"I suppose it's like the ticking crocodile, isn't it? Time is chasing after all of us."
-Peter Pan
Chapter Six: Lillian and Killian
(Neverland: Lillian's Past)
Blood and sweat dripped into Lillian's eyes as she pulled herself up a tree branch. She braced her head against the bark, blinking until she could see straight again. Heavy rustles from below stirred her back into motion and she hefted her frame up another branch.
"Ye'd best give up, lass. It's a worse death tha' awaits ye if ye keep runnin'," a gritty voice chuckled from below. "Ye come down now, we kill ye quickly. But keep it up, an' it's Marooner's Rock for ye."
"Technically, pirate, we're climbing," she grunted as she hefted all her weight to one leg and pushed herself up through a break in the branches. Her head cleared the leafy canopy, thrusting her into dim sunlight. An early dawn unveiled a murky Neverland sprawling around her.
"But I'll grant you this, running is not a particularly brilliant plan."
A dark mass hovered between her and the rising sun, growing larger as it grew closer.
The pirate's head, scratched and muddied from his own ascent, popped up from the branches as the mass loomed overhead. The angle of light changed and the mass turned blue and yellow and breathtaking as the Jolly Roger sailed out of the sun rays, dragging a rope along the treetops. Lillian rammed her heel into his head, launched herself off the tree, grabbed the rope and swung free.
"Not when you can fly!"
The pirate, a greasy blonde with a bleeding, bulbous nose, could only hold fast to the tree and glare as the girl swooped away, brown leather coat flapping in the wind as she dangled from the side of the soaring ship.
-0-
(Storybrooke: Present)
"Did you say the future?" Emma blurted. She'd expected a certain level of chaos in the town hall, but she'd arrived to find absolute bedlam and securing a private place to radio Killian basically meant bolting herself in a supply closet, while Mary Margaret and David ran interference. The whole town, still emotionally exhausted from the shadow of the Wicked Witch, wasn't dealing well with yet another imminent threat.
"Aye, love. Nigh thirty years, give or take."
"How can you be sure it's for real?"
"Because I know who wrote it, Swan. It's Henry."
"Henry!? You're reading Henry's journal from the future?"
"Aye. Fortunate for us, too, given his loquacious nature. He records that, sometime in our near future, Storybrooke comes under devastating attack. You all make it back to the Enchanted Forest, but the threat follows you. While there, he seeks out the Jolly Roger to aide in the fight. That's as far as I've made out."
"So it's possible Lee's not from another realm, she and this monster she's hunting are from our future?"
True panic began to build in Emma's gut.
"Aye. Her description matches Henry's: a shape-shifting creature which takes hosts, drives its victims into homicidal insanity, and travels realms seemingly at will."
"How do things like this even exist?" Emma sighed in exasperation.
"Just delivering the message, love."
Emma paused for a moment before radioing back. "Killian, you said 'you all make it back'. What happens to you?"
"Swan," Killian's tone warned that he'd rather not answer.
"Killian," she pressed.
"Apparently I have the audacity to die in the first round."
"How?"
"He has yet to elaborate but the lass did say I'd make a fine appetizer."
"Keep reading. I have to go figure out what to tell the town."
"I know what you're thinking, Swan, but didn't we learn a pointed lesson about changing past events?"
She clenched the radio until her knuckles turned white. "It's not the past, it's the future. There's a difference."
"It's the past to Henry."
"Just. Keep. Reading."
Emma shoved the radio back into her waistband. Heat filled her face and she found herself wiping tears. Taking a moment to steel herself, she made three quick decisions. First, she'd only tell the town the bare minimum they needed to know to stay safe. Second, this scourge ended here, if it was the last thing she did. And third, Killian Jones was, on no uncertain terms, allowed to die.
-0-
(Neverland: Future)
Henry, whose tender heart rarely expressed violent emotion, full-out shouted at Lillian, voice deepened with the responsibility of rank, if not by age alone. Though by Neverland magic, he still appeared in his early twenties, by Enchanted Forest reckoning, he had passed 40. His cream navy uniform and red brocade coat—red coats which had trickled into military uniform code ever since Emma Swan returned to take her place among the high royalty—added a sharp edge of authority to his every movement, his every word and, at present, his very glare. Lillian, who rarely shrank from anything, stood with hands behind her back and shoulders slumped. She felt dirty and small in comparison, her own brown leather forest gear, still grimy with sweat and tree sap, clashed with the ordered cleanliness of the captain's quarters.
Reckless. Thoughtless. Dangerous. Cavalier.
She rather liked that last one, but coming from Henry, it hurt.
"Henry, I…"
"No. No, Lillian. You were sent here under my care to keep you safe. How am I supposed to do that when you disappear in the middle of the night? If we hadn't gone looking for you, where would you be right now?"
Lillian's heart sank further. She didn't believe she was here because she was in danger, everyone was in danger. No, she was here because she was a bad memory.
She burned to say as much, but she said nothing and Henry kept on with his speech. "Keeping you safe now means teaching you some discipline. This crew has rules. This family has rules."
Lillian stared at the grain of the table in front of her. Oh, this again. She was supposed to go with a team. She was supposed to run at the slightest sign of trouble. She was supposed to be a good little Charming or a brave little Swan.
But that was the material difference between her and Henry.
He was a Swan, son of the Savior. She was just the little orphan Jones.
BOOM.
She braced as a pile of hardbound journals slammed on the table, snapping her back to attention. "I recognize that look in your eye, Lillian," Henry hissed, walking to a drawer close to his bed. He opened it, pulled out a few items, and shoved it closed angrily. "You don't want to listen to me anymore. Fine. Maybe you'll listen to this," the young captain held out a folded paper. "Before Killian died, he left me a key to decoding his old logs. This war went very bad very quickly and we lost a lot of people. There are few left who remember him and, because of that, you've lost out on a lot. For that, I'm sorry, but it is no excuse. You want to keep playing the lone maverick, great. See where that gets you. But if you want to learn something about a ship, about duty, about your family—you won't find a better teacher." On top of the journals he placed the paper and, with little ceremony, the nicked and worn hook of Killian Jones.
"Henry…"
"No," Henry straightened, his gaze lingered on the hook before returning to Lillian's. His temper had cooled, but his authority remained. "From now on, on this ship, it's not Henry. It's Captain. And unless it's an apology, you don't speak to me again until you've read all of this."
"Cap…"
"Not. One. Word."
Lips pressed tightly together, Lillian pulled a small pouch from her pocket and held it out to Henry. He let his glare sink in for another heartbeat before he took it and examined the contents. Pixie dust. Hard to find in the new Neverland, and enough to keep the ship in flight for quite some time.
Lillian raised her eyebrow questioningly.
The young captain closed the pouch tightly and nodded subtly. "Good work, Lillian. But bad form."
-0-
(Storybrooke: Present)
"Emma, it gets worse."
"Are you kidding me?" Emma leaned her head against the tile wall of the small bathroom she'd slipped into when she heard Killian click the radio for attention. She had finally talked the town off the proverbial ledge, set up a security detail with Mother Superior, and convinced at least half the residents to bed down for the night. Regina hesitantly agreed to defend the town hall, for Henry's sake, of course. Gold took watch at the hospital, being the only person they knew this thing was afraid of. Things were finally starting to settle, she didn't need more bad news.
"It's not just the Enchanted Forest, it's all the realms. Or at least all the realms future Henry knows about. They all fall except two—the Enchanted Forest and Neverland. As the Scourge grows more powerful in the Enchanted Forest, it gets faster, stronger, and harder to kill, so Henry goes to Neverland to build his secret weapon."
"The ship?"
"Lee was right, he turns it into a bloody warship. He wants to make a fleet to take back the realms."
"A fleet of magic, flame-throwing battleships," Emma almost laughed, "yep, that sounds like Henry."
-0-
(Neverland: Future)
After numerous attempts, Lillian all but gave up on the first page of the pirate logs. Her head aching with the sheer extent of rules, symbols and synthetic grammar in Hook's books, she slumped face down on the open page.
"Doing a little research on the family tree?"
Lillian sat up, deftly closing the book with one hand before registering the presence of Rumplestiltskin. She idly lifted the book and tapped it on the table. "The only parents I knew are dead. All I have left are rumors," she let the book drop flat on the table with a look of irritation, "and mystery."
"I'll save you some trouble. There wasn't much mystery to your father, it's your mother that boggles me. But," he giggled, throwing a finger in the air playfully. "Never say that I was never a team player. The captain wants you to learn a little discipline, and I am happy to oblige."
"Henry sent you?"
"Of course not, dearie. He believes in you. I, however, am a bit of a skeptic. Don't take it personally. In fact, I'll teach you something even your father would approve of. Lesson number one," the green man's demeanor darkened. "You don't leave the ship without your captain's permission."
Lillian's feet tingled and, for a moment, she couldn't even lift them from the floor. She turned a dark glare of her own on the snickering man.
"Lesson two—and really this is more of an ad lib on my part—if you ever do anything to endanger Henry's life," Rumplestiltskin gritted his teeth in a humorless smile, "I will wipe you from existence."