A/N: Ohhhhh man. I can't believe it's finally here! This has been a labor of love for me for the past few months, and it's kinda weird to actually have other people besides me and @kmomof4 read it lol. I hope you guys love it. And speaking of @kmomof4, I have to say a very special thank you to her for her beta skills and just for being a fantastic person and friend while I freaked out on the daily over this project lol. Without further ado, I give you my contribution to the 2018 Captain Swan Supernatural Summer!

It had been three days, twelve hours, and forty seven minutes since Emma Nolan had her last encounter. That's what she called them, not like she had a point of reference for this sort of thing. 'Encounter' seemed to fit. What else do you call it when a dead person sends you messages from beyond?

Encounters for Emma came in many different manifestations. Sometimes she would get a glimpse of a life once lived, images of a face, or a house, different places or things. Other times, she would hear a quick snippet of a conversation. Stronger connections she could hear them speak directly to her, usually just one or two words. Other times, she would get a whiff of something. Perfume, or home cooking. Once or twice, they had even come to her in a dream. She was always waiting for the one encounter that never came, though.

Emma first started noticing the encounters when she was ten years old and her grandmother passed unexpectedly. She had been very close to her father's mother, Ruth, and had been devastated at her passing. She was the only grandparent that Emma had ever known, her mother's parents and her father's father having passed before she was born. She thought she was going crazy at first, or imagining things. She would smell her grandmother's cookies, or hear her laugh. When Ruth appeared in her dreams for the first time, she had been ecstatic. She had her beloved Nana back in some fashion. She could still seek her advice and comfort, not quite as often as she would have liked, but it was better than nothing. Her grandmother's visits were few and far between, after all. Emma would often get restless waiting for her to appear. She secretly wished for more spirits to talk to.

And because of that wish, she blamed herself when her parents died two short years later in a car accident, even though she never had a single encounter with them. After the loss of her parents, Emma was sent to live with her mother's younger cousin Ruby, who was only five years older than Emma herself, and Ruby's grandmother, the only family she had left. She and her grandmother, affectionately referred to as Granny, doted on Emma but she became very closed off and bitter into her teenage years. She carried much of that hardness with her to this day. She wasn't the same in a world without David and Mary Margaret Nolan. There was a particularly difficult time when Emma refused to wear anything but Mary Margaret's frilly floral blouses or David's oversized flannels. She had discovered some time ago that she could prompt visits from her grandmother by wrapping herself in one of her quilts and assumed it would be the same for her parents.

It wasn't.

She gradually started wearing the clothing less and less, hanging on to a couple of things here and there. Until one day, when she was 16, Emma packed up every stitch of anything they'd ever touched and packed it away, never to be seen again, furious at herself for not being able to make the connection. The only things she kept from her parents were their wedding rings and her mother's engagement ring. They hung on a long chain around her neck and under no circumstances were they ever removed. She never told Ruby or Granny of her encounters, or anyone else for that matter, because she knew they would either think she was crazy or the inevitable demand to contact her parents would come. She couldn't let them down like that. So in enough time, she stopped reaching for her grandmother's quilts as well. It was easier to encounter spirits she didn't have a personal connection to.

The last encounter she had came about because she had picked up a shirt in a thrift shop. It was a brief encounter, just a vision of the letters J and K. Nothing spectacular. Things like this often happened when she touched something that belonged to a person that had passed on. It happened a lot in secondhand shops, which happened to be where Emma preferred to shop for clothes. It was thrifty and she often found some cute buys. She was surprised at first when she made the discovery of the encounters in such places, though. She hadn't given much thought to where clothes in the local Goodwill came from. Logically, she knew that people donated the clothes, but she had never thought before that of course people must donate a good portion of their loved ones' clothes after they died. It didn't bother her though. It's not like she was wearing the clothes these people were buried in. Plus, she got some pretty fascinating insights from these clothes sometimes. She didn't end up buying the shirt that gave her the vision of the letters, but they lingered at the back of her mind, nagging at her until she pulled her leather bound journal from her messenger bag and wrote them down.

And here now, three days, twelve hours, and forty seven minutes later, sitting alone in her affordable little apartment, she had pulled her journal back out. She had completely forgotten about that previous encounter when the letters jumped out of the page at her again. She ran her finger along the edge of the letter J, and then the K. She suddenly smelled jasmine and heard a female voice murmuring in her head.

Wrong. Change it. Wrong. Change it.

What the hell did that mean? She frowned at the letters as they swam through her head and she wrote them down again and again, varying the letters in size and style, from cursive to print, from big to small. She even reversed the letters so they read K J rather than J K as she had been writing. Once she did that, the murmurs stopped. She still smelled jasmine clinging to the air.

K J.

"Huh? Wonder what that means." It was more of a statement than an inquisition but a shudder crept up her spine as she said it, giving her pause. She shook her head free of the sensation and got up to retrieve her ramen noodles from the microwave, sticking her pen in the messy bun as she went. She had almost made it back to the couch, ready to immerse herself back in the newest case file she had been going over when a jolt of pain flashed through her head.

"What the hell?!" she growled as her noodles sloshed over the side of the bowl and her free hand shot to her temple. She righted her food bowl and set it on the coffee table next to where she had left her case sheets and journal. The fragrance of jasmine was near overwhelming now. Sitting down on the blue gingham couch where she had effectively set up shop for the day, she removed her large black-rimmed glasses from her face and rubbed the bright green eyes she uncovered. As she pressed her fingers into her eyes, the letters began to swim in her head again, K's and J's encompassing everything.

"Alright!" she shouted to the empty room, grabbing her journal. "Pushy bitch," she muttered. She hadn't had an encounter with someone so persistent in some time. Hell, maybe ever. And she didn't even know anything beyond the letters she had scribbled down. And that they smelled like jasmine. Female, she was certain, based on the perfume and what little she heard of a voice. Foreign? She thought she caught an accent. She flipped open the journal, pushing the case file to the side for now, and pulled the pen from her bun. She stared at the page holding the different combinations of the letters. She decided to start fresh. Turning the page, she rewrote the letters down (K then J) at the top of the blank space. She waited. The floral scent invaded her nose still but the murmurs were quiet. Her hand was poised in writing position, but nothing came. She waited a full minute. Still nothing.

This was getting frustrating. Emma closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to hear the slightest whisper again. She should have bought the damn shirt at the Goodwill. That would have probably kickstarted something. But if she bought every shirt she had an encounter with, she would have one very large and eclectic wardrobe. Still, she waited, trying to force a connection, some kind of contact. She took a deep breath through her nose and focused, feeling the ridge on the grip of her pen dig into the sensitive under flesh of her knuckle. She grit her teeth. She was going back to buy that stupid shirt tomorrow. Suddenly, she felt lighter and the botanical aroma that had surrounded her so thoroughly for the last half hour seemed to dissipate. All that remained was the smell of her now cold ramen and the A/C. Sterile and empty as usual.

Blinking slowly, the room came back into focus and Emma frowned at the loss of connection. For someone so pushy, she didn't get far with whoever this person was. She shrugged and removed her hand from the journal and was about to reach for the case file when she glanced at the place where her hand had just been poised to write. She felt the blood drain from her face as two bold words she didn't even feel herself writing stared back at her from the blank space.

SAVE HIM.