'Always' is printed in swirling script along the line of her hip where her shorts settle, and she likes it best that way. Out of her sight, out of the line of possibility. Not a glaring flashing sign of what is to come like the letters printed neatly along his collarbone.
When they meet, she thinks he is an asshole. To be more certain, he is an asshole. He is all smirk and slopped hair and shining eyes… but the way they settle on her in a mixture of amusement and utter disbelief–it wrecks her.
The first time she wonders about his tattoo he is tying a cloth round her stinging palm and staring past at her with a purposeful lust in his eyes that makes her head spin and her eyes reach for anything else to cling onto. She finds the scars on his wrist and he pulls them away from her vision like her eyes have the power to burn.
(It says I love you and she feels an odd urge to brush her fingers across it, to whisper that she understands, that she has scars too.
She doesn't).
He has his motivations and she has hers and the two mingle more often than not. It is a night of frayed nerves and waning calm that she loses her patience and drags him by the ridiculous leather collar to kiss the smirk straight off his lips.
It was meant to be a one time thing, but the asshole had never been taught how to quit.
Their romance is best described as hesitant. She is undeniably attracted to him and she can see him fall for her in the sparkle of his eye every goddamn time she smiles. But she thinks of frantic kisses and clinging to leather that smells far too much like his and the night probably darker in memory than it was in reality, when she could not hold him tight enough. She thinks of the thank you that used to twine down her spine and she thinks of the dread that knotted in her stomach when the words had fallen from his lips and horror had set within her.
When Killian gets too close she needs only clutch at her hip where the 'always' had etched itself painfully home before the absence of 'thank you' against her spine had even managed to fully reach her heart.
She thinks of 'Always' dropping lilted and gasping from his tongue as the sparkle leaves his eyes.
(She is in love with him anyway).
She kisses him for the second time, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. She finds his tattoo somewhere between the adventures and the quiet moments.
"Stay," she breathes the words as her fingers brush across the line of his collarbone. He smiles in that soft, adoring way of his, nuzzling his nose near hers and pressing their foreheads together.
"Always."
The word stops her heart and he tenses when her nails dig into his arms and her eyes harden.
"Don't say that."
The first night they spend together she wakes to his calloused fingers playing a soft pattern along where he has finally uncovered the word she has kept tucked safely away.
She curls into him and finds the wrist that 'I love you' has scarred, kissing him and holding him and showing him that someone still did.
"Stay with me." She breathes.
His fingers silently brush her hip.
He is taken from her in a storm of frantic kisses and flashing light and magic searing in her bones. He holds her while her body quivers under the power, hand at her hip, thumb turning incessant circles along her hidden mark.
"Don't say it," she gasps and watches his face crumble, "Don't you dare."
He opens his mouth and she prepares for the very worst.
"This is not the end."
It is not.
He finds her and it is all her parents need to welcome, practically chain, him into the family. He proposes not a year later on the docks.
"Be my happily ever after, my darling."
She tries not to cry as she pulls him to his feet, tugging his hand to her hip and giving him a teary eyed smile that he returns with grandeur.
They are married on his ship in the simplest of fashions, just her parents and her son and a flowing white dress that blows in the salt kissed breeze and does well to hide the bump just beginning to pop from her stomach that only he knows about.
The bump is brought into the world eight months later in a mess of tears and a mass of blond curls. They call him Liam and Killian cries, peppering so many kisses between her and their child that she finds herself grateful there is no kissing-limit he is running dry.
But she understands when she holds their little boy near to her after he has fallen asleep at her bedside with his fingers entwined in hers, when the infant's little eyes pop open and stare up at her with an intense shade of blue that reminds her of every reason she has fallen in love with his father.
And life goes on. Killian gets his first grays and has the worlds first 300-year-old midlife crisis. Emma talks him down with a great amount of kissing and distraction–until he points out she's got one similar and they both wind up peering anxiously in the bathroom mirror at the lines in the others faces that they have grown in together.
"Aging with you has been a remarkable adventure, my darling."
She smiles with her own soft adoration and turns to straighter his collar, brushing along the tattoo that perpetually peeks out from beneath it.
It is luck that neither of them manages to get themselves killed by a witch or a monster or a family member on a quest for revenge, and it is something Emma reminds herself every day as they continue to grow old together. Their boys are grown and the lines on both their faces have set more steadily into wrinkles but in spite of it all, she can still see that sparkle light in his eyes every time she smiles.
"God you look good for, what, 360?"
"I'm just rather glad none of our children are part monkey."
The banter really ought to have grown old at some point, and perhaps the passionate kisses close behind. Emma thinks he must still have some Neverland residue left on him that keeps them so deeply in love.
She swears it is possible. Her mother insists it is more likely a side effect of that pesky true love.
She doesn't really care, so long as he keeps kissing her like she is the only thing that matters in the world, tracing the pattern along her hip by memory.
But they live in Storybrooke.
She doesn't know what curse hits him. Only that they are deep in doing that thing where they keep the town safe and he is deep in his goddamn heroics and although he swears against it, neither of their reflexes are what they once were. She thinks now maybe it was only her reflexes that needed the work, because he is the one who catches the flash of light and moves to protect her from it before she can even flinch.
She hits the gravel on her knees beside him in a heartbeat, cringing at how the shock travels through her bones and clutching at the rough stubble on his chin as she begs, orders, pleads with him before pressing her lips to his.
Maybe it is that true loves kisses have a limited usage.
He doesn't go.
"Oh god. Oh god," she breathes the words in a tumble against his neck, "you came back."
"Couldn't quite manage to ignore such harsh demands to stay. Perhaps one day I'll be able to refuse you, my love."
He speaks slowly, meticulously, thinking his every word through in a way he never has before–effortlessness melted away in one hit to his skull.
She is not sure if it is aftereffects of the curse or the fall, but her pirate is never quite the same man again.
His movements are languid and he never is fully there, attention flitting away from its focus at the tiniest of distractions. He holds her in shaking arms and kisses her more deliberately and she hates how the years begin to pile up behind them. He only grows worse.
She is not quite as full of life as she used to be either, but unlike her husband, is not too proud to ask for help. No–he insists on still giving it as well.
He is at her parents helping David repair some ridiculous, meaningless leak when her father calls her.
"Come to the loft. There's been an accident… Killian's hurt himself." A pause. "It isn't good, Emma."
It is a wonder she doesn't kill herself on the way over, in the frantic way she swerves the bug to reach her parent's home in record time, practically throwing herself up the stairs and into the door. Victor is stood outside and catches her wrist before she can go in, telling her words she cannot make her brain hear.
He is laid out on the couch and she isn't certain she has seen him appear so weak in the entire time she has known him.
It makes her stomach turn anxiously as she crosses the room to him, lowering herself more cautiously to her knees in front of him with a shaking hand pressed into the cushions of the couch.
His eyes are remarkably clear in spite of how his body sags against his own weight, and when his gaze settles on her he smiles wide.
"Swan. Thank the gods you're here, your bloody father has made himself quite the nuisance."
She can hardly manage a laugh, and presses her lips together when his face falls.
When he reaches to weakly cradle her cheek, she can see the energy drain from his face.
"Smile for me, my love. Please. I hate to see you cry."
He manages to catch a tear on his thumb, eyes trained on hers wide and hopeful.
"You've got to earn those, buddy." She tells him, voice crackling under the pressure of a contained sob.
The smile softens from his face, and somewhere past his lines in the echo of his eyes she can see a shining mess of gold dragging wide eyed man out from beneath a pile of bodies, can feel her heartbeat echo in time with the stuttering tempo that had overcome her in that moment.
His breath audibly stutters, and the sobs rises silently out of her throat as she ducks her head onto the couch in front of him.
"You can't leave me."
She sobs the words into the cushion as his fingers knot into her hair, tugging lovingly at her tangled locks.
"The first part of you," he says softly when she forces herself to peer back at him, chin still rested on the couch in front of his weakly moving lips, "I fell in love with," his lips brush gentle against hers now, and her eyes flutter closed, "was that way you've got of making me wish to do exactly as you tell me to."
She finds his lips again, kissing thorough and languid, trying still to hold back her tears.
"Stay."
The word creeps past her lips before she can register it, too caught up in swallowing back every sob as it rises.
But once it is gone it is gone, and she thinks the ache in her stomach may drag a hole straight through her.
His expression softens lightly, and a smile plays at the corner of his lips. He reaches out to her and she shifts, expecting his fingers to seek out the words printed in her side.
They fall weakly on her heart instead, tracing the same soft pattern they would at her hip before settling firm against her.
The smiles she gives him is full of tears, but the brightest light fills his eyes and he is falling in love all over again.
His fingers press more firmly against the place above her heart and his sparkling eyes seek hers out.
"Always."