colors of love
chapter one
Summary: A myriad of colors dance across her vision. It stops as soon as it starts, and then all she can see a deep, stormy shade of blue.
It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.
It's also the color of his eyes.
Damnit!
A CS soulmates!au.
A/N: This is my first OUAT fanfic! I'm super excited about this one. It's almost complete, and it will probably only be 4 chapters at the most. The only reason it's so long is because it follows closely with canon . I hope you guys like it!
About two years before the Dark Curse hit and about a year and a half before his alignment with Cora, Killian Jones met his soulmate.
Meeting your soulmate is supposed to be magical, literally. Everybody saw the world in black and white, only when they met their soulmate, did the world burst into color. That was when they began to see clearly for the first time.
Too bad Killian couldn't remember a second of it.
It was really one of the strangest things that had ever happened to him. He woke up one morning, with a bruised jaw, a killer hangover, lying on the floor of his cabin and…..he could see colors.
Killian couldn't remember anything, try as he might. All he remembered was going to the tavern after he and his crew had weighed anchor at the docks and everything was black from there.
There were only bits of memory he could grasp-musical laughter, bright gold and a taste of cinnamon and vanilla that lingered on his lips. Killian felt-knew that he had forgotten something incredibly important, something beyond meeting his soulmate, and he couldn't understand it, because nothing could be more important than getting his revenge on Rumplestilkskin.
Eventually, he gave up on remembering. If the lass he had met didn't care enough to come find him, it really didn't matter. Killian certainly didn't care. Milah may not have been his soulmate, but Killian had still loved her with every beat of his heart. And he would get revenge on the Dark One for ripping her away from him if it was the last thing he did. (It probably would be.)
He couldn't afford to have any distractions. Even if it meant never finding his soulmate.
(There are times when he just can't stop thinking about it, though.)
Emma Swan doesn't believe in soulmates.
Well she used to, when she was a child and still in the foster system. She used to dream of looking into that one person's eyes and seeing the world in color for the first time. To someone who'd never been loved or cared for, having a soulmate sounded like a dream come true.
Emma heard the stories, too. There were the two kids in her class who bumped into each other on the first day of school, stared at each other in dazed wonder; and then promptly declared that they were soulmates. There was the girl in the system who claimed she had seen her soulmate as a baby and could now see colors. There were hundreds of these stories and Emma eagerly listened, and hoped and believed.
Then she met Neal Cassidy and everything changed.
Falling in love with him was easy and felt so right that Emma didn't think it mattered if they weren't soulmates. She naively believed that their love could defy the laws of nature and that they didn't need their respective soulmates as long as they had each other.
They survived on the streets, stealing from convenience stores and sleeping in the back of their cramped car. It wasn't an easy life, but they were together, so it didn't matter.
Until one day, Neal set her up for his own crime and left her in jail, pregnant and broken.
The day she gave up her baby for adoption, she closed off her heart and resolved to never, never trust anyone again.
Emma Swan doesn't believe in soulmates.
Or, to be exact, she doesn't believe that there's anyone out there who will ever truly love her like all the stories claim, because at the end of the day, she's still a little lost girl; incapable of loving and incapable of being loved.
Eleven years later, on her twenty eighth birthday, Emma blows out a candle, squeezes her eyes shut and makes a wish.
Almost immediately, there's a knock on the door. It's a young boy. He says his name is Henry.
He says he's her son.
Everything goes haywire from there.
After she takes Henry to Storybrooke (seriously, who names a town that?) Emma's perfectly normal, boring (and lonely) life is shaken up. She doesn't plan to stay for more than a week, but there's something about Henry's adoptive mother that makes her skin crawl. Emma just wants to make sure her son is safe, at least. Is that selfish?
(Because she loves him. She loved him from the moment he was born, continued to love him even when she gave him up and the more she spends time with him now, eleven years later, she just continues to love him more.)
Between becoming the sheriff of Storybrooke of Storybrooke, overseeing the drama that is Mary Margaret and David Nolan's love life and dealing with a mayor who seems to be out for her blood and spending time with Henry, Emma doesn't have time to think about soulmates.
Then Henry gets poisoned.
Suddenly, Emma finds that the curse is very real and that she's in a town full of fairy tale characters. Almost immediately, she's sent to slay a dragon and steal the antidote for the poison (at the bottom of the library of all things) only, it doesn't work because Gold-Rumplestilkskin double crosses them.
She goes back to the hospital to find that Henry's heart stopped beating. Emma sobs and presses a kiss to his forehead in goodbye.
There's a warm pulse of light and magic and Henry wakes up.
As does the rest of the town.
Now, everyone has their memories back and its utter chaos. Then, Gold brings back magic making the situation worse. And before Emma can process the fact that she's the daughter of Mary Margaret and David Nolan-Snow White and Prince Charming- she and Mary Margaret are sucked into a portal and end up in the Enchanted Forest where they have to team up with Mulan and Sleeping Beauty to get back home.
Seriously, what is her life?
After escaping from Cora (the Evil Queen's even more evil mommy, apparently), they go back to the refugee camp only to find everyone dead.
Emma's stomach turns at the sight of the hundreds of corpses strewn about the destroyed village. This Cora is one psycho bitch. She wants to get to Storybrooke as well, but she won't, not if Emma has anything to say about it.
Henry is there, after all. Emma has to protect him.
"There's someone under there!" Aurora's voice brings Emma out of her thoughts and she swings around to see Mary Margaret and Mulan help a man out from under a pile of corpses.
"Thank you," The man rasps out, and the sound of his accented voice sends a shiver down Emma's spine. He turns and looks at her.
Emma staggers back, barely suppressing a gasp as a myriad of colors dance across her vision. It stops as soon as it starts, and then all she can see a deep, stormy shade of blue.
It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.
It's also the color of his eyes.
Inhaling sharply, Emma tears her gaze away and looks around, feeling more panicked by the second.
Damnit, damnit, damnit!
As she looks around, taking in the sandy earth, the ruddy brown of Aurora's hair and the faded pink of Mary Margaret's cardigan, her worst fears are confirmed.
This guy, whoever he is-is her soulmate.