Warning: somewhat dubious consent and lots of sex.
He is walking back onto his ship when he hears the voice calling out for him.
"Captain! Captain, wait."
It's a woman's voice, and Killian has always been inclined to pay heed to women's calls. He lets his crew precede him onto the ship and waits patiently until the narrow cloaked figure has reached him. Under the hood of her ragged cloak, the woman is pale as though ill, with a narrow bony face and a wide mouth and eyes that suggest a need such that could never cross her lips. She is steely and calm and her voice has a texture like wood grain, but she needs something from him, and Killian's favorite kind of woman is the kind that comes begging.
"I want passage on your ship. For me and my baby." Yes, there's a swaddled little package in her arms, mercifully quiet. He doesn't like babies.
"Passage? We're not a passenger ship... Madam. We're running goods up the coast to the White Kingdom. Not a trip for a woman to take." He cocks his head, enjoying the sight of her from this angle: partway up the gangplank, he is more than a few heads taller than her, and she has to tilt her head and look up at him. "Yet you seek passage with a ship full of rough-trade sailors."
"I will pay." She holds something up to him and the light glints bright off a chain looped around her hand, a chain of gold. When he takes it from her, it spills like liquid into his palm, so finely made it seems spun like thread. He doesn't question how a woman alone, carrying a babe, has come by such a thing. Desperate women will take any measure necessary.
"This won't be enough," he tells her, closing his hand over the chain, enjoying the flicker of fear that passes through her eyes like a disappearing light, manifesting in the little twitch of a smile she gives him. "Not for an unlucky woman and a squalling infant. What else do you have to offer me?"
He can see the moment she understands by the way her eyes go dark. The baby in her arms makes a noise; she turns away from him slightly, protectively, and lifts the bundle of cloth and child to look into its face. As if speaking to the babe, she says, "I'll give you anything." She strokes the baby's cheek. "I'll do whatever it takes."
Graciously, Killian permits her to keep the baby in his cabin, so that she can have it near to quiet its nighttime cries. Not that he will allow the baby to have nighttime cries: he points at it with his dinner knife the first evening she spends on the ship and says, "If that thing wakes me in the night..."
She smiles at him, the way he now knows she does when she's afraid. "She won't." That's how he learns it's a girl.
He doesn't think to ask for her name until he thinks to ask for the baby's; when he questions her, she gives him an unreachable look, and he thinks, there's one that knows the power in a name. Instead of answering, she says, "My father was a miller."
"What shall I call you, then?" He lifts a curl of her brown hair and lets it trail through his fingers. "Mills?" He smiles.
"Why not?" She is looking into the makeshift cradle, not at him, but he feels her attention. He moves her hair out of the way; her neck is very pale, and so is her upper back, where he can see the bony knobs of her vertebrae in telling prominence.
"It makes you sound like a governess." He begins to undo the buttons down the back of her dress. "Or a valet." The dress drops away from her and she turns to face him. He isn't surprised to see that she's thin all over; her swollen breasts look too heavy for her narrow frame.
"Aren't I your servant?" she asks in her low smooth voice, and she puts her arms around his neck.
"Mmm."
Her mouth is suitably warm and wet, and it's the same between her thighs, when he gets there. He makes her ride him as punishment, because she won't let him touch her breasts, and regrets it almost immediately. There's no mistaking the way her eyes go distant while he's inside her, as though she's merely loaning him use of her body for a while and she'll return to it when he's done, like a spare room.
The next morning, he thinks she's asleep when he rolls her onto her front, but her response is not to startle awake or stir; she docilely turns her head to the side and lays there for him while he fucks away his morning erection.
"Get yourself something to eat," he tells her when he's done, and pats her hip as a rider might pat the neck of his horse. "You're too thin."
When she's putting her dress back on, Mills asks him, "How long will the voyage be?"
"All told, two weeks," he says, buckling on his sword belt. "Perhaps three, if weather intervenes."
"That's not very long."
"Trade routes along the coast, they're quick. It's out on the open ocean that you have journeys of a month or more."
"The open ocean." He glances across to her; she's reaching into the cradle, lifting the baby up and staring into her daughter's face as the child wakes and mewls. "What's across it?"
"Other lands. The land of Chin is there."
Mills rolls her shoulder; he sees the fabric of her dress drop down on that side. She gives the baby her breast before it can start to cry. Though her back is to him, he senses the attentiveness in her voice when she asks, "What's Chin like? Have you been there?"
"A few times. Before the spice routes closed." Under his gaze, she sways the baby a little in her arms; as he speaks, he feels that everything he says is being absorbed, pulled out of the air and into her. "They've different sorts of houses, with high peaked roofs. And their ships are... Different."
"Is different good?"
What he wants to know is why a miller's daughter is interested in Chin. "People are the same all over. The only thing that changes from place to place are the decorations." Trying to get a rise out of her, he adds, "Though their women are more beautiful than ours."
She doesn't take his bait; she hums to the baby instead. He leaves her there, her bare shoulder pale as milk, untouched.
The men don't like having a woman on the ship; Killian can't blame them for their superstition. There is something frankly uncanny about the way Mills moves through the ship, occupying space too easily, unafraid of any of them. It's for her own safety that he confines her to his cabin: if she keeps walking around like a queen, acting like she owns the ship, the men will get angry, they'll eventually break. He might not like her very much, but to let her be hurt when he could prevent it would be bad form indeed.
As an apology, he brings her a gift from his private stores. The cabin boy brings him hot water one night and Killian mixes the drink steaming hot in two cups, hiding them from her with his body until he carries them over and gives her one, sitting with her on the edge of the bed.
Her eyes widen just a fraction when the smell reaches her. "Is this..." She brings the cup up and deeply inhales, then she takes a long pull, forgetting the heat of it. She makes a throaty noise of satisfaction, the kind that's been absent from their shared nights.
"You've had it before," he says, taking a judicious sip. Chocolate is wickedly expensive, not the sort of drink that should be familiar to a miller's daughter.
"I haven't had it bitter like this," she murmurs, breathing in the smell again, which is nearly as good as the taste.
"You've only had it sweet?" Killian reaches for a curl of her hair and plays it through his fingers, the color not unlike the drink in his cup. "Someone's spent good coin on you."
Mills gives him one of her little smiles and takes a long swallow of chocolate. The baby gives a wail from the cradle across the cabin; she rises to her feet to go tend to it, and he sighs, finishing his own cup, waiting for her.
Shortly, he is rewarded for his patience with a few flavored kisses to his mouth and her hands at his belt. Against her lips, he mumbles, "Sweet enough for the king's whore."
"What?" Her hands, reaching into his trousers for him, stop where they are. He opens his eyes and sees that her face is very still.
"It's just a sailor's phrase." She blinks once, slowly, and doesn't move her hands; he says, annoyed, "It means that your mouth tastes sweet. Now. Mills. If you please."
She gets on her knees in front of him and takes him down like the drink. It's when he's finishing in her mouth that the baby wakes up again, probably hearing his guttural groans, and she pulls away almost before he's done, clambering up off her knees with an imbalance that tells him her joints ache. He has to tuck himself away, feeling conscious of her attention though her back is to him. He joins her at the side of the cradle to get his first good look at the child, in its mothers arms.
"Dark, isn't she," Killian notes. Even for the relative pallor of the infant's skin, it's still darker than the mother.
"She's perfect," Mills says, giving the baby her finger; it grabs on with a gurgle.
"I suppose her father wasn't who he was meant to be," he says, addressing the little form cradled in its mother's arms. "And Papa noticed, yes?" He reaches out to tease the soft curve of the baby's cheek, surprised when Mills moves the child out of his reach, the small fragile head just under her chin. Her expression is blank and impenetrable.
"I'm not going to hurt her," he says.
"She's not yours." Mills' eyes are stone, unyielding. "She's not for you."
He lifts his hands, surrendering. He's heard of mothers doing worse things than giving warnings when their children are threatened. Taking himself to the far side of the bed, he begins to pull off his boots, disliking this new Mills all the while, much preferring the woman who named herself his servant. When she gets into bed with him she is docile again, as if in apology, a malleable tangle of flesh who lays on her side for him and makes no sound when he moves in her but for her heavy breathing.
"You could pretend to enjoy yourself, you know," he says to her pale back afterward.
"I could," she agrees.
Sleeping with her in the room isn't nearly so bad as he thought. Neither is sleeping in the room with the baby, which surprises him more. He often finds himself waking as her weight moves on the bed, getting up or laying down again, and he thinks she must be rising to feed or rock the child before it cries, some sort of mother's intuition. Once, he rolls over and tosses out an arm to find that she's gone from the bed; cracking open an eye, he sees her dimly lit by the guttering lamp, naked, sitting against the wall reading a book.
"What's that you've got?" he asks. Over the time they've spent together he's counted the things she owns - the one dress, the purse of odds and ends, the ragged cloak, the baby's swaddling clothes. He has never seen this book, a ragged leathery thing that gleams oddly golden under the light.
"Nothing." She closes the book and gives him a smile; he reads it as fear.
"I want to see it," he says, holding out a hand, imperious. Her smile widens slightly. She stands; her brown hair spills over her shoulders onto her breasts, a pale nymph in the murky glow of the lamp. The light softens her bony, hard edges, smoothing curves into her; she looks different, healthy. For the first time he sees her as she must have been before - before whatever happened to her, the wealthy milk-fed daughter of a miller, perhaps his only child, spoiled but sweet, the kind of girl a sailor like Killian might be compelled to carry off and wed.
Her hand is flexing strangely at her side, as though she is squeezing something in empty air.
"Mills," he says, though dragging himself back to rational thought feels oddly difficult. "Vixen. I won't be distracted."
"Of course you won't, Captain," she says, and puts the book on the stand by the side of the bed. "Not a man like you." Her voice is a low purr. She advances on him, pushes him down to the bed, swings one leg over him and straddles his hips. "Not you... So driven..." Her fingers trail through his chest hair. "You'll take... Whatever you want... Won't you, Captain?"
"You'll find, Mills," he says, distracted, "that I will."
She takes him inside her and rocks her hips like the ocean, so beautiful to him now, her breasts swaying, the curves of her hips warm under his hands. She keeps a hand on him, holding herself up; the other she presses to her chest, as though trying to hold herself together, and the thought makes him growl, pleased, thrusting up hard into her. It's the first time that she stays within herself, the first time he can watch her face shift and change, tense and release, as he moves inside her.
When he comes, it's hot and sudden and blinding and he's aware in the sweaty aftermath that he doesn't like it. It didn't feel right. Killian is accustomed to feeling veryright whenever he chooses to finish inside a woman. The look of satisfaction on Mills' face has an unsettling intensity as she takes herself off of him and lowers herself face down to the bed at his side. She stretches her hands over her head, stretches her legs out to the end of the bed, digs the toes of her little feet into the mattress, and gives a low, humming, "Mmm," sated. The trick of the light has ended; she is bony again and he is disenchanted.
"What's wrong?" she asks quietly when he turns his back to her. Her hand plays feather-light over his arm. "Didn't I please you?"
"Not nearly well enough," he replies curtly, shaking off her touch, glancing at her over his shoulder. Past her dark curls on the pillow, he sees that the nightstand is clear. The book is gone. "What was that book?"
"What book?" She smiles. He is accustomed to reading fear in her smiles; now he wonders, a chill pulsing through him, if her smiles weren't meant to frighten him.
He has a dream about Mills the night before they berth in the White Kingdom port. He doesn't dream often; when he does, he dreams of his mother and father and of the knife and of the scar on his cheek. This time, as he usually is, he is a silent, helpless adult witness to the victimhood of his boy self.
"Very sad, isn't it," murmurs Mills' voice from next to him.
He can't look away from the thrashing child on the floor of the one room where he and his mother and father lived. "You shouldn't be here." He echoes her words from before, her protectiveness: "This isn't for you."
"I'm taking it anyway," she replies.
He feels a sensation like a cool hand passing over his brow, conscious, in his dreaming, that it is taking place with his physical body, not within his mind. He should be waking up - the lightest touch, the merest change, always rouses his pirate's reflexes - but he feels the effort to wake die before it finishes.
"Let me go," he tells her, not knowing why he addresses the order to her; she has no power over him. He drags his gaze, inch by clawing inch, away from the scene before him so that he can look at her.
Before he sees her, before her shape manifests from the darkness of his dream world, he finds himself waking, breathing as though from a struggle, a hard swim to the surface of himself. For a few moments, he can only lay there, staring up, trying to catch his breath.
When he looks over to Mills, her pale back is to him, her breathing even enough to seem like sleep, but he can feel her awareness, her attention. He knows she's wide awake.
Killian thinks that he'll be quite glad to see the back of her when he helps her from the ship onto the docks in the White Kingdom.
"I'm afraid this is where we must part ways," he says. "And what a pleasure your company has been on this voyage." His tone is dry.
Mills gives him another one of her intractable smiles, shifting the baby in her arms.
"May I at least know your real name, before you go?" he adds, with more courtesy than he feels she deserves. If he knows her real name, who she really is, he's sure he can shake away the cold grip she has on him, leave the last traces of her behind on this dock like shedding his skin.
"Now, why would I tell you that?" she replies, still smiling. Though he's not sure she's gained weight over two weeks, she seems healthier, fuller, as though something has been restored to her, or as though something new has filled her hollows.
He gives her a courteous little bow. "Mills," he says.
"My dear captain," she says. He looks up in surprise, in time to catch a glimpse of the self-satisfied smirk on her long face as she turns away from him and walks down the dock, into the port town.
He returns to his ship, to oversee the goods being carried out of the hold and to make sure that the illegal fairy diamonds stowed there aren't discovered by the customs official. From the deck, he looks out to the docks, squinting in the sunlight, and he thinks that he sees a wisp of purple smoke trailing above the heads of the workmen; as soon as he sees it, it's gone.
Cora worries about her skin. She can't help but feel that she is somehow marked, scarred by her passage through the world, by the hands that have held her and hurt her. It's the first time in a while she's had a chance to bathe, not just wash, so, naked, she picks up the hand mirror from the vanity and inspects herself.
Her feet and calves are pristine. Her knees are bony and veined but not bruised, her thighs fleshy and unmarked. The scattered birthmarks on her belly and her back guide her, landmarks to see what is the same and what has changed. Soon she can put down the mirror in relief: Killian Jones has not left a mark on her. There is no sign of him anywhere on her, just as if he had never been.
She's already fed the baby; she can bathe without interruption as her daughter sleeps nearby. Smoothing her hands down her body, Cora knows that this starved thinness will be gone soon, eased by the untying of the magic Rumplestiltskin hadn't warned her was knotted deep within.
He hadn't prepared her, hadn't taught her well enough, she thinks. When he showed her the art of spinning gold, he kept back the knowledge that she had the power to do much more than such a cheap parlor trick. She closes her eyes, remembering his high-pitched goblin giggle, the mocking lilt in his voice: Very nice, very nice, not bad at all for the king's... Oh, but we're in polite company, aren't we, dearie?
And in exchange for that, her child.
It had been a life for a life. She dips her head under the surface of the water so that she won't think about it, but under the water is the rest of her pale thin body, a reminder that using magic wrongly kills as surely as an execution. How long could she have lasted, with the misused power eating her alive? Would she have survived the passage on Killian Jones' ship if the pieces hadn't fit together that night, if she hadn't, somehow, learned?
She surfaces again, restless, rising from the bathwater and drying herself. Her wet hair drips onto the floor; she makes an experimental pass of her hand, focusing her will, and her hair is dry.
It's the same way she's paid for this room: a movement of her hand, and things happen. A movement of her hand, and now people do what she wants.
Dressed again, she crosses to the cradle and looks down at the baby. For this small life, she broke her word, she stole the book, she ran away. Everything she's done, every deal she's made with every imp and king and pirate and lord, has been for her daughter.
"No one will ever take you away from me now," she tells Regina, and she strokes the round curve of the baby's soft head. "You're mine."
Note: Phwooooaaar, it's done. I wanted to get my headcanon for Cora out into the world before The Miller's Daughter (are you excited? I am!), hence this fic, but once again it's turned into a manifesto of Hook's skeevy attitudes towards women, especially since I've removed Milah from the equation. Unfortunately, I knew that the way I wanted to tell this story, I couldn't tell it solely through Cora's eyes, so Killian once again has had a chance to show off his problematic nature. I think Captain of Hearts is going on the shelf now, though – I've said as much as I can for now – and it's time to go back to Swan Queen. I hope you enjoyed!