Content Warning: This fic contains mentions of forced prostitution as well as some slurs related to that. Also, there is an instance of child abuse. Neither are the content of the majority of the fic.
"The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world's end." — Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Milah falls in love with the sea first.
No, that's not right. She falls in love with herself, her freedom, her choice to walk away and choose a new life of her very own.
But it's fitting that she takes to the sea with a ship of pirates, sails out into that wide open expanse. She feels brave; she feels strong as she takes it in, barely noticing Killian by her side.
(They'll say she didn't look back. She does; she always will because she is leaving her son and it's the hardest thing she'll ever do but she still goes.
She goes because dying in front of him, dying so slowly and resenting him for it would have been worse.
Milah leaves her son but she doesn't regret it.)
Her story doesn't begin with Rumplestiltskin. She was a girl, once, poor, no different from any other girl in her village. Except that she always wanted to play with the boys, go on their adventures into the forest beyond their little town.
They didn't want her to play with them, though, because she was a girl and girls are gross, and she had pushed the biggest boy out of the group into the dirt before taking off through the streets on her own, exhilarated by her defiance, exploring the streets until she knew them inside out. Her hair streamed black and wild behind her, her bare feet caked with dirt, the bane of her mother when she finally came home for the night.
"You have to stop this foolishness, Milah, and behave like a proper young girl," and Milah would roll her eyes and grumble as she washed her hands and feet and face because she behaved like herself and being anything else seemed awful and stupid.
(Still, she tries. She promises her mother and takes their dirty laundry down to the river, and she washes half of it before a frog jumps onto a rock beside her head and croaks at her. And she notices the world around her again, the birds chirping in the nearby trees, a rabbit hopping into the shadows of the forest, the sunlight filtering through leaves and over grass.
She doesn't think. She goes. And when she returns home with sopping wet laundry that is streaked with dirt, one dress completely missing, she endures her mother's yelling and the slap across her face.
She goes to bed without dinner and stares out her window into the dark, dark night, only a sliver of the moon in the sky.)
Her mother starts to get anxious after Milah's fifteenth birthday. She listens to her parents have whispered conversations about dowries and finding a suitable husband and finally pinning her down.
Milah sneaks out into the night and goes down to the harbor, to the sea. She goes all the way down to the sand, stands there with her toes buried in it and watches the waves roll in and out.
One day, one day—I'll leave.
She stills and slows her breath, matches it to the slow foaming water. One step and then another and another, until she is ankle-deep in the water, further and further out until the sea is pulling at her waist, dragging her out, dragging her away.
She gives in to the pull and goes under, swims underneath the surface with eyes wide open. The salt stings but she keeps going. Going until she can't hold her breath anymore and she has to rise to the surface, gasping, head flung back to see the full moon.
She takes it all in, head bobbing just above the surface, and with a slow breath, she lets herself sink underneath the water.
(She doesn't go every night, she can't, but she goes as often as she can, swims with strong sure strokes underneath a midnight sky full of stars.
She wears the scent of salt on her skin and braids seaweed around her wrists.
And now that she's older, there are boys, some men, who try to follow after her, offer her flowers picked from a clearing in the forest or poems that compare her beauty to the sun or sweets purchased from the marketplace. She knows what they want; she takes their gifts, and when they watch her expectantly, she turns away and laughs at their anger, scorns them for believing she can be bought.
She just smiles and goes down to the shore, strewing flowers behind her.)
She meets Rumple on the shore. No one has ever followed her out here before, perhaps too afraid but more than likely uninterested to follow her that far out of the village, and he startles her when he speaks.
"You come out here a great deal," he says, and she twists in the sand to look up at him, clambering to her feet.
"You followed me here," she replies as she edges away from him. "Why?"
He shrugs and takes a step back, holding up his hands. "I meant no harm. I just noticed and thought—at least, it seemed like a good idea before I got here."
"It wasn't," she tells him, her lip curling at the way he looks at her, as though she is something precious, something to be owned and put away. "You should go."
She turns and strides down the beach, the wind whipping through her long hair. She only looks back when she's standing in the water, grounded in the small waves lapping over her feet, and he's gone.
She finds his footprints in the sand as she leaves to go back, and carefully, slowly, she places her steps inside each one, sinking down in the imprints he left behind.
A few weeks later, Milah comes home to find a parcel wrapped in soft brown cloth waiting on the roughly hewn kitchen table. She touches it, wondering, and opens it.
The shawl is beautiful. Silken green thread as dark as seaweed woven with coarse rope that looks like the kind that sometimes floats ashore, fraying and faded and soaked to the very core by the ocean. She drapes it over her small bed and runs her hands over it and over it. She's never owned anything so beautiful; she lies on top of it and turns her head so her cheek rests against it, smells the salt and pungent seaweed.
Rumple asks for her hand in marriage a week later, and she agrees without hesitation, smiling and pulling her shawl tight around her shoulders.
Life with Rumple is easy. Simple. He spins and weaves, and she plays the part of the dutiful wife, cleans and cooks and makes friends with the other women in the village. Her saccharine smiles set her teeth on edge, and her bones ache, but she's happy.
She chose this, she chose him; it's more than she thought she would be allowed, so she takes with both hands and buries her dreams in the dark of night on the shore. She takes his devotion and gentleness and tries to give back what he wants, struggles into the costume of the pretty wife who is good and kind.
She loses her balance sometimes, drifts too close to the forest's edge, turns her gaze to the sea and envies the men that sail away. She pulls her shawl around her shoulders and clings to it like an anchor. Sinking and sinking and sinking.
She wonders if she can drown this way.
The war takes Rumple away from her, and she sits by the fire at night and looks at her swelling belly, holds her hands against it and presses back against the push of tiny feet from inside her skin. She never wanted children, but she whispers to this little one swimming inside her, loves so much deeper and fiercer than she believed possible.
She will be better, she will be good.
When she gives birth, she thinks she might tear in two, and there's a part of her that hates the child she is pushing out of her body for causing her this pain, for stealing from her just like so many others have. But when it's over, she clings to the midwife's hand and weeps and holds her baby boy close, falling in love with every perfect wrinkle, his imperfect reddened skin.
"Baelfire," she whispers into his ear, traces his name down his spine. "My little Baelfire."
It's just the two of them, building a world together, and she misses Rumple but never like she thought. She can be content like this, just watching her little boy kick his strong chubby legs and smile up at her. She murmurs his name to him constantly as though it can be a charm against any ill that might befall him.
She never should have—she is so very wrong.
News from the battlefield reaches them, and her husband is a coward, a man who cut and run before his first battle. And she loses everything. No one speaks to her, no one buys her wares anymore, she is all alone.
Alone and full of rage and falling to pieces because she has never needed anyone, she knew better than to allow anyone so close that they could steal everything from her without a second thought. She has no idea where Rumple is, if he's run away from her as well or if he died or if it matters now that the damage is done; she hopes he is dead, she hopes he rots beside the road until he is nothing but bleached bones she could pass by without a second thought.
The days pass and it isn't long before there is no more food or money to buy any. She will not beg, she will not, so she tosses her shawl into the fire and bundles Baelfire up and goes to the tavern. She waits at the back door and it doesn't take long for a man to come out, eye her up and down, and she places Baelfire in the grass in the shadows and—
It's not enough coin, not nearly enough, so she waits for another. And another. She goes home with a small handful of coins and holds Baelfire close as she sits by the fire and stares into the flames.
She survives.
And Rumple comes home full of excuses and reasons, and she wants to turn him away, spit in his face and take her son far far away, but she can't keep him out. This is his house, his son. His wife.
Nothing is hers. She leaves that night and runs to the sea, plunges into the waves and swims out and out and out until her muscles ache and she can barely see the shore; she wonders how far she could go before she would sink from exhaustion.
But she won't be lost. When she turns away from him, when she walks away, she wants him to know. She wants to make him burn with it.
There's more than one way to drown. She finds that out at the bottom of bottle after bottle, drinking to forget a husband who looks right through her, a village that has shut her out, her son who plays alone because no one will let their children associate with the coward's boy.
Her head swims with the alcohol, and it's not the same as when she holds her breath under the water until her lungs want to burst, but it's better. It hurts like falling off the knife's edge, hollows her out until she is empty, bloodless, a ghost.
Killian is the first to say "come away with me," and she smiles and lets the bottle in her hand slip from her grasp.
(If she had known the events she was setting in motion, she wouldn't have changed anything. She still would have left.
But she would have laughed at the idea of her lover and husband feuding for centuries over her.
As if either of their quests for revenge could ever make her theirs.)
Pulling Baelfire into her arms, Milah murmurs, "I love you, Baelfire. You know that, right?"
He squirms and frowns, asking, "Why are you crying, Mama?"
"Because I love you so much." She slips a braided bracelet of seaweed and rope onto his little arm and kisses the top of his head. "Because you're my brave strong boy."
He looks confused still, but he kisses her cheek and says, "I love you, Mama."
She smiles and tousles his dark curls and lets him go. "Go on, go play."
She watches him run off; she stands in the sunlight and watches her son turn and smile and wave at her. She waits until he's not looking to walk away.
It turns out that she's a coward too.
Life at sea changes her. Her muscles grow and strengthen, callouses form on her hands from swordfights and clambering up the mast to be the lookout, her skin darkens from the sun.
She transforms. Becomes.
Pirate.
Free.
Milah knows that Killian wants her; it's not a surprise, nothing new, but he just waits. She'll feel his eyes on her back at times and when she turns to look at him, he just smirks and stays where he is.
She's always been the pursued, the hunted, and the desire to turn the tables heats under her skin. She wants and she wants and she wants, but she doesn't give in. Not yet.
The night she goes to his quarters, Milah strides forward, sword still strapped to her waist, her hair wet from swimming in the sea alongside the ship. She crawls up his bed to him and straddles his legs, slapping his hands away from her.
"I am not yours," she says quietly as she removes her sword. "Do you understand?"
Killian's eyebrows furrow as she starts to pull her shirt from the waistband of her pants. "I believe so, love."
She pulls her shirt up over her head and starts working on the fastening of his pants. "I don't want to be your wife. The gold I earn is my own. I won't be yours."
"And what if we fall in love?"
She laughs and leans over him, brushes her lips against his as she says, "Even then."
He nods, once, and she smiles as she guides his hands up to rest on her hips.
Some nights she sits out on deck under the stars and closes her eyes; she lines up all the memories she has of Baelfire and tries to imagine him as he is now, growing and growing, a boy who loves to explore and find little treasures and hide them somewhere safe.
He might have changed—she bows her head and plants her palms against the rough wood of the deck, remembers that she chose this.
A bad mother, selfish, whore, coward: she is guilty.
"Because I never loved you!" She realizes too late that this is a mistake.
That look is in Rumple's eyes again, possessive, jealous, strange glittering eyes that she knows so very well, and now he has power.
His hand is in her chest, and she screams as he grasps her heart and rips it out, holding it in front of her as he squeezes and squeezes and she falls, feeling the shatter in every part of her being. She looks up at Killian and whispers I love you, desperate not to lose completely even now.
She has power as well.