The Islander
A Once Upon a Time fiction by Vena Grey

Summary: It was just a body. She'd seen dozens of them before, most far worse than this. But since then, whenever she sleeps, she finds herself in a place meant for children to go in their dreams. An old-fashioned whodunit, Captain Swan style. AU.

Disclaimer: Sometimes, I like to play with other people's characters.

Author's intro: Once upon a time, a little novelist from the Pacific Northwest went to university and forgot how to write fiction. Nearly five years later, the desire to get back in touch with that part of herself materialized with a vengeance. Rather than dive off the cliff headlong, she decided to practice with fanfiction. At the time, her mind was full of three things: Once, to which she'd been introduced in a whirlwind over the span of a month, given that she now had time for television again; financial research, which was thoroughly boggling her mind; and her thesis in criminology. Amidst that sea, The Islander came into the world.

This little story was born in a NaNoWriMo-esque writing frenzy during the summer of 2014. I barely remember writing it. It's freaking bizarre. But I love my little mutant of a story.

A couple of last things before I stop rambling and let you read. PhiraLovesLoki and SaharaDesiderata (now called The Poly Lama) very generously beta-ed the first half of this story for me, and I'm grateful for their help. Secondly, because it was brought up during the beta process: I am American but I use British spelling. I'm not sure why, but I've done so as long as I can remember.

Without further ado, then, The Islander. Bon voyage.

Chapter One
The body

The problem with a room with a lot of windows in an old building in the city is that without fail, every witching hour when the bars closed, the sound of sirens would split the air in the dark room like she wasn't inside at all and she'd roll her face into the pillow and groan. She'd tried everything she could think of: extra weather stripping, earplugs, a box fan for the ambiance, and when that didn't work, even one of those whirring machines Mary Margaret had bought for her son to help him sleep through the summer thunderstorms. Nothing.

Usually it was a matter of just rolling over again, pulling the covers over her head, and forcing her mind into nothingness long enough to fall asleep. There were nights, though, when she'd already had a hard go about it getting there in the first place—nights when she'd turn over, roll on her back and map the grooves in the ceiling, always catching a glimpse of red out of the corner of her eye with an ungodly number like 2:15 or 4:27 or 3:48 blinking back at her. That morning, her whirring thoughts deposited her just shy of her normal rising time. It was still dark, but with a measly twelve minutes until 5:00, she exhaled, swung herself out of bed, and put her hair up for her morning run.

Henry's school was just a couple of subway stops away. She didn't know how he did it, but her son, reared in the chaos of her college co-op after she'd found herself pregnant at eighteen, had the miraculous ability to wake up the first time his alarm went off barely forty minutes before he had to be there, shower, dress, eat, read, and dart out to catch his train as soon as it pulled into the station and was never late. Superhuman, she sometimes thought. But it was nice, all the same. Forty minutes before school was 6:50, leaving Emma enough time after her own early rise to catch a 15-minute train both ways to Central Park and run a good seven or eight miles in the morning calm before he was even up. It was the one time, after the bars closed but before the morning rush, that the city felt small, and sometimes as her feet beat a path through the trails she would imagine she was in another place, running through the forest, or, if she was feeling motivated, on the run from some dangerous foe.

But it was the cop in her that never let her leave home without her gun, and when she saw the crowd of onlookers gathering around an immobile shape on the path ahead she reached for her holster before she noticed two other men in uniform had beat her to it. Still, out of instinct, "NYPD," she said a little breathlessly, holding the badge in front of her. She met the eyes of one of the officers.

"Get back," the other said, waving away the crowd.

The man was lying face down on his left arm, his right forward as though he'd meant to catch himself. A small pool of blood crept out from his chest, opposite where, facing her, a remarkable hole tore through the leather of his jacket, and it was then that she decided to look to one of the officers.

"How long has he been here?" She didn't recognise either of them.

"The body's still warm; less than half an hour, I'd imagine." He held her gaze. "The medical team is on their way."

"Any signs of foul play?"

"Aside from the hole through his back?" He smiled a little despite the situation. "The dirt on the trail tells us he was running through the woods when they caught up with him, but he doesn't have much on him now."

"Think whoever was after him took something?"

"We don't know yet, but we will soon enough. We'll keep you posted if it's serious. Sidney Glass," he extended a hand over the body and she eyed it a moment before doing the same.

"Emma Swan."

"Well, Emma, sorry to have kicked off your morning this way, but I think we can take it from here. Good to meet you, despite the circumstances."

She looked up from the body and saw he was looking at her. "Sure, you too." And then she rose to her feet and was off again, catching the 6:30 train as it was leaving instead of arriving, but still back in time to have Henry's breakfast cooking before he was awake, like any other morning.

The flurry of action when she arrived at the station that morning was surprisingly average compared to what she'd expected. Thankfully, it was Ruby's turn to get the coffee that day, and the junior detective didn't even look up from the stack of papers she was sorting through to hand Emma her drink. "Thanks," she muttered as she passed. Her partner was already standing by her desk, boring holes into the side of her head with his sharp gaze.

"Were you going to tell me you found a body in Central Park while you were running this morning?"

"Hello to you, too, Graham," she quipped, setting her briefcase on her chair, straightening her jacket and steeling herself before meeting his eyes. "I didn't find it. If you already knew about this, you would know there were two other officers already there when I found him."

"Yes, Regina called after hearing from Officer Glass that you'd found them. I just wanted to make sure you were alright—you weren't on duty." She felt his hand on her arm before registering its presence, and when she did she shrugged it off.

"I'm fine," she said slowly. "I had my gun, and I left when they said they didn't need help. No questions asked, no rules broken."

He exhaled slowly and nodded. "I know. I trust you." He looked like he wanted to add something but stopped himself. "Look, Emma, I know it's been a while since the last one, and if you want to talk about it—"

"I'm fine," she repeated, this time with a small smile. "I'm going to go talk to Regina before I get settled in. Graham, you don't need to worry about me." She took her coffee and was brushing past before he could say anything else.

She knocked twice at the Captain's door. It was Emma that spoke first once she entered.

"Graham told me you'd gotten a call from Sidney Glass that I'd found a body in Central Park this morning."

"Glass told me you'd run into them, yes." Regina looked up from the stack of papers she had in front of her. "Might I ask what you were doing in Central Park that early in the day?"

"I run there every morning before Henry wakes up. I left when they said they had it covered."

"I know, Swan. You weren't out of order. I just wanted to know if you saw anything."

"No, he was already dead by the time I got there. It looked like he'd been chased."

"And you didn't hear anything?"

"Nothing unusual. Glass said he thought the guy had been dead half an hour by then."

"Which would have put you on the other side of the park, so you wouldn't have heard anything. Especially not a stabbing." She ran a hand over her face.

"They used a knife?"

"That's typically what a stabbing entails." She dropped her hand to the table and sighed, shaking her head, silently apologizing. "I'll let Glass know. Thank you," she finished, and Emma turned.

The rest of the day was a blur. That morning hung over her and Graham like a wet blanket. As they wrapped up their previous case, he would stand too close, touch her too much, always behind her as though he were protecting her from something, acting as though what she'd seen that morning were some sort of disturbing anomaly as opposed to a standard part of her job. Lunch with Ruby was a reprieve. But then she had a briefing, then a patrol shift. Graham almost looked like he wanted to say something as she was leaving, but didn't, and his concern nagged at the back of her mind the whole way home.

When she arrived home that evening, Henry was still at soccer practice. An hour-old text informed her that he would be having dinner at Avery's that night and would be staying overnight to work on a project they'd been assigned together, so she didn't need to wait up for him. She ran a hand over her face and sighed. It was good timing, actually, and the Martins were good people, so he'd be fine—no, that wasn't it, she reasoned. The day felt twice as long, and before she knew what she was doing the whiskey was falling into the glass and she was floating to Henry's Xbox, depositing Good Will Hunting into the open tray, herself back on the couch, and concentrating her entire being on zoning out to the fullest extent of her abilities.

It didn't make sense that this was bothering her. She'd encountered the same situation she'd found this morning a dozen times—all things considered, this one was relatively tame in her line of work. That wasn't it. Graham had been unusually…I don't know, protective, she reasoned, but he'd been doing that for a while, and she'd never wanted to think about why. Ruby? Ruby had been disturbed by the report when they'd talked about it, but she still wasn't used to the idea of people being killed like this. And Regina had almost expected her to report the news, but though she too had seemed troubled, her ability to approach it with such serenity was enviable, minor lapses aside.

Emma ran a hand through her hair and pulled herself back to the movie. I'll bet it's just me, she decided. It's probably nothing. When she sipped her drink, the burn in her throat was calming. She set it on the floor. And before she could think again, the room around her went dark.

She'd never seen this place before. The sand below her feet was course and rough, like on the shoreline that passed for a beach not far from her third foster home in Maine. That one was her sixth overall, and by the time she reached it she was entering seventh grade. She took up running, then, in whatever kind of weather Maine could throw at her; the crunch of the sand beneath her shoes drowned out not only the snide remarks echoing in her head after another first day at school but also the nag of her own subconscious that she was just some unwanted kid no one cared about.

But the water before her wasn't the blue-grey tumult of the North Atlantic. It was overcast, but this water, she knew, was the purest blue-green she could imagine. And behind her, instead of the sparse outer piers of Portland, were trees and flowers of the most vibrant colours, a thick forest that wasn't necessarily inviting but from which this obscure sense of adventure seemed to radiate like a wind.

What is this place? She thought. There didn't appear to be anyone here, no signs of civilisation, and yet, she didn't quite feel like she was alone.

When she looked down, however, she was puzzled. On her arms were the sleeves of a red leather jacket she'd thought she'd lost years ago. She checked the tag in the inner seam—the ES she'd written to mark it was as there as it always had been. Past the necklace, a golden circular thing she didn't pay much attention to, she saw on her feet the short Timberland boots she'd vividly remembered setting fire to in a Viking funeral at the end of her post-graduate European backpacking trip with Mary Margaret. That's not possible, she thought. This has to be a dream.

"And so it is," an accented voice attached to a man she had not heard approach sounded from behind her. She tried not to jump. He smirked a bit at the effort; she narrowed her eyes, at which he gestured grandly to the land behind them and she felt at her hip pocket for her gun. No dice. "This, so they say, is a land where you can have anything you want. Evidently it works, but yes," he turned back to her then and she started a little, "as it is a dream, that would be the catch." He raised an eyebrow. "Now who might you be?"

"That's none of your business." She stepped back as though meaning to leave, her expression guarded. He picked up on it.

"You know, you can leave at any point. All you have to do is wake up." That smirk again. It was then that she noticed his clothing: black, everything, long leather jacket, a complicated vest resembling alligator skin, both that and the linen shirt half open and displaying both a substantial amount of chest and a strange silver necklace she, for some reason, found herself wanting to touch. She shook her head once and his smirk grew such that it reached his eyes. "Or, you could stay here, and keep me company as long as your curiosity suits you."

And at that, she snapped to attention and deliberately did not dwell on the fact he'd made her curiosity sound like something dirty. Instead, she turned and quickly made a beeline for the forest behind them.

"Or I could get the hell away from you and figure out what I'm doing here in the first place," she huffed. She heard him chuckle to himself as she marched off and suppressed a groan of protest. His eyes were so trained on her she almost felt heat on her back.

He gave her thirty seconds' head start.

The maze of trees and tropical plants she found herself in didn't seem to lead much of anywhere. She proceeded in what she thought was a straight line, finding the forest floor's lack of elevation change rather irritable. Stranger still was the fact the only sounds she heard were the ones she was making. The foliage rustled as she pushed it aside, but the treads of her boots were quiet on the forest floor. There were no animals, at least not that she could see. This both reassured and troubled her; she hadn't yet seen any fruit aside from small berries growing on the island either.

A more pressing concern, she figured, was water. But as she thought about it, it occurred to her she wasn't thirsty. Not only that, she wasn't tired. It had to have been at least an hour and a half of walking by then, but at this rate, it appeared she could have gone on for days just as she was.

As she questioned the peculiarity of this place and her seeming lack of physiological needs, a fallen tree presented itself to the side of her beaten path as though by magic. She didn't question it, opting instead to sit and study the unchanging, strangely silent forest as she might an alien planet. A second rustling only moments later pulled her attention back to the route she'd taken. She wasn't surprised to see the man she'd met on the beach emerge through the leaves—to her slight alarm, however, the impulse that ordinarily would have made her get up and run again didn't present itself. Still, she narrowed her eyes.

"You've seriously been following me this whole time?" she asked flatly. This time, though, he smiled.

"Aye. At first I thought I'd imagined you, so I wanted to be sure."

"Sure of what? I'm definitely here, not that I know where here is, exactly, but I don't think I should be." She laughed a bit. "I really need to be getting back."

"In that case, in what order should I proceed?"

"What?"

"Well, should I first tell you where you are, how to leave, or why you're here? Take your pick."

She looked at him intently, replying immediately, "Where."

"Well, you're in Neverland," he shot back, stepping a few paces closer. "That was the easy one, and explains how you're here and how to leave. You're asleep, so to leave, you just wake up."

"You make it sound so simple."

"Well, as simple as waking up." The smirk was back, and as he was now standing uncomfortably close she rose to her feet. "Don't you want to know the last answer?"

His blue stare was so intense it made her shiver. "I thought you'd covered your bases."

"No, I've neglected one thing," he raised his hand and pushed her hair from her face, grin growing just so as he heard her breath catch. "Why you're here."

And then, her right foot came down on his left and she pushed against his chest and took off through the forest with the agility of a cat. He swore and ran after her.

The advantage to seeming no physical limitations in this place was that her pace five minutes in was no slower than when she started running away from that creep. The disadvantage, of course, was that he knew the terrain; when she caught a glimpse of him blocking her path, she changed course without breaking stride, grinning just a second when she heard him swear and attempt to match her turns.

And then, it was so obvious. She turned again, this time further away, then again toward the way she'd come, then straight forward to where she was going, continuing in that nature until she couldn't hear him anymore and she felt the exhilaration flood over her like a wave. She pushed herself faster, now not to elude him but because the rush of the wind in her hair and on her skin felt like flying. She'd never run like this before. So, just to try it, she levered herself with grace off the trunk of a tree, landing ten feet away and keeping on, and before she knew it was bounding through the trees in a way that was not humanly possible. He's right, she thought between breaths. This is a dream.

When the trees gave way into a small clearing, she stopped, not to catch her breath but to just look. I can wake up whenever I want, she decided. She could run vertically up a tree, stand astride the branches and stare at the sky, if she felt like it. When she turned back the way she'd come, though, she felt her heart sink: there he was again, standing this time with his arms crossed sternly, a glint of something silver in his left hand.

And that's when she saw it. Her eyes went wide. The silver glint was an enormous metal hook, and he wasn't holding it—it was his left hand.

"How the hell do you keep finding me?" Her voice came out smaller than she liked, and she couldn't look away from his hook.

"I'd been trying to tell you that—"

But before he could finish, she was gone.

I don't know if I mentioned earlier, but the first draft of this story is already finished. I'll be updating every Monday as best I'm able. We've got twelve chapters and an epilogue, and this is (probably) the only chapter that will have a long author's note. Crossing my fingers.

Fanfiction has made reviewing so much more convenient, now that the little box is at the bottom of the page. Do me a solid and leave a review on your way out, would you?

See you next week!

Vena