"Oh yeah," Emma muses to herself, a thought occurring to her, "I always forget Hook isn't your real name."
"You forget who we are, Captain," Regina spits hotly, gesturing between her and Gold. The sun sinks behind them, flooding the deck with amber light, as somewhere overhead, a bird sings an evening song.
"And you forget your place, majesty," Hook snarls back. "This is my ship, and I'm telling you, we're anchored for the evening." Regina opens her mouth with a retort, which Hook swiftly cuts off, glancing around at the whole group of them. "Whatever place you think Neverland is, it is not. With the sun that low, if we ventured out onto land now we'd never return."
"But we have magic," Regina says, though she's lost a little of her steam.
"And so do our foes," Hook replies narrowly. "Our best shot at finding Henry is to wait until sunrise. Plainly, love, we're lucky to have come through where we did. Cannibal Cove is the second safest, if not arguably the safest, place for us."
Emma snorts, as if he's joking, before realizing he's not. "Come on. Cannibal Cove?" She asks, exchanging glances with her mother. "You're not serious."
"Deadly," Hook says, his eyes burning into hers. He sighs, turning away. "It's also the quietest."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Regina inserts, crossing her arms.
"You'll soon find out," is Hook's reply as he crosses the deck to lower the anchor.
Emma sits up, rubbing her temples. She's been tossing and turning for hours, waiting for the crying to stop. Not hers, of course, but the ghostly wails of children echoing over the sea, even resonating down below deck, beating against the hull of the ship like dulled waves.
They all figured out pretty quickly what Hook meant by this being the quietest place, and she doesn't want to think about what the other parts of the island must sound like.
Across the cabin, her mother rustles, having heard Emma move. She flips over, her eyes wide and gleaming with withheld tears. David's arm is draped over her waist. "Where are you going?" She whispers.
"I need air," Emma sighs. She didn't expect to be able to sleep, anyway, not with the flashes of sickly green magic, Neal's hand slipping from hers, Henry in the clutches of Tamara and Greg, all haunting her thoughts every time she shut her eyes.
She escapes to top deck, rubbing her hands over her arms for warmth. It's a cool night, certainly warmer than Storybrooke, which now seems so far away that she can't fathom that she woke there that morning.
A dark figure stands at the railing, the wind breezily whisking his coattails around his calves. She hesitates for a moment before marching forward to join him. Save for a quiet intake of breath, he doesn't acknowledge her presence.
"Can't sleep either?" She starts.
After a pause, he inclines his head towards her. His hair is tussled in the kind of way that only comes from running ones' hand through it often, and his smirk isn't even trying to reach his eyes, but it does tell her he has no intention of answering her question.
Emma focuses her gaze out onto the misty island beyond them, the echoing cries of children drifting back into her conscious. "Does it ever stop?" She asks.
Though she doesn't elaborate, he knows to which she's referring. He glances up at the moon, his brow furrowed. "Give it an hour," Hook says eventually, his voice unreadable.
She suddenly feels awkward, wondering if this was a bad idea. Captain Broody doesn't seem to happy to see her. Maybe if she tries changing tactics. "So. Cannibal Cove, huh?" She asks lightly, to which he snorts audibly. "How'd it get that name if it's apparently so safe?"
"Liked the sound of it, s'pose," comes his eventual reply.
It takes a moment for his implication to set in. "You named it?"
Hook turns to her again, eyes sparked. "That I did, lass. Long ago, believe it or not, I once had a fair amount of…influence in Neverland."
She doesn't know what to make of that, so she lets the silence fill the space between them. It's a comfortable quiet, anyway, like it usually is with him. "I also tried dubbing Mermaid Lagoon 'Lermaid Magoon' as well, but strangely enough, the name quite didn't stick," he adds as an afterthought, soundly oddly nostalgic underneath his teasing tone.
Emma raises an eyebrow, stifling a laugh. The humor seems out of character for the pirate—that's the kind of joke Henry would make. But before she can comment, Hook's voice breaks through her thoughts.
"Names are a powerful magic, Emma," he says lowly.
She wants to write him off, or roll her eyes at how dramatic he is, but his gaze is intense, bluer than the sea beyond them, boring into her skin, making her shiver. He's right, of course.
She'd come into this world with nothing but a baby blanket and a name, and it was the fact that she had the latter that gave her hope as a child. She'd thought that If someone had gone through the trouble of embroidering her name, she must've been cared for, at least at some point, and maybe she could be again.
When that hope faded, when she'd left the system, she'd chosen her own last name. She'd be her own damn family, and she'd fly free doing it.
"I assume Swan is not your given name, after all?" Emma frowns at him, wondering how it is he can read her thoughts so easily. He raises an eyebrow before tucking himself back over the railing, turning his gaze off onto the island. "We may not always choose our names, but we do choose the way we let them shape us."
Emma pauses, letting his words sink in. Every time she thinks she has him pegged, he does or says something so surprising that she remembers she barely knows him. She understands him, sure, but that doesn't mean he doesn't defy her expectations time after time.
"Oh yeah," Emma muses to herself, a thought occurring to her, "I always forget Hook isn't your real name."
"Don't," he says immediately, his voice strained. He turns to look at her, his eyes empty and wrinkled with age. "Please, Emma, if there's only one thing you ever do for me, let it be remembering my name."
She does remember it, the memory as clear as the moment he said it. He inhales sharply as she scans his face, her eyebrows raised. He wants her to say it, to say it now, but her throat has gone dry. Killian, she thinks, trying to will the words forward. Killian.
The moment for her to speak passes, and his eyes flutter with disappointment, giving her a small, sad smile.
"Just don't forget. Because I have, and I will again without…" He trails off, closing his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, they're soft, even vulnerable. Emma lets out the breath she didn't know she'd been holding as her heart slams against her chest. "You are my reminder, after all."