Killian had been in Storybrooke for a long, long time. Not nearly as long as he had been in Neverland, (and oh god, did he regret that sometimes), but long enough for it to matter. He still looked to be in his thirties, dark hair and clear blue eyes mocking him whenever he looked in the mirror.
You're the one who didn't want to grow up, his reflection sneered. Well you've gotten your wish now. How does it feel?
To be honest it felt like crap.
Killian remembered meeting Emma, being charmed off his feet by her confidence, her vulnerability, her honesty, her insight. He remembered loving her, remembered the pain of loss. A pain still felt.
He remembered walking Henry to school and watching him get married.
Remembered Snow's utter distaste for him in the beginning, and later, her utter acceptance of him into her family. David's near-martial watch over his daughter, and that same protective gaze being lowered over him.
Remembered roses at their funeral.
He remembered laughter and balloons at a birthday party, for who, he can't discern. Remembers wedding cake and black clothes.
Death and life and life and death.
Killian remembered holding little Emma as she cried, remembered sunny days spent telling her stories and nights spent watching her bake her insomnia away. Remembered planting dahlias and daisies over Henry and Emma.
Remembered five graves in a cemetery he'd never be laid to rest in.
But that was okay. It was all okay.
He still had Henry's Emma, had Red and Victor and Jiminy, Jefferson and Grace and Regina and so so many others. Some had passed on, a few had left, but it was okay.
Because that was how time worked. It kept moving, kept pushing you forward if you didn't move your feet. It refused to pass you by, instead insisting on pulling you with it, forever moving forward, forever glancing back.
Granny was gone now, too. So was Gepetto, Sydney Glass. Cora had just withered away. Dust in the air.
As Belle grew older and Gold didn't, a decision was made. When it became clear that he wouldn't die as long as he was in Storybrooke, he handed his shop over to Killian, gave him a locked box with a dagger inside and told him to keep it closed.
He and Belle were later said to have resuscitated a library in upper New York, filled it with magical books. Hid and guarded it.
And one day, when Killian received word that Gold had died, quietly and unspectacularly in a hospital, he found within himself no sting of regret that he wasn't responsible.
Only a quiet melancholy for all the things that were ending around him.
And then one day Regina wasn't in her office.
They found her sprawled, undignified, over her front walk, black hair frosting over with silver and smooth skin slowly wrinkling with hidden age. Turned out her magic had failed her. She just stopped. Couldn't keep herself alive anymore, not even with her willpower. Emma went to her funeral, laid down deep violet orchids and a single red rose, so dark it seemed black.
Jefferson got sick one winter, and he didn't get better. Jiminy was one day freed of his duty, found lying on his bed with a wide, wide smile on his face and a letter from Regina clutched carefully between his hands. It was just one after another and soon Killian stopped keeping track.
When Emma disappeared, Killian just stopped.
The clock was still stagnant, eight fifteen on the dot.
August left town, when Killian wasn't quite sure. It may have been after Emma disappeared, it may have been before Henry and Kate died. He stopped marking things with holidays or weekdays.
He stopped everything.
For about ten years, Killian was more frozen and purposeless than he had ever been. Grace married some guy from Portland, dragged him back to Storybrooke. She knocked on the door, found it unlocked.
She talked to Killian for about an hour.
Nobody else ever knew what she said, neither of them ever told. But Killian left that apartment, walked out of the door for the first time in ten years, little more than a skeleton with a dying heart.
Forty-four years in Storybrooke, and he began to look backwards again.
He went to the docks.
The wood was familiar, weathered and rough beneath his feet.
"I should be looking for her." He sighed, winter-cold air frosting over with clouds of his breath. "Emma, I mean."
Most people would take a moment to slip off their shoes, socks. He sat on the edge, ignoring or perhaps unfeeling of the ice water seeping through the seams of his shoes and into his bones.
"Not you, Emma. I mean Henry's Emma. The young one." He looked down into the water, as though he could see to the bottom if he tried.
He couldn't.
And not just because it was, well, the ocean, but because of the blue threads of light tangling around his legs. Killian knew that light, knew the warmth of it, the bone-chilling feeling as it swept through you.
And he knew, without any bit of doubt, where Emma was.
Because that light only came from a portal to Neverland.
So he smiled, looked up as if his Emma was listening and said quietly, "Thank you."
He braced his hand against the dock's edge, eyes wide and mouth closed. Then he pushed, falling gracelessly into the water. The roughness of it felt good on his face, like he was finally waking up from a long sleep. Once he got his bearings, focused enough to grasp a thread of light in his hand, he could feel something. Something he hadn't felt in a very, very long time. There was a pull in his chest, a burning urge to dive, deep deep down into the very depths of the sea.
The air he had locked in his lungs had long since expired, and the burning in his chest was as much in his lungs as his heart. But on he went, forever down into the dark. When he reached the portal, he thought he was dying, the light was so bright. But he could see the sun, far above him, a different sun that shone like sizzling gold.
He had reached Neverland.
Killian breached the surface of the water harshly, sun blinding him and salt like acid in his lungs. His hair fell over his eyes and for a moment he lost track of which way was up. That is, until he heard the unmistakeable sound of mermaids laughing at some poor fool.
Well he was a fool, alright. But he wasn't going to give up on Emma now, and it was as good a bet as any that they were the ones to have taken her. Nobody else could swim that deep.
"Excuse me," he began, wading onto the shore and across the tiny strip of land that separated the sea from their lagoon. "you wouldn't happen to have seen a young girl? Yay high, dark hair, blue eyes?" When they merely continued giggling, he added as an afterthought, "Legs?"
"Why should we tell you?" A redhead, whom Killian faintly remembered as being named Devina, rolled onto her back to look down at him. Also to give him a prime view of her chest, which he ignored. He'd seen all the tricks before.
"Because I'm bloody Captain Hook, and she's my granddaughter," he replied shortly. Devina arched a thin eyebrow.
"You look good for your age, Captain."
"So I've been told," he quipped, brandishing his hook. "Now tell me before I feel the need to go fishing."
"Ohhhh, her..." A blonde sighed despondently. "She's over there." Killian scrambled frantically over the rocks to the spot underwater she'd gestured to. The mermaids snickered. He turned a half inch, and the mermaids scattered, swimming back to their ocean lair.
"Emma?" He felt beneath the surface frantically, "Emma?!"
"Hi." He turned abruptly. He hadn't heard that voice in years. It was like hearing an expertly played symphony after being subjected to horrible renditions of 'Hot Cross Buns' for four decades.
"Emma?" He knew she'd hear him, despite the fact that he'd barely gasped her name.
And Emma it was. Just not the one he had been looking for. She looked good, her hair tied up in braids and wrapped in a dress made of white linen. She smiled at him, and he realized she had found Emma. The girl had a blanket over her shoulders, and despite the perpetually sunny climate of Neverland, her lips were blue.
"Hi Uncle Killian." She waved. Killian was still bowled over by the reappearance of his lost love, and absently waved back with a flick of fingers.
"You can't be real," he breathed.
"No," Emma replied simply, "but I am. Isn't that the point of Neverland? Impossible things become possible?" He took a step forward, reached out. His fingers brushed her forearm, and the warmth, the mere feel of skin on skin made him nearly collapse.
This was real. She was real.
His fingers tightened around her arm and pulled her to his chest. Her arms went around his waist, his hand to the back of her head.
"Gods, how I've missed you." He whispered into her hair. She nodded, eyes clenching shut as she buried her face in his dripping-wet collar.
"Um, guys?" The poor girl was still shivering, and she pointed, frightened, behind the two. They turned as one, finding themselves face-to-face with a group of bristling mermaids.
"I think we run," Killian said, looking to Emma, whose arm was still around his waist.
"Yeah," she nodded. "Totally."
They splashed quickly from the lagoon, Emma hooking one arm through the elbow of her granddaughter and dragging her along behind them.
"Come on!" She yelled gleefully, plunging into the sea. Still hand-in-hand with Emma, who was hand-in-hand with Killian, Emma the younger found herself being yanked under. Her startled gasp was quickly muffled by saltwater, and as the trio swept through the portal, she began to claw her way upwards after her grandparents.
"I am never leaving Storybrooke again," she gasped, clambering onto the dock. Killian chuckled ruefully.
"You were never really meant to leave in the first place," he coughed.
"Actually," Emma began, lying one her back. "She was. It's only because of her I'm here."
"Oh?" Killian lay down next to her. "Do tell." And then suddenly, "Wait, you'r both named Emma." The two nodded in sync. "What am I supposed to call you?"
"Well, I could be Em and she can be Emma." With that, the younger of the two flopped backwards, eyes set closed stubbornly, as though she'd rather never wake up again, thank you very much.
"Well then," Emma started, smiling, "my heart was ripped out." Killian shot her an look, which she laughed at. "The ashes of my heart get spread in the ocean," at this Killian smiled sheepishly, "fall through the portal, end up in Neverland. Some fairy- I think her name was Tina Bell? Something Bell?- anyway, she does some wacko fairy spell, and until a blood relative ends up within ten feet of me, I'm still dead. So, the lovely Em here gets kidnapped by mermaids and ends up about, well, ten feet from me. And now I'm alive."
And then Emma promptly fell asleep to prove her point.
Three weeks later, and Emma was still being asked by incredulous passer-by how she was (miraculously) alive again.
"I mean, the first few times it was alright, but now I just wanna rip all my hair out," she explained to Red, who nodded obligingly and attempted to sneak her another cookie.
"Duh."
Thirteen years later, and looking not a day older, Emma and Killian concurred that due to Tinker Bell's 'wacko fairy spell', as well as the forty-some nonstop years spent in Neverland, she was as unaging as he was.
Emma was adjusting well to being alive-again.
She still liked cinnamon in her hot cocoa, still looked pained and sad whenever someone mentioned her parents. She still took flowers to the four graves on the hill. She cried, and made Killian promise not to tell.
He held her closer, and never did.
Em visited from college, bringing countless boyfriends, (each of whom fled the minute her grandparents set upon them), and eventually, a large brown leather-bound book.
She proposed they write down the town's stories, the ones not told in Henry's book.
So they did.
The story of a kindhearted, lonely pirate and a long-lost, walled-off princess, of a cricket and a queen. A wolf and a scientist, a puppet and his father. Of a sleeping beauty, a warrior maiden and the prince who loved them both. Of a spinner and a librarian, a schoolteacher and a coma patient. Every one of them on a journey, making mistakes, winning and losing battles. Of history repeating itself, and happy endings. And it was a happy ending. Or it would have been, if that was the end.
But Killian and Emma lived on. They're still living.
Happily ever after.