Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE PRICE
It's a half a day's ride from the port to the castle, back to the place where her daughter's funeral will be held. Failure threatens to consume her, to stop her horse and throw herself from the causeway, but Emma suspects that such a death would not find her reunited with her lover and child, and that's all that keeps her riding forward.
Her parents and son, so cold toward her when she left, are waiting, worried, distraught over the letter Mulan had sent off from the port regarding their departure. Her return, alone with a defeated set to her shoulders is explanation enough, and she breaks down into wracking sobs. They tell her that it's all right, that she tried, and perhaps it simply cannot be done.
The drawbridge shuts with a hollow thunk as the sun slips past the horizon, leaving the feeling of being in a tomb as her family guides her through the cold stone hallways and up the stairs to Charley's room. There's still an I.V. hung from a glass bottle, but the other rudimentary medical equipment has been taken out. Without any nourishment, the small girl looks frail, her skin paper-thin and revealing the veins.
"I'm sorry," Emma weeps, and places a kiss on her daughter's forehead. There is no rainbow light.
"I'm sorry," Emma weeps, and places a kiss on her daughter's forehead. There is no rainbow light, only the rippling of the looking glass...
Killian blinks once at his reflection in the mirror in his ship's quarters then turns back to face the woman who once preened herself in front of it. Milah stands off to the side with his heart in her hand and looking exactly as she did the day she was killed, right down her clothes.
Perhaps not exactly.
The cold and spiteful expression is gone from her face, replaced by the sadness of a tormented soul that has spent centuries in this harsh purgatory while watching the generations of destruction to her own family that began with a single choice in a tavern one night. She is not the woman he fell in love with and he is not the man who fell in love with that woman. But neither are they heroes for having realized the consequences of their selfish actions.
"How long?" he asks.
"Until my granddaughter's last breath."
The way things go in that family, he knows that could end up being more than decades before he's released from this hell and able to find whatever peace comes after, but Killian nods, because he never was a hero, not when everything he did was to win and keep the heart of another.
And, besides, even if it was Charley's snobbish aunt and uncle who dared her to climb that tower, the girl probably would not have fallen if she hadn't spied him shagging that chamber maid...
"Do it."
"It cannot be undone. Not here."
"Do it," Killian repeats, growling this time.
And so his original true love crushes his heart to dust.
There is no pain with the ending of life in the land of the dead, only awareness of the silence and stillness within.
AN: That was some kind of quasi-existentialist weird angsty shit.