CHAPTER SEVEN
THE FAVOR
Killian is at a seaside tavern and already half drunk when Emma finds him well before "happy hour". He's not hard to find, flipping coins into an extremely busty woman's cleavage while aggressively flirting with a young bar maiden who's clearly been taking drinks for tips and is probably one more shy of passing out cold the way she's stumbling and spilling her pints of ale.
Pulling some coins from the sack at her belt, Emma hands them to the busty prostitute and orders her to take the drunk girl home while her virtue is still intact.
"Awe, come on, luv! I put a lot of doubloons and charm into- the pirate protests, before she turns to face him and push back the hood of her cloak. He back-peddles with, "Teaching her how to hold her liquor so she doesn't get taken advantage of."
Emma picks up the nearest stein of beer and throws the contents in his face. As he sputters a few of the other pirates in the tavern seem to consider coming to his defense, but then think better of it. Whether they're from Storybrooke or Blackbeard's former goons who never made it there, her face is recognized everywhere thanks to being a princess. It's not being a princess or even once married to one of "their kind" that stays their hands on their weapons, though. Everyone knows she was the Dark One once, and just as it is with Rumplestiltskin, rumors persist about how the demonic magical force permanently alters its hosts, what when it's supposed to be that death is the only way to be free of it. She's used that fear occasionally to her advantage, much as it does not sit well with her.
This seaside red light district of debauchery isn't the sort of place for an upstanding lady to venture, even in daylight. But put on all black, some red lipstick, and a severe hairstyle that would send even the Evil Queen of the past running for the hills, and people of the Enchanted Forest won't fuck with you.
"I see you've had no problem reverting to your old self," Emma snaps as she slips onto the wooden bench across from him. She recalls their first "meeting" in a tavern like this one, when she was dressed as a busty maiden and trying to get him drunk, which was his tactic for getting laid. Somehow she'd been able to convince herself that the man from the past who probably raped women, that his future self had warned her about, was a completely different man from her lover. Maybe it was part of her own increasing disconnection from pre-Storybrooke Emma that had skewed her view of reality and how people don't really change.
"You're looking a little 'retro' yourself," Killian retorts. "On a warpath of destruction now that you're a free woman? You're welcome by the way."
Emma glares. "For granting me a legal right that I would have had if I hadn't gotten dragged into this patriarchal nightmare world that everyone else seems so delusionally fond of?"
"What can I say? People here have simple interests."
"Getting drunk, getting married, getting pregnant. Wash, rinse, repeat," Emma scoffs, then tells him, "I want to go to Wayland."
Emma doesn't need to ask if he's heard of it the way he tenses. It's probably a place all sailors have heard of going to back the time of Odysseus... which is maybe a concurrent time in a timeless world based on the Peloponnesian War; she tries not to think too hard on the parallel universe crap.
"Has Charley-"
"Not yet, but there's been no improvement," Emma cuts him off. "Mulan said that, perhaps, her soul had begun to pass on before Whale was able to internee, that it's trapped now. Mortality seems to work differently here."
"Magic doesn't like to give up the dead," Killian responds. "The Crocodile is right that it reigns supreme over science here. It's possible, but..."
"Will you help me then?" Emma asks. "You have the fastest enchanted ship-"
"You conned me into raising another man's child. You just sent my entertainment away and threw ale in my face."
"It's not a con if you were aware of it. Your entertainment would be considered statutory rape back in my world. And you never told me that Milah was Neal's mother. You also never told me you betrayed him to Pan to save your own ass with a side of spite at his rejection. As though any child would trust a man who lied to him for weeks, kept secret that he was his mother's lover - a criminal that she loved more than the child she abandoned.
"We might have wronged one another," she states, "but Baelfire did nothing to deserve your betraying him as a a child or your intentionally hurtful pursuit of me like some prize, just to take away someone else he loved, because damming him to that hell, alone, for centuries wasn't enough. Did you mean any of what you said before you left, or has alcohol just loosened the truth from your tongue?"
Killian looks away, half hiding his face with a large stein of ale. "I meant it. I was not a good man," he concedes, then corrects, "I am not a good man. My bother's death was less a catalyst of change as it was finally freeing me from his morality and rigid adherence to rules under which I had been silently chaffing. I was always a pirate at heart. The sea was always my first love. And you were just a siren that enchanted me, made me believe I could be better."
"You deluded yourself over one kiss I never should have given you that was probably spurred on by a cloud of narcotic pixie dust," Emma scoffs. "And whatever man you are, he still owes Baelfire. Neal died so his family had a chance, the family you tried to take from him like a condescending bully before he was even dead just to hold me up like a trophy. And for what? To double down on your spite at a child? No matter what I've done, you owe him, you owe his family, and that includes his daughter, regardless of what you think of me."
AN: They both kind of suck in this story. Sorry about that. Bad unconscious!
