3 centuries. There once was a time when he felt every moment of them. The pain, tearing its way through his heart. The fury, rolling in like a sudden unending storm at sea. And the emptiness, its hole so vast in size that he no longer felt like a person but more like a weapon, with one purpose and one purpose only. Never to know or feel love, but to avenge a love that once was.
Those times have become few and far between. Gone are the days in which 300 years rest on his chest like the weight of every world he's ever visited, stealing his breath and threatening to crush his heart. He finds himself guided by a compass found on a journey that changed the course of his life in ways he still can't comprehend, and it seems he stumbled upon the lifetime – the seconds, days, months, years – that he was meant for all along.
2 losses. They once were ghosts, haunting him always. He was their tether to the world, his unfinished business trapping them at his side until the three of them finally reunited. Their lives and their losses defined him. Captain Hook. Rank and name serving as reminders of the absence of them both.
But she hadn't left him. Not when she lay in the very same place where Milah had taken her last breath. Not when she drove away from a curse designed to keep them apart forever. Not when she slammed the door in his face and had him locked away, false memories serving as the only life she'd ever lived. Not when she fell through a portal back in time and temporarily erased her own existence. And not when she found herself freezing to death, a wall of ice keeping them apart.
She never left him. Even when she wasn't there, she remained in his heart, a beacon of hope that perhaps not every loss was meant to be forever...that perhaps the relief of being found could outweigh the pain of being lost.
1 moment. The door stands open before him and his left hand trembles behind him, the rose in his grip reminding him that this moment is, in fact, real. He looks up from the floor and suddenly can't be certain that he hasn't fallen into a dream.
Words fail him. He's lived more lifetimes than anyone deserves, seen more wonders and terrors than he could ever recall, and yet it is this moment in this lifetime that he cannot bring himself to believe.
This woman, beautiful and stubborn and powerful and perfect in her every imperfection, infuriates him and thrills him and completes him in ways he never imagined possible. She fills the empty spaces of his heart just as he has come to know that he fills the voids within hers.
In this one moment, she stands before him, the most beautiful sight he's ever beheld, her eyes wide and her lips parted in a mirrored look of how he feels, two open books standing ready to start a new chapter. He draws in a deep breath, searching for words to describe the utterly indescribable, and prepares to speak – to press pen and ink to a blank page - in 3, 2, 1…