Summary: In the crumbling storyscape of 'Heroes and Villians,' a dying deckhand and a false savior find life in the pause of a heartbeat and where time stands still.
-or-
In which the author says 'Screw it, I'mma write the thing' so she writes the thing.
He had been relatively content being a deckhand. The captain aside, it wasn't a terrible life. Killian was able to explore new lands, see new places, and called the sea his home. Soaps and baubles, bought with coin others would spend on rum and women, lined his shelf and tiny chest. He loved the earthy scent of it on his clothes while at sea and enough of the salt air clung to his skin while on land.
It was a good life. It was his life.
Then the lad came, called him captain, and everything he knew went to hell.
When the boy's mother crashed into him, her eyes reading the story of his life in the pores of his skin and adoring him anyway, Killian wondered if it wouldn't be too terrible to burn after all.
He had never understood why people did it. Dying for one's own self never appealed to him. Survival was so deeply ingrained into his being that keeping his head down and doing what he was told was okay. It meant he could travel and breathe the air of the sea. Dying for someone else was unfathomable.
Death itself wasn't what terrified him. He imagined death was painless. It was those moment before that had him glad to be more useful with a scrub brush than a cutlass. Losing his hand had been excruciating. The act of dying could only be worse.
But after he was told an improbable tale he wanted to believe and after knowing it wasn't him she saw when she read the lines of his face, he wanted to be who it was that he wasn't. With her hand settled against his side, familiar and new, leaning toward her felt as much of a muscle memory as the sword in his hand. The flutter in his chest and the hitch in his breath was more of a forgotten constant than something just discovered.
Then a dagger slid between his ribs. It hurt and was excruciating but for a moment he didn't think of that at all. She was crying, for him of all people, and he just wanted her to run.
Oh.
So this was what it was all about.
For the first time since he could remember, Killian Jones was not afraid of ding. Dying meant she and the boy would be safe.
For the first time since he could remember, Killian Jones was terrified of death. Death meant he had to leave them behind.
That didn't matter though, did it, in the end. As she said, this world wasn't real. Killian would die and he would wake up and things would return to her normal.
He was a bit put out about ending up as nothing more than a dream, though.
xxxxx
It was true, in the end. In a tiny loft with too many people, the Killian Jones that had been a captain most of his life woke up and dying had been a dream.
However, in a crumbling storyscape, the Killian Jones that had been a deckhand only a few short years woke up and dying was still a possibility.
xxxxx
Emma had no name and no family. Her only friend had been a solitary guard who only locked her up because half-dreams had become a reality and more than once she had tried to swim away.
Even when those dreams thought they were a reality and memories not her own crowded her skull and tongue and limbs, her friend tried to help. (Even before, when all she wanted to do was claw and scratch and bite and kick, because that was the language the world had taught her, the solitary guard stayed.)
She mourned Lily when they shot her from the sky. Even if the dragon survived, she knew they'd never see each other again.
The other Emma knew a different dragon and only the other knew the boy. This Emma felt a deeper connection to the former and none to the latter. After all, a child could not be born when the father died before the story was even written.
The man, however, wasn't quite who the other Emma knew and this one never had, but the skipped beat of a heart was shared by both. The other saw traces of the man she loved while this one saw a shy face and painfully kind eyes.
Maybe that was why, when the boy disappeared and the world felt as though it was slowly crumbling around them, Emma went to find him. Even if he was dead, she didn't want her last sentence in a dying book to be 'and the girl who no one loved perished alone' and his to be 'the vultures ate well that evening.'
Travel became easier. In a shrinking world miled disappeared while others scrunched together. Descriptive landscapes lost their purple prose, paragraphs became sentences, and exposition shrank away. What had taken hours to travel became less than one and she was at the dock again.
He wasn't there.
She knew it would be a possibility when she started but facing the truth of it left her adrift. She stood in place, slowly circling, stubborn eyes scouring the walkway to see if he had been hidden behind crated or tucked in shadow.
"Oh ho! I knew you'd be back!"
Emma jumped at the sudden voice, spinning until she found the source. A weathered old man hunched over a sturdy walking stick smiled up at her.
"And how did you know I had been here to begin with?"
"Oh, I saw! Not much happens in this part, so when something did, I had to see." He heaved a sigh that rattled his lungs. "That poor man."
She bristled and when her eyes began to sting she became even more annoyed. "I'm glad his torment brought you a bystander's glee."
"You misunderstand, I assure you." He shuffled forward. For one so old his grey eyes were surprisingly clear. "I had to see. Fortunately by that time, enough of the story had been changed to where, after, I didn't just have to watch."
Her own eyes narrowed as her head tilted to one side. "What do you mean?"
The old man waved his hand as his eyes clouded for a moment. "Enough, enough. He's been asking for you. Or, mumbling your name. What is it again, child? Enya? Anna? Armadillo?"
"It's Emma." She wanted to throttle this strange little man. He was fraying the last of her nerves and, worse, giving her something that suspiciously tasted like hope.
The gaze of his sharpened, just a bit, and he nodded. "Good. Then I don't have the wrong one. Come, come."
She followed, because of course she did.
The hovel he brought her to was more a haberdashery of mismatched material. Wood, metal, and stone made the structure and the furnishings were even more eccentrically out of place with each other. "Do pardon the mess, it's rather quite new."
Emma looked around, spying cuckoo clocks, a tea set, and a water pump against one wall while the others were decorated with odder things still. Even the decorative pillows, few as they were, held combinations of unproportionate sizes and materials. One was made half of silk and quite large except where it scrunched in the middle into velvet. It looked like a lopsided bowtie.
"You say it's new, but everything is old." The curiosity of the place had her momentarily forgetting why they were there, not that she understood the reason to begin with.
"I meant the place is new. Everything else has been here for ages. They just forgot for awhile."
She stopped in her tracks and her shoulders dropped and her head tilted back. "Stop with the riddles, old man. Who are you, exactly? And why am I even here?"
Again, his eyes twinkled at her. "I told you, child. He's been asking for you. As for who I am...well. That's an even more complicated answer."
"If he is who I think he is, he's not asking for me. He's asking for the other me." And it hurt, because of course it did, and she fully understood the claims of being jealous of one's self.
The man stopped. He sighed and again his chest rattled. When he turned to her, the twinkle was still there but there was an edge to it that gave her pause. "This story was meant to continue. It would have taken one more book, maybe two, but the publishers would have fired the author for 'professional disagreements.' The story would have continued, of course, under a ghostwriter. The ghostwriter would have fixed things." He stepped even closer and now those eyes of his looked familiar. "What the author didn't understand was why he titled it Heroes and Villians. It's because, in this story, both would find their happy endings. Some through death, others through things not yet revealed."
"You still speak in riddles. What does this have to do with what you're telling me?"
He was silent for a moment. He pursed his lips and his eyebrows drew together. "In book three, a deckhand was supposed to witness something so terrible that he had to act. He would have to form a mutiny. He is supposed to become a captain in this story."
"Well, obviously. He was never meant to stay there his whole life." She knew this, could feel it, and yet. "But what does this have to do with me?"
"You were the catalyst. Killing a dragon in a sleeping curse? Starting to kill someone in chains? There are core elements of a person that not even rewrites can erase. That's what makes a story believable."
It was the biggest pile of dragon shit she'd heard in all her years and Lily used to tell her that the reason she didn't chew her up and chomp her bones was because she would taste like dirt and twigs. "Seriously. Can't you come up with anything more believable than that?"
The man huffed. "Fine, fine, let's just go with I was swayed by a coward's dying act of heroism and leave it at that." He grabbed her forearm, the grip surprisingly strong for someone his age, and shoved her through a hole in the wall hidden by a blanket before she could argue about labels.
And she thought to do it, too, in that moment of confusion when she saw nothing but multicolored cloth and mayhem. But then the cobwebs clear and her eyes focus and she can't help the startled little gasp and the stuttering in her chest. Distantly she was pleased the reaction she had before wasn't just because of the other one.
Emma wanted to rush over and she did before nerves got the better of her. She hovered over him, his torso bare save for the poultice and wrap. His arms draped over the table, hook and brace on a smaller one not far away. His eyes were closed and her knees trembled when she heard the smallest of breaths and saw the faintest rise and fall in his back.
Her fingertips ghosted over his cheekbone, the curve of his jaw, and even briefly along his shoulder. She did not linger. Her excuse for touching him was to make sure he was real and warm. Her reason for not continuing to do so was because he did not know her.
Despite the lightest of touches his eyes fluttered open, just a touch. His lips curled up, just so, and when he spoke it was more air than voice. "Hello."
Her breath was either a laugh or a sob, she wasn't sure which, but either way he blurred before her. "I'm sorry I woke you."
"No, it's-" He broke off and his eyebrows furrowed together. She could tell by the bunching of his shoulder muscles that he wanted to lift himself up but she placed her hand on his back to keep him in place. "I thought-you went-"
She cleared her throat and averted her eyes. He had an interesting scar on his shoulder. "She did. Herself and the boy are probably home eating...that something that's made of cold and sweet and...milk?" Isis green? Ice...something?
"Oh." His eyebrows remained furrowed until suddenly they weren't. "Oh. Well. It's a pleasure to meet you?"
She dared to look up. They were mildly confused but his eyes were the same as when she had first met him. And suddenly she had to explain herself. "The world is ending and your eyes are kind and I'm sorry."
As far as explanations went, it was probably the crappiest.
He blinked as he processed this. "It's...well. I'm glad it's with you, then."
"Well, I don't really want to destroy the archetype of new lovers dying together, but." The old man was there, then, surprising them both. Emma had forgotten about him, and she wondered if Killian even knew who he was. "I'm a selfish man, and there's always a third option."
She wondered briefly what the second was before the thought tucked itself into the back of her mind. "And what is that?"
He held up a key. It wasn't anything significant in looks, standard in appearance if a little old and rusted. She tilted her head and he huffed and rolled his eyes. "It's a key to another realm, child. One that's not here, where certain injuries are just sort of...frozen."
Her brows furrowed together. "And you're saying we would be stuck there." One small prison for a much larger one.
"Well, yes. Should he leave, he would start again with the time he has left here. Which, despite my meticulous care, would be hours."
Her breath quickened as she thought. Would it be okay? Would one realm be enough? On the one hand, all she had known before her mother had locked her away from the world had been a small cell aside from the rare day Lily could risk taking her out. On the other, all the realms were so vast and she...wanted to see them all.
But alone?
Killian's fingers more bumped against hers and only stayed with her grip on them. "It's okay, Emma. We could go, but you don't have to-"
"We'll do it." It was the offer of freedom that made up her mind, even if she didn't know if she would take it or not.
The old man clapped and did a small jib in place. "Excellent! I'll just-"
"On one condition. You tell us why."
The old man heaved another exasperated sigh. This time there were no rattles. "Have you not been paying attention?"
"I have. It's not my fault you speak in riddles."
"I've been alluding to something, there's a difference."
"Then stop alluding and just tell me!"
The old man pinched the bridge of his nose. "Before an Author is an Author, he is often times...the Narrator. That's what I am. I am this story without the bias of one person."
"That makes no sense."
"It does if you're me." Again he sighed. "I am usually stuck in the exposition, stalled by the narration, hidden in the nuance. When your...other's son came here, he broke those, so, well, here I am." He shrugged.
She worried her lip between her teeth. Looking down at Killian for a moment, she finally nodded.
xxxxx
Killian supposed it was a bit of an ordeal for his two rescuers getting him to the ship. Emma nearly had to carry him while the Narrator shuffled along and muttered to curious eyes about too much rum.
Still, he was glad to be back on the Jolly Roger. After all, she was home, and she seemed to welcome him with creaking boards and a fluttering sail.
It was probably silly, thinking the ship was somewhat sentient. But the collection of boards and planks had never seemed to take a liking to the former captain and yet when Killian muttered to the mast the journey unerringly went smoother.
He was sitting now, in a bed that had never been his but according to a boy had apparently always been. Or as always as always counted, if centuries of life was plausible.
The Narrator kept to the deck, watching the waves for some unknown lock. Emma knelt behind him, her soft fingers working over a poultice and bandage, making sure everything there was as okay as they could be.
He swallowed a few times before he found the courage to speak. "I meant it, you know. You don't have to stay when we get there."
Her fingers stilled for a moment before they continued their work. "Are you giving me an out, or yourself?"
He shrugged before wincing and hissing his breath in through his teeth. "You, I think. You'll likely tire of my company after the novelty of my pretty face wears off."
She snorted and moved her hands to his shoulders. "It wasn't your face, though that's not bad, I suppose."
Apparently she liked his eyes. He leaned back a little as her thumbs gently worked at the knots in his muscles. His shoulder more than twinged but he did his best to ignore it as he tried to tease her back. "What if I lose those, then?"
"The pretty face is a nice second." She was quiet for a moment. "I'm not her."
"You still look at me the same."
Her nose pressed against his hair and he could nearly feel her breathing him in. "I mean, I'm not exactly...I have two sets of memories. One I barely remember and the other I'd almost like to forget."
"We can always make new memories, love."
"No." Her voice became a whisper in his ear, a secret for him and the ship around them. "I think I might be crazy. There may be days I try to bite you or where I scream at nothing."
"There might be days where I hide from it." If she was being honest, so was he. "I've been told I can be a bit of a coward at times."
"Will you hate me for it?"
"Will you?"
There was a shout above and they could feel the portal open. Killian knew it they were through when the pain in his back was still there, but not. And he could move again.
He shifted on the small bed to face her. "We could try."
There were days where she lapsed but she never bit him. He would just wait out the storm and calm her when he could.
There were days he hid, but that was only because neither of them had had the chance to play hide-and-seek as children. He always found her because she would giggle in her hiding spot. She always found him because he finally wanted to be found.
The Narrator left soon after arriving in the Land of Untold Stories. Before he did, he called them remnants, shadows of other people.
Emma scoffed. They weren't remnants. That implied they were the same as those who they had been made from. They weren't. They were their own sounds, just bounced off walls with a hint of the original source.
They were echoes.
I don't know why I love the idea of these two so much. I just do. So apologies ahead of time if one day I go 'I wanna write the thing again' and then I write the thing again.