head. Having volunteered at the hospital, she was familiar with the routine exam process.

"Emma's results were… unsettling."

"Unsettling?" Charming repeated, crossing his arms in front of his chest. Snow's eyes darted involuntarily to her sleeping daughter.

"Disturbing, really," Whale continued, flipping open Emma's chart in his hands. "Firstly, she's severely underweight for her age and height, and her body mass index suggests that at one point or more during her life she was intensely underfed, if not suffering from starvation."

Snow stepped over to beside her daughter and looked down at her. Emma's cheek bones were severely pronounced, and poking out of the neck of her gown she could see the shadow of her overly exaggerated collar bone. She looked extremely skinny. Snow's mind flashed back to the bags of food she would leave outside the cannery each week. How a bright smile would light up the face of her then unknown daughter. Reminiscing, she felt so ashamed. She should have given them all more. One bag of groceries was nothing a trio of growing adolescents. She should have opened her house to them, should have recognized her daughter the moment she met her and cared for her as a mother should. She pressed her eyes shut tightly and tried to remind herself that she had not known then what she knew now.

"Secondly," Dr. Whale continued from behind her, "she has a number of severe injuries that never healed properly. At least five of her ribs have been bruised, and I suspect a number of them have been broken. They are now stable, but they never really healed properly, which suggests that when the injury or injuries occurred, she did not receive treatment. The same can be said of a series of what appear to be hairline fractures in her wrist and forearm."

Whale handed over the x-rays as he spoke, and Charming saw for himself. It felt like he could physically feel the pain of each break, each fracture, in his heart as he flipped through the images.

"Finally, we took note of all visible scars and markings," he said, almost apologetically as he handed over a series of photographs. Snow returned to her husband's side as he took them, slipping her hand in his for comfort and support as they addressed the toll their absence had had on their daughter's childhood. She was afraid of what the images would show.

There was a smattering of small circular burns on both her arms that were curiously similar in size to cigarette butts. The curved scrape of what could only be fingernails was still etched across her collarbone. The residue of harsh lashes layered her lower back. Charming did not want to think what had put them there. The final picture showed a series of scars hidden at her hairline and about her ear.

"That last one is courtesy of an empty whiskey bottle," came a voice from behind the group. Whale looked up as the royal couple whirled around to find August standing in the doorway. After Emma had been taken away by Dr. Whale, the nurses had taken Neal aside to treat his gunshot wound more appropriately. August had gone with him, but must have slipped away to come check on Emma.

"A bottle?" Charming hissed, his face white with rage at the thought.

"Was she taken to a doctor?" Whale asked.

"By who?" August said, stepping into the room. "Her foster father? He was the one who smashed the bottle into her face in the first place"

"Um, well," Whale stuttered ashamedly, "judging by the scar, it was stitched up, though roughly. Who did that?"

"I did," August said.

Dr. Whale continued to question August about what he knew of the other injuries. Most had happened before he and Neal had found Emma in Pennsylvania, though some he knew some details about. Snow was still confused as to how August - Pinocchio - had ended up in this land with her infant daughter in the first place, but it seemed as if the two had been separated shortly thereafter. She wanted answers to her questions, but she knew there was a time and a place and right now what mattered was that this young man knew more about her own daughter's health and history than she did, and so it was he the Doctor needed to speak with and not her.

She understood this, and at the same time it made her difficult to stand there and listen to August recount what he knew of the abuse. She cast an apologetic glance at her daughter, murmured something to her husband about needing some air, and fled the room.

Charming found his wife kneeling amongst the belongings of their daughter and her friends scattered throughout the corner of the cannery. Her back faced him as he approached, but he could tell she sensed his presence.

"What are you doing here?" he asked delicately as he drew level. She turned her chin up to face him slowly, and as she did he saw in her hands a soft, white blanket.

"I came here to get this," she sniffed, stroking the blanket with one hand. "I thought maybe she would want it when she wakes up. She kept it all this time. It was... the only thing I could think to do."

Snow dissolved into a distressed silence. Charming knelt beside her and said nothing, waiting for her to continue.

"Look at this place, Charming," she whispered through quivering lips as she scanned the few belongings. She could make out three distinct sleeping spots. Makeshift pillows made of garbage bags stuffed with leaves and the cushions of old, discarded patio furniture. Sheets of newspaper lining the ground for insulation. The black soot of a days-old fire sat in the middle. "This is where we sent her."

"We didn't know," Charming said, draping his arm around her shoulder. She looked at him.

"Is that an excuse?" she begged. "Fourteen years. She spent fourteen years in that system, without parents, just that man and others like him. I met her first just before Christmas, which meant she spent all winter living in here. The three of them. All winter. She asked me for medicine once, and I followed her back here. I knew she was living here, I knew she didn't have a home, and I… I used to leave food for them. A box of food every week. That's it. Who does that? Who leaves food for a group of homeless kids? Who doesn't open her house to them, take them in, love them like their parents should have?"

Tears had begun to stream their way down Snow's cheeks. Charming pulled her to him, resting her head on his shoulder.

"We should have protected her," she said. "We're her parents, we should have… I should have… protected her. Shielded her from all the evil in the world, not abandoned her to face it alone."

"We gave her her best chance."

"This was her best chance?" Snow asked, motioning to the three sad sleeping places.

"It was," Charming said. "I know it's hard to accept, but it was her best chance. To grow up, to have a life, to one day have a family."

Snow sank silently into her husband, leaning her heavy head on his shoulder. She knew what he was saying was all true, but somehow she only felt worse.

"I just… I've never felt so…"

"Helpless?" Charming suggested. Snow sniffed and nodded. "I know. Me too. But we've found her now, and I promise you," he paused and tilted his wife's face to look her in the eye, "I promise you. We'll never lose sight of her again."