A/N: Another drabble from the "angst" meme on tumblr. This time the line was "It's all my fault," and the pairing Captain Swan.
Three hundred plus years is plenty of time to gather the stuff of nightmares, so Emma doesn't know why she is surprised the first time she is awakened by Killian's sudden twist and roll accompanied by pained mumblings and whines. It takes her a few beats to remember where she is and whom she is with, but even her slow, fuzzy realizations can't stop the ache in her heart when she hears Killian mutter hopelessly, "Help me!…Liam, no! Don't leave me!"
She sits up, rubs her eyes, and pushes her hair out of her face before looking down at Killian. The sweat gathering at his hairline looks like beads of glass as the pale, bright moonlight streams in through their bedroom window, casting him in icy blue and the deepest black. Any other time and she would be breathless with how devastatingly handsome he is in this duotone of light and dark, but the pain and helplessness etched in his features is too much…heart crushing in a way she wishes she didn't understand so intimately herself. Killian's brows are pinched and his jaw twitches in time with his clenching teeth only to pause as he laments, "It's all my fault…all my fault."
His hand bunches the sheet and blanket in a short, tight coil, then splays out again, shaking. Emma reaches out to softly touch him, soothe him back to sleep, but he pulls away, breath hitching harshly in the stillness of the dark.
"Killian," she murmurs near his ear. "Killian, wake up. It's just a dream…just a dream."
She thinks her voice must be reaching him because the lines in his forehead begin to smooth out and the vein in his temple that throbs when he's stressed begins to recede. Emma tries again to lay her hand on his shoulder and this time he relaxes under her touch. She rests her forehead against his and smiles.
"It's ok, Killian. You're here with me now."
She feels him stir, his eyes fluttering open as tears slide down his cheeks and into his hair. The blue of his eyes is lost to the blackness of his pupils as he tries to focus on her, on now.
"Swan?" he asks, desperation burnishing the edges of his voice.
She wipes away the tracks of his tears and kisses his lips. "Yeah, it's me. You just had a bad dream," she whispers.
"Aye…sorry," he says sleepily as he shifts until his head is resting on her chest, arm wrapped around her waist, fingers tangled in the hem of her tank top.
"Shh…don't be," Emma tells him as she rubs circles over his back until his breathing evens out, and then she, too, dozes off again.