A/N: many thanks to Flpirate305 for pointing out that my html was showing! All fixed now, I hope.
Emma was very much unsure of what Hook was going to do once he was released from the hospital. He had, after all, attempted to kill Gold and then Belle several times over before being hit by a remarkably well-timed car and then incapacitated. She watched from the doorway as an orderly she didn't know the name of uncuffed him from the bed. He flashed her a charming smile and thanked her cordially before swinging his legs over the side of the bed and easing himself upright. Her eyes flicked coolly over the soft cast on his leg and the way he held his left arm. She pressed her mouth together in sympathy, tracing the sickly pink-blue of the bruises fading on his cheek and examining the blood that had drained from the scrape on his forehead to settle darkly around his eyes.
For a moment she could almost forget she didn't care.
His head started to turn towards her, and she managed to look away first.
"Ah, Swan." He sounded cheery enough, but there was strain in his voice when he said her name. It was telling. He knew it, and cleared his throat as he bent to tie up his boots. Emma crossed her arms and stepped into the room. The click of her shoes on the white floor was unnerving. Hospitals were a river of ambient noise, and she found that any one sound that stood out was disturbing.
"Heard you were being released today," he looked up for a second, and she caught the flash of his eyes. "Thought I'd stop by and remind you that murder's not a great plan when you're barely out of the woods yourself."
"Oh?" His smile was more genuine now, and more terrible. He had finished with the laces and was pulling up the leather tongues of his boots. "I had no idea. I'll keep that in mind when I decide to kill someone innocent." He stood, finally, and though he was several inches taller, there was a faded look to him that made him seem light and hollow.
"We have laws here," she hissed, leaning in to look him in the eye. "And they involve putting you in prison if you kill anyone."
"Do you really think your prison can hold me?" He replied, leaning in himself until the few inches between them were dark and she could feel his labored breaths on her mouth.
"In your condition?" She scoffed, stepping back. "Not much of a challenge." She turned smoothly, striding away at a pace she hoped wasn't too eager. The click of her heels followed her, like an unsettling reminder of his hand in hers and the sound of his laughter choked with blood on a cold, wet road.
Behind her, Hook leaned back slowly, his spine lengthening inch by painful inch until he was at his full height again. He sighed.
"I'm sorry, Swan," he muttered, pulling her gun from his pocket with a trembling hand. "I really am." A nurse walked past, and he turned, pretending to look at himself in a mirror. All he saw, though, was the smug grin on the Crocodile's face as his pretty little Belle convinced him to walk away and leave him bleeding on the deck of his own ship. The gun slid home in his belt like a dagger to sheath.
He waited in the atrium for some ten minutes, drinking a little paper cup of water until he heard the distinctive slam of Emma's car door and the rumble of the engine. Then, stiffening his injured leg, he swept from the hospital with passable stealth. His leg wasn't quite healed, and still made slight scraping noises on the ground as he walked quickly, quietly, to the much-despised pawn shop. In the back of his mind he heard himself laugh, three hundred years younger, at a man who limped meekly past.
"Pathetic!" He had shouted, taking a swig from a near-empty bottle of rum. "That's what you are, mate. How can you live with yourself?" He spun on a drunken heel. "How can you live at all?"
The man had looked at him with resenting, dark eyes. "With great difficulty, sir," he had said tightly, "just as anyone else does."
He had gone on his way, then, to a tavern and a woman who would irrevocably alter his very soul- provided he had had one in the first place. He hadn't known then, hadn't known anything, but those angry, dark eyes would one day be smug and triumphant, looking down at him in shades of sickly gold.
He reached Gold's shop. Standing there, across the street, dyed dark beneath the light of a streetlamp, he could see the blue of the moonlight and the dark of the shadows. The gun was heavy and feather-light in his pocket. It wouldn't be the first time he killed someone, and despite what Emma said he wasn't very good at staying in jail. It wasn't material or heavenly consequences that were holding him back. It was the idea of seeing her face, twisted with horror and disgust, as she forced him, bloodstained and broken, into a cage and shrouded him in darkness. He knew the darkness wouldn't hold, that the cage could be broken, that blood could be washed away and bones could be mended. But Emma could not. If he lost whatever trust she still had in him, that couldn't be fixed with thread and plaster or rum and a handkerchief any more than his hand could grow back or Milah could return to life.
Milah. The thought of her, bowed and fading in his arms as her last breath whistled out in his name- it returned his resolve, strengthened his hatred, burned in him like steel and fire. He crossed the street, stepping out of the false light and into true darkness, cool shadow.
He slipped his hook through the crack of the door, pinning the bell to the doorframe. Once that was done, he pushed it open, just wide enough for him to slide through with a quiet rasp and thin rustle. He closed it carefully behind him, and stepped over the panel that had creaked dreadfully when Gold had stepped on it. The counter loomed ahead of him, a solid brick of darkness in the mottled silver-blue patches of light. Sliding his hands down the drawers, he stopped at the last. It pulled out, lined with deep blue velvet and cushioning a long, tightly-wrapped package.
"Ah-ha," he crooned, lifting the dagger lovingly from it's resting place and using his hook to unfold the black cloth it had been shrouded in. "Well hello."
It trembled in his hand, throwing waves of magic around the room, washing over him, the objects, anything in reach. It was as if the moment he picked it up it had become a part of him, as much as his aching leg or his hook. The magic flowed through him, lightening his doubts, eradicating his fears, soothing his pain. As if it wanted him to hold it, wanted him to use it, to bathe it in blood and revenge and desperation. Killian adjusted his grip on it and swallowed. His heart thrummed with power, hollow and waiting to be filled with magic and darkness and the blood of others.
He obliged.
"Oh, Dark One," he called, lifting the dagger to the shivering moonlight. "Oh, Crocodile!" And then, bringing the dagger down on a glass case with a resounding crash, "Oh Rumplestiltskin!" The glass shattered into sand, blowing over Killian's boots like deadly sugar, razor-sharp and begging to be inhaled. He didn't even notice, eyes fixed on Rumplestiltskin as the man he'd been waiting to kill for three hundred years bowed to him, low and deep and sardonic every inch down.
"You called?" He sneered, the nervousness in being compelled after so long leaking through his anger. He stared at Killian as the other man stepped forward. Killian looked him up and down, memorized every second of this moment, then smiled.
"I did," Killian grinned, and thrust the blade deep into his heart, barrelling up through the ribcage, the stomach, the lungs, until he could feel the blood flowing over his hand. Gold grasped his hand with both of his own.
"You don't know, do you?" He asked, words twisted by the blood in his mouth. His smile grew wider and wider, teeth sharp and turning red with blood. He snapped his fingers weakly, and miles away, Emma's phone rang. "You don't know," he laughed, grasping Killian's jacket tightly with his dying strength.
"I don't know what?" Killian asked roughly, twisting the curved blade deeper into his slow-beating heart.
"You'll see soon enough," the Crocodile laughed, falling to his knees.
Emma turned her car, speeding the thirty seconds to Gold's shop. She was out of the car in seconds, urged on by some feeling, some instinct telling her to move move move now, or it'll be too late. She almost made it, too, hearing Gold's last, rasping breath under the pleasant tinkle of the bell. She stopped in her tracks, eyes fixed on Killian, hurt leg splayed at a strange angle, blood smeared over the back of his coat where Gold had held him. He was bent over the man, and there was a pool of blood soaking through his trousers.
"Hook," she asked, breathing heavy. Her gun was fixed on him as he stood, though she doubted it would have any affect now.
His hands were covered in blood, as were his shirt and vest. They dripped as he stood, and his leg straightened as it rose from the floor. The arm he had been holding close in pain only an hour ago was hanging loose with a silver, swirling dagger in hand. It was when their eyes met, though, that she really understood. The two black eyes he'd been sporting faded from deep purple to navy blue to magenta, then gold and green until they healed completely. The scrape on his forehead disappeared, and his split lip knitted itself back together. The hook on his hand was surrounded by black fabric, then pale gossamer, like a cocoon, and then finally it dangled from new fingertips like an afterthought. She looked up from his hand in distress, hardly able to fathom what was occurring.
He looked at her, and his eyes were gold.