Chapter 5: Family Ties
The next morning Snow White and Prince Charming woke up in each other's arms. The sun was shining and birds were singing and there was an angry message from Emma summoning them to the sheriff's office.
Emma was not there when they reached the police station; or it was possible that she was at the station and was making the two of them wait like naughty children who had been called before the principle.
Suddenly, both Charming and Snow were struck with the same thought. During their amorous adventures the night before there had been one place where they hadn't made love.
"The couch in the principal's office!" They shouted at the same moment and then giggled like mischievous school children.
"Don't even think about it!" An angry voice seethed behind them.
Emma strolled in to the room with purpose. She walked around her desk and plopped into her chair. She dropped a file on the desk top in front of the two truants from decent behavior.
Snow jumped up ran around the desk and threw her arms around her daughter and hugged her tightly. Emma was caught off guard.
"How is Henry?" Charming asked with enthusiasm.
"He is doing great. They should let him go home later today. I left Ruby at the hospital playing video games with him.
"Was she wearing red?" Snow asked as she walked back to her side of the desk and sat down beside her husband.
Charming exchanged an anxious look with his wife
"Doesn't she always?" Emma gave them a puzzled look.
Snow and Charming left out a collective sigh of relieve. They knew that Red likely was not going to turn into a wolf in the middle of the day and eat their grandson, but it paid to be sure.
The angry look had returned to Emma's face. She opened the file and began to read, " The two of you are being charged with 28 counts of vandalism, breaking and entering and destruction of private property."
Snow and her husband shared a guilty look.
What the hell were you two thinking when you embarked on your rampage last night?" Emma's voice had raised several decibels and her disappointment was clearly written on her face.
She had them there, they honestly could not think of an answer.
"David, I would expect this kind of behavior from you"
His mouth opened and closed in shock at the accusations being branded about by his daughter of all people.
"Mary Margaret, I would have thought you would have behaved better, after all you aren't the town Trollope!"
This was more than Charming could take and he stood up angrily and slapped both hands on the desk. This caused Snow to involuntarily jump.
"I won't have you talking that way to your mother, young lady."
Now it was Emma's turn to gape. The moment was surreal to her. She hadn't really thought about the ramifications of the curse being broken. These two people sitting across from her thought of themselves as her parents.
Right now she was not a daughter, she was the law and these two people who sat in front of her, ok one of them was currently standing and pacing the room, were not her parents or even her friends. They were two people who, in her eyes had broken too many laws to count.
Snow White could tell by the anger on the faces of her husband and her daughter that unless something was done quickly the situation was going to turn ugly.
"Emma, why don't you tell us what the charges are against us?" She tried to sound calm.
Emma flipped open the file again and started to read.
"Breaking and entering at numerous locations; both private and public around Storybrooke; destruction of property at Mr. Gold's shop, namely a bed and covers."
"It is our bed!" Snow said through gritted teeth.
Emma continued, "Destruction of property belonging to Dr. Whale, namely the hood of his car and a coffee mug and lamp that had been on his office desk at the clinic. It was his favorite mug." She stated firmly with a grimice.
Charming glared, "He was lucky I didn't break that ugly mug he calls a face." This caused Snow to giggle uncontrollably, which made Emma glare at her. Really, her daughter and husband were so much alike.
"This isn't funny!" Emma seethed.
"How can you prove it was us?" Charming asked casually.
"Video surveillance cameras, you were caught in the act more than once last night," Emma winced with disgust.
Snow's face turned beet red and even Charming looked away in embarrassment.
"Who all has seen the tapes? He whispered the question as he put a protective arm around the shoulder of his wife as he stood behind her.
Emma sighed, "Only me and only as much as I had to see in order to confirm the identity of the culprits."
Snow relaxed slightly.
"Except, Ruby saw part of the one from the diner, you two just had to pick a table that was near the cash register," Emma rolled her eyes. "People have to eat off of those tables!"
"How much did you see?" Charming asked as he swallowed hard as he started to walk around the room again.
"Oh god, this is so embarrassing. We are going to have to leave town," Snow sobbed. "We will have to get new identifications."
Charming stopped pacing and instantly went to Snow's side and held her tightly against his chest.
"Relax, we stopped watching when you mentioned, "service with a smile," Emma informed him. "Ruby that it was hilarious!"
Charming relaxed a little, but it was still more than he would ever want anyone to see.
"The point is, you broke the law and you are going to have to pay restitution. " Emma sighed. "Now, I am thinking it will have to be in installments since neither of you has any money."
Snow pulled away from her husband and she looked up at their daughter. "You are wrong, Emma dear, your father and I are extremely rich or so he says." Snow frowned.
On the way to the police station Charming had told his wife his last secret. How he had the fairies send gold, silver and jewels through the wardrobe before it was finished. A king's ransom was waiting in a cave in the woods. All they had to do was find the cave location and stake their claim to the riches. For her part, Snow still had a few questions about the cave.
"There is a cave in the forest," He explained to Emma. "I found it when I was looking for Snow in the woods after you questioned me about Katherine."
"This was during one of you blackouts when Mary Margaret found you wondering around lost?" Emma asked, her face was screwed up in a frown of concentration as if she expected to have trouble following his convoluted explanation.
The puzzled look that crossed the face of his wife was a mirror image of the expression worn by their daughter. "You mean, when we were out looking for Katherine after she disappeared?"
"I was not looking for Katherine. I was looking for you, which was why I was so confused. I was looking for you to stop you from killing Regina," He paused and went on. "Only, I was in the wrong forest and I was not in my right mind, so when I remembered begging you not to kill her, I had the victims wrong."
"Of course, that explains everything." Snow exclaimed.
Emma gave her a skeptical look.
"Well, maybe not everything. It does explain a lot though. The forest is where the worlds were bleeding together. That is why you were wondering around the woods looking for me and it also explains why you were able to do that one brave, noble thing when you saved me from falling into the ravine. Just for a moment, you were my Charming." Snow smiled blissfully.
"Have I really only done one noble act this past year?" He gave her a wounded look.
"Well, there was that one time that you let me shower first during our affair while you were supposedly married to Katharine."
Emma looked disgusted, "Can we please refrain from discussing the details of your affair?"
"I don't think you can call it an affair since we were actually married at the time," Charming mentioned in a matter of fact tone.
"That is true," Snow nodded her head in agreement.
"I don't see what that has to do with you being rich?" Emma snapped impatiently.
"I found the treasure cave when I was wandering around the forest. Now I remember that everything inside it belongs to us. I will use some of the treasure to pay for the damages we caused."
"So, now I am supposed to believe that you have bunch of treasure hidden away in Aladdin's Cave?" Emma did not try and hide the sarcasm in her voice.
"Aladdin's Cave is much different," He said in a matter of fact tone.
"This whole town is certifiable. You all have always been strange, but now you are going all Twin Peaks on me!" Emma rolled her eyes and rubbed her temples. A tension head ache was starting to build.
"What is Twin Peaks?" Snow asked.
Emma gave her a disbelieving look.
"TV show from the early 1990's. I watched it when I was a child. Forget I mentioned it." She turned back to her father." As long as you pay for repairs to the private property you damaged, I really could care less if you cash in the family jewels, pull it out of a magic hat or even out of your but…"
Snow White interrupted he daughter in a scolding tone, "Emma!"
This was not the family reunion that she had been looking forward to having between mother, father and daughter. Emma seemed to be carrying around lot of anger towards her father. Snow suspected that she still thought of him a David Nolan. Emma had grown up in a land without magic and where happy ending didn't exist. It was going to take their daughter some time to adjust.
"Can we please save the battle for our real enemies?" Snow gave her daughter and her husband a pleading look.
"Speaking of battles, I guess I have your sword. At least that is what Gold told me when he gave it to me. He had it in his shop." Emma turned to her father.
"How did he end up with all of our possessions?" Snow wanted to know.
I have no clue, he gave me the sword. He also gave me some kind of freaky art object as well. It had a bunch of blue glass unicorns. Suspended on wires, I was strangely drawn to it."
Charming gave sigh of relief. Emma had the baby mobile.
"That is not a piece of art!" Snow cried out in alarm. That is the mobile that hung over your crib in your nursery."
"I had a nursery?" Emma gave them a puzzled look.
"Of course you had a nursery," Charming answered in a matter of fact tone.
"What on earth for? You had every intention of shoving me in a tree trunk and sending me to another realm. Why bother and build me a nursery?"
Snow White opened her mouth to answer and then closed it again. Clearly there were some serious anger issues they were going to have to work through.
"Sending you away was never our first choice," Snow replied with tears in her eyes. "It was the hardest decision we ever had to make. In the end we felt that we had no other choice."
"There is always a choice," Emma replied more coldly than she had first intended.
Emma had spent most of her childhood rehearsing in her mind how she wanted her first meeting with her birth parents to go. Her imagination had osculated between scenarios where she was gushy overwhelmed with joy and other situations where she gave them hell for leaving her.
She thought both situations would feel different from what she was feeling at the moment. She was angry, but joyous at the same time. Mostly she felt frightened and lost and she tended to lash out when she felt those feelings.
Tears were falling from the eyes of both Snow and Emma now. Charming could see that both of the women he loved were in pain, for he did love Emma nearly as much as he loved his Snow. He knew that the more he got to know his daughter the larger his love for her would grow. At the moment, he needed to protect them both. Emma needed answers, but both women were too emotionally raw to be of help to the other.
Snow stood up and tearfully proclaimed as she swallowed hard and tried to catch her breath, "I need some air." She rushed from the room and when her husband stood up to follow her she dismissed him. "Stay here,I just need a moment alone." She tried to muster a weak smile, but he could tell from the lack of color in her face that she was utterly heart broken.
He was still holding onto the hand of his wife and he kissed her gently on the forehead before he let her go. His tender gesture did not go unnoticed by there daughter. Emma was trying hard to reconcile what she knew of David Nolan versus what she knew from story books of the epic love of Snow White and Prince Charming. It wasn't easy to for her to accept that they could be the same man.
Charming watched his wife leave through eyes filled with concern. Then he turned back to Emma.
Father and daughter engaged in brief staring match and then Charming spoke.
"I know you are angry and confused. If you want to yell or hit someone or anything else, if you need someone to hurt, let it be me."
Charming gave his daughter a serious look and then let out a breath and then he continued in a softer voice.
Because of who she is, Snow feels everything so intensely. I think it is because she is so good and so pure of heart, she is easily wounded by those she loves and she loves you profoundly. So please don't hurt her." He had a pleading look in his eyes.
"That is rich, coming from you," Emma exhaled in disgust.
"What is that supposed to mean?" He asked with genuine curiosity in his voice
"I have seen the effects of your love on her over the past year. Every time you broke her heart I was the one who had to comfort her and put the pieces back together. Every night that she cried herself to sleep over you I was the one who held her hand. You hurt her so many times and so deeply. Because I do love her, it is hard for me to stand idly by and let you hurt her again"
Charming knew that David had hurt Mary Margaret repeatedly and he also knew that Snow had forgiven him. But hearing the details from someone who had witnessed the pain he had caused firsthand brought back so much of his guilt.
"Everything that I did over the past year was because of the curse. I am not really that person. I would never intentionally do anything to hurt any member of my family"
It was important to him that Emma believed what he was saying.
"The curse makes a convenient excuse, but I only have your word and it means little to me," Emma shook her head in the negative. "
You want me to believe that you love her and are suddenly a different man than the one who broke her heart this past year. I am going to need to see a whole lot of proof"
"What about all the times I saved Snow? True loves kiss is what woke her up after she ate the poison apple. She married me and was willing to have a child with me. All of that has to count for something." He was desperate now.
"No offence, but I only have your word that all of that happened. It is a little hard to believe that one man could do all of that, even Prince Charming." Emma's tone was slightly mocking and she had her hands folded in front of her in defiance.
"It all happened, you can ask Snow." His voice was soft, but the look in his eyes was emotional. He sat back down in a chair opposite from his daughter.
"I will ask her, but there is still the possibility that you drugged her or hypnotized her into believing that you are some kind of hero," The expression in her eyes was one of iron clad determination. She was daring him to try and convince her that he would not hurt the woman they both loved.
"I never said I was a hero. I am just an ordinary guy who was thrust into extraordinary circumstances.
He met her look with one of equal determination, "I was fortunate to fall in love with a wonderful woman and I realized that I would go to the ends of the earth and back for the woman I loved. Since you were able to break the curse, I thought that meant that you were a believer in our story. I guess you need more convincing."
"It is a lot to get used to in a short amount of time." Emma shrugged.
"We have both loved you since the moment you were born. Snow has spent more time with you over the past year so she feels bond with you that I can only hope to one day have," He tried to infuse his voice with as much sincerity as possible.
"If you loved me so much, why did you just send me away?" Her voice trembled slightly, betraying the underlying emotion she was feeling. What really hurt was the fact that she gave him and utterly devastating look.
He could have reminded her that she did the same thing with Henry, but he couldn't hurt her that way. She was his daughter. So, he settled for the simple truth.
"We wanted to keep you safe. For the record, I wanted to keep you with us. Luckily the wisdom of your mother prevailed and she insisted that I take you to the wardrobe."
"You wanted to keep me?" Emma was genuinely shocked at this announcement.
"It would have been the wrong choice. Your mother was right we had to send you away in order to give you the best chance possible. You would have been and infant. You saw over the past year what Regina reduced me too, David Nolan could not have protected you from her. She would have killed you or taken you away from us. The life you had here was better than any life we could have given you under the curse."
"How can you say that? I was bounced around from foster home to foster home until I was old to be on my own and then I got pregnant at 17." She stated angrily.
"I know that and it breaks the hearts of your mother and me every time we think about the loneliness that you must have felt. Knowing that you had to go through all of that hurts almost as much as the memory of the moment we had to give you up. I know that we can't give you back your childhood, but we both want desperately to be a part of your life now."
"I don't know what will happen in the future. Right now, the scars of my childhood are still too fresh."
Charming started to unbutton his shirt. This caused Emma to freak out. She was convinced that he was trying to seduce her.
"What the hell do you think you are doing now, Nolan?"
He didn't stop until he was able to peel enough of the shirt off for Emma to see the scars.
"Are those from the accident? Why are you showing them to me now?" Emma found herself strangely moved by the sight of his scars, as if there was a strong memory attached to them that she could not fully grasp.
Very patiently, he redressed. "There was no accident. These are scars from the sword wounds I acquired while I fought off the Regina's guards in order to save your life by sending you through the magic wardrobe."
Emma gapped at him and then asked in low tone, "Do you actually believe that really happened?"
"Emma, it was as real as the conversation we are having right at this moment. I need you to realize that you are not the only one who has scars from the actions you mother and I undertook 28 years ago."
Emma titled her head and gave him a serious look, biting her bottom lip in the process. It was a look Snow gave him when she finally gave in and came around to his way of thinking on a subject. Emma looked so much like her mother in that moment that tears formed in his eyes.
Emma sighed. "Please don't cry," She rolled her eyes. "If you really believed that sending me away was the only way to save me and to end the curse, what made you think it would work?"
"Your mother had faith that no matter where we sent you that we would all be reunited in the end. It took me a while to believe that too, but in the end I knew you would find us."
"How could you be sure?" She tilted her head again and gave him a puzzled look.
"You are my daughter, it is what we do best," He gave her a gentle smile. "We find each other."
Emma let out a breath of air, "I think you better show us your cave of treasures," She reluctantly replied.
Snow had composed herself and come back into the room. She was ecstatic to see that they hadn't killed each other while she had been outside.
Her husband was instantly at her side.
"Are you alright?" He asked with great concern in his voice.
Emma also looked concerned.
"Thank you," Emma finally said to her mother.
"For what?" Snow tilted her head and gave her daughter a puzzled look.
It made Prince Charming want to laugh out loud with joy. He wondered how, over the past year, he had missed the similarities between the two women. It was obvious that they were related.
"Thank you for coming to the hospital last night." Emma answered simply.
"How did you know that we had been there?" Charming asked.
Emma laughed, "You are not going to believe this, but I saw it on the surveillance cameras."
"Those invasive cameras will be the end of us all." Snow groaned. "Is there no privacy in this town?"
"I think the mayor had something to do with the installation of all the cameras. They can be useful though. I checked this morning to make sure that Regina had not tried to sneak into Henry's room last night and I saw that the two of you had been there."
"I really needed to see that you and Henry were okay," Snow White told her daughter. "I love you, you know that right?" There was emotion in her voice, but no tears in her eyes.
"I love you too," Emma admitted with emotion equaling that of her mother. She turned to her father. "I will try and get used to you. For now, we had better go before I change my mind and decide to throw your butt in a jail cell for no other reason than because I can." She gave him a tough look. But Snow as sure that she saw a flash of teasing behind the hardness in Emma's eyes.
Charming gave his wife an innocent look and took her hand in his.
The three of them left the station together. Maybe they were not yet a family, but they had made a good start.
Next: All that glitters is gold, silver and jewels.