I'm so sorry for the delay. There was way too much to put into this chapter - reunion, family drama, explaining Neverland, explaining Hook and Neal's history. I tried it a bunch of different ways and eventually decided I couldn't put everything I wanted into there, so there is some reunion and family drama in here, but in the next few chapters there will be some more, specifically regarding Neal and Gold. But on the bright side, while I was trying to get this part right, I also jotted down a lot of good future scenes so that hopefully the posting pace will pick up.


When Neal first recognized his surroundings after he had fallen through the portal, still sporting the pain and harried breath of the bullet that had ripped through his side, his only thought was to get off the island as quickly as possible. He knew where he was, he had been here before, and he knew what awaited him if the keepers of the island found him on their turf. He was sure the lost boys would recognize him, even though he was an adult now, and he knew what they did to people who betrayed them. He had watched it done several times, hadn't had any other choice. And Neal had definitely betrayed them.

Luckily, he had landed near the shoreline. He half-stumbled, half-dragged himself to the water's edge, where he found a rotting log conveniently washed up a few yards from the waves' breaking point. It took all the strength he had to push it into the water, the arm on his injured side proving useless and limp, and flop himself on top of it as it began to float out to sea, all the while sure that from the depths of the jungle he could hear threatening footsteps and, every once in a while a voice he vaguely recognized, before he mercifully lost consciousness completely.

He didn't know how long he drifted like that. As his body floated in and out of the waves, his mind floated in and out of consciousness. At one point he was vaguely aware of a long, slender shadow flickering in the depths below him. Mermaids he thought, but he was too delirious to muster much fear, let alone the motivation to do anything about it. Perhaps they thought he was already dead, or just a log drifting along with no person clinging to it. For whatever reason, they left him well enough alone, and he was grateful.

By the time the party on the Jolly Roger found him, it was nearly too late. The sea had swallowed much of his blood before the open wound had managed to clot itself, and had lowered his body temperature to a dangerous level. His pale face had turned blue, and at first, as Charming and Hook hoisted him on board, Emma feared the worst. As they lay him on the deck and backed away, allowing for Emma and Gold, an unlike pair bonded by the only person in the world who could bond them, to step forward and crouch beside him, Neal did not move, nor did he open his eyes. Emma grasped his hand as Gold leaned forward, and waited for his assessment.

"He's alive," Gold determined, his voice nearly cracking as Emma breathed a sigh of relief that somehow only served to further entice tears into her eyes. She choked back a sob. "I'll need to work fast."

Gold placed his hands over his son and closed his eyes, muttering some kind of incantation. Emma watched the color return to Neal's face. Gold's hands glided over to the bullet wound, and through the whole it had torn in his shirt Emma saw it heal over until it was completely gone. After a few more moments of concentration, Gold sat back on his heels, panting. Still Neal did not move.

"I though you said he was alive," Emma said frantically, looking from father to son. "If you healed him, why isn't he…?"

"Wait for it," Gold breathed, a hint of fear in his own voice as he struggled to trust his own power. The two stared down at the still man between them. Moments turned to years as nothing changed. The entire crew held it's breath.

Then, suddenly, Neal began to choke water from his lungs painfully. While Gold helped him to sit straighter, Emma pressed her eyes tightly closed, two shaky tears escaping her lashes and dripping down her cheeks. She found she had to remind herself to breathe.

"It's alright, son, it's alright," Gold was saying, his voice softer and more tender than any of the people watching had ever heard it. "You're alive. You're going to be alright." He seemed as if he were trying to reassure himself as much as his son before him. Neal continued to cough up water and gulp air back into his lungs.

"Papa?" he asked blearily, blinking the wet from his eyelashes, utterly confused as his father's face swam before him. Gold put a supportive hand under his arm and dragged him to a standing position. "What's… where are… how did you find…?"

His sense of touch seemed more sensitive right now than any of the others. He could feel the pain in his side, which had become a part of him for the last couple days, was noticeably absent. He could feel his mind light and dizzy in its skull. He could feel the cool water dripping down him and on to the hollow wooden surface below him. But he still found his vision swimming so that he could barely see what was in front of him. But his eyes did find something that they latched onto, and it helped him to focus. Golden hair swimming before him. Such a familiar shade. He followed it to her face, and then her eyes. Those eyes could level him anywhere.

"Emma?" he breathed, a relieved smile spreading over his face, his focus finally returning to his sight.

"Are you alright?" Emma asked in a whisper, her eyes hard to read as they scoured his face. He nodded slowly and moved towards her. He wanted her in his arms, wanted to inhale her scent and feel her heart beating close to his. Instead, he got a quick, smart smack in the face.

"You son of a bitch," she spat fiercely as the rest of the dock froze.

"Um, ow," Neal said, rubbing his jaw line.

"You tell me you love me and then you just let go?" Emma bore down on him, her voice furious and terrified. He knew that tone in her voice, and knew that she only reached it when she truly cared about something or someone. He would have smiled if his cheek weren't so sore. "I have half a mind to throw you back in the water."

"I wouldn't try it," Gold growled, stepping protectively in front of his son.

"Keep out of it, Gold," Emma snarled, pointing an accusatory finger in his face. "I didn't see any of this parental concern when he was being sucked through that portal with a bullet in his chest."

Gold's face whitened with fury, but he held his tongue as Emma turned away from him and made to storm down the deck. Neal sidestepped his father. He would deal with him later. Right now he only had thoughts for what he was now sure was the love of his life.

"I was trying to protect you," he offered weakly.

"Just like the first time you left?" Emma said fiercely, rounding on him and challenging him with her eyes. "Remember how well that turned out?"

"I was going to fall through that portal whether I liked it or not," Neal reasoned, his voice finding its strength. He was not going to go down without a fight. He may have hurt her, but he stood by his decision to let go of her hand. It was the only one he could have made at the time. "The only choice I had in the matter was whether or not I dragged you with me. I didn't want to do that to Henry, to have him lose both his parents when he only needed to lose one."

"Well, that's just great, because now both his parents have lost him!"

"What do you mean?" Neal said, blinking. "Why are you all even over here, and how did you get…" He began to look around at all of them and noticed the lack of any young boy on board. Emma would never have left Henry unless..."You aren't in Neverland looking for me, are you?"

"We thought you were dead," Emma said, before she remembered that she was furious with the man in front of her and didn't owe him an excuse. Despite her anger, she wanted him to know that had she thought he might have lived, of course she would have been looking for him too. If things hadn't gotten so messed up. "You were shot in the chest, you fell through a portal to God knows where…"

"Where's Henry?" Neal asked directly. He knew that when she started rambling, it meant she was avoiding something.

"Bae, you've had a long couple of…" Gold started gently from behind his son.

"Where is he?" Neal insisted of Emma, his voice rising.

"They abducted him."

Neal felt the pit of his stomach drop inside of him, as if it were no longer there. As if it were long gone in the depths of the ocean. It was strange how quickly he had become attached to the boy. He'd always pictured himself as a loner, never staying in one place for too long, never getting close to anyone, but somehow this kid had wormed his way into his heart in a few short weeks. Just like his mother.

Emma saw the devastation waft over his expression like a wave, and she felt the sudden urge to run to him. To grieve with him and have him console her and promise each other things. Like that they would get him back and that they would not stop until they did. He was the only other one who was experiencing the same grief as she, and as she looked into his eyes as she delivered the news, she understood that he did in fact love his son as much as she did.

Neal saw a similar despair in Emma's face, and he desperately wanted to hold her in his arms. To cradle her and tell her everything would be alright and have her scent engulf him and take him away from the situation at hand. For a moment, the two stood suspended in the wake of the unspoken emotions between them, but the moment passed and Emma's untrusting instincts kicked in as she looked away, unwilling to let herself seek solace in the man who had abandoned her twice now.

Neal sensed this rejection and cleared his throat, trying to put two words together and clarify things. He was afraid to ask the next question that came from his mouth.

"Who's they?" he croaked, his voice dry.

Emma didn't want to answer. She felt the response catch in her throat. She wasn't quite sure why. Though she had been unable to admit it, she had been jealous of Neal and Tamara while they were together. She should be happy that the woman turned out to be a backstabbing kidnapper. But she had also played Neal, and as much as it terrified Emma, she did love Neal. And she knew how devastating it felt to be played.

Emma hesitation confirmed Neal's suspicions for him, but another of the crew answered nonetheless.

"Greg and Tamara," Regina said darkly. She was not entirely following what was going on between Emma and Neal and any other party that played a role in that weird and twisted history, and perhaps she should have been considering how heavily her own son factored into that equation, but she had suffered too much pain and fear at the hands of Greg and Tamara to give a damn about revealing their identities.

Neal brought a hand up to his mouth, his face creased in rage and disbelief. He turned away from the group and took a few steps towards the edge of the ship, as if he was looking for some place to be alone to take in the news before he realized that he was on a very small boat with no escape. Just like Emma had realized the night before. She really felt for him. How could she not? Despite her anger and fear, she did truly love him, and she knew what it was like to be lied to by someone you thought loved you.

"We tracked them here, to Neverland," she offered as small solace. "Used the last bean to follow."

Neal was silent for a moment more as if he was hearing things on a delay, but then he turned to look sharply at, of all people, Hook.

"Are they bringing him to him?" he asked. Everyone on board showed a certain surprise at Neal addressing Hook in such a familiar and cryptic manner, not the least of whom was Gold, whose narrowed eyes darted between his son and his enemy in confusion.

"I can only imagine so," Hook answered simply.

"You think Henry's the one he's been looking for?"

"I think Greg and Tamara must believe he is. We were just getting into all that when you washed onto the horizon. Perhaps you would like to chime in any embellishments you think appropriate as I begin?"

"No," Neal said, his voice suddenly strong and sure. "I don't want you anywhere near this. You sold me out to them. You'd just as soon sell him too."

"If I was worried about protecting myself I wouldn't have come here in the first place," Hook reasoned stubbornly. He knew when he decided to come on this voyage that he would have some trust to rebuilding and some proving of himself to do. But he was going to do it, going to do the right thing until no doubted anymore.

"Why would you give a damn?" Neal argued bitterly.

"You know why," Hook told him with a cryptic cock of his eyebrow. Neal cast an almost unnoticeable glance in the direction of his father, then down at the floor before he pierced Hook again with his skeptical glare.

"Didn't stop you from giving me up to him all those years ago."

"It almost did," Hook said. "It would have if you hadn't been so bent on running away from me, but given the circumstances, I did what I had to do. By the looks of it, you managed yourself just fine, didn't you?"

"This is different," Neal said, his voice almost panicked. "He's been looking for this boy for hundreds of years. If Henry's the one he's been looking for, then he's as good as dead."

"What?" Emma and Regina chorused together. Emma had been vaguely following the fast-paced interaction between Neal and Hook, steadily becoming more and more confused by the increasingly cryptic nature of what was being said. However, when the word 'dead' began to be thrown around, that was when the waiting to be clued in on what was going on had to stop. Emma felt herself grow a bit weaker, and for a moment feared she might not be able to keep her balance as the horror of the idea crept over her. Henry, her Henry, good as dead?

Snow seemed to instinctively know that Emma was close to collapsing, because she took a subtle step up behind her and gently grabbed her arm in support.

"I hadn't really gotten to that part yet," Hook growled, his eyes darting to a panicked Emma as he sidestepped Neal and made to walk up the dock, "but nice job softening the blow."

"Will you two please slow down and explain to the rest of us what the hell you are talking about?" Regina demanded.

"Not what," Hook said, turning to face them all. "Who."

"Who, then?" Emma prodded. She was done with these cryptic games. The word 'death' had been thrown about in the same sentence as her son, by his own father, no less. This was no time for secrets. This was the time to lay everything on the line.

"Pan," Neal answered in a vicious whisper.

"Pan?" Snow said, scowling. "As in Peter Pan?

"You've heard of him?" Hook asked the crew from the Storybrooke, perplexed. As far as he knew, they had only ever lived in the Enchanted Forest before the curse.

"We've all seen the film, I'm assuming," Regina said, looking around at them all as each nodded. "Peter Pan came and took Wendy and her brothers to Neverland…"

"You don't know crap about Wendy Darling," Neal said sharply. The heat of the response caused everyone to look at him, surprised. "Or her brothers."

"You knew Wendy?" Emma asked him, a bit in awe.

"You could say hers was my first foster family," Neal told her, and Emma gave him a small sympathetic smile. "I came here to save her and John and Michael from being taken by the shadow."

"The shadow?" Regina asked darkly.

"Neverland is nothing like the movie you saw," Neal explained. "Peter Pan isn't some happy-go-lucky hero. He's a villain."

"Peter Pan's not the villain," Snow protested in uncertain confusion.

"Just like Red isn't also the wolf?" Neal challenged her, and Snow took the point silently. "None of the stories are the way they seem. Because they're real. This is real, and it's not pretty. If they are taking Henry to Pan, then our only hope is to stop them before they reach him, because if Pan gets involved…"

Neal didn't finish his sentence, as if the ending was too gruesome, but the terrifying mystery of letting it hang open-ended did nothing to calm Emma's nerves.

"We have to get to the island," she said desperately. "We have to stop them."

"I can't just land on shore," Hook explained in an exasperated tone. "The only time they allowed me on shore was when I had something to trade."

"So let's trade, then," Snow suggested, failing to see the problem. "We have to have something they want. What did you trade with them?"

Hook did not answer, and Emma could not help but notice the dark and challenging look Neal shot him over his shoulder. Snow raised her eyebrows at Hook, awaiting a response as well as the rest of the crew, but Hook remained silent, avoiding their eyes until Neal finally answered for him.

"Boys," he said simply. Everyone's head turned towards him. "He traded them boys he found. Like me."

"What?!" Snow asked in sharp disbelief, but Gold was already on his feet, and within moment he had grabbed hold of Hook's lapel threateningly.

"You back-stabbing, cut throat coward!" Gold growled, ferocity etched in every line of his face.

"You're calling me a coward, crocodile?" Hook challenged, meeting his passion in full forced, his face inches from Gold's. "Have we forgotten why he landed alone so far from home in the first place?"

"Can we leave the past in the past?" Neal asked in an aggressive voice, pushing his father and the pirate apart as if he were pushing through two western-style saloon doors. He turned and dropped down on spare crate, bringing his fingers up to his temples in frustration. Emma truly felt for him. Even before she knew the truth about his past, she had known it was not a good one. She and he and shared that in common, and sort of had an unspoken agreement not to speak about what was past. Both had wanted to forget, and it had bonded them, that desire to leave the past where it was and move forward. After all, when two people meet in a mutually stolen car, it can be assumed that there is nothing in either one's past that they want to relive.

"I don't understand," Emma cracked through the commotion, her brow furrowed. "What do they want collecting boys in the first place? What's their angle?"

"I never knew," Hook said.

"So you just threw children to this guy without knowing what you were handing them over to?" Charming growled, his face red and furious, looking as if he half wanted to pop up and do the same as Gold had done.

"Look, if you want specifics, why don't you ask the guy who spent nearly a century in their company?"

All eyes rounded on Neal, who looked up with a wary, exhausted expression on his face.

"I don't know for certain, to be perfectly honest," he admitted. "All I know is when I first got on shore after they took me from your ship, they compared me to a picture. One of them asked 'Is it the one he wants?' and the other shook his head and said no. Then the first told me that I was lucky, that I would get to live. I never saw the picture, so I never knew what the boy they were looking for actually looked like."

"You think it could be Henry?" Regina asked, her voice high and squeaky.

"Why would Peter Pan have a picture of Henry?" Emma asked, hot and confused blood pumping through her veins as her breath seemed to tightened in her chest.

"And have acquired it hundreds of years before he was born?" Snow contributed.

"And even if he is, how would Greg and Tamara know about it?" Charming added.

"We don't have answers to any of these questions," Emma said, so frustrated now that she stood and began to pace just to have some thing to do. "We need more information. We need to find a way onto the island."

"I told you, we can't land if we value our lives," Hook reiterated. "We may have magic on our side, but so do they, and this is their territory. They've been here for centuries, millennia more likely, and they will be able to know every move before we make it."

Emma couldn't deny that the situation felt quite hopeless. She had watched Peter Pan as a child, but had never imagined it like this. True, it had not been her favorite Disney Movie – the idea of staying a child forever had not much appealed to her, considering her childhood had been so terrible. Sometimes, she felt like she already was in Neverland, that she was a lost boy floating around trying to take care of her fellow foster siblings because there were no true parents in the picture. Except without magic, or fairies, or flying shadows.

"If the only way to land on shore is with a boy to trade," Neal started in a low voice, first looking at no one but instead at the wooden floor boards at his feet, "then lets give them a boy to trade."

With that, he looked up at the group in front of him.

"What do you mean?" Hook asked, his brow creased. Neal turned and addressed his father.

"When you first found me at my apartment in New York, you made offer, do you remember it?" he said. "You said you could turn the clock back."

"I did," Gold said, nodding slowly.

"So do it," Neal insisted. "Make me fourteen again. We can land on the island and Hook can trade me to them like he did so many years ago. For all they know, I've been camped out hidden in Neverland for the last twenty years since I ran away."

"Absolutely not," Gold protested. "Out of the question."

"They'll recognize me, they already know what I look like, it will be completely plausible," Neal insisted, standing now and facing Hook. "You handed me over to them once, for all they know why wouldn't you do it again? I can infiltrate the lost boys, try and find out more about what's going on."

"Won't you get in trouble?" Emma asked, and for a moment she realized how much she sounded like a very small child. "For having run away?"

Neal's meaningful stare and lack of response was answer enough. Whatever awaited his 14-year-old self on that island was nothing good, and he knew it. The group grew silent at they realized the sacrifice Neal was suggesting of himself. But each person only had to look into his face to know that it was no use arguing. His mind was set. Emma knew there was no stopping him, but she had also just gotten him back, and she wasn't about to let go of him in a hurry. So she said the only thing she could think to say.

"You're not going alone."


And yes, while this will continue to be an adventure-based story, there will definitely be some Charming family coddling and tension when the past catches up with them once Emma is turned back into her twelve-year-old body. Stay tuned!