A/N: I have been obsessing over soulmate fics in the MCU tag on AO3, and then I had this brilliant idea to write one for Killian and Emma. I wrote it before season 4 aired, but the only part that's not canon-compliant is the last section. Title from One Thing by Finger Eleven. I own nothing, and the idea of soulmate marks isn't mine either.
/
Killian is over 300 years old when his soul mark appears. It's ironic, really. His soulmate, the person he'd long ago given up on, is born just as he's watching a cloud of purple smoke engulf the dome Cora has projected around them. Everyone outside had their happy endings ripped away from them; he doesn't know if that means he'll never meet her, or if he will end up being her punishment in some twisted way.
He has just enough time to lift his shirt and see the words scrawled right over his heart: What are you boys playing? He rolls his eyes and pulls his shirt back into place, a strange flash of blonde hair running across his mind, before Cora's spell takes effect and he thinks no more.
/
When she's a child, Emma whole-heartedly believes in soulmates. There are movies and books and television shows that tell her they exist every day. As she grows older, passed around from foster family to foster family, she believes in the idea less and less. After all, how can soulmates exist when love is such a rare entity in the world? By the time she's sixteen she's all but given up on the idea of love and soulmates, and she leaves her foster home knowing in her heart that the "Thank you" just behind her ear is nothing more than a freak birthmark.
She meets Neal, and that's when she knows for sure soulmates aren't real. If they were real, she would have his words-Impressive, but really, you could have just asked me for the keys-somewhere on her body instead of the generic words she'd been born with. (When she was younger, her heart would speed up anytime someone new said the words Thank you to her. By the time she was ten she resented her soulmate for saying something so nondescript. At thirteen, it no longer mattered to her.)
She relaxes into their relationship, knowing it's the right choice for her, even though they don't have each others' marks. It's not unheard of, being with someone who doesn't have your soul mark, even if it is rare, but she's never been one to do things the conventional way. They love each other and that's enough for her.
Emma gets arrested, finds out she's pregnant, gives up her baby, and decides to shut love out of her life. It's never done her any good, and it's just too heartbreaking to continue thinking it's possible for her to have any kind of love in her life. She's done with it. To hell with Neal and to hell with Thank you.
/
When time starts again, Killian's hand is still resting over his heart, over her words. He wrenches his hand away and clenches his fist; getting revenge on the Crocodile for Milah's death is his only concern. He's lived without What are you boys playing? for 300 years now, and he's certainly loved without her as well. She's of no concern to him until he's killed the Crocodile, and perhaps not even then.
/
Mary Margaret and David don't have matching soul marks, but Emma still believes they love each other. Not in the right way, or as much as they might wish to love each other, but she can tell they really care. It's enough to make her reconsider her stance on love in general.
Henry eats the apple tart and falls into a coma. She takes up her father's sword to battle a dragon and retrieve a potion to revive the son she shares with the Evil Queen. Then she breaks the curse with True Love's Kiss.
It's enough to make her reconsider her stance on the existence of soulmates, even if she's still doubtful she'll ever want to find her own.
/
She and Mary Margaret fall through a portal, get captured by Mulan and Princess Aurora (what the hell is her life now?), meet Lancelot-who-is-really-Cora, and return to a not-so-safe haven full of dead bodies.
Except one of them is not dead. They pull the man out from underneath the pile of bodies. He gasps out a desperate 'Thank you," and her eyes widen. She swallows, though her mouth is drier than she thinks it's ever been, and nods in acknowledgement. To give herself time to think, she walks to the well and retrieves water for both herself and him.
She glares down at the water as she considers what she should say to him when she gets back. Should she say something obvious, so there's no doubt in his mind who she is (if he's her Thank you, that is)? It would kill two birds with one stone if she were to ask him, "Why didn't Cora kill you too?"
Mulan interrupts her train of thought and they head back together, speculating about why Cora would leave him alive. They agree something feels weird about the situation, and Emma is not one to show her hand too soon, so she goes with, "Here you go," and hands him one of the cups.
She watches him closely as they talk, but he doesn't react to what she says, other than to thank them for saving him. Emma clamps down on the brief flash of disappointment and focuses on what he's saying. She can tell immediately that he's not being genuine with them.
It's not until they're trekking towards the beanstalk that she takes a moment to thank whatever high beings may be out there that her soulmate is not Captain Hook.
/
Killian feels a mild stab of disappointment that the gorgeous blonde is not his soulmate (not that that's ever stopped him before), but refocuses on the task at hand. He needs to get the compass, and right now, this group of women is his best shot at getting it.
He flirts with the Swan girl as they ascend the beanstalk, as they take out the giant, and as they search his hoard for the compass. She seems strangely immune to his charms, which makes him work all the harder for her attention.
He regrets letting his guard down when she handcuffs him and leaves him on the beanstalk, even if he does understand her reasons.
When they leave the women trapped in the Crocodile's cell, he spares a moment to hope they find a way out of it. She may have betrayed him, but there was no doubt in his mind the Swan girl loved her son, and she deserved to find a way back to him.
He lets her win the fight. At the time he tells Cora it was because he had a backup plan, but he knows that's a lie. Emma deserved it more than he did.
He and Cora make it to the Land Without Magic and he puts the Swan girl from his mind. He has a Crocodile to hunt.
/
When he wakes up handcuffed to a bed, Emma sitting over him, his breath hitches. He makes an innuendo to cover the frantic beating of his heart and ignores the sliver of guilt in his chest when she tells him about Belle.
He ignores the guilt he feels as he pushes her out of the way in order to stab the Crocodile in the chest.
He ignores the guilt he feels when he agrees to help Greg and Tamara destroy Storybrooke.
However, he can't continue ignoring the voice inside him that says his quest for vengeance is going to destroy him. He especially can't quell the insistent voice in the back of his head that tells him this is not what Emma would want.
/
Emma can't exactly say she's surprised when Hook shows up to warn them about Greg and Tamara's plan. He's a pirate; they are notorious for looking out for themselves, and he obviously thinks his best interests lay with her and her family.
She can definitely say she's surprised when Hook returns with the magic bean and offers his services in retrieving Henry from Neverland. That doesn't sound like something a pirate would do.
/
Emma nearly dies on the way to Neverland and Killian finds himself rubbing his heart as he waits for her to start breathing again. For the first time since they appeared, he actively contemplates his soul mark and wishes the words under his hand say Here you go instead of What are you boys playing?
He saves her father and she kisses him, and for the second time he wishes his soul mark said something different.
He helps save her son, and they make it back to Storybrooke, and they fight together against Pan, and he watches his Crocodile die, but he doesn't care, because he's watching Emma drive across the town line, and she won't remember him, and all he has of her is the memory of one kiss and the bitter reminder that she is not his soulmate written across his heart.
The green smoke swirls around him as he thinks over their last conversation. He'd told her not a day would go by that he wouldn't think of her, and she'd responded, "Good."
It meant something that she said "good" instead of rolling her eyes or scoffing at him.
As he feels himself being pulled back into the Enchanted Forest, he realizes that one word means more to him than the five scrawled across his heart.
/
After she gets out of prison, Emma decides to focus on raising her son in a stable home. She loves Henry, but after Neal's betrayal, she can't see herself letting anyone else in.
That doesn't mean she's opposed to finding Thank you; she's just not going to obsess about it like she did when she was a child, and she's not going to let her soul mark dictate her future. She's going to take it slow, focus on her kid, and if she finds the man who carries her mark, great; they can date and maybe they can develop a relationship. At the same time, she's not opposed to dating someone who doesn't carry her mark. At this point she's figured out that it's not the soul mark (or lack of) that determines the success or failure of a relationship; it's the people involved in the relationship.
She meets Walsh and they get along great. She ignores the feeling in the back of her mind that tells her something is not right in her life. A stranger knocks on her door one morning and kisses her, and after she shoves him away from her and slams the door, she scratches behind her ear and wonders why a hasty kiss from a stranger feels better than a kiss from her boyfriend.
She drinks the potion and remembers, but she's still confused about why kissing him felt so damn right.
/
Emma and Killian take Henry back to Storybrooke, and they work together to find out about the missing year, and they find Neal-and-Rumplestiltskin, and Neal dies, and Zelena is the Wicked Witch (seriously, what is her life?), and she takes a crash course in magic from Regina because apparently she's the only one who can stop her.
Killian starts acting weird around her, which confuses her because they had been getting along so well. She knows he has feelings for her, and if she's finally being honest with herself, she has feelings for him too. She has too much to deal with to think about romance, but she really wants to be his friend. She just wants to know him, be around him.
He kidnaps Henry, and she knows he thinks it was the best option, but she also feels her faith in him crack.
Zelena drowns him, and she know she shouldn't, that she needs to keep her magic in order to defend her mother and unborn sibling from the witch, but her heart is racing, her breath is hitching, and tears fill her eyes.
The moment her lips touch his, she can feel the magic draining from her, but she can't find it in herself to care. He's breathing again, and they can figure out the next step together.
Her brother gets kidnapped, and they fight Zelena, and despite Emma's lack of magic they win, and Zelena's in jail, and her mother is holding her brother in her arms, and Killian is there, asking about what she'll do about the magic she still hasn't gotten back.
She says she won't need it in New York, and his face falls, and she quashes the overwhelming urge she has to ask him to come with her. He doesn't belong in New York any more than she belongs in the Enchanted Forest.
/
They get sucked into a portal to the past (seriously, why is she even surprised anymore?), and they interrupt her parents' first meeting, and they find Rumplestiltskin to help them get back on track, and Killian needs Emma to distract his past self while he makes a deal that will put Snow in the right place at the right time to meet Charming.
He leaves the tavern and she saunters up to his past self and asks, "What are you boys playing?"
/
Killian makes the deal with Snow, and they attend the ball to make sure everything goes as planned, but Emma gets captured by the Evil Queen, and then rescues herself. She tries not to look too pleased that Killian at least tried to rescue her, because no one has ever done that for her before.
Then Regina kills her mother, only Snow's not really dead, and her parents save each others' lives, and everything is back on track, and they make it back to Rumplestiltskin's castle only to be imprisoned with his collection of magical objects. Killian tells her it's time to stop running from who she is, and she does. They make it back to the future because of the faith Killian had in her.
She tells her parents what happened, and they celebrate her brother's birth, but she's missing Killian, so she meets him outside to thank him for his help in returning her to Storybrooke, to her home, and he tells her how he did it.
She's speechless. He'd traded his home for the chance to give her hers. In that moment, she knows he's the right choice for her. In her entire life no one had given as much as he had in order to make her happy, with no thought about recompense. He'd done it just to make her happy, and that's why she leans forward to kiss him.
/
They're in his room later, lying on his bed, kissing, and his hand brushes her hair behind her ear. She feels a jolt and pulls away from him.
"Emma?" he asks, eyebrows coming together.
It's the first time in a while she's thought about her soul mark. "Do you remember the first words you ever said to me?" she whispers.
His eyebrows contract further as he thinks back. "Did I thank you for pulling me out of the pile of bodies?"
She smiles and nods, pulling her hair up and away from her mark so he can see. "Is it yours?" she asks, already knowing the answer.
She feels his callused fingertips brushing over the mark and doesn't bother suppressing her shiver. He makes a distressed sound and pulls back. "It's my handwriting, but I don't understand."
Emma scoots closer and places her hand on his cheek. "What do you mean?"
Killian shakes his head, his voice cracking. "Mine don't say 'here you go'. They say something else."
She smiles and leans forward to give him a quick kiss. "Those weren't my first words to you," she tells him.
"Yes, they were, Swan. I remember, because I remember thinking several times since then that I wish my words said something different." He buries his head in her neck, working to suppress the tears filling his eyes.
Emma grips the back of his head, holding him tightly, and whispers, "You don't remember my first words to you because you got drunk, and then someone punched you in the face so hard you passed out."
She feels his breathing stall on her neck and his whole body goes rigid. "Swan?" he says, so much hope in his voice she can't hold back any longer.
"After you left the tavern to meet my mother," she begins, pulling his head away from her neck so she can look him in the eye. "I walked up to your table and said, 'What are you boys playing?'"
He lets out a choked laugh and presses a quick kiss to her lips. "Gods, Emma. Do you know how long I've waited for you?" He leans down for another kiss. "Three hundred years in Neverland, and then your words showed up right before the curse hit. I didn't know if I was your punishment or if we'd end up never meeting."
She smiles up at him and says, "I'm glad it was neither. I'm glad it was you, Killian."
He leans down to kiss her again, and her hand slides down past his neck to rest over his heart, and in that moment everything feels perfect.