The cruiser's engine roared with Emma's rage as she took the corner too hard. Granny's veered into view farther down the street and she saw Zelena outside with Hook by the throat. Blood trickled down his neck from the press of her nails. Emma hit the gas—but with a glance over her shoulder and a smirk of ruby red lips, the witch disappeared into emerald smoke, tossing the mass of dark leather and sass into the cruiser's path.
Emma slammed the brakes and swerved. The screech of the wheels covered a choice string of expletives. David bolted out of the diner, shouting, even before she slid to a complete stop. While she climbed out and called for paramedics, he shirked off his button down. Blood trickled down Hook's neck from the press of Zelena's nails and David knelt to tend to Hook's wounds. However, when David pressed soft flannel to Hook's skin, the captain growled and drove his hook at the prince's eye.
"Hook!?" Emma shouted, and a flick of her wrist sent the silvery sharpness clattering down the street. David caught the disarmed stump and forced Hook's shoulders to the pavement, but the pirate's head snapped in her direction. He sprawled on the street as he had lain another night, drenched in blood and vengeance. She stopped short at his glare through sweat soaked strands—not brilliant blue, but burning red-like a troubled dawn and a winged beast on a New York rooftop and never, never for the Savior.
-0-
The seizures started in the ER with a few jerky motions that sent every machine screaming. At the first convulsion, Emma backed away, deferring to the medics, but the second came so hard and so violent, Emma shouldered in to block his swinging stump from knocking a nurse senseless. At her touch, Hook dropped all resistance. His writhing ebbed, his breaths growing even and shallow. She tried to let go, but whenever she withdrew, his heart raced and his muscles tensed and his red eyes roamed in madness; so she stayed at his side, rubbing his knuckles through fits and whimpers and moans.
-0-
Mary Margaret's reassuring tones flitted somewhere at the edge of Emma's hearing, Whale chimed in agreement, but Emma's attention strayed down the dim hall of the psych ward—the sturdiest rooms they could find—when Regina's dark eyes appeared at the slat of Hook's cell, motioning her inside.
She heaved open the door and her eyes fell on the limp form slumped on the bed. For the moment, he slept, oblivious to Regina, who eased open one of his lids to examine his red, darting eye.
"You can relax, He's not going monkey."
Emma stepped forward. "Thank you, Regina—"
"I said he wasn't going monkey, I didn't say he's fine." Regina straightened, tugging her suit jacket smooth. "This is Oz magic, a bit outside my understanding. To break it, I need to know exactly what I'm fighting."
"I'll call Belle," Emma began, but a grunt from Hook cut her off. He started to whimper and writhe. Emma sat down on the edge of the cot and placed a hand over his knee until he quieted.
"Responds to light magic," Regina noted, "promising."
-0-
After the all-clear from Regina, Whale had Hook moved to an observation room. Half a day after peeling Hook off the street, Emma found herself curled up in a chair next to his bed, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She mumbled groggy goodbyes as her parents kissed her goodnight and withdrew from the room.
She was just drifting off when Hook called out unintelligibly and started to shake. His lids parted and red discs darted about the room. Emma stood and pulled his hand to hers.
"Hook," she soothed. "Hook come on, settle down."
The heart monitor beside him only beeped faster.
"Killian—"
She pressed both hands to his face and, for a brief moment, his crimson eyes locked on hers. He slackened, his mutterings faded to soft groans, and his lids slowly drooped shut.
Relieved, but dead tired, Emma swayed with exhaustion. She glanced out a glass panel to the team keeping watch—Tink, who had her back to the window, and Regina, who frowned into her vending machine coffee. Deciding she was too beat to care, Emma swung a leg over the side of the bed and climbed in.
"Wake up now and I'll kill you myself," she huffed, and laid her head on his chest, one hand clasped on his face, brushing along his cheekbone to the beat of his calming heart.
-0-
Emma woke up pleasantly warm and tried to bury deeper into her pillow when a nose full of musk and man reminded her exactly who her pillow was. She bolted upright, eyes darting to the glass, relieved to find the curtain drawn closed over the panel.
No witnesses.
As the adrenaline ebbed, she peered down at Killian's face. She hadn't been this close to him since she kissed him in Neverland. The proximity brought back the rush of that moment: the challenge in his eyes, the confidence in his grin and that fluid sense of control. Now exhaustion etched across his stone still face, a furrow between his knit brows, even as he slept. Truthfully, she'd noticed that mark of concern long before the witch attacked, nestled among his darkened countenance and cold glances and perhaps another time.
Emma Swan knew a wall when she saw one.
Perhaps the pirate captain had at last grown tired of courting danger, grown tired of her. The thought cut surprisingly deep, so she shoved it away. She was not about to lay here and creep on Captain Hook because he got a little broody around broom-wielding sociopaths.
With a huff, she swung a leg back over the edge of the bed and hopped out.
To find said sociopath primly posed on the edge of a dated plastic chair, black hat and all.
"Oh, don't get up on my account," cooed Zelena.
Adrenaline kicked in and Emma moved herself between the witch and the pirate. "What did you do to him?"
"It's just a little curse," she replied innocently, "that manifests his darkest dreams before his very eyes until his brave little heart literally bursts. He's been the stuff of nightmares for centuries, one can only imagine what's going on in there."
Truth, her senses screamed. Emma's glare sharpened. "Why Hook?"
"Delayed justice. He tried to kill my mother."
Lie, her senses screamed.
"Oh, did you like this one, too?" the witch faked a horrified expression. "I'd hate to make you a black widow yet again."
Lie.
"Bit of advice between us girls," Zelena said as she stood, her gaze dropping to Hook. "Kiss him goodbye now, while there's still fight left in him."
With a puff, she disappeared
-0-
One phone call and two hours later, Belle and Regina shoved a book at Emma in a language she couldn't read, but the pictures, with fiery red eyes and gaunt cheeks, told more than she'd wanted to see of Hook's fate.
Grim fairy tales indeed.
"Nightmare curse," Belle explained. "Kills with terror and despair born out of one's deepest fears."
"His own personal hell," replied Emma.
"She's trying to trigger a heart attack," Regina translated, flipping through another tome. "Zelena did her research, too. There's a cure, but not for Hook."
"What does that mean?"
Belle shifted nervously in her sky high heels. Doing this much for the man who shot her couldn't be easy. "A mother's kiss breaks the curse—or any biological parent, I suppose. But either way—"
"Best as we know," Emma finished, "the cures have been dead for centuries."
"All three of them," added Regina.
Emma turned her face back to the sleeping man to hide the heat building in her eyes at the reminder that Hook had also outlived his best chance at True Love's Kiss.
Damn that blue-eyed witch.
-0-
The next time Hook seized, it wasn't Emma's hands but Whale's defib paddles that kept him this side of the unknown and she wondered this wasn't Zelena's attempt to teach the "savior" her own uselessness.
It was like Zelena heard her thoughts because the witch appeared in the quiet room, grinning ear to ear, with the most obnoxious bag of popcorn she could find.
"Annoying, isn't it?" Zelena giggled and popped a kernel in her mouth. "Knowing the cures to his problem are locked away by the laws of time—"
Pop, another kernel.
"—If only you could reach back for just a moment—"
Pop.
"—but, alas—"
Hook grunted and trembled in his sleep and Zelena wiggled her eyebrows with excitement.
"—Won't be long now."
And then she was gone again.
Emma didn't have time to deal with the witch's taunts because Zelena was right. Hook was building up to another episode and whatever needed doing needed doing now, before the room filled with people and Emma lost her last few moments alone with Hook ever. All she could think about in that moment was Zelena's advice, to kiss him. Not a kiss goodbye, though, she wouldn't give either of them the satisfaction, but she did remember the fire their kiss lit in his eyes and she needed that part of him to kick in. Her kiss, if he was to be believed, had saved him once—brought him back from the edge. A small part of her, that small fleck of resilient hope she blamed on her mother, wondered if her kiss could bring him back again, but though she might be the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, she was also a product of the real world. While she felt a lot of things when she looked at Hook, she'd also felt true love's kiss with Henry and, in comparison to the rock solid surety she felt for her son, any attraction to Hook paled in comparison, leaving her with only the certainty of her own doubt.
Hook jerked and the monitor screamed and Emma ran out of time. It wasn't her best shot, but it was her only shot.
He was drenched in cold sweat and she had to wipe strands of his dark hair out of his eyes before she leaned over and—
He jolted and his eyes flew open—bright blue, and oh-so-clouded with confusion.
"Killian?" She asked, and blinked back her own surprise because, while he was certainly awake and she was certainly relieved, she also certainly did not kiss him.
"Swan?" he croaked, blinked—and pulled away. The movement was almost imperceptible—she was still bent over him and he had nowhere to go, really—but it was there and it was not the reaction she had expected. She called for Regina, reminding herself he was dying three seconds ago so he's allowed to be a little out of sorts. It was still enough room for her doubt to fester, however, so she clamped down on the sore spot at the back of her eyes and focused on how much she loved her son.