For DarkRoseSwan. There is always more Captain Swan to share.

Chapter 10: gone

I should've gone with her.

He turns the phrase over and over again in his mind as the days pass since Emma has left to take her son back to his hometown in Maine.

Since uttering the phrase the words haunt him, ever present in his mind with every minute that goes by that she doesn't return.

He tries her cell after the first week passes trying to tell himself that she's probably just busy getting her son situated. Maybe he didn't have the best home life and she was helping out his adoptive parents. He pretends that his heart doesn't stutter in his chest when the automated voice comes on telling him The caller you are trying to reach is unavailable.

The second week he files a missing person report. He doesn't think the police take him seriously as he is not family. "Maybe she just decided to stay with her son." "Maybe the area has bad cell reception." They tell him, but he knows its more than that.

He calls all the hospitals along the major roads from Boston to Maine. None of them have seen her or her boy.

When the police report no leads after another week has gone by, he decides to take matters into his own hands. But there is no town named Storybrooke in Maine. Perhaps he had heard the child wrong. He spends the next three weeks driving from Boston to Maine, stopping in as many towns along the way as he can. He visits the hospitals he called, puts up flyers and talks to as many townsfolk as he can. No one has seen her. It's as though she has simply vanished.

He drives through every town in Maine that starts with an "S" or a "B". She is not in any of them. Heart-broken he returns home.

He calls the leasing office of their apartment building. He is not family nor her emergency contact so the information they are willing to share is limited. She has not terminated her lease and the rent payment was made for last month. (Neal is her emergency contact. He can't guarantee that if the man were to ever show his face in the building that he wouldn't punch him until his arms gave out. Deep in his gut he knows Neal is somehow responsible for her disappearance.)

He uses the spare key to her apartment more often than he should. Sometimes in the middle of the night when he awakens from a dream of her smile only to be jolted back into the harsh realities of consciousness, he quietly walks down the hall and unlocks the door to her apartment.

Nothing has changed. Her spare bottle of perfume still sits on her dresser. The throw pillows on the couch are propped at a haphazard angle. The calendar still shows the month of October. A fine layer of dust begins to coat everything but he cannot bring himself to clean it off.

He doesn't touch anything when he is there, simply stands in the foyer or walks down the hall to her bedroom, just looking. Looking for some sign that she is going to return.

Six months pass and his editors is on the phone threatening to fire him. He can't keep missing deadlines. The authors need the illustrations for their books. He can't bring himself to care. He has illustrations, hundreds, possibly even thousands of them but they aren't just the superheroes or animals or cartoonish figures he is required to draw. She appears in all of them in some way.

Her yellow bug sits on the street in front of a toy store where a mother and child are looking in the window. Her red winter coat is worn by a rabbit trying to make a life for himself in the big city. Her green eyes sparkle on the face of a superhero about to save the world. And then there are the drawings of just her.

Her head thrown back in laughter, her eyes smiling over a steaming cup of hot cocoa, her proud stance in front of her bug. The drawings help a little. It allows him to remember what life was like when she was still here.

One year passes. It's a blustery day in October with threatening winds and gray skies. There's an electric feeling in the air, the kind that comes along with summer thunderstorms but the temperature is too cold for that. Sleet or freezing rain is more likely. Today is her birthday.

The shots of rum flow down his throat easier than he imagined. He wants to forget. He needs to forget. He can't handle her invading his dreams, his mind at all hours of the day. He awakes the next day, early afternoon by the position of the sun, feeling as though he has been run over by a truck. His head is pounding and the incessant ringing of his cell is doing nothing to ease the throbbing.

"What?!" He barks into the phone.

It's the police. Someone finally saw a flyer he put up. They remember seeing her and her son at a gas station, about thirty miles outside of Maine. He tries to stop it, but his heart soars. She did make it at least that far. Now he finally has something to go on. Last night he was resigned to giving up. To accepting the fate that she was never going to return and simply chose to leave him and the life she had made here in the past.

He hires a private investigator.

Her rent is stilling being paid each month. She resigned from her job via email two months after she disappeared.

A few weeks later he is alerted to the sound of furniture being moved down the hall. Throwing his apartment door open, he finds three men from a moving company packing up and taking her possessions from her apartment. He tries to stop them, begs them for information but all they can tell him is that their boss said to empty this apartment and the tenant wouldn't be there.

The investigator calls again.

A couple remembers seeing both of them in a diner off Interstate 95 near Kennebunk. The couple sat behind them and remembered overhearing some bits of conversation. The boy was saying they had less than an hour left.

"Assuming they continued to head north, that puts them around the Freeport area. I've contacted the local police there. They remember the flyers you put up but are going to start reaching out to the community. But it's been two years Killian, I don't know if we're going to find her. I'm sorry." The investigator tells him.

He refuses to lose hope. She has to be somewhere in that area. He uses all of his vacation time and goes there himself, wandering around in the town, looking for any sight of her. He hikes through all of the state parks and spends hours walking on the shores. He doesn't know why he's drawn to those two places but finds some amount of solace when he's staring out into the vast expanse of the Atlantic.

Once home again he finds himself drawn to the water. He spends hours walking along the docks, taking in the ships and sounds of the ocean in front of him. It's the only place he feels like he can breathe.

On her birthday, five years after she disappeared, he stands on the pier at the harbor. His fingers twist over the small piece of metal in his pocket, turning it over and over again between his fingers. When it warms up he pulls it from his pocket holding it in front of his face.

The gray skies and dark clouds that have appeared on her birthday every year since her disappearance are present once again. But as he holds up the small piece of metal, the clouds part and a ray of sunshine beams through and lands on it, making the object sparkle.

Years ago this simple act of Mother Nature would have given him hope. Made him believe that the clouds had parted and the sun had broken through while he was holding something of hers meant she was nearby, meant that it was sign he would find her soon. But five years of dead end leads left him bitter and jaded. He knew he couldn't continue like this.

Winding his arm back, he threw the spare key to her apartment as far out into the water as he could. The ray of sunlight followed it as it soared through the air and landed with a satisfying plop into the water. The clouds shifted and it was dark and gray again.

Shoving his hands into his pockets, he turned to make the long walk back home.

Angst really isn't my thing to write, so if this isn't too believable, I'm sorry!

Additional Author's Note: fantasylover4evr asked how Killian can be in both worlds and I realized I intended to explain that later in the story but it doesn't come up for a few more chapters and it's not good form to leave you all confused. Captain Hook was in the Enchanted Forest with Cora when Regina cast the first curse, however while everyone else went to Storybrooke he went to Boston and became Killian Jones. When Emma and Mary-Margaret fell through the portal, it brought him back to the Enchanted Forest. As for the time difference, it's simply a mistake in Regina's curse. She'll explain it in Chapter 17.