prompt 9: Evil Queen's wish in the 6a winter finale was slightly different...
One of the instructors were named Jones. It wasn't too important at first glance, she only had the class as a maybe if one of the others didn't pan out and she didn't think too much of it till she went to print.
K. Jones.
Somehow that first initial was important. Very important. Her brain didn't know why, but the rest of her knew something. Her heart beat faster in her chest.
K. Jones.
She checked the faculty page. She needed to know what their first name was.
K. Jones
She was standing on the edge of a cliff reaching for something, something. Something that didn't have a name or a reason, just something that she needed to find.
This is important, a part of her whispered. Find him.
Her thoughts were silly yet she scrolled faster, holding her breath, ignoring the clatter of Henry's feet as he came in the door and missing the buzz of the washing machine as it finished. She was so close to figuring it out. She hadn't realized there was an it till then and now it was as though the empty feeling where something was supposed to be was too powerful to ignore.
There was a gaping hole and every passing second made her feel as though a far reaching memory was trying to break the surface.
So close, so close.
K. Jones.
K. Jones.
Carson Joan. Wendy Johavior. Marvin John. Kenneth Jones.
Kenneth Jones.
"Fucking Kenneth," she whispered, deflating. It wasn't the name she was looking for, it wasn't Killian.
Killian. Killian.
Something warm spread from the tips of her toes to the top of her head like a blanket. She remembered a kind smile and a tiny woman she loved like family who was her mother. She remembered a vague stranger making mistakes who was her father. She remembered jail, her pregnancy, the heartbreak as she gave him away, the heartbreak as she saw him again, and the utter despair when her son had died, the relief when he came back.
She remember the uneven beat of her heart as lips pressed against hers and the gleam of metal beneath her palm, razor sharp yet something she knew would never hurt her.
Her eyes widened.
"What was that?" Henry piqued in, slumping onto the couch beside her, peeking at the screen. Tactfully, he didn't notice her jump. "Decided to go to school again, mom?" Or maybe was distracted by something else.
"I was considering it, but now I think we might travel for a little while." Her memory was fuzzy and yet clearer than it had ever been
"Where to?" he asked, not bothered by the prospect of moving yet again. To him, this would just be another place, just like their move from Florida to Boston, then to New York. He wouldn't know that he had been raised in Maine, that he had lived there his entire life without her and that the life they had, them against the world, wasn't so real and it had been painful for them both.
The life they had here, the fake one, should have been enough.
And yet, happy as it was, they had family that wanted them back and a town they had to save. People who loved him, people who loved her. And selfishly she wanted it back. Him, especially.
Killian Jones. "Storybrooke."