Someone to Watch Over Me

Canon Divergence: Emma Swan is 10 when she first sees the pair of bright blue eyes watching her from the cracked door of the wardrobe. She thinks it was just an imaginary friend, until she sees those eyes again at 16 and 23.

Based on the prompt: A child is kidnapped and the monster who lives under the bed isn’t happy about it. Although it ballooned into something else and there ended up being no kidnapping . . .  

Age 10

              Emma’s new foster mother, Martha, looks to be in her seventies with brittle gray hair and deep wrinkles. Yet her smile is kind, and her hands are soft as they gently give her slim shoulders a squeeze. The house is at least a hundred years old with cracked, peeling paint, and scuffed hardwood floors. A monstrous, black pot-bellied stove radiates heat from the corner of the main room. Like most old houses, one room leads into the next, and Martha gently steers her through the doorway next to the stove. She tells her this will be the room she shares with Lindsey, the sullen teenager with a permanent scowl on her face. Emma looks around, taking it all in through her wide jade eyes. There’s a fireplace in this room, but it’s bricked up. A small space heater instead runs in the corner of the room. Martha tells her this used to be the dining room, and a set of French doors line one wall. A long, low piece of furniture sits in front of it to block the door, but through the beveled glass, Emma can see the foyer and the front door that she knows leads out to a massive front porch complete with a swing.

              Martha shows Emma her bed, and she’s surprised to find that she gets the larger one. A massive double bed of thick, dark wood with tall posts. Lindsay’s twin bed, just a simple metal frame and mattress sits in front of the room’s one window.

              “Lindsay couldn’t sleep in that huge bed, so I got her that cot,” Martha explains with a shrug. She sets Emma’s suitcase beside the bed and then pulls a small stepstool form under the bed. “This thing is so high off the ground, you’ll have to use this to get in it. It’s a very old bed.”

              Emma eyes the stool and tries to hide how pleased she is with the bed. It’s ornate and obviously an antique. It’s like something out of a movie. She’ll feel like a princess sleeping in that bed.

              But the best thing of all is the wide space between the bed and the hardwood floor. No monsters can lurk under this bed.