He'd hobbled down every hallway in this labyrinth full of sick people, the handcuffs dangling from his wrist. Killian had kept one eye on the blue jiggling mess someone must have mistaken for food...else why was it on a plate...and one eye on the only person he knew he could believe.

"What's this?" A lovely mixture of something appropriately called pain killers dulled the realization he'd been ungentlemanly in interrupting Swan and her mother's discussion. But this substance didn't allow for courtesy. "I found it on the tray." And there goes a bit of the pain killers, he thought, leaning against the wall. Maybe wandering around was a bad choice...

"Really?" Funny how her eyes alternated from piteous to anger. Anger? Why...oh, the restraints.

"Pirate!" He held up his arm to show off the handcuffs. Really, no one had answered his question. "What the bloody hell is this?"

"Jello," she said. Oh, of course, because that's something just anyone not from around here would know, he glared at her.

"It's food. You eat it," Snow White added, just as tired and irritable-looking as her daughter. But then, he had no reason to disbelieve them.

"I thought it was a hallucination." He caught a leggy brunette out of the corner of his eye. Well, if two presumably noble and kind women would pay an injured man no heed, then he could focus his attentions elsewhere. And she was quite lovely. "Well hello, you're quite real, aren't you?" He threw in a grin.

"Go eat your Jello," Swan snapped, taking his arm and pushing him back down the hall.

"Not jealous are we-" Now the room should not be blurring...should definitely not be blurring. Ow, ow, ow.

"Hang on." Even though it echoed a little in his brain, he could make out the change in tone, concern. She hoisted him up as best she could, but his torso refused to twist. His legs refused to pick up a pace, or any pace.

Before he could take in any faces in the hall or wall hangings, he could feel his bed, sitting on the edge of it, Swan squatting and waiting for his face to give her some sign he wasn't going to lose consciousness. With a breath, he swung his legs up and let his body sink back into the bed.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" There was a sigh right beforehand, a sigh of relief.

"Sorry, darling, but it was a pressing matter."

"I had them put you in this room so Gold wouldn't kill you here on the spot!"

"That doesn't explain the handcuffs, though, does it?"

"Yeah, not making the same mistake twice." She cuffed him to the bed again, only higher. His eyelids fell closed, only for him to snap them back open one more time. A little jaunt down a corridor should not be so agonizing.

"You may want to die, but I'd rather you didn't," she said, quietly, not looking him in the eye. Dead Guy of the Year, she'd called him. Killian wanted to tease, wanted to give any indication possible that someone wanting him to be alive was a pathetic sentiment despite it being the most he'd gotten out of anyone in so long. But his eyelids were growing too heavy...it took an effort to move his lips and tongue into coherent words...

"Do you promise that Jello is food?"

"Well, I'm not going to lie, it's not great food, but it's edible. I'll let them know to bring you something nicer." She was laughing, smiling. Poor Swan should be home in bed she looked so bedraggled and hauling him this way and that was no help.

"I'll stay here so they'll know where to find me." Ah, Percoset, the nectar of the gods was able to work its magic now that he was lying still, Swan's figure little more than a silhouette to his eyes now. "You're beautiful even when you're running on no sleep, you know that?"

"That's pretty bad flattery, but on a night like this, I'll take it," was the last thing he heard before he fell back asleep.

"...and this, this is on this page, the Hansel and Gretal story!" Henry had held his book out in front of him like a map pointing to row of trees after row of trees, so certain they matched the illustrations. For Killian, such enthusiasm was amusing. He really couldn't blame him, poor boy had been stuck in the same town for too long. At his age, Killian had already traveled to exotic lands, without aid of portals, granted, but he'd seen enough of Storybrooke to know enduring eleven years there would make anyone stir-crazy.

Swan avoided him...and he'd be lying if he hadn't quite been avoiding her. She was playing some kind of game with her son, calling out page numbers and then he'd flip to them and see if they'd passed whatever was in the picture or something to that nature, with a tone of mild disbelief, he'd noted. Like she still had some difficulty that all this was real. It was subtle, though, and gentle enough that Henry wouldn't pick up on it. No, they ambled along laughing and asking each other questions like two peas in a pod.

It made one feel a little left out.

Damn Snow White, he thought. She'd manipulated him somehow, and here he'd thought her incapable of such treachery. She had killed Cora, you stupid ass, he reminded himself. Yes, but Cora had been an altogether different breed of madness that had been badly in need of extermination. He did not fear her murderess; he congratulated her. Even at the expense of his revenge, he could admire a well-played move when he saw one. A bit different when he was the victim in all this. Bad form.

And still he listened in on all of it, her laugh like an ocean breeze, richer since it wasn't a sound he heard often. Ah, well, he smiled. A mother and son should be peas in a pod, and they'd been apart long enough...

"Henry, do you know how to play Pendulum?" he threw out, recalling having to learn that game at a young age when the sailors' dice would roll off and plummet into the water or a spilled bucket spoiled the playing cards. Henry ran up to him, one eyebrow straight in studious observation and the other arched in intrigue. He shook his head wearily.

"All you have to do, lad, is come up with a person or thing, no places, and then I do the same. You then present an argument as to why your choice could beat my choice if paired against one another. I counter it, and we proceed until one can no longer come up with any arguments."

"Verbal tennis," he said.

"Oh, so you have a variant of it?" Killian frowned for a split second. "Well then I suppose you'll be a superlative opponent. Ready? Ogres."

"Ninjas."

"Shouldn't we avoid making a fire?" Henry asked, setting down the backpack and pacing the perimeter of a small thicket.

"Rookie mistake, kid," Emma said. "Ogres are blind. They hunt by sound alone." With a short laugh, she added, "And, uh, guns don't really do much to them, so...yeah, those two things would have saved me from embarrassing myself in front of Mary Margaret." She sat next to him and dug around in the backpack. "That woman thinks of everything," she said, pulling out matches.

"So!" Henry heaved, setting his hands on his knees, which prompted a smile out of Killian, he had to admit. There was quite a bit about Henry that was adult, quite the achievement growing up with Regina. The excitement, the wonder at everything—obviously a boy, but it was the way he sequenced everything out, the way he was confident to steer the conversation now. "Do you have any places to recommend?"

Er...

"What?"

"For living. I saw the castle was damaged. We wouldn't be able to live in that for a long time. I read that it took like a hundred and sixty-eight years for the French to build Notre Dame, and you're a pirate, so I just figured you had been around and would know some good places to live." He paused to look over at Emma, whose nigh-cross-eyed face probably matched his own. "There aren't anymore magic beans. Not on this side, anyway. We're stuck here."

"I...Henry...I'll be back. I'm going to go get us some food. Watch him, please," she said in one breath, hurrying away from the firelight and into the forest. Stuck. More like trapped, he thought. However disengaging her world might be, it was what she knew. She didn't have to repeat her silly version of the events surrounding Jack the Giant Killer for him to remember.

"No, I suppose that would be for your family to decide," he settled on saying, giving himself a nod that he could be quite the diplomat when the occasion called for it. He ought to change the subject in spite of the fact the boy seemed much keener on the idea of staying than his mother.

"You should be glad we're staying anyway."

"And why is that?"

"If you went back to Storybrooke, wouldn't you just get taken to jail?"

Killian released a breath he hadn't been aware he'd been holding and laughed.

"I'd like to see anyone try to put me there," he said, giving the boy as much bravado as possible. He could study his face this way, the way he did with Bae so long ago, except this time, images of Milah were much, much hazier than before. Memories he'd retained, naturally, but other than a few specific images, a wrinkle in the forehead here and there...Henry reminded him of Bae but appearance-wise resembled his mother's side of the family, a good portion of his grandmother, his grandfather's mouth.

Henry seemed to like him, however, which managed to cheer him. Nodding, he pulled out his book and positioned it to where the fire would allow him to see it.

"So your book there..."

"It has our stories in it. It says what really happened." He turned it around and opened it up like a teacher about to read to a group of students. "It's how I knew what the curse actually was."

"Could I take a look?"

Swan returned, he noted from the corner of his eye, something small and meaty, rabbit by the look of it, getting ready to meet the fire. She stayed silent, and he didn't envy being in her position, just realizing her choice of lands to live in had been taken from her by sheer happenstance and that she'd heard said news in front of the man who had kissed her but was too much of an ass to know what to do about that other than hope he could kiss her again.

"I still say we should kill him," the warrior woman, Mulan, had said by the campfire months ago. Killian rolled onto his side so his back faced them, feigning sleep, an old trick that worked more than he thought it should. "He's leading us right into a trap."

"If he was willing to double-cross Cora, he'd be willing to do that with us," Snow White had said, although more to herself, as if she were calculating figures.

"Yeah, but he's a way to this compass thing," the one who had held a knife to him, the one who had all but dangled his life right in front of him for what she wanted despite the simpering princess' doubts.

"If it's all a ruse-"

"It's not. He was telling the truth. All he wants is his revenge. Guys like him give their loyalty to the highest bidder, which, according to him, is us."

"And so best case scenario, he goes to your world with you and kills a man?" Aurora gasped. He rolled his eyes.

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," Swan had said. "Rumpelstiltskin and his problems are pretty low on my priority list right now."

Good taste, he mentally cheered her.

"We kill him now, you're no worse off than where you are now," Mulan argued.

"Jeez, can you just chill out, Mulan? Go beat up a tree if you have some issues to work out. We're not killing him."

"Emma, honey..."

"Am I the only one who wants to go home?" her tired voice started to yelp. He could feel eyes on him, as if she remembered he was "sleeping." Sure enough, she lowered her voice to a whisper. "The compass thing is true. He was telling the truth."

"Now how do you know that? You really can tell when someone is lying?" Aurora asked.

"Yeah, guy's kind of an open book, and keep your voice down. He's trying to sleep."

Emma Swan, how Cora underestimated you. She'd given him brief descriptions of the two women, explained who they were well enough, but had laughed that "the daughter" was brand new to their world, a fish out of water trying to catch its breath wherever it could. How wrong she'd been.

"Swan, is this supposed to be you?" He held up the page with the picture of Charming placing her in the wardrobe, swaddled in a thick white blanket.

"Yep, Step One towards breaking the curse," she snorted.

"If you go back one you'll see my grandpa fighting off guards to get her to the wardrobe," Henry added. Ruffling a swan's feathers had become something of a pastime, and it beat avoiding her. He'd...he swallowed, his blood running cold...and warm...he'd missed her.

"Striking, from the baby to the woman, I mean. Having no idea how much of a force to be reckoned with she'll become."

"Yeah, well, rabbit?"

Henry had volunteered to keep watch, entirely something Bae would have done. Cunning woman that she was, Swan had permitted him with the condition that he lay back for five minutes to "rest and gather his thoughts." He slept curled up over on the opposite end of the fire, leaving the two of them to have to speak to each other to set up watch shifts.

"You can go ahead and rest. I'm not tired," she said to the flames.

"Really? How can you not be?"

"Would you have liked to have been stuck in Storybrooke for the rest of your life?"

Absolutely not.

"I don't know, a new land, new devices, pleasurable company to be found, I'm sure." He shot her a grin.

"Yeah, I get it. You'd make do."

"Don't you think you'd make do here?"

"It's not..." she groaned, her fingers sliding up from her temples into her hair, leaving him wishing he could do the same to her. It truly was as if she could hear his thoughts at times because she pulled them back out and waved them around to help her explain some convoluted thought. "Staying here means not being the sheriff anymore."

"Are you really that married to your job?"

"It means having to be..." A face followed that made him discover what she'd look like tasting rotten meat. "A princess."

"Ah, I forget you are one sometimes," he said, a heat building. It was a cliché, too many songs about pirates somehow being involved with a princess, but this was more, gods help him, and the guilt of it being more, the guilt of forsaking his revenge in favor of a chance of not parting with her any time soon, terrified him less and less.

"I forget I'm one sometimes! That means having to learn how to be a queen, having so many people depend on you, doing the politics thing, heading off into wars, holding court...I, I wasn't even okay with just one person depending on me for a long time." She looked over at Henry. "He found me."

"What do you mean he found you?" Curiosity had told him very early on he wanted to know just how Swan had come about this lad and how he'd fallen into Regina's clutches and how the pair now somewhat shared him in a most awkward way.

"It was my twenty-eighth birthday and there was a knock on the door with a little kid basically waving and going, 'Hi, I'm your son that you put up for adoption and I'm from a town where everyone's a fairytale character but they don't remember that because my other mom cast a big curse and you're the only one who can break it.'" For once, she grinned back at him, flushed at the craziness of it. That was how he wanted her to look at him, just like that, happy, carefree, embracing all the craziness. "It took like a year for me to even believe him."

"And then to throw his father back into the mix must have been a delight," he tried.

"Captain...sir?" the nurse, Linda, he checked her name tag again. "That ringing means you have a phone call."

"How's that?" he asked, struggling to sit up in the hospital bed. She helped adjust the bed for him, picked up part of the contraption on the table next to him and held it against his ear. "Say hello."

"Hello?"

"Hook, there are problems."

"Swan, how nice of you to check in on me, although this seems quite the lazy way of doing it. I see passers-by walking in the hallway all the time taking flowers to the invalids they're here to see..."

"Listen, this is to give you a heads up. I'm leaving town and that does not give you a free pass to go do anything to Belle. You leave her alone and you'll stay in one piece. Got it?" Dread was only something he'd heard in her when she'd been on the other side of that cell.

"But if the sheriff leaves the town will erupt into chaos." He chose to give his sarcasm a monotone since laughing hurt so much.

"It's kind of a weird deal I have with Gold, uh, Rumpelstiltskin." He growled, but waited for her to finish. "I owe him a favor and without spilling out somebody else's business, I'm going somewhere with him and this is all with the threat that if you touch a hair on Belle's head, he will kill everyone I love. You will be watched and I don't care about the circumstances between the two of you." He was going to speak then, but she kept going. "Hook, you're...you've got another chance to live and I'd rather you take advantage of that then just keep digging your own grave."

"Touching sentiment," he said and then sighed. "I swear to the gods of my world and yours no harm will befall Belle that is my doing. Now, in regards to this trip of yours, do not, I repeat, do not let the Crocodile seduce you. He can be the charmer you know, all scraggly and gimpy. I hear that really does it for some ladies out there."

Her voice was gone and Linda had to gently take the phone from him and explain what it was to hang up on someone.

"Neal, yeah," she said, her back straightening, and then she looked right at him. Gods, he hoped he hadn't jumped. He couldn't look away from her, whether he wanted to or not, and he could foresee no reason on earth why he would want to. She stood up, her breathing just a hint ragged.

"Don't go hunt anything else right now," he said, springing up, facing her.

In one swift motion, he'd curled his arm around her and, lifting her an inch or two off the ground, propped her against a tree trunk. With care, he switched arms so his hand could touch her face, and she was allowing it. He'd half expected to be slapped in the face and have a gun pulled on him, but no...gods, how soft, how bloody pliant and, and responsive she was. Her eyes—he'd planned to seduce her but to hell with that. He closed his eyes and savored her kiss again. He didn't feel old or broken or empty now...he hadn't any time he'd been with her... oh, her jawbone tasted as sweet as her lips. A soft gasp, her hands clasped at the back of his neck, her hips knocking into his—he'd been mad to think he was the one seducing her. A short, breathy sigh of his name sucked even more control from him, leaving nothing but a burning need to extract it from her over and over again.

Breaking away from her, Killian stared at her. So pale-featured, like spun glass save for the hardened soul beneath.

She was staring back, something going on behind her eyes he desperately wanted her to voice. It looked like...like she was not going to let him go. Her legs trembled, too. Say something, he prompted himself, scolding himself for feeling so tongue-tied.

"I wanted to kiss you ever since the beanstalk," he whispered, slipping back into a seduction mode and yet so close to her throat, the tip of his nose in her hair—his voice was less steady than he would have wanted. He leaned in again, so ready for that touch of bliss again, but she pulled back.

"I'm going to say a word and I want you to say the first thing that comes to mind," she said, her brow knitted and her lips pulled down again. He'd lose that one for sure, as the only thing in his mind right now was Emma, Emma, Emma...

"Milah," she said. His heart still raced, but he cooled just a little.

"Taken."

"A guy plans revenge for a few centuries and all of a sudden..." Her head made a circular motion, like she was leading him to an answer, but his head still spun. Stone still, he could hardly think, so dizzy.

"All of a sudden, he's this close to a beautiful woman who knows how to best him because she understands him," Killian whispered, shocked he could gather a coherent response. "May not approve of him, but understands." He pressed against her again. "It's a rare thing, and for my part, I quite like understanding you."

"It took you this long to be on the rebound?" she asked, her voice still husky, her eyes still not leaving his.

"Emma..." She lunged just a hair when he said her name. He'd scream it out a hundred times if it eventually brought her back. He ran his fingers through her hair, suddenly wondering if it would be the only time he ever could.

"Tell me you don't want me," he murmured, his forehead on hers. "Tell me to go." He gripped her hair, still tangled in his hand, but gently, trying hard to control something in him he couldn't name. "No, I don't want to forget Milah. I catch myself at times not thinking about her, thinking of having a life, thinking of you, of being happy and letting her go and then there's a damned tremendous lot of guilt. And then there are times when there's guilt about having no guilt at all." He couldn't hear himself anymore, wanting what this little dance or whatever it was to end and be replaced by something more, more substantial. Less teasing, but just as tantalizing. "I spend time with you, Emma, and I want to live. I think of you and I'm happy. Sometimes I don't want to be happy or want you but it doesn't make it go away."

How close, the proximity, that so little space was between them hurt. It was an ache Killian had never, in all his years, ever felt. He released her, letting his hand droop over to the trunk instead, mesmerized by the way her eyes had bulged, shimmered a little, like fireflies against the night, frightened but dancing.

"You didn't come along for me, did you?" she whispered in a quivering voice. "You came along for you."

"Yes." Backing away, the night air felt so cool, chilly even. He stood in one place and closed his eyes. That rather answered the question, didn't it? Guilt or no, he did want a life, one with purpose and reason. There. A massive weight he'd hauled on his back for longer than anyone should remember had been knocked off, reduced to crumbles so he would never have to carry it again. He almost laughed, almost wept, but Henry stirred, the fire crackled, and crickets chirped incessantly in the background. All this rescuing business was far from over.

"I'll take the first watch," he said, walking around the fire to the far end of their little camp. "You should try to rest."

And thank gods for a little stroke of luck, Killian thought, not hearing any arguing, just the sound of Emma nestling down on the ground next to her son, because now was decidedly not the time to share that he'd finally gotten it through his thick, stubborn head that he loved her with all his blackened pirate heart.

A/N: The very first scene is an extension of a deleted scene which I was very happy to find existed, so about the first half of that scene was actually filmed. Coming up, Belle takes some desperate measures.