A/N: This chapter contains strong language.


Gone, gone in an instant, and he doesn't know where to follow. He's placed his phone on the table so he won't have to bother with his pockets when and if she calls him, "when" feeling more and more distant.

His sleep is fitful, and not only because he's slumped over in a chair with the side of his face pressed against the table's hard surface. No, it's the images of earlier that plague him—a whishing of blonde waves when she ran away, the sparks and dust flying everywhere before that, and, worst of all, his "what did that monster do" question that internalized the whole thing for her. The shame and fear on her face, and that dead resignation immediately following, that instinct she must have taught herself over the years to just accept the hardships that came her way so she would have more time to fight them off.

He hadn't meant it; she had to know that, shouldn't she? Emma Swan is the furthest thing from a monster, the Savior. The curse breaker, the champion of the Lost Boys, the one to whom they all owe their lives in one way or another—Regina, her mother, her son, his own. The very fact she had run away at all, her broken pleas for everyone to stand back so she wouldn't hurt them...a monster values only his own desires and well-being. She was everything bright and sincere in the world, and if she had only let him stop her, he'd do something...shake her, kiss her, fuck her mercilessly until she realized it. Until she never drove away from him again.

That thought and Snow's fingers drumming on the back of his shoulder stir him back into consciousness. She wordlessly holds out a cup with some kind of juice in it and a wrapped rectangle with illustrations of oats and honey on it.

"It's daylight," she says. "I will be in the woods tracking my daughter."

It's not a request to come, he notes, eyeing David packing unseen items into a backpack and Elsa staring out the window wringing her hands. It's a royal decree.


He and David had searched the town yesterday, even a little cabin hidden off the path he'd known about without explaining how. But they hadn't traversed the woods, dusk too much of a threat. Snow leads their motely procession, her eyes fixed on the ground beneath them, apparently searching for footprints or snapped twigs since even he's sure he could spot a car's treadmarks in the dirt and he didn't even know what a car was all that long ago.

"She's probably just now waking up," David calls to her after inspecting a row of trees. "We should go home, relieve Belle of babysitting duty, and be there for her when she gets back."

Elsa approaches him and holds her arm out, balancing a water bottle in her palm, which glows a faint blue. He takes it without a sound, knowing the water in it will be good and cold. Taking a swig, he licks his lips and raises an eyebrow at Snow's lack of response.

"Shall I check the map?" Elsa offers up to the clearing they've stopped in since neither Snow or David seem to hear her.

"Mary Margaret, Snow, I, I'm not sure Emma's going to want to look out her car window and see an, an intervention coming her way," he tries again.

"I don't care. The sooner she sees us, the better," is the gruff reply as Snow bends down and gazes at a small cluster of white flowers with such an intensity her chest heaves. She swallows a sob and turns to face all of them. "Are we stopping?"

"Momentarily, milady. Let Elsa catch her breath," he finds himself saying, only just now hearing Elsa's ragged breathing try to manage itself. She tries to smile and waves a hand that they can go on.

"Snow..."

"What, David?" she snaps. "You can only reword wanting to go back home so many times, so what? Go! I'm not leaving here without her!"

"And what are you going to do? Drag by the hair kicking and screaming all the way home?" he snaps back, and Killian and Elsa's heads spring right up. He, he could not have heard right. All throughout the humid, unstable jungles of Neverland, all throughout the most ill-timed pregnancy ever, he's never heard David snap at his wife. Ever. But there he is, standing there in front of her with his arms crossed, nostrils flaring like he's ready for battle. Snow's jaw goes slack, as if her husband's just cut her across the face.

"She's not a child you can just order to go to her room," he says.

"No, but-"

"What do you expect to happen?" he shouts. Killian doesn't know why, but he glances over at Elsa, who mirrors the same stunned, gawking look he has, unsure how they're hearing what they're hearing. They stand frozen, their immobility the only kind of security they can find.

"What do you expect to happen, huh? She'll just pile everyone into the car and drive us all back? We can't tell her what to do. That ship has sailed. She's an adult. She's a princess. She's the Savior that can do all these magical things and just when we're all beginning to get a handle on all of that and she wants to be all of those things, it all spirals out of control! And we're out here, helpless, while our other child has problems we can actually help him with!" David closes his eyes, fighting back tears. "Snow, every time I sit down and give Neal a bottle, every time I rock him when he's fussing...I'm thinking about how I'm not being there for Emma, and when she needs us, really needs us, we don't know the first thing to do and we're missing all the things with Neal that we missed with her!"

Snow's face softens as she edges up to him, her hands lining up with his jaw line.

"We're missing time with both of them, no matter what we do," David mutters.

"David, Charming," she breathes. "This, this is our happy ending. We have it! We have each other. We have Emma. We have Neal. We have this place where all our friends and our subjects look up to us...you know better than anyone that's worth fighting for. Every family must go through this, right? It's a big change, one child to multiple children."

"Not to this extent," he interrupts, and, to be fair, the same thought had popped up in Killian's head.

"I...I don't understand my daughter the way I should," she chokes, breathless after the admission. "But I know she needs us. She needs us, Charming. When she thinks she's better off alone, that's when she needs us the most. She needs to come home. To us, to Henry...to him," she says, nodding in Killian's direction, and for a moment, he had almost been sure he and the rest of the world had vanished for them. "We need to remind her of that, and we'll probably have to remind her of that her whole life. I, I won't lose her to one moment of misunderstanding that was, that was completely my fault," she whispers. "Because we're her happy ending, too. It's not just ours."

He and Elsa can do nothing but stare at the two of them just lock eyes even more intently than they had before and share a kiss, which gives way to an anguished hug, foreheads resting on collarbones and crooks of necks. Nodding to each other, they set off out of the clearing into the trees, either oblivious to his and Elsa's presence or merely that unconcerned by it. He blinks a few times, his hand gripping his belt loop.

"Well, that was surreal," he remarks, dumbfounded, shuffling a bit before stepping to.

"That was, that was like listening to my parents fight," Elsa agrees, hitching up her skirt and catching up to him.


He lugs the backpack up the stairs to the apartment, and, upon seeing it's only seven in the morning according to the clock on the wall, is ready to fall against the door and just let his feet slide out from under him until he has no more weight to support. The forest smells that fill up the space barely mask the sweaty odor they're all emitting. Elsa and David pace past him, beads of sweat clinging to their necks.

"You'd think a big yellow driving machine would be easier to find," Elsa exhales. It would be, if Swan was just out on patrol or not fearing her own magic...

"Perhaps she doesn't want to be found since, you know, that's what she bloody told us," he almost snaps. Gods, didn't they know what all her protests to them coming closer to her meant? And yet he'd gone out with all of them looking for her like an idiot, not sure what he would say, or if he could even say anything that would help her. This...he has no magic. Any time he's hurt people, and he's hurt countless over the span of centuries, he'd fully intended to, and if he'd been able to bring down a streelight at any time, he'd have used it as a mallot on a certain crocodile just for sport.

"Well, the good news is, thanks to the ice wall, Emma can't leave town," David says, standing over the faucet. That ought to boost his spirits, convince him she'll just come home when she's ready, but a nagging feeling clings to him. This isn't her angry or unsure and just needing to be alone for a little while. Something drastic and insidious permeates around them, as trapped within the ice wall as the rest of them.

"The longer she isolates herself, the worse it will get," Elsa says, leaning against the counter. "Her magic will just keep spiraling."

"Elsa's right! This was a bad idea coming home. We should still be out there searching!" Snow returns from the sitting room portion of the apartment.

"Hey, this isn't your fault. It isn't." She shuts her eyes at David's assertions, though. "We'll find Emma, but we've been searching all night, everyone's exhausted, yourself included, so we refuel. We regroup. And we go out and we find our daughter, okay?"

"Okay," she breathes. He makes it sound so simple. Perhaps after the way they'd hashed it all out in the woods earlier pushed David to the other extreme. What would they say to her? What would any of them say? Glancing over at Elsa, his mouth drops open a fraction, trying to word together some eloquent stream of a request that she go out and pursue Emma alone. Her magic, somewhere in her past, had done this. Only she might be able to understand, but he can't impose on her and he can't very well send a woman who's only been in Storybrooke for a few days into the woods alone with the Snow Queen eager to collect her.

He hears the door creak open and holds his breath, but it's Henry, moping in with silent stomps and his hand never straying far from behind his ear, as if in pain.

"You don't have to look anymore," he says, wincing and burrowing his fingertips into the spot.

"Henry. We thought you were asleep upstairs! We told you to stay here!" Snow admonishes him.

"What happened?" David asks.

"I snuck out, okay? I'm sorry. But I found her."

Found her. And she's not home. Henry didn't bring her home.

"How is she?" Snow asks him.

"Is she okay? Is she hurt?"

"She's out in the woods. I thought I could help calm her down, but when I showed up, it just made things worse." He looks down at the floor, and Killian instantly knows exactly what the lad looked like as a wee boy, sitting in a chair with his hands folded ashamed of himself. It's-not-his-fault-he-did-all-he-could-he-can't-force-his-mother-to-do-anything...the words feel hollow as Snow puts her arm around Henry and leads him to the bathroom with soothing words about cleaning, cleaning...he leans over just a tad...a gash. Bloody hell.

"This is bad news. If anyone can calm her down, it's Henry," David sighs, maneuvering behind him to rest on the counter. He has to block that out for now. She's hurt him, never mind unintentionally. Swan won't be thinking that way. It'll bring her down lower than she already was, inarguable proof, in her mind, that she can't return to them, never mind how desperately she may want to.

Desperate.

She'd do anything for Henry.

Whatever it takes.

The nagging feeling coils around his insides, but he can't yet name it. His legs all but jiggle with the desire to sprint out the door and back outside, but he knows she won't be in the woods anymore. She'll have moved. She'll feel the need to make some desperate action, and that's as far as his thinking can go.

"When your powers are out of control, everything's upside down. You don't want to be anywhere near the people you care about," Elsa tries to explain.

"Wonderful," he snaps. "Well shall we send Sneezy after her then? Or Happy? Which is the dwarf she despises?"

"I was so scared that I would hurt Anna, until I realized you can't run away from the people who love you because, in the end, they're the only ones who can help you."

"Anna's what made you stop running?" he asks, softening his tone and sitting down. He scoots the chair back until he's close enough to pull an atlas from the little shelf. Folded up between the cover and the first page is a topographical map of the forest, each peak and plateau neatly outlined, himself probably the most experienced at reading such things, and yet it gives no clue of what he needs to know.

"Not quite." Elsa squirms a little, a sheepish expression tsking over her face as she sits next to him. "She went after me, make no mistake, but I hurt her. I pushed her away and pushed her away until I almost lost her. The worst part of all of it was..." She closed her eyes and groaned at herself. "The worst part was that I knew she loved me the entire time, and I never stopped loving her. It took finally starting to feel I deserved to be loved that made all the difference, made me able to control my powers and actually begin living a life." With a shaky sigh, she leaned over to him and set her fingers on his harness and hook. She narrowed her eyebrows at it, but he didn't get the sense she was repulsed. "It takes so much to accept that the bad things in the past happened, but that they don't dictate your future."

Snow and Henry exit the bathroom before the words can truly sink in, the latter bolting up the stairs to the loft.

"Do you think it would be all right if I talked to him?"

"That's up to him," he says quietly, his eyes traveling away from her to his hook and then to the map.


He doesn't know how long he'd been studying the map, seconds, lifetimes...probably no more than an hour as Elsa descends down from the loft. Henry isn't with her.

"How is he?" Snow asks in a murmured voice.

"I gave him enough ice for a week. It should help with the swelling."

"No...how is he?" she asks again.

"Upset," Elsa settles on after a pause. "I just wanted him to understand Emma's magic is tied to her emotions, like mine. The reason she hurt him is because she was trying so hard not to hurt him. It sounds very convoluted when I try to explain it now."

"No, no. It makes perfect sense," Snow sighs. It doesn't take magic to know that tension, worry, fear—it all leads to bad form one way or another. Not that that helps improve the situation much.

"Where's Henry? Is he okay?" Regina bursts through their door...with her shirt unbuttoned, oh bloody hell. His hand catches his forehead as it drops. And here he'd been thinking the day couldn't get much worse.

"He's fine. He's upstairs," David tries to answer calmly. Well, that makes one of them. Good to know that they've all been combing the woods up and down for endless hours while she took the opportunity for some tryst. David seems to at last spot the very very noticable outline of black lacy undergarments, for his tone changes. "We've been trying to call you all night!"

"Well I'm sorry if I don't respond to your every summons! Though I did bring that locator potion you wanted. Maybe next time, try leading with 'thank you.'" She slams a small bottle on the table and snaps back toward Snow. "Now may I see my son, please?"

"You might want to finish buttoning your shirt first..." Snow's hushed voice fails to evade everyone else's attention, Regina scrambling to make herself presentable and mumbling on about being in a rush. Rich. A bloody wonder she could even want to engage in that behavior with Snow and David's phones calling her nonstop.

"A locator potion," Elsa breathes, picking up the bottle as daintily as she can. "How does this work, exactly?"

Too literally, he longs to answer, remembering that damned cloak plunging itself into the water, but, to his surprise, David takes the lead.

"We just pour it over anything that belonged to Emma. Something, something like this." He moves closer to him, but snatches the red scarf that had been strewn over the table across from him. Running his fingers over his face, he'll stay with the map, thank you. The true conundrum still stands, locator potion or not—forcing Swan home will only push her away more. He's rather astonished Elsa seems so on board with the idea, or at least he would be if he could devote his focus to it. His eyes and heart pang, clinging onto the idea that the map will hold the answer to the whole thing. Even Snow's phone ringing sounds faint by comparison.

"It's her!" she gasps. His head snaps up. Maybe it's all over. Maybe all she needed was a night to calm down, think things through. Swan so often sells herself short, so quick to think the worst of herself, and yet she always comes through. So many times she's dodged the selfish, weaker choices that would have rendered her an outright villain if not the victim of another one.

"Oh, yes, yes! No, he's fine." Case in point, he thinks, asking right away about her son. "Emma, I am so sorry about what happened yesterday. I don't want you to ever think we are afraid of you. No, of course it matters."

He needs to hear her voice. Needs to hear how she's underplaying the whole thing. Then he'll know. Holding his breath, he watches Snow's head bob up, in confusion? It's too difficult to tell. They should all change how they speak on these blasted things, use that "speaker" button more often. She and Henry hadn't even told him about that when they gave it to him.

"Emma? No, wait." Snow spins back toward all of them, not in a panic...not in relief.

"What did she say?" David asks her.

"She said she's going to get rid of her magic. Forever."

So she had been desperate. The nagging feeling he'd felt earlier claws its way from his stomach up into his throat. Some things never change, no matter what land you're in, and Rumpelstiltskin finds and feeds upon desperate souls no matter where he is. The hat.

"How is that even possible?" Elsa asks, and her question seems to confirm it. There is no other way to rid a magical person of their magic. It's part of them, etched into their core as surely as their blood and bones. She went to see the Dark One and he was all too happy to somehow convince her he would do anything but suck her up into that thing.

"She said it would all be over soon, and she can't wait to be home for cocoa with cinnamon."

"Did she say anything about the method? If it was a spell or a magic object of some kind?" he asks, feeling himself go pale. He already knows the answer. Gods, she's putting her trust in that monster.

"Who cares how she's doing it? That's not what matters here," David snaps at him. But it does. So much more than she'd ever let her parents know. Maybe it's not too late. She said she was going to do it, not that she was at that very moment. He can call her, blessed phones and their uses. He can call her and tell her...

Tell her everything.

"No, you're absolutely right." He manages a smile and reaches back, tapping his trousers. "I wonder if she tried to call me. Bloody hell, I left my talking phone in the back of your truck." His teeth bite down on the words to keep them from breaking up, wobbling, as it were. He doesn't know how he listens enough to David's correction to respond. He has to reach her. He has to find her.


A/N: Coming up? A lot of bad things. I'm sorry. I've put a lot of thought into how to write being without one's heart, researched some unpleasant things, and just wanted to let you know that if the narrative seems a bit detached and less passionate, it's intentional.