A/N: Okay, this unbeta'd and spur-of-the-moment, so there may be mistakes.
Also, disclaimer: nobody I love has died on OUAT since Graham. I most certainly don't own it.

"I want to live," Emma says, and that's how it begins.

Henry is dying, of that there is no question. Someone without a heart cannot live long in a land fueled by belief, and Henry's life is running out.

"Could we replace his heart?" Charming asks, and everyone's mind jumps to the same conclusion.

"Could we take his heart back from Pan?" Neal asks, and Killian can see the murder in his eyes, and it turns his stomach, this shattered soul who used to be so small. Regina shakes her head, and there is steel and despair in her voice.

"Pan's infected it. It would kill him to get it back."

"Could he take someone else's, though?" Emma looks up, and she is no less determined than her opposite.

"Yes, I think so. Why? Who did you have in mind?"

"Me."

Killian spins to look at her, and she stares grimly back as assorted protests arise.

He doesn't ask why.

He knows.

"I want to live," Emma says, "but I want Henry to live more."

They say in Neverland you just have to believe. Maybe, maybe not. Killian wouldn't know, he was never very good at believing in things.

"I believe in you," he'd told her, and meant every word.

"You just have to believe," Regina told her, hand poised over Henry's chest, wide open and waiting like the vulture she was.

"I want to live," echoes in his head and he can't sleep, can't do much of anything but stand because he has to hold Neal back as he lunges forward.

"Emma!" as though he has any right to her choices, as though they're colored candies he can pluck from her hands and devour.

"Emma, there's gotta be another way!" There isn't, and Killian has seen one too many mothers cry over their lost sons to stop Emma from doing this, never mind the burning in his eyes and the grit in his throat.

"Do it quick," and the sand chokes up around I love you and Please don't and I should be the one, because he shouldn't, and she wants to and he shouldn't, he hardly knows the boy.

Emma's hand glows a bright, blinding blue, and she thrusts it into her chest, deep and painful. Killian winces, but he can't look away, and three hundred years smash into him like thunder. She is Emma but she is, in that moment, also Milah, and she's dying at a thousand miles an hour. His grip on Neal must be painful, it's so tight, but he can't let go, he can't let Emma down. Not now.

"Emma!" But Neal is still struggling, still fighting, still screaming his lungs bloody and burned, still voicing every selfish thought Killian is ashamed to have had. "Emma, please! You can't leave me!" Emma hands a brilliant crimson ball of light and muscle to Regina, who wordlessly takes it. Like it's her birthright, her golden bloody throne. She presses it almost gently into Henry's chest, and he takes his first deep breath since giving Pan his heart. "Emma, please, I love you!"

"Shut up!" Snow snaps, finally meeting her breaking point. "Just... stop." There are tear tracks down her face and red crescent-moons where she stopped herself from saving Emma. She abandoned her daughter once, twice.

Neal abandoned her forever, came strutting back as though she was his due, some golden trophy girl he could sweep off her feet and claim for his own.

"Quite," Killian grits out, pushing Neal away from him and wiping the tears from his eyes. David is knelt over Emma's body, sobs wracking his body in shudders. Snow is standing over them both, fists clenched tight and head hung low, bow forgotten and arrows useless against this martyr who was her daughter.

"And who the hell are you, huh?" Neal is angry, hurt. Killian is just tired, just broken. What he wouldn't give to change places with her father, to be able to cradle her in his arms and try in vain to piece her back together, to try to heal her as she had healed him and not be judged for the killer he nearly was.

"I want to live," she said, but she didn't want it enough to stay.

"Killian," she said, like she didn't know she said his name like a prayer, "Killian, you have to promise me you'll look after Henry."

Neal is yelling at him, words he can't understand because they don't come from her. Regina is holding Henry, shushing him as he cries for a mother he barely knew and a heart that wasn't his but now is. Killian sees the world in shattered glass, edges sharp and scraping against raw skin, his mouth full of silence like kaleidoscopes and the rainbows on oil.

"I can't," he breathes, "I can't."

Coward that he is, he pushes Neal back, stumbles, dizzy and dying into the wild.

He runs.

It doesn't work the way he'd hoped. He can still see her smile, smell her hair, feel her lips on his, her fingers in his hair.

"It was just a kiss," she scoffed, eyes frantic and mouth quivering with a long-guarded heart.

He accepted it because it was a lie.

He can't accept it anymore. He's seen her heart, seen her boundless love in her actions, in a death and a birth, and he knows now that it was never just a kiss. He's seen her bare her very soul to a man she both loves and despises, has seen her surprised and angry and sad and lying.

It scares Killian the most that only now has he seen her happy, to give her son life twice over and die in the making.

She died with a smile and a prayer, their eyes locked over the shoulders of the once-boy who tied them together with a fragile thread of anger and shame and lost love.

"Killian," she whispered, like she knew the depths of his heart and the width and breadth of his love for her.

"Killian," she whispered, dying.

He thinks maybe this time he won't live through it.

Oops.