A/N: This is my first multi-chapter in a very long time, so I apologize in advance if there's a bit of a learning curve to this one. But I hope you enjoy it, because I am. Any criticism is very welcome, and I live for reviews.

Summary: It's been five years since Killian died - five years since Emma had a daughter who he would never know. Still learning to navigate a world without him, Emma is given the chance to find out what happened after he died, but after five years of trying to forget, will she take it?

"Jilly!" Emma called up the stairs. "Come on, we're going to be late!"

"Coming, mommy!" Her daughter yelled, thundering down the stairs a moment later with a pink backpack slung over her shoulder and a stuffed animal clutched in her hand. She held up the toy when she reached the bottom, and smiled brilliantly up at her mother. "Duckie wanted to come too."

"Well, let's you, me, and Duckie get going. Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Neal are excited for your sleepover." She held out her daughter's coat, and the little girl held out the stuffed animal. Emma hesitated a moment before taking Duckie, her daughter oblivious as she shoved her small arms into the sleeves of her coat.

As Jillian busied herself with her boots, Emma regarded Duckie for a moment. He had been her daughter's for the whole of her short life, but before that, he had been Emma's.

He had been a gift, once.

"Mommy, we're going to be late." Jillian said, tugging on Duckie until Emma released him. The little girl's sly smile told Emma that she was deliberately using the same words Emma had, and Emma grinned softly in return. It was hard to smile today, but the comical five-year old always brought one out in her mother.

"When did you get to be so sassy?" Emma asked as she ushered her daughter out the door, letting it swing shut behind them. The little girl stuck her tongue out, but Emma pretended not to notice, instead just ruffling her daughter's brown curls as she led the way to the bug. Almost as if she knew she was toeing a fine line, Jillian climbed into the back of the car and strapped herself into her booster seat without being asked. Emma simply raised an eyebrow at her daughter, and was rewarded with a glowing smile in return, one that said how could you be mad at this?

One that Emma knew very well, from a long time ago. God, if her daughter kept making those expressions that were just, impossibly, like his, Emma was going to lose it.

Not now. She told herself firmly, twisting the key in the ignition with perhaps a bit too much force as she thought it.

"What are you going to do with Grandma and Grandpa this weekend, kid?" Emma asked, glancing in the rearview mirror at a very excited little girl.

"They promised we'd have pizza for dinner." Jillian said in a reverent tone. "And we're going to watch movies, and Uncle Neal got a whole buncha new dinosaurs, and Grandpa said we can have ice cream for breakfast."

"Oh he did, did he?" Emma arched an eyebrow. "Well, maybe Grandpa and I need to have a little talk."

"Mommy noooooo." Another glance in the mirror showed Emma a very distressed five-year old with a face so dramatic she had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

"If you promise me you'll help Grandma make sure Grandpa behaves, I won't say anything just this once. Deal?"

"Deal!" The young girl squealed, bouncing in her seat. Emma chuckled a little under her breath, letting her daughter continue to babble plans for her sleepover all the way to the loft.

Jillian knocked on the door when they reached the loft, a complicated "secret knock" that she had made up with her Uncle Neal the last time she had stayed over. It was only moments before David opened the door, a smile already on his face, scooping Jillian into a hug as soon as she crossed the threshold. The little girl squealed in delight, and Emma smiled fondly at both of them. She deposited Jillian's backpack beside the door, and waved at her mother standing in the kitchen.

"I'll be back Sunday after dinner, guys." Emma snagged her father's arm, pulling him a few steps closer so she could press a kiss to her daughter's cheek, still held firmly in her grandfather's arms. Both of Jillian's grandparents loved her fiercely, and Emma had a sneaking suspicion that David would hold the little girl forever if she asked him to. "Be good, kid. I love you."

"I love you too, mommy." Jillian twisted in David's grasp to clasp her arms around Emma's neck and place a sloppy kiss on her nose. Emma ran a soft hand through her daughter's dark curls, and for a moment she almost called off the whole sleepover so she would never have to be away from the most precious person in her life. She released the little girl and turned back towards the door, but before she could take one step towards it she heard her own mother's voice ring out from behind her:

"Emma?"

"Yeah?" She didn't turn around, knowing the tone in her mother's voice, knowing she couldn't get pulled into the conversation she know Snow wanted to have.

"You're welcome to stay, honey."

"No, she's been talking about this for weeks. This is your time together, and she sees me every day."

"I don't mean stay for her sake, Emma. I mean—"

"Bye Jilly!" Emma called out, cutting off her mother's words, and slipping out the door before Snow had a chance to finish.

I mean stay for your sake, so you won't have to be alone. That's what her mother had meant to say – that Emma should stay so she could spend the evening under the watchful eyes of both her parents, both of them shooting glances at her, expecting her to fall to pieces because five years ago tonight, Killian had died.

Before that night five years ago, Emma had thought that blood ran red no matter what. Before that night, she hadn't known that when someone gets slashed deep across the chest with a crooked dagger, their blood runs fast and thick and black out of their body. She hadn't known, before then, that when you grab the arm of someone whose blood is flowing fast and thick and black out of their body as they're being sucked into a portal meant for the entire town, that you'll end up with stains on your hand that look like ink before they look like blood.

She hadn't known, before then, that no matter how many times you wash them, your hands will still bear those stains for years, even if nobody can see them but you.

Looking out over the silky black water lapping at the shore as she sat on the end of the concrete pier, Emma couldn't help but make the comparison. She couldn't help but thinking that if she hadn't taken that second to hesitate, to think Who will look after Henry, and just jumped in after him that everything would have been different. That she could have saved him, despite the gash that cut straight through his jacket and down to his ribs, and the fact that his chest had been still long before the portal had closed behind him.

Now Henry was off at college, and Emma was alone with a daughter Killian had never even known to expect – A daughter who was so like him, but who he would never get the chance to know.A daughter with a name so like his, some days Emma choked on the shape of it as it left her lips.

Five-years-ago-Emma had been stupid. Five-years-ago-Emma had decided that Jillian was the perfect name for a little girl. A name so close to his, she thought that she could trick herself, calling her daughter down for school, pressing a kiss to her forehead before bedtime and murmuring her name as she told her how much she loved her. Almost the way she would say his name – whisper it to him night after night as they fall asleep and again in the mornings when they wake up together with the sunlight streaming through the curtains of the home they made together and his hand tangled loosely in her hair, holding her to him.

Five years since she said that name, and every day she tried to trick herself to forget that it's true.

But it is. She reminded herself. He's gone. He's been gone. He always will be.She took another swig of rum from the bottle beside her and sighed. The alcohol took the edge off, but the bite of it still tasted like him.

She suspected it always would.

You need to think of your future, Emma. Archie had said, two days after Killian had slipped through the portal. In the absence of a formal minister, Archie covered all the burial services in town – all the funeral pyres, all the cremations, all the internments, all the everything. You need to think of what he would have wanted, but you also need to think about what will give you the most closure.

Emma had sat there, staring at nothing, and let him talk at her until Snow had jumped in.

I think a traditional burial. She had said, a passing glance sliding over Emma's frozen figure. So she'll have somewhere to go to…be close to him. As if Emma needed a specific place to feel like Killian was still standing next to her, to feel like he was just in the other room, to feel like any moment he could walk through the door of their apartment and she could talk to him, cry on his shoulder, tell him everything and have him make it better.

It was the cruelest irony that the one person who she could have stood talking to about Killian's death was Killian himself.

Archie and Snow had talked specifics, and later that night Snow had placed a hand on a still-immobile Emma's shoulder, rubbing soft circles, and said It's all taken care of, honey. You just have to show up.

She didn't.

Well, she had and she hadn't. There was a small service in the field they had begun using as a cemetery, but Emma had hovered on the outskirts of it, shielding her body with the broad trunk of an old tree so nobody would know she was there. She hated the service, hated the burial, hated everything Snow and Archie had planned. This wasn't Killian, represented forever by an empty box in the cold ground, far inland, so apart from the sea he had loved. If they had known him at all, they would have set a small boat on fire and cast it out into the water, and someone would have sung that song he loved about being frozen at sea, and it would have been simple and heartbreaking and she wouldn't have made it through five minutes, but at least it would have been him.

So she stayed there, sitting on the ground with her back against the rough bark, head buried in her knees as she listened to hymns and stories about Killian told by people who had never really known him.

She went back to her apartment after that, the one he had shared with her, and locked the door. Her parents had come knocking about half an hour later, but she pretended not to hear it. The door was magically sealed, and eventually they seemed to realize that they weren't getting in and she wasn't coming out, so with a final word through the door to call them if she needed them, they had left too.

She had padded over to the closet then, and pulled down the coat that had been hanging in the very back since the very first day Killian had moved in – the long, ornate black leather coat that he had worn those first months she had known him. It was too big, and heavier than any piece of clothing had a right to be, but it was well-worn and shaped to fit the planes of his chest, and God did it smell like him. She sank to the floor, overwhelmed with how here he seemed when she felt his jacket, and how gone he was when she looked up into the empty room. How their story had ended before it had even begun.

She fell asleep wrapped in the soft folds of his coat.

When she woke up, it didn't smell like him anymore.

Ever year on this night, she came home from the docks just this side of too-drunk-to-walk-down-Main-Street, slipped her arms into his coat, and crossed the line into the realm of too-drunk-too-stand while pretending that the supple leather still smelled like him, and still felt like him instead of like years of grief. She wondered how long it would be before Jillian started asking questions about why she had a sleepover with her grandparents on the same day every year, or how long it would be before she would start asking questions about her father that Emma couldn't answer without losing her composure, or how long it would be before the identity of her father wouldn't matter beyond that he was a person Jillian had never known, and Emma no longer did.

The little girl had already stopped asking to hear the story behind the thick ruby ring Emma had strung on a chain around her neck. It was only a matter of time before she would stop asking about the rest.

What I wanted, she had told him once. What I thought I could have…was never in the cards for the savior. But for a while, it seemed like it had been. It seemed like a happy ending was something that maybe, just maybe, could happen for her.

It didn't hurt less, five years later, to realize that it never would.