CS + Three Dead Hearts (CS Hiatus Challenge Prompt)
He watched in anguished horror as the life drained from his brother's eyes. Even knowing that there was nothing that could be done, he continued to cry out for help. Sailors swarmed the cabin in an effort to aid their fallen Captain, but it was too late. Liam's heart lay still, and Killian felt his own go dead right alongside.
He hadn't thought too much of the stirring within his chest as he spoke to the chestnut haired beauty the night before, but now that she was back the strumming in that dormant organ gave him a renewed sense of life he had not considered for many years.
"Things changed," she had said, and that was all he needed to hear. For as much as things may have changed in her home life, it was nothing to the change of his outlook on the misery his dead heart had endured since Liam's death.
But now his dead heart beat again. Beat with adventure, and intrigue, and love. Beat again with renewed hope.
Dust and ash. Where Liam's heart had been stilled by the viscous sap of a damned plant, Milah's was now dust and ash.
The bloody crocodile had refused to kill him, but didn't the wretched creature know that Killian's own heart had been turned to ash as well? The only thing keeping it from scattering on the winds like his beloved's was the anger and vengeance he vowed to wrought upon his enemy, but even such intense passions could not change the fact.
Killian Jones carried a second dead heart.
He'd ignored it at first.
That rhythm starting a new in the face of the fierce, tough lass who had bested him. The swell of long buried desire that crept up in him every time he caught glimpse of her form and face. The longing that plagued his chest that lingering year away from her when he'd vowed to not let a day go by without thinking of her.
It was no use, though. Emma Swan had awoken his long dead heart only to stab through it to save everyone from his own villainy.
It was a strange thing to have a truly dead heart.
He'd been without his heart before - damned crocodile - but it had still beaten then. Now, though. There was no pulse, no flutter of life, no standard rhythm, nothing.
His third dead heart, and by all rights is last...
That first beat back nearly felled him.
Standing amongst the graves with a newly beating heart, his true love before him, Killian Jones felt alive as he never had before.
The resurrection of the flutter within his chest was a testament to their love, and he would protect this heart at all costs. No more dead hearts.
It stopped. Actually stopped.
She cast away her sword in the face of an enemy that was incapable of backing down, and Killian felt his heart stop.
Killian Jones was a survivor, though
He had survived three dead hearts.
But if this one stopped beating, he didn't want to survive it.