Author Note: So I know I'm late boarding the Captain Swan ship, but I started writing this a little while ago intending to finish it before the end of the hiatus and somehow Season 3 snuck up on us and I wasn't prepared. I'm currently around two-thirds of the way through but I couldn't wait anymore so I just decided to start publishing it :) It's an AU post 'And Straight on 'Till Morning' and will probably end up being around ten chapters long. I'll be editing and publishing chapters as I write so bear with me! This is my first ever fanfic so I'd greatly appreciate any reviews and feedback xx
They had been in Neverland for all of eighteen minutes, and already things were taking a turn for the worse.
"Bloody crocodile! I ought to skin you right here."
Yep, Emma thought, definitely worse.
"Hey!" she stalked over to the source of the commotion, stumbling slightly as the deck rocked beneath her feet, the lurching of the floorboards making her stomach heave. Hook had Mr Gold dangling over the side of the ship by the front of his shirt. "What the hell is going on over here?!"
"My presence on this ship seems to infuriate him," Gold remarked dryly. "What's the matter, pirate?" he leered, "can't handle the fact that I crushed Milah's heart in this very spot?"
The aforementioned pirate's hook was being smashed into Gold's face before Emma had time to react. Hook slammed the older man back against the wall and pressed the sharp, curved metal against his throat.
"Go ahead," Gold snarled, blood welling up from the gash under his eye.
"Hey!" Emma repeated, grabbing Hook's arm and wrenching him away. The pirate stumbled back a few feet, and Gold dropped to the ground, coughing and wiping a hand across his face, smearing blood along his cheek. His eye was swelling rapidly. She jabbed an accusatory finger at Hook, "cut it out. Both of you," she added, turning her glare on Gold.
"As you wish, dearie," Gold reached for his cane and used it to prop himself up. Hook let loose a stream of profanity that involved the use of several words Emma hadn't even known existed, but made no move to attack him again.
It was at that moment that David burst onto the deck with a shout, looking ready to shoot someone. Mary Margaret followed closely behind, smoothing her hair and tugging at the hem of her shirt.
"What the hell–" her father took one look at the blood on Gold's face and swung around towards Hook.
"Whoa," Emma stepped in front of him, placing a hand on his chest, "it's okay, really. I handled it."
"You handled it," David repeated. He looked from his daughter to the pirate, brow creased as if the words were in a foreign language.
"Nice of you two to finally make an appearance," Regina remarked from where she had stood and watched the whole thing, an impassive expression on her face.
Snow flushed guiltily, and Emma caught sight of a faint smudge of red lipstick on David's cheek as he turned away.
Great: while she had been playing babysitter to Captain Hook and Rumplestiltskin, her parents had been getting fifty shades of inappropriate below deck.
"Now that you boys are done squabbling, why don't we all move on to more productive things, like, say, finding my son. Or have you all forgotten the reason that we're here?"
"Regina's right," Emma put in, albeit reluctantly, "we're wasting time. Henry's our main focus right now," she swallowed around the lump in her throat and squared her shoulders, turning to Gold, "so how do we know where he is?"
"We don't," Gold said matter-of-factly, "the globe showed us that he's somewhere on the main part of the island, but there's no way of knowing his exact location."
"Well that's just great," Emma crossed her arms, "wonderful." She turned away, leaning against the side of the ship and staring out across the water at the island in the distance. Henry was there somewhere, lost amongst all that greenery. After a moment, she felt Snow's hand on her shoulder, warm and reassuring.
"You might not want to hear this, but there's also no way of steering the Jolly safely to shore," Hook said, "there are no ports. We'd run aground."
"So, what, we swim there?" David asked.
"Can't," Hook replied, "these seas are infested with sirens. They'd be on us the second we touched the water."
"So we use magic," Snow said confidently, "transport ourselves there with a spell."
"It's not that easy, I'm afraid," he sounded genuinely contrite, "magic works differently in Neverland. It has to be drawn from nature: from the sea or the land or the air. You would have to devise a new kind of spell, one that works here."
"So basically what you're saying is that we're stranded here, with no way of getting to shore," Emma said flatly.
"And you didn't think to tell us this before we took a one-way trip through a portal?" Regina demanded.
Hook regarded her with contempt, "would it have made a difference?"
There was a long pause.
"No," Regina admitted finally, "I guess it wouldn't have."
Emma's fingernails dug into the wood, her knuckles white. No way of getting there without a new spell, and that could take weeks. Henry could be anywhere by then. "There has to be some other way," she tore her gaze away from the sea, turning to Hook imploringly, "you spent years here. I know you and your crew lived on the island at some point. How did you get there?"
He didn't respond, his eyes sliding away from hers.
"Hook," she snapped.
He sighed and slowly turned to look her straight in the eye, "we threw one of our crew to the sirens and made a break for shore while they were distracted with him."
A heavy silence settled over them as the words registered in everyone's mind.
"Oh," Emma said in a small voice.
"Any volunteers?" Regina put in, sarcastic as ever.
Nobody spoke. Hook's expression was pained, as though he wished he were anywhere but here, and for once Emma agreed with him.
Emma stared out to sea, trying to quell the dark thoughts racing through her mind. They had finally given up on finding another way onto the island after hours of brainstorming solutions. Hook had anchored the Jolly Roger as close to shore as possible, and Gold and Regina had grudgingly agreed to work together to come up with a spell. It was the best they could do for now, but it wasn't enough to take away the hollow ache in her chest.
The others were all asleep in their bunks below deck, but she had been awake for hours, pacing the small space restlessly before finally coming up to get some air. The island – and Henry – was less than seventy metres away, so tantalisingly close yet so far out of reach.
Emma took another sip from the bottle of whisky she had swiped from the collection of supplies below deck, trying to discern any movement beneath the surface of the water. She wondered how long it would take the sirens to reach her if she jumped overboard right now, whether she had any hope of making it to shore alive.
"You do look rather ravishing bathed in moonlight, I must say."
She jumped at Hook's voice behind her, whirling around and clumsily knocking over the empty bottle by her feet, sending it rolling over the gently undulating deck. Hook watched it roll away, then turned to look pointedly at the second one in her hand. She raised her chin defiantly, and tilted her head to take another swig before shaking the bottle in exasperation. Empty.
"Where's all the alcohol on this damn boat?"
"Ship," he corrected her automatically, but the corners of his mouth twitched up into a smile, "you should know by now that a pirate always guards his most valued treasure."
She thought for a moment, "feel like sharing any of it with me?"
"Not even slightly," he told her, "besides, I think you've had quite a fair bit to drink already, lass."
"I can handle it," she insisted, feeling herself sway slightly and wondering belatedly if she actually could. She had thought drinking would take her mind off Henry, but if anything it had only intensified the bleak thoughts, caused them to cloud her mind like shadows blotting out the sun.
Hook's grin faltered when he saw her face, and she recognised his expression immediately. It was one she had seen countless times before, on all the social workers and teachers and foster parents she had ever had. It was the face someone made when looking at something hopeless, broken beyond repair.
"Listen, Emma," he began, taking a step towards her, and it was his use of her first name that let her know he was being serious, "I didn't get a chance to say it before, but I truly am sorry about your son, and about Baelfire, and…well, about everything."
Emma knew in that moment that he wasn't only apologising for leaving her trapped in Rumplestiltskin's cell and forming an alliance with Cora, but for all the decisions he had made that had led them here.
"If there's anything I can do to help, just say the word," he was still looking at her with that pitying expression, the one that everyone had been giving her since Neal had fallen through the portal. She couldn't stand it. If there was one thing that Captain Hook wasn't, it was sympathetic.
She shook her head, swallowing past the lump in her throat. She had managed to push Neal out of her mind, to focus solely on finding Henry, but now all the thoughts were bubbling up again: the anger and the grief. She was furious at Neal for letting go, for putting her life ahead of his own when she had never asked him to, but most of all she was furious at herself: for not being stronger, holding on tighter, for not trying harder to hold on to him.
"Don't," her voice was thick when she finally spoke.
"Don't what?"
"Don't look at me like that," she met his eyes, "like I'm some kind of wounded animal, like I deserve your sympathy when I'm the one who should be apologising. I'm the one who left you in that giant's lair. Maybe if I'd just listened to you…" she hesitated for a beat before finally saying aloud the thought that had been plaguing her for weeks, "…maybe if I'd just trusted you, none of this would be happening right now."
If she had just let Hook join them, they wouldn't have had to deal with Cora's scheming or Regina's wrath after her death. Maybe without that added distraction, they could have spent more time focusing on exactly why Greg had come to Storybrooke in the first place. They could have stopped Greg and Tamara before things had gotten so out of hand.
Hook shook his head, "if I've learned anything from the last three centuries, it's that thoughts of that sort can only bring misery. It does no good to reflect on the past, on the what-ifs and the might-have-beens," his eyes were shadowy; "they can only tear you apart."
"Is that how you live with yourself after all the things you've done?" the words were out of her mouth before she had time to process them.
There was a long pause, and Emma thought for a moment that she'd gone too far, that he would close himself off as he had so many times before.
"I suppose it is," he said finally, glancing away from her, "you tell yourself that whatever you did was necessary at the time, that it was the only available option. Then you wake up the following day and move on. And you don't look back."
Emma blinked, and for a moment she saw Killian Jones standing before her, saw the vulnerability he usually kept masked under the layers of Captain Hook, the façade he had constructed for himself. She remembered the hurt in his eyes when she had chained him to the wall in the giant's lair, the imploring note in his voice as he asked her to trust him. That had been Killian, not Hook, she knew that now. She just hadn't wanted to believe it at the time.
"What is it?" he asked, and she flushed and dropped her gaze, realising she'd been staring.
"Nothing," she mumbled, "it's just...I remember being the same way before I came to Storybrooke. I tried so hard to block out the past, but in the end everything just got dredged back up again. Especially with Neal–"
She stopped herself. Her hand instinctively went to her neck, where the Swan keychain had always hung, then dropped to her side when she remembered it wasn't there anymore.
Hook looked at her for a moment or two, then said quietly, "what happened between you two, if I may ask?"
She sighed, "it's complicated."
There was a flicker of a smile on his face, "more complicated than Henry's family tree? That took quite some time for me to comprehend."
Emma laughed in spite of herself, "I guess not."
He stood there, not pushing or prying, just waiting for her to speak first. And so she did.
"We were both escaping our pasts. I was running away from my foster home, and he…well, he was running from his father, I guess."
"Rumplestiltskin," Hook clarified.
Emma nodded, "I knew it was a mistake to get involved with him. He was a thief, a criminal. I was just a kid, barely seventeen, but I thought…" she sighed, "I don't even know what I thought. I just knew that he was the only person who'd ever made me feel like I had a home, like someone cared…" her voice turned hard, "then he let me go to jail for his crimes and disappeared without a single trace."
She knew even as she said it that she wasn't being fair, but she couldn't help it. The bitterness of his betrayal still remained, like an old wound that would never completely heal.
"That's what I thought anyway," she continued, knowing she had to tell the whole story for Henry's sake. "Turns out that August – that Pinnochio told him to stay away from me, that it was the only way he could help me to fulfil my destiny and break the curse. So he did, and I went to jail. By the time I found out I was pregnant he was long gone. The first time I heard about any of this was when I tracked him down for Gold: I had no idea who he really was. So he found out about Henry after disappearing for eleven years, and you know what he said? He wanted to know why I'd kept it from him. Like I owed it to him or something," she laughed, the sound bitter, falling flat in the silence.
"I knew Baelfire once," Hook said, "he came to me as a boy in Neverland. It was only for a short time, but I saw the kind of lad that he was: defiant, courageous, even in the face of adversity. The Bae I knew would never have done that to you. But maybe somewhere along the way to becoming Neal, he lost his true self. Maybe being in the Land Without Magic changed him."
"Maybe," Emma sagged against the side of the ship, suddenly exhausted.
Hook watched her for a moment, his expression unreadable. "It's been a long day," he said finally, "you should rest."
She waited for him to make some jibe about helping her to 'rest', but it didn't come. He turned and made his way across the deck to the stairs leading down into the cabins, and she followed him, casting one last look at the island as she went. He was waiting for her at the bottom of the steps, and as Emma began to descend them she felt a sudden wave of dizziness overwhelm her. The world blurred and shifted, and she blindly threw out a hand to steady herself as her feet slipped out from under her.
His arms were around her waist before she had time to register what was happening, holding her tightly and steadying her against him. Her hands automatically grabbed onto the lapels of his leather trench coat.
And then they were so close that their noses were almost bumping, his breath tickling her face, her mouth hovering just inches above his. If either of them moved just a fraction, they would be kissing. Moments passed. He didn't let go of her, and she didn't want him to. His gaze locked onto hers, and Emma's breath caught in her throat. She had never noticed how blue his eyes were until now.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, he released her, and she stumbled down the last few steps. She stared up at him wordlessly, her heart drumming furiously against her ribs. His eyes darkened, sweeping over her hungrily before focusing on her mouth.
Then he seemed to shake himself. His voice was gruff when he spoke, "get some sleep." He turned abruptly, the door to his cabin closing behind him.
And Emma was left standing in the hallway, wondering what exactly had just happened.
She couldn't help but feel disappointed.