He fell asleep on the couch at a time of night that was technically morning, and dreamt of the way she drove.
He had only seen her in her car once, but that was where his mind placed her. The whole dreamscape was bright and a breath of summer, the yellow of the car and the gold of her hair and the warm, comfortable scent of leather and vinyl dancing across his senses until he wasn't sure it was a dream anymore.
He hoped it wasn't a dream, but he knew better than to let hope sink its claws into him.
Dream-Emma had one hand loose on the wheel, sitting low on the curve of it and practically in her lap, and the other hand resting comfortable on the gear shift. Her thumb rubbed a gentle pattern on the leather of the steering wheel, and there was a smile on her face that he had never seen before - something serene and peaceful and right. Her body was moulded perfectly to the seat and she leaned into it like it was everything, and every slightly lost look she had ever shot this car across the garage suddenly made perfect sense.
They turned a corner and she steered with one hand, a single finger sliding to the groove where the centre crosspiece of the steering wheel met the edge then the heel of her hand skimming along the curve of the wheel with just enough pressure to coax the car around the corner, all of it as the other hand worked the gearshift in perfect time. She let go at the apex of the curve, the wheel turning back around under her palm, and the whole thing was so effortless and comfortable that he could see in this moment how much she was this car and it was her.
He didn't want to stop looking at her - at the smile she wore for this car, at the way her hands fell against its various knobs and dials, at her eyes brilliant and green in the sun shining through the window - but dream-him let his eyes drift shut anyways, the sun warming the side of his face as the car sped along in gentle rhythm.
But then he was standing in the middle of the road, the solid ground suddenly too steady under his feet, and all he could see where the taillights of the car as it sped away from him. And it sped, the casual pace of the car now replaced with something reckless and dangerous, and even though it was the Bug before him, Emma was driving it like she had driven that silver Rabbit the morning he realized how hard he had fallen in so short a time. But it almost wasn't Emma because the car wasn't steady in its speed - it was all over the road, the lane markings nothing but lines on the pavement, and she was getting dangerously close to the deep ditches and hydro poles on the other side of the gravel shoulder.
Then suddenly it wasn't Emma anymore, but Liam and the Volvo he had been driving the day that became his last, and as the front end of the car crumpled like paper around the uncompromising pillar of a hydro pole, he saw both of them slumped against the steering wheel - two images superimposed, everything he had lost in one convenient package.
He was both too cold and too warm when his eyes snapped open, the indistinct darkness of the living room empty and lonely except for thoughts that were spiralling out of control, overflowing from his head to fill the too-large space. With both parents gone, a policeman had told him about Liam. But Emma?
Emma could be gone in more ways than he could count, and nobody in the world would know enough to tell him.
He pushed himself off the couch with a heavy sigh, his neck stiff from the position he had been in and the stress of having his losses play out so vividly, and he so badly wanted to get in the GTO and tear down the roads ringing the town - push the car and himself until there was no space to think about anything but the road in front of him. But David was right - he couldn't keep flouting the law and expect there not to be consequences. Besides that, he couldn't keep letting this eat him alive because he had no right to it - no right to Emma, and no right to the pain losing her had left behind.
He went to the kitchen instead, put on a pot of coffee because sleep was an unrealistic hope now, and tried not to think of the way Emma looked in the morning, half-asleep and in his bathrobe, making pancakes at his stove. He tried not to think about warm water swirling around his hands as she teased him about leaving his dishes everywhere like a heathen. He tried not to think about her because he couldn't think about her, not without losing himself to it, and because she hadn't come here for him to fall for her, to become a part of this house and his life as much as she had, or to make such an impact that her absence echoed everywhere.
He turned his back on the kitchen, looking out across the living room as he listened to the coffee drip, and told himself that he wasn't going to think about her again. Not now, not ever.
It was a foolish thing to think, really, because she was everywhere - but still, he kept his promise, mostly. The garage bay on the right, the one that had turned into hers, ended up occupied by cars so he could bounce between two jobs and let the momentum finish the work for him. He went to David's for dinner and though there were no onion rings in the centre of the table and the seat beside him was empty, the loft rang with laughter and stories, and he realized how foolish it was to call himself lonely. He test drove car after car and the fact that she wasn't in the seat next to him felt less and less like a hole in his chest. It felt like getting over her, and two weeks seemed like an awfully short time to do it in, but part of him knew that he would never truly be over any of it - that she would linger in the months and years following, and that something fundamental inside of him had changed and that the effects would linger long after the scent of her faded from his spare pair of coveralls.
Four days after she left, he climbed the stairs to the second floor - the first night he didn't force himself to sleep on the couch or the chair in his office or anywhere but the bed that was too big without her - and lingered in the door of his room. He remembered her here, leaning against the doorframe, and him in the bed and terrified because night was for ghosts and bad memories and not for sleeping, not a full night. Not here. But she had curled next to him and he had woken that night and every other after it to the sun pink on the horizon and her toes pressed to his calves in the cool morning air.
He didn't expect to wake anywhere close to dawn, but against all odds...
No, that wasn't right. It wasn't against all odds that he opened his eyes the next morning to a crisp golden sun with a peaceful, dreamless night behind him - it was because Emma wasn't just lingering in the garage and the kitchen and the living room and the GTO. She was lingering in the soft press of her fingers to his arm as he faced Gold across the shop, in the gentle firmness in her voice as she told him he was staying in his own house for one night, and in the ghost of her palm in his as he filled in the pieces of why everything was so hard. She was lingering, and he was so much better for it.
That weekend, he replaced the broken window in the room next to his.
The days she was gone piled up until it was one week, and then two. He could see the difference their time together had made in the house, in his business, and in the way his smiles came more readily when he passed people on the street. He could see it in the jokes David made about the lack of speeding tickets issued late at night, in the way Mary Margaret stopped making it a big deal when he stopped by after work, and in the way Gold glared at him as though he wanted so badly to sink him but couldn't find a way anymore.
It was late afternoon and he was half underneath a 90′s Nissan when the phone rang. The radio was blaring, filling the garage right up to the ceiling, so he only just heard it, jogging slightly into the office to answer because he wasn't sure how long it had been ringing underneath the loud guitar.
The moment he answered, he missed Emma tenfold.
"Hello?" Said the woman on the other end. She had a high pitched voice that grated instantly, and he wanted to hang up. "I think something's wrong with my car? It might be a flat tire, but it stopped just outside of town?"
"And what kind of car do you drive?" Killian asked, palming his keys and turning down the radio.
"A red...Honda? I'm sorry, it's my husband's car."
He missed Emma. He missed the way she would have told him the make, model, and year of the car she was driving. He missed the way she never would have been driving a car that wasn't hers in the first place. He missed the way she would have poked fun at him even over the phone, the way she had the very first day she found him in the garage. He missed the way she would have fixed the problem herself and never had to call him at all.
She was still here in a million small ways, but hearing a voice that wasn't hers made him miss her all the same.
"How about you tell me where you are," He said finally. "And I'll see what I can do?"
It was cruel irony that the woman was broken down just North of the town sign.
As he pulled up, he could see a chrome bumper and not much else peeking out from behind the cheerful "Welcome to Storybrooke". He wasn't feeling very cheerful, but he plastered a customer-grade smile on his face as he neared the sign.
That smile dropped as he got close enough to it to see the car the bumper was attached to. Yellow, bulbous, older than he was, and he knew every inch of it.
And it was most certainly not a Honda.
He pulled up behind the Bug and got out of the truck slowly, and part of him thought that this couldn't be real. But there was Emma leaning against the side of the car, a smile half on her face but a terrified look in her eyes.
He stopped a few feet from her and waited, her mouth opening but closing again instantly, words she wanted to say building behind her eyes. He knew he should look away, give her some space to think because she didn't look at all certain about being here - and why would she - but he couldn't. Two weeks he had been seeing her face places it wasn't, convincing himself to stop looking for it, but now that she was in front of him he couldn't just look away. So instead he let his eyes trace the fall of hair over her shoulder, gold in the sunlight and so much more than he had remembered; the precise shade of green of her eyes as they darted up to his face and away, and how everything that ran through her mind was reflected in them; the way her hand pressed against the metal of the Bug to ground her, and the way her fingers danced against it; the way she was here, in front of him, and so real that he wondered how he had ever lived on memories.
She was silent through it all, so eventually he just said, "Tell me I'm not imagining this, Emma."
"That depends." Her voice was low and fragile, and the eyes that darted up to meet his were half-undone already. "Do you want to be?"
"How could you even -"
"Because I left." She cut in, reading his mind like she always did. "Because it was all right in front of me and I didn't listen and I drove away and that's my fault, so if you didn't want -"
"Emma." He was aware that interruptions piling on interruptions was no way to have a conversation, but he couldn't let her even finish a thought that suggested he wanted anything else than her, here, forever. "You cannot seriously ask me if I want you here after..." After what? After she had come into his life and made it hole again? After he had fallen in love with her and let her go? After they had built something like a life for themselves here together in a month and four days?
"I know." She said softly. "But I let things happen between us and then I ruined them." Like I ruin everything. He could see the rest of her sentence in her eyes, and remembered her telling him that night in his boat that everything she ever had fell apart. "And it would be well within your rights to ask me to go, because I'm the one who left first."
Her voice petered off to nothing and he had always told himself that above all he would give her the space to decide where things went between them, but she was hunched into herself and her eyes were still uncertain and her knuckles were white from the force of her hand pressing against the Bug, and he couldn't stand here two feet and too far away from her, just letting it happen.
And he couldn't let them dance around this anymore because the last time he had, he had lost it.
"Emma." He closed the two feet quickly, steadying himself with a hand against the roof of the car, and he could have sworn she stopped breathing. "Neither of us expected this. This was supposed to be a repair job, nothing more. But what we got..." He felt a smile touch his lips, and he saw an answering one on hers. "I don't know how to handle this either, or where it's going to go. But I'm willing to find out, if you are."
Her gaze dropped to the gravel shoulder beneath their feet, and when she looked back up the uncertainty was gone from her eyes. "Why do you think my car broke down in this exact spot?"
"Something about this town must be unlucky, I guess." He said, leaning that much closer until her breath and his were one live thing.
"Or lucky." She whispered.
"If I had my choice, I'd say -"
He didn't have a chance to say lucky because then her lips were on his, her free hand wrapping around his shoulders and drawing him closer. He could feel her settle against the side of the car, her back arching to accommodate the slight curve, and the solidity of it was good for both of them because he felt like he was made of air.
She pulled away slightly and breathed into the air between them, "So you'll forgive an idiot who drove away from the best thing staring her right in the face?"
"Only if you'll forgive an idiot who let his happy ending drive away in a car he rebuilt himself." He murmured, letting a smile crawl across his face as he pulled her to him again.
As he brushed a gentle kiss against her lips, he threaded a hand in her hair and she smiled against him because this - this was familiar. This was home the way it hadn't felt in two weeks, and if he was right and this town was lucky, this would turn into home for two more weeks, two more years, and beyond.
She hadn't wanted to let him go, but they had two cars crowded on the shoulder behind the Storybrooke sign so she had to settle for following too close behind the truck on the way home. She could see the back of Killian's head through the truck's rear window, and more often than was probably safe she caught a flash of hopelessly blue eyes in the rearview mirror as he looked back at her, making sure she was there.
He had nothing to worry about - she was stupid enough to leave once, but she wasn't stupid enough to leave twice.
She half-expected an interrogation or at least some kind of discussion about what had happened - the falling for each other, the weeks spent with two lives practically one, the her driving away and never looking back - but when they pulled up the driveway he just hopped out of the truck as casually as he had every single day she had been there before. He waited for her to park next to him and pulled her to him when she got out of the Bug, slinging an arm around her shoulder and leading the way through the back door of the garage. The shop smelled like oil and iron and old coffee, and she hadn't realized how much she had missed it all.
She didn't know why Killian would have pushed her to talk about any of it when all he had ever been was understanding. Instead, he pressed a kiss to the top of her head - one that lasted slightly too long, but that she wished lasted longer - and nudged her towards the repair bay beside his.
"It missed you." He said softly, nodding towards the power jack and the mess of tools along the back wall and the dirty coveralls folded on a stool.
"Just the garage?" She asked, arching an familiar eyebrow that made him laugh out loud - a full, bright thing that filled the garage.
"Just the garage." He said with a wink, but the eyes behind it were too soft and too full to mean it.
She walked over to grab the coveralls, sliding them on over her jeans in a motion that felt so, so familiar. He settled in to work, angling his body over the engine of a beat up Nissan so he was still facing her, and as he started whistling softly along to radio something in her chest shifted because this was everything she had been missing, everything that made her chest so hollow in the weeks she had been away, everything she had been a fool to give up.
"Hey Killian?" She called across the space, her voice pitched exactly right to carry over the radio and across the wide garage. His eyes caught hers and she shot him a smile, and she hoped it said everything she wanted it to. "My garage missed you too."
He asked the question she had been waiting for later that night, tangled together in his bed, the space between them nonexistent but still not close enough.
"Where did you go?" His voice was barely a breath in the dark, but she was so close she would have heard anything.
"Florida." She whispered. "Key West."
"What's in Florida?"
"Nothing." She pressed her forehead to his chest because only once she had gotten there had she realized how much nothing was anywhere after she had gotten a taste of everything here. "I thought...I thought that if I got the farthest away I could get from here that leaving would start to make sense. That it would be different enough that..." She cut off, because how did she even begin to explain the things she had thought would make a difference when the real difference had been in front of her all along?
"That what?" He prompted gently, running a finger up and down her spine as he did.
"That I'd forget about this." She breathed. "About...the fact that I love you. And I can't let myself..."
"Then don't." He pressed his lips to the top of her head, and she could feel the shape of his smile. "Then let me love you, because I do. And I plan to for as long as you'll let me. So you don't have to love me back."
"Too late." She felt an answering smile light on her face. "I knew it was too late in New Hampshire, and again when I was stuck in traffic in New York, and all the way down the coast, and every day in Florida until I finally turned around and came back."
He drew her impossibly closer just let the words hang between them, the gentle night and sheer comfort of finally being together enough to say anything that hadn't already been said.
She waited until his breathing evened out, and whispered, "It's been too late for a long time."
The next morning dawned lazy and bright, and Emma leaned against the kitchen counter as she watched Killian struggle with cinnamon rolls. She tried to keep the smile off her face for his sake, but she couldn't help the hint of it that found its way out because he was covered in flour and trying very hard, and because their whispered I love you's were still ringing in her mind. She could see the sun edging over the horizon out the window, painting the field in front of the house in shades of gold, lighting softly on the Bug nestled in the driveway next to the truck and the GTO, all waiting for whatever came next.
She couldn't help the soft sigh that escaped because lo and behold, she had blinked and Saturday breakfasts in the kitchen with Killian Jones had become her forever.
Perfect.