A/N: Thank you so much to all who have read, reviewed, followed, favourited, or looked at this in any way at all. Small note for this chapter: in my world, speed is measured in km/h, not mph, so when you get to that part of the chapter, be advised that 140 kph is somewhere around 85 mph. My fics may have their abundant weaknesses, but we do follow the laws of physics here. As always, comments and criticism are always welcome!
Gold was already at the garage by the time Emma got there the next morning, and the way he was standing made her think he was looking for a fight. It wasn't that he was combative as much as he was...still. He looked wound up, like he had a thread of anger and anticipation holding him up, and was waiting for an opportunity to let it strike out. But his car was finished, sitting in the front lot and glossy in the early morning sunlight, and Killian was actually smiling as he handed over the key. Well, smiling in a very smug, very satisfied, very I-know-what-you-were-hoping-would-happen-and-didn't-I-just-foil-your-plans kind of way, but smiling nonetheless.
"Don't hesitate to bring it back in if you have any other problems." Emma heard him saying as she walked up. "I'm always happy to have a look."
"I'm sure there will be." Gold muttered. He looked unreasonably angry for a man who had just gotten the fastest service in the history of services. His hold on the dapper-old-gentleman facade he seemed to wear looked tenuous as he jerked a curt nod at Emma on his way back to his car. She paused in the doorway as he started up the engine, listening to the smooth purr of it for a moment and the barely-there sound of the gears shifting as he put it into gear and rolled down towards the road.
"Like it's brand new." Killian commented, coming to stand behind her with his hand braced on the doorframe.
"Must've had a good mechanic." Emma said drily, watching the car kick up dust on the road for another moment before pushing off and wandering into the garage. "What time did he come by?"
"Quarter to eight." Killian chuckled. "And he was in a rage before I even opened the door - you should've seen his face when I told him his repairs were done, when he realized he wasn't going to get the chance to yell at me."
"You did check my work, right? He's not going to come back in here with some stupid little problem I missed?"
"I took a look at it." He followed a few steps behind her back to the workbench, shuffling a few tools around as she slipped her coveralls over her clothes, and now he flipped a wrench in the air and gave her a winning smile before backing towards a car already mounted on the jack. "It was perfect."
She just waved a dismissive hand at him, turning towards her first project of the day - a 90′s Ford with an exceptionally flat tire - to hide her sudden smile.
She mounted the tire quickly and dove into a morning of back-to-back oil changes, the garage cool and quiet except for the faint sounds of Killian working on the other car and the tinny sound of oil draining into the pan.
Sometime between the first two oil changes, Killian went to the back to grab a tool and flicked on the radio in the office, the soft strains of distinctive, twangy guitar following him back into the garage. Emma's head snapped to his, her eyebrow already arched in protest.
"You're not serious." She said flatly. He just shook his head, bewildered.
"What?"
"Come on - country? Really? Of all the music in the world..."
"Not a fan?" A sly, slightly wicked smile replaced the confusion on his face. "And what do you listen to that's so superior?"
"I don't know...Alt Rock? Anything?"
"Oh please. Alt Rock is not a preference - Alt Rock is a copout." He disappeared around the back of the car again, his stupid grin still laced through his words. She narrowed her eyes and threw a balled up shop towel in his direction, though it barely made it halfway.
"You're a jerk, you know that?" She called over. He only laughed.
"If I am, Swan, at least I'm a jerk with taste."
The next afternoon, Killian drove into town to answer a service call, and returned an hour later with an '89 Buick and a smile splitting his face.
"What are you so goddamn happy about?" Emma asked him, wandering into the front lot when she heard the rumble of the tow truck. She had been working on a car that was stuck behind the shop, the engine fried and the car immovable without the truck or another person around to move it inside. The back lot was dusty, unreasonably hot in the sun, and the car itself was a pain in the ass, so she was already cross even before he came in like the cat who ate the canary. "Did someone give you that car as a gift, or did you just lose your mind between town and here?"
"Careful with that tone, lass." He said, downright jubilant as he sauntered over to the passenger side and opened the door, fussing with something inside. "Otherwise you don't get your gift."
"I'll pass on the gift if you'll shut up and come tow that stupid Chevy inside."
"Why don't you wait to see what it is first?" He reappeared, his grin flashing brilliantly in the sun, hefting a large cardboard box in his arms. "Picked this up at the post office on my way back."
"I don't care about your mail, Killian. What I care about is -" She trailed off as she thought about the answer to that question - I care about getting my car back.
All at once, his smile made perfect sense.
"Is that..."
"Yours." He nodded, that grin getting impossibly wider as he passed her to deposit the box at the back of the shop, Emma nearly running in her haste to follow him. "I've got one more part coming from another supplier, but it'll be here in a few days, and in the meantime this is what I need to start."
"I take back everything bad I ever said about your mail." She knew her voice sounded slightly breathy as she looked down at the box, resting her fingertips lightly on it like it was the key to everything she had ever wanted. He just chuckled under his breath and grabbed a knife off the bench, slicing through the tape and opening the box to shuffle through the contents.
"I can't dive completely into your repairs - I do have to honour the other bookings, and you still have to work here." He said. "But I'll work on it as much as I can, and we'll get you back out there."
"I know the deal." She said, her gaze dancing over the sleek metal of the parts. A smile played on her lips, and a thousand repairs on hellish cars in the baking heat of the back lot would all be worth it once she had the Bug back. She looked up, and he was watching her with a different, slightly wistful smile on his face. His hand drifted up to rub behind his ear as her eyes met his, and she got the idea that she wasn't supposed to have seen him.
"I'll unload the Buick and bring the truck around back." He said. "We'll hook up the Chevy and get it in here."
"Sounds like a plan." Killian broke away first, and Emma watched him for a moment, swinging his keys casually as he walked back to the truck. He was nearly at the garage doors when she called, "Killian?" He turned only slightly, enough that it was only with one eye that he saw her grateful smile. "Thanks."
The twist of a smile he returned wasn't quite the triumphant thing it had been when he pulled up. "Anytime, Swan."
The minute Killian pulled those parts out of the truck, Emma should have realized that her luck - her happiness - wouldn't last long. She left the shop that evening just in time to grab the last piece of lasagna at the diner on the ground floor of Granny's, then went upstairs to spend the rest of the night with a book and a glass of lukewarm wine. It was only ten by the time she felt her eyes drifting shut, but between the hellbeast that was the Chevy and her long day with Gold's repairs two days prior, she wasn't surprised that her body was finally catching up to her.
She was somewhere just north of sleep when her phone rang.
"Emma Swan." She said groggily, caller ID a foreign concept to her mind that was just screaming sleep.
"You took the towels." He said without preamble. "All of them."
She sat straight up in bed, instantly, painfully awake. She should have known it would be him - who else had ever called her, and who else would call her now unless it was someone with an axe to grind?
"We only had four towels." He plowed on. "You could have at least had the decency to leave me one." She could hear in his voice that this was just the beginning of where this conversation was going to go. He had always had a talent for getting himself worked up, so fired up about something so small that he would let build and build until it was an hour long conversation where nobody else got to say a word.
"What do you want, Walsh?" She asked. She drew her knees up to her chest and rested her cheek on them, wishing that she had never picked up.
"I want to take a goddamn shower without having to stand in the middle of the goddamn bathroom air drying for an hour."
"You're a grown man; you can buy your own towels." But she knew him, and knew this wasn't where it was going to end. "What's this really about?"
"What's this - Emma, you left. I come home from work and you're fucking gone without a word to me, with all the goddamn towels, absolutely no warning..."
"Hold on." She held up a finger even though he wasn't there to see it. "I would have thought that You don't fit in my life would have been warning enough, from your end. Especially considering I'm the one who didn't fit in your life, according to you."
"You're putting words in my mouth. I said that your behaviour-"
"You asked me to blow off my job to go to a party with you, Walsh. That's not my behaviour."
"That's not fair." His voice got a few notches louder, and she got out of bed as if to get away from this entire conversation, taking a few steps before she realized there was nowhere to go. "I told you when we got together that my job involved a lot of corporate events."
"And I said I'd come when I could, but-"
"You know how important family is to my company, to the CEO, who was there by the way..."
"You cannot have ever expected that I would abandon a meet with a perp I'd been setting up for weeks to drink champagne with the upper management of your company just because a husband and wife and 2.2 kids are part of your corporate values!"
"Emma, you're a bail bondsman! It's not like you can't set something else up! But this was a one time event with all the senior guys, and now that you've left entirely what the hell am I going to do for family?"
"Find one that means something beyond how it looks to your boss." She said. Her blood felt like ice in her veins, and she felt numb as she spoke. Once upon a time, she had believed in a future with this man. Again, like always, it had been foolish even to want it.
"It's not even..." He made an impatient, angry sound. "This whole thing...you're just not thinking, Emma. That's what doesn't fit. This, this being selfish, was never you."
"That's where you're wrong, Walsh." She felt the energy drain from her body, suddenly not angry despite what he was saying, suddenly not anything. "You never knew me at all."
She hung up on whatever words she knew were building to an explosion on the other end of the line. The room was too quiet now that the weight of his expectations was gone, but even though she was tired in a way that ached all the way down to her bones, she felt restless. Her feelings were mounting to an apex she didn't want to face, because she had let herself want a future, dream of a family, imagine that it was something that could happen for her, and even though she had to live with the knowledge that she had been wrong, even though that was a fact that spun through her mind every day, hearing his voice had made it too real.
She needed to be not-here. She needed to be somewhere that wasn't this room that was simultaneously stifling and too open; she needed to be somewhere that would anchor her, where she wouldn't feel like a transient in this world where everyone had somebody but her. Most of all, she needed somewhere where it felt like she belonged.
She didn't change out of her pajamas as she stole down the dark stairwell and out into the night, ghosting along the dark streets, taking breaths that didn't feel real. Nobody else was out, but if they had been she felt like they wouldn't even see her. She was a spirit and the earth and the air, but she wasn't a person because people needed people, and she must not because nobody ever stayed.
It took minutes or hours to get to the garage, but once she was there it felt like it took the space of an insubstantial, not-enough breath to get to her car in the rear lot. It was locked - they keys hanging on the service wall inside the building - but that hadn't stopped her the first time so it definitely wasn't going to now. A spare bit of wire slid down past the window glass, a quick tug, and she was sliding into the driver's seat and taking a deep breath that felt like the first in far too long. And then the breaths were coming too fast and Goddamit, Emma, you can't cry about this but everything crashed over her now that she was sitting here because the seat felt as familiar as a pair of arms wrapping solidly around her, and the scent of the interior was musty and familiar and she didn't think of the smell of a family kitchen or cinnamon rolls on sundays when she thought of home, she thought of this. And then despite her warning to herself, the tears started to fall because how had she gotten to the point that she had to attach these feelings of belonging to a car that wasn't even hers to feel like the word home applied to her at all?
"How are you all that I have?" She whispered, her voice hitching and breaking. She ran her hand over the curve of the steering wheel, the smooth knob of the gear shift, and she imagined punching the gas pedal hard and tearing out of the lot, down onto the road and far into distance, fast enough to leave her thoughts here in the dust of the parking lot, fast enough to outrun anything.
"How are you all that I have?" She yelled, her voice loud and tight in the small space. "How are you all that I have and you don't even fucking work!?"
The anger took the last bit of anything out of her, and she dropped her head to the top of the steering wheel, the smooth vinyl cool against her forehead as she watched tears drip onto the dusty steering column.
"Please be okay." She whispered into the dead air. Her voice was muffled and close in the small space she had created, and it sounded like a bare shell. She knew it was a mechanical problem and nothing more that was keeping the car here, but tonight it felt like something more. "Please don't go away too."
She woke to the sound of metal-on-metal, bolting straight up in her seat. She had wormed her way into the back seat before falling asleep the night before, and for a moment all she could focus on was the headrest in front of her, and the bare white wall outside the windshield.
Then she locked eyes with Killian through the open back door of the shop, his eyes wide and apologetic, darting to workbench and the chaotic spread of tools. From his guilty look, he knew he had woken her, which means he had known she was there in the first place.
She slipped out of the car, leaning against the roof for a moment as she got her bearings. It was still dark out and her head was throbbing from the tears and the near-sleepless night. Killian's eyes were trained on her, and he moved as though to take a step towards her. She froze, waiting for the inevitable comments: That's no place to spend a night; What are you doing here; Don't you have anywhere to go? She'd heard every line from every well-meaning person a hundred times before, and she mentally kicked herself for being so careless, for not sneaking out before he woke up, and most of all for coming here in the first place.
The silence stretched between them, but still he said nothing, just holding her there with that look that had layers and layers behind it. She didn't know how he had come in that morning, early as ever, seen her stretched out in the back seat, and known that the reason her body fit so perfectly against the dips and rises of the seat was because this was the closest thing she had to home – the closest thing she had to someone being on her side, to having somewhere to go when the night stretched out long and lonely. And she didn't know that he had been cautiously working seized bolts off an ancient engine for two hours with a pair of pliers instead of wrenching them off with a torque drill because he had spent more nights than he was proud of curled into a back seat of his own, and he knew, somehow, that she needed this.
She just stared back at him, her eyes wide and slightly wild, until he cleared his throat, rubbed a spot behind his ear, and said in a soft voice, "There's coffee in the office."
"Uh...thanks." She slid through the back door and past him, avoiding his careful gaze, and straight to the office where she poured herself a cup and sank down in his desk chair. A refrain of stupid, stupid, stupid ran through her head as she drank the first cup without really tasting it, the liquid burning her tongue but waking her up enough to steel herself against whatever it was he was going to say when she went back out there, pour herself a second cup, and venture back out into the garage.
He was fiddling with something on a silver Rabbit, and didn't so much as look at her as she slunk out with her coffee and went to pull on her coveralls. Only when she had them zipped up the front did he finally say, "There's an '87 Toyota Tercel out back that needs a new fan belt, if you're looking for something."
That was all he said, even as she moved the Toyota into the garage and got to work - not even his usual banter. The work itself was slow going, not because it was hard but because she couldn't concentrate. All she could hear was Walsh's voice on the phone last night, and the way he had sounded weeks ago when he told her that the choices she made didn't work with his life, and she needed to change to be a part of it - saying in so many words that she didn't belong.
"Emma." Killian's voice was soft but insistent, cutting through the whorl of her she came back into herself, she realized she had been staring at the new fan belt in her hands for several long minutes.
"I've got to take the Rabbit for a test drive." He said. "You mind coming along?"
"Sure. Why?"
"I want to pay attention to the tachometer and the way the engine sounds, and it's easier if someone else is driving." He tossed her the keys. "Mind backing it into the front lot? I've got to lock the house."
He was gone maybe five minutes, then back and tossing a small bag in the back and sinking into the passenger seat.
"Mobile toolkit." He explained, nodding to the bag. "Sometimes a bolt needs tightening on the road."
"You going to close the garage doors?" She asked as a reply.
"Nah. Nobody's up at this hour, and anyone who stole a car from me would end up driving it around town where everyone knows its real owner anyways." He tapped the dashboard and nodded at her. "Take a left on the road."
"What'd you do to this car, anyways?" She asked, rolling down the driveway slowly.
"Rebuilt the clutch. Thus the thorough test drive."
"When did you do that?" She cut a glance sideways at him - she had been in the garage every day, and she had never seen him so much as look at this car, much less dismantle and rebuild the entire clutch.
"Last night." He gestured towards the road, still approaching very slowly as they crept forwards. "Come on, Swan. I know you can drive stick, and we're not going to get a good test at this speed."
She let their conversation lapse into silence as she accelerated, turning left as he directed onto the long stretch of road leading away from town. They drove along in easy silence for a few minutes, Emma shifting smoothly up and down through the gears as they went along and Killian staring intently at the dash as the dials catalogued how fast the engine was turning. They couldn't have been more than a mile from the shop when he nodded resolutely and said, "Looks good."
She was about to ask whether he wanted her to turn back when she saw a glint of a smile appear on his face.
"How fast do you think this car can go, Swan?"
It took her a fraction of a second, enough for shock to register and be eclipsed by a wicked, restless excitement, then she was right there with him. "Five speeds, 2.5 litre engine...I'm going to guess 140 easy?"
"Why don't you test that theory?" He said, and the empty space in her chest that had only hours before wished to run from everything she had ever felt sang with the possibility of speed.
She punched the gas hard, and shifted up two gears at once. He didn't need to ask her twice.
They flew along the road and didn't say a word to one another as they did, but their combined excitement and sheer reckless glee was enough to bring them closer together than words ever could have in those minutes as the needle on the speedometer climbed higher and higher.
"Stop sign!" He said too soon, pointing at the faint red shape up ahead. Emma thought about not stopping - about blowing right through this stop sign and every other one, about driving this car until it gave out or until they ran out of gas.
She settled for shifting into neutral and letting the car coast at breakneck speed until it was nearly too late, and braking so hard the seatbelt cut into her shoulder.
They idled at the stop sign a moment, and she was waiting for the admonishment: for him to tell her she was being reckless, that this wasn't her car, that this was his business and not to blow the brakes on a test drive.
Instead, two fingers settled lightly on her kneecap, and he said, "Let the clutch out enough for the engine to catch, but don't move."
She did, and watched the car respond. The engine growled, the car shuddering beneath her as she held it there, and she felt as though all that anticipation and raw power was feeding straight into her own body - that his two fingers solid and steady on her knee were all that were holding them there.
She saw his eyes dart up to the dash, but before he had a chance to say a word of instruction, she put the car in gear - second gear, not first, because they were well past that - and that same wicked smile spread over his face. The pressure of his hand left her knee, and they screamed off the line. A wild grin touched her lips, and she chanced a look over at him. He looked...perfect. With the pre-dawn light just starting to paint the sky shades of purple, with that smile on his face, with his expression wide open and ecstatic...
His hand dropped to hers on the gearshift, and she nearly jumped out of her own skin. She had held his gaze for a fraction of a fraction of a second, but with her foot heavy on the gas, the engine was whining in the low gear. His hand guided hers through third and fourth to the fifth and highest gear before he let released it. "You've got more than two gears, Swan." He laughed shortly, then pointed at an intersection approaching far too fast. "Turn right!"
She slammed the brakes and they took the turn so fast she could feel the rear wheels slide an inch or two at the apex of the curve, heard the clutch drop into place heavily as she shifted into a messy third, but then they were through and facing another straight shot of blissfully empty road and the car could have used a sixth gear to carry the amount of speed she was asking of it, but the engine was cool in the pre-morning air and the car was willing and Killian wasn't saying no to any of this and finally, finally she felt something like happy.
"Okay, okay." He said, breathless and joyful like he had been laughing. "Slow down - we're going to shoot straight off the edge of the coast and into the ocean if we don't." She was reluctant, but she eased on the brakes as the blue line of the ocean got nearer and nearer, until they rolled to a stop mere feet from the waterline, nothing but a weathered log fence between them and the sea. She pulled on the parking brake and turned off the car, this place clearly some sort of destination. The engine ticked faintly as it wound down, and Killian ducked out of the car, retrieving his bag from the back seat and moving around to climb on to the hood.
"Come on, Swan." His voice was muffled through the glass, but the sound of his hand patting the hook echoed through the inside of the car. He held up his bag with one hand. "I've got breakfast."
He waited until she was settled on the hood beside him before pulling out, with no small degree of ceremony, two muffins wrapped in a paper towel, and a thermos.
"You bring snacks on all your test drives?" She asked, arching an eyebrow at the setup.
"Only on the ones conducted before dawn." He handed her a muffin, balancing the other in his lap while he unscrewed the thermos. "I forgot mugs, but there's coffee."
"I trust you've had your shots." She held out a hand for the thermos and took a long swig. With the adrenaline starting to fade, she knew she'd be feeling her long night soon enough. Handing the thermos back to him, she regarded the muffin. "Is this...a bran muffin? Seriously? What are you, eighty?"
"More like three hundred." He said casually, sipping some of the coffee. They sat comfortably for a few moments, then he twisted so he was facing her. "Emma..."
"Tell me why Gold is so hell bent on chasing you out of town." She said quickly, the words springing to mind when she realized what he was about to say: That's no place to spend a night; What are you doing here; Don't you have anywhere to go?
Killian's gaze fell hard on her face, and she held it in steely silence. He searched her eyes for a moment, then broke her gaze and sighed heavily. "It's...you know about my brother. About how he's..." He started worrying the edges of his muffin, and Emma took a bite of her own while he put the words together. For bran, it was pretty good. "He was in a car accident. Gold...he was...well, nobody knows if he hit Liam directly or just ran him off the road." He ran a hand through his hair. "There was a court hearing afterwards because I was angry and I knew - know - he was involved, even though he said his car was out of control because of a failed repair weeks before. But it got thrown out because there was no concrete proof." Emma looked over at him, and he looked tired and slightly ragged, but she could still see something burning in his eyes - some knowledge that he was right about this even if nobody else knew. "You've met him - seen the lie of a person he pretends to be. Polite, tame, firm in business but fair...and he hates that I brought him into that case and made people doubt, even for a moment, that he is who he wants them to believe he is. Now they look at him and wonder if he's the type of man who would play such a part in another man's..." He stopped for a moment and took a heavy breath, and she was instantly sorry she had brought this up. "Liam was well liked, friendly, kind, a good businessman, brother...and I had sympathy on my side even if I did bugger up the business afterwards. So now Gold's in it for the revenge, and I'm..." He sighed a final sigh and took another swig of the coffee. "I'm trying."
"Killian..."
"Your turn, Swan." He brushed the demolished crumbs off his jeans and gestured to her with the remains of his muffin. "I don't mean to pry, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let my best mechanic suffer in silence if there's a listening ear about."
"I..." She swallowed her explanation, because for a moment she actually wanted to tell him everything from the very first moment when she had been deemed not good enough and left on the side of a highway to the very last moment with Walsh and his life having no room for Emma Swan unless she unbecame herself. But that was not a story anybody wanted to hear. "Let's just say I'm trying too."
"Here's to trying, then." He raised his muffin, and she tapped hers against his. The sun was just edging up over the horizon, and even though they were both slightly muted from the direction their conversation had taken, the gesture itself was a hopeful way to ring in the new day.
"Here's to trying."