Disclaimer: Title borrowed from Blue October's song: 'She's My Ride Home'. I don't own any of them but I wish I did.

KILLIAN:

The curse is coming...and Emma is going.

The acrid smoke swirls up behind us, consuming and obscuring everything in its path. Soon it will draw us all in, away from the world in which we so desire to remain. The strength of magic roars and shrieks in its terrible advance, and in a few moments we'll all be consumed, pulled back into the world we came from. But for now, the only pull I feel is over the town line to where my eyes strain to see every last glimpse I can manage of the yellow-hued vessel bearing Emma away, my hope with her.

"Emma, you have to go…"

I wish with all my soul those words had been untrue, but they aren't. She has to leave, to carry herself and her son to safety…and she must leave us all behind. Henry may well be the price Regina must pay, but for us the forfeit is Emma, the loss of her light and the hope she brought to us all. Even as I stand here now, desiring nothing more than to go after her, I remain, doing the only thing any of us can do for her now to compensate for both her loss and ours: survive…and escape this bloody curse Pan sent down on us.

"I know the real reason you did this. You did it for Emma."

Aye…I did. All of this, everything since the moment I returned to Storybrooke with that accursed magic bean, all I've done is for her, for her son, for her family, and for her chance at happiness. And now I watch her go, leaving it and us behind as we become the victims of this altered curse. She's leaving, and it feels as though she's taking the heart and soul of this place with her.

"My gift to you is good memories…and Henry? You'll have never given him up. You'll have the life you've always wanted."

"But it won't be real!"

"Your past won't. But your future will be."

Regina's words echo in my head like some sort of cruel taunt. Her past will be extinguished, not even a faint trace remaining. She'll be gone, and every moment we've spent together will have not existed at all to her, every moment spent with her that's changed me, molded me from being the empty man full of hatred and revenge that I once was into someone entirely different will fade. It's the cruelest of punishments and probably no less than I deserve in the scheme of things…but that admission does nothing to dull the pain of it.

"You've touched the lives of everyone here."

Her mother's words are truer than she knows…but it won't be real to Emma now. None of it will, and I wonder if anything will ever feel real to me again after this—now that the only person in hundreds of years that could manage to make my hate-clouded life become so clear will be absent from it. I wonder, too, if that clarity will fade when she does, or if it will remain…yet another unintentional gift from an unwilling saviour. But this will be all too real very soon. In a moment she'll vanish and so will we, thrust back into the world we came from…the world we never should have left at all. Safe, alive, breathing; but I fear most of us will be broken in some way or another.

The only thing that keeps me rooted in this spot and at least…accepting of my fate, is this: that Emma—my Emma—my heart, will be happy. She has a future ahead of her, and a bright one at that, full of happy memories of a life spent with her son. She may not remember us, remember me, or anything about the last few months that have so changed me...us. But she'll have a future, she will have Henry, and she won't recall the pain of this moment. She'll not know to mourn what was unjustly ripped from her right when she was at the cusp of attaining it forever.

"There's not a day will go by that I won't think of you."

"Good."

Pain sears my heart, but I somehow feel a ragged shred of hope still burning in me; because she may never remember, but I always will.

I will remember for her. And someday perhaps, she'll remember again.

I tilt my head back and watch as the smoke descends upon us, the cold, heavy caress of it curving around my face to allow its bittersweet tang to begin an overwhelming assault my other senses. It sweeps us up like a purple tide, sweeping me and the rest of her family far away from the woman who now holds my heart.

Our fleeting moment in her life is now done, and all of us—at last—are Going Home….