When Emma said 'buy us time', Killian had thought twelve, maybe twenty people.
This was an army. The people from under the mountain, the refugees and fighters and angry little people. They had come out from under their mountain and they were furious. They spanned as far as the eye could see, that one with a picaxe this one with a saber, the next with a torch.
And at their head, the puppet and the orphan.
"Be safe," Grace said, hugging Emma goodbye.
"Good luck," she replied with a tight smile.
"No, you'll need it more than me." Despite her assurances, Killian didn't miss the way her hand tangled with August's or how white her knuckles were.
"Cora." Emma stepped over to the old woman. "Cora, do you remember what I told you about hearts?" Grace turned sharply to look. Cora nodded. "Today, I want you to take as many of them as you can. Don't smash them, just tell them to go to sleep until you say otherwise." Cora nodded again, a wide, blithe smile on her face.
"Killian!" Emma called him over, wrapping a black scarf around her neck. "It's time." He nodded in reply, pulling away from his marveling.
"Goodbye." He smiled fondly at Grace, stubborn and loyal as she was, and shook hands with August, her strong, wooden other half. "Farewell."
And they left.
The fairies rose from their places in line, forming ranks and brandishing sharpened wands.
"Ready?" August asked Grace, turning to look at her. She nodded, light burning in her eyes.
"Always and ever." She drew an arrow from the quiver at her back, and spinning, fired it at the walls.
Almost en masse, the fairies launched themselves after that arrow. The guards hardly noticed at first, only worrying when their blood was already wetting their fingers.
The dwarves assembled under the mountain, picking away pieces of the foundation. Chipping away this support and that column. Bit by bit, the castle was theirs.
When the drawbridge dropped and ogres began pouring out, Grace didn't worry.
Maybe she should have.
Emma and Killian had made good time. They had met Grace and August and Emma's army at dawn, leaving the castle not long after. It must have been midday, and they were at the border of Allen's land. In the time between Killian's childhood and now, Allen had erected a long, weaving ivory wall, built not of stone or wood, but of bones and sand. The guard towers were made obvious by the curtains of clothing hanging in long streams down each side.
"Where'd he get the bones?" Killian whispered to Emma, wary of the many guards along the wall.
"Soldiers, rebels, ogres. Any dead thing is ordered brought to him, so he can steal their bones and clothes. He takes fur if he can get it." Emma seemed particularly saddened by the sight of a long, lovely red cloak sewn into a section of what seemed to be wolf pelts. "That hat..." Her forehead wrinkled, frown deepening in thought with a sudden idea.
"What hat?" Killian looked, but he didn't see any hats sewn into the long panels.
"Grace's father's hat. That guard's wearing it." Emma pointed down. "I wonder if he knows what it is."
"Probably not. Why do we want his hat?" But Emma was already halfway to the wall. Killian cursed and followed her.
She climbed quickly, he found, more quickly than he. Apparently all that practicing on the stone at the resistance camp was paying off. Hand after hand, foot, left, right, up up up, no, don't look down. He tried not to think of the poor things making up this wall eh was climbing, pretending the bones were wood, the gaps a ladder to the deck of his ship. He came face-to-face with a wolf skull, picked clean by both vultures and the wind.
Killian decided that if he ever met King Allen, he'd scratch his eyes out and then poison him. Maybe stab him a bit.
They made it to the top.
Grace should have been worried. Her army destroyed, August missing, ogres everywhere and only Jiminy Cricket for company. She should have been scared out of her wits.
She wasn't. She had been waiting for this since she was ten, and no tiny conscience was going to stop her.
"If you find August, tell him I love him, okay?" She smiled down at Jiminy, pressed a kiss to his head and dropped him into a jar. "Sorry." She shoved a length of rope over her shoulder and left the sealed glass jar in the mud.
He wasn't her conscience anyway.
"Well." Killian looked at Emma admiringly. They had, together, made short work of the guards on this sector of the wall, and Emma had snatched both hat and cloak from the wall's eerie, pale, clutches.
"What?" Her face crinkled, and he had to remind himself that he'd kissed her and she'd pushed him away. Obviously she wasn't interested. He had no right to think her face crinkling was adorable.
But it kind of was.
"Nothing, lass." She made a face at the nickname and he smirked.
"Come on then." She began the perilous descent down the other side of the wall. Hand over hand, foot below foot, don't look down.
He followed promptly if reluctantly.
"Where are we headed?" He called down, voice half-lost in the wind. Hand over hand. Foot below foot.
"You ever heard of Maleficent?" She yelled back at him.
Grace was alone. The ogres disappeared, the guards gone. The mist rising off of still-hot blood was foggy in the sea-cold air, and she could hardly see. She was spinning in circles, feet red with her comrades' blood, breathing it in, stepping in it, she was drowning in it.
Blood and ice and fog, she was drowning.
And alone.
So alone.
"So this Maleficent..." Killian asked, breathing rough in the desert sun. "She's a witch?"
"Yeah, and a dragon." Emma pulled the black scarf over her mouth and nose, keeping out the sand.
"A- a Dragon?!" Killian did a double take. "Do I even want to know?" Emma shook her head.
"Probably not." She looked up, pressing the cloth to her mouth with a hand. "We're here, anyway."
It was an odd feeling, looking up from beating sun and blinding sand to find yourself surrounded by trees in front of a huge lake.
"How-?" Killian looked from Emma to the lake and back again.
"Hat."
"Ah."
"So how are we getting across?" Killian was fairly sure he couldn't swim a lake that big. And even if he could, who knew what was in it?
"Boat." Emma was striding purposefully towards a small dinghy anchored to a pine tree.
"Small boat."Killian was doubtful of this 'boat'.
"Let's just hope it's stronger than it looks," Emma huffed, shoving it into the water. Killian snorted and helped her.
It was. While they were attacked twice by crocodiles (and Killian couldn't quite figure out why Emma was laughing so hard), the boat held out and they reached the other side fully intact.
"Wonderful," Killian snarked, peering up at the spire Maleficent had set home upon, "more climbing."
"Get over it, pretty boy," Emma snorted, pulling the scarf tightly around her neck. Killian smirked, his thoughts somewhere along the lines of 'she thinks I'm pretty', before he realized what that sounded like and promptly cleared his throat and frowned. Manly, yeah. he was manly.
"We climbed a sixty-foot beanstalk once, Jones, I'm sure you can handle this." Killian wondered about the beanstalk all the way to the top.
Where he found other things to worry about.
Like the dragon lady with the scepter.
Maleficent actually proved to be a courteous, if facetious, host, and she listened amiably to Emma's story, even the part where Emma killed her. ("Happens all the time, dear, don't worry about it.")
"So will you help us?" Emma bit her lip and fidgeted with her hands, and looked, for a short moment, like a very small, very nervous, little girl.
"You want me to help you recreate a timeline in which I am trapped as a mindless beast for thirty years and then murdered by you?" Emma shrugged apologetically.
"Of course I will. Where would you like to go?" Emma's smile would have put the sun to shame.
"The Jolly Roger, three hundred years ago. The day before he's going to leave for Kanampa." Maleficent smiled.
"Very particular."
"Time travel." Emma shrugged. Maleficent gestured that they were to stand up. Emma walked over closer to him, shoulder to shoulder, even. He felt their fingers brush, could smell green leaves faintly, and then there was a crash and he couldn't focus on any one thing at a time.
Maleficent was falling, sceptre scraping a long white line across the floor. There was blood seeping down her dress from a small wound in her side. When she fell to her knees, listing down to face the cold stone, he could see the arrow fletching poking out.
The witch raise her arm, dragged her sceptre, and he could see it in her eyes taht she was dying. But Emma's grip on his arm brought him back to the present, and Maleficent was screaming something and there was blue mist seeping from beneath their feet, and he could hear the archers nocking arrows to their bowstrings.
Instinctively, he grabbed Emma by the shoulder, pulling her down with him, but he was just a bit too late, there was blood leaking from somewhere near her neck, and he could see the arrow now, in the space between the side of her waist and her collarbone. She was lying in his arms and there was noise all around and there was thick red blood flowing over his hands and he had no clue what was going on, only that she wasn't safe and he needed Emma safe.
He could hear the ocean behind him, and he knew they were home.