The rest of the day consisted of trip after trip to the town archives, lugging everything to the sheriff's station, the only reprieve when Swan had held her phone up to his ear so he could tell Henry personally when he would be picking him up. Spur of the moment this sailing excursion may be, he thinks after swinging by Granny's for a thicker shirt to wear out in the wind, but he needs it, and Swan is up to her hips in paperwork as it is, so it's not as though she'll be doing anything rash tonight...that is, if she doesn't strangle the thief in his cell.
"You know which entrance to pick him up?" she asks for the hundredth time over the phone. Tucking the latest box under his arm, he manages to hold the phone up to his ear with his shoulder.
"South entrance...I'm sure the barrage of exiting children will give it away."
"I already called the school and let them know you'd be picking him up, so if anyone gives you a hard time..."
"I simply have them call you. Relax, love." A soft, shaky sigh answers him. Best change the subject, he decides. After all, if anyone should be nervous about picking the lad up after school, it should be himself or Henry. "I'll drop off this one last box and be on my way."
"Okay. Because school lets out at three-thirty, you know."
He knows. He'd gone with her to the apartment between hauling boxes so she could look up the policy in the school's handbook, a rather gargantuan manuscript, and a quick greeting to her mother and brother, the latter reciprocating Swan's affections by spitting up all down her arm, delaying their return to the station by only a few minutes so she could run up and change. Swan, however, acted as if it had added hours to an already-behind schedule and had bolted back to the station to help Elsa sort through what was already there, leaving him to handle the rest. He hadn't even done it yet and he feels as adept at retrieving Henry from school as though it had always been part of his routine.
"Paperwork ahoy," he announces, holding the box up for Swan and Elsa to see as he enters the station. "Old city records from the mayor's office, per your request."
Relishing the proud smile greeting him, her lips forming a rather enticing pout as she does so, he keeps his eyes on her as he lifts the lid. It comes as no shock the contents harbor a musty odor.
"Oi! Somebody's forgotten about me dinner!" the thief belts out. Musty odor, indeed, he thinks, mirroring Swan's disgruntled face. Bothersome parasite still reeks of the drink and the neglected sheets on the cot in the cell are probably soaking all of it up. "I had the bangers and mash."
"You had the water and Pop-Tart," Swan retorts, grabbing a clear bottle and some tart that in no way looks popped and thrusting them between the bars.
"Somebody's already had a nibble."
"I'd had my shots."
He doesn't hear most of the git's commentary on that, Elsa straining herself to hoist as many files as she could out of the box.
"They're wedged in there pretty tightly," he says, pulling a few back with his fingers to give her some leeway.
"So I can see."
He has to leave now if he's to make it to the school on time, the whole point of this endeavor compromised if either he or Henry are kept waiting for a prolonged period of time. There's a familiar pang in his stomach as he looks over at Swan, still sorting through even more files. Attached at the hip, Regina had said, and he supposes it's probably true, nearly every waking moment spent on this case. To leave her now even for just a few hours leaves a deep hollow pit in his chest. Spoiled, he thinks, remembering so many nights of lying awake feeling nothing but emptiness that she was a whole world away with no memory of him. Unable to suppress this sudden urge of greed, er...he'd rather call it longing, he crosses over to her.
"Well, I'm off to take Henry sailing, love, unless there's something else you want me to do here."
"Make sure Henry wears his life vest, okay?" she murmurs back, tilting her head back so she's inches from him. She ought to look in love more often, he decides, catching himself admiring her.
"Befriending the son to get in with the mum? Yep, no one will ever see through that," the thief snaps. Well, Swan may be able to ignore him as she's had more practice tuning him out, but the crass remark might as well have been shots fired across his prow.
"Why don't you keep your thoughts to yourself, mate?" He turns and grits his teeth at the thief, arms dangling over the bars. That dealt blow at the library might not have been worth it, but one right now just might quench his thirst... No, he doesn't have time for this. He'll let Henry down if he's late and he'll let Swan down even more if he doesn't at least try to stop regressing.
"Goodbye," he says hastily, making sure to kiss her just once, reassuring himself the separation won't last.
Henry flings his backpack by the wheelhouse and treads with light steps around to the lines.
"Good memory, lad. We'll be out past those shoals in no time," he says, leaving a gold piece on the worn, splintery planks of wood that now led to nothing. Paying for use of a boat, he didn't mind. So long as he could pick which one, and, judging by the shape of the trim and the crumpled bits of paper all around the helm, he'd been more than generous with assessing the cost.
Henry didn't compare as much to New York this time, but Killian wonders if he'd prefer that to the stiff courtesies the boy tried to apply, a throwaway observation on the weather here, a detached concern about the difficulty of finding the school in the first place. Fortunately, he knew Swan had been nervous and Henry distracted or else he might have wondered why everyone suddenly doubted his sense of direction.
"Are we going back out to that island?" he asks him over a strong gale.
"Whatever you want. We can go there or we can circle around. I'll say this for the bloke who owns this boat—at least he keeps it fueled. Bear three points starboard so we'll steer clear of the shallows over there. Henry?"
It had almost worked, the deep blue waves clapping against the slippery brown rocks. The sun and the shadows just beneath the surface of the water meeting each other. The old sensations of the wind daring your face to turn away from it all—it had distracted him only long enough to discover he wasn't the only one in the boat who looked preoccupied.
"Sorry," Henry mutters, still turning the wheel with inexperienced hands, but it's nothing practice can't remedy.
"Just let it float out here a moment, lad. Get your bearings."
"I'm fine."
"No one's saying you're not...but if something were on your mind, you could trust me with it." Sighing, Killian decides to walk toward a coil of rope rather than Henry. He's overplayed his hand, come on too strong. He supposes it's a discussion they should have eventually—he will not keep it to himself the way he did with Bae; a son has the right to hear a grown man tell him he's in love with his mother...and said son has a right to tell the man exactly how he feels about it. Watching Henry from the corner of his eye, he notes some deliberation, the lad's mouth flexing this way and that.
"It's just that, you and my mom..."
He wishes he had rehearsed something.
"When you guys went back in time, you had my book with you."
Killian blinks at him, his eyebrow arching well into his brow. Henry had spoken it so knowingly, like this was some shared understanding they had, but he can think of no reason why such a detail would vex him so... Ah. It wasn't that they had taken the book with them. It was that they had changed it, his totem, his talisman powerful enough to return his memories to him. Curling his lips back, he takes a breath.
"I'm sorry, Henry. When I borrowed your book that day, believe me, time travel was not something I had intended on doing... I swear, I kept it as close to me at all times as I could."
"No, it's not that. I lent it to you and you get sucked into a portal. That...well, around here, that happens," he says with a laugh. "No. When you came back, it changed. It was like it had rewritten itself even though the future had stayed pretty much the same."
"That's how I understand it," he agrees.
"Well," he breathes. "You've sailed to a bunch of different places that have magic. Is that a thing? Books that rewrite themselves? No, uh, no magical guild of authors?"
Scratching behind his ear, he shuffles and pretends he's doing so to peer over the rail of the boat.
"In all my travels, Henry, I've never seen anything that even begins to resemble your book. It's a marvel," he says, tempted to ask if he has it on him. He's seen parts of it, but, should they find a spot of land shielded from the wind, they could peruse it at their leisure, provided the sun didn't glare off the white pages and sear the colors of the illustrations into his eyes.
"That's what I thought," Henry heaves.
"Might I ask what's warranted this line of thought?"
"Nothing, nothing. Just thought it was time to really get to the bottom of it since it's a mystery," he lies, shrugging. Well, don't be too hard on him, he corrects himself. He's going to the trouble of answering with truths, just evasive ones. The unnatural way he rubs his nose and the indentation just underneath it confirms it. One does not need a lie-detecting superpower when it comes to a twelve-year-old.
"What say you to exploring around the ice wall and then circle back around for dinner?" he offers, switching places with him at the helm, the two of them silently agreeing to let the subject go for now.
"One time we'll have to rent one that has a crow's nest," Henry calls to him, climbing up onto the rail and craning his neck out toward the shimmery blue prison bars the Snow Queen has in place. His tone's returned to normal, too. "Got any stories about my dad getting tangled up in one?"
"Several," he laughs, wrapping his arms over the spokes of the helm and setting his chin into them like a bird in a nest, watching him. So much like his father.
"Can we get closer to the wall?" he asks with a skittish face, expecting to be turned down.
So much like his father, he thinks again, nodding his head at him. With his mother's expressions.
Henry managed to keep him from dwelling on his debt to the Dark One with chatter about some "unsolvable" logic puzzle on his phone, placing numbers in a grid in such a way that they never repeated themselves in their respective square, row, or column. Over grilled cheese, they'd set the phone in between them and tried positioning the digits in the correct spots, himself having more success than the boy. It reminded him of when he would pass the hurry-up-and-wait moments the Navy was so fond of dealing out by creating graphs and charts from puzzles with missing information. Mister White's painting of the mountains did not come in last at the contest...Mister Red came in third...the man who painted the ocean came in first...Mr. Green beat the man who painted the desert and the man who painted the flowers beat Mr. Orange.
The numbers had come a little easier to him for the mere reason the grid to work with already existed, and, after a light teasing that one day the lad will find something to best him in, he'd walked him all the way to Regina's house. Not his grandparents' apartment tonight, he had mused with his hand on his belt and his lips tucked into his mouth outside on the walkway after Regina had curtly thanked him and taken Henry inside without looking back.
Swan really needed to get her own place...
Not wanting to even bring her up with Regina, he had decided to stop at the sheriff's station, his hunch being that she was there.
Bathed in sparse light and the only sounds being his footsteps and the faint humming of the food dispensing box in the corridor, he exhales at seeing the sheriff's door propped open with a wedge of wood. He sees her behind the glass partition, leaning over in her chair with her back to him. He raps on the glass with his hook, startling her a fraction of an inch.
"Hello, love," he says, suddenly frowning at the distant melancholy in her face. Her lips try to muster a wistful smile at him as she sits back up and folds her arms.
"You seem vexed...like you could use a drink." He holds his flask out to her and she takes it without much reluctance, but she turns away from him as she removes the cap.
"That's putting it lightly," she groans in a hushed, almost hoarse voice, like she'd been sitting here so long she'd forgotten how to talk. Something had to have happened...not something life-threatening, however. She's not angry, nor on full alert as the Snow Queen has rendered her thus far. He follows her mournful eyes to a small box on the floor at her feet.
"What's that?" he asks.
"What's left of my childhood."
Swallowing, he gazes at the box, so small, probably filled to the brim with memories of something that ended too soon, probably things she hadn't revisited in years... Whatever happened tonight struck some private nerve in her and yet the pirate in him yearns to open it up and drink it all in, like dusting the sand off of a buried treasure.
"May I have the honor?"
For a brief moment, he thinks she's reading him, but she's looking past him, weighing something in her mind other than whether or not she can trust him with it. She picks up the box and sets it on the desk and pulls out an even smaller, veneer-stripped box with scuffed edges. She whips it out in a haste and holds it to her.
"Are you okay?" he asks. It can wait. Really. Some things take years, lifetimes, to be comfortable talking about, and this, this is showing him the memories, the pain.
"I think so," she huffs, extending it out to him in one fluid motion. There is still some reserve in her eyes, but she lets go of it when he takes it and places her hand back on the desk, fingertips on the rim.
Holding his breath, he opens it and the first item on top of folded pieces of paper and lopsided woven bracelets elicits a surprised grin on his face. Spectacles. Simplistic thick ones that feel so small in his grip. His grin widens when he looks up at the abashed smile watching him, imagining her with them on. Truth be told, he had empathized with every hint of her past but could never actually visualize it.
Returning them to their place, he sifts through the contents and the slight glint of something shiny beckons to him. He lifts out a ring, robin's egg blue and in need of polishing. It doesn't take someone with experience in handling riches to know it's fake, cheap, even. The story behind it is what's earned it a place among the rest... Little spectacled Swan, just a cygnet, wearing this and hoping someone would say she looked lovely with it...
There's a photograph, her face and Bae's crinkled in happiness, looking in each other's eyes. They'd been happy. For however brief a time, they'd made each other happy, had dared to hope that they'd found a family. No way of knowing fate would toss all of that into the four winds and watch it scatter.
He'd deserved a family. Deserved love. It begins to rush back to him, standing there in the pawn shop unable to speak as David placed his hand on his shoulder and Snow had swept Belle up in her arms and just held her as the tears flowed.
Needing to look away, needing to seek out solace, he catches Emma staring at him, her eyes wide and prepared to rebuild the walls he knows right now are nothing but a trench dug in the ground. She snaps her head away after reading him, quicker now than ever. Sighing, she gathers up a blanket and wraps the corner of it around her hand, like knitted snow it's so pure looking, a bold purple ribbon woven through it with "Emma" on it. She scrunches it in her hands and sets it back into the box. He'd expect some of it to puff out, but it's so tiny, barely long enough to bundle a baby...ah.
Examining an odd-shaped contraption, she pops her head up and looks out past the glass.
"Swan?" He follows her out to where she's bent in front of the television, fiddling with the machine under it. In her hands she holds the black tapes that play events on them, the machine it had been in set aside. The desk provides adequate enough seating, so he props himself up onto it.
"I haven't watched this since I recorded it, but some things happened today that made me think about the past," she says, swaying back onto the desk next to him. He wishes he could have been there with her, whatever had happened, but part of him wonders if it was for the best. Sometimes it feels so much better to look back on all the eons.
"Reflective today, are we?" he asks, you don't know the half of it answering him as her chest heaves only once. Instinct takes over as he clasps her hand and interlocks their fingers, feeling her press into him. "Hey, show me. I'd love to know more about your beginnings."
Smiling at him, she pushes a button on the device in her other hand with a limp arm. Instantly, there she is, as a child. Her temple is smashed up against the temple of another lass about her age, giggling and sticking their tongues out with an endearing abandon. Just being two cheeky adolescents, no hint of the Savior, but also no hint of the loneliness that's plagued her. She didn't look the part of an orphan here. She looked like she could be anyone's child.
Their child.
Stop, he tells himself, forcing himself to tear his eyes away from the sweet blonde girl and observe everything else.
"Who's that lass?"
"Just an old friend," she answers, barely audible, lip quivering. It's too easy to realize why she's shaken, yet another person who meant something to her...else why record the two of them just being together...and leaving her. Hands still clasped, he lifts his arm and wraps it around her. She lays her head down on him, going still, relaxing in his arms as he'd hoped she could do. The action almost seems to change the, the...footage. That's the right word. The screen darkens and awakens to the face of a chubby laughing boy a year or two older looking than Emma, sixteen, perhaps, and something tells him this was not a young girl's crush.
"Where's that?"
"I don't really remember," she says, the words broken up. He can see from the corner of his eye her squinting at the television, scanning it for some clue as to when this was. Understandable. He doesn't know how many times she was shuffled around from one residence to another, but if this world's foster care system was anything like the orphanages of the Enchanted Forest, the odds of finding a permanent home dwindled considerably once you were no longer a babe in arms.
"Maybe my next foster home?" she asks him. Still, it ought to look vaguely familiar, he thinks, second-guessing himself. It wasn't all that long ago she was fifteen years old.
"Blocked it out? Unpleasant time?" he suggests.
"I guess."
Perhaps they should shut it off. He knows he can't bare to see the laughing girl crying huddled in a corner as someone berates her or, worse, abuses her. His eyes linger on her neck for a second, searching for scars. Her hands, as beautiful as they are, boast burns, one even close to her flower tattoo on the inside of her wrist. And some blows don't end in a scar, he remembers. No, those end in making you feel like a pathetic shell of your former self. She doesn't need to relive any of that.
But the boy doesn't look abused. His clothes look clean and serviceable and, face facts, well-fed. Unless he was the one who had tortured her...
"Who's that? Another friend?"
"I don't remember any of this," she murmurs, just gaping at the screen. They should turn it off. Before, she knew what she was showing him...
The Emma in the screen reaches out for her machine, leaps for it, and the boy just laughs and wobbles the thing all over the place.
"Give it back, Kevin!"
He bolts up. The woman in the doorway between them... No, no, it can't be. It's a trick of the light, a bad angle...and it's not. It's unfortunately not. Regrettably not.
"Bloody hell, is that..."
"The camera is Emma's, not yours. We respect property in this house, Emma."
The Snow Queen nears them, her face so close, so familiar it threatens to claw its way out of the screen and stand right in front of them. Gawking, Emma hits a button that freezes the action on the television. It makes it worse.
"Yeah," she breathes.
"Turn it off. Emma, turn it off."
"What?" She rips her eyes from the screen and just stares at him, her bottom lip falling open as if he can explain this to her. Her eyelashes fluttering, she drifts back to the screen, her hand shaking as she brings the device with the buttons on it back up, but then she pushes something that sends everything on the screen whirling backwards in a disjointed frenzy.
"What are you doing?"
"No, no there has to be something on here that can explain this," she says to herself, standing up and watching the boy taunt her again.
"You can watch the same thirty seconds over again all night, but nothing on there is going to explain this," he says. Like addressing a wall. Standing up, he runs the backs of his fingers against her hairline. "Emma, love." He waits until she's focusing on him. "We will review it, but for right now, please, turn it off."
She manages to do so without breaking eye contact, the screen going mercifully blank. About to ask if she's all right when he knows she's not, she tilts up on her toes and kisses him with her fingers carding through his hair. Every thought flees from his mind, like a flock of birds taking off from their perch. Her tongue swirls around the inside of his mouth and he's just about lost, bombarded with one of her hands still rifling in his hair and the other flattened against his chest, pushing, pushing through with such force he's surprised his heart's still intact when she dips her mouth down to kiss his bottom lip as she takes in air.
"Minx," he pants, his forehead collapsing onto hers. "I was trying to comfort you."
"You are," she says, gazing up at him. Her eyes shine...pupils so dilated there's only a rim of the warm hazel-green color...but not from holding back tears. Cupping his face, she closes her eyes and steadies her breath. Her fingers slip down to his jaw as she comes back to reality with a sigh. "We have to get to the bottom of this."
He watches her maneuver around to the back of the desk they were sitting on. Licking his lips, he waits until his blood flow returns to normal. One day he'll tell her just what she does to him, that her magic must weave a spell over him. Not that he cares. He too comes back to reality with a sigh and turns to see her tapping a pen against a piece of paper.
She's drawn a line with little notches marked in, labeling them with names and numbers he deduces to be ages. Ah. Foster families. Where she was at ten, at seven, the most intriguing block the first one with a single word, "Swans," written next to it.
"This is the last place I remember," she says, flipping the paper over for him to see. "I remember it. I remember running away when Cecilia got adopted. She was so young... I was too old..." she trails off, leaning over more until her forearms bear her weight on the desk. "That's when I met Lily, on the tape."
"Short-lived friendship, I take it?"
"Very. She had...everything I wanted. She had someone to go after her. After that, after that it's a blank," she says. "The next thing I remember is being out on my own."
"You had your memories erased," he concludes. She'd been right. The Snow Queen had known her and, at some point, removed their problematic relationship from Swan's mind.
"But you gave me a potion to remember everything! And it worked!" He shakes his head.
"That potion would have only brought back the memories taken by Storybrooke disappearing. Everything else that happened to you was still there, which means that there was sometime before you went to New York that she would have done that to you." It's so bloody repulsive, altering these people's minds this way and that. He glances back at the television screen as if it's the enemy, as if it's the vile thing that violated her so.
"The ice cream shop," she groans. She shuffles through some of the files and glares at a photograph of her with the Snow Queen in Storybrooke clothes, as integrated into the town as if she'd always been here. He might have even passed her on the street one day; gods know he'd been too busy with his own nefarious deeds to pay attention to anyone else's.
"You're right. I, I can't do this right now," she stammers. Throwing on her jacket, she packs away her box of memories, the tape still in the box below the television. "I'll drop you off at Granny's and then just go home."
"We can devote as much time as we need to it tomorrow," he says, his hand floating in the space next to the small of her back as they go out the door and she locks up.
A/N: Here is where the timeline gets a little weird. The end of "The Apprentice" starts in the morning and "Breaking Glass" apparently starts in the evening as Will is rambling on about dinner and it gets dark soon after the action starts. However, everyone is in different clothes, which would imply it's the next day. By 4x6, all we know was that somewhere prior to that episode, Ingrid's shop and house were searched. So I had a choice to make. Option 1 was drawing out the narrative and somehow make two full days of file-reading a riveting read. Or Option 2—make it the same day and find reasons for the characters to have changed clothes by the time evening rolled round. I opted for the second. Coming up? An ominous looking ice cream truck.
