A/N: I couldn't help it. Also, my knowledge of both surfing and of physical therapy comes from watching friends in both careers, so just pretend it all makes sense.
"Pro-surfer Killian Jones loses his hand in a shark attack. During his rehabilitation, he meets physical therapy student Emma Swan and makes it his quest to help her overcome her fear of the ocean."
Emma practically hydroplanes into the parking lot of the therapy center that morning. The leftover puddles from last night's rain are all doing their best to add to the humidity in the coastal air, making her skin feel sticky before she's even three steps away from her bug.
Of course, she's too busy hugging her bag to her chest, making sure the downpour stays off her paperwork. Uniforms can dry, but once ink bleeds it stays smudged forever.
The automatic doors welcome her in and she swings toward the employee locker rooms without a glance at the patients waiting in the small reception area. She's late, she's almost ridiculously late, and stopping to look at the same group of sunburnt elderly patients she helps on a bi-weekly basis is only going to make it worse.
The locker room is blissfully quiet when she enters, even though the chill from the A/C unit is sending goosebumps all across her soaked legs. She tears her running shoes off and slips on a pair that her boss has deemed appropriate for work instead, right after she slides her clinic pants on over her running capris. It takes her another two minutes to find the ridiculous name badge Regina insists on her wearing at all times and fix it on her polo but then she's out the door again, ponytail swinging over her shoulder as she practically jogs back into the main treatment room.
Except Mrs. Lucas isn't sitting on the bench and waiting for her with a laundry list of complaints when she pushes the door open. Mrs. Lucas isn't in the room at all. Emma nearly drops her binder when she sees the patient that is waiting for her. He's a complete stranger but she knows exactly who he is.
"You're —"
"Can we please skip the awkward introductions, lass? It takes so much time."
His eyes are too blue. She's seen them dozens of times on the local news and shrugged it off, attributing the color to some kind of magic camerawork or post-processing. She and her friends definitely did not go see the surfing documentary that featured him for all of three minutes when their local theater held a special showing, that's for sure.
He's staring at her like she's grown a third eye on her forehead, Emma realizes with a jolt, and she realizes there's been about two minutes of actual silence between them since he last spoke.
"On second thought, I think I preferred awkward."
Emma gives herself exactly one second to school her face into something that resembles professionalism and clutches her binder closer, stepping in his general direction.
"Come to work on the remaining hand, I'm guessing?"
He's smiling at her like she's given him a winning lottery ticket or something, and she's glad she didn't choose to tread carefully around him like the rest of the world seems to be. It's been a few months since his story faded from the press — a twilight surfing competition gone awry that left him with several broken ribs and a missing hand — and It's not like avoiding it while she's working on him will help anyone. Year after year their little coastal town airs footage from the attack. Sometimes interviews of him air afterward, and while the scar on his arm looks like it's healing nicely, she still sees shadows in his eyes when someone brings it back up. Something inside her always boils when they actually track him down at competitions (ones he only ever judges for now, for reasons she didn't understand until she saw his file herself) and surprise him with questions about it when he thinks he's been interviewed about how he surfed that day.
"You're new here, aren't you?"
"I can get someone else for you if you want," Emma answers hurriedly, turning for the door and biting her tongue afterward as punishment for barely being able to say two words to the man — to her patient — without trailing off into her own mind.
"That's not what I meant," he apologizes, reaching out for her with the hand he has left. "You just…the last therapist that worked on me nearly choked on her gum when she saw my arm."
He raises his scarred stump in a big of a shrug, as if it's something he deals with every day, and the boiling starts in her chest again.
"Well," she responds, slapping the binder down on the table next to him and letting her hands fall to her sides, "I don't have any gum."
She didn't think it was possible for him to smile wider, but apparently it is.
"Ten more circles, and then I want you to switch to going backwards, okay?" Emma's taking notes on his range of motion and his stamina as he stands in the middle of the room and swings his arms around in full rotations, standing behind him so she can watch for any strange muscle patterns or bone movement. The white lines of his scars curl like the crests of a wave against his tanned skin, interrupted every so often by freckles that seemed to trail all the way down his forearms.
Then there's the worn, sun-bleached tank shirt he's wearing, the one Emma is deliberately not paying attention to as she scratches her pen against her notepad. It looks like he's worn it every day of his life for the past eight years, and for all she knows he has. He might be a bit of a public figure, but he's still a total stranger.
"Any new pain?" She asks, just to break the silence. "Anything moving when it shouldn't?"
"Not a bit," he responds evenly, reversing the direction of his arms. "But I wish you'd come stand where I can look at you while we talk."
"We aren't really talking."
"Ah, but we could be." He turns and peeks at her over his own shoulder, giving her a smirk she's never seen on the news. He's always been kind of bashful and diplomatic with the anchors that interview him after competitions, even when he's only spectating instead of judging, but now he's got Emma wondering if it's a matter of trust, not nerves.
So she swings around, steering clear of his arms as she comes to lean up against the bench he was previously perched on and figuring she can track his rotations just as well from the front. She quirks a brow at him afterward when he continues on, waiting for him to say something this time around.
"Well? Are we talking yet?"
"Depends. What do you like talking about? I'm guessing work is the first thing people usually ask about, and the last thing you want me to ask about."
"It's definitely up there," she snorts, toeing the floor with her stupid squeaky sneakers.
"I used to surf for a living, in case you were wondering," he says with a serious tilt of the head and a sparkle in his eye that's anything but. She feels a strange swoop in her stomach at the look and she promptly sets that thought right next to the one about his shirt.
"Ah, so you're that Killian Jones."
"Pleasure's all mine." He lets his arms swing down to his sides as they finish the exercise. Emma looks at him for a moment before making her decision and pulling herself off the bench, lifting her paperwork up so he can see it for himself.
"This is the range of motion you had when you first came in on both arms," She says, pointing with the edge of her pen. "That's muscle damage you received after the bite and that number right there is the projected range of motion you'd get back."
Then she pauses and flits her eyes up to his, enjoying the hopeful, patient confusion in his eyes. God, they really are that blue.
"You've passed it significantly. As long as you keep up your visits here, you can get back out in the water and do your thing."
The toothy grin of his doesn't resurface, to her shock. He is smiling, he looks happy, but it's not the one she was waiting for, the triumphant and slightly smug one he's been giving her while they run through his usual workouts. Emma doesn't understand why the news isn't making him happy, because it should. He's someone who was born to be in the water, better at curling his board around a wave than he is at walking, and she's seen him fearlessly take on enough foul-weather competitions to know he's not afraid.
Except he is.
And she can tell he knows she knows the minute their eyes meet again and he lets out a shaky laugh, rubbing his fingers over the bright raised scar along his wrist.
"D'you know I haven't been in the ocean since it happened? It's not because of the shark, I know it's not, because I can't put my finger on what it is, and the longer I put it off the worse it gets, I know, but —"
"— but it doesn't help knowing when the fear's still there," Emma finishes, following his eyes to the same spot on the floor he's staring at. She might be new at this, but she knows that fear and anxiety are the obstacles her patients are really fighting, not a broken leg or a pinched nerve or a muscle tear. She keeps reminding herself she doesn't know him, even as she scoots a little closer to lay a comforting hand on his forearm (or she tries, she only ever makes it to the space on the bench between them before losing her nerve) and even as the words topple out of her before she knows what she's saying.
She has an idea, and she doesn't know if she's overstepping boundaries or if she's going to piss him off and send him running to somewhere where the staff don't know who he is when she does it, but suddenly she's ripping his paperwork out of her binder and turning the paper over, scrawling Goals for Jones in large handwriting at the very top of the sheet.
"That's your writing hand, right?" She nods, handing all of it over to him. He nods back, not quite following her until he sees what she's written.
"I want you to write four for yourself. I don't care what they are, short-term or long-term, as long as they involve something you do with your arms."
He's looking at her like he has no idea what she's saying, which makes a lot of sense because shehas no idea in hell what she's doing making empty promises to her patients, even if they've only been implied so far. It's an all-but-unspoken rule around their clinic so that patients don't get their hopes up, but she figures a man who exceeds his own prognosis knows all about rule bending.
And so she waits patiently while he writes, some of his goals taking more time than others, and looks them over with a cool, clinical eye once he gives it to her again.
One - Dress shirt buttons.
Two - Shaving.
Three - Modified gym workouts.
Four - Hold Emma Swan's hand.
Her cheeks are downright scarlet as she realizes what he's written, and the bastard's only smiling wider. She's regretting wanting to see it at all because she knows lines are being crossed, lines that might get her fired before she even gets her foot in the door in the medical world.
But then those stupid blue eyes of his find hers and something soft in her takes away her rapidly rising anxiety over this man and his flirty looks and the way he makes it feel like they've just met on the street instead of in a professional setting, replacing it with a reminder of why she wanted this job in the first place.
She scrawls her goal under his and then leaves it on the bench between them, reaching through empty air to take his hand in hers.
"One down," she smiles, "four to go."
Emma has the list in her pocket the morning they walk along the beach together, hands linked just like they were the day she first met him. It's a bright morning now that the sun's risen, waking up the gulls he claims sound more endearing than ear-piercing once you get used to them. Wet sand scrapes around both of their bare feet as they stand in front of the ocean, Emma in a large hoodie that belongs to him and him in that stupid tank shirt of his that she loves so much.
They're the only ones around for miles out here, even though the pier's only a couple thousand yards away. The entire sky is a gentle gradient of orange into yellow, too, making the sea look almost green in comparison. He tries making a comment about how it matches her eyes to ease the tension and she nudges her shoulder into his arm, squeezing his hand despite the cheesiness of his words.
Of course he realizes she's nervous, too. Of course he's trying to be there for her even as she's trying to be there for him.
Emma turns and looks at him seriously for a moment, dropping his hand and assessing the look in his eyes. He seems ready, or ready as he'll ever be, and in the end she just lets her gut lead her like she did when they first met. He's way better at reading her than she'll ever be, but they've always understood each other.
"Race you, Jones," she yells as she's halfway to the water, his sweatshirt tossed inside out on the sand as she runs. She's giggling and shrieking and completely scaring the seagulls out of the water where they were bobbing peacefully before, and the water's just as chilly as she was expecting it to be, but when she hears him splashing in after her she can't feel anything but joy.
Killian scoops her up in his arms, both holding her up beautifully while he smiles at her through the sandy spray her feet are kicking up, and when she slides back down to stand on the sandy ocean floor beneath their feet he doesn't let go. His hand comes up, though, and brushes a lock of her wet hair behind her ear, leaving goosebumps in its wake as his thumb lingers at her cheekbone.
"You're incredible, Swan."
His voice has too much in it, and she narrows her eyes in confusion.
"You're the one who just got back in the ocean after seven months."
And he's inching further toward her lips with every word she speaks, shaking his head and cupping her cheek and pulling her to him with help from the arm at her back. He just smiles, looking at her like she's just handed him a gift more precious than any surfboard or championship trophy or award of recognition he's ever received.
And he kisses her in the ocean. His lips find hers between smiles and soft sighs and hands tangled in hair that'll likely have sand in it for weeks. He kisses the cold from her skin and pulls them even further into the ocean he'd been so worried over before. Emma doesn't know exactly when the water gets too deep for her to stand but she smiles hard enough to break their kiss when she feels him support her when her feet can't find the bottom. He feels sunlight in her hair while she tastes salt in his mouth, and they spend the rest of the morning swimming, only coming out of the water when a pack of seagulls begins swarming on the sweater she'd left behind.
