Title: A Short Story About Love

Disclaimer: I don't own Once Upon A Time. If I did, Adam & Eddy would be fired and picking up litter by the side of the highway.

Summary: Years of grief and deception culminate with a journey. Rated for language. Genre also adventure/romance. (Swanfire)

Author's Note: This is what happens when a weird Once Upon A Time dream that clearly plagerizes Game of Thrones and Pirates of the Carribean demands to be written down. Sorry in advance for the heavy use of expositional narrative and presense of a certain pirate mascot. It's kind of weird tense-wise, mostly written in present and some present progressive tense. The title is taken from the Fringe episode "A Short Story About Love". Where my Cortexifans at?

A Short Story About Love

CHAPTER ONE

THE WITCHING HOUR

It's night, what Emma might have called The Witching Hour before she believed in the existence of witches thanks to one who'd altered the course of her future forever. She isn't certain of what has woken her this night, but rather than try to get back to sleep, she slips from bed and the arms of her lover to perch on a chair by the window. There she wraps herself up in one of those mass-produced Pottery Barn afghans that might pass for a family heirloom from Grandma if most every sitcom in the past thirty years hadn't include it over the back of the couch.

Emma feels about as fraudulent as the blanket, meant to look special and unique, but in truth she considers herself just another pretender.

Usually it's the nightmares that wake her, heart hammering, breath short. No one knows the true horrors of her time as the Dark One, what it was like to have that insidious voice in her head. Well, that isn't true, but she's never going to have coffee with Rumplestiltskin to talk about it.

Worse than the nightmares are the happy dreams, the "what might have been" fantasies that never could be. Sometimes Neal never leaves her and Henry is born in Tallahassee with a different name but the same steadfast devotion to family and precarious curiosity. Other times she finds a way to save Neal from the price of the Vault and though it isn't easy, they find their way back to each other and all of the pain and hurt and fear that had kept her heart closed to him is melted away by the possibility of Tallahassee. Emma wakes from those dreams in tears, her heart aching as though on fire, and she flees from the warm sheets and body beside her, because that restore potential for darkness wants to hurt the man she's given her heart to.

In the dark of night, Emma acknowledges that she has settled for an easy option, because she doesn't want to be alone. And with the secrets that have come out since she first kissed one Captain Hook, since she said those three words you can't take back to Killian, she finds herself hating him and loathing herself for staying with him. There's an irrational and cruel desire to take that arm slung over his head, moonlight setting the word "Milah" in sharp contrast to his skin, and use a bolt of magic to remove the hand that has pleasured both her and the mother of her first love - and then repeat the process with the hand she restored to him before learning the deep and dark secrets he kept from her, actions and choices she often thinks he doesn't even consider wrong.

But she doesn't.

And when daylight returns, pushing back the shadows in which she finds clarity, she will bury it all away and pretend that the true love they shared that helped save her didn't burn bright and fast like a match, leaving them with nothing but ashes. Gone are the days when she thought something better and stronger would rise from those ashes. They will never be her parents, no matter what Killian thinks as he prides himself on extolling some delusional virtues of how he won her heart and their one-true-love-ness. They will instead remain, like Regina and Robin, some corrupted carbon copy playing life out as though they were destined, as though destiny is forever instead of about untwinable moments when two people might be soulmates, before they head off on separate paths, become so very different from those people that any kind of true love after that between them is simply a desperate delusion to regain what was lost.

Magic doesn't seem to know the difference.

As wind blows through the trees, making the shadows dance, Emma considers that isn't always true. People don't always change so much that they can't find one another again. She and Neal had a chance, an understanding, a kismet that was still there and might have grown again into an active love instead of remaining this dormant thing in her heart, carried around for over a decade, just as it had been with her son.

It hurts the most that Henry will never really know his father. From her own childhood as an orphan, she understands that grief for children comes in moments, with each "first" that is experienced alone instead of with those who should be there to share in it. She has tried to be both mother and father, but she knows that's impossible, particularly little as she knew about Neal in that final decade of his life.

She sees the flicker of grief and anger in Henry's eyes sometimes when Killian seamlessly and carelessly inserts himself into moments in which, however "together" they are, he should know that he is not and never will be welcome. There's a sociopathy to the former pirate that she ignored in favor of the distracting passion and to which she became complacent, the better he learned to read her - but he has never quite figured out Henry, and in its those moments his true nature is revealed.

She isn't blinded by passion anymore.

Passion always fades, revealing the flaws that once were hidden by its blinding glow.

And when she ponders them on nights like this, Emma thinks there's more than enough reason to leave him. Sometimes she even takes a mental inventory of all the things she will pack and where she will go.

There's a rotting little house on the beach she discovered near Elsa's cave, and she thinks about how she would spend a year fixing it up, with Henry's help, and they'd paint it Bug Yellow and have a solarium filled with plants like their apartment in Manhattan. She even has magazines that she skims at work sometimes, dog-earing pages of interiors and gardens.

But she'll do neither of those things. She'll stay with him and let the cottage fall apart, forgotten, until perhaps one day her dreams will fade away as well, washed into the sea with the termite-eaten porch and weather-worn clapboards.

Relationships are about a journey, not an ending, her parents like to say, but Emma knows that's a lie people tell themselves to keep from admitting that they've wasted precious time on something that never should have been. And to keep from dealing with tragic endings, because if she learned anything from Regina's experience with Tinkerbell, it's that grief is a taboo in the world of her birth, akin to a disease that must be either conquered swiftly with a stiff upper lip or smothered by the introduction of new love. You can't have a happily ever after or even a happy beginning if you're so busy focusing on the part of your heart that will always belong to the one you lost that you miss the opportunity to sacrifice another chunk on some frivolity with the potential to become true love. There's some truth to it, but it's all so warped and twisted, based upon such ridiculous fallacies about love and relationships and misogynist ideologies, that any kernel of truth in that philosophy is undermined by the fairy tale fantasy delusions.

Such has become her life, Emma thinks. If you can't beat 'em, you have to join 'em, and so she has embraced their crazy.

Eventually, she thinks, she'll forget the little yellow house in her dreams that's filled with love and laughter. Eventually, it will be no more and she'll have accepted this life, imperfect as it is, perhaps even convinced herself that finding a happy ending in "as good as it gets" isn't the biggest betrayal of all.

The sound of rustling sheets pulls her from those depressing thoughts, and turning her gaze from the moonlight catching on the brittle strands of the dreamcatcher, Emma meets the heavily-lipped eyes of her lover. His hair is wild and a shadow of stubble on his jaw adds to his physical attractiveness... his sole virtue that was enough to seduce her but would hardly be enough to keep her if there was a better option. Or if the truth was that she didn't want a better option.

"Luv, come back to bed," he calls, voice rough, and in a cadence intended to be sexy, so ingrained is that lethario habit in him after three centuries of tricking bar maidens into bed.

Emma tries not to think about that, to ponder how much a person changing away from criminality for such selfish reasons as to claim her heart can actually, if at all, atone for three hundred years of doing terrible, unspeakable things. In the light of day she can explain away his villainy as the haze of a broken heart and vengeance, but she has been brokenhearted, and she has the capacity for great evil, but she would never do what he did or continually place the blame on others, say he was being used by a bigger evil than his own to rebrand his actions as the desperation of a victim.

She knows that her words to that effect have encouraged the delusion in Killian, made him believe himself to be redeemed and a hero, but in the light of day she needs him to be those things, because The Savior cannot be with a villain and it is her job to save everyone, to make them better and get them happiness whether or not its deserved.

At night it's different. In the growing shadows Emma needs him to be the monster he truly is, that she sees in him even if he is blind to his own twisted and ugly reflection now. She needs to feel dirty and she needs to be hurt. She needs him to be rough and dominate her, make her forget that there was ever a time in her life when sex and emotion were one. Killian never complains, of course.

She knows that in the daylight it grates on him that she is the one with power, that it drives him to the frequent distraction of blatantly disregarding her authority even if his own plan of action is some half-assed nonsense sure to get him and others nearly killed, just because his chauvinist sensibilities cannot allow him to be cowed by a woman. And so, she lets him think that he has the control in their bed, in the physical side of their romance as he "seduces" her with his pretty face, flowery words, and his "sword".

Emma doesn't even feel bad that he is so easily fooled, which, perhaps, doesn't say much for the state of her moral compass... any more than it says for his, she supposes.

They have now been lovers long enough that Emma doubts Killian has ever made love to anyone, despite his belief otherwise in his dear sweet Milah. But Emma reasons it impossible that two utterly unempathetic people could do anything more than copulate for the purpose of the endorphin rush and the egotistical high of being the one to bring someone else to the heights of ecstasy.

And so that's what they do.

Emma slips back into bed, and he slips into her, and she lets him be the man he can never be during the day when he is just the "pirate mascot" consort of The Savior. She cries out his name and she bites his lip until she tastes blood, and he chuckles that she is a saucy little pirate wench, makes some crude joke about always knowing she had a little - or not so little tonight - pirate in her. It's not remotely as romantic or clever as he thinks, but she laughs and kisses him, that all-passion-without-sweetness kiss that so pathetically defines them.

Then she rolls over, imagining that the arm laying heavy on her hip and the callused fingers tracing patterns on her thigh belong to another.

Before a dreamless sleep claims her, Emma wonders which one of them is truly the villain.

AN: Hook. It's still Hook.

Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.