Three
When Emma wakes up, it is to the sound of a door slamming shut.
She bolts upright on the couch and her eyes are wide, her heart racing with confusion and fear, before she realizes that it is the morning and that her one-handed friend must have just left the tiny house to start his chores.
She sighs as she sits there, contemplating lying back down and sleeping for a while longer, but then she chooses to get up and search for the bathroom instead.
Logically, she searches the bedroom first, but finds nothing but piles of things lying where she swears they hadn't been the night before.
On a groan, she starts limping her way back through the living room, where she realizes that the man whose distorted version of kindness she's taking advantage of is living in filth.
There is trash everywhere and things aren't exactly in tip-top shape for a Navy Man, so she wonders as she walks through the disaster area of a kitchen, if he just doesn't clean.
There are flies swarming an overflowing trash can in the kitchen by the front door and there are scuff marks everywhere from his boots, which makes her roll her eyes. If he'd just pick up his feet, the floor would be less of a tragedy than it is.
She finds the bathroom, a tiny little thing, tucked back by the kitchen table, which is itself cluttered in dishes, beer bottles, and piles of notebooks and papers.
When she opens the door to the restroom, she is overwhelmed by the scent of grime and scrunches her nose as she manages to drop the toilet lid.
Emma examines the little room as she stands there, wincing at what looks like the start of mold on the wall of the shower, and she discovers a colony of ants that are nonsensically marching their way along the crumbling molding.
This man lives in a pigsty and she is being forced to share it with him for four weeks. Great.
After she discovers that he doesn't have any soap and that the water only runs cold in the sink, she pulls open the squealing door and studies the rest of his kitchen and pantry.
She finds that the ants continue to march into the storeroom, where he's left some food haphazardly spilt on the floor. She huffs and shakes her head, then goes to see if he has any cleaning supplies tucked away anywhere.
Emma discovers that he does have some cleaning supplies, but they appear to have never been touched or even considered as useful. They're crammed into a portion of the storeroom behind light bulbs and barrels of water that she has to work at to grab them. He has a vacuum cleaner, but she doubts it would work without the cord that has clearly been cut off for some reason.
She looks through the shelves of food and finds that there isn't much here. She figures he must have an emergency stash somewhere, and she decides she'll ask him about it later. If they're going to be stuck here together for a month, she's not going to be the one that suffers because they don't have enough to eat.
On her way back toward the living room where Henry's silence indicates he's sleeping, Emma stares at the bathroom door, at the paint chipped walls, and the ants marching along the cracked crown molding.
Almost compulsively, she goes to work cleaning the house right away.
She starts in that disgusting mess of a bathroom and scrubs every surface until she is satisfied that she won't contract a disease if she were to visit it again and it smells like a cleaning solution, a clear sign that it has been sanitized.
If her mother were here, she probably wouldn't believe that Emma Nolan would ever risk another injury while nursing one already in order to scrub behind the dusty, grimy toilet base.
Her leg is in a lot of pain by the time she finishes tidying up the kitchen and storeroom, so after wiping the dust off of the shelves of the bookshelves in the living room, Emma tends to Henry and then lies down again.
Killian hasn't returned yet, which is probably for the best, and she closes her eyes with the duster still in her hand.
When she opens her eyes again, it's because Henry starts fussing. It doesn't feel like it's been long enough for her to have slept long at all.
Suddenly, she understands why her parents only wanted one child.
She immediately goes to help and care for him, taking him into her arms with a slight struggle. His cries almost offend her. Emma definitely hasn't spent enough time around children to know what to do, but she thinks she should get him something to eat.
It's much nicer with the room clean and the trash taken out. She can actually make out what is where and the smell isn't overwhelmingly rank.
She'd discarded all of the garbage to the back of the house in what appeared to be a landfill-type pile that he'd started.
She hadn't seen Captain Hook then. She's sure he's off sulking and keeping to himself right now instead of dwelling near them.
Emma opens up the curtains to let light into the living room as she feeds Henry and then, when he's finished and burped, she settles him back into his bed of pillows so she can clean the rest of the man of the house's mess.
She throws her hair up into a bun atop of her head using a rubber band she'd found in one of the drawers in the kitchen and hobbles around as she moves piles of garbage and creates a cleaner smelling and looking place of dwelling. She wonders if he's ever actually cleaned as she discovers a pile of clothes on his bedroom floor.
"Looks like I'm doing laundry now, too." Emma mutters, throwing the clothes onto the bed so she can wrap everything up in his probably horribly dirty bed sheets.
She carries everything out into the kitchen and throws out the garbage before she takes a tub from the storage room and fills it with water. She finds some soap and gets to cleaning everyone's clothes outside, by what appears to be a good enough place to hang the wire to set things to dry.
She handles her and Henry's clothes with care and makes sure they smell exceptional before allowing them to dry on their own line, pinned down with some clothespins she discovered in a miscellaneous drawer in the kitchen.
She keeps her eye out for Killian, but doesn't see him anywhere amongst the smattering of trees and shrubbery.
Her gaze goes to the lighthouse at the end of the beach. It's tall and white, appearing a little worn for its years. The waves rolling in against the shore remind her of the night she stood on the side of the ship and was tossed from the upper deck and to the lower one.
Her leg hurts when she thinks of it and she takes a deep breath. All she sees when she closes her eyes is her parents in mourning over the loss of their only child and it makes her want to throw up what's in her stomach.
After she goes back inside, Emma starts to prepare herself a meal of oatmeal and bread, returning to Henry to give him some attention as she makes her food.
He's a good baby, she thinks, because when he's properly taken care of, he doesn't complain. She sings a little to him when she sits down to eat her food with him in her arm and pokes at his nose, laughing a little when he makes a face.
"You're too cute, Henry."
She just barely reaches for her spoon when the front door squeaks on its way open.
Killian stares at her first, his mouth open as if he was about to reprimand her for something, and then he looks around the room.
"Did you clean?" he asks, narrowing his eyes at her.
"You were living in filth. Of course I cleaned." Emma scoffs.
He just looks confused and bewildered as he searches over the room.
"The clothes and your bed sheets should be dried soon and I'll have those folded up and replaced as soon as I can." Emma takes a bite of her oatmeal. "Oh, and you had mice living in that storage room, by the way. I got rid of them. Or… tried to. I think you need to patch up the wall in there."
His eyes widen at that and she smiles smugly, looking down at the bowl in front of her again. "You shouldn't... you didn't have to do all of that."
Emma hums. "I'd thought you would have been more appreciative that I'm doing housework. You know, being a woman and all, I have no other good use." He stares at her with a clenched jaw and steps inside, allowing the door to clatter shut. "You're welcome, by the way."
He scowls a little and wipes his feet on the mat she'd discovered in the bedroom under a pile of other misplaced items. He walks over to the kitchen appliances and sets to making something.
Emma ignores the feeling of under-appreciation and attends to her own meal and Henry, whose attention rests on his own toes.
"How do you get warm water for baths?" she asks. "I should give Henry one."
He doesn't answer her. He opens and closes drawers like a man plagued by fury.
Emma sighs. "Plates are by the stove. Silverware in the drawer by the sink."
He stills and she hears the two open one after another.
Killian takes a seat at the table across from her a short while later and she watches him with a raised eyebrow, waiting for her answer.
He's made himself a sandwich that he eats as if she isn't here with him. He doesn't have any regard for manners or her, it turns out, and he makes little noises that infuriate her between hard swallows of breath through his nose.
"Boil it over the fire," he tells her gruffly. She's looking at Henry, biting on her lip so hard she thinks she could draw blood, and keeps her gaze down. "Shouldn't be using that leg, though."
Emma looks up at him. "I do what I want."
He sighs, pushing the last bit of sandwich into his mouth. "Your funeral."
Killian stands up and disregards his utensils into the sink, thankfully, before he storms back outside, the door slamming shut roughly.
"Your funeral," Emma mocks, sticking her tongue out toward the door childishly.
/
Killian sucks in a deep breath of the ocean air as he walks back toward the lighthouse.
His fingers twitch by his side and he reaches up to drag his hair out of his face. It's getting too bloody long, but he doesn't feel like cutting it.
He opens the door to his lighthouse and studies the pile of wood he has set up on the floor. He has decided to build Henry a bed, because it doesn't feel right forcing him to sleep in a cradle of pillows.
Even though Henry's cries can be a bother, he'd rather be able to look back at this time and say he did the proper thing.
This was the proper thing to do, right?
With a heavy sigh, Killian sits down in the chair in front of the lumber. He switches on the record player and the slow, quiet tones of the melancholy guitar begin to echo around the small circular base of the lighthouse.
He knows the song by heart, but he doesn't sing, he just listens as he works the wood and finishes shaping the cradle for the little one.
Memories of a time years ago flashback in his mind and he closes his eyes sorrowfully while he leans back.
There are letters ingrained in the wood from where he'd put his chisel years ago, the initials of a child he'd never get to meet.
Sometimes the memories come and he drowns them out in alcohol, but when he considers the present- how he has a woman and a child in his home now, and how that woman cleaned his home from top to bottom without him asking- he figures he should stay as far away from the bottle as he can.
Killian scrubs his hand over his face and averts his gaze to the photograph sitting on the edge of his desk- of he and Liam years ago. They're both grinning, but Liam has it worse, his arm wrapped around Killian's shoulders, and Killian has his uniform on. The two of them stand in front of the lighthouse while a boat sits tied off to the dock.
Killian feels a pang of regret settle in his belly and he closes his eyes as he turns away from his desk and instead toward the door.
"Apologize, you git." Killian mutters under his breath. He sighs heavily and hesitates for a few moments before he steps forward.
As soon as he stands outside in the cold, with the sound of the ocean roaring against one side of him, he hears Emma's screams and hums a laugh.
"I told you, didn't I?" he shakes his head, but rushes forward regardless.