"Why does this keep happening to me?" Emma grumbles as she stares up at the unfamiliar canopy.

"Look on the bright side. We can finally have an adventure together," David all but crows as he holds his hand out to his daughter.

Emma ignores it and scrambles to her feet on her own. "Really? We just fell through a portal." She used to wonder how Alice felt when she had tumbled down the rabbit hole. (Of course, that was before she realized Alice was probably real and probably had tumbled down a rabbit hole.) But back then, poor orphaned Emma used to sit in a dark corner of some library in Minnesota and think of the sensation of falling, of finding a new world and discovering everything was upside down. That Emma had needed a world that was upside down. This Emma needed this shit to stop. No one had mentioned how your shoulders would twist the wrong way when you hit the ground or how it would ache to be torn away from the familiar – whether up was up or up was down or everything was sideways – it was just…familiar and you knew your way around, you knew your way back. There's no running away when you don't know which direction you're headed.

"And what about Neverland?" Emma asks in a weak attempt to appease David whose pout she can see without even looking at him. That was one great twisted adventure together, she thinks bitterly.

"We were all there. It wasn't the same, it wasn't special," David insists as he follows his daughter already marching into the thick of the forest. "Your mother got to do this with you. Even Hook has–" David stops abruptly. He stops walking too. Emma has also frozen several feet ahead of him.

Emma wants to tell her dad that it's okay, he can mention Hook, a part of her even wants to remind him that his name is Killian and he has been with her both times before and in Neverland too, but it feels as though all her emotions are caught in her throat and she just can't, because of course it's not okay. Hook is gone, has been gone for two years now, and she is in a new world for the first time without him.

It's never hurt quite this way before. She has done this before. She has lost more than once. There was Lily and Ingrid, Neal and Walsh, even Graham. And she had loved them or thought she had loved them. But those losses have never felt like an open throbbing wound that would never close, have never felt like it reached to the very bottom of her soul. She had been able to pick herself up after each of those losses, build up her walls and go on. But it wasn't the same with Killian's. Was this what it was like to lose a kindred spirit, maybe a true love? A part of her wishes she regrets even meeting Killian but she can't. She loved him too much. She loves him still.

"Let's just try to figure out where we are and how to get back to Storybrooke," Emma finally says, managing to keep the waver out of her voice. She puts one foot in front of the other, focusing on her steps. One, two, one, two is easy enough. It's easier at least to fall into a routine than drown out thoughts of Killian and love and worlds upside down.

They only run into a few travellers. There's apparently nothing further inland and only a decrepit fishing village on a rocky coast. Each traveler shakes his or her head at the word "magic." One elderly woman with a blind eye confirms that it has long been gone from this land. "Some people don't even know what magic is anymore," she croaks.

"We came from the Land Without Magic," Emma grumbles later as night is falling and she can't even generate a flame. "That should mean all other lands have magic." It means she should be able to do magic here but staring at the pile of kindling in front of her doesn't appear to be working. She tries throwing her arms out and wiggling her fingers.

"It just looks like you are doing jazz hands."

"Not helping, David."

She tries to put her whole body into the motion. How the hell are they going to get back if she can't do any magic?

"Don't tell me what that looked like," she says before David can say anything.

They take turns sleeping on the cold forest floor but as dawn breaks on the second day, Emma feels something stirring her awake and it takes her a moment to recognize the hum of her magic, pulling at her, leading her.

She throws a glance over at David. "Um, I'll just be a second. I need to go down to the river."

When she gets down to the water, she's not quite sure what to do. There's something compelling her here, something familiar but not. She looks at the opposite shore but there's nothing except trees. She feels it though. She puts her hands out, willing her magic to do something, anything, open a portal so she can get the hell out of dodge and all the forest leaves out of her hair, or maybe even brew a fucking pot of coffee. But again, nothing, it just hums under her skin, feeling almost content. But she doesn't know why. She trusts her magic like she trusts her gut but a part of her is scared, because magic comes from emotion and what sort of emotion, what sort of pull, would draw out her magic when nothing else has so far?

But she was born brave, had to grow up brave, was taught to be brave by a man that gave her everything he could, including his life. She touches the bit of sail she has tied around her ring finger and walks into the water, following where her magic might take her.

"Hello."

Emma's heart stops. She isn't facing the speaker but she would know that voice anywhere – it haunts her waking dreams and her darkest nights, it's sealed in her heart, it's on a damn voice message on her phone that she listens to over and over again until she can't stop. But it just can't be. Hope is a dangerous thing, especially when it's false. There is something playing her false here, it has to be, and she should run as fast as she can, faster than she's ever run from anything before, but she can't. Because she needs it to be true.

She turns in the direction of the voice and he is there. Ocean blue eyes staring deeply into her own and she is drowning in them.

"Killian?" she whispers.

"Ah, so you've heard of me?" he replied, his words too familiar, striking at her heart. But his voice is different, the look in his eye is different, until he is looking away. "The Dark One," he calls himself.

"No," Emma croaks in response, realizing what she had missed in her initial shock of seeing his alive. He didn't know her, he didn't remember her, she was a stranger to him.

"Don't worry, lass. I'm not here to hurt you," he replies, misinterpreting her response. "I just…"

"Emma?" David's voice comes from behind her.

Emma turns her head towards the sound instinctively but realizes her mistake the moment she does. She twists back but Killian is already gone.

"No, wait!" she cries, scrambling towards where he had stood. She looks around frantically even though she knows he's gone. Because she can't feel him anymore – her magic is silent again, no longer directing her towards him. Still, she can't just give up, not when she thought he was long dead, and he is alive and breathing and she had felt him both stirring and quieting her magic, bringing her back alive, stitching together all the parts that had been broken. She falls over a fallen branch and stubs her toes and she's suddenly crying and laughing, overcome with relief at finding him, grief for believing him dead and failing to look for him, and hope hope hope, that she thought she never would have again, and love love love because she loves this man with every beat of her heart and she has it, she has a second chance now. She's never been to a new world without Killian and now she will never have to be.

"Emma! Emma, what happened?" David pants as he breaks through the tree line and nearly trips over her fallen form.

Somehow she manages through the tears and the laughter to tell David that she believes – she believes in the fucking family motto – that they will find the ones that they love, even if they have been separated by realms and curses and memory loss and death and even the darkest of nights. "I believe, Dad."

"Ah, yeah, that's good, sweetheart," David nods, clearly not understanding. He helps her up and this time, she lets him.

"I believe," she repeats, one hand holding her father's while using the thumb of her other ro rub the pice of sail on her finger, his piece of sail. Because it should have been impossible, it should have been something that only happened in storybook fairytales, not in her life, but it's real, Killian Jones, he's alive. And she is going to find him because she will always find him.