Killian and Emma were not a combative couple. After the affair of both being Dark Ones and the subsequent trip to the Underworld, they came to the agreement together that secrets and lies had no place in their relationship. That naturally eliminated a lot of conflict. He also theorized that early on in their courtship, their disputes centered around her reluctance to admit her feelings for him and to let him into her life. With that also settled, bickering was rare in the house. They worked hard to always make decisions as a unit and avoided assuming anything.

But when conflict did arise, they fought with the kind of passion one could expect from a former-thief-turned-bail-bonds-woman and a pirate.

When they returned from the Underworld, they were more in love than ever before and too busy consummating that love and basking in the glow of being reunited to spare the time necessary to argue. It was eerie, actually, how little they fought. They both fell into the trap of believing that this peace would continue for the rest of their lives.

And then they got engaged.

It was like someone flipped a switch and suddenly everything they did created derision. They bickered more in the five months they were engaged than any other time in their lives together. They had their first big blowup that required a visit to Archie to sort out. Emma slept on the couch one night after refusing to apologize for not doing her part in cleaning the house (and she slunk back up to bed sometime before dawn because the couch was not a suitable bed and her guilt was eating holes in her heart). They bought a new couch a couple days later and they devised a clear list of chores that they both were responsible for separately. After that, they had a week or two where everything was good again.

That lasted until Killian brought up the matter of safety at work. Some trolls showed up in town one day when Emma and Will were on patrol together. Will was still adjusting to the new schedule and Emma was actually eager to take on the trolls and give him his first taste of heroics. That plan did not go as well as she liked as they were vastly outnumbered and Will hastily poured out a potion that negated all magic within a mile in hopes that it would get rid of the trolls. The only thing it did was disarm their greatest weapon: Emma's magic.

They fought valiantly, but a troll still managed to land a few good hits on both of them, resulting in Emma having a dislocated wrist and a cut on her forehead. She had to then wait a few hours in order to use her magic to heal them both which was right around the time Killian showed up for a shift change.

Will was finishing up the report (which Emma planned to stay and read over before filing it away) when Killian walked into the station, whistling an old shanty and twirling his car keys around his finger, his good mood instantly disappearing when he saw the tender red mark just above his beloved's eyebrow and the dried blood on her shirt.

"What happened?" he demanded, marching right up to her and reaching for her newly healed hand, causing her to hiss and pull it away. "Emma?" He only called her by her first name when he really needed her to hear him.

"I'm fine. Just a little banged up. Nothing magic can't solve," she said, trying to wave away his worry.

"By what? Who did this to you?" His hand instinctively reached for his holster, prepared to draw his weapon and take down anyone who had injured her.

"Just a few trolls. They're gone now - won't be causing anymore trouble around here. As long as they didn't invite any friends for a visit."

"I hope they did," he murmured venomously.

She sighed and used her good hand to cup his cheek. Will made some sort of disgusted sound nearby. "Hey, I'm fine, okay? It comes with the territory of the job. I can win any fight. That doesn't mean I'll walk away unscathed."

Her words were meant to comfort him but they haunted him all night as he went through his patrol. By the time he got home the next morning, he had allowed anxiety to consume him as his mind raced through every worst case scenario he could think of, each one worse than the last. His worry was not assuaged by seeing Emma in bed whole and safe when he noticed the bottle of Tylenol and a thawed-out ice pack on her nightstand. The wound on her head was completely healed and her wrist was no longer swollen. He was still a nervous wreck at the thought that what happened to her yesterday could have been much worse.

"I told you, it was just a couple trolls. Nothing I can't handle," she answered when he said as much. She left the door to the bathroom open as she went inside to wash her face and begin her morning routine.

"And what if next time, it's something worse?"

"Then I'll deal with it. We can call Regina to heal me. I'm not the only one in this town with magical healing powers."

"What if it's too late for that?" he asked, his voice soft with dread.

Her hands stilled in the process of drawing her hair into a ponytail and she turned to face him, surprised to find him sitting at the edge of the bed in a defeated pose. "I'm not going to die, Killian."

"You can't guarantee that, love. No one can."

"You did."

"And I died three times after that!" he exclaimed. A part of him knew that lack of sleep and anxiety were making him slightly delirious and more volatile than normal. He was too far into this discussion to stop now though.

"You really don't need to remind me. I was there each time and each time it was my fault," she snapped.

"Don't I get to be the one concerned about losing you for once? Or does it always have to be me?"

"Depends, how many times have I died in front of you?" She slammed the door closed so that she could use the bathroom, wrenching it open again after she had flushed and washed her hands. "I don't get why it's a big deal. These trolls were the first monsters we had to deal with in what, three months?"

"Oh, yes, let's celebrate that it's been three months since we faced catastrophe!" he proclaimed sarcastically, not bothering to hide his eye roll from her. "What happens five, ten years from now when we have a family and young children and you get hurt while fighting something? What happens then? I have to explain to our children that their mother isn't coming home because an ogre ate her?"

She gritted her teeth around her toothbrush and finished brushing before responding, trying to take several calming breaths before saying, "It's my job, Killian; being a mother, savior, and sheriff. What do you want me to do when we have kids? Stay home, knit, wash and fold your damn underwear while you're the one out saving the town? I knew you were a pirate. I didn't know you were a misogynist."

"I don't know what that means but I disagree vehemently. See? You're not the only one who can use big words."

"I'm only asking why it's totally okay for you to be the one out there risking your life while I have to stay home for the sake of our hypothetical children." She stomped to their walk-in closet and pulled a pair of jeans and a sweater from the shelves.

"Hypothetically, you could be pregnant. Would you fight a troll if that were the case?"

"Hypothetically, you could snap back to being the villain you once were and try to kill me in my sleep." She regretted the words as soon as they came out of her mouth. She slid back toward the door and tentatively looked at him, dreading what she would see in his eyes when she did. A silent void yawned at their feet. "Killian, I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

But he was a man who had once held a grudge for two hundred years. His anger at her wouldn't vanish just because she said sorry in the same heat of the moment that had led her to say what she had. "Congratulations, Swan, you won this round," he mumbled, heading to the bathroom where she heard him turn on the shower.

She was ready to wait him out and try to mend things once he was out of the shower until her phone buzzed on her nightstand. Henry, asking if she could drop off one of his books he had left at her house. She hated leaving the house with this unresolved but she had no choice.

When she got home, he was in bed and because he was an exceptionally loud breather (something she didn't know until living with him, and was extremely grateful for on the days when she needed some reassurance of the fact that he was alive and well) she could tell that he wasn't asleep. If she had to guess, he wasn't going to sleep with this looming over their heads.

So she toed off her shoes and crawled into bed behind him, pressing herself flush to his back, looping her arm around his waist. "I know you're not that man anymore, and I trust that you won't be him again. I trust you," she whispered.

He sighed, and was quiet long enough that she began to assume he wasn't going to respond. "You weren't wrong to say what you did. It is something I fear every single day, that one day my strength will fail me and I won't be able to be this man anymore, that I will fail you, and Henry, and your parents, and everyone else relying on me to be good. It could happen so easily. I've already done it to you once before. Who's to say it won't happen again?"

"Me, because I love you," she said. "I loved you even when you did go back to that. I was prepared to drag you back from that precipice before you could go over the edge, no matter how determined you were to go over the edge."

"I don't deserve you, Swan."

"That's debatable. All I know is that we make each other better. I hear what you're saying about being worried for my safety. I promise, I'll try to keep it in mind at work from now on."

"Thank you, love." She nuzzled her face into the back of his neck and decided that it wouldn't be so bad if she spent her morning in bed with him while he slept. "Swan, may I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"What is a misogynist?"

She chuckled and pressed a light kiss between his shoulder blades.

Their peace was short lived, as not even a week later they were working on wedding plans and found themselves amid another conflict. Emma found it slightly ironic that planning a wedding brought out so much dissension, when it seemed like it should be the opposite. Although, part of the problem was how little planning Emma and Killian were doing. If it were up to them, they would have had a small ceremony on board of the Jolly Roger months ago. It would have been a guest list of maybe a dozen people, a simple menu, a small bouquet for Emma - very little pomp and circumstance.

Emma's parents had other plans for their wedding. "Swan, we can't have a seven-tiered cake and hope to have any money left for retirement," Killian said as he unlocked their front door and ushered her inside. He helped her out of her coat before hanging his own up on the hook by the door, a smile still coming to his lip at the sight of their respective leather jackets hanging together.

"My parents offered to pay for some of it," Emma said, moving toward the fridge and taking out leftovers from their meal the night before.

"I don't want your parents paying for all of it." This was an old argument between them. Neither accepted any gift easily. Killian especially didn't want to be in debt to his in-laws. He already felt like they were being generous in letting him marry their daughter.

"We've discussed this, Killian." She divided the leftovers onto two separate plates and waved her hand over them to reheat them. He fetched forks and knives from the silverware drawer and set them on the table. "This is my parents' chance at the whole planning a royal wedding for their daughter thing. Can't we indulge them just a little bit?"

"We're going to indulge them straight into destitution," he said with a bite. She put their plates on the table and retrieved the bottle of wine from their fridge.

Emma sighed. "They missed out on everything else in my life. The least I can do is give them the chance to give me the kind of wedding they always imagined for me."

"Which also happens to be the kind of wedding they would have if they got married here. And what about Neal? Can't they save all of these grand plans and ideas for him?" She gave him a look that warned him of the dangerous territory he was entering. He plowed ahead anyway. "Just talk to them, Swan. You can't possibly want all of this flamboyance as well."

"No, but as someone who never thought I'd get married, or have parents who would be so eager to help plan my wedding, I am not taking a single moment of it for granted."

"Emma, I am starting to feel like this isn't our wedding anymore."

She put her fork down with a sharp clank and chewed over her next words carefully. "What do you want me to do? Tell them that I don't appreciate all of this that they're doing to show their support?"

"Yes." She huffed, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms petulantly. "Why can't you say no to them?" He knew perfectly well why she wasn't fighting them on anything - he just wanted to hear her say it.

She had other ideas as she abruptly stood. "I'm done talking about this."

"Of course you are."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Any time I try to give you any sort of advice on your parents, you walk away. You don't want to hear it."

"Has it ever occurred to you that I'm just grateful to have my parents at all? After years of wondering and feeling like I was abandoned, I have a mother and father and after everything we've been through, I'm not going to do anything to jeopardize that relationship."

"What about everything we've been through? This is supposed to our happily ever after. We fought for that."

"And we wouldn't have it without their help-"

"At least you have your parents to help you."

His words immediately took the wind from her sails. He had a point. He absolutely had a point. She had been foolish for going on and on about how she had to value her parents when she had forgotten that he didn't even have a choice to do that. At the end of the day, his parents would still be dead. Her fury returned quickly when she realized that if anything, that should make him more understanding of her feelings.

"They're your family too. They have taken you in and loved you because they saw me do it."

"That is not the same as if I had my own parents here and you know it." He drummed his fingers on the table and looked back to his food. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up."

She gritted her teeth, aching to accept his apology while also still upset about some of the things he had said. She would sooner bite off her own hand than admit that he had been right, which is why she found herself putting on her coat and grabbing her keys from the table beside the door. "I'm going to Granny's," she said, at least wanting him to know where she was going so that he wouldn't worry about her all night.

Emma had forgotten how late it was until she walked into Granny's and saw that it was nearly empty. A couple of the dwarves were sitting in the corner booth, Gold and Archie occupied another table, and Whale sat at the far end of the bar. Lily sat at a stool closer to the door and Emma sat down with one between them.

"You look like you've had better nights," Lily said.

Emma flagged down the bartender and ordered a generous glass of whiskey. "How often do you see me at a bar at nine o'clock on a Tuesday night? That should give you an idea of the night I've had."

"Yeah, well, your reason is probably better than mine." She raised her eyebrows in question at Lily. "Will asked me out on another date."

"Yeah?" Emma was glad for the distraction from her own issues.

Lily took another gulp of her drink. "I really didn't want to like him. I was happy on my own, you know?"

"Believe me, I know."

"But I'm also happy with him." Emma also understood that. "How'd you do it? How did you give up your independence for him?"

"I wasn't giving up anything. Killian understood me. He knows me better than I know myself. It felt more like joining a team than leaving something behind. I knew that life would only be better with him in it." And she believed every word she said, which only drove home her guilt for walking out on Killian earlier.

"I don't know if I'm there yet with Will, only that he's the first person I've met that has made me consider it." She chuckled to herself. "He's actually really sweet. He read poetry to me."

"Seriously? Will is a poet?"

Lily snorted. "Oh, he definitely didn't write any of it. It was a book Belle loaned him. I don't have to worry about those two, do I?"

Emma was just about to answer when they heard a crash come from the opposite end of the bar. Both women turned to see Whale hunched over, blood dripping from his mouth as he gagged. Emma was beside him in a flash, barking at Granny to get a towel. She helped Whale lay down on the floor and her eyes swept over his body to see if there was any sign of a wound or explanation for why he was vomiting blood. Just when she thought her night couldn't get any worse, this was happening.

"I don't understand…" she muttered when she saw nothing wrong with him externally. She pulled out her cell phone, ignoring the message from Killian on her screen, and passed it to Lily. "Call 9-1-1 for an ambulance, and then call my dad. He's on patrol tonight."

"I already texted Will," she said, taking Emma's phone anyway to call for an ambulance.

Emma wanted to heal with him but with no clue of what was wrong with him, she couldn't. "Whale, stick with me." It was then that she noticed how his eyes were slightly yellow. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"It's cancer," he ground out.

"Cancer?"

With shaky fingers, Whale reached into his pocket and handed her a stiff business car. "Call my oncologist. Tell him to meet us at the hospital." More blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, and Emma quickly dabbed it away with a napkin.

It was liver cancer, a somewhat advanced stage of it. That was what Emma learned after riding in the ambulance with Whale and staying with him in the emergency room. She had no connection to the man (she actually disliked him to a certain degree) but seeing him prone and alone, she couldn't bring herself to leave him in the sterile room assigned to him. Nurses flitted past, whispering about seeing their doctor admitted, speculating about what had brought him in. Apparently, he had been keeping his diagnosis a secret. It had only been a matter of time before his illness showed up in public and today was his day.

"I guess all that liquor has finally caught up to me," he attempted to joke when he saw the look on Emma's face when his oncologist delivered a grim prognosis.

"You're looking at weeks, Victor. Treatment is no longer an option." There was a brief discussion about a liver transplant, followed by more jargon that flitted right over Emma's head. She just kept thinking about the fact that he was only in this position because of his drinking habit, and how she knew someone else in town who had lived in the bottom of the bottle for quite some time.

When she finally did drag herself through the door of her house, it was dark inside. Killian had left the light above the oven on for her. She listened for any sound that he could be watching TV in their room but she only heard the typical creaks and moans of the old house at night. She made a beeline for the bookshelf in their living room that held all of their liquor and in a fit of anger and borderline desperation, began pouring all of their liquor down the drain. When she was finished with those bottles, she collected the two flasks sitting above the fridge and also poured them out, watching the amber liquid swirl through the drain.

"What the bloody hell are you doing?" Killian asked from behind her.

He had snuck up on her. "No more alcohol, for either of us. God, Henry lives here. He's getting to the age where it's common to sneak alcohol. We should never have had it here in the first place."

His stunned expression gave way to anger as he finally noticed all of the empty bottles sitting on the counter. He hastened forward, examining the label of one of them. "Did you pour out all of these?" he asked in disbelief.

"Yes."

"But, what are we going to drink?"

"Water."

He set down one bottle for another. "This is a specialty bottle gifted to me by a distiller in the Enchanted Forest. It was priceless."

"It was. Now it's somewhere in the pipes beneath your feet."

"Swan, have you absolutely gone mental?"

"Have I? You are the one who has been living on rum for the last two hundred years-"

"What else was I supposed to drink?"

"Water! Or tea, or freaking goat's milk for all I care."

He narrowed his eyes at her when he noticed the red rimming her lashes - the tell-tale sign that she was on the verge of tears. "Why do you care?"

"I sat with Whale on the floor of Granny's while he puked blood because his liver is so rotted with alcohol, he's dying. I don't...I can't have the same thing happen to you."

His jaw ticked as he processed her words. "That is not your decision to make."

"It is, Killian. I am going to be your wife and I refuse to be widowed because you won't take care of yourself."

"Oh, here we go again. Let's have it out once more about your concern for my survival," he said, dramatically rolling his eyes. It was around that time that she noticed the lights were still off, immediately thrusting her back in time to when they argued in this very room as Dark Ones. "Because evidently you see me as being so weak and so vulnerable that a mere gust of wind will be my demise."

"I can't be worried about you?"

"It's all you do, Emma. I don't think you even know how to love me if you're not panicking about my well-being."

She drew in a shaky breath. Of all things he could have said, that stung the most. Him questioning her ability to love cut her deeply and in the heat of the moment, he wasn't regretting his words to her. Killian Jones was not a man who rushed into apologies. "Maybe," she said slowly, spreading her hands out in front of her, "maybe we shouldn't be doing this." Her words came out in pieces as she fought to give voice to one of the thoughts that had been spinning through her head for the last few weeks.

"Doing what, Swan?"

"This!" She gestured wildly around herself. "Look at us. We're miserable. We can't even agree on what to buy at the grocery store each week. How are we supposed to be married?"

A deep line formed between his eyebrows. "You wish to call off the wedding?"

"I think we just got caught up in some passion. Maybe we're not cut out to be a long-term couple."

"How can you say that? We share True Love; of course we should be together forever."

"And keep fighting every day and every night? I'm tired, Killian, and I want to go back to how things were before."

"Before what?" She didn't answer. "You can't mean before we met. Emma, you weren't happy then. You have grown so much these past couple years. How can you wish to go back to that? Everything we've been through...We have crossed realms and time for each other. We have battled countless villains and beat death itself - you want to give that back?"

She felt their relationship fracture in the space between their feet, creating a berth that couldn't be trespassed without reconciliation. There she was, standing in the house chosen for her by her True Love with the intention of sharing a life there and she couldn't tell him what it was that had her reconsidering, because she didn't know herself. But all of these fights they had been having, they had to mean something, right?

Sensing her train of thought, Killian stepped closer to her. "We have always said that we will fight for our future. That will never stop. Emma, I told you last week that every day I wake up and make the choice to be a better man because I love you and I want to be a man worthy of your affection. Similarly, we need to wake up everyday and make the decision together on whether we are going to fight that day for the future we both want. I know you want it, love, just as I know that you are afraid of what lies in that future but I can tell you that I am going to love you. No matter how bad things get, no matter how hard we have to fight, I am not giving up and I am going to fight alongside you because if there is anything I am certain of in this life, it is that you and I work better together than apart."

His words were everything. She could hear it in the way his voice wavered slightly. He was staking their entire relationship on his speech.

Without warning, and because she was about as affectionate as a porcupine, she began to laugh. His eyes widened and he looked at her like she had absolutely lost her mind. She waved him off and settled both hands on her hips. "I just realized that I could really use a drink right now," she giggled.

He sighed and leaned against the pillar to the foyer, waiting for her to compose herself again. "Swan, you do not complete me. You are not the essence of my being. Rather, you inspire me to be the man I once was, the man my brother always believed I could be. Please, don't make me live without you."

"What do you want me to say, Killian?"

"What you need to." He gulped, meeting her gaze, trying to appear unafraid of what would come next but she knew this man better than herself in many ways and she could see just how terrified he was in that moment. "But I can promise you this: I am never going to stop pursuing you. I promised you that I would win your heart. That will never end."

And she knew that. She knew that he would always love her but when she said that she was tired of fighting with him, she meant it. The obvious solution to that would be for her to compromise with him. Her scared and wayward heart wanted her to call it off and shelter herself from all of these altercations. She thought about how horrible it was to fight against him, all the way back to their showdown in the Enchanted Forest. Then she considered how confident she felt when she fought with him. No one could anticipate her moves, read her mind, or cover her blind spots quite like he did. For someone like her who had fought for survival for so long, how could she pass that up?

She hiccuped as a few tears fell from her eyes. "I can't," she tried to say, wiping at her eyes with the backs of her hands.

"What, love?"

"I can't give up on you," she said, her words nearly unintelligible as she closed the distance between them and threw her arms around his shoulders. He embraced her in return, his shortened arm wrapping around her neck and stroking her hair.

"Aye, love, me neither."

"I'm sorry." Her voice was muffled by the soft shirt he wore to bed on particularly cold nights or when Henry was staying with them.

"I'm sorry as well."

"I'm sorry about the rum."

She felt rather than heard him chuckle. "Rum is relatively easy to acquire. There will be more. Though if you wish for me to limit my consumption, I will."

She pulled away just enough to look up at him through teary eyes. "Really?"

"Aye." His hand pushed her bangs back and his thumb stroked away some of her tears. "I hear you, Swan. I hear your concerns and I am willing to compromise with you."

"I'll talk to my parents tomorrow - see if we can cut back on some of the costs. I guess we don't need centerpieces that are the size of a small tree. And I really hate carnations."

"And the cake?"

"You don't even like cake. Maybe we can get a smaller cake and do a second dessert that you like."

"Pie would be good."

She hummed and pressed her face to his chest, pressing her lips to his shirt before pulling away from him and opening the freezer. An old bottle of vodka was inside the door and it was the only remaining bottle of alcohol in their house. She poured it into a cup and topped it off with ginger beer. He eyed her curiously when she conjured up a piece of paper and a pen and flicked on the light that hung over the table.

"We don't fight well. Every time we fight, we go too personal and bring up things that we shouldn't and that makes the fight even worse. I propose we come up with some lines that we can't cross while fighting."

"Rules of engagement?"

"I guess you could call it that." She tapped the pen against the legal pad. "First rule: no bringing up the past maliciously. We can't use our past mistakes against each other. It isn't fair and it only brings out more pain."

He nodded in agreement. "Indeed. Secondly," he paused and waited for her to finish writing to continue, "we settle things before bed, or we don't leave the house before we've resolved things. No running, aye, Swan?"

"No running," she echoed, wrapping her fingers around his. "We need a safe word."

"Ah, parlay?"

"Is parlay real? I thought that was just a Disney thing."

"Ah, love, Disney has remade all of our lives into movies and shows."

She thought for a moment what word they could use for their code word to shut things down or to end an argument. There were a number of words they could use: Jolly Roger, Bug, beanstalk, crocodile, storybook. Only one stood out more than the others. "True Love."

"True Love?"

"Yeah. The day after you came back, I talked to my mom about it and she said that the fact that we share True Love will always be our homing beacon. It is what will always bring us back together, no matter what. That will be our code phrase for when things have gone too far."

"True Love it is, then," he said, his eyes sparkling in that way they always did when their magical love for one another came up. "No fighting in public, either, or in front of other people."

She nodded in agreement. "Especially my parents. Another rule: don't say 'I love you' if you don't mean it."

"I always mean it, Swan," he whispered. "There's nothing you could do that would make me stop loving you."

Her heart warmed at his words. "I'm tired of fighting with you."

"Aye, me too, love."

She slid her chair closer to him and leaned forward to wrap her arms around his neck. "Last rule: always end a fight with a kiss." He met her halfway, pressing his lips to hers in a searing kiss. Time lost meaning as they grew lost in each other. At least until they heard Brig whine and scratch at the floor at the top of the steps. He chuckled, breaking the kiss. "Someone is upset we're not in bed."

"Hm, then take me to bed, Captain."