Title: The World In Between
Author: Miss Peg
Rating: PG
Genre: Angst
Fandom: Once Upon A Time
Summary: He followed her everywhere that she went.
Spoilers: For episode 1.07: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Notes: Written for the 15genres1prompt challenge.
He walked around town with his badge hooked over his belt and his gun resting in its holster. He no longer needed them and yet he still had them, a permanent fixture in his ghost-like state.
He followed her everywhere that she went; to the diner, home, to the Sheriff's office, wherever she went he followed because he couldn't think of anything else to do but watch the world he was no longer part of.
He understood now why he didn't feel the things that others felt; when his heart burst he didn't feel it in his chest like the average person would. He felt pain in his chest, but the heart's damage was outside of him somehow. That was when he remembered in its entirety what had happened to him.
The Queen, Regina, had stolen his heart, not metaphorically, but literally.
He'd expected the end of his life to be something more…dramatic. A shoot out, torture at the hands of a masked gang, anything but having his heart ripped to shreds.
He hadn't expected this. This world that he now lived in, a ghost-like plain that coincided with the world he'd once known to be the only. Before he realised that Storybrooke wasn't the real life he was supposed to lead, before he found out that he was actually a huntsman paid by the Queen to kill Snow White.
He didn't really believe in the after-life and yet he seemed trapped between life and death. Forced to live on the fringes of one of his previous lives for eternity, or at least until he found some closure that enabled him to crossover to a final resting place. Perhaps the moment when the curse would break and their first world would be returned to its former glory.
He still couldn't quite believe what had happened to their world, the world they'd once all known so well and yet couldn't even remember. He wasn't sure what made him know, before everyone else, but he wondered if not knowing would have kept him safe from harm.
And so, when he watched her wake up in the morning he followed her around town. He watched as she brushed her teeth, put on her shoes and got into his old car. He watched as she apprehended a couple of the town's teenagers mid-fight, stopped to buy a donut before lunch and brushed a dusting of sugar off her trousers.
Every moment he watched with pain resting heavily in his heart, a heart which had now reattached itself to his body. He could feel the pain of her loss, he could feel the love that he hadn't been able to feel before and he could feel the happiness at having known her for just a few short months.