Snow's eyes had not left Emma's face in what felt like hours. Sometimes, she found they had grown dry and red because she had forgotten to blink. Even with a tube down her throat to help her breathe, her baby girl was the most beautiful thing she had ever laid eyes on, and after having almost lost her in the tomb, Snow could not bring herself to wrench her from her sight.

But the battle for her life was not yet won. Sure, her throat was unsliced, thanks to Henry's devastating sacrifice, but she still would not breathe on her own. Snow listened to the whir of the machine as it pumped oxygen in and out of her lungs, and willed for some kind of change. It had been hours now.

"What's wrong with her?" Snow had asked Dr. Whale, when, not an hour after the end of the surgery the monitor had begun to beep rapidly and Snow had been swept from her daughter's side as Whale brought out the paddles. It took three violent shocks to return her heart beat to a safe rhythm. Snow had watched at the side of the room, her face half buried in her husband's chest as he wrapped his arms around her. "Did something go wrong in the surgery?"

"Everything went fine," Dr. Whale assured her. "I was able to repair the damage. There's no medical reason she shouldn't be breathing on her own."

"Then why isn't she?" Charming begged. "Could it be magic, like with Henry and the apple turnover? Could the blade have been laced with some kind of poison?"

"I doubt it. I would have seen something more supernatural if magic were involved," Whale replied. He bit his lip and glanced at Emma. "I've seen this before. Patients crashing even though they are medically sound."

"And what causes it?" Charming pressed. Whale looked at him and his wife, as if he was hesitant to tell the truth. Then he sighed and continued.

"A lack of will," he admitted, casting them an almost apologetic glance. "If a patient's spirit has lost the will to live, then there's not much the body can do to recover."

Snow's breath had caught in her throat as she shared a dreadful look with her husband. It was more than plausible that Emma's will to live was being tested, considering what had happened in the moments before she had collapsed.

"We're going to find him," Snow whispered now to her still daughter. "We're going to get him back. You can't give up."

Emma's chest rose and fell mechanically with the pattern of the machines. Her face showed no sign of recognition or change. Snow leaned in closer, warm tears trickling down the bridge of her nose and dripping from its tip.

"He needs you," she whispered shakily. "You're his mother. Henry needs his mother. You have to come through this. You can't give up."

Snow heard the sound of the door sliding open behind her. She sat up straighter, sniffling and wiping the tears from her face. She turned and saw her husband as he advanced towards her, a cup of coffee in each hand. He placed one of them on the table beside his wife at the head of his daughter's bed, then reached to rub Snow's back comfortingly.

"Any change?" he asked.

"No," she sniffed.

"She'll come around," Charming assured her. "She'll pull through, I know it. She's a fighter."

Snow swallowed hard, trying to keep her doubt at bay. She felt Charming's ginger touch on her cheek, swollen and stiff from the violent battle she had been forced wage with the woman lying unconscious before her. He turned to face her and crouched, concerned.

"How are you?" he asked.

"I'm fine," she insisted, but Charming kept his hand pressed gently up against her cheek, and for a moment she closed her eyes and allowed it to cup her face, sinking her wounded cheek into its support.

"I did this," Snow choked, her guilt overcoming her.

"Snow," Charming protested.

"I put her life in danger. I had to have my revenge, and now, she's lying here in a hospital bed without the will to live."

"She will come out of this," Charming insisted.

"She lost her son," Snow countered dramatically, turning to face him. "That boy meant everything to her, and now he's gone. She has no reason to want to come out of this."

Charming took both her hands in his and forced his wife to look him in the eye.

"You did not do this," Charming told her in a soft, warm voice. "Emma will come through this, and then together, we will find away to get Henry back."

Charming could see that he had not convinced her fully, but even still Snow was grateful for the reassurance, however fleeting. She cast a sad glance at her daughter lying in the hospital bed before standing from her chair.

"I need some air," she said off-handedly. Charming watched her go sadly before turning to his unconscious daughter and leaning closer. He took her hand in his.

"Please, Emma," he pleaded in a whisper. "You have to wake up."

Neal had spotted the empty seat in front of the cocoa mug before the bell of the diner door had finished ringing, and he instantly became anxious.

"Where's Henry?" he had asked Granny.

"He went to the bathroom," Granny told him as Charming and Red filed in behind him. She surveyed him over the tops of her spectacles. "Something about not feeling very well."

Neal had trotted down the hallway in the back and knocked gently on the bathroom door.

"Henry?" he asked. "Come on Henry, my eggs weren't that bad."

When he pushed open the door and found the room empty, his face fell.

"He's not in the bathroom!" he said in a frantic voice as he came back into the diner.

"What?" Granny exclaimed, slamming the coffee pot down on the countertop.

"He's not there, it's empty," he repeated, struggling to choose which of his emotions to feel the most strongly – fear or anger.

"Where could he have gone?" Red asked.

Neal's face darkened as he wracked his brain. He was new to this whole father thing, but Henry was his son. If he were in his position, where would he have gone?

"Does Henry know where Regina's vault is?" he asked.

"Yes," Charming breathed dreadfully, thinking back to the time when Snow and Emma had been trapped in the Enchanted Forest and he had found Henry down there trying to find a way to get them back. "He's been there before."

"Then I know where he could have gone," Neal said darkly, catching his eye. The party flew out of the diner without another word, Neal in the lead progressing with storming strides. He had all but thrown himself down the stairs in the floor of the tomb, calling out in a panicked voice.

"Henry?!"

As soon as he skidded to a halt on the stone floor and saw the scene in front of him, the blood drained from his face. Snow knelt with an unconscious Emma in her arms, shaking her vigorously and calling her name hoarsely while a pool of dark blood spread around them. He advanced forward and was instantly on his knees beside the two women. Charming was two steps behind him.

"No!" he gasped at the sight of his wife cradling his daughter, covered in blood. He joined the group in one stride and knelt beside his wife. "Get an ambulance!" he bid Red, who turned from where she had just descended the stairs and sprinted up them again. Charming turned his attention back to his unconscious daughter, hovering his hands over her. "Emma?" he whispered.

"What happened?" Neal asked gruffly, taking Emma's hand, his eyes lingering on her wound.

"I did it!" Snow was sobbing. "She had my heart and she made me… and I couldn't…"

Charming pulled his wife to him and cradled her as her body writhed with silent sobs. Neal looked up at her.

"Henry?" he asked desperately. "Was he here, did he…?" Snow nodded, but that only made the uncertain knot in Neal's stomach tighten. "Where is he?"

"She took him," Snow stuttered through her sobs. "Regina. She was about to make me kill her and he flew in and said he would go with her if she let us live. She took him and they disappeared."

Neal's heart stopped at the news. He stared at Snow, then at Emma, his mouth open, disbelieving. But as the blood continued to spread around his fingers, he snapped his mind to the most pressing matter.

"We have to get her to a hospital," he said. He caught Charming's eye, who nodded, and the two of them helped to lift Emma's body into Neal's arms. Charming took Snow's hand as he made to follow Neal up the stairs, but halted when he felt Snow lag behind. He turned and saw that she was staring darkly at something on the ground. He followed her gaze. It was a heart, glowing red. He looked back and Snow, and she caught his eye, confirming its identity. He crouched slowly and gingerly took the heart in his hands.

Snow eyed the heart with a skepticism that bordered on disgust. She was afraid. If she was feeling this level of pain and fear with her heart outside her body, how much would its magnitude increase with it back insider her chest? She raised her glance and saw that Charming was watching her eyes, waiting for her to be ready. She took a deep breath, pressed her eyes shut, and nodded.

When he had pressed her heart back into her, all the pain and sorrow she was feeling, the guilt and the shame and the grief, had exploded inside her. She had no choice but to succumb to it until she had collapsed, unconscious, into her husband's arms.

It was nearly twenty-four hours and three code-blues more before Emma's body finally stopped waging its war against itself and she began to breathe on her own. Perhaps her subconscious was tired of them insistently bring her back with the electric paddles every time she decided to call it quits. In any event, it was a few more hours before she regained consciousness, and another hour still before Neal summoned up the courage to leave the waiting room chair he had been sitting in throughout the ordeal in a pained and guilt-ridden silence and face his son's mother.

He stood sheepishly in the doorway and watched her for a moment. She looked in pain. In all kinds of pain. He thought back to the happy-go-lucky girl he had met in that stolen car. He had so much to make up for. After a few moments, she spotted him. Her eyes cut him in a severe, accusatory way.

"I trusted you," she growled, pain etched in every crevasse of her voice.

"Emma, I'm…" Neal began, but she did not want to hear it.

"I trusted you to keep him safe!" she thundered. Neal sank into the chair next to her bed, his eyes as devastated as hers.

"I'm so sorry," he said, his voice shaking. "You disappeared in the tomb and I left him at Granny's for like two minutes to enlist my father's help, and when I came back he'd run off."

"He walked in on his adoptive mother about to force his grandmother to kill his birth mother," she spelled out for him. The guilt in his face deepened. "He had to bargain for our lives by promising to go with her. She took him. He's gone."

"And believe me, no one regrets it more than I d…"

"No one?" Emma challenged, her face torn and vicious. For a moment she seemed to struggle with her words, as if she couldn't find ones that quite fit her emotion. "You knew him for all of one week! He's my son, I gave birth to him. Held him in my arms right after he came into this world. Giving him up once was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. And then he came and found me, and he was perfect. He was this perfect boy, and I told him I would protect him and…"

The rage in Emma's voice had melted into devastation as she completely lost her composure. What had been fury before now found itself tragic grief wrung from her in hot tears, which would not subside. Neal came forward and instantly wrapped her in his arms, and at first she thought she would shove him away. But she surprised herself when she didn't. It was all too much, and instead she sank into his embrace as the tears she could not stem began to flow.

"You should have seen his face," she panted, trying to catch her breath and rein her emotions back in. "And I couldn't do anything." He patted the back of her head.

"We will find him," Neal said. "I know it's been a while. I know we haven't seen each other in over ten years, and I know circumstances are very different now, but I know you. You don't give up. You get what you want. Do you remember how was used to be when we were together? We were unstoppable."

"We were thieves," Emma scoffed.

"We were unstoppable," Neal insisted. "Whatever happened between us, you can't deny that we made a great team. And now, it's personal. It's family."

Neal pulled away from the embrace and took Emma by the shoulders, looking deep into her moist eyes.

"I know you don't trust me, and I know you have no reason to," he said, his eyes completely genuine as he spoke. "But I promise you that we will not stop until Henry is away from Regina and back with his real family."

Emma wanted to scream. She wanted to run. She wanted to curl up and cuss and rock in a secluded ball until she forgot everything that had happened in the last few days. Everything that had happened in the last few years. Everything that had happened in her life. But as Neal held her gaze, somehow she felt herself nodding. Gently, he reached up to touch her cheek, then he pulled her to his chest again.

"So you get one day, ok? One day to rest and mourn and grieve and recover. And then, our work begins."

Swanfire fans, you are welcome. Captain Swan fans, do not fret! I intend this to be a deeply involved tale with a fun, tense and witty love triangle, and a protective father added into the mix, as the story continues. (Swan Queen fans, I hope you find enough of interest in this story to forgive the fact that I can't make that one work right now.)

In the next installment, the planning begins as Emma, Neal, Snow, Charming, and just about everybody in Storybrooke teams up to find Henry and get him back to his birth parents. In addition, a forgotten character shows up in Storybrooke once more.