Emma woke up to the kind of silence that only ever followed snow. It was a heavy sort of quiet like the blankets around her waist, which felt more substantial than they had when she'd fallen asleep the night before. Of all the ways to wake up, she thought drowsily, this wasn't terrible.
The moment fell away once Emma heard Killian yawn behind her, much closer than expected. The feeling of his fingers skimming the edge of her wrist where it was exposed by the blanket immediately followed, and she came to the sudden understanding that his forearm was the heavy weight resting on her side. Sure enough, the golden hands of his watch reflected the overhead light into her eyes when she looked down at the blankets covering her.
A deep ache filled her chest at the sight of it, a painful bloom somewhere just below her collarbone despite — or perhaps because of — the sheer comfort it brought. He probably had no idea that he had turned in his sleep toward her. He probably didn't give it a second thought that most of this trip would entail nights spent lying right next to her, either. Emma, on the other hand, had listened to Mary Margaret talk about the possibility of something like this simply happening to them before they even arrived at their destination.
The trouble, Emma always insisted, was that things like this never just happened. People's lives could change over the course of time, but a week-long road trip was not enough of it. Either feelings existed, or they didn't. Either people acted on them, or they didn't. A year had come and gone since Emma first met Killian, and despite every single pointed look from her brother and every muttered encouragement from his wife, she had never seen the evidence through her own eyes. She knew part of that was the careful game of distance she always found herself playing whenever he was around, but that was the point, wasn't it? She was the only one playing.
Move, Emma.
She spent several seconds trying to figure out a way to pull herself from his arms before she sighed and eased her hips to the edge of the bed in one tense motion. His arm fell away down the blankets, and then she was free to stand up and greet the day. It should have felt like victory when he didn't immediately stir, but Emma just felt cold.
She shuffled toward the switch on the wall and turned their lamp off. The reflection of the porch light on the snow cast a bright enough glow on its own; six inches of snow blanketed everything in sight, including the Range Rover. It was perfect, except for a few trails left by the squirrels and the birds, and she stood there for a while as the sun began to set the sky on fire.
By the time the water shut off again, Emma was packed and ready, her long hair wound in a plait that fell past her shoulder blades. She made herself busy with lacing her boots while he changed and pretended to only notice him once she heard the zipper on his bag close. He looked more awake than he probably felt, but more than anything she noticed a difference in his smile. It was like he knew exactly what she'd been thinking about from the moment he woke up. Near from the day she met him, he'd always had a strange knack for being able to guess her thoughts. Maybe this was just another one of those moments — or maybe it was just one of the side-effects of being close to him.
"Did you send a picture back to Mary Margaret yet?"
"I don't think they're even awake," she remarked, wondering just how worried they would be if she sent them a picture of the Range Rover covered in last night's snowfall. The choice to not contact them last night during the storm had been a little less than accidental.
"That's true. I forgot about the time change," he muttered, glancing down at his watch for a moment. She watched his eyes change in a way they usually didn't when he checked the time, but in a second the expression was gone and replaced with another grin. "I don't remember you waking this early either, Swan. Was I snoring that badly?"
"You don't snore."
"I know. I just wanted you to feel better about the fact that you do."
"You're so full of shit."
"Aye. But you enjoy it."
Emma rolled her eyes and huffed as she shouldered her bag, dismissing the topic before he could keep it up. She was not treading any closer to the topic of their sleeping arrangement last night. He was too good at reading the path her train of thought took, and it was hard enough to pass by him without remembering the way his fingers had traced the outside of her palm. Feeling the ghost of it throughout most of the morning was more than enough for her to try and handle.
From what she could tell, their luck with the weather had quite literally changed overnight. As thick as the snow had been, it had fallen warm and powdery, making it miraculously easy to scrape off the front windshield and side mirrors. Driving on the freshly scraped main streets wasn't as easy — she always swore the plows actually made it worse by packing down all of the snow and slicking it up — but somehow they made it back onto the interstate without having to get out and push.
And, terrified as she'd been of driving through the snow the night before, she had to admit it was one of the most beautiful views she'd ever seen. Small town after small town flew by once they made their way past Milwaukee, each one blanketed in less snow than the last. They weren't two hours into the day before patches of grass started appearing again and the radio started fizzling into static.
"Tell me how you and David met."
Emma threw the half-question out into the air without putting much thought into it; her foster brother had mentioned Killian long before she ever had the chance to meet him, but somehow the story of their introduction was always forgotten.
Except now, in the space between her request and his answer, she was starting to wonder if that was such a coincidence.
"That's not the most flattering story," he admitted, softer than she was expecting. She thought he'd stop there, but he let out a little sigh and shifted so he was facing her more directly. "But I'll tell you, if you'd like."
"It can't be that bad."
"You'd be surprised."
Emma paused a moment, trying to figure out what he was doing. If he wanted to avoid the conversation, then he would have found a way around it by now. "All right," she finally said, turning the radio down until the music was barely more than a whisper. "Tell me."
"David and I met when I was transferred to his department. His unit was short-handed at the time, and my latest case had just closed." he explained. "He runs quite a tight ship, as I'm sure you are aware. I took it upon myself to take every opportunity to rile him up that I could."
Emma knew exactly what he was talking about. Her brother was nowhere near obsessive, but he always made a plan and followed through on it, sometimes to a fault. She always chalked it up to him playing the protective older sibling, but it wasn't exactly a surprise to hear it carried over into work.
"He'll deny it now, but we near hated each other right off the bat. I've always had trouble dealing with authority, and his way of dealing with that was trying to control me further. He made it his job to oversee every step I took on our case, and it damn near drove the both of us insane — not for a lack of instigation on my part, of course," he added, a bit of a hollow grin on his lips. "If it hadn't been for a single case we worked on together, I think we'd still be at each other's throats."
"Which case was it?" Emma asked, trying to remember any stand-out instances of David complaining about work. As many times as she found him dazed and weary on the couch in the living room, she'd never heard him mention problems with coworkers. For David, it was always about the task at hand.
Killian's smile fell, subtle and yet perfectly clear in her peripheral vision. "I'm not sure how much he would have told you, since it was so widely televised — there was a pair of child traffickers."
"Greg and Tamara," Emma interrupted in a low voice, her own expression darkening. He was right in guessing she didn't know much, but what she did was enough to set anyone into a rage. The couple had paced up and down New England, kidnapping young boys and using them to pass drugs along the coast, along with who knows what else. David hadn't told her much after they caught the people responsible, and she was fine with not knowing.
"We both spent weeks combing through evidence and tracking them down. I'm still not sure if it was the godawful station coffee or the insomnia addling our brains, but that was the first time I saw how much he cared about what was happening around him. Most of us numb and isolate ourselves to get through our work," he admitted quietly. "I reconsidered after the dust settled."
Emma was quiet for a while, her mind swimming with everything his story had dragged up. Then, because she couldn't think of anything adequate enough to soothe the memories, she glanced over at him with a small, lopsided smile.
"I was expecting something about David punching you for flirting with Mary Margaret and giving you that scar on your cheek."
As always, he was ready for her. "Emma, love, have you ever seen me flirt with another woman?"
"I've seen you charm bartenders into free refills."
"Yes, but I seem to remember you batting your eyes at our waiter for another basket of onion rings at the very same pub," he argued, cocking his head in her direction.
"That's different."
"Is it?"
He had a point, Emma realized slowly. From the moment she'd met him until now, she had yet to see him put his energy into getting to know someone. She had yet to overhear conversations featuring unfamiliar names, to shake hands with new guests over family dinner, to let herself consider the possibility of five passengers in the car instead of four on the way up to Thunder Bay. Emma had gotten used to him as he was, and the thought of almost any alternative was unthinkable.
That was exactly her problem. Almost left room for exactly one possibility, and it was too easy for her to imagine.
"All right," she ceded, trying to draw the conversation back to a place where she felt safe giving him honest answers. "Then where'd the scar come from?"
"That's two questions, Swan. Is it not my turn to ask you something?"
"I don't remember agreeing to rules like that."
"Aye, you didn't, but that isn't going to stop me to asking."
He had trouble in his eyes, the kind that let her know he was planning on being relentless. She wished it didn't look so enticing coming from him.
"What is it you want to know?"
Killian made a noise of amusement, which didn't ease her in the slightest. "This isn't an interrogation, love. You don't have to be so defensive."
"I'm not being —" Emma paused before she could finish her sentence, glowering at the road in front of her. "Fine. Okay. But then you answer my question afterwards."
He held a hand in the air. "On my honor." To Emma's surprise, he immediately reached for her, gently tugging free the wrist that rested farthest from him on top of the wheel. It wasn't the way that her arm pressed across her body that made her startle, though. It was the way his fingers held the weight of her palm, and the way his thumb skimmed over the small tattoo on her wrist. Had his touch been any gentler, she wouldn't have felt it at all.
"I want to know where you got this."
It was a simple forget-me-not, one that had adorned her wrist for as long as she'd known David. Ruth hadn't exactly approved of a tattoo as an adoption present, but even she had admitted it suited Emma after the swelling went down on her skin.
"Believe it or not, David has a friend in the city. He was never going to use his friend discount, so he gave it to me —" she paused there, realizing she had already fulfilled his question. He'd even given her an easy start on purpose, asking the where instead of the why, but the unspoken invitation to keep going was sitting right in front of her.
She took it.
"I used to draw it on my wrist all the time. I used to do it when I was feeling down about being on my own. It's supposed to stand for steadfastness."
She had to work not to turn her eyes to him at that point, because his thumb traced the petals again. She took a deep breath and pressed on, trying to focus her eyes on the road in front of her.
"So when I finally got my family, I didn't have to keep drawing it anymore. But then my wrist looked really weird without anything on it, so…a tattoo." She finished with a little smile, pressing her fingernails into her palm and fanning them out again.
"Please say something. You're never this quiet."
He opened his mouth to reply but seemed to think better of whatever he was about to say, pulling his hand away to rest at his side instead. "I got the scar when I was very young. Nine years old was a little too early to learn to shave."
"But you didn't let that stop you, apparently."
"Not at all. I'd watched my brother Liam doing it and that was all the motivation I needed to try it myself."
Emma had never had reason to picture him young, but she spent the next several miles drawing the mental image in her mind. His description of Liam and their adventures together drew her own memories of David to mind, even though she and David were much closer in age. Emma had only heard about Liam a few times before, and always in past tense. It didn't take much to connect the scattering of happy memories into a bigger picture of the man Killian had lost.
They continued trading stories as they day grew long and the winter sun stretched higher, sticking to an unspoken agreement to tell more lighthearted stories than those they'd started with. Cities passed hour by hour in the rearview until the gas was empty again, but even then she rolled down the driver's side window so she could listen to him talk about the merits of the metric system versus America's standard. By the time Duluth was behind them, he'd convinced her to let him switch her phone to display both military time and Celsius.
Stout, scrubby pines and their taller neighbors lined both sides of the road now, and Emma could feel the wind pushing Killian's side of the car every time their route crossed over a river. The sun, which had been chasing them all day, had fallen back behind the trees long since they crossed into the Superior National Forest. Emma hadn't officially labeled it a competition, but she was longing for the chance to stretch her legs on frost-covered grass instead of gas station concrete. Her phone had buzzed no less than four times in her pocket, too, letting her know Mary Margaret was just as anxious for them to arrive as she was. Every road sign taunted her with the miles left to go — especially when the speed limit reduced in a residential zone — but then, all at once, things began to look familiar. First, it was the way the road widened in front of them, signaling the end of the national forests' easternmost boundary. Then, it was Grand Portage Bay and its national monument, which would have still been a pit stop had David been in the car, and Wauswaugoning Bay minutes afterward. Canada welcomed them for the second time in three days.
A short ten minutes after crossing the border, just in time for night to truly fall, Emma turned off the interstate highway down a dusky, frost-bitten stretch of dirt. The smell of frozen wood spread through the air even with their windows closed, along with smoke from someone's chimney. This time, the slower speed didn't hinder a thing; she took in every untouched pile of half-melted snow and weathered fence post as she climbed the driveway.
It had been darker the last time they came, the first time Killian traveled with them. He hadn't been able to see the sun reflected in the picture windows that looked out over the lake, or the way the ice formed over the beach and climbed over the unsuspecting reeds near the water's edge. She glanced at him as she parked by the front steps, watching him take it in in a way she hadn't the year before.
Tradition looked nothing short of magnificent, and he looked exactly as awed as she'd felt the first time David and Mary Margaret invited her to come. Even with just the light from the interior shining down on him, she could feel it coming from him, and she would have been lying if she said it wasn't in the least infectious. For a moment, it felt like this was her first time seeing everything, too.
"C'mon," she told him with a grin, pulling the key out of the ignition and taking hold of the one that opened the front door instead. "It looks even better when the fireplace's turned on."
It took three trips to haul everything into the foyer. Emma stubbornly left her gloves off, as if that would make things go more quickly, but in the end she found herself fumbling with the matches because of it. She knelt in front of the stone inlay of the hearth and hissed victoriously the second a spark lit.
"Killian! It's lit. Where is the wood?"
"Hold your horses, Swan," he grunted, sloughing an armful of wood onto the stone in front of her. "Everything on top of the pile was sopping wet."
She waved off his pointed complaint and shoved a few thick logs into place, watching to make sure her starter didn't die out. When it didn't, she looked over at him gleefully, and shoved his arm when she saw he was looking at his phone.
"This is the most important part of Tradition, Killian. You're not allowed to miss it to answer them yet."
"Miss it?" He asked, grinning softly at her. He made a show out of settling down, legs crossed in a mockery of hers, and every part of him seemed a little softer in the light of the growing fire. "I wouldn't miss this for the world."