I Will Always Find You for theonewhoknits, rated T.

Prompt: Emma doesn't want to be found. But Hook will find her. He will always find her. I'm just so caught on the idea of her feeling the need to disappear completely (to protect the fam, or whatever) and him finding her.

The dark road beyond the pale sweep of her headlights was nothing but a blur through her tears. Her hands were shaking as she steered the old yellow Bug around the curve in the narrow two-lane road, gravel crunching under its tires. She probably shouldn't be driving right now; she had to keep only one hand on the wheel, using the other to wipe her face as silent sobs continued to shake her ribcage. She felt like she'd been gutted, like the tears were coming out of her rhythmically by now, without her volition, just something that had always been and would always be. She couldn't imagine that it would stop. She couldn't imagine that it would be okay.

She was never going to see Storybrooke, Maine, again.

Emma stared straight ahead at the dark asphalt ribbon of the road, winding in and out among the shadowy trees. She didn't know where she was going and she didn't even care; her few worldly goods were carelessly thrown in the back seat, a pitifully scant record of a life. But even worse, she had the memories this time, the memories she had thought she'd never have. Her mother. Her father. Her son. Her place. Her job, her home, her life.

And him.

She was never going to see him again either.

Emma choked on a fresh gust of tears. She couldn't do this, she had to pull over, and she just made it off the road before she came totally unglued, leaning on the wheel and almost screaming in agony, beating her fists against the dash, as if it would somehow remedy the injustice of what had just happened, what she'd agreed to. Cora, Regina, and Gold were just too powerful, and she had been deluding herself to think she could ever match up with them. Gold had threatened to kill Hook, and Cora had threatened to kill Emma's parents, if she herself didn't pack up, leave Storybrooke, and give Henry back to Regina and make things go back to the way they were before she ever came. As if they would. As if they possibly could.

Emma, of course, had fiercely resisted; there was no way she wasn't going to fight for the people she loved. When she'd pleaded with Gold that he had no reason to want her out of the way, he had replied calmly, "Actually, Miss Swan, I do. You're preventing me from doing something that I want very much, and I've never been the sort of man who takes well to rivals. And now that I've made a truce with Cora – " he cocked his head at the witch – "who is going to permit me to do something I want very much, I'm afraid that her arguments are simply too persuasive. I'm very sorry, dearie. It's nothing personal. But if you want your parents and your thrice-damned pirate to see another sunrise, you'd better pack up your car and leave forever, tonight."

Emma didn't understand, couldn't process the betrayal, couldn't move. She'd done the only thing she could: lunged at him. But he knocked her aside with a negligent flick of the hand, a crash of almighty dark magic that even she couldn't resist. It left her sprawled on her back and gasping, and the pawnbroker limped over to her with deliberate, steady taps of his cane.

"That, dearie," he said, "was not very wise. I'm not accustomed to giving more than one warning, and now you've made me angry. I advise listening closely to what I'm about to say. You're going to go to your apartment and get your things. While you're there, a certain pirate is going to pay you a visit, and beg you not to go. He might even claim that he loves you. In which case, you are going to tell him in no uncertain terms… that you do not."

"Or what?" Emma gasped. "You'll kill me?"

"No, dearie." Gold's face split into a spectral grin. "I'll kill him."

—-

Emma sobbed on the side of the road until she'd run out of tears, until her eyes were hot and hard and hollow. She didn't know how long. She wished she had a potion to drink to forget this, to make it go away. She couldn't forget the confrontation at her apartment as she'd been blindly throwing things into a suitcase, when Hook crashed through the front door without the barest semblance of politeness, demanded to know if she was leaving, telling her that she couldn't, begging her not to. And then he'd done it. When she asked him in a trembling voice why he should even care if she went, he cursed, smashed a vase of flowers off the table with his hook, and roared, "Gods damn it, woman! Why do you think? Because I bloody love you!"

There had been a thundering silence after that, neither of them able to believe that he'd said it. Then he reached for her with that desperately earnest look in his eyes, the one he'd had right after she'd taken his hand and pulled him out of the rubble in the giant's den, right before she'd snapped the cuff over his wrist. But he was the one grabbing her wrist now, making her look into his eyes, and saying, "I know you do too, lass. I know that you – "

"No," she said. "I don't."

"And I – what?"

"I don't love you." The words sounded calm, impossibly calm. So much that she didn't even think it was her who had said them. Oh God. She had. She'd done it.

He reached for her, breathing, "Lass, no, you don't mean that, no," trying to touch her cheek with his good hand. But she'd turned away, unable to stand the look of shocked, numb betrayal on his face, unable to trust herself to maintain the ruse.

"No," she said again, faintly, as she hefted the suitcase. "No, I don't love you, Hook. I never did. Whatever you thought we had, what we could have had… we don't. It's over. You have to let go. Please, you have to trust me when I say… I don't."

His hand fell away from her. He just looked simply too stunned to say a word. She turned and started to walk, one foot after the other, down the stairs, out into the night, out, out, out, gone.

—-

The eastern horizon was turning bloodstained red by the time Emma started the Bug again. She was somewhere in the ass-end of Maine, didn't even know if she was driving north or south. Dumbly, through her haze of grief, she supposed that her only option was to go back and try to pick up her old life in Boston. Return to her job as a bail bondsperson, maybe see if a unit in her old apartment building was up for rent. . go back to being the abandoned orphan who had no son, who had one-night stands as her only form of intimacy and was the first to kick the guy out if he wanted to cuddle too long afterwards. She didn't see how she could even pretend. To have had her family, her life, her place, and then losing it, was worse than never having it at all.

Mad ideas whirled around her brain. She could try to call the cops, a SWAT team, bring in all kinds of firepower, guns blazing. But that was the worst thing she could possibly do. The town would be exposed, its people turned into freak shows or confined to psychiatric institutions, and by the time she got anywhere near her parents, Henry, or Hook, they'd all be dead. She would tear apart everything and everyone. This way, as horrible and unbearable as it was… they'd survive, her parents would somehow have to live knowing she was there, she was out there, but they'd never see her again… Henry… oh God, Henry, and Hook…

If Emma thought about it any more, the pain would just be too much. She turned on her phone, started GPS, got a rough direction as to how far she needed to go to get onto southbound I-95, and pulled out, driving without looking back. She turned on the radio, but it was playing some bad heartbreak song that she couldn't stand to listen to.

She'd been driving for about an hour when it started to rain. Heavy, massive thunderheads rolled in like beaten gunmetal, closing a wet fist on the black trees, pounding the pavement until it turned to billowing steam. Even her wipers set on the very highest level couldn't scrub it away fast enough, and her knuckles turned white as she fought to keep the Bug from hydroplaning out of control on the narrow, snaking road. It felt like this in rural Maine: a hundred miles from the ass-end of anywhere, and her cell phone had been on zero bars for a while. If she –

One moment she didn't see it, the next she did. She didn't even know what it was, just that it flashed past her in a blur, then rushed straight at the windshield, causing her to scream, jerk the wheel, and feel the tires lose contact with pavement as the car went into a sustained, spinning nosedive. Emma hauled on the wheel uselessly as she kept sliding, thinking madly of the wolf in the road the night she'd first come to Storybrooke, and –

She had no more time to contemplate that thought. The Bug tilted, tipped, and met the thick trees bordering the highway with an awful, rending crash. She saw the hood crunch almost in slow motion, saw the windshield start to give out, could see almost the individual flecks of glass in the stormy air, brilliant as chips of diamond.

She didn't remember consciously reaching for it. Only that she did. The hot heart of magic, hands flinging out in what was certainly a futile attempt to save herself. The glow sizzling down her fingers, catching the glass against its shield.

Magic always comes with a price.

She somehow thought she'd already paid it.

—-

Emma regained consciousness she had not the faintest idea how long later. She was lying under the crumpled undercarriage of the Bug in a faceful of sodden mud, leaves, and motor oil dripping steadily from the mangled guts of her car. She had no clue how she'd gotten free, if the magic had flung her out, if she'd crawled out on her own power and forgotten when she blacked out, and she was soaked, cold, freezing, and scared out of her mind.

"Oh God…" The words issued involuntarily from her lips as she staggered to her feet, balancing herself with a hand on the destroyed fender. She limped back around and tried to unjam the driver's side door, in hopes of getting her cell phone and wallet out, and finally managed to crawl back in. The steering column was sheared off, driven all the way into the seat in a way that certainly would have impaled her too if she'd still been in it. For whatever reason, she wasn't.

Emma felt around gingerly in the darkness, trying to avoid slicing her hand to pieces on the broken glass, until she finally pawed at her cell phone with the tips of her fingers and drew it out. She didn't want to just leave it – all her worldly goods were in there, after all – but after a moment, she turned away. If this was what her fate was, perhaps a clean break was better. She could collect new possessions without the old memories embedded in them.

But she wanted those memories. So badly.

She dawdled by the car, debating the idea of trying to get back in and – and do what? Carry all her shit with her? It wasn't raining anymore, but the air was heavy, damp, and misty. She needed to get back to the highway, hope to thumb a ride, and also that every clichéd slasher movie she'd ever seen was just that. Surely not everybody driving by had chainsaws and duct tape in their back seats. She had another memory of almost hitting Jefferson, who turned out to be a psychotic schizophrenic who drugged her tea and tied up her mother and would have hurt her too if she didn't…

He just wanted to go home.

So did she. So did she.

But home didn't exist anymore.

Aimlessly, at last, Emma started to walk, boots sloshing in the leaves. She had a vague idea of which way it was back to the road, but she hoped it wasn't far; she'd twisted her ankle badly, and it throbbed with every step. She kept neurotically checking her cell phone, as if she somehow expected it to have acquired a single solitary bar of service. It hadn't.

Rain whispered in the branches above her. She craned her head, trying to tell which direction the sun was in hopes of working out some rudimentary sense of direction, but it was hopeless; it was twilight already, and darkness fast falling. It was like some kind of never-ending forest, like something had happened when the magic had come out of her…

Something that had happened when the savior left Storybrooke.

Deciding at last to listen to her instincts, Emma halted, leaves swirling around her. She had, she realized now, been fighting something, as if she was walking against the wind, into the teeth of some invisible, fierce resistance. She closed her eyes, breathing the damp scents of forest and earth, feeling something new moving around her fingers, stirring invisible threads. It was just so much like her. This, whatever it was, had saved her life, but she had trained herself so long to be deaf to her heart, and to suspect any airy-fairy unquantifiable, unreasonable instincts, that she was still stubbornly trying to forge her own path.

"I'm sorry," Emma said aloud, to the silent, watching trees. Her body heaved with an expelled breath, the shadows of the ghosts that seemed to hang close enough to touch. She stood very still, listening instead of leading. For a woman as self-sustaining and strong-willed as she was, stubborn and independent and solitary, it was like asking her to gnaw off her own arm.

After a moment, however, she thought she heard something. Not even a noise outside her, but a still small voice within herself. The sort of thing that Archie would have called a conscience, but more than that as well. Like a glowing thread running through her, leading her… where?

The only way to find out was to take a chance.

Try something new, darling.

It's called trust.

—

Emma had been walking for almost fifteen minutes when the ground started to slant down under her feet. She had kept her eyes closed – she saw the glowing thread that way, but it vanished when she opened them and tried to see for herself. She had been somehow able to navigate without her eyes; she could just sense where rocks and trees and ravines were in front of her. But when the ground turned to a muddy, steep slide and her footing gave out, her eyes jerked open and she grabbed and flailed at the bare roots jutting from the embankment as she tumbled down it. A moment later, she landed in a breathless, filthy heap on a scatter of seaweed-wracked stones, with her nose two inches from a tidepool and a curious-looking crab.

The seashore. Storybrooke was on the coast, of course, and her hours of driving had roughly paralleled it; it wasn't too improbable that she'd somehow stumbled on it. She pushed herself to her hands and knees, spitting out a mouthful of dirt, and looked out over the black glass pane of the ocean, lit by the rising moon. The shadows were deep and tricky, and she wasn't entirely certain of anything she had seen or hadn't seen recently, but she thought she could –

A ship.

Emma blinked and squinted hard, terrified that she was still hallucinating, but the image remained, imprinted stark and black against her weary eyes. It was definitely a ship, and not one of the corrugated little fisher tugs that plied their trade around here, off the Grand Banks. It was a tall, stately two-master, sails looking almost translucent in the witchy glow, anchored perhaps two or three hundred yards offshore. Her eyes raked it frantically, suspecting any, every kind of trap. They wanted her to come out there, they had commandeered it to retrieve her, had changed their mind about her potential use as a hostage, they would capture her and never let her…

Emma stared at it a moment longer, desperately gauging her chances, her choices. Then she stood up, stripped off her boots and her heavy leather jacket, and splashed into the water.

The ocean's embrace was so cold that it felt like knives. Gasping, she started into a clumsy breast stroke, bobbing along with her head above water, trying not to imagine any encounters with unpleasant marine life; she didn't think you got sharks this far north, but you never knew. Pulling hard against the onset of cramps, wondering if she could make it out; you had to have a whole bag of tricks as a bail bondsperson, and she'd once chased an escaping perp into the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of winter. But that was a long time ago, and she was different then.

It didn't matter. If she closed her eyes, she could still see that glowing thread ever so faintly, and she had to keep following it; by now, she didn't have much of a choice. She'd gone too far to try to make it back, and the ship loomed closer with painful slowness, stroke by stroke as she kicked and clawed through the cold water. She had no idea how deep it was. Deep enough to drown.

The waves were restless, choppy enough to further complicate the going. Emma's breath burned in her throat; salt chafed her lips and stung her eyes. She didn't want to put her head under, for fear the ship would have vanished when she surfaced, and the current was now distinctly against her, trying to tear her far out to sea. Even when she turned on her back, she was sinking.

At that moment, faintly, Emma heard a shout, distant and windblown in the night. Out of the corner of her fritzing vision, she saw a dark figure jump up on the side of the ship, fling off coat, swordbelt, and other hindrances, and execute a perfect form dive into the water with barely a splash. It – he resurfaced an instant later, and she saw a gleam of metal where his left hand should be. Of all the ludicrous, impossible things, it was.

Adrenaline snarled madly through Emma from head to heel. Nothing short of an actual tsunami could have stopped her then, and she surged forward like an Olympic swimmer smelling the buzzer board, gasping, coughing on the water in her lungs. She couldn't tell if he'd seen exactly where she was, and she raised a hand, screaming in a hoarse salt-rasping croak. "Hook! Hook!"

The second the words had passed her lips, she was mortified. What if this was one of them in disguise, trying to get her to… to something? They'd said they'd kill him unless she told him that she didn't love him. What if she'd just failed the final test?

Even that, however, was not enough to get her to stop swimming. And he was powering through the waves toward her, sleek and dark and strong as a seal; of course, he lived on water, he knew how to handle it in its native environment. She was close enough to see the flash of his eyes now, and no matter how accomplished Cora was at shape-shifting, somehow Emma didn't think that the witch could replicate that look of pure, consuming relief, agony, and terror.

She cut out her next stroke halfway, and let the wave at her back slap her into Hook's arms.

He held her so tightly that she could barely tell which direction was up. He was saying something in a hoarse, choking voice, swearing over and over, and she started to cry, not even consciously or knowingly or anything except more salt water leaking out of her eyes and the heaving of her battered chest as he locked her against him with his hooked arm and used his good hand to pull hard against the current. She tried to help him as much as she could, and their bodies fell wordlessly, naturally in sync. Not even a minute later, they bumped gently up against the side of the Roger.

Emma snagged hold of the wood with frozen, shaking hands, not sure she could manage even the comparatively short climb, but Hook never let go of her. He hauled her above him on their way up, a few ropes lashing down apparently of their own volition – of course, he'd said the ship was enchanted – to assist its captain on the ascent. Then they tumbled over the gunwale and sprawled out on the deck, soaking wet and gasping.

Both of them tried to say something at the same time, then gave it up as a lost cause. Emma scrambled into him, clinging to him, as he held her so tightly that she could not breathe and did not want to. Their mouths attacked each other, devouring, kissing barely an adequate word to cover it as they both made sobbing, breathless noises, rolling over and over and almost banging into the hatch cover, the mast, or any other of the obstructions present aboard a fully rigged-and-sailed wooden vessel. They kissed again and again, Emma tasting blood on her broken lips, until at last they rolled over once more and fetched to a halt, her collapsed on his chest and sobbing.

"Gods," Hook croaked at last, smoothing her hair out of her face. "What in the bloody hell… what are you… mad, you're bloody mad, what did you even… bloody woman, you scared the life out of…" He hesitated, as if terrified that she was going to shove him away again. "But what are you even… when you left, you…"

"No." Emma clung onto his still-wet shirt with both hands, desperate to make him understand, desperate to know the truth. "Wait. I – I have to make sure you are who you say. Not Cora, or – or any of them. What did you do to me at the top of the beanstalk, and what did I tell you?"

He cocked his head, as if he was at a loss for words, and her gut seized with terror. Then he reached out and clumsily smoothed her tangled, knotted hair out of her face, stroking her cheekbone with his thumb before he reached out, took her hand, and kissed the faint, faded white line across it. "You said you'd been in love," he said, almost in a whisper. "Once. And I suppose you meant it after all, lass. Though if that's what you were going to say, then you bloody confused me by what you just did. You seem to appreciate the fine art of tormenting me."

Emma bit her lip. She had no idea if it was safe to confess to him yet that it had been a lie, but the fact that she couldn't let go of him, that she was still shaking, must surely tell the truth. But she was terrified that someone was going to appear in a cloud of purple smoke and take him, rip his heart out, the pain made even worse by the false hope. She pressed her hand against his chest, felt it beating reassuringly beneath her fingers. She touched him again, smiling and crying in the way she had in the moments before losing Graham, a memory that frightened her further.

"How did you know?" she asked at last, softly. "How could you even know where to…"

Hook stared up at her, his face grim and set. "Love, you're not the only person who needs, right now, a bloody explanation. Tell me what's going on."

"I left." The words spilled out in a rush.

"I gathered that." The lines around his eyes remained chiseled as deeply as stone. He was, after all, three hundred-plus years old, and this was one of the first times she truly realized it.

"I… Hook, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. They threatened you. They told me that unless I told you that I didn't love you… if I didn't leave… you, my family, all of them… they'd kill them."

Hook didn't answer, but she heard the breath issue painfully out of him, his eyes gazing up at the stars now flecking the dark vaults of the sky above them. At length he said softly, "I believed it. Bloody hell, lass. I believed it."

"But you're here – ?" Her fingers ghosted over his face, desperate to touch him again.

"Yes," he admitted with a rueful smile. "It seems I am. Because I'm a sodding fool who doesn't know when to stop and who has wasted enough bloody years of his life chasing after the memories of women I've lost, it doesn't seem there's a sight else I can do with it. But you… you're alive, at least you're still here… not just in my head, which is a bloody demented place if you haven't guessed. And I've never been the sort of man who doesn't fight for what he wants, love. I was down to the marina the instant I saw you leave town in that bloody contraption of yours. I would have sailed…" He hesitated, his voice roughening. "I would have sailed all seven seas and back, I would have killed the world serpent, I would have gone to the very center of hell, if that was what it took to find you. I will always find you."

Emma laughed, heartbroken and euphoric at once. Then she bent to kiss him again, and this time there was no hesitation left between them as they lay on the deck in each other's arms, clothes drying slowly in the heat of their embrace, the moon overhead almost as bright as day. They kissed, then kissed again, then giggled and whispered, a lover's secret.

"What can we do, Killian?" Emma asked at last, drowsily, her head snuggled against his chest. "We can't just go back. They're too powerful, they'll kill you, then me, then you again… but we can't just let it. My son, my family… I'm going to fight for them. I just don't know how."

"As it happens, love…" Hook nudged her gently, and they stood up together, suddenly cold, clinging onto each other as they started across the deck toward his cabin. "You remember those beans the bloody giant was planting?"

Emma gaped at him. "Wha – did you?"

He grinned, as close to shyly as Captain Hook ever got. "May have purloined one, love, yes."

"But they're… I mean, can we…"

"The ship's made out of enchanted wood. If the portal opens, we can sail down it."

"But where?" Where could they get the weapons, the resources, the magic that they would need to return and take back Storybrooke together?

He grinned again, wider, and turned her to face the night, the moon on the water, the golden glow on the rigging, the gleam of his hook where it held her gently around the waist. "There's still a place where I have a few friends, lass," he murmured. "Well, make that one friend. Pixies being a bunch of temperamental bloody bastards and quite unsurpassed at holding grudges. But when we come back… well, the rest of them want to kill me, but she'll listen. She will. And from there, we'll find a way, love. We will." He kissed her ear.

Emma twisted in his arms, trying to get a look at his face, trying to meet his eyes, to see for herself if it was a lie. She couldn't stand a lie, and she also couldn't think where they were going. But then, something else she had said long ago, in another life, came to her. And slowly, at last, she began to smile.

"Like where, Captain?" she breathed. "Neverland?"

"Yes," he whispered back, and bent, once more, to take her mouth with his. The final word was spoken between them, breathed into each other's souls.

"Neverland."