Beta/Edited by PeaceHeather

Chapter 2

She washes her hands and arms in the kitchen sink, the water scalding her skin to a glowing red. The first aid kit is in the bathroom, and Mary Margaret's sewing basket is sitting out on top of her craft supplies, so she grabs that on her way back up the stairs.

Hook hasn't moved, though his head swivels to watch her as she hurries back to his side. "I don't suppose you've got any rum?"

"In this world, we use disinfectant," she says, hoping they have enough disinfectant for this sort of thing.

"For me, lass. I've a feeling I'm going to want it before we're through."

"You've lost too much blood," she tells him, sorting through the sewing kit. "Alcohol will just thin what you've got left. I don't want you bleeding more than you already are. I've got some pain killers, though." She digs through the first aid kit and comes up with a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol. "I doubt they'll do more than blunt the edge."

He eyes the bottle skeptically, then shakes his head. "I'd prefer rum."

"Sorry," she says, even though she isn't.

There's an assortment of needles, although most of them are delicate little things completely unequal to the task of sewing up flesh. Towards the bottom she finds an unopened package of upholstery needles, though, some of them longer than her finger, and three of them curved and sharper than his hook. She rips the package open and holds one up to the light.

Hook grunts. "That'll do. Whatever thread you have that's thickest, as well."

Emma tosses aside the tiny spools of cheap stuff until she finds a larger spool of heavy duty thread. She has no idea what project Mary Margaret bought it for, but the color is a rather brilliant shade of hot pink.

"Over my dead body," he says, when he catches sight of it. The look on his face is priceless.

"Seriously? What, you're worried your stitches are going to clash with your eyeliner?"

His eyes narrow.

"Your life is on the line." She waggles the spool of pink thread at him, and arches an eyebrow. "Do you really have a choice?"

He rolls his eyes, but a grin flickers across his face like heat lightning. "Bad form, Emma, kicking a man when he's down. How long have you been waiting to throw that back in my face?"

"Take a guess, Mr. When-I-Stab-You-With-My-Sword."

"Touché."

Emma threads the needle, willing her hands not to shake. It only takes her three tries. She feels completely at sea here, and tries to remember every first aid class she's ever taken and every doctor show she's ever watched on TV. She doesn't have a lighter, so she swabs the needle with alcohol, then soaks the thread in it, too, just to be sure. There's little packages of disinfectant wipes in the first aid kit and she rips one open with her teeth, then scrubs her hands with them.

Her throat seems to swell shut, though, when she looks at the towel now partially soaked through with his blood. The darkness at the edges of her vision closes in again, and there's ringing in her ears. "Hook, I—"

His hand, sticky with blood, clasps her wrist tightly. "Emma," he says. "Look at me."

It's a struggle, but she does. His eyes are calm as he gazes back at her, his mouth unsmiling and serious. "You can do this." He believes it. Normally she finds herself confused by the layers of half-truths he dresses his words in, but this is straightforward and true as steel. He believes that she can do this, and because he believes it, she finds herself almost believing it, too.

Emma nods and reaches for the towel. It comes away from the wound with an awful sound, like something wet tearing. She chokes down the bile that rises in her throat and takes a deep breath. Then she gently wipes away as much of the blood as she can and reaches for the bottle of isopropyl alcohol. "Do I need to warn you that this'll sting?"

"Is this revenge, Swan?"

In answer she douses the wound, and watches him go rigid on the bed, his teeth clenched hard and his eyes shut tight with pain. He doesn't scream, she'll give him that, though she hears something rip and glances over to see his hook buried in her mattress. Mary Margaret is going to have a fit later, she's sure. Still, better the mattress than her, she thinks.

Slowly his muscles unclench. Panting slightly, he turns his face toward her, his expression sour. "You're a cruel woman."

Emma contemplates the wound and the needle and tries to distract herself as she jabs it through his skin, starting at the lower corner. He hisses through his teeth while she clumsily ties a knot.

"Let me remind you that you're the one who decided to climb through my window. If you wanted sweet and gentle, you should have gone to Belle. Oh, no, wait—you shot at her, knocked her over the town line, and now she's forgotten that she's supposed to be sweet and gentle to ugly beasts like you."

"Ugly, am I?"

"Beauty is only skin deep, Hook. Right now, I can see under your skin and trust me: it is not pretty."

He chuckles weakly. "By all means, keep telling yourself that you don't like me, sweetheart. You and I both know the truth."

"Hold still," she says. "This is hard enough without you jiggling around."

"I don't jiggle," he says, voice petulant as a little boy's. Emma makes another stitch, hating the way the needle slides through flesh, hating even more having to pull the length of thread through the skin. She's had stitches before, though not quite this many at one time, and even with anesthetic it's never pleasant. She's honestly surprised he hasn't passed out by now. His face is nearly as pale as the sheet, tinged a bit with gray, and the knuckles of his hand show white beneath the blood. He's clenched his fist tightly into her quilt, but she can't find it in her to worry about the stains now. That can be dealt with later, when he's patched up and packed off somewhere else.

Emma makes her stitches carefully, aware that failing this project will result in something much worse than an F on a report card that no one had ever really cared about, anyway.

"A bit faster, if you please, darling. I'm hardly delicate," he says, three stitches in. Emma jabs him a little harder on the next stitch than she'd meant to, and then tries not to feel bad when he swears softly under his breath.

He helps her out by opening his mouth again. "I must say, this isn't quite how I pictured sullying your bedsheets."

"Considering how much time you waste chasing after Gold, I'm surprised you spent any time picturing my sheets at all."

"Oooh, jealous, are we?"

"You know, this would be easier if you would just pass out or something," she mutters.

"And miss a moment in your company?"

Emma lets the side of her mouth that's facing away from him quirk up into a smile. She can't tell if it's bravery or bravado that prompts him to flirt in the face of death. Still, it's a welcome distraction from what she's doing, and her hands are steadier now. As long as he's flirting he's still alive, she reasons, and that's what counts.

"Since you're feeling so chatty," she says, "why don't you tell me about Neverland?"

He grunts. "I'm afraid I'm not feeling quite that chatty."

Emma arches a brow. "Weren't you the one who said that the stories I know are all wrong? I used to read about Neverland when I was a kid. So, c'mon, tell me what it's really like."

He's quiet for a moment. Emma pauses in her sewing long enough to take a peek at his face. His eyes are shuttered, his expression closed off, mouth pressed into a thin line. Then something shifts and he grimaces. "I'd far rather hear you tell me the story you think you know."

"Well, there's Peter Pan. The Lost Boys. Captain Hook and Mr. Smee — although in the stories I've read the crocodile is actually a crocodile, not a pawnshop owner who likes to make deals." When he doesn't respond she continues. "Um ... what else? Neverland is this island somewhere, and you have to fly to get there, and no one there ever grows up. There's Indians and fairies, lagoons full of mermaids. Lots of adventures. Am I wrong so far?"

He is silent for so long that she looks up, suddenly afraid he's passed out, but his eyes are on the open window. His mouth tightens again and she watches, fascinated, as a muscle tics in his jaw.

"Not entirely," he says, finally, though his gaze is still on the stars.

"So, does Peter Pan exist?"

He's quiet again, then he turns his head to look at her. "No," he says. "Peter Pan doesn't exist."

She only sees it because she's looking so hard for it: he's almost, but not quite, telling the truth. Or maybe he's almost, but not quite, lying. With him, it's sometimes hard for her to tell, and the last person she had so much trouble reading was Neal. Emma hates the implications of that, so she goes back to stitching him up, falling into a rhythm of needle, thread, and flesh.

When he speaks again, it surprises her so much she almost drops the needle. "It can be quite lovely, you know."

"What?"

His eyes take on an odd faraway look, as if he's gazing at a memory that is both bright and terrible. "Neverland. There's a mountaintop where the stars come in every color you can imagine. They shine so close and sharp that you feel as if you could reach out and pluck them from the sky and put them in your pocket like gems. The ocean there is so blue that sometimes you cannot tell the difference between the sea and the sky, or whether you're floating or flying; and so clear you can count the tiny crabs that scuttle along the bottom." Hook scowls, suddenly, and closes his eyes. "It's the most dangerous place I've ever been."

"You just said it was beautiful."

"Aye, but often the most beautiful things are the most perilous as well. The true danger of Neverland is that you may never want to leave. It makes you forget, and anything that makes you forget who you are and what you want, that traps you forever, is dangerous." His voice is quietly intense. She wonders how much he lost to Neverland, and whether he's managed to get any of it back. Emma thinks maybe he's shared more than he meant to, and it makes her feel guilty, as if she's used his pain to get something out of him.

"I grew up in the foster care system," she says, and it comes out like an apology. She winces, but continues, picking her words as if they are shards of broken glass. "It wasn't all bad. I mean, most of the families were really ... nice. I guess. There was one family, when I was eight or nine, and they had this great house. Really great, you know? Big. Lots of rooms. Pool in the backyard. They even had a treehouse and sometimes I'd go up there and I'd watch the stars and wish that I could stay there forever."

She makes a few more stitches, estimates she only has a handful more to go. Then she'll clean him up better and disinfect it again. She'll need gauze—

His fingers brushing gently through her hair startle her. "They had a child, didn't they? Not long after you came to live there. They forgot about you, shut you out." He tucks an errant strand behind her ear, and she could swear that she sees a strange sort of sympathy in his gaze.

Emma stares at him, her heart thudding in her chest so loudly she's sure he must be able to hear it. He's right, of course. Less than a year after they'd taken her in, the woman had gotten pregnant. They'd kept her on until a new foster home could be found, but with a new baby on the way—a miracle baby, they said, completely unexpected—Emma had no longer been wanted. There is no way he could have known that, however.

"Lucky guess," she mutters.

His sympathetic smile doesn't falter. "Actually, no."

Emma looks away. She hates the way he reads her so easily. Probably nearly as much as he hates that she can tell when he lies.

She finishes up the last few stitches, then ties the thread off tightly and snips the remainder with a pair of small scissors. The bleeding has slowed to a mere trickle, so she uses the disinfecting wipes to clean up the fresh blood from the stitches, and wipes up his abdomen as best she can. She packs gauze over the seam and tapes it down, trying (without much success) to avoid the dark trail of hair that runs down the center of his torso to disappear into the waistband of his pants.

Emma's aware of his heavy-lidded gaze on her, and the way his stomach muscles jump a little whenever she touches him. Now that the worst of it is over, his scrutiny makes her nervous, which immediately makes her slam her defenses back into place. Of course, with him it's probably futile, but it makes her feel better. Stone faced, Emma finishes cleaning him up.

"Let me see your head," she says, and he turns his face obligingly so she can examine the cut near his temple. It's not deep, barely a scrape really, but there's a hell of a bruise forming, and his left cheekbone looks awful. She prods it gently to see if it's broken. Nothing moves weirdly under her fingertips, though he winces when she touches it. "What the hell did he do to you?"

"I could be mistaken, but I think he was trying to kill me," Hook says. "The feeling was mutual, I assure you." He ought to look like someone beat him with an ugly stick, but the bruises only serve to make to make him look even more menacingly attractive. So not fair.

"And yet, you're strangely not dead. I get the feeling that Rumpelstiltskin doesn't really know the meaning of the word mercy."

Hook's smile hangs crooked. "Perhaps I killed him first."

"If you did, you wouldn't be worried about going to the hospital," she points out. "You can't kill him here in Storybrooke. Not without the dagger, and I know for a fact that he's hidden it away somewhere no one will find it. You're not stupid enough to attack him outright, so he found you and ... what? Why'd he let you go?"

He smiles softly, his entire face lighting up as he gazes at her. "Clever lass." From him it sounds like the warmest praise she's ever received, which is why she doesn't trust it one bit.

Emma scowls. "You're not going to tell me, are you?"

"Oh, it's far more fun when you guess," he says. He tries to shift then, and groans when it pulls on his stitches.

"Idiot," she says, but it comes out fonder than she intended. Her room is a mess. There's blood all over the sheets and the quilt—which she really hopes isn't something Snow made, because if it is her mother is going to kill her. There's first aid stuff and sewing supplies scattered on the bed, a blood soaked towel on the floor, and Emma herself is wearing far more of Hook's blood than she ought to be. "I'm going to help you get that shirt off. Think you can refrain from making any more innuendos, buddy? Or am I gonna need to gag you?"

"I'll be a perfect gentleman."

"Liar," she says.

Hook proves her wrong, however, and saves his strength for helping her extract him from his mangled leather vest and linen shirt. Then he's bare from the waist up except for a silver chain around his neck, and the complicated leather brace that holds his hook. If it weren't for the blood on his hand, the bruises and the bandages, he'd look like a leather fetishist's dream come true, sprawled across her bed.

He has a few old scars scattered across his shoulders, arms and chest. Some look like they could have rivaled his newest injury. She wonders who sewed him up before. She wonders if it was Milah. Whoever it was had been pretty good at it, or maybe he's just one of those people who heal cleanly.

Emma pushes those thoughts out of her head. "How's the pain? Do you want those painkillers?"

"Shall I tell you about the time I had to remove an arrowhead from my thigh with just one hand and my teeth?" He quirks an eyebrow upward in challenge, clearly trying to impress her with how manly his pain tolerance is.

"I think I'll pass," Emma says. She tries not to think about the other things he can probably do with one hand and his teeth. He's pale, certainly, and a little gray around the edges, but he doesn't look like he's gone into shock. She wonders if that's normal for someone from his world, or if it's just because Hook doesn't have it in him to give up.

"Would you be so kind?" He holds up a leg and wiggles his foot at her imperiously. Despite being half-dead from blood loss and in total agony, he manages to put the promise of a full night's worth of seduction into his smile. Idiot. Emma rolls her eyes but pries his boot off anyway, then the other, and dumps it beside its mate.

Something about seeing his boots beside her bed, and his clothes strewn about her room, makes Emma pause. It finally dawns on her: he's going to be staying the night in her bed.

Whether she likes it or not.

Notes: This story is actually finished, and will be twelve chapters long. I'm posting them as I finish editing them, which takes about a day or so. You can expect regular updates.