Beta/Edited by PeaceHeather (and you can blame/thank her for inspiring me to expand the hand-porn section.)
Chapter 3
Emma takes momentary refuge in the bathroom. Her tank top and pajamas are streaked with blood, and she's—gross—gotten some on her face and in her hair, too. Turning the water to the hottest she can stand, she scrubs herself clean, scrapes the blood from beneath her nails, and then washes it out of her hair. When she's finished, Emma leans against the counter, hands braced on either side of the sink and stares at the faint ring of red around the drain. The after-rush of adrenaline leaves her feeling shaky and unsteady on her feet.
He could have died, could have bled out in her room while she slept; or worse, could have died out on the street somewhere. Emma feels sick just thinking about it. He still could die. He's lost a lot of blood and there's always the risk of infection. She'll have to call Mary Margaret in the morning and have her pick up some stuff on her way home—and, man, is that a phone call she's not looking forward to making. They'll need to move him, eventually, somewhere safe where Gold can't find him, at least until Hook's healed and able to take care of himself. Storybrooke isn't that big, however, and the list of places where Gold won't look is depressingly small. Besides, Gold has magic at his disposal; it's a miracle he hasn't found him already.
There's nothing to be done for it at the moment, so Emma gathers some clean sheets from the linen closet, and wets a clean washcloth from the sink, then returns to the bedroom. While she was gone, he's managed to lever himself out of the bed and into the wicker chair she usually keeps tucked into the corner where the ceiling slopes lowest. His hand is pressed to the bandages and he's panting, slightly, again. He's also removed his hook and laid it on her nightstand, next to her gun.
She kneels beside him and takes his hand, sliding his rings off and wiping them down, one by one, before placing them on the nightstand. Then she uses the wet cloth to clean his hand for him, steadfastly refusing to look at his face while she wipes down his arm and wrist. Emma has to scrub gently to remove the dried blood from his knuckles and the creases of his palm, and she takes her time cleaning between each of his fingers. It's a shame he only has one hand, she thinks. He's got long fingers with broad, flat fingertips and short, blunt nails. His palm is wide, calloused in unexpected places from wielding a sword and hauling on ropes.
Emma can feel him watching her and she can't help but feel self-conscious. She's intensely aware of the warmth of his skin, the way his fingers curl slightly to touch hers as she works, and the way his breathing hitches every so often.
"You shouldn't move around so much," she says as she finishes, just to fill the tense silence. "If you tear those out I'm not stitching you up again."
It's a lie, and they both know it, but he lets it be. His voice is huskier when he speaks. "I thought it would be easier to fix the bed if I weren't in it. But I've no objections to being tied to your bed, darling."
She chooses to ignore that one—as well as the odd wobbly feeling in her legs—and instead gets up and strips the bed, wadding up the bloody sheets. Thankfully, none of it seems to have seeped through to the mattress, so she makes the bed up quickly, covering up the new puncture mark he'd made in it with his hook.
Emma adds his bloody clothes and the towel to the stack of dirty laundry, then takes it all to the downstairs bathroom and dumps most of it into the tub. She turns on the water and fills it enough so that everything can soak, hoping that she can remember to get it all into the laundry before Mary Margaret gets home in the morning. Hook's leather vest cleans up a little easier, and by the time she's finished it looks almost as good as new, except for the slash through it. Emma drapes it over a towel bar to dry, scrubs herself one more time, then changes into a clean pair of pajama bottoms and a black tank top that she'd thankfully left in the dryer.
When she returns to her room, he's still in the chair; his face is pale and exhausted. He looks so tragic that she doesn't even have the heart to snark at him. "Ready to get back in bed?"
"Thought you'd never ask." There isn't even a hint of innuendo to it, and for some reason that makes her heart speed up to double-time. Carefully they shift him back onto the bed, and Emma regards his leather pants dubiously.
"I think David's got some sweatpants that'll fit you."
Hook raises an eyebrow. "Sweatpants?"
Emma laughs in spite of herself. "Yeah, I guess that does sound pretty gross, huh? They're just cotton pants, kind of like these." She gestures at her own pants. "They'd be a lot more comfortable to sleep in."
"And you'll be my valet?"
She narrows her eyes at him. "It's not like I've never seen a naked man before."
"Ah, but you've never seen me naked before, and I'm hardly in a position to enjoy your inevitable reaction."
She could make a joke—several come to mind, and the urge to ask him what else he's had cut off is nearly impossible to resist—but his face has taken on that grayish cast again after having moved twice, and his flirtation lacks its usual oomph. Right now he looks battered and sore, and like he's in more pain than he's willing to let on.
"I'll try to restrain myself," she says, instead, her voice dry.
Emma feels weird going through Mary Margaret's laundry basket, but toward the bottom there is a neatly folded pair of dark sweats that would never fit her mother. For a moment she considers calling them now. Mary Margaret and David would be over here in a heartbeat if they knew Hook was upstairs, in her bed. The clock on the wall, however, informs her that it's three in the morning, and she doesn't want to wake them. With everything that's happened, Emma doesn't begrudge them some time alone to deal with it. Besides, she can handle Hook.
When Emma returns to the bedroom, she's gotten her wish: he's asleep. His breathing is regular, his color slightly better, but when she takes his pulse it seems weak. Emma chews her lip, debating. Then, deciding that it'll be easier to do this if he's not awake to sling innuendos at her the whole time, she reaches for the buttons on his leather pants.
Now that the icky chore of sewing him back up is done, it's harder to ignore the fact that he's ridiculously attractive, mostly naked, and in her bed. Attempting a clinical detachment that she doesn't really feel, Emma sets to work. Each button undone reveals another inch or two of his abdomen, and it's immediately clear that he's bare beneath all that leather. She hesitates over the last one.
"Oh, don't stop now, love, you're just getting to the good part," he says, and Emma leaps back from the bed as if burned. He's looking up at her again, his eyes twinkling beneath his dark lashes.
"You were asleep!" It comes out like an accusation.
"I was," he agrees. "Then you touched me. What can I say, Emma? You're a stimulating woman." He gives her a smile that ought to be illegal, if only so that she can arrest him for it.
"I'm about to stimulate something, that's for damned sure," she mutters under her breath.
He laughs softly, clearly unable to help himself. "You have mettle, Swan. Have I mentioned how much I love that?"
"Yeah, well, you just keep on testing it, Hook; see how far it gets you." She crosses her arms and gives him her stoniest glare. "Now, I'm gonna help you get those pants off, and you're gonna keep your mouth shut, or else I get to pick the body part you lose next. Got it?"
Hook just smiles at her, unrepentant, but he shuts his mouth.
Since the buttons on his trousers are undone, she reaches for his pant leg, her gaze no higher than his knees. His pants are practically a second skin, so it takes a bit more effort on both of their parts than she'd like to get him out of them, and the minute he's stripped she throws the sheet over him. There's no way he's got enough strength to get him into anything else. He's sweating now from exertion, his skin clammy when she goes to feel his forehead, and she's certain the dark circles under his eyes are from more than just smudged eyeliner. She tosses a clean blanket over the sheet to make up for the missing quilt.
"You need medicine. Liquids. Antibiotics. And probably a blood transfusion."
"I only need rest," he says, panting a little. "Trust me, I've survived far worse."
She can't help but believe him. He has an amazing amount of endurance; she's never met anyone who could take the beatings he does and then get back up so quickly. Hook is not the kind of man who gives up, on anything, ever. If he wants it, he fights for it with every breath in his body.
She pads over to the window, looking out at the stars and ocean beyond, wishing for something she's unsure how to name.
Beneath her window Storybrooke sleeps peacefully, lights off in almost all of the windows so late at night. Over the harbor, the moon hangs full and bright; Emma spares a thought for Ruby, then looks down at the street below. If Rumplestiltskin is watching her house, he's not being obvious about it.
Emma suddenly frowns as she looks down the sheer side of the building.
"How the hell did you get up here?" she says, turning back around.
"Hmmm?" He's barely awake, now, his voice a sleepy rumble. Something about that, combined with the sight of him naked, in her bed, does funny things to her stomach. Emma slams a lid on the feeling and narrows her eyes.
"You could barely stand when I woke up." She props her hands on her hips and gives him the stare she usually saves for interrogating bail jumpers. "How the hell did you get up here? I know you didn't come in the front door, you'd have had to break it down to get in. But why would you come through the window?"
His mouth quirks into something that might resemble a sleepy smile, if it weren't so self-mocking.
"Oh, there's a bit of the boy in this old pirate, yet. As I said, I never could resist an open window. Time was, that was how I entered all ladies' chambers."
"And escaped from them, too, I'll bet. Pretty sure you didn't waste your strength out of some misplaced sense of nostalgia, though. So, how did you get up here?"
His answering chuckle is dark. "All it took was the happy thought of seeing your face one last time—"
"Do you have to have a line for everything?" Emma throws her hands up in exasperation.
"I was on the bloody rooftops already," he says with a touch of temper, and she realizes that if he'd been sleepy before, he hasn't been since she started asking questions. "Best place in town to spy from, really. That's where the crocodile found me. Your window was open, princess. I needed sanctuary. End of story."
His tone says he's done with this conversation.
Emma turns away again to study the window. The face of the building is rough brick, free of drainpipes or trellises that would make a climb from the ground possible for an uninjured man with two hands. Her window faces onto the street, so he couldn't have jumped across to it. The houses on either side are close, though. And the one to the right has a roof just a few feet below the level of her window. Still, Emma's not entirely sureshe could have made the leap from that roof to her building, let alone her window, and Emma's had to do a couple of rooftop chases in her line of work. Maybe he came across from the other direction, and dropped from her roof to the window?
She'll have to wait until he's stronger to try to pry the truth out of him. Of course, she knows that once he's stronger he'll guard himself even more carefully.
He's a lot like her in that way, even if his walls are built mostly out of innuendo. Emma knows a false front better than anyone else, and sometimes she feels like she can see straight through his facade of smooth-talking charmer to the damaged man underneath. She doesn't know the exact details of what happened between him and Gold and Milah, but he's carried this wound as long as he's carried his hook, and it has festered, untreated, for all that time. Emma knows this because she's carried a hole in her heart for a long time as well. She also knows that her compassion for him is dangerous.
It's why she chained him up on top of a beanstalk, after all.
Emma doesn't know for sure, but she suspects that it's the same reason he left her locked in Rumpelstiltskin's cell.
When she turns back toward the bed, he's propped his head up on the pillows and is watching her quietly, his face neutral. She returns his gaze steadily. He is damaged, she thinks, but not broken. And if that can be true of him, maybe it can be true for her, as well.
She shakes herself, and steps away from the window, closer to the bed. "No sign of Gold. But then, I suppose if he doesn't want to be seen, he won't be. I should ... Do you want anything? Orange juice or something? That's what they give you when you donate blood, I think."
"Will you put rum in it?" he asks, with more of his usual roguishness. He looks almost exactly like Henry when he's trying to weasel something out of her: extra hot chocolate or a later bedtime or another ridiculous mission for Operation Snake-Of-The-Month. And she hasn't been a mother long enough to have built up any kind of defense against that sort of look—something Hook undoubtedly knows.
Emma smiles without quite meaning to. "If you're good and don't move while I get it, sure, what the hell, I'll put some rum in it."
"Then we have an accord," he says with a grin, and even though he's basically naked, missing the hook and battered all to hell, he still somehow manages to look every inch the pirate captain. Emma rolls her eyes.
"You've stopped wearing your necklace," Hook says, suddenly, as she moves toward the door.
"Huh?"
His eyes are dark, his expression neutral again. "The swan necklace. You've stopped wearing it. And you're not quite accustomed to it being gone, are you? You keep reaching for it, which means you wore it for quite some time, but you only do it when you're tempted to trust me."
Emma catches herself before she can touch her chest where the pendant used to lie, and realizes she's been unconsciously rubbing that spot all evening. Hook is watching her, as if waiting for a response.
"I'm gonna go get you some juice," she says, and practically runs down the stairs.
It's at least ten kinds of wrong that he can read her so well, she thinks as she slams open the door to the fridge to get the orange juice. No one sees through her facade as well as he does. No one has ever seen through her facade as well as he does. Not her mother. Not even Neal—although, to be fair, she'd barely had one when she'd first met Neal, and now he can't seem to read her at all. Instead, Neal makes assumptions about her feelings that would piss her off if she actually cared about any of it. Only she doesn't. At least, not where Neal is concerned.
But Hook? Hook pisses her off. He's flirty and far too attractive, not to mention the most perceptive person she's ever met. It's impossible. He'simpossible. She wants to hit him, or chain him up to something, or figure out how to put the pieces of him back together, or just ...
She fishes a bottle of rum out of the liquor cabinet and stares at it gloomily. She just has to get through this night, make sure he survives, and then in the morning she will figure out what to do with him.
Emma is debating exactly how much rum to put in Hook's drink, when there's a loud knock at the door.
Warily, she stares at it. It's after three in the morning, and Mary Margaret wouldn't knock. If something had happened to Henry, Neal would have called, wouldn't he?
Her gun is still upstairs by the bed, so she picks up the rum bottle instead and pads quietly toward the door. When she looks out the peephole, she's not entirely surprised by what she sees: Rumpelstiltskin, looking immaculate as always in one of his shiny, tailored suits, is standing outside her door, both hands on his cane.
He meets her gaze through the peephole and smiles.
Notes: I'm not ashamed to say that I love comments and do a little happy dance every time I get them.