All right, readers, this is my FAVORITE chapter! I sort of just sat down and converted this from script to an actual chapter in a whirlwind tonight, so I may go back and change it once the excitement has worn off, or I may not because I'm actually quite excited with how it turned out. But just because it's my favorite doesn't mean it's the end! There is more to come! I really hope you like it because this is where the big moment happens, so sit back and enjoy!
Rapunzel jumped down from the dock, her bare feet landing in the sand just as the tide washed up over them, and walked closer to Mr. Gold, eyeing him with both suspicion and curiosity.
"What do you mean, I'm not who I think I am?" she asked.
"He's talking about your mother," another voice joined the conversation before Gold could utter a word. Rapunzel spun around to find this new voice, confusion twisting her facial features.
"What do you know about my mother?" she asked with a hint of hesitation, as if she were better off never knowing what she imagined would be a painful truth.
"A great deal more than you can imagine," Hook answered softly, his blue eyes filled with a deep and overwhelming sadness before some invisible barrier between himself and his emotions snapped back into place and he turned his glaring gaze towards Gold. "What I can't figure out, though, is the rest of the story." There was no question in his words…no request for information. He was demanding it. Mr. Gold, however, appeared entirely unfazed by Hook's sudden presence in a place where he shouldn't have belonged.
"Your mother's name was Milah," Mr. Gold explained after inhaling a deep breath slowly through his nose. His eyes remained locked on Rapunzel as he temporarily ignored Hook. "She was my wife, and the mother of my son. She left us, abandoned us when Baelfire was young to go gallivanting off with…Killian Jones." He said the name like it was poison in his mouth, looking Hook up and down, from head to toe, his eyes dark. "Over a decade later, I heard rumors of a woman matching Milah's description turning up in the kingdom of Corona, so I journeyed there and I learned of a baby girl that had just been born of a king and queen who were unable to have children. Further discovery proved that Milah had indeed been the mother of the child and had left the baby with her estranged sister, the queen."
Hook's eyes grew wide with realization as he staggered back several steps, reaching out to steady himself on a sign stuck into the stand. He didn't blink even for a moment as he gazed at Rapunzel, a breathtaking new emotion in his eyes that was entirely unrecognizable. It was almost as if he was seeing her for the first time.
"One day, she left," Hook took it upon himself to continue where Gold's story left off, his words sounding so far away that he could hardly believe it was his own voice speaking. "She was gone for several months. She said that there was something that she had to take care of alone, and that I shouldn't worry. I trusted her, so I let her go. The day that she returned was the day before she…" he trailed off, casting his eyes down to his hook and up at Mr. Gold.
"She loved you…and you loved her. She was the dream that you lost," Rapunzel said, filling in the blanks left after her first encounter with the captain. To answer her, Hook rolled up his sleeve to reveal the tattoo of the heart and Milah's name on his arm. She stood silent for a moment, her mind finally reaching the end of the story…and why Hook was suddenly looking at her as if he'd never seen anything quite like her in his life. "So, that means that I'm—" she stopped, casting a glance between the two men who had come to play such monumental roles in her life, even if she didn't know it until this very moment.
"—my daughter. Mine and Milah's," Hook finished her statement, the words just as foreign leaving his lips as they sounded in Rapunzel's thoughts. Nevertheless, her heart seemed ready to explode with her newfound knowledge. For her entire life, she'd believed that she belonged somewhere else…that she was meant to be someone else. And in one moment, everything she'd known for the centuries she'd been alive was turned upside down. There was the man who raised her, who seemed to love her in the only way that he knew how…the wrong way…and there were the parents she never knew, who weren't even her parents at all but her aunt and uncle, celebrating the very short time they had been given with her for hundreds of years…and there were her real parents…her mother, Milah, gone before she ever had the chance to know her, who gave her away…and her father, Killian…who sent her in the direction of her lifelong dream before he even knew who she was…and whose sudden unconditional love for her filled an emptiness inside her she thought would remain vacant for her entire life.
Killian, meanwhile, hesitated as he closed the remaining distance between himself and his…his daughter. He didn't know how he felt, truly. In honesty, he hadn't ever felt this much in all his years. He was overcome with a spectrum of emotions that he knew he would have to sort through one by one as they separated themselves in his mind and heart. But in this moment, coming to the stunning realization that he had known all along, somewhere deep inside him, that this girl was more to him than just a resemblance to the woman he loved and lost, the only discernible emotion he could feel was love. The kind of love that changed his entire world in a single moment. He had been alone for so long that the thought of having anyone in his life had long since gone. But here she was…a manifestation of the love that he and Milah had shared, looking back at him with the same whirlwind of emotion in her deep blue eyes and bringing another startling realization to the forefront of his thoughts. A recognition he had failed to place before, in what seemed like a different life.
"You look so much like her. That day in the bar, I thought I was seeing a ghost," he explained as he cautiously reached his hand out, finally letting it rest on her cheek when she didn't back away from his touch. "You're beautiful, like she was. But you have my eyes."
It was true, they both realized in the same moment. The familiarity they found in each other came not just emotionally, from the bond between father and daughter, but physically, in their eyes. The same striking shade of blue, putting even the ocean to shame.
Placing her hand over his and smiling brilliantly, Rapunzel's eyes began to fill with tears of joy as she closed the careful distance between them, wrapping her arms tightly around Killian who, taken aback for a moment, tightened his arms around her as well. Several silent moments passed, with no words perfect enough to say all that needed to be said, before Killian pulled back and met her eyes again, the widest and brightest of smiles on a face that had seen only darkness and pain for so long.
"I actually have something to show you," he said, realizing what he had come to do before he'd walked in on the conversation of a lifetime. Rapunzel smiled, though she appeared confused.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Come with me," he said, holding out his hand. Without a moment's hesitation, Rapunzel placed her hand in his and followed him up the beach towards town before quickly spinning back around.
"But what about-?" she asked, searching the area for any sign of Mr. Gold, whose presence had been entirely forgotten, though he seemed to have disappeared. Killian turned in a circle, his eyes darkening for just a moment as he searched as well and found nothing.
"I'll deal with the Crocodile later. Right now is about you," he said softly, replacing that smile that he couldn't seem to control if he'd wanted to and leading his daughter up to the street and off into the night.
So there ya go! The reason why in this story, Rapunzel's eyes are blue. The reason why she looked like Milah. The reason why Emma saw something familiar in Rapunzel's eyes at the very beginning of the story. The reason why Killian helped Rapunzel in the bar...and the reason why Rapunzel felt drawn to him in that same moment. All of these instances were leading up to this very moment. And just a random trivia fact for all you readers: this was not how the story was supposed to go when I first wrote it as an episode in script form. Rapunzel was just going to be the lost princess, like normal, and then all of a sudden during the bar scene, Killian invited himself into the story and became her biological father. Extremely complicated not only to write but to wrap my mind around, but I love that this is how it happened. Please please please let me know what you think!