Beta/Edited by PeaceHeather

Chapter 8

In Henry's stories, true love's kiss is the answer to everything. There's that brief moment where the entire universe seems to holds its breath; then a wave of magic pulses out, righting whatever is wrong, filling the hearts of everyone within its radius, and reuniting parted souls. When she'd kissed Henry and woken him, when Snow had kissed Charming, that's what it had felt like. Warm and pure and perfect, as if that single moment was concentrated from a million wishes, dreams, hopes, and promises all come true.

That is not what happens this time.

As Emma presses a kiss to his lips, she feels them change from warm and soft to cold and unyielding. Then, suddenly, it's as if all the light, all the hopes and dreams she's ever held close to her, are being sucked from her soul. Desperate to hold on, unwilling to give up, Emma throws herself into the sensation, following it wherever it may lead. Darkness rises around her, closes in hungrily, and then all she can feel is cold so deep she aches with it in her bones.

The transition is abrupt and brutal; she lands back in her body with a bone-rattling thud that knocks the wind from her. Emma gasps like a fish on dry land, trying to fill her lungs with air.

When she opens her eyes she is not in her bedroom, kissing a pirate turned to gold.

She blinks hard, scrubs at her eyes with her fists until she can only see spots, certain that she's gone blind. After awhile she realizes she's not dying from lack of oxygen, even though whatever she's breathing feels about as natural as inhaling glass. She closes her eyes again and tries to relax, recalling the basics of some crap meditation class she'd tried once on the suggestion of her OB/GYN when she'd been in prison. She focuses on steadying her breathing, then opens her eyes and lets them adjust.

The sight before her, such as it isn't, gives her pause.

She is standing on a dark beach, where the sand is black and the waters are dark and still, and the sky is empty of every star. There is no breeze, no waves; not a single sound breaks the perfect silence that bears down on her ears till they threaten to pop.

Despite the lack of starlight or moonlight, she can see the empty beach stretching for miles in every direction. Nothing moves along that dark, empty shore. Nothing breaks the perfect line of water and sand that stretches as far as she can see to the black horizon.

Emma is reminded of a painting she saw once in a museum during a school field trip. She'd laughed at the absurdity of it: a black square painted on a black canvas, the price tag in the millions of dollars. Now she wonders if the artist hadn't dreamt something that looked like this: black sea, black sand, black sky, and only the inky surface of the water and the empty void of the sky tells her that there is any difference between the three.

Nothing here is warm, or soft; even the sand beneath her boots is hard, and when she touches it to see if it's real, it cuts her fingertips like shards of glass. Emma jerks her hand away from it quickly, not liking the sensation at all; it's frigid and her skin seems to cling to it, like a damp finger pressed against a frosty window pane. The air, or not-air, around her is cold like she's never known before, so cold it cuts through cloth and skin, and when she inhales it flays her throat and ices her blood, making every movement painful and slow.

It is not, suffice to say, what she expected would happen when she kissed him. Not that she'd expected that her kiss would break the curse; after all, Hook's true love had been Milah. But Emma isn't a quitter, she's a fighter, and there is no way she is going to let Gold win without putting up one heck of a fight.

She's never seen a netherworld, and this is about as far from a fiery room full of flaming curtains as it gets, but she'd be willing to bet that's where she is. And somewhere in this vast and empty landscape, Hook is wandering, lost and alone, unaware that somehow Emma has followed him.

"Hook!" Emma's voice sounds oddly flat and thin, as if the nothing around her is swallowing it before it can travel too far. "Jones!" The name leaves her mouth, but then seems to drop to the ground, solid as a pebble. She won't find him that way.

She doesn't belong here. Nothing belongs here, because this is where Nothingdwells—where it is born, and where it goes to die. Emma feels as though she is past the edge of the universe, looking out into whatever void lies beyond the stars, at the absolute end of time and space.

It's depressing as hell.

Emma wraps her arms around herself, and bounces in place a little in a futile attempt to get warm. It takes a moment before she realizes that she's not wearing what she was a moment ago: she's back in her jeans and leather boots, her black tank top and red leather jacket. There is a dagger tucked into her boot that looks a lot like the one she'd stowed there while stuck in the Enchanted Forest. She frowns down at her clothing, unsure why her trip to Nothing Land necessitated a costume change; still, she's glad of the extra layer against the cold. She zips her jacket up tight, and stuffs her hands in the pockets to try to warm them up—only to discover something else that has come along with her. She recognizes the shape of it before she pulls it out her pocket.

It's the thimble.

Carefully she turns it over in her palm. The metal is warm, or at least, less cold than everything else around her. Something niggles at her brain, something she should be remembering ...

Emma slips the thimble onto the tip of the ring finger of her left hand and examines it. It's a common, ordinary thimble, made of cheap metal and slightly dented on one side. What was it Killian had said? I'd have liked to have given you a real one, but...

A real one what?

And then the answer comes to her: a half-remembered quote from a book she'd read many, many times as a child.

"Surely you know what a kiss is?"

"I shall know it when you give it to me."

On the heels of that thought, several things about Killian Jones begin to make an awful lot of sense. Awful in the sense that if what she suspects is true, then his life has been even more tragic than Captain Hook's has any right to be.

How the hell did you get up here?

There's still some boy in this old pirate, yet. I never could resist an open window.

All it took was the happy thought of seeing your face one last time—

Of all the fairytales and fantasy stories she'd ever read as a motherless orphan, Peter Pan was the one that had resonated the most deeply. Discovering that Captain Hook was real had been, in some ways, even more surreal for her than learning her mother was Snow White. He is, in some respects, exactly the way she'd always imagined Hook to be: bloodthirsty, handsome, and never more dangerous than when he's being a gentleman. But Killian Jones is somehow more: he is bravery and cockiness personified. He's ridiculous, boyish, and so lost that she aches for him. And something about him makes him seem as familiar as a long-lost friend.

Emma's heart pounds, and for a moment the cold recedes and all she can feel is a giddy sort of joy bubbling inside of her. She wants to know, needs to see him one more time—

The thimble suddenly glows.

"What the hell?"

A tiny, shimmering, blue-green light rises from the thimble to hover in front of her astonished face; it is slightly larger than a firefly, and Emma can almost swear she hears the faint chiming of tiny bells. The light is unsteady and dim; but Emma thinks if she could reach out and touch it, it would be something warm and small but solid, cupped in the palm of her hand.

She arches an eyebrow instead. "Tinkerbell? Seriously?"

But the light doesn't chime or resolve itself into a pint-size person with wings or anything. It just hovers in front of her, flickering, waiting.

"Can you help me find him?" she asks. She doesn't really expect a response, and none is forthcoming. But the light floats away, down the beach, drifting like a dandelion seed on the wind. If there were a wind. Which there isn't.

Emma tucks her hand back into her pocket and follows.

Her boots make no sound on the sand, not even the gritty crunch of glass she'd expected. Her feet don't sink into it. The water, if that's what it is, looks as flat and hard as a glass tabletop, and she can't help but wonder, if she stepped on it, whether she could walk on it, too.

Or maybe it would swallow her up, like a black hole.

Emma stays away from the water.

Time passes. Or maybe it doesn't. Whatever time sense she normally has is completely screwed up here, and with no landmarks or stars, it's impossible to tell how much distance she covers or how quickly. The only reason she knows she's moving at all is because the line of the water undulates very, very slightly where it meets the sand. The tiny light floats ahead serenely, though after a while she decides not to look at it directly. As the only pinpoint of light in the entire world, it leaves afterimages and phantom spots dancing across the black landscape. So mostly she watches the line of the water, and keeps her little will-o'-the-wisp in her peripheral vision.

Her exposed skin has long since gone numb from the cold, and she can't really feel her fingers or toes. She keeps her hands tucked deep in her pockets and stumps along, wondering if you can get frostbite in a netherworld.

The silence weighs on her. It presses against her eardrums, until she has to clench her fists to keep herself from wiggling a finger in each ear in an attempt to clear them. The void around her smothers all external sound, so that her heartbeat becomes a bass drum, pounding in her head. She swears, after a while, that she can hear the blood rushing through her veins, the stretch and pull of her muscles and ligaments. She can even hear the tiny, annoying pop her left knee makes as it flexes—a little souvenir left from tackling Neal in Manhattan, most likely. Emma grimaces, feeling like the world's most disgusting one-man band.

All she has left to drown out her awareness of herself and keep her company are her thoughts and regrets.

Maybe it's because this is practically hell, but for once it feels okay to admit: she's lonely. Emma has never been the kind of person who liked crowds. She'd learned the lesson early on in life that she was better off solo. There are days in Storybrooke when she feels overwhelmed by how many people surround her, count on her, need her. For the first time in her life, she's part of something bigger than just herself, and sometimes it's exhausting. Being alone usually relaxes her; it's a return to the status quo.

This place is not relaxing.

This is the wish for solitude gone horribly, horribly wrong—like a Twilight Zone episode, but without the entertainment factor.

Emma walks, and walks, and walks some more. She walks until she misses the Enchanted Forest, where everything was only a "bit of a journey" from everything else. She walks until she misses Boston and its tangled web of streets that make about as much sense as a knotted ball of string. The light drifts ahead of her, neither fast nor slow, in a more-or-less straight line that follows the still and silent water.

Oddly, she never tires or gets hungry. It seems like a small mercy in this place, where she doubts that she will find either food or sleep. The prospect of sitting down and resting the ice cubes that her feet have become isn't even tempting. The thought of being in that much contact with the ground, of possibly touching the sharp not-sand with her bare skin, sends a shudder of revulsion through her.

Still, she misses the idea of food and rest. For what seems like hours she attempts to drown out her thoughts by picturing all of her favorite foods and drinks, trying to remember what they taste like. Eventually she starts going through foods in alphabetical order, just to see how far she can get before she finds Hook. She makes it all the way through to zebra snack cakes and zinfandel before she gives up on that tactic.

Hours pass. Possibly days, or weeks; it's difficult for her to tell. She knows she's been walking far longer than should be humanly possible. Her world has become a metronome of placing one foot in front of the other, interspersed with the occasional bout of swearing under her breath.

Emma thinks longingly of home. She almost wishes that Mary Margaret had dived in after her—except that would probably have required her mother kissing Hook, too ... and there was a thought Emma never wanted to have, ever again. It's just that, aside from following the little blue-green light, she has no plan on how to find Hook. Finding bad guys is what Emma is really good at, but it's not like she can trace his credit cards or hack his email here. And when she does find him, she has no idea how they'll get home. She's fairly certain that Rumple had only booked a netherworld vacation for one, and Emma is a stowaway. Whether that will make any kind of difference, when it comes to getting them out of here, she has no clue.

She wonders how much time has passed. Whether Henry will come home tomorrow—or came home yesterday, or last week, or whatever—to find his mother in a coma, her lips glued to a golden half-naked pirate statue in her bed. It's good to know that she'll be able to have left him something really traumatizing to talk to Dr. Hopper about until she gets back, although if Regina finds out she'll probably have Emma's rights revoked on the basis of indecent exposure or ... something. Something horrible, probably; Regina is always so good at finding something horrible to accuse Emma of.

She thinks about Regina, who has now lost her witch of a mother and may be planning her revenge at that very moment. She thinks about her own mother, who is slowly coming back from the scary place Cora's death had sent her to; and her father, who is trying so hard to hold his wife together.

Eventually Emma is forced to think about Neal, only to find that she's already come to a few conclusions: he has a fiancée, he's moved on, he'snever going to apologize so she might as well forget about it, and he's ... really trying with Henry. Which, if she's going to be honest, is the only thing she truly wants from him. She certainly doesn't want another chance with him, as Gold insinuated—probably as an attempt to manipulate her into doing something he wanted. All Emma really wants is for Neal to be there for Henry, to be a good father, to not ditch him the way he ditched her. Henry deserves a family that loves him and supports him, no matter what.

That topic exhausted, and no end to the beach in sight, Emma resigns herself to the last card in her mental Rolodex: Hook.

She had been wrong about Killian Jones, back on top of that beanstalk. Or, she'd been wrong in fearing she might be wrong about him. If she'd done things differently, offered to help him, trusted him ... Hook had told her, in Rumpelstiltskin's cell, that he wouldn't have abandoned her. At the time her instincts had told her that he was speaking the truth. She hadn't wanted to believe it, hadn't wanted to trust. But there are so many choices he's made, things he's said or done, that make her think he isn't entirely the villain he's painted himself as.

He's definitely still dangerous. And definitely obnoxious.

But Emma's found she kind of likes that about him. Maybe a little too much.

Emma has never believed in soul mates. Despite the evidence of her own parents, it seems logistically impossible for there to literally be a perfect match out there for every single person in existence, and even if there were—what are the odds that you will find that person? What if you're born on opposite sides of the planet, or hundreds of years apart? In the world Emma grew up in, there are no happily-ever-afters. Maybe it works differently in fairyland, but in her world, hearts just don't match up like two pieces of the same puzzle.

Still ... there's something about Killian Jones that resonates with her own heart. He sees her more clearly than anyone else ever has; and Emma realizes that she, perhaps, is the first person to see him in a very, very long time. When she looks in his eyes, she can see the pain and loss he tries so hard to hide, and the loneliness that he wears like armor. She recognizes it, because it's the same weight she has carried her entire life. He has gotten Emma to open up more easily than anyone she's ever known, and the temptation to just spill her entire soul into his hand is nearly overwhelming. She's never felt that way about anyone before. It's exhilarating and terrifying.

Sort of like ... flying.

Speaking of—her guiding star seems a little farther ahead, so Emma picks up her pace. She doesn't catch up right away, however, and it's not until she breaks into a jog that she realizes that it's moving faster, as though all this time it's been floating down a stream and now it's met up with a swiftly flowing river.

The cold burns the back of her throat and her lungs until breathing is painful. All she can think, however, is: Wonderful, I'll find him and my nose will be running. She has no idea how long she'll have to maintain this pace—she just hopes that her little fairy-light doesn't get too much more zippy or she won't be able to keep up.

When she first sees him, Emma thinks it's her vision going wonky from the exertion: he's another shadow on top of a shadow in a world full of shadows. At first he looks like just a spot, and then the spot gets bigger and she can see the dull glint of metal, so she speeds up. He's laying facedown, his hook arm outstretched and his head pillowed on the leather sleeve of his right forearm. The toes of his boots are in the water, and Emma is disturbed to note that the water doesn't ripple around them. He doesn't move at all.

Her fairy light chooses this moment to get peppy, and it zooms across the empty beach to wheel dizzily around his prone figure. Finally it stops and hovers, growing brighter and brighter until it looks almost like a tiny blue-green star hanging in the empty sky. Emma bursts into a sprint.

Fifty paces away from him, she sees Hook suddenly roll over onto his back and squint up at the light above him, shielding his eyes from the glare. Relief pours through her, though she doesn't slacken her pace.

By forty paces he's stood up. He's dressed in his full pirate regalia once more: black leather from standing coat collar to pointy-toed boots. His cutlass hangs at his side, and his hook gleams in the light of the little star.

At thirty paces he reaches up and plucks it out of the air, cupping the light in the palm of his hand.

And at twenty paces away, just as she's about to call out to him, Hook balls his hand into a fist and crushes her star into dust.

Notes:

Okay, before anyone freaks: it wasn't REALLY Tinkerbell. We know what fairies look like in OUAT. This was more like the spell that Charming used to find Snow. (And that choice may have been deliberate ... )

Thank you to EVERYONE who has reviewed. I appreciate it. :)

Credit for the two lines of dialogue I blatantly stole from "Peter Pan" to J. M. Barrie.