~Apologies for this one… most of the text is lifted from the actual scene in the episode! I promise there's more originality to come… really… just hang in there….~
Emma walked out the front door of Granny's. Yep, that was Hook sitting over there, all right. Alone. Irritation flitted across her features, why couldn't he have just come inside with everyone else? He should have been there for the naming, the coronation, whatever it was. He should have been there, with her, to help tell their story to her parents.
Don't you think he knows that? A little voice in her head whispered fiercely. That pirate would do anything for you, and he's proven it time and again. There's some other reason he's out here.
Damn. She hated it when that little voice was right.
"So," she said as sat down next to him, "do you think Rumpelstiltskin is right? I'm in the book now. He said everything besides our little adventure would go back to normal. Do you think that it is?"
Hook looked down for a moment. "He's right. Otherwise I'd have remembered that damned bar wench I kissed."
She couldn't help but smiling. There he was, a bit of a flirt; almost back to normal.
"How would that prove anything?" Emma felt herself anticipating his answer. How would that have changed anything, had he remembered a kiss from 30 years ago? It wasn't as if he'd care about some random woman he met at a bar that his life story would change...
Hook smiled. "I know how you kiss; I'd have gone after her." He met Emma's eyes for a moment. She heard to the ends of the earth whisper in her mind before he turned his eyes away to play with one of his rings. "But I didn't. My life went on exactly the same as before."
A pause.
A breath.
A smile.
"Yeah, must've been the rum."
Emma wanted to say so much; she just couldn't find the courage to speak the words. They went through so much together back in the Enchanted Forest and their relationship – whatever it was – certainly had to be stronger for it.
Maybe she'd had her walls up for too long, maybe she was broken too much to ever trust someone with all her heart again, but this man in front of her? He'd whittled away at her defenses until she felt like she was as thin skinned as a Faberge egg. He'd become her friend.
The pirate and the princess.
It sounded like something right out of Henry's book.