A/N: ANGST! And Captain Swan comfort. =)
She didn't catch him. A spare, wily little man with eager eyes and a venomous smile. Conniving and cruel, like so many others...but with power, wielding a pen like a sword.
She didn't catch him. Not today—because she was just tired, drained—and she found herself sitting on a bench outside of town, a stupid idea with any number of villains lurking about, but she…just didn't care at this point.
He found her, because that was what he did. Sat down beside her in a kindly sort of quiet, rested his hooked arm on the bench behind her. Tipped that perfect profile upwards, as though he was just out to look at the stars.
"I'm really angry," Emma said at last, and she thought that her voice, and the words, sounded silly.
His gaze was on her in an instant, searching and sympathetic and affectionate. "Emma, I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault." Sharp, bitter. She sounded like herself ten years ago. It sucked. "It's just—I can't freaking believe that my darkness got…like, ripped out of me. I just—" she stopped short, and realized that her eyes were brimming with tears. "I'm not even a good person! I'm a really crappy human being."
He winced. "Love—"
"Just let me finish," she whispered, and he did, rested his good hand on his knee and waited. With her, as he always was, and it was strangely comforting, even amid all the hurt.
"I was a teenage delinquent, and I got pregnant, and I…I was the bad kid in the foster home. Nobody wanted me. When Henry told me I was the savior?" She coughed out a little laugh, a twisted, tortured sound. "I didn't believe him! How could…how could I be good enough to save anybody?"
He wanted to say something, defend her, even to herself. A muscle in his jaw worked, but he wouldn't interrupt her, not for the life of him.
"And then, to find out that my parents didn't trust me. Even before I was born? They didn't trust that I could make good choices, as a normal person—I had to be protected? I was ruining someone else's life before I even made it into this world! Somebody has my darkness. And they didn't even get to grow up with—with their family. They probably grew up feeling abandoned, and unloved, and that wasn't true."
"Emma," Killian said, turning towards her, and his hand threaded gently through her hair, curving around the back of her neck—it must be moments like these that he wanted two hands most, so that he take her to him wholly—"Emma, lass, you can't blame yourself. It was an ugly fight…heroes and monsters, and—" his voice trailed off and Emma pulled away from him slightly, turning to face him.
"She wouldn't have left her child," she said, very softly, and in that moment she realized it was the worst part of all. "They call her a monster, but—but she wouldn't have let go of her child."
Like they let go of me.
The tears came, then, and she felt them rise up in a wave, so strong a tide that she was curling in on herself, smaller than she had ever felt.
His arms were around her then, strong and sure and holding her, and she clung fast, glad that he was here, and that he loved her.
But it hurt, deep to the very roots of her being—and try as she might, she couldn't get the voices in her head to be silent. She heard whispers of giving you your best chance, and she thought it was the most dreadful thing of all when chance wasn't a part of it, when something was taken and given without the justice of uncertainty, when she was made to question her magic and memories, to wonder if even the very light within her was not her own to keep.