Chapter 31

The entire walk home, as she could hear her heart pounding in her ears, see her breath gusting silver in the frigid November night, Emma convinced herself that she had been imagining things. When she'd looked again, squinting through the snow, the pirate ship – if it had been there at all – was gone, and after the bitch of a night she'd had, she certainly wasn't about to crawl down there and go exploring. It could have all kinds of prosaic, boring explanations, though admittedly she was struggling to think of them, but hey, this place was weird. Even without the weird, it was, you know. Historic. Who was to say that they didn't have a two-master just lying around for special occasions, spruce it up and sail it out in the bay every so often? She hadn't seen it before, but that didn't count for a whole lot around here. The most likely explanation was just that her over-stressed brain had momentarily gone on the fritz. It would figure.

Stamping and blowing, she finally reached the brick building on its quiet treed street, a cozy glow filtering through the curtained windows. It was four flights of stairs up to her apartment, where she unlocked the door and stepped in, shivering. Snowflakes were melting in her tangled hair, and she probably looked like the Wicked Witch just after Dorothy had thrown the bucket on her. Fingers clumsy with cold, she unbuttoned her black peacoat and slung it on the hook, visions of hot cocoa with cinnamon dancing in her head. Maybe a dash of Jack, if she was sure that David was asleep. Maybe two.

Mary Margaret, who was sitting on the couch marking arithmetic quizzes for her fifth-graders, glanced up. "How did it go?" she asked anxiously. "Nobody's been in that library for years, and I thought I heard sirens – "

"Yeah. You did." Emma headed for the kitchen. "There were two people imprisoned in the freaking basement of that place. Graham and I got them out and took them to the hospital."

Mary Margaret gawked. "Oh my God, that's. . . that's terrible. You're going to open an investigation, I'm sure?"

"I'd feel better about our chances if Regina wasn't already up our collective asses." Emma balled her hand into a fist and hit the countertop, causing nothing but her knuckles to hurt. "But that would probably be because Regina did it. I'm sure of it. I just need proof, to question them or get a clue or anything that I can use to – "

Mary Margaret looked shocked. "Why on earth would Regina Mills have any reason to lock people underground? She can be prickly, it's true, but I don't think she'd – "

Because she's the Evil Queen. Emma didn't entirely believe it, though it seemed as likely as anything at this point, but she was increasingly convinced that there was something fundamentally wrong with the woman. Since Tamara and Greg were here back when Killian shot Belle in Gold's shop, they already knew all about this place and what it was. She wouldn't want them spilling. Yes, she definitely had to talk to the rescued hostages, assuming they didn't miraculously disappear overnight. She'd asked the nurses at the hospital about a dozen times to call her if anything funny happened, but couldn't be sure of their ability or willingness to carry through if Regina started throwing her weight around. What was more, she didn't have a single real ally. Gold would give her sly tips, but his favors always came at a staggering price. Graham was on her side, but for whatever reason, couldn't defy Regina. Everyone else. . .

"Let's just say it wasn't the body snatchers," Emma said at last, pulling the cocoa tin from the cupboard and stirring several spoonfuls into the warm milk. She rooted in the fridge for the can of aerosol whip, garnished the drink, and shook cinnamon over it, then took a slug. "You gonna head back downstairs to your place? It's late, you probably have to hit the hay. Oh, if you want me to give you something since this was totally last-minute, I can grab the checkbook – "

Mary Margaret shook her head. "No, it's fine. I was actually wondering if you and David want to come over for Thanksgiving. We could cook dinner together, more efficient than either of us doing it for ourselves, and you know. . ." She shrugged shyly. "It would be nice."

Nice. The hot chocolate burned a little too much on its way down, and Emma turned away, trying not to cough up a lung. She had been asking her neighbor to babysit so often that it seemed crass not to accept at least one social engagement in return. And there was no denying that she felt comfortable with Mary Margaret in a way she rarely did. Emma – tough, fierce, independent, bounty-hunting, ass-kicking Emma – wasn't the kind of woman who got asked if she needed help out in grocery stores, or was caught dead at cosmetics counters or mommy blogs, or even felt comfortable casually sharing details about her life. She had fended off countless invitations to join play groups or parents' associations back in Boston, where the other moms compared their designer handbags and complained about their husbands. In fact, until now, she'd barely had any female friends since Wendy.

"I don't know," Emma hedged. "I'm not sure you want to be around David after he's had too much sugar. And we went shopping already and everything, I don't. . ."

"It's all right," Mary Margaret said quickly. "I understand if you don't want to, I just, you know. . . I thought I'd ask, I don't exactly have anyone to cook for either, so. . ." She shrugged, trying to look nonchalant, and Emma thought of seeing her and the elder David, David Nolan, at school the other day. How intimate they'd looked."No pressure, I just. . ."

"Actually," Emma said, making a decision. "Yeah. All right. We'll come over."

"You – you will?" Mary Margaret blinked, then beamed, her delight so evident that Emma felt even worse for having initially turned her down. "That would be great! I'll make a pumpkin pie, I've never really liked apple pie for some reason so I hope you don't mind – "

"No, pumpkin pie is great." Emma managed to smile. "What else would you have, right? And I'll try to keep the kid from trashing your apartment. If the snow doesn't stop, though. . ."

"No problem." Mary Margaret picked up her papers and shuffled them back into her purse. "I should get going, though. See you soon?"

"Yeah, soon."

Emma waved her out, shut the door, and finished her hot chocolate, staring at her blurred reflection in the dark windows. Then she rinsed the cup, threw it in the dishwasher, and padded into the bathroom. She was just emerging, thinking longingly of her warm and waiting bed in its curtained nook, when she heard small footsteps descending the stairs from the loft. "Mom?"

Startled, she turned. It was David, in his Star Wars pajamas. "Hey, buddy. Why are you awake?"

"I had a bad dream." David's lip quivered. "There was an evil witch after me, and then there was a mermaid who wanted to eat me, and she drowned me. It was really scary!"

Emma wondered if it made her a bad mother that her first reaction was relief that it wasn't Henry again. She tousled her son's dark hair. "The only evil witch around here is the mayor, and I promise, no mermaids. You can go down to the harbor tomorrow and look if you don't believe me. Come on, back to bed."

"No!" David clung to her like a barnacle. "I want to sleep with you!"

"Look, I had a really long day, I need to – " Emma rubbed her weary, aching eyes. Yes, definitely failing on the mother front, not taking five goddamn minutes to comfort her kid after a nightmare. She blew out a breath. "Okay."

David pattered after her into the sleeping nook, and they crawled into bed together, pulling the heavy covers up. Snow was still scratching at the windowpane, but he curled up against her and dropped off again almost immediately, his deep, slow breathing and his warm little weight obscurely comforting. She thought of the nights back in Boston, watching movies on the couch together. So rare, those nights. Realizing only now the depths of the damage inside her, that she was honestly terrified of loving her own child too much, that she couldn't stop or control how much she already did. Six years of pretty much just him and her, and she was furiously trying to put the brakes on finding anyone else she could care for like that. Holding herself away. But even if she was an irredeemable fuckup, she was, as she'd confessed to Mary Margaret, terrified of transmitting the same to him. I want to give him the best, but what if the best isn't me?

She fell asleep eventually, and had murky, anxious dreams of her own. They both woke early the next morning, just barely after sunrise, and David appeared to have regained his joie de vivre; he was bouncy as ever as they ate breakfast, especially due to the fact that it was the start of Thanksgiving break. "Mom, can I go out and play? I know you have to go back to the hospital and talk to those people, but I don't want to. Please? Please!"

Emma considered. It was practically a crime against humanity to deny a six-year-old boy the opportunity to romp around in half a foot of freshly fallen snow, and David would be bored out of his skull if she took him to the hospital with her, whining and tapping his feet and making it hard to focus on properly questioning Tamara and Greg. This was presumably the kind of small town where people never locked their doors and looked out for each other's children, but considering how slippery David had been recently, she was having issues with letting him go out alone. Still, it would be extremely lame to wake up Mary Margaret, probably crashed out on the first day of her break from small children, and send her straight back to babysitting one.

"All right," Emma said, "but you can't leave downtown or go anywhere with anyone, all right? I'm serious, kid. If I find out that you've hared off with one more stranger, I'm going to – "

"Ground me until I'm thirty," David finished, with a superior sassiness that really did not befit a child of his age. He grinned. "Maybe just until I'm twenty-five?"

Emma stared at him, laughed despite herself, then gave him the stink-eye just as a reminder. They finished breakfast and bundled up, and he leapt down the stairs so exuberantly that she was afraid that he would break his neck. He didn't, of course, and blasted out into the silent white morning as if fired from a rocket, whooping at the top of his lungs.

"Don't wake up everybody on the block!" Emma shouted after him, aiming guilty glances at all the shut and curtained windows. As she herself had walked home last night, she had the prospect of a chilly slog to the hospital, and tugged her knit beanie more tightly over her blonde curls. Boots crunching in the sidewalk salt, she looked over her shoulder one more time at her son, who clearly thought this day was the best thing that had ever happened in his life, and set off.

Storybrooke General looked as shut down as the rest of the town when she trudged up in the rotunda, icicles dripping from the portico and the ER sign blinking red in the drifting mist. She touched her deputy sheriff badge nervously and headed through the sliding glass doors, checked in, then climbed the stairs to the second floor where they had put Tamara and Greg. She would definitely prefer to handle the first phase of questioning solo. It wasn't that she didn't trust Graham, not exactly – but there were too many times when the mayor had somehow known something that she'd only told the sheriff. When she'd asked him about it, Graham insisted stoutly that he didn't narc to Regina, and her lie detector wanted to believe him, but. . .

As she drew closer, Emma saw someone slumped, asleep, in an uncomfortable Formica chair outside the hospital room. It was, in fact, Graham Humbert himself, gold-brown curls falling in his face in a manner that gave her a queer urge to stroke them away. She hesitated, trying to decide whether to wake him, but he snorted and jerked upright, blinking blearily before spotting her. "Em – I mean, Deputy Swan?"

"What are you doing here?" A wry smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

He blinked. "Well, I. . . well, I just heard you telling the nurses to call you if anything happened, and you wanted them to keep an eye on Tamara and Greg just in case, so I was. . . you know. Taking care of it for you."

"You big dork," Emma said, both exasperated and affectionate. "Are you seriously telling me that you slept in a freaking hospital chair all night because you overheard me talking to the nurses about something?"

"I. . . yes. Why?" Graham sat up and winced. "Well, now that we're both here, we probably want to head in and get started on some answers, huh?"

Emma hesitated. "Don't take this the wrong way, but is there any chance I could handle this myself?"

"What? Why?"

"Do you. . . know these two from anywhere?"

Graham looked furtherly puzzled. "No. Should I?"

Ah. Considering that he himself had been the one to arrest them after the break-in of Gold's shop six and a half years ago, this was just as weird, if not more so, then him failing to remember the time he'd flipped out on her as they were trying to hunt down Killian. Regina's been messing with his memory somehow. Or was it just a side effect of a curse that was supposed to make everyone forget everything? Either way, she didn't want to play tiddlywinks with one of the biggest, if not the biggest, case Storybrooke had ever had.

"Never mind," Emma said. "Go home and change your clothes and get some real sleep. You pulled an all-nighter, I can take it from here. Okay?" Her voice softened as she brushed the dangling curl back over his forehead. "Now go. Shoo. That's the law talking."

"I thought we were both the law," Graham grumbled, but he got to his feet, brushed off his jeans, and made his way, only somewhat unsteadily, for the door. Emma watched to make sure he didn't pull anything cute, then turned back to the hospital room and quietly let herself in.

Tamara and Greg were both asleep. Their beds were set side by side, divided by a curtain, and they were covered in sterile white blankets, hooked to monitors and IVs administering fluids and nutrients and medications and anything else that was needed after spending God knew how long as prisoners underground. Thankfully, they did not look to have been poisoned or turned into toads or anything else untoward, though it was hard to say if this was due to Graham's constant vigilance or not. Emma felt obliquely bad about having to wake them, but she needed answers. She moved toward Tamara, who was closer, and gently shook her.

The other woman stirred, then jumped, looking alarmed, before remembering where she was. She took a deep breath and sank back regally on her pillows, a queen holding court. "Can I help you, Sheriff Swan?"

"Yeah." Emma pulled up a chair and switched on the tape recorder in her pocket. "This is just informal. Don't want to put you under any pressure, but I need to get the ball rolling."

Tamara's eyes flickered. "I'm allowed to have a lawyer present during this, I assume?"

"Of course," Emma said, doing her best to sound soothing. "But last night when we were hauling you out of there, you said you were on my side, and my side wants to do my job and see somebody pay for this. I'm guessing you don't have a whole lot of desire to protect whoever threw you down there?"

Tamara smiled gracefully. "Of course not. I apologize. Unfortunately, I don't know that we'll be a great deal of help. We never saw who took us out of the cell in the station and down to the library basement. They never asked us anything, tried to find out why we'd come or who we were – just took us out in the dead of night and made us disappear."

"Okay," Emma repeated. It wasn't setting off any alarm bells on her lie detector, but it still didn't feel quite right. "Did you smell anything – a perfume, something like that? Do you think it was a man or a woman?"

"I don't know."

"And they really never said anything at all? Look, the last time we. . . met, you talked about a failsafe, a self-destruct trigger. I have sympathy for what's happened to you, believe me, but it sounded like you weren't just coming up here for the pleasant coastal New England ambiance."

"Of course we weren't," Tamara scoffed – quite surprising Emma, who had expected her to insist the contrary. She rolled her head at Greg, who was still asleep. "I'm helping the man I love avenge someone he loved very much. Does the name Kurt Flynn mean anything to you?"

Startled, Emma shook her head. "No."

"That's his father," Tamara said, indicating Greg again. "Or I should say, was his father. When Greg was a boy, just after his mother died, his father took him camping up here in the Maine woods. Trying to take his mind off it. They stumbled into this place. Into Storybrooke. Only one of them came out. Kurt Flynn has never been seen again. Greg has spent his life trying to find this town, and take revenge on the woman who stole his father." Tamara's dark eyes held Emma's, unblinking. "Regina."

Something like an electric current rocketed down Emma's spine. I'm helping the man I love avenge someone he loved very much. She couldn't help but think of Killian, his centuries-long hunt for vengeance for his Milah, her disbelief that one man could love that fiercely and that long, crashing headlong through every obstacle that common sense and utter impossibility could throw in the way. But here was a live wire, a very live wire in her quest to uncover Regina's schemes, and thus, she had to handle it with excruciating caution. "Then I'm pretty sure that we have a lot in common. If Regina was the one who kidnapped Greg's dad, if you rolled into town and found out what kind of operation she was running here, she'd have a lot of incentive to make sure you disappeared forever, right?"

"I suppose," Tamara allowed. "But – "

"In the car on the way up here last time, you talked as if there were more people involved in this. An organization. H.O. What's that stand for?"

Faint surprise showed in the other woman's face. "You are sharp."

"I thought you and your friends were going to kill me," Emma said evenly. "You can understand if I was on red alert."

Tamara had the decency to look abashed. "We do regret that, as I said. We didn't really want to hurt you. But you had to be with us in order that we could find Storybrooke again. This place, this curse – it's all mixed up with you, don't you see? It's invisible to the outside world, impermeable. . . unless the savior is the one crossing through."

It wasn't an electric current this time. It was a bolt of motherfucking lightning. "What did you just say?"

"The savior," Tamara repeated. "We had access to a lot of research on the subject, and it made it quite clear. It's you who has to end this. Make no mistake, Greg and I want you to do it. We want to see Regina brought down, all her ugly little skeletons toppling out of the closet."

"But – " Emma's head was starting to spin sickeningly. "I've – I've heard something like this before, but – how? How do I break the fucking thing?"

Tamara hesitated. "Not sure."

"That's helpful." Emma clenched her fist around the tape recorder in her pocket, trying to wrestle herself back under control. She heard herself asking Wendy Darling the same question in desperation, back in London right after Killian had disappeared, and Wendy's similar inability to give her an answer. I imagine that's why it's a terrible curse. It loomed up in front of her, huge and impassable, even as she remembered what Gold had said about it. But the curse is what's keeping Henry from finding you – from finding anyone in this town – and naturally, he does want to. I am none so sure, however, that you should let him. If I know anything about Neverland, and the sort of creatures who exist there, it's opening the door to a darkness that could destroy us all.

The solution according to Gold, of course, was to team up with him, find a way to Neverland, deal with Henry and then break the curse. It was terrible, but it was protecting them from being found by even worse things. . . yet it would bring down Regina, it would make Emma remember herself, give her back her family. . . at the cost of what? I don't want to kill Henry. I don't want to hurt him. Her first son, the shadowy ghost haunting her dreams and David's alike. Pan. What kind of power does he have? Who is he?

Emma opened her mouth. To say what, she had no idea. Just then, however, there was a short, urgent rap on the door.

She turned. "Yes? Come in."

The door swung open, and a harried nurse stuck her head in. "Sheriff Swan? I'm so sorry to interrupt, but your son is downstairs in reception, looking for you. He's quite insistent."

"David?" Emma was surprised – and considerably unsettled. Her independent, adventurous, fearless kid, having been granted license to run around all by himself, wouldn't come looking for her here unless it was serious. She jumped to her feet. "Thanks, Ms. – "

"Green," Tamara said politely.

"Ms. Green. You've been very helpful. I have to go." Emma switched off the tape and hurried after the nurse, out of the room and down the stairs to the front desk. Sure enough, David was hopping up and down in agitation, craning his head in every direction in search of her.

"David? Sweetie!" Emma ran to him. "Are you hurt? What's going on? What's wrong?"

"I – I was at Mr. Gold's shop." He bit his lip. "There's someone there. A man, I don't know who. I've never seen him before. I went in, and he gave me a really funny look and asked who my dad was and I told him, and then I was going to leave, and I looked back, and they were. . ."

Emma's stomach suddenly felt as if it had been sucked out of her back. Time to yell at him for visiting Gold later. She licked her dry lips. "Were what?"

"About to fight." David looked upset. "With swords. I think you need to stop them."

It felt as if the ground was falling out from under her, as if she was being hurled into an utter, endless abyss. It's not, it's not, pleaded one part of her brain, and another screamed, It is, it is. She had no idea how she was presenting such a composed exterior, when everything was crashing like a shipwreck on the inside, as she smiled and said, "Stay here, okay? I'll be right back," and touched the gun in her jacket, and burst out into the snowy streets, and began to run.

All Captain Hook saw as the door crashed open was a blur, sprinting to fling itself between him and his mortal enemy, as if utterly unaware how much grief, guilt, revenge, and rage thickened the air like a bomb about to blow. Saw it – her – pull a gun and look very much as if she knew how to use it, spin to face him, and –

Dear. God.

Their eyes locked for a mad, eternal moment, staring into each other's faces as if they'd both been trapped in Medusa's gaze and turned to stone. Her hair fell in snow-sparkling tangles to her shoulders, pale as winter, gold as an angel, so cold and sculpted and beautiful that it made every sinew of his body ache with the desire to snatch her up in his arms and never let her go, to kiss her until neither of them could breathe, to break, to fall, to drown –

Emma Swan was thinking no such thing. Her lips parted briefly as if about to say something, and then she punched him hard enough to make him see stars. He reeled backwards, and she lunged after him, throwing him flat and slamming her boot down on his wrist, wrenching his sword out of his hand and kicking it into the corner. Her voice was a ragged, breathless hiss as she cocked her gun and trained it dead between his eyes. "Don't you move a fucking muscle."

"Well done, Miss Swan," the crocodile commented gleefully. "To be honest, I wasn't sure that you had it in – "

Emma whirled on him. "You don't get to say anything either. Are you out of your mind?"

"I had nothing to do with it. I was minding my own business, perfectly aboveboard, when our reprobate friend here came storming in with blood and brimstone on his tiny mind. Otherwise, I never would have – "

"Shut up. I know what's between you two. Don't you try to play innocent." Emma looked more furious than Killian ever remembered; even as she had him on his back, holding him at gunpoint, his heart was pounding with the desperate disbelief and euphoria of seeing her, of breathing in her scent, of seeing her like something out of a dream after years – how many? How old was David, oh God, David, six? Seven? – of being apart. "If you would just give it up before you – "

"It's on my to-don't list." Gold flashed a sleek, vulpine grin.

Emma shot him a look of poorly disguised loathing. Then she pulled a pair of handcuffs from her belt, planted a knee on Killian's chest, and set to work. It was only then that she noticed the absence of his left hand and what featured in its place, and her lips parted again in shock. But as before, she was hard as steel, silent as death, and just as utterly undeterred. She unclicked the hook and shoved it into her pocket, then cuffed his wrist and stump together, hauling him to his feet. Without another word, she marched him out of the pawn shop, into the snowy street.

Killian twisted, trying desperately to look at her. "Lass – Emma – Emma – "

She completely ignored him, fishing out a phone with a gloved hand and thumbing in a number. She held it to her ear, still jamming the gun into the small of his back, and waited as it rang. Then she said, "Graham. I'm really sorry, I know I just sent you home to sleep, but I need you to bring the squad car down to Gold's right now. No, it's not about them. Yes, it's extremely urgent. Great. It's under control. Thanks." With that, she hung up.

"Emma." Killian's voice split the cold air like a shot. "Emma, look at me. Look at me. I – I know this isn't what you expected – it wasn't what I expected either, Christ, I didn't – "

"Didn't know that I was going to be here?" she snapped, reading his mind with uncanny accuracy. She wheeled on him at last, lethal as a deck gun, her face bloodless except for her feverish green eyes and the spots of high color scalding her cheeks. "You fucking vanish off the face of the earth for almost seven years, and then turn up here, trying again to kill Gold and dressed up like some – like some – " She seemed unable to find the words. "Pirate?"

"I – " All of his carefully crafted, eloquent speeches, where he'd explain everything and beg her to forgive him, were withering like a rose in frost. "Emma – I – lass, bloody look at me, I swear, it wasn't that I meant it, he threatened – "

"You haven't changed at all," she hissed. "You're exactly who you always were – that loose cannon, still out for himself and no one else, who wants to kill Gold and to hell with the consequences for anyone. I don't know where you've been, I don't know how you found your way to Storybrooke, but I want you to Get. Out. Now."

If she had taken his heart in her fist and squeezed, it could not have been worse. He stared at her, hearing Gold's words echo like a sentence of damnation. As for the reason he thinks his father's name is Colin. . . well, that was his mother's doing. Lying to him for his own good. She doesn't want anything to do with you, and who can blame her? He had thought the crocodile was just trying to hurt him, had opened a window into his soul and extracted his deepest dreams and darkest fears, but it felt as it had when he saw David for the first time, when he tried to breathe and nothing happened. She had never been so heart-stoppingly beautiful, and so heart-shatteringly barred away. He could see her walls engulfing her like a cage of ice and iron, nearly tangible enough to touch. He had nothing to say. He couldn't. Nothing but a name.

"David," he whispered. "Our son."

She went as still as if he'd hit her. The silence was ghastly. Then, moving her lips the barest bit that was humanely possible, she breathed, "How dare you."

"I saw him!" Killian couldn't help himself. "If I'd – I never – "

"No." Emma jerked away. "He's my son. I was the one who lost my job when I came home from London pregnant with him. I was the one who had to catch on as the hospital janitor and work six nights a week at minimum wage until he was born. I was the one who went through eleven hours of labor with only one nurse who even held my hand. I was the one who struggled to keep a roof over our heads and any food on the table at all, the winters where I couldn't even afford to pay our heating bill regularly, the only thing I have in this world – raising him and working my ass off and being completely convinced that I'm a horrible mother and scarring him for life. You don't get to talk to me about him."

"Emma – God's sake – he's my son too, my son, do you think that means nothing to me, as if I can just walk away from him, from you – Gold threatened him, he said – "

"I don't care what Gold said!" Emma screamed. "I didn't need to, you know. I didn't need to have your baby, or even keep him. But I did. Even knowing what was likely to happen, everything that did happen – " He thought she was going to cry, but Emma Swan did not cry. Her face was a mask, tearless. "For you. I did it because of you. Because I was stupid enough to think that we'd find each other again someday, and you might have changed. Do you think I'd have done that for any random guy who just so happened to knock me up? It might have been naïve, but I was naïve, I was twenty-two and pregnant and alone and broke and fucking – heartbroken. And now you come back and you're exactly the fucking same. You sicken me."

"Do I look remotely the same? Do you think that, lass? Really? You're smart, you can see it. Every moment since we left each other – I have been fighting like bloody hellfire to get back to you, passing through places and people I never wanted to see again, losing this – " He brandished his stump, as best he could with the cuffs, in her face. "And I don't care! I'd give the other one, I would give everything, if it brought me back to – "

Emma's lips curved in a mirthless smirk. She glanced up the street as if in search of Graham, but no police car could yet be discerned. "Really," she whispered. "That's very nice. And yet your first priority, when you finally made it here, wasn't to come find me or see who you might be hurting or any of it. It was revenge. The same as ever. Fine. That's your choice. But don't you dare have the gall to stand there and lie to my face about it."

Killian struggled for words, but nothing came. He was caught dead to rights, with no excuse or explanation or justification possible. "I don't deny it," he said at last, hoarsely. "There's nothing I can possibly say or do to make it right. For so long. . . Emma, this is me, this is me as much as the man you knew, and I. . . I'm the worst human alive. I'm not proud of this or anything. Just please. . . please. . . you don't have to have anything to do with me again, you don't have to even look at me, but my son, please, my son. . ."

"You've known you're a father for fifteen minutes and now you want to fight me for custody?" Emma's voice rose on a barking, glass-breaking laugh. "Like any court in their right mind is going to look at you and think you make a fit – "

"I don't!" He fell to his knees in front of her, begging, pleading, as he hadn't since the day Baelfire had found the drawing of Milah and confronted him. "I don't deserve it! But David, please, just let me see him, even just once, please, please, please – !"

Emma flinched away from the naked, ragged agony in his voice. She breathed hard and fast through her nose, not looking at him, her entire body strung too tight to hold, the center coming undone. "You son of a bitch," she whispered at last. "You son of a bitch."

"Destroy me, Emma." He stared up at her. "If that's what you want. Do it."

She flinched again. He saw her hands curl into fists, whether with the effort of not touching him or not killing him he couldn't be sure – although it was almost certainly the latter. Then she spun away, and, following her gaze, he saw the Storybrooke sheriff's cruiser plowing down the street toward them. Then it jerked to a halt, and none other than Graham Humbert himself leapt out. "Emma! I came as fast as I could! Is everything – who the hell – "

Mastering herself, but with a look of such searing despair that Killian felt it like a punch, Emma stepped away. "He broke into Gold's shop and tried to kill him," she said, clipped and curt. "You'd better take him to jail. Make sure you lock him up well. He's a con and an escape artist."

"Right." Graham marched forward, seized Killian, and steered him toward the car, seemingly surprised by his lack of resistance. "Just between us, that was a really stupid idea, mate."

I'm not your bloody mate. He wanted to snarl it, wanted to scream, wanted to break loose and run to Emma, who stood behind them, face dead white, lips set. It was tearing him in half to be pulled away from her, from anything he had imagined to come back to – did he seriously fancy that he'd return from the dead after over half a decade and she'd shower him with grateful kisses and pledges of true love? Did he seriously imagine that he deserved it? All he could see was a dark tunnel, closing down on him, strangling him. Hook. Hook. Hook.

Graham forcibly immured him in the back seat of the cruiser and slammed the door. Killian leaned his head against the leather, feeling very much as if he was about to be sick. Our vengeance will be written in your blood, in the blood of your children. Aye, try telling Emma about that, about everything. About the broken promises, the shattered dreams. Hook. Hook. Hook.

Graham got behind the wheel and pulled out. Killian looked back. Saw Emma still standing there in the middle of the street, motionless, watching them go. A lost girl. Lost forever. Watched her until she grew small and smaller, and then vanished entirely in the falling snow.