The name on the dagger taunts him, a different section of it gleaming every time he blinks his eyes. His eyelashes beat down again and again, a relentless torrent, hoping that the name will be gone the next time he glances over at it.

"How could she be so stupid?" he hears someone—Regina—break the silence.

Emma Swan.

"Regina!" David scolds her.

"Well, there had to be another way!"

"There wasn't," he hears a dull, lifeless version of Snow somewhere in his periphery, but it sounds so faint.

Emma Swan.

Good.

Come back to me.

You.

I love you.

"That thing was going to kill you. She saved your life!"

"Don't you think I know that?"

"And now she's...the Dark One." Henry. Henry now has to see her name emblazoned on that wretched thing.

"Now she's a problem for all of us."

You chose her and the consequences of that decision.

You think that kiss actually meant something?

You're out of your depth, pirate.

But I need Miss Swan. Surely you understand that.

"She's still good."

I love you.

It overrides the villainous cacophony in his head, her voice, her words growing louder and louder until they sound more like an anguished cry for help than anything they sounded like before. Swept away, all alone, the Darkness already attempting to poison her—he needs to do something. He needs to find her.

"W-where she's gone?" Robin asks, not Killian, but it doesn't matter. He needs to find her.

"It doesn't bloody matter," he growls at the dagger. Stalking toward it, he has no plan. He has no predictions. An instinct much more animal than cerebral has taken over.

"Mate, don't," Robin warns. But he shoves the fist taking a handful of his jacket aside.

"Get out of my way!" he snarls at him. He won't, won't show the horrid dagger any respect, picking it up without hesitation off the ground. He won't squander his time wondering if it feels lighter or heavier than he expected. He won't. "If we can't find her, I can damn well bring her to me. Dark One! With this dagger, I command thee! Return!"

The wind whistles. Henry closes his eyes. Nothing answers him, not even the croaking of a frog or the chirping of a cricket or any other night sounds.

"Dark One, appear!" There's no need to scan the road to see if she's racing toward him, the streetlights bathing everything in an artificial gold hue. A small part of him blames himself; had he had a plan, she would have had something to run to. If she would just appear, they could sit down somewhere and he could assure her they'd find a solution, together. He'd hold her, of course, sift his fingers through her hair, let her hand place his over her heart again to feel it beat. If she would just appear.

"Put that thing down before you hurt yourself, Guyliner!" Regina snaps at him. "I thought you knew the dagger's rules!"

And she does? He doesn't remember an Evil Queen holding a Dark One's leash, just one who cavorted with him one minute and plotted against him the next.

"With it I can summon the Dark One from any corner of the world," he recites from the yellowed, tarnished scrolls that speak of all things unholy. It was...oh yes, it was a debate between a holyman and some green codpiece arguing the Dark One didn't really exist...or maybe that it did exist, but only as a manifestation of everyone's selfishness and dark desires. The holyman didn't speak of proof because "what on earth would we do if we found it," but instead reiterated the basic information of the Dark One—it's evil, and only the one who wields its dagger has any hope of curbing its destructive nature, as the one who possesses the dagger can summon the Dark One from any corner of the world.

If she would just appear...

"Well, there's your answer. She's not in this world," Regina says. Our world, the Enchanted Forest. She must be there, alone, wondering how she will still be her if no one comes for her. Surely she would have enough presence of mind to locate Merlin. He's the key to all this.

"The Apprentice!" Snow cries out. "The Apprentice. He has to know all about this. He'll tell us where she went!"

No one agrees or disagrees, no time. Killian runs back to the pawn shop, not caring who follows him. He's first to burst through the door, the bell slamming into the glass. Hurrying into the back room, he sees the Blue Fairy, kneeling over the Apprentice, on the sofa right where they left him. Belle stands off to the side, hugging herself and watching the two of them.

"Apprentice, that monstrosity took Emma. Where did they go?" He winces at his own tone. We need this man's help, he reminds himself, his attention suddenly honing in on the old man's shallow breaths, his eyes going in and out of focus. Surely the Darkness hadn't been in him long enough to kill him? Surely Emma's magic had saved him and the man's simply exhausted...

"She is now where all darkness is born—in your realm," he croaks, his words trying to dislodge the phlegm or blood or whatever sounds stuck in his throat.

"Then take us there," he demands. If her magic's interference hadn't been enough to save this man, then it won't be enough to save her. She could be sprawled out on the ground, just like the Apprentice, writhing in pain and wondering what's keeping him from reaching her as the Darkness snuffs everything out of her.

"I am too weak now," the Apprentice sighs, biting down on the statement with more than a hint of disdain. "But this will help."

Bloody hell, too weak to get up, but spry enough to conjure up a wand? Killian shivers at the contorted, suffering faces mashed together on the base of the wand.

"It is a gift from the Sorcerer, from Merlin, on the day I became his Apprentice," the Apprentice chuckles, smiling at the memory. Puffs of air snort out his nose as he tries to roll onto his side to hand the wand to them. "In it is all the light magic."

"It can take us to our daughter?" Snow asks—no. Pleads.

"Not on its own. In order to cross realms, it must be wielded as it was forged—with both sides of the coin, the light...and the dark." Eyes rolling back into his head, the Apprentice's grip loosens, and the wand rattles against the floor as he hisses out a final breath, the Blue Fairy's head tilting in sympathy.

"Guess that's my cue," Regina says, and for once he's glad she's there to end the silence with a heavy dose of reality. None of them loved him; none of them even knew him, so mourning will have to wait. Regina's nose scrunches for a split second as she handles the wand before raising it up to the ceiling, doing all the mental preparation work to cast a spell, to mold present and future, existing conditions and desires together. And, in this case, light and dark as well. It doesn't register with him that his eyebrow is rising until the muscles around it twitch...Regina won't be able to do it.

You've worked too hard to have your happiness destroyed.

I love you.

"Enough, you're going to embarrass yourself and waste our time!" he snaps at her, ignoring how her lip has curled back, brow knitted together in frustration.

"Watch it. I know what I'm doing," she snaps back.

"Well, that's not enough. You heard the man. It needs darkness. You've gone soft." The Evil Queen redeemed, Rumpelstiltskin unable to waken...they've all defeated so many villains they might have to resort to revisiting the butcher shop and getting that Bo Peep woman to give it a whirl.

"You want to see soft? Why don't I use that hook to show you your intestines?" Bravado, fortitude, spirit—whatever anyone wanted to call it, they need an exaggeration of it. Regina's eyes widen and seem to ignite as she stares right into him, daring him to make a move. He almost smirks at how ineffectual he finds it, how he'd seen it a dozen times on her and on her mother before that, and on...

"Well, you've got the fire, love, but not the blackness, not anymore. How's this for irony? You've done too much good." Oh no, he won't let her evade him now, not when she's the only one who can grant him access to her sister. "No, we need someone wicked."

"No," she almost snarls. "No, no, not my sister! That witch is more than wicked. She's...deranged." She holds the wand out in front of her again, but halts, too reluctant to try and fail again.

"For Emma it's worth the risk. She sacrificed herself for you, Your Majesty, because she believed an Evil Queen could be good. Don't you think you owe it to her to repay the favor?"

"I was in Emma's debt long before tonight," Regina sighs after a beat. Pursing her lips, she lets them guide her gaze away from him and everyone else toward the door, back to the street. "But trying to work with that walking green bean...there won't be a Storybrooke or anyone in it for Emma to even return to."

"She has a cuff on her that keeps her magic at bay," Robin adds. "We'd have to take it off for her to be able to wield that thing and she has no reason in the world to do that."

"What about the baby?" Henry finally speaks up. They all look over at him, making way for him to address them. "She's not going to want to have a baby in a world that has a Dark One in it. Mom may not be here right now, but she will be. She'll know to find Merlin, and she'll want to come back to us. You could apply a scare tactic, that when Mom comes back, she'll be evil and ready to punish everyone who's made life difficult for her, starting with the witch who tried to erase her and everyone with a time traveling spell."

"Sound. Now get the key or punch the right buttons—whatever you need to do," Killian says, nodding at Henry.

"Henry, no one's going hurt Zelena while she's pregnant," David says quietly.

"None of us would, but a Dark One would."

"She wouldn't be the first one to kill a baby," Regina says, crossing her arms, possibly trying not to shudder. "Fine. We'll explain the situation to her and ask her for help. But the second she starts acting hostile, which will be the very first second, we're out of there. We'll look for another way. First thing in the morning."


Once someone becomes unpredictable, she becomes more than just a tool, less useful. More dangerous. A cold, harsh truth—one Killian must remind himself of over and over again—but a truth just the same. The Evil Queen slinks her hips to and fro as she leads him to her chambers, not that he'll be bedding her any time soon. Too ruthless, the stories of slaughtered peasants too many to count. Not that he makes a habit of taking royalty to bed, but he'd prefer one who wouldn't be as likely to run a knife through him as show him a good time.

The Enchanted Forest practically hums in anticipation of something, the air warmer...sweeter...than it had been the last time he'd stopped ashore. He had at first dismissed it as relief because Neverland was far behind him, but the thick sweetness wafted upward and followed him all the way up the spiral staircase from the Queen's dungeon to her room. Thick, but not overwhelming. Scents he hadn't inhaled for so long suddenly hit him hard enough to daze him, cinnamon the chief instigator. The dank, moldy odors of the dungeon, the girl Belle's sweaty, dirty countenance—nothing subdued it completely.

The Queen ushers him into a gray, sparsely furnished room, the exact opposite of what he'd expected. This Queen Regina won't remain an ally for long, too unpredictable. Had she an exorbitant amount of pillows, maybe. A few fur rugs, a fire in spite of the soft warmth outside... She sashays to a vanity, more functional than ornamental, and pours blood-red wine into a chalice.

"Things are about to change in this world," the Queen says, handing it out to him. He accepts, glaring at her as her hand lingers. It is an act to force his attention, nothing more. This flirtatious demeanor is as much a mask as his usually is. "Radically."

With a sweeping, graceful quickness, she picks up her drink and glides past him into the sunlight from the terrace. "I have plans to enact a curse that will take everyone to a far-off land."

"How will that help me?" Blast it, he doesn't have bloody time for such dreamy talk! Why? Why, why, why, his mind demands, all the gossip and parchments since he'd docked the Jolly Roger swirl together in cacophonous chatter. Surely some bit of news would stand out amongst the rest.

"This new realm? It's a land without magic," she purrs. "Where the Dark One will be stripped of his powers. There you won't need any magical weapon to kill him." She edges toward him, waving his hook around until she nestles it right under his chin.

"You can do it with a mere flick of your wrist," she whispers.

No magic. Oh, he's seen the Dark One without magic. A lame cripple. But even that doesn't excuse his level of cowardice. How easy it will be. How gratifying to see that decrepit, arrogant face widen in terror. Surely of all the times the Crocodile's been afraid before, none would compare to watching the hook plunge into his own chest.

"Tell me what I have to do," he orders. If her words are in jest...they're not. Her sultriness wanes into something more business-like. She's planned all this in her head so many times that its execution can be no less than perfect.

"There's one person I don't want following me to this new land. You're to see that doesn't happen."

"An assassination. Who is it you want me to dispose of?" She darts her head back to face him, eyes colder than they were before. Snow White? It nearly hurts his brain to try to recall all the news surrounding the target of the Evil Queen's wrath. Newly married...well, not so newly married, she and her consort due for a child any day now. Assassinating one of countless treacherous royals, he can do, especially for the reward she's dangled in front of his face, but with a little brat on the way, perhaps he should make a counter offer.

"My mother," the Queen says with a sneer.

"Splendid," he utters aloud. He won't have to kill a baby and the Queen can exact a more creative punishment on her stepdaughter. Win-win.

"Isn't it, though?" she breathes, rather carelessly, waving her hand over his hook. It doesn't appear any different, but her sudden fascination with it says otherwise.

"It's now enchanted," she says, clicking it back into place. "It will enable you to rip out her heart."

His head snaps up. The glowing pink, pulsating heart in the Dark One's hand... Milah slumping over... her frantic, murmured "I love you..." He had never wished the same fate on anyone but the Crocodile, much less someone's mother.

"I believe you've seen it done before."

"Yes." One word, yet hoarse. He swallows before she senses any misgivings.

"The enchantment will only allow you to rip out one heart. So make sure you do it right."


He arrives at Regina's house at first light, bags under his eyes and wearing yesterday's clothes. He's run his fingers through his hair so many times he's given up on it staying still. Every time he absently brushed a few strands out of his eyes, his fingertips had tried to recreate the way Emma did it, hard, fingernails scraping his scalp, reminding him he's alive.

"Hi," Henry says, opening the door for him. Stepping into the foyer, he watches Henry go back to the bottom of the staircase and sit down to tie his shoes.

"Where's your mother keep her potions?"

"What?"

"We don't have time to go to the vault, lad, and if I ask her to stop by her office, she'll refuse me. She has to have a few things here around the house." Groaning at the fact he's being too vague—and that he's already drifted into the powder room and fumbling through the contents of the Mills family medicine cabinet—he comes back out to find Henry standing, hands at the ready. "She keeps it in a black, stout bottle, red liquid...she once used it on my hook to enable it to take out a heart. That's what we need."

"So you can force Zelena to use the wand?" Henry scampers around him, into a study of a sort, for once ignoring the magic bo—computer, and opening and slamming the drawers under it on the desk.

"If she doesn't comply." He had stayed up all throughout the night, poring over his books on potions and poisons, praying to gods he hardly believed in to find something of use.

"Did you go back to my grandparents' place last night? You look like you've been up all night," Henry says as he sorts through a drawer filled with pens and a few other office-type items Killian's seen before but can't yet name. Not waiting for an answer, he adds with a shrug, "I was, too. Reading the book. Rumpelstiltskin's name isn't in it, neither is his story, but it mentions 'the Dark One' so many times...I thought it would have a clue. Is this it?"

For one moment, Killian considers scoffing, laughing, even, at how the same woman who keeps a heart-removal potion in her house is the same woman who couldn't use the ridiculous light-and-dark-magic wand last night. But he'll take a boon when he sees one. Ripping it out of Henry's hand, he stuffs it into his pocket.

"Apologies, lad, but it has to be kept out of sight. It's meant to be a back-up, a covert back-up."

"Right," he says with a nod. Ambling back into the foyer, he calls up the stairs on his way to the kitchen. "Mom! Killian's here! I'm going to start breakfast for me and Roland."

Killian leans against the wall and just watches Henry pull a pan out from one of the cabinets, gather eggs and milk, position bowls and spatulas, flashing a friendly smile at the small moppet of a boy entering the kitchen and telling him breakfast will be ready soon and he can pick any game for the two of them to play when they're finished—Emma would be beaming with pride.


"Hook! Hook, come on! We're getting out of here. Now."

He'd been so close to Zelena's heart, so close to ending all the catty and rather disgusting digs the two sisters had made at one another and yielding some actual results. But he can't do it with Regina around. The second she realized what he was doing, she'd freeze him or "poof" him to Granny's, so determined to keep her sister under her control. He laughs in the backseat of her car.

"Oh, you find being back at Square One funny?" Regina calls back to him as she turns them onto the main street.

"Hardly, but what I do find a damned good laugh is the fact you think you can keep Zelena under lock and key indefinitely," he shoots back, ignoring Robin jerking around to give him a look of horror.

"I don't think that's any of your business," she snaps.

"Well, it's just that in my experience, when people want a way out, they find one."

"And in my experience, I know how to hang onto my prisoners," she says, a fraction of her grin shining in the rearview mirror at him. "Don't worry. She's in a place far more secure than the brig of some ship."

"You're fine with this, mate?" he aims at Robin. "Leaving the witch alone, day in and day out, everyone content to just assume she's not getting out of there, leaving her to her own devices with nothing but hate for the woman you love and your child she's carrying as leverage?"

"You saw what all she did when she was free," Robin counters, shaking his head as if he's had this argument with himself a couple of times. "I'm sorry things didn't go well back there, but if Zelena's free, she'll come after Roland and Regina, and I can't allow that to happen."

"Fine. Drop me off here." Gesturing at the diner, he slouches in his seat and stares out the window...because that's just how much he cares about whatever they have to say. He'll have to go back to the hospital, alone, this time. Only he won't know what buttons to push...nine of them with possible repeats...x number of slots to fill...he'd be there all day and night. Perhaps Henry will have an idea. Henry's always been so resourceful, and he's just as ready to have Emma back as he is, so if anyone could help, the Truest Believer and the new Author certainly could.

The Author. Henry's the Author now. He can rewrite this. There's no need to use the potion, no need for Zelena at all. All he would need to do is pen something simple like, "The Darkness in Emma disappeared and she found herself home," and it would come to pass.

It takes all the discipline in the world to not just burst out of the car and stumble into the diner. Mustering as much self-control as he can, he shuts the car door behind him and storms into the diner. Sure enough, Henry sits at the counter, sipping a drink and absorbed in a book.

"Henry, you can fix this." He sits next to him, a mere touch on the arm enough to earn the lad's undivided attention. "You're the Author now. Use that pen. Write the Darkness out of Emma. Bring her back."

Shifting in his seat, Henry seems to swallow down a bout of queasiness, an apologetic look coming over him.

"I broke it."

Killian didn't hear that properly. Couldn't have heard that properly.

"You what?"

"It's too much power," Henry explains. "That's how the last Author got in trouble. He stopped recording history and started using magic to change it. My mom wouldn't want me to. She'd want me to be good."

His forehead slumps into his hand, his fingers rubbing his temples out of instinct. Bloody hell, they'd just survived an infernal topsy-turvy world where everything was backwards, and here, when they're all supposed to be home, they're all punished for doing the right thing. Emma saves the whole town—again—and she's the...she's in peril. Regina's too much of a hero to be of any use now and Henry resists the temptation of nigh-limitless power and now can't save his own mother? Good is what's supposed to always win, isn't it? When did it skip ahead a few pages only to hurl the book into the corner and hide behind a chair?

Well then, he thinks, running his fingers against his scalp as hard as he can, the potion it is. He still can't get past the button configuration...but if it becomes a two-man job, he may not need to at all.

"Ah, honor. So you won't break any rules then?"

Henry tilts his head and raises an eyebrow. Ah, yes, lad, I know quite a few stories about you—stealing your teacher's credit card to go track down your mother, trapping yourself in a mine just for a piece of your grandmother's coffin, daring to make magic explode in a well...however that worked.

"What if there was a way—a dangerous way—to help your mother?" Killian asks him. "Something your other mother wouldn't like?"

Henry snorts silently and lowers his voice to a conspiratorial volume.

"I don't need her permission," he says. "I'm not a kid anymore."

Oh, he loves this boy. Loves him as much as if he were his own. They can do this.

"Good. Because our best bet is the person Regina hates the most."

"Zelena," Henry says, nodding.

"That's right. We're going to break out the Wicked Witch." He can't resist allowing the corners of his mouth to curl up into a grin. The two of them can do this. He wishes he could curb the swelling sense of hope warming him from the inside out, but a bigger part of him wishes nothing of the kind. If he can still feel like they'll have their arms around Emma before nightfall, that means the possibility exists.


A/N: I have returned! Be patient with me, though, since I am doing this chronologically. Thanks again to my beta OnceSnow for taming this beast of a chapter. Coming up? Crazy Eyes Zelena does not mess around.