2. Intervention
"Christ, Swan. I knew you'd fallen off the wagon, but this is something else."
"You really know how to charm a girl, don't you?" Emma asked with an edge of irritation, as she made a grab for the brown paper bag.
Killian, however, was way ahead of her, easily transferring the bottle into his other hand and out of reach before she could even get a finger to it.
"Don't even think about it, Swan," he said, raising a single finger in warning, the beginnings of a smirk tracing his lips.
Emma held back the urge to sucker punch him, lest she compromise the integrity of of the bottle he was withholding, and settled for rocking back on her heels, crossing her arms over her chest again, waiting.
"I will share it with you, lass-" He held up his finger again as Emma moved to interrupt. "But I'll require two things from you first."
Maybe Emma would sucker punch him anyway. Just for the hell of it.
"Firstly, and I cannot stress the importance of this, you're going to have a shower."
"And the second thing?" Emma asked, her words laced with arsenic.
It wasn't like she'd invited him over looking like this. He's the one who had shown up unwelcome and unannounced. It wasn't her fault that he'd shown up looking like that, while she definitely erred on the human disaster side of the spectrum.
"You'll let me feed you some real food," he said finally.
She had to hand it to him, the guy really wanted to earn his $50.
"I'm not a child!" she replied hotly.
"Really, lass?" He raised a single eyebrow. "When was the last time you ate something that wasn't Pop-Tarts? Be truthful now."
She opened her mouth to refute his claims, but of course, she couldn't. He had her over a barrel, and he knew it, if his stupid smirk was any indication.
"Fine!" she relented. And if there was a bit of dramatic foot stomping, could anyone blame her?
"Excellent!" he grinned, twisting her around, and putting a hand on each of her shoulders to steer her towards the bathroom. "Make yourself a little more human, and I'll see about finding something edible in the toxic waste dump you call a kitchen."
Emma scowled, but allowed herself to be led down the hallway.
"I hate you," she said dispassionately, as she reached the bathroom, turning back around to face him.
"I know," he smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling with mirth. She reached out and slammed the door in his face.
...
When she emerged twenty minutes later, feeling, admittedly, at least 70% more human in clean clothes with her hair blown out, it was to Killian Jones pacing like a caged lion in a kitchen she barely recognized. The mountain of dishes in the sink had been cleaned and put away, the counter tops were practically gleaming, and there was more than a hint of citrus in the air. She swore that even the fridge magnets had been rearranged. Holy OCD, Batman.
"Whoa."
"Whoa is right, love," Killian said, pausing mid-step to face her. "Here I was thinking I'd be able to scrounge together enough raw ingredients to make an omelet. Only to find that literally the only things you have in your fridge are ketchup and nail polish." He looked positively frazzled. "Why do you keep nail polish in your fridge?"
Emma shrugged, ignoring the increasingly pained expression on Killian's face.
"And the shoes in your oven?" That was an easy one. It was broken anyway, and the racks were at a convenient height. Somehow she didn't think Killian would agree with the ingenuity of it all, so she kept silent.
"Alright, that's it!" he declared, striding towards her front door. For a second, Emma assumed he'd finally admitted defeat, and felt a small surge of victory surge in her gut. But the feeling was cut short when instead of reaching for the doorknob, as expected, Killian instead went for the coat rack, taking down Emma's signature red leather jacket and holding it out for her.
"You'll be needing this, lass. It's Granny's for the likes of us."
Granny's Diner, only a couple of blocks from Emma's apartment, was a neighborhood institution. Stepping inside, Emma always felt like she was stepping into a time warp, the decor decidedly reminiscent of a time before civil rights were in vogue, and smoking indoors was considered A-Okay. Sometime during the Eisenhower administration, perhaps, when checked table cloths, vinyl seating and formica table tops were at the cutting edge of interior design.
It was cutesy as hell, and Emma always felt like she should be wearing a poodle skirt and ordering a milkshake with extra malt. But the coffee was good, the onion rings were even better, and it was open 24 hours a day. More than that, the eponymous Granny Lucas, who had been running the place with a firm hand since time immemorial, liked to pretend she was a hard-ass, but more often than not, she liked to slip Emma extra portions and ask after "that wayward brother" of hers. Granny had an uncanny ability to sniff out strays.
They arrived just before the dinner rush, the familiar scent of burger grease and coffee grounds washing over her as they stepped inside and made their way to the only unoccupied booth.
"A grilled cheese and tomato soup, for the lady," Killian told the waitress, as she approached their table with the plastic menus, before Emma could even get a word in edgewise. "And I'll have have some of Granny's fabulous lasagna." Emma kicked him under the table. Domineering bastard.
"And to drink?" The waitress turned her attention squarely to Killian, and Emma felt the anger swell in her chest.
"Tea for the Brit, and a coke for me," she blurted out, before he could contradict her. The waitress's pen remained poised on her pad, waiting patiently, and pointedly, for Killian's instruction. Of course.
"Aye, that'll do just fine," he relented, giving the waitress a conspiratorial shrug. She didn't miss the way the waitress's gaze lingered on Killian long after he had directed his attention back to Emma, a hint of longing flaring in her eyes.
"You're an asshole," Emma grumbled, when the girl had walked away.
"Perhaps," he mused, reaching out to straighten the salt and pepper shakers. "And yet, I am providing you sustenance. The least you could do is leave my shins intact."
Granted, it had been a childish move. But Emma wasn't in the mood for high-handed do-gooders.
It wasn't that she didn't appreciate the clean kitchen and the free dinner, even if they were hardly offered in the spirit of altruism. If anything, it made her less suspicious, knowing what his motives really were.
But there was nothing Emma Swan hated more than being passive while other people made decisions for her. It rankled, in a way few other things did. Which might explain why her recent dismissal had hit her particularly hard. There was nothing worse than that dizzy sensation as your world spins out of control, while you are left paralyzed, unable to do anything to prevent it. It was a feeling Emma had felt all too frequently as a child, and it was one she did her best to avoid as an adult. She had to acknowledge, though, that Killian wasn't doing it on purpose. He was trying to help. She could at least try to play nice.
"Fine," she mumbled, smoothing out the napkin from where she had balled it into her fist. "So where is he, anyway?"
Killian looked up from his own preoccupations with the condiments. "Sorry?"
"August," Emma clarified. "Where is he?"
She caught it, the twitch of indecision in his features. She simply blinked at him.
"Phnom Pehn, last I heard."
Emma's traced her mind back to high school geography. It hadn't been her best subject. "South Korea? No, that's Seoul, isn't it? Er... Cambodia, right?"
"Aye."
"And do you know what he's doing there?" He let a single eyebrow rise at that, in a look that clearly said, do you really want to know?
No. Emma didn't. Plausible deniability and all that. She just wanted to know he was alright.
"Did he say when he was coming back?" Killian shook his head, and Emma's heart sank inside her chest.
As unreliable as he was, she missed her brother. She missed rides to the office on the back of his motorcycle, the thrill of weaving through traffic with her arms tight around his waist, always half convinced they were going to die. She missed the little notes he left on the bathroom mirror, with quotes from his favorite authors. She even missed the rhythmic clanking of keys from his ludicrously ancient typewriter as he sat up late, working on his stories, even as she cursed him from underneath her pillow in the next room, demanding to know why he couldn't just get a laptop, like everybody else, for fuck's sake.
"He'll be back, Swan." She looked up to see Killian regarding her carefully, having correctly interpreted her thoughts.
"Yeah." Emma smiled a sad smile. "I know."
Before she and Killian could have anything approaching a moment, their food turned up, carried by none other than Killian's admirer from earlier.
"She seemed rather friendly," Killian noted with some confusion, once the girl had left again, after checking for a fourth time if there wasn't anything more he needed.
Emma bit back a laugh. "Oh, to be cursed with your pretty face! She left you her number."
"She did?" He sat up alarmed. Emma reached over to tap the napkin on the side of his saucer, unable to contain her grin.
Written in black sharpie, the words Call Me! Aurora xxx 555-8768 were bleeding through the thin paper.
Emma couldn't contain her snort of laughter anymore at the look of horror on his face. She gave the girl points for courage, but for execution?
"Christ on a bike. Are those kisses?" he asked, picking it up to examine it more closely.
"Oh, look," said Emma, grabbing it from the other side, "and a real kiss," she said, pointing at the smudge of red lipstick on the top corner, clapping a hand over her face to prevent a torrent of laughter.
"Did she even look legal to you?" Killian hissed back in a whisper, beginning to look back towards to kitchen in a wary kind of way.
"What can I say?" Emma shrugged, dipping a corner of her sandwich into her soup. "Your appeal is just universal. Pensioners and high schoolers alike..."
The tips of Killian's ears turned pink, as he took a long sip of his tea.
"We promised we would never speak of that," he said coldly, as his replaced his cup back into the saucer with a clatter.
It was true, Killian did have a kind of... magnetism about him. He did have one of those faces, and the scruff and the bedroom eyes certainly helped. Often he used it to his advantage, conning files out of uncooperative secretaries, faster service out of baristas, and dates out of bored barflies. But it did backfire on him, sometimes, being so damned attractive.
Like the time he and Emma had been out at the Rabbit Hole during another one of August's long absences, and he'd been cornered coming back from the restroom by a rather lascivious senior citizen. He had eventually been able to extract himself from the situation, but the tell-tale smudge of purple lipstick on his collar did require a rather pained explanation.
"It's alright for you, Swan," he had said at the time, "If someone kisses you, and you're not interested, you just deck them. I couldn't do that! What if she broke a hip?"
He was right, of course. But it didn't stop being any funnier. And his dignity, well... it would recover in time.
"No," Emma corrected. "Our agreement was that I wouldn't tell August. And I didn't. I've lived up to my end. You said nothing about not tormenting you later."
"An oversight which I bitterly regret," he sighed into his teacup.
"It's alright. I won't tell him about this either," Emma smiled, tapping the side of her nose. "It's strictly off-the-record."
Emma was beginning to think that dinner wasn't such a bad idea after all.