"Love? You know you're supposed to wake me when this happens." Emma wants to be angry at his fussing but the left side of his hair is sticking out in the air from the pillow and there's a little red crease across his cheek and-he's cute, okay?
She just gives a little shrug and smile instead, the blanket on her shoulders sighing with the movement as she turns back to typing up a report from the station on her laptop. "You need your sleep."
She hears Killian make some sort of disapproving noise in his throat as his sock-clad feed stride toward her, swishing on the hardwood until he's right in front of her, a gentle hand shutting the lid of her laptop and bending until they are nose-to-nose. "So do you."
His voice is so gentle, those ocean-blue eyes crinkled with concern and that mouth turned down and she can't-can't fight him. Not when he's being adorable. Instead she just nods. "I know."
He knows she's getting frustrated with his mothering but the simple fact of the matter is, Killian is scared.
No, scared isn't the right word. Terrified. Elated. Frightened. Joyous. Acutely reactive.
He's not sure there is a word.
"Emma," He settles next to her on the couch and she allows it, allows his arm around her shoulder and he feels the shiver down his back, feels the frigid temperature of her flesh and it chills his heart, makes him ache.
He holds her closer. "Emma, you're freezing."
She nods in agreement next to his collarbone, unable to cuddle close to his warmth. "I know. I just...I woke up and had to vomit and I didn't want to wake you up, so I came out here."
He wants to be angry at her, wants to berate her for doing this, but she's chilled and curled up next to him so the golden top of her head is about all he can see under the blanket and it's past three in the morning and he simply can't summon an ounce of rage. So he kisses her hair instead, pulls her fully into his lap so her head rests under his chin and her frozen thighs bracket his. "Swan, that was not the arrangement we agreed upon."
She sighs against him, even her breathe cold against her neck as he gathers her closer, feeling fear take residence hard in his gut and heavy in his heart.
"You need to sleep, Killian. You've barely gotten any rest since I got pregnant."
She's not wrong. He hasn't slept well since the first time she woke up in the night sick as a dog, bowing over their lavatories as he held her hair back and fetched her a glass of water. Slept even less since she showed him a positive test a few days later, tears streaming down both their faces with a mixture of elation and terror.
He kissed the top of her head again, hand urging her to tuck her frigid nose against his throat. "Neither have you."
Because it's been five years since they've been trying and they've had this before, but they've always lost it.
The first had been early and there was Whale telling them that was normal. The second-
The second had been late and there has been so much blood and he's not a stranger to that, he's bleed a man from his arterial veins with his hook but this was his wife and she had gone so pale-
(And he has nightmares about that night, Emma waking him with water trickling down her face and liquid coating their bed and small, whimpering cries that shook the very core of his existence.)
They had stopped trying, after that. Not preventing it actively, but no longer looking up positions and remedies that the interweb promoted helped conception. They resigned themselves to simply living with each other, which Killian could hardly call a burden. They had Henry and each other, and seemingly infinite days of simply living with love and that was enough.
Except Emma had gotten pregnant four months ago, just shy of fourty.
(Whale had used the term geriatric pregnancy and Killian had punched him out for it.)
So he feels rather justified in his terror, especially when even as her belly pressed lightly against him with added roundness, her collarbones protruded harder against his shoulders.
She couldn't keep food down. Couldn't sleep.
It was killing her and killing him to watch it.
"Oh, Killian," Her hand wormed its way out of the blankets to touch his cheek and only then did he realize he was crying.
"Hey, hey babe. I'm okay. It's going to be okay." Her green eyes were round and soft with sleepiness and love even as the little lines beside them crinkled with worry.
Killian nodded against her palm, turning his head so he could press a kiss to each beloved finger, each little joint that was a part of his wife until giving an open-mouthed kiss to her palm and simply resting there until he felt the knot untie his throat.
"I'm frightened." It was the first time he admitted it, sitting in the early hours of morning and the late hours of night with his wife, feeling helpless in the dark but safe under her touch.
"Of what?" She whispered back. They didn't need to whisper, Henry had sought out his own adventure years ago and the house was still. But it seemed necessary not to break the quiet of dawn's twilight.
He shuddered against her, arms shifting in an attempt to bring her further to him, to pull her inside him where she and the babe would be safe. An impossible wish.
"You can't keep food down Emma. You're too cold to sleep. This isn't-this isn't good for you." He bit the last part out, blinking almost angrily against the moisture he felt welling up in his eyelashes.
She shushed him, humming softly as her fingers stroked the back of his neck, his scalp, the scar on his cheek. He felt weak for accepting his comfort but too tired to turn away. Killian heaved, gaining his faculties of speech after long, quiet moments of his wife's gentle touch and bottomless peridot eyes.
"Whale said everything looks good," She said when he shuffled her legs over his lap, hand slowly massaging and warming her calves and thighs. "There's no reason to think that what happened last time will-"
Swan chokes off at that, her own memories of the lost child and the gravestone in their backyard with the name 'Leo' carved on it. Killian wants to brace her against him when he hears it but he's so afraid to touch. To harm her when she seems so small and fragile. Instead, he brackets her back with his stump so his hand can carefully trace the lines of her cheeks, her slender neck, down her breasts to rest reassuringly on the bump that had formed in the last few weeks. He simply wants to keep her warm. To keep them both safe.
He nods against her temple. "I know love, I know. I just...Swan, I can't lose you."
Because losing the child gutted him but losing his wife to his own doing? Killian Jones knows he wouldn't survive that. (His father hadn't. Had gone into a bottle and never returned.)
They sit like that for a long time, simply taking comfort in the tactile sensation of a lover, of heartbeats, breaths, and the slow, silent flowing of blood. It's impossibly frustrating to him, knowing that he'd give his life to protect her and unable to stop the possibility of impending physical doom. He can't protect her and his child from this, as much as he prays to the stars and the bloody fucking sea.
There's birdsong somewhere in the distance and he wonders how long they have been sitting here. Emma's exquisitely sensitive fingers seemed to have warmed, pressed against his breastbone, at the very least. Her breathing is even and calm but he feels her conscious mind, nearly brushing against his own.
Dawn is coming.
"I told you once that villains don't get happy endings." Killian murmurs into Swan's hair before he realizes what he's saying but he needs her to understand why he's so adamant about staying awake with her and cranking up the heater until it feels like Neverland to keep her warm, lying with her under all the bedclothes of Storybrooke, holding her hair when she gets sick. He just needs her to know-
"When I think about Leo and how sick you've been I think...I've gotten greedy. I was a pirate for hundreds of years and I don't deserve this life with you, much less a child. I fear...I fear I've asked for too much after all I've done and the gods will see fit to take it all from me."
He's crying again but this time he knows, feeling the sobs curl and vibrate in his spine as Emma straightens against him. She folds the corners of her blanket over his shoulders until they have their own pocket of her, rising slightly until he feels her nose brush his, her mouth kiss against the wetness on his face.
When he opens his eyes, she's level with him, her cheek pressed against him and arms strong as she hugs him.
Her breath is warm this time when she speaks. "I thought Leo was my punishment for giving up my first child. Like, he didn't want to stay because he was worried I'd abandon him too."
A thousand statements rise into his mouth when he hears her because she is a wonderful mother and her son loves her and she gave him his best chance, ripping out her own heart, to do so-
And they all die there, on his tongue, when he understands why she's telling him.
Quite a pair they are, blaming themselves for things beyound their control.
Thank the gods they found each other.
"I love you," He whispers instead, pressing it into the skin of her neck.
He feels Emma's wet smile against his shoulder in response. "I know."
It's a much bigger statement than it seems, but Killian Jones has always known how to read between the lines, how to read behind the walls and nooks and crannies of his wife.
Dawn breaks.
They name her Alice.