Amor Fati
[Latin, literally - "Love your fate". An attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good.]
She keeps him a secret from everyone - the ruined pirate who screams at night because he has nightmares, the man who lost his ship, friends and everything he held dear. The man who had his heart ripped out in the same manner he had once stolen hers (though not as gently, it had been rough and cruel and a punishment for his sins). So she keeps him a secret.
He lives by the sea. I's one of the things that give him the worst nightmares but he'd never give it up, even if it tortured him, even if it killed him - he was a sailor at heart, above all else. She visits him whenever she can. It's a secret how she yearns to touch him, but he is poisonous so she never does.
It's a secret - she doesn't tell her husband, she doesn't tell Mulan or Snow - they're too busy planning happy affairs that don't involve the pirate - Mulan is helping her friend Robin with his wedding, Snow is planning her daughter's. They don't want to know a thing about the man anyway- not after the infamous fiasco he threw after Emma rejected his advances and hurt, he betrayed them again.
She'll never admit it - out loud it sound low and dreadful of her - but in a wordless level she likes keeping him a secret. She likes that he is hers. Though she doesn't like that he is broken and lifeless and screaming at night. They have a history so she won't give up on him, ever.
He stole her heart and now he had his own stolen - he is kept on a leash by Regina with the virtual blessing of every royal but Aurora - so that he would never stray back to his old, traitorous ways. Oh, how she wishes he wouldn't call her name - 'Rora - how she wishes she could comfort him, how she wishes she could touch him. But she can't, and he still looks at her, searching for his heart in her eyes. The broken pirate and the rising queen, what a pair.
On the day of Emma's wedding she sees how happy they all are - even Regina, the Evil Queen, is given another chance to live a happy life, and Aurora questions why is she denying her own happiness, and his?
So she goes to his cabin by the sea and takes him by the collar and tells him that he has a daughter. For a minute he looks at her, so lost, so lightless- and then he smiles and some flicker of that light she fell in love with returned. It is so glorious, like the sun rising from the sea and setting it on fire with its rays - that she laughs (and maybe a few tears spill, and maybe her laugh is too breathy, and maybe she wants to lean in and touch him, breathe him in and create a home that actually suits her) but if she does - that would be admitting to every sin she has committed when it came to him. "Her name is Gale," she whispers. "Hook, she's as wild little thing as the sea you fell in love with." And he laughs but he too does not touch her, and God, why has he always been such torturous temptation?
A fortnight after that, she orders her men to build a small ship, to carve the prow like a siren and paint it with the colors of the sea and the sand. She names the ship Nereid and realizes she doesn't know why she had ordered it -his rightful owner was as imprisoned as a slave.
The next time she goes to see him, he's painting the sea - it's pretty and the sea foam looks so real and it's full of birds flying into the sunset. "Killian," she says to him that day. "It's beautiful."
"It's rather depressing actually," he replies. "They're flying away but they don't know there's no land ahead." She misses the old him. She misses the him that was strong and cocky, the him that confidently had seduced her and had told her stories of pirates and treasures and swordsmanship, the way his voice had enthralled her and lured her in. It's her old nurse that tells her the trick, when Gale can't sleep at night - when two people embrace, they're heartbeats even out, and find balance. He may have no heart, but she'd create on for him, even if it was a sin.
That night, she goes to him, puts away the crown (light, light is her head) and takes him in her arms. It's odd but she thinks she's actually the one that's more soothed. That night, by his side, she dreams of the thrill of the sea, of impossible adventures she would never torture herself to dream about if she were awake (princesses, and most of all - queens don't venture with pirates to the lion's den). She dreams of a small garden on a ship, and of children running about and that dream is reckless and foolish and so impossibly, painfully, endearingly hers that she's not even sorry for it. He doesn't tell her this - thinks himself too undeserving even to tell her - but he dreams the same dream.
It's the touch. No one says it, no one even realizes it, but it's the human touch that slowly brings him back to life. It's the little things she brings him over the weeks - a breakfast, a book, a MP4 player (she doesn't tell him it's Rumplestiltskin's creation - powered by magic and not electricity) - it's full of songs by a musical band called ACDC and it's wild and roaring and it suits the Killian she once knew. It's the small photograph of Gale she brings him.
One day she realizes he's not as quiet when he cracks a sassy joke; he's livelier and the next time she sees him he laughs out loud at the story of Flora's newest unfortunate goof. He doesn't scream anymore at night. She finds herself always nestled in his arms, her nose buried in the crook of his neck - only then, half in the waking world, half in the one of dreams - she confesses to herself that she is at peace, at home, only it doesn't need confession. The scent of sandalwood and sea lulling, luring her to dream of adventures.
She doesn't know when it stops being about Philip or about sin or about temptation but rebellion is slowly igniting both of them. One day, she goes to Regina - to her hut in the forest that she shares with her new husband and stepson and newborn daughter - and after some sassy exchanges, she tells Regina that everyone deserves a second chance. "He already had used his." It is Snow that answers in Regina's stead. Aurora hadn't heard her come.
"He was never given a second chance, Snow. That's why he did the things he did."
She wants to run all the way to his cabin by the sea, the small wooden chest in her arms, but duty calls her at the last moment and she has to return to the palace in the end. Before Aurora goes to sleep, she opens the little box (Philip is waiting for her inside the bedroom chambers but she can't bring herself to go to him just yet), looks at the pirate's heart - it's dark, dark red but at the very core of it - a very small spot in the very essence, you'd almost miss it - it is bright and light and pure. She takes it in her hands, very carefully - the way she was careful when she first kissed him, not quite knowing what to do with something so old and dangerous and precious in her arms - and whispers: "You're free, finally free of your curse, Hook. You will belong back to where you've always belonged - to yourself."
He asks her to come away with him, to take their daughter and get aboard on the Nereid but she declines - she can't leave her kingdom, she is a queen after all. "I will see you again, I swear," he says. "I'll come at night and whisk you away to adventures to worlds where time passes differently; you'll always be back before dawn."
"I'll hold you to that promise." She smiles and wonders if he can see the love she has for him in the gleam in her eyes.
"I'll see our daughter too, even if she never learns the truth."
She presses the palm of her hand to his cheek and he leans in. "Even if no one else knows, she will be told the truth, when she's old enough to know to keep it a secret."
And he kisses her then - passionate and aching so very haunting.
It is the first kiss in years.
People will later tell you captain Hook is a man who belongs to himself and the sea, as he should, and he becomes an honorable trader but when the work bored him too much, he turns to hunting pirates - no one could be better suited for the job really, no one else knew more of pirates. He always does everything in the name of Queen Aurora of the Sand and people whisper of a supposed affair but they all love their king too much to really consider such a scandalous thing. They all just assume it is her friendship that put him back in line.
Slowly captain Hook gathers a group of fearsome men that turns to be well-respected and together they become the protectors of the Sand Kingdom by sea.
Captain Hook never married, and maybe it is because he had once had a true love - a woman named Milah who had died - and after all, there couldn't be love after true love, could there? Then of course, it might have been because he had once loved Queen Emma too, or at least that's what people whispered...
Never-the-less, he is mourned by many when he dies, sixteen years after the restoration of the Enchanted World. Of course, by none more than queen Aurora and princess Gale of the Sand, but no one but themselves ever learns the truth (no one had ever bothered to ask why was there an improvised garden in the captain's berth), and the two learn to live and smile and laugh and move forward as he would have wanted them to do.
Captain Hook had always belonged to himself and the sea, but there was a moment when Killian Jones had belonged to them, and that moment was actually infinite.