As promised, new chapter already! I'm glad you're so anxious to read this story because I'm equally anxious to share it with you! Thanks for reading and enjoy the feels!

Emma spends the weekend doing nothing except being with Henry; taking him to the beach and watching him play in the sand, but her thoughts turn to Killian too often for comfort. She tries to block them and focus all her attention on her son, but it's not really working, no matter how many times she tells herself that Mrs. Jones is there if Killian needs anything, that he'd been without Emma for years and that he won't even notice her two-day absence.

It's funny really, that after only a week of taking care of him she already thinks that she's irreplaceable, as if what she's doing for him is something no one else can do properly.

"Mommy", Henry says to get her attention, sitting down on her beach towel and setting aside his plastic bucket and shovel, effectively pulling her out of her reverie. She brushes sand off his shoulder and he crawls into her lap, giggling when she blows raspberries on his neck. "Why do you work for mister Killy?"

"Did Ruby tell you something?" Emma asks him, chuckling at the cute nickname and wondering what Killian would think of it if he heard her son refer to him as "Killy".

"No. I just heard you when you told her that you need to feed him and do stuff for him, and I was wondering why", Henry says, patiently waiting for her to gather her thoughts and answer him.

"Killian needs help with certain things, and it's my job to help him", Emma says, brushing hair from his forehead and thinking that she really needs to give him a haircut. Trouble is, by the time she gets home she already misses him so badly that she only wants to talk to him and listen to him talk and mundane things like haircuts tend to get overlooked.

"Yes, but why?"

"Because he was hurt and he can't do it himself", she tries to explain Killian's condition as delicately as possible, and Henry frowns, obviously not getting it. The main reason Emma treads so carefully, is that she's so acutely aware of her other duty, of her task of stopping Killian from doing something horrible to himself, and it's making her deathly afraid of Henry somehow finding out about it.

"Can't the doctors fix him?" He asks her, looking up at her with a hopeful expression because he's four and he doesn't understand yet that miracles like that only happen in cartoons and children's books.

"There are some things nobody can fix, baby", she tells him softly, her stomach dropping at the possibility that Killian is going to be stuck in that chair for the rest of his life.

Emma ambushes Leroy in the kitchen on Monday morning and demands to know how serious Killian's condition is and what are his chances for recovery. Leroy starts to list medical terms like incomplete SCI and C6 and ever-present danger of AD and she stops him, waving her hands around until he shuts up.

"In English, please", she says, and Leroy rolls his eyes, which seems to be his default response to pretty much everything. That and heavy frowning; he'd be a perfect Grumpy if this was a fairytale and not real, hard life.

"He's pretty much screwed any way you slice it. The best I can do is exercise his limbs to stop the muscles from atrophying, and maybe in time he recovers some mobility in his arms, but he's never going to walk again unless the good doctors come up with something groundbreaking, which I doubt they ever will", he says, looking at her like she's stupid for expecting to hear anything else.

Emma feels like she's been slapped, like he just told her that she's a silly girl who doesn't know what she's doing without actually saying it.

"But-"

"But he's too young and beautiful and charming and charismatic to have that happen to him", Leroy mocks her, shaking his head like he hadn't expected this from her. "You're not the first caregiver who pitied him but you're probably the last so… just don't. He hates it."

"I wasn't-", Emma starts to say but he storms out of the kitchen and leaves her standing there, feeling awful and wondering why he said that she's going to be Killian's last caregiver; he can't honestly think that she's going to do this forever, can he?

Something is telling her that there's more to his words than that, but she chooses to ignore the bad feeling in the pit of her stomach because it scares her more than she'd like to admit, and leaves the kitchen to see what Killian wishes to have for breakfast.

"So, Swan. Where is your son while you're wasting time here with me?" Killian asks her a couple of days later as she tries to clean the floor in front of the TV without obscuring his vision. "And could you please turn it off, this movie is bloody awful."

"Henry is with a friend of mine. And I'm not wasting time", Emma says, turning off the TV and glaring at him as she leans on her broom pointedly.

"Why not put him in daycare?" Killian asks her, his raised eyebrow telling her that he doesn't care if she's doing any cleaning or not.

"It's too expensive. And besides, he loves Ruby. She'd been taking care of him pretty much since we moved here", Emma says, going back to her work.

"Ruby? So you don't have a boyfriend?" He asks her, and Emma freezes involuntarily at the word boyfriend because it makes her think about Neal and that is never a good thing.

"No. What's with the sudden interest in me?" She finally answers him, relieved that her voice doesn't tremble at all.

"I'm bored", he says, but there's a glimmer of something in his eyes that she could easily call relief if she ever thought he'd be interested in her.

"Then let's go outside. Take a walk around the neighborhood", Emma suggests, and he looks at her like she just proposed they went on the Moon.

"No thanks", he says curtly, his eyes giving her a silent warning not to push it.

"Oh come on. You're bored, and you're going to stay bored until you get out of the house", Emma says, refusing to take no for an answer.

"I'm not in the mood for people staring at me like I'm some kind of a sodding circus attraction", he says, and his words slice her like a knife.

"But-", Emma starts to say, wanting to tell him that nobody would stare because most people would probably just ignore him, but then it hits her that feeling invisible must hurt more than awkward stares.

"Drop it, Swan", he says sharply, effectively cutting her off before she can put her foot in her mouth. He startles her a little, but she doesn't back down because if she lets him win this round she may never convince him to leave the house.

"Fine, then let's just go to the garden", she says and starts walking, praying that he's going to follow and letting out a silent sigh when he does.

"What's it like being on the ocean with nothing but the water and sky surrounding you?" Emma asks, stretched out on the bench with her eyes closed. Killian is parked next to her under the tree, and when they're here she keeps forgetting that they're not friends, that she's just his employee, that she shouldn't be asking him questions like this.

"Indescribable", he says, and she can almost hear the wistful smile in his voice. She can't see him but she's still so aware of his presence, of the exact relation of his body to hers in this garden, among the flowers and trees and under the sky that shares the color with his eyes.

"Try", she says softly, listening to him breathe until he finally speaks and she can listen to his voice shape common words into poetry with his beautiful accent, making her want to stay here like this forever.

"It's peaceful. It's like you're not even on the same planet as everybody else. It's like you're the last person on Earth and you're finally aware of the immensity of the universe."

Emma had came to the realization that there's no safe subject pretty quickly, that there's no way to avoid making him think about everything he'd lost, no way to take his mind off his situation completely because he's aware of it every waking moment and there's nothing she can do to change that, but sometimes he loses himself in memories, for just a little while managing to leave the bounds of his body and be free again.

This is one of those times.

She opens her eyes and finds him looking at her, a little disappointed that she didn't get to see his face when he was far away, because it's only when it happens that she feels like she's actually doing something that matters for him.

"I've been alone most of my life, and I hate it, but you just made it sound kind of wonderful", she tells him softly, remembering her childhood, how much she had longed that some family would adopt her and made her their own, but it just wasn't in the cards for her.

"What do you mean? What happened to your parents?" He asks her, leaning forward a little, as if he wants to let her know that he's here if she wants to talk about it.

And when she realizes that she wants to, she tells him everything; how she can't remember any parents, just the orphanage she grew up in, how she had a family for a couple of years when she was little but they got their own child and they gave her back, and how after that nobody had ever wanted her.

Her voice trembles and she doesn't want to cry, so she sits up and blinks, staring at the flowers across the path and breathing slowly until the burning in her sinuses goes away.

"I'm sorry, Swan", Killian says softly, and Emma shrugs because it's nobody's fault but her parents'. Still, the way he says it is so genuine she can't help but smile.

"Treasure your mom and dad even if they irritate you sometimes", Emma tells him, turning her head to look at him. "They decided to keep you, and they are the only people who are going to love you no matter what."

"My father doesn't want to come see me because I'm like this", he says almost absentmindedly, leaning his head back and staring up at the tree top.

"What?" Emma exclaims before she can stop herself, and he nods, his mouth pressed into a thin line. It's hard for Emma to decide what is worse; her parents giving her up when she was just a helpless baby or Killian's father failing him now when he needs him the most.

"I'd say your theory of unconditional love doesn't apply to life-altering injuries. Either that or he's a bloody wanker", Killian says and Emma wishes she could somehow take his pain, even if there's no other way to do so but make it hers.

"Your father and my parents would probably get along pretty good", Emma says and feels warmth spreading through her when he looks at her again and gives her a smile, and it's got absolutely nothing to do with the sun shining down on them.

It seems that each passing day reveals one more layer of her and one more layer of him, and more often than not, those layers are pretty much the same. She'd always believed in kindred spirits, and for a moment she can almost believe that maybe she just found hers, but then she remembers that she had thought the same about Neal and she puts a stop to those kinds of thoughts.

She's got Henry, and that's all that matters.

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