Disclaimer: I own nothing.
You know that feeling when you're waiting for a train when you've just missed one and the other is twenty minutes away?
That feeling of every minute extending infinitely. That feeling of dread as you get more and more late for the important thing you were headed to. That feeling of spending each second of those infinite minutes thinking about all the things you could have done to get there earlier. That feeling of being stuck in limbo, helpless and frustrated and wholly at the mercy of the immovable time table of something beyond your control.
That feeling.
Except now, pretend you're a demon who's been alive for six thousand years, waiting-well, not particularly waiting, exactly. More like knowing with a sense of misplaced comfort and more than a bit of anxiety that this would be the end, the final chapter of his life- for something to happen, only to realise that it's not going to. Imagine now, waiting for this thing, this story that was to be your future, the ultimate truth that you have known since your conception, this inevitable, inescapable reality and then realising that you have botched it up so completely that it hasn't happened.
Imagine that the train is Armageddon.
Imagine that it is seventeen years late.
But the thing is, Killian Jones doesn't have to imagine.
This is his life.
And now, as he watches Emma Swan shift gently under the sheets, her head resting on his chest, his hands playing with her hair-such soft, beautiful hair too, why did this have to happen honestly-in a moment that would be considered perfect by even the most skeptical among us, he wishes that it wasn't.
An angel and a demon sit in a car.
No, this isn't the beginning of a terrible joke as the angel and demon in question would be happy to tell you. That is, once they get their jaws off the floor at the recent development to the question of How badly did we fuck up Armageddon?
(Besides, the two of them are more human than anything their respective sides in the cosmic battle between good and evil will tell you. Or they themselves would admit.)
"That's her?"
"Yes," Killian says. Groans really. But honestly, everything that has come out of his mouth since the moment that the lights in Emma's bedroom had first shattered (and then put themselves back together) has sounded like one long sigh of sigh of lamentation given voice. As though he has been saying Why me? with every breath.
"And you're sure?"
David is looking out at the woman in question, her blonde hair loose about her shoulders, her eyes sparkling as she talks animatedly with a little boy who she is walking with on the street opposite them. They sit in Killian's old beat up car.
Italicised because it is only a car in the loosest terms in that it has four wheels and it runs upon them. Killian has always preferred ships anyway.
He takes his forehead off the steering wheel where it has been resting for the last five minutes while David had asked the most inane of questions repeatedly, as though asking them again would change the answer. He has never wanted to smack someone upside the head so much in a while.
But he couldn't really blame the angel for his reaction. He was just being who Killian himself had been not twelve hours ago.
A deep breath before he looks out at her. They're hidden away in a side street so as to avoid detection and even from this distance, he can see the way her eyes dance with joy as her son talks rapidly about some new thing he had learned yesterday, the way her hair whips around her head as a breeze blows past, the way she pulls her coat tighter around herself when it does.
He has to try very hard to quell the overwhelming urge to run out and wrap his arms around her.
"That's her," he sighs this time. Half awe, half yearning.
David turns away from the window and meets his eyes.
"She doesn't know?"
David doesn't seem to notice Killian's reaction to looking at her, his mind seemingly still stuck on the fact that they had finally, maybe, perhaps found the reason that Armageddon was tardy.
"No."
"But-how? Isn't this supposed to be built in? An instinct that would take over her when she turned eleven they said," he turns again to the window to watch Emma waving goodbye at a school bus, "And she's had a child?"
"I don't know, mate," Killian shakes his head as he talks, his eyes following Emma as she begins to walk back down the way she had come, "it might have something to do with the fact that we screwed up and instead of sending the baby to parents who would raise her to be the bloody antichrist, we sent her to a couple who was in true love."
He says the phrase with the disdain with which most people talk about taxes. Or standardised tests. Even the demons at the deepest depths of hell knew about true love. A stubborn bit of residual magic from Creation with a capital C, that seemed to pop up randomly and disrupt perfectly functioning things.
The angels just call it part of the ineffable plan and smile indulgently when kisses heal deadly diseases. Demons on the other hand just find the whole thing extremely irritating.
David's eyes widen, his head whipping back to look at Killian again.
"You're joking! You really fucked up there, Hook."
David was the only one who would ever get away with calling him that name.
A leftover from the few hundred years he had spent as a pirate with a hook for a hand when he had been punished by those Below for caring for a human woman, saving her from a man who hurt her.
Even though cruelty and sadness was supposed to be his purpose, he had never been one for actively pursuing it, content instead to watch from the sideline and nudge things along when need be. But, something had shifted in him when he met Milah.
It had been a rough hundred years for the world at large when they took her away from him. His ire had ignited as expected, never allowing him to pursue the feeling that had taken over him for the brief time that he had spent with her.
He had recovered eventually, going back to his subtle ways of spreading a little discord and a little disaster in the world but he had never gotten his hand back.
He wears a prosthetic these days and it serves him very well.
Six thousand years of being sworn enemies gave David the right to call him whatever he pleased, he figures. Though recently, more often than not, their antagonism had devolved into the two of them getting smashed together and laughing at how the collective powers of heaven and hell had managed to delay and/or cancel the end of the world because they misplaced a baby.
A baby who was supposed to have grown up in the Mills household, with a mother whose heart they had stolen away and a father who was unendingly kind but too afraid to protect her. It was perfect. Killian had supervised the exchange himself, watched Cora Mills name her daughter Regina and take her home.
But then, eleven years had come and gone. All the players of Heaven and Hell ready and standing opposite one another in a war that never happened because the woman who was to be the spark that ignited the fire wasn't who they thought she was. Regina, though a somewhat unpleasant child, was by no means the kind of evil that ended worlds.
(He and David had drunk through an entire cellar of wine that night. Killian afraid that the ones Below would come for him any minute and David working down the adrenaline and fear that came from getting himself ready to fight the one friend-loathe as he was to admit it- he had.)
There had obviously been a mix up and David had sworn that it wasn't his people.
"They seem to have wanted this war as much as your people did," he had said, his face twisting into distaste, as if he had just sucked on a particularly sour lemon drop.
And so it had been, every year passing by like an infinity as they searched and searched. Looking for this other child- who they eventually began to refer to as a woman- as they marched solidly towards her twenty eighth birthday, seventeen years late for the end of the world.
"True Love must have protected her all these years," David says, his voice a little bit wondering.
"Your lot wanted the war too so why didn't they see through the true love nonsense?"
"Hey! True Love isn't our thing. It just happens. It's-"
"Ineffable, I know."
He rolls his eyes at the word, finding Emma again as she closes the door behind her after entering her apartment. The apartment he had just left this morning. This morning when he had leaned her against her bedroom door and held her as close as he could. This morning when his kiss goodbye had felt heavy and desperate, even as she had laughed into his mouth. This morning when he had almost told her that he loved-
"How did you find out, anyway?"
"Hmm?"
It takes Killian a moment to bring himself back to the moment.
"I-"
He had known this question was coming, of course and he had had an articulate answer all planned out. The kind of thing where you hear it to the end and then wonder what on earth it meant and yet find yourself nodding along. But the moment he sees Emma step out onto her balcony, a mug in her hands, a soft blanket around her shoulders, he loses all his words.
"Oh heavens, tell me you didn't. Killian?"
This bloody angel knows him far too well.
"The lights in her bedroom all smashed when she-"
"Alright, alright. I don't need to hear any more."
Killian shrugs as Emma goes back inside, the door to the balcony sliding shut, curtains falling into place and hiding her away. He sighs deeply as he starts the car and begins to pull them out into the road.
"So you just accidentally stumbled upon the Destroyer of Worlds while trawling through bars for a one night stand?"
"No."
The word comes out stronger and harsher than he had intended. He glances at David whose eyebrows are very high on his face before gritting his teeth and looking back at the road.
"What have you been hiding from me Killian?"
"You're not my mother Dave. I don't have to tell you everything."
But the statement lacks the conviction that his previous one had had. Perhaps, he would have told David if he had had any idea at all as to what was happening himself.
But, he had been drowning before he had ever known what he was doing.
He had met her by chance as he had been hanging around a disreputable drinking establishment on a Friday night. Waiting and watching, sowing a little dash of despair here, a pinch of anger there.
He'd watched her chase after a man who had upturned a glass of something bright pink onto her dress before dashing out the door. He'd watched as she'd smashed a car door onto the man's hand before cuffing him to it.
He had gone up to her that night and told her that she had been bloody amazing in there. Not his best work, to be sure, but he hadn't been able to help himself.
It had been several hundred years since a human had captivated him so. He just wanted to be around her, to be a part of her life in some small way. There was something about her that-
In hindsight, it was probably the whole being the Destroyer of Worlds thing.
But Killian choses to ignore that fact because he had fallen (pun, not intended) for the way she smiled, the way she fought. He had fallen for the way she was the flames licking the devastated remains of the person who dared cross her one moment and soft heart smiling at her son, hugging her parents the next.
She had made the impossible happen.
She had made him want to be good.
He refuses to believe that it had been some sort of cosmic, fucking messing around that led him to her. He refuses to believe that the big man (or woman) had pulled a couple of strings and helped him find her because they were getting impatient with the waiting around for the world to end.
It had taken him the better part of a year and one of the best few months of his long, strange life to gain the privilege of her trust and another few months to taste her kiss. Last night had been the first night that they had-
"I have to tell them."
"Mm?"
He really has to learn to listen when David is talking but his dead heart is beating in a rhythm that is screaming her name with every pulse.
"Killian, we have a duty. You have to tell your people and I have to tell mine."
"No!", he wants to scream. He wants to find Emma and convince her to run away. Her and Henry and him. Run away to somewhere they couldn't find them, run away to a place where the great plan didn't exist.
But, as those Below loved reminding him, Armageddon is everywhere.
"I know," his voice is resigned, his eyes closing for a moment as he lets the car drive itself, as he tries to remember the touch of her lips on his own, the last smile she had smiled at him.
"But maybe, you should tell her first."
His eyes shoot open at David's statement.
"What?"
When Killian meets his eyes, David is looking at him with a softness he hasn't seen since that night some seven hundred years ago when he had come to him lacking a limb and holding a bottle of rum.
"You should tell her first. It's only fair."
"But, it might wake something in her. Whatever that's been dormant all these years might come out and I don't know how it will affect her."
He runs his hand through his hair even as he begins to consider David's suggestion.
"Yes, but this is going to happen anyway once we tell and it's going to happen in a much more startling and potentially dramatic fashion. It might be kinder if she found out from someone she knows."
"Kinder?"
Killian's voice is a whisper. They're supposed to be enemies.
It was carved in stone and inked on paper. It was an inevitability and an unchangeable truth but so was the fact that he was not supposed to feel this way for a mortal.
But, here they were.
Potentially the worst angel and demon to grace the halls of heaven and hell.
"Kinder. And you know how us angels are all about the kindness."
Killian cracks a smile at that and nods, a small dip of his head as the car moves along, out of the city.
"Thank you."
"You have four hours, Hook. Make them count," David says before he disappears with a small pop, air rushing into to fill the space in which he had been.
And Killian begins to drive back. His heart in his throat, his eyes staring straight ahead as he prepares himself for what happens next.
Somewhere outside the city, David sits by a creek and feeds the ducks, all the while pondering the ineffability of true love.
And how even demons could not escape it.
The ducks quack loudly, their voices filling the silence of the woods where he sits.
He tosses another piece of bread out and smiles.