#sheriff!emma

He knows her name.  

He knows her name .  

Emma can’t move.

She can no longer feel Killian’s arms around her, can no longer feel the warmth between them.  She is paralyzed, petrified, frozen.

Far far away she can feel Killian’s lips next to her ear, just a breath, IAmHere .

Emma’s brain goes numb.  It’s impossible.  She’s not even here.  She’ll wake up, and when she does she will be in her bedroom, turning over to hit snooze, because none of this is real.

The boy laughs.  It’s a terrible sound.  Then he lifts his hand with a look of extreme concentration in his eyes, and Emma can feel her entire body start to tingle as if a low current was running through it.  It feels like thousands of ants running under her skin, tickling and stinging and almost painful, and Killian’s arms wrap around her more tightly, as if he can feel it, too.

And then it cuts out all at once, and the boy lowers his hand.

“Ahhhh,” he says, an exhale of profound satisfaction.  “Now that is what I’m looking for.  Your magic is---”  He cocks his head and smiles, a terrifying, cartoonish grimace.  “ Compatible .”  It sounds like he’s tasting something delicious.

He licks his lips.  Emma can’t look away.  

He leans forward, his voice an intimate whisper.  “And I will suck you dry of every last bit of it.  Every last shred of magic I will suck from your marrow, so I really hope you’ll do better than the last one.  As a matter of fact, let’s start with an incentive.”

  And he flicks his hand.

Lightning strikes like the crack of a whip, rips Killian’s arms from around her, throws him backwards, 

sheer momentum towards the edge of the roof, and he stumbles

and he stumbles

tries to hold on to the edge, but his fingers miss,

she can see it

she can see him

and then he

falls

  And all Emma can hear is herself.

Screaming.

-/-

“What.  Just happened.”

August’s voice is pure steel and when he looks at David his eyes are just as hard.  David nearly flinches.  And then he realizes, fuck .  He’s in charge here.  He is the deputy.  A deputy who just watched his sheriff, his sheriff and a Boston detective disappear into thin air, and fuck .

FUCK .

He is in no way equipped to deal with this.

But he is in charge, and it’s time to cowboy the fuck up.

Now.

  “Ash,” Elsa’s voice is thin, bordering on hysterical.  “Check for ash, check where they were standing, please---”  

She falls silent, drops to the floor and lets her hands roam the dirty station linoleum, wiping the floor with her fingers, almost manic, as she repeats, “Please, please, please----”

“Hey,” August says gently and kneels down beside her.  “Elsa, stop.  Stop.”  He very carefully takes her wrists, doesn’t let go when she tries to pull them away.  “Elsa.”  He says again.  “There is no ash.”

He holds up her wrists, so that Elsa can see grime and dirt on her fingers, but no cinders of any kind, and whispers, “This is not like Liam.”

And Elsa leans forward and presses her hands to her eyes.

  For a long moment they all listen to Elsa’s labored breathing, and then she frees herself from August’s embrace and looks up.

“A spell,” she says.  Her voice is unsteady.  “It was a spell.  Killian accidentally read it out loud.”

David can see Ashley shake her head and mumble, That’sImpossible , can see Mary Margaret, her mouth a perfect, round O , can see Elsa, tear tracks on her cheeks and the doctor going WhatTheFuck , and then comes right back to the flint in August’s eyes.

“Where could they be?”  Elsa sounds even more unsure now, and Ashley says, “Did those two just vanish? ”

And then, like a dam breaking, everyone starts to talk all at once.

It’s a wall of sound and noise, absolute bedlam, until David can no longer hear himself think and he yells out loud, “EVERYBODY SHUT UP.  NOW! ”

And the room falls quiet.

  August smiles and nods at him and it gives David courage.  Not much.  But enough.

“OK,” he says, going to the locker by the door and opening it.  In it is a bank of fully-charged walkie talkies.  “We don’t know what just happened.”

He looks at August.  August nods again.

“But we saw Emma and Killian fucking disappear and they have to be somewhere .”

Elsa nods.

Ashley nods.

He can’t see Mary Margaret’s face, because she’s wandered over to the triskelion map.

“Now - in case they are in the vicinity of this town, let’s look.  OK?”

This time everyone nods. David starts to hand out walkies.  

“Everybody switch to channel two.  You guys take everything north of Main Street,” he points at Victor and August.  “Ashley, you and Elsa take everything south.  Mary Margaret and I will---”

“Check the woods,” she cuts him off.  “Look.”  She points to the map.  “I didn’t realize it before, but here’s the cabin.  The cabin where Leroy stayed before he disappeared.  Where you found the first set of notecards.”

And then she puts a pin at the center of Graham’s triskelion.

-/-

There is a moment.

A moment of pure peace and tranquility and the knowledge that his life is complete.  Because he has loved.

It strikes him then, like the hammer to a bell, that this is what his life comes down to.  The fact that he has loved.  That he loves .  Within the presence of pain and the absence of reason, the paths taken and missed and abandoned, the faces he can no longer remember and the ones he can never forget, he has loved.  He has been loved.

The warmth inside him explodes, wraps around him like a cocoon of pure happiness and an armor of strength as he stumbles, backwards, with force,

through no will of his own

pulled 

pushed 

and then----

  It’s all right, Emma.

I love you.

  He hears a scream, hears something tear behind him, hears a whoosh and a crack and then 

he’s 

falling

-/-

“Do you hear that?”

Mary Margaret holds up a hand and David stops in his tracks to listen.  

“I don’t hear anything,” he says.

“Exactly.”  Mary Margaret’s brow furrows.  “This isn’t quiet.  November woods are quiet, obviously.  There is much less animal activity in winter, but this is not quiet.”  She looks at him.  “This is silence .”

David tilts his head and tries to pay attention and realizes that Mary Margaret is right.  There is no wind nor rain, no creaking of branches nor cracking of underbrush, and no trace of the thunder and the lightning they heard back at the station.  Listening to his surroundings is like falling into a well; an oppressive, muzzled, claustrophobic absence of sound.  

Mary Margaret takes his hand.  Squeezes it like she’s holding on to him and he squeezes back just as hard.  There is something out here, something unnatural and sinister, keeping the very air around them in a choke-hold, waiting for--- 

Whatever it is, it is not good.  He knows that much for sure.

  “Let’s get to the cabin.”  All David can manage is a whisper.

It looks like all Mary Margaret can manage in return is a nod.

Then she lets go of his hand and turns to lead them away from the toll bridge, away from the river, and into the woods.  David loses his bearings in less than a minute.  The surrounding trees block out any view of the sky, not that it would have been of any help; it’s cloudy and the light is diffuse, coming from everywhere and nowhere.  There are no shadows.  It’s impossible to tell the direction of anything.  

And then there is the silence which is just getting worse.

He can hardly hear Mary Margaret’s movements, and she’s only a few feet ahead of him.

Can hardly hear his own breathing, his own footsteps; even the fabric swish of his clothes is muted, off, distant.  It feels like his body doesn’t belong to him.

  “Hey,” he tries to say, but it comes out garbled, a sound without meaning, and he feels a spike of panic.  Mary Margaret is speeding up, walking faster though terrain familiar to her, but not to him, and he is falling behind.  Trees have already obscured her twice.

“Wait,” he tries again, but again there is no word, there is just muddled frequency, like the mumbling of adults in children’s cartoons.  In front of him Mary Margaret is not slowing down, he can see the sleeve of her red jacket loping slightly left and he tries to catch up, but he can’t, not quite.

Panic spikes harder and then he lunges, takes two running steps, three, and then launches himself forward, catches the hem of Mary Margaret’s anorak, just barely, but he can feel fabric, closes his fist around nylon and gore tex and they both go down hard.

  “David!”  Her eyes are large and worried, and her body feels very small underneath his.

Her exclamation gets swallowed by the air around them.  There is no resonance at all.  No reverb, no echo, the sound does not carry. He is inches from her face and almost doesn’t hear her.

She stares at him, fear creeping into her features, as he tries to catch his breath.

“I’m so sorry,” he says.  He can hardly hear the words inside his own head.  Then he leans down to whisper directly into her ear.  “Something is out here.”

He feels more than sees her shake her head.  

“No.”  She has put her own mouth to his ear in turn, and he feels her warm breath tickle.  It’s such a small, mundane thing, but it’s comforting.  

She takes a deep breath, and then adds, “This is not the presence of something.  It is the absence of something.”

-/-

“Will you stop that ,” says the boy standing before her, and snaps his fingers.  Emma’s scream is cut off like a clipped string, and she gasps.

“Don’t worry,” he goes on.  “He’s not smeared across your pavement.”  The boy smiles.  It’s vicious.  “Yet.”

He licks his lips, grins at her.  His features, his limbs, his body give the illusion of a male not yet in his twenties, but the square of his shoulders, the arrogant ease of his bearing, the twist of his cruel mouth all beg to differ.  In his movement is power, in his posture command, and his eyes--- his eyes are ancient.

This is not a boy.

This may not even be a human being.

  He points up at the tear, blacker than black down the sides of the iridescent bubble, and says, “No, Emma Swan.  Your boy is somewhere else entirely.”  

Emma feels cold, colder than she ever has, feels the absence of Killian like a physical thing, like a soul-sucking, bone-chilling vortex of despair, and she can’t move a muscle.

Killian fell, fell like he did in every single vision, and she couldn’t stop it, should have stopped it, and what does he mean, somewhere else entirely ?

How on earth does he know her name?

  He cocks his head as realization hits Emma and smiles his vicious smile again.  There is an odd, childlike glee about him, which supports the impression of boyishness while it emphasizes how very much he is not one.  It’s completely unnerving.

“What do you say we dispense with the pleasantries,” he adds with a casual wave of his hand, “and get down to business?”

And Emma finds herself nodding.  

“Good,” he says.  “Then let me introduce myself.”  His smile becomes genuinely gracious for a brief moment as he takes a mocking bow.  “My name is Peter.  Peter Pan.” 

Everything inside Emma constrics as if squeezed by a gigantic vise.  Her heart actually skips a beat, and then stutters as it starts to beat twice as fast as before.

“Ahhhhh.”  Pan raises a mocking eyebrow.  “I see you’ve heard of me.”

  Yes.  Well.  Emma has read the book.

Years ago in the back of a decrepit library, hiding from the psychological warfare battleground that is every middle school cafeteria, she read a book about a boy who did not want to grow up.  To have this ‘boy‘ now standing before her, cruel and dirty, with his depraved smile and his eyes older than time and imbued with magic strong enough to tear the fucking fabric of reality , it’s simply too much.

Emma laughs out loud.

It’s thin and forced and lodged firmly south of hysteria, but it’s hers, and it’s sound, sound she’s making of her own free will, and it breaks the trance.

  Something inside her rises, a steel core of pure will, because Killian is not out there on the pavement, he is somewhere else entirely , which means he is not dead, and she is not alone, and she is not losing him, not losing anyone to this figment of a story that should never have been told.  

Because we all must grow up, sooner or later.  Growing up is the point.

  “I have heard of you, boy ,” she says, and hardly recognizes her own voice.  Pan’s eyes narrow, but before he can open his mouth she adds, “And you already know who I am.  So let’s do dispense with the pleasantries.  Why are you here?”

-/-

It is dark.  Darker than night.

He can just make out the tops of tall trees all around, a dark slope of hillside, and the rushing of fast water.

He is on the toll bridge. 

Except that it’s not the toll bridge.  This is not Storybrooke forest.  It’s an echo of Storybrooke, a shadow version of it, devoid of light and life.

Killian shudders.  It’s cold.  He feels the absence of warmth, of Emma, of--- any living creature.  The only reason he can see anything at all in this starless, moonless darkness, is because of a soft glow that comes from the railing of the bridge.  He steps closer, and sees light, weak and faint, but there, emanating from the bottom of the bannister.

He crouches, remembers a different toll bridge a lifetime ago where he also crouched, where he reached for a wrist of warm skin and a pulse beating in time with his own.

Even if he didn’t know it then.

  And then he leans back and looks up.

And there they are.

Runes, along the length of the railing, underneath the bannister, just like the ones up in Storybrooke, on the real toll bridge.

Ogham script runes.

Glowing.

-/-

“It’s really quite simple.”  Pan leans forward.  “And I’ve already told you.  Not that I owe you any kind of explanation.”  He quirks a vain eyebrow.  “Neverland is running out of magic.  The wellspring is running dry.”  He licks his lips.  “Your magic will replenish it.”

  The wellspring is running dry.  Emma can see Killian sitting at David’s desk, notecards in front of him, speaking about water eternal .

Neverland is real.

  Her insides coil like a spring of a different kind.  “Why not just take me then?  Why kill all those people?”

Pan rolls his eyes.  “Do you think I can just waltz into the Land without Magic any time I damn well please?”  

“The Land without--- what do you mean?”

“Oh, you’re such a human, ” Pan scoffs.  “You guys always think you’re the only game in town.”

Emma’s head is spinning, and she cannot stop thinking about Killian, and there is no spark.

“This is not like sending my shadow to snatch little kids from the comfort of their beds.”  Pan’s eyes narrow.  He is angry.  “It takes power and skill to break the barriers.  To travel between any realms is extremely difficult unless you’re a mermaid--- ” the word is loaded with almost lethal hatred--- “but to enter the Land without Magic is damn near impossible.  Because, as the name suggests, it doesn’t have any magic. ”

The last sentence lands like a lead balloon at Emma’s feet, and she feels the truth of it, the inevitability.  There is no magic.  There never was.

“Then why are you here?”  The questions stretches out into the unknown.  Forever.  The black iridescent bubble pulsates softly, but it doesn’t move.

There is no time here.  Emma can feel it.  The absence of time passing.

The absence of forward movement.

The eternal now.

  “I am here because every once in a while, you do get someone with a spark.”

A spark.  There is no spark.

“And if a spark of magic is powerful enough to surface here, in this realm, devoid of all forms of it, well---”  He licks his lips again.  “Then that is just the spark I need.”

He straightens up, looks at her with utter condescension.

“Now then, Emma, ” he sneers.  “It has taken me considerable effort, not to mention vast amounts of Neverland magic and energy to breach the walls of this realm for a second time.  Let’s see if you’re of more use than the last one.”

Elsa on a couch in her living room, surrounded by dozens of pictures of a smiling dead man, saying in that low voice full of infinite sadness, “It told me to unleash my magic.”  

Saying, “It said it was here for my power.”  

Saying, “I didn’t know and I couldn’t do what it asked, and then my husband died.”

Sobbing.

  There is no spark.

  Instead, Emma remembers.

Something else.

-/-

On a deserted road near the north side of the town line, a medical examiner and a psychiatrist look at each other, exhausted.

The ME picks up the walkie strapped to her belt and presses the talk button.

“We got nothing up here,” she says.  “How about you guys?”

  Near the southern end of that same town line, a doctor and a former detective look just as exhausted and the ex cop shakes his head.  “Nothing,” he responds.  “And we’ve covered every scrap below Main Street.”

  “Yeah,” comes the reply.  “Same here.  What about you, David?”

  They wait, the four of them, two north and two south, wait, but nothing happens.

Static cracks twice, leaves the silence even quieter than before each time.

And then with a burst of white noise all the walkies go dead.

-/-

The runes are Ogham but the language is nothing Killian has ever encountered.  It is neither Old Norse nor Manx nor anything he’s ever seen.  It seems to not even be made up of words, it is merely lines representing sound, sound without meaning, and he shudders again.

It is so, so cold.

  But above him the runes are still glowing, and he shakes his head and takes a deep breath.

What does he have to lose.

He exhales slowly and starts to read them out loud.

-/-

“No,” Emma says, and looks at Pan.  “This is different.  You just said you breached the barrier for the second time, but--- I don’t think you’ve been here before.  Not physically.”

  Elsa talking about the sparks and the howling resolving into words, and all of them, every last one of the people involved with this case calling the culprit ‘it’.

None of them have seen this Lost Boy.

This is his first time in the Land without Magic.

  “She was weak .”  The disdain and pure hatred in Pan’s voice are absolute.  “Do you know what it cost me?  To reach into this soul-sucking void and siphon enough energy to even attempt to open the rift?”

“Siphon enough---”  Emma gasps.  “ That’s why you killed those people?  For their life force?”

“What else?  I needed massive amounts of energy, needed it to power complicated spells and massive magical forces, and it’s not like you have any other power source in this vacuum.”  He sneers.  “And then I had her, I almost had her, and she failed. ”

He looks at Emma, eyes burning, deranged.

“She was bound to your laws of physics and science.  Couldn’t imagine anything outside of it.  Couldn’t fathom the very concept of magic.  Not even when I ripped her husband through a tear in your precious space-time continuum.”  He leans towards Emma, his face inches from hers.  “I thought it would bring out her spark like it has yours, but nothing.  NOTHING! ”

  The last word is a scream, and then Emma feels it.

A small frisson of energy, pulsing in time with her heartbeat.

-/-

In the complete and utter silence that surrounds them, Mary Margaret squeezes his hand again, hard, and David looks up.  

There it is.

The cabin.  The cabin where it all began.

They walk up to it together, hands linked, and David would give anything to be able to go in alone, to leave Mary Margaret out here, outside, out of danger, but he knows she would never let him.  He looks at her, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed with a look of pure determination, listening even in this absence of sound, all senses on high alert, and realizes---

He needs her.

He needs her to do this with him.

He cannot do it alone.

  The stand still before the entrance and she looks at him and nods.  It means more than he could possibly tell her.  His jaw muscle jumps as he reins himself in and then nods back and squares his shoulders.

They enter the cabin together.  It looks exactly the same.  Evidence numbers still mark blood spatter and fluids, thin shafts of light fall through small windows, the silence around them is absolute, and then David hears it.

Hears it.

From far, far away comes the sound.  Of a voice.

-/-

He looks at her with those blue eyes and that soft smile.  Like she’s the only person on the planet.

“I know you can do it, love.”

His voice is warm and sure and he takes her hands.

  Emma opens her eyes and feels it

feels it

the spark, the flame, and the roaring fire,

she has power

she is power

and no boy demon with a god complex and a complete disregard for human life will tell her what to do with it.  She will save those she can and mourn those she can’t and she will get Killian back from wherever Pan sent him, because she deserves this, she deserves to have this one, good, beautiful thing in her life, and because she loves---

  She turns and looks straight at Pan and he flinches.  He is afraid.  It causes a thrum of extreme satisfaction inside Emma, and then she feels it.

Warmth.

Pulsing.

Oh, yes.  She is power .

  “Where is he.”  Her voice is steel and flint and no mercy.  “Tell me.”  She watches Pan shrug, but it looks more like a shudder.  “Tell me now. ”

The boy who isn’t squares his shoulders and raises his hand and Emma can feel energy, sharp and volatile, flowing from him, trying to counter her own.

“I don’t know,” he says.

It’s a lie.  Emma knows lies.  And his power is no match for hers.  

“Tell me,” she says again, and then Pan lifts his other hand.

  With a crack the tear in the bubble opens and out pours power , 

so much power, 

jagged pulses stabbing at her, ripping through her, around her, tearing at her like carnivores to the slaughter, and in the middle Pan, smiling, harnessing, focusing it, until it becomes one flowing line, directed at her.

Emma can feel electric arcs flash between her fingers, a crackling of energy as her spark explodes , and then they burst forth in a solid beam of bright white light.

  The warmth inside her rises, pressure so hard it pounds in her temples as she tries to control the beam, as she tries not to think, as she strains to aim it at Pan, but then---

A strike of lightning, a bolt of pure power, blindingly blue and viciously acute, hits her square in the chest.

It nearly breaks her in half.

It cuts off her breath, forces the air from her lungs, doubles her over.  The energy flowing from her hands cuts out with a pop loud enough to burst her eardrums and dissipates and all Emma can feel is pain.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t come prepared,” Pan’s voice hisses, “do you think you’re the first person to think of fighting back?”

Emma falls to her knees.  Tries to get air into her lungs, but all around her is static, arcing in buzzing, humming flashovers, and she cannot breathe .

The force coming at her is so strong she feels like she’s being torn apart from the inside, her cells straining to hold together and not let her disintegrate into an aerosol spray of blood and lymph and lipids, and still it comes

still it comes---

  “Your power is mine , Savior.”  Pan’s voice seems to come from everywhere at once.  

Emma’s body is screaming.  Her heart is hammering so hard it may actually beat out of her chest, and then suddenly the energy changes and starts to pull from her.   

It feels like everything inside her, everything she is and was and ever will be is being sucked out into an endless void and she can feel her power, her life force, her very essence torn from her straining cells like marrow sucked from a bone--- 

gushing 

spouting

hemorrhaging

draining her down to a useless pile of bones

it hurts

so much

  Emma screams.

She gasps like a fish on dry land, tiny, useless bits of air, as her fingertips sputter and fizz, as she tries to get up, as the warmth seeps from her spasming body, she howls---

a sound of pure and desperate frustration as she tries, 

tries, 

tries to get up ---

  “I am so tired of your theatrics,” Pan says, disdain dripping from every syllable.  “Now shut up and serve your purpose.”

And he snaps his fingers.

  Blackness swirls out from the tear, blacker than night, blacker than death, and she can feel it wrap around her, can feel herself being sucked into a vortex of nothing, a void of silence and grief and despair and she suddenly realizes.

She is going to lose.

-/-

As Killian reads, the runes start to glow brighter, start to hum, start to vibrate and warmth, warmth starts to spread through his frozen limbs, so he keeps reading, his voice steady, his thoughts on Emma, and the warmth spreads and spreads and fills him until he feels her, 

he feels her

fighting, straining, with everything she has, just outside of,

just outside of---

  He can feel a presence behind him---

.

“David!”  Mary Margaret screams and suddenly the voice echoes all around them, speaking words David doesn’t know, can’t place, can’t even tell apart, but the voice is warm somehow, steady, not threatening, and then----

light explodes into the cabin

brighter than sunshine, brighter than daylight, and Mary Margaret links her fingers through his and stretches out her other hand, towards the light that curls around her fingers, wraps around her arm, and grows brighter and brighter

he can feel it

pulsing

feeding off of him and the woman holding his hand, but David

is not afraid----

.

Down the deserted roads to the north and the south of the town line, two people each watch in awe as a bright white beam of light shoots straight up out of the forest and into the sky, lighting up the dark clouds, burning them away, and then curves,

curves 

gracefully

towards the center of town

towards the roof of the town hall

and then something screams, loud enough for them to hear it, over a mile away

and then a black cloud explodes, wisps and wings and streams of darkness torn asunder, still screaming, dissipating

and four people break into a run----

.

Emma feels it the moment before it hits, feels a surge of warmth and more energy and then a bright beam of white light pierces the bubble and tears it to shreds and there is the howling she’s heard in her head,

there is the blackness, the wind, and the red sparks,

there is the heartbeat

  Across from her is Pan, his face a grimace of pain and fury, 

behind him is the tear, starting to glow

around her wrap the tendrils of light that splintered the bubble

and she can hear the outside world again, can feel that heartbeat that isn’t hears, can feel Elsa and Ashley and Victor and August out in the streets of Storybrooke, looking for her, for Killian, for them, 

can feel David and Mary Margaret, love and power, inside the beam

can feel herself becoming this power

and then

she hears his voice, his voice , calm and steady and oh so lovely, as it speaks to her in sounds she doesn’t know but somehow understands and she turns

steps forward

and pushes, pushes Pan backwards, towards the edge of the roof, towards the tear that is now white light and flame pulsing

and Pan screams as she hauls him with the strength of her whole body, he howls as she throws him and the tear swallows him whole----

  But it doesn’t close.

There is something inside of it.

Something reaching out to her, a heart beating with force, desperate, hopeful, until that heartbeat is everything she hears, everything she feels, and with her last burst of energy she reaches into the tear and starts to pull

pull 

pull

Behind her the door to the rooftop opens and they spill out of it, Elsa and Ashley and Victor and August, but she doesn’t see them, doesn’t notice, because she can feel him now

she can feel him

and the heartbeat splits , 

separates 

becomes two heartbeats

as she pulls and pulls and pulls and pulls

and Pan is still howling, trying to claw back to her side

and August is holding on to Victor who is holding on to Ashley who is holding on to Elsa who is holding on to Emma as she pulls

and pulls

her bones and muscles and tendons screaming

screaming in pain and pressure and tension, but she is not losing this

she is not losing him

  and then

everything

shatters 

.

When Emma opens her eyes the sky above her is blue.  There’s not a cloud in the pale November sunshine.  A soft, chilly breeze caresses her face.

The world is still, but not silent.

She can hear slow movement and groaning as the people around her struggle to their feet, and she sits up.

It’s an ordinary rooftop.  Not even very high.  There are no signs of battle.

To her left August and Victor are pulling each other up, and behind her she can hear Ashley and Elsa asking “Everybody all right?”, and in front of her, near the edge of the rooftop---

  “Emma?”

  She starts to sob, because he’s there, scruff and wild hair and worried blue eyes, he’s here, he’s here , getting up and wiping his hands and walking towards her and she has never ever ever seen anything as wonderful, as amazing in her whole entire life as this man who hauls her to her feet and hugs her and hugs her and hugs her until he’s sobbing, too.

“I am never letting go,” she says.

“I don’t want you to,” he replies.

  They stay like that, for minutes that feel like hours, his nose in the crook of her neck and her head buried in his chest, until Emma hears another voice say, “Killian?”

  This is not a voice she has ever heard before.

It doesn’t belong to any of them.

She looks up and sees a man stepping forward from behind a fan casing, a tall man with close-cropped brown hair and haunted eyes and a puzzled expression on his face, a face Emma has seen smiling and laughing inside a hundred picture frames, his eyes glued to Killian’s back and then next to her Emma can feel more than hear Elsa take a ragged breath, and another, and whisper, “It can’t be,” and then August bolts forward to catch Elsa as she faints.

  And at that moment the rooftop door opens and expels David and Mary Margaret, stumbling, winded, Mary Margaret trying hard to catch her breath, and then David says, “What did we miss?”

.

.

.

EPILOGUE

“As far as I can tell it’s gone.”

Emma holds up her hands.  Bare hands, utterly ordinary.  There is no spark.

Killian simply pulls her back against him.  He has not been out of contact for the last 24 hours and if Emma has anything to say about it, he never will be.  She still feels warm only when pressed against him, feels the peace of hearing his heartbeat when she lays her head on his chest, but there is no spark.

She is happy there isn’t.

“Do you miss it?”  Killian’s voice is soft.

“No,” she says.  “I never really had it.”

“I love you.”  He smiles at her.  “I love you so much.”

They are wrapped around each other on her couch, her ratty, comfortable couch, in her wonderfully comfy warm living room, and she never wants to move another muscle.

“I love you, too,” she says.  “Do we have to leave?”

“You know we do,” he says quietly.  

Emma groans.

But he’s right, dammit.

-/-

Everyone is already at the station when they get there.

  Elsa and the tall man look like they’re trying to occupy the same space.  The man briefly breaks away to give Killian a long, hard hug, and then gravitates right back to Elsa as Killian moves right back next to Emma.

There will be time for them later.

August is still wiping his eyes off and on.

  “Look,” David says, because someone has to break the silence.  “It’s not like we can ever tell anyone what happened.”

“Or fully understand it,” says Mary Margaret.

“Or fully understand it,” David echoes.  “But I figured that maybe we want to talk about it once, while we’re all still together.”

“And have slept.”  Ashley grins.  “Or at least I slept.  Some people in this room may not have.”

She gets up and walks over to Elsa and the tall man.  “I’m assuming you’re the famous Liam?”

He nods.  “I don’t know about famous, but Liam I am.”

Emma smiles and Elsa rolls her eyes, but then she returns Emma’s smile with such a brilliant one of her own, Emma is blinded for a moment.

  “Look,” Liam says.  “I know you all want to know where I’ve been and how I got back here, but I can’t tell you.  I--- wasn’t.”

“You don’t have to talk about it here,” Elsa says.

“Or ever,” Killian adds, and Emma has to grin at the utterly annoyed psychiatrist-look Elsa shoots him.

The rest of them nod, but Liam shakes his head.

“No, you don’t understand.  It wasn’t awful or anything.  It just--- wasn’t.  One moment I was in my living room in Boston and the next I just--- was not.”  He lifts his hands.  “I can’t really explain it.  It’s like I was sleeping.  I don’t remember being .  Until suddenly I found myself on a bridge.”

Killian draws a sharp breath and Emma wraps her arms around his waist, squeezes until she feels him relax.

“It took me a long time to remember who I was.”  He looks at Elsa.  “Took me a long time to remember you.”  His voice is quiet.

“It’s OK,” she says, and leans up to kiss him.

When they finally pull apart, there is not a shred of embarrassment between them.

“At least I think it took a long time.”  Liam says.  “I don’t know if time passed there.”  He falls quiet.  Nobody moves for a very long moment.

Then Emma walks over to the whiteboard.  “Let’s look at what we know.”  She points at August’s graphic.  “Neverland was running out of magic, and Pan was trying to harvest it here.”  She laughs and says, “There’s a sentence I never thought I’d say.”  From out of the corners of her eyes she can see a lot of nodding.

“Originally he found Elsa.  Opened a small rift and started reaching through it to murder people and siphon their life force in order to make the rift bigger.  Big enough for him to go through.”

  “It’s highly likely that he’s been doing this for centuries,” Killian adds.  “Millennia, possibly.  Think about it.  Time doesn’t exist in Neverland, but all that life force has to come from somewhere.  The fact that the spells carved on the victims were mimicking human language tells me that there must have been contact,  contact dating back many, many generations.”  He scratches behind his right ear as he tries to harness his next thought.  “And think of the lore-- all those stories of magic and otherworldly creatures, on the Isle of Man especially.  There is so much of it -- in Norse mythology as well.  So many similar stories and legends, all of them incredibly detailed considering they are more than a thousand years old.  Some more than two thousand.  I think this has been going on for a very long time.”

  Emma feels a rush of fondness watching him explain, features animated, hand gestures making his points, every inch the nerdy professor, and in that moment she loves him so much it almost hurts.  

When he turns to look at her again, eyes shining and so very in his element, she vows to herself that his detective days have to draw to a close.

This man needs to be around books again, books, and scholars, and ivy covered walls.  Or at the very least walls not spattered in blood and urine.

  She nods, along with the rest of them, because he’s making perfect sense.  “When we were fighting Pan asked if I thought I was “the first one to fight back”.  It would support your hypothesis.”  

Killian beams at her after the word ‘hypothesis’.  They are going to have so much fun later, using that word in a completely different context.  It will be the most educated dirty talk ever .  She grins at the thought and then clears her throat to cover the heat that just shot into her cheeks and turns back to the board.  

“So with each sacrifice Pan gets stronger, and the sacrifices link through the quill---  wait.”  She looks at Ashley.  “That’s why you couldn’t name the elements.  It’s from an animal that’s from a whole different plane of existence.”

“Nicely put,” says the ME.  “My supposition exactly.”

“Then what about the connections?”  Emma asks.  “If all you had to do to be next in line was touch the quill, why are we all connected?”

  “I don’t know if this helps,”  Liam says, and looks at Killian.  “I remembered you last, LB.”  He shakes his head again.  “And I can’t explain it, but the moment I did, I got the urge to write down these sounds I kept hearing all around me.  Write them down somewhere they would last, but not easily seen, so I carved them into the bannister of the bridge.  On the down side.”

“How?”  Elsa stares at him.  “Liam - how did you write a language you don’t know, in a script you don’t know?”

“I heard your heartbeat,” Emma whispers.  “The day I met Killian, I started to hear your heartbeat.”

Liam’s brow furrows.  “My heartbeat?  How could you possibly hear my---”

“I think you called me,” Killian says, a slight tremor to his voice.  “I think you called me--- to the case, to Storybrooke, and to---”

His voice cuts out.  Emma glances up at him, and oh, the look he gives her.

Sorrow and joy and pain and happiness and so, so much love.

She can’t speak for a moment.

She only snaps out of it when August clears his throat.  Loudly.

  “Connection,” she says.  “Whatever the magic was that Pan was after, I don’t think it was just inside Elsa and me.  I think it connected us all.  Look at all of us, here.  And all of us who---” she swallows hard-- “cannot be here, but were part of this.”

Killian takes her hand.  The warmth still flows.

“It was love,” he says, his voice soft and fond.  “All of it.  Love is not just romantic love.  Graham taking recovering addicts to find themselves in nature.  Dr Boyd finding a stubborn orphan on a bench and seeing something inside her, enough to make an effort to change her life.”  He squeezes Emma’s fingers, hard.  “August picking up a newborn by the side of the road when he was just a little boy himself.  Even Victor---” he smiles wistfully--- “finding connection and solace in a back room.  Love is a very powerful thing.  I think it would transcend realms and language and just respond to need.” 

They all fall silent, and then Elsa clears her throat.  “Were we all connected by circumstance?  By a series of events?  Or did these events all happen to us because we were connected?”  She smiles.  “Who knows?  But in the end---” she looks up at Liam, who smiles down at her with the exact same smile Killian has when he smiles at Emma---  “what does it matter?  We’re here.”

She kisses her husband.  “We’re here, and he’s gone, and we can chop this up six ways from Sunday, and we will--- ” she looks around--  “but we may never fully understand it and I for one need a fucking drink.”

And Liam smiles and says, “That’s my girl.”

-/-

That night, after grilled cheese sandwiches and fries and lots and lots of drinks, after laughter and lightness and a moment of silence for the departed---

after August proclaims he cannot wait another fucking moment and hauls Victor up the stairs, and David says something much more polite which amounts to exactly the same thing and pulls Mary Margaret out of the diner at a near run---

after Ashley drives back to Bangor and Elsa and Liam get into a car headed for Boston and all the good-byes are finally said---

finds Emma and Killian back on her ratty, comfortable couch, in her wonderfully comfy warm living room, and Emma sighs as Killian bends down to kiss her.

“I don’t want to move again,” she says.  “I am so tired.”

Killian’s lip quirks and he looks at her as his tongue does something absolutely indecent and his eyes flash.

“I could move a bit ,” he says, and then he gets up and in one fell swoop throws her over his shoulder and Emma screams a laugh.

“OK OK OK!” she shrieks, and then laughs again, because he’s stomping down the hallway to the bedroom and then he just dives them onto the bed and goes very still on top of her.

“I don’t want you to worry,” he says.

Emma’s laugh catches in her throat.

“Worry?”  she asks.

“About the future,” he says.  “I’m not going anywhere.”

God, how she loves him.

“Good,” she says, voice a little bit choked. 

“Wherever we go, we go together,” he says.  His eyes are large and so, so serious, and she almost doesn’t notice that the last part sounded like a question.

But she does notice.

“Together,” she says, and feels him exhale.  “Together, wherever we go.”

  He smiles.  Smiles that soft, fond smile of his.  “I love you so much.”

She smiles back.  Happy and sure.  “I love you, too.”

Then his grin becomes impish and he twitches his hips.

“How much?”  He asks, and it sounds absolutely wicked.

“Let me show you,” she whispers, and flips them around.

.

.

.

THANK YOU AGAIN, EACH AND EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU, FOR BEING SO WONDERFUL.

LOVE AND HUGS!!!!!

Emma looks at Killian and smiles, because it’s comforting how some things never change, and oh, the look he gives her in return.

It makes David blush.  Across the room.

“I bet they can find a much better use for their time.”  Mary Margaret rolls her eyes and grins.  “And I agree with the doctor.  I think we all could do with a break.”  

David feels another atomic blush start to creep up his neck.  This whole freshly-cooked lobster impression his skin insists on doing he could truly live without.  Especially since Mary Margaret is looking straight at him now, eyebrows raised in silent question.

From out of the corner of his eye David can see Emma and Killian very much not looking at them, and then he hears Emma’s voice, as she says, “Take me home?”

Killian quietly replies, “Of course, love.” and Emma does not flinch at the last word.

Instead she beams at Killian.  Her whole face lights up.  Happy.

Killian smiles back, and even David can see how much the man has changed in just these few days.  He is no longer the husk he first encountered at the diner; empty, weary, sardonic, and incredibly hungover.  The man slouched at the counter that morning could not have smiled like that.

  Emma nods at David and checks her watch.  

“Let’s meet back here at 9 tomorrow morning,” she says, and then gives him a wicked grin.  “If you two want to join us for breakfast, we’ll be at the diner around 8.  But we understand if you can’t make it.”

And with that parting shot they leave, while Mary Margaret bursts out laughing and David’s face once again attempts to emulate the sun.

He tries to take a deep breath and say something coherent, anything at all, really, while Mary Margaret’s chuckle fades and she once again looks at him, eyebrows raised in amusement.

He can’t think of anything.

Nothing a thing.

  And then she sighs.  Shakes her head.  Takes one step forward and then another, until they’re almost touching, and then she smiles an absolutely brilliant smile.

“So, David Nolan,” she says.  Still smiling that thousand-watt smile.  The kind that could light up an entire village.  “Are you going to make me wait the whole night, or are you finally going to kiss me?”

And David decides that words are maybe not what this situation needs at all.

Action is.

He can do action.

Outside, in front of the station, Killian and Emma hear Mary Margaret’s happy squeal being cut off midway through and Killian quirks his left eyebrow suggestively.

Emma laughs out loud.  Oh, that man can definitely get serious mileage out of a good innuendo.  But he is not the only one.

“ Finally ,” she says.  “Wasn’t that a long time coming.”

“It was.”  Killian takes a step forward and puts his arms around her, wraps himself around her, tightly, and it feels ridiculously right .  His lips brush hers gently.   “So was this.”  And then he kisses her.

Thoroughly.

  When they pull apart she’s lightheaded and cannot wipe the stupid grin from her face.  Not that she wants to.  He leans his forehead against hers, their noses touching, his lips ghosting across her cheek, and it takes her forever to get her bearings.  When they finally start walking, he keeps his arm around her waist, her body pulled tightly into his side, and it’s so easy, the way their strides match and their rhythm syncs up, the way he keeps nuzzling her neck and smiling.  He’s happy.  She can tell he’s happy.

Hell, people in Canada can probably tell he’s happy.

It makes her feel light and buoyant and hopeful -- even amidst all this threatening doom.  

  When they get to her house she can barely open the door before he pushes her inside, slams it closed with his heel and kisses her absolutely breathless, and when he pulls back his pupils are blown wide and she can feel him, hard as a rock against her.  He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out, nothing but his ragged breathing, and Emma slowly lets her hand wander down his breastbone 

and lower

and lower

until she feels him, wraps her hand around him, and he groans

helpless 

helpless 

and she grins up at him, unrepentantly.

  And strokes him.

Once.

  The sound he makes is feral .

With a growl he picks her up and marches her down the hallway as she wraps her legs around him and kisses his neck, his pulse point, his collarbone, and then he stops, whispers a strangled, “Which door?”, and she doesn’t look up, bites his jaw and points left, and with a snarl he twists the handle and takes two more strides and then finally, finally, they’re on the bed

their limbs tangled

their lips trailing fire

their hands frantically pulling fabric, pulling buttons, pulling belt loops and buckles and bra clasps, and then he stills above her

and she nearly sobs because god, she’s aching 

she’s ready 

and she lifts her hips, rubs herself down his cock and he groans as he enters her 

AllAtOnce

GodItFeelsGoodYES

  WhereHaveYouBeenAllMyLife

I’veWaitedSoLong

ForThis ForYou

  She can feel it, from the tips of her toes to the top of her hairline, as she comes,

she comes---

  And suddenly there is a spark - warm, glowing, golden - it erupts from her hands, shoots jets of light from her fingers,

envelops them

lifts, lifts them halfway off the mattress, 

and she screams as he lets go

and they shudder

and they shake

and they collapse, fall back down, boneless and spent.

They lie there for minutes, just trying to catch their breath, and then she turns to look at his face.  There are tears in his eyes.

Tears.

“Emma,” he whispers.  Just that.  Just her name.  But she knows what he’s saying, knows it in the marrow of her bones and the bottom of her damaged, lonely, fortified heart, she knows.

And so she simply nods, and kisses him softly, and then pulls the covers over both of them.

-/-

In a quirky house on the outskirts of Boston, Elsa Jones rubs her tired eyes, looks at the clock, and calculates the time she has left to sleep before she has to leave.  No matter which way she counts, it’s barely five hours.  She sets her alarm, shucks off her shoes, and curls up on the couch with the afghan.

There really is no point in going to bed.

-

Twisted into tangled sheets in a New England country-style room at Granny’s, two men lie wrapped around each other, one dark-haired, one fair.

They have both given up pretending to be asleep, and try to enjoy just being together for now.  Fingertips run lightly over warm skin, their breaths come slow and evenly.

“He is not getting you,” the dark-haired man says, for perhaps the tenth time.

The blond man smiles, just like he has all nine times before.  

“Good,” he says.  Then he looks up.  “Stay,” he adds.  “Please stay.”

The dark-haired man nods.  “I was never going to leave.”

The blond man smiles again.

“That’s even better,” he says.  “I was never going to let you go.”

-

And in a charmingly messy cabin bedroom on the outskirts of town, a teacher and a deputy lie spooned together under a checkered bedspread, fast asleep; another dark head and fair one, on the same pillow.

-/-

Killian very slowly takes Emma’s hand and threads his fingers through hers.  He knows she’s awake, even though her eyes are closed.  He pulls their hands up to kiss her knuckles and she smiles and slowly opens her eyes.

“Hey,” she says.  Quiet and soft.

“Hey,” he answers.  Just as quiet and soft.

“Are you OK?”

He nods.  He is so much better than OK.  He’s wonderful.

“I’m good, love,” he says, and notices how again, she doesn’t flinch.  So wonderful.  “You?”

She nods, and her smile gets wider.  

“I’m very good,” she says.  “Except that I really want some hot chocolate.”  

She sits up, squeezes their entwined fingers.

“Want to go make some hot chocolate?”  

He does.

Twenty minutes later they are curled up on the couch, in pyjamas and blankets, each with their own mug of what Killian thinks must be the most sinfully delicious thing he’s ever tasted, short of Emma, and then he remembers---

“That light before,” he blurts out.  “Did I--- did I imagine that?”

Emma sighs and takes a long sip before she sets the cup down on the coffee table and looks up at him.

“No,” she shakes her head.  “No, something definitely happened.”

“Do you think----”  He can’t bring himself to say it out loud.  He doesn’t want to spook her.

“I don’t know.”  Her voice is a whisper now.  “There was a----  it felt like a spark, and suddenly there was power .  Energy, you know?”

He nods.

“I don’t know what it was.”  

He can feel her uncertainty as she speaks, feel her hesitation.  Her brow crinkles.  He kisses the furrow, then leans his forehead against hers.  

“Don’t be afraid,” he says.  “It’s OK.”

She sighs and closes her eyes.  “Whatever it was, it ignited , somehow.  Or at least that’s what it felt like.  And then it--- it just---”

“Shot from your fingers?”

“Yeah.”  She pulls back and rolls her eyes.  “But that’s crazy, right?”

He shakes his head.  “No, Emma.  I felt it.  You felt it.  It lifted us off the bed .”  He smiles at her.  “Whatever it was, it was real.  And you are not crazy.”

-/-

In her Bangor morgue, Dr Ashley Boyd slowly closes the lid of a hard case filled with evidence bags and notes and flash drives.  She clicks the clasps shut and grabs her coat and then carefully wheels the case out to her car.

The thump of her trunk lid slamming shut on top of the case echoes across the empty parking lot as she methodically opens the driver’s side door and starts the car.  She sits there for almost a minute, engine idling, lost in thought.

Then she puts the car in gear and turns its nose towards Storybrooke.

-/-

“You asked me about my ancestors.”

  They’ve been silent for many long minutes, and Killian nearly jumps when Emma speaks again.  He tightens his arms around her.  What he wouldn’t give for a moment of solace, for a time-out, for the chance to just be together, just enjoy each other for a little longer.

She folds her hand through his and squeezes, as if she heard him, as if she knew what he’s thinking, and he can feel her want it, too.

But time waits for no one.

  “I did.”  He kisses the top of her head as she sighs.  “It’s a theory.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.  “I’m so sorry I couldn’t help.  I’m sorry I don’t know anything.”

Even in his embrace he can feel her shoulders slump, and he tightens the arm around her waist as he pulls their entwined hands up to his heart.

“Emma,” he says.  He loves saying her name.  “Please don’t apologize.  None of this is your fault.”

She looks up and her eyes are suspiciously shiny.

“I don’t-----”  Her voice cuts out and she clears her throat.  “I feel useless.”

It hurts something deep inside of him, the way she says that.  The way he can feel true pain leak through these few words.

He kisses her gently and squeezes her fingers again, and then reaches up to cup her cheek.

“You could never be useless,” he says.  “You matter.  You matter to me.”

A choked sob escapes her and then she’s kissing him, hard.

  Minutes pass before she pulls back, her eyes still wet, but her smile wide and genuine.

“You’re never going back to your room at Granny’s, by the way,” she says.  “You’re stuck with me now.”

His heart does a truly wonderful and terrifying leap and he has to take a second or fifteen to remember how to breathe before he can nod and say, “Good.  That’s good.”

And then he has to hug her again.

  “I think the hot chocolate is no longer hot,” she finally says, pointing her chin at the mugs on the coffee table after another long bout of silence.

He doesn’t care at all.

He has his arms full of Emma.  That’s better than anything else.

“We’ll make more later,” he says and then pulls back to look at her.  “Would you like to tell me what you do know?”

Her brow furrows.  “How do you mean?”

He smiles.  “About your past.  About your beginnings.  The things you know about it.”  

She bites her lip and he hastens to add, “Only if you want to, of course.  Not if it causes you pain, love.”

“No, it’s OK,” she says, and relaxes against him.  “There’s not that much to tell, and----”  She takes a deep breath.  “I don’t mind sharing it with you.”

  He knows the magnitude of this gift she’s giving him. Knows that this is a big thing for her.

Waits until she speaks again.

  “There’s not much to tell.”  Her voice is matter-of-fact.  “I was found by the side of a highway.  A country road, not an interstate - not far from Portland.  The police report actually doesn’t state which one, so I’m not altogether sure, even though I’ve spent--- well, some time trying to figure it out.”

She shudders and he tightens his arms. 

“Are you cold?”  He whispers.

“No.”  She shakes her head. Burrows deeper into the blanket.  “These are just very old ghosts.  I’m fine.”  Still that calm, neutral voice.

It takes her a few moments, before she goes on.

He just waits.

  “Anyway,” she finally says, “I was found by a random boy taking a shortcut home from school.  He thought I was a toy at first, or at least that’s what the papers said.  They didn’t identify the boy by name, and neither did the police report, since he was a minor.  Only seven years old, I believe.  Which is odd, because what 7-year-old walks home from school alone?”  Her voice sounds far away now, very much lost in thought.  “Not that it matters,” she goes on.  Back to matter-of-fact.  “He found me and I guess he realized I was an actual human baby once I started crying, and so he carried the basket I was in to the nearest adult.  And thus I entered the system.”

  Something cold and hard tightens in his stomach at those words, at the meaning behind them, and he buries his nose in her hair.

“I’m so sorry love,” he says softly.  

She chuckles a dry, mirthless laugh.  “It is what it is.”

He half expects her to go rigid, to close off, but instead she exhales a long breath and relaxes into his embrace, leans her head against his shoulder, her fingers playing idly with the folds of his sleeve.

“There’s not much else to tell.”  Her voice is pensive now, quiet, and he’ll take that over her eerie neutral any day.  “There was a string of foster homes and group homes and failed escapes.”  Again that mirthless chuckle.  “They always catch you.”  She shrugs.  “No matter how fast or how far you run.”

  There’s nothing he can say. All he can do is hold her tightly and hope she feels that he’s here.  With her.

Especially since he is busy trying not to imagine what would compel a teenager to run away, to want to exchange a roof over her head for a life on the streets.  He can’t imagine it, because he’ll go mental, and that is not what Emma needs.

  “But the last time they caught me, I ended up in a holding cell in Bangor,” she goes on and snaps his thoughts back out of the screeching loop of cruel siblings and bullies and predatory foster fathers.  “And that’s where I met Ashley.”  She smiles.  “Dr Boyd, you know?”

He nods and she shifts slightly, lets her hand wander down his arm, puts it on his.

“She just happened to be at the station.  She was doing her residency at Portland Mercy, was just contemplating going into forensic medicine, and happened to be in Bangor that day, for a meeting with the coroner.  I was waiting to be processed out and she sat down next to me on the bench and just started talking to me.  She asked me what I was doing there and I told her.  I thought it would shut her up, but instead she started to ask me lots of questions.  Most of them hypothetical.  Like, what did I think of the criminal justice system, and the duties of law enforcement, and so on.”  

She chuckles again, and this time it’s genuine.  

“Anyway, I was bored, and the woman from child services was taking forever, and so I answered every one.  And after Ashley was done asking me all these questions she said -- and I will never forget this -- she said, ‘You’re too smart to be this stupid, kid.’  She told me to stop fucking around, and to tough it out and stop running away, and that I had a great future in law enforcement ahead of me.  And that I should become a sheriff, not a cop.  She said I would do well in a self-contained space where I could make my own decisions, and that a metropolitan precinct would just grind me up and spit me back out.”

  This time she laughs out loud, and so does he.

  “She certainly had your number,” he says.

“She certainly did.”  Emma nods.  “And thank my lucky stars she did, because for once in my life, I took someone’s advice.  And she turned out to be right.  Of course.  It’s really infuriating just how often she’s right.”

He has to take a deep breath because again he’s not thinking of things, things like how they never would have met if she hadn’t ended up on a police station bench in a medium-sized town in Maine of all places, and he whispers, “I’m so glad you’re here.”  

  She leans up, kisses his jaw, his neck, his collarbone, and he bends down, catches her lips, soft and warm and wonderful against his.

  Warm and wonderful.

Warm.

  That golden warmth spreads through him again, and finds an answering glow in Emma, and they both look at her hands, sparking, humming, luminous ---

Light threads through her fingers, curls up her arms, almost playful, and he reaches out, can’t not reach for her, and when his hand touches hers the light explodes, becomes a focused, powerful beam, shooting straight at the wall, and for a moment

one 

brief 

endless 

moment

the wall disappears 

and there is darkness

and wind

and the roll of thunder

and the crash of waves

and the screaming of beasts

  and then nothing.

  Just a wall.

And two people on a sofa, wrapped around each other.

Holding hands.

 .

.

He folds his fingers through hers and returns her smile with a sigh of relief.  

“It’s better if I help you unpack the boxes,” he says.  ”Show you how everything is organized and categorized.”

Emma laughs out loud.  He really is a professor at heart.  It’s wonderful and painful in equal measure.

“Killian,” she answers, not rolling her eyes.  “First of all.  I saw those boxes when I helped you pack them up.”  

An image of his living room rises before her eyes, barren and desolate and so full of sadness, and she fights it down because there is no time for this right now.  He squeezes her fingers like he knows she’s thinking troublesome thoughts and once again warmth spreads through her.  

She will never get tired of that feeling.

“And also,” she finally goes on, “it’ll be better if I look at everything with fresh eyes, you know?  Completely unbiased.  Sometimes a little disorder helps you gain a new perspective.”

“You are a very smart woman, Emma Swan,” he says and beams .  Like he truly likes how her mind works.  The warmth inside Emma grows like a living thing, and very faintly she thinks she can feel-----

  “Love?”  His voice snaps her back to the present and she doesn’t know what expression is on her face, but it’s making his brow furrow.  “Everything all right?”

Emma nods and leads him into the station waiting room, where she points at the couch.

“Do you need a blanket?”  She tries to pull her hand from his, but he doesn’t let go.

“What’s wrong?”

His eyes are worried now, and Emma is still blindsided by the fact that he called her love like it was the most natural thing in the world, and she can’t---

“Please talk to me.”  His voice is a whisper.  “Something just happened.  What’s wrong?”

If she stays here a second longer with his fingers threaded through hers and his gentle voice and his soft eyes she will start to cry, and she has cried enough these past few days.

Too much.

  So she shakes her head and she looks up with a smile and says, “It’s nothing.  Don’t worry about it.”

Her voice is steady.  She is proud of that.

He lets go of her hand and runs it up her arm, all the way up to the back of her neck.  His eyes are serious, but also tender, and he pulls her towards him very, very slowly, gives her time to back away, but she doesn’t, couldn’t , not when he’s looking at her like that.

He bends his head and kisses her, slow and soft and oh so careful, and she wraps her arms around him and wishes they could stay that way forever, because she never wants to let go.

He’s warm and solid and real in her arms, and then he wraps himself around her, and it’s so perfect she nearly cries despite everything.

  When he pulls back she holds on for dear life and he leans his forehead against hers.

“I am here, Emma,” he whispers.  “I am in this.  You can tell me anything.”

“I know,”  she says, because she does know, because it’s nothing but the truth.  But he’s not responsible for her scars.  He has enough of his own. 

“I’m fine,” she repeats, and he brushes his nose against hers, kisses her again, and then waits until she pulls back.

When she does, it feels like she’s tearing off a part of herself.

  She walks over to the cabinet and pulls out a blanket and a pillow and hands them to Killian, who gives her one last figuring look before he sits down on the couch.

“Sleep,” she says.  “I’ll save you some pizza.”

“Do you remember back in my room, the first time you came by?”  He smiles a wan smile.  “I was so hungover and you were ready to haul me down here to lock me up?”

She grins and nods, but his smile falls.  “I told you I wished I’d never heard of you.”  

His eyes look sad now.  

“I’m so sorry, Emma.”  His voice is quiet, and god, he’s so sincere.  He really means it.  “I’m so sorry about all of it.”  He looks up and it looks like he’s in pain .  “I didn’t mean it.  I didn’t mean it then, but now----”

He swallows hard.  

“Emma, I swear, meeting you is the best thing that has ever happened to me, and I know I’m not supposed to say this after just a few days, but I swear, I know it. ”  

He takes a deep breath.  

“I know it.”  His voice is a whisper now.  “I know it, and I am so sorry.”

  There is nothing she can do but walk over and sit down next to him and hug him within an inch of his life.

-/-

“I take it you have seen this kind of thing before?”

  Victor is sitting on the bed in his room, cross-legged, looking small and out of place with his carefully tousled hair and his expensive suit pants and his button down shirt which is still crisp and perfectly white despite the fact that he’s trudged through a damp forest in November.

August pours two glasses of the scotch he just liberated from Granny’s bar and hands one to the doctor.  In the time it takes Victor to take a sip, August has emptied his own glass and refilled it.

He walks over to the armchair by the window and sits down.

  “Yeah, you could say that,” August says quietly, and empties his glass again.  “I have seen this kind of thing before.”

Victor looks up.  “What happened?”

“Nothing that’s going to happen to you.”

The doctor laughs out loud.  It sounds bitter and resigned.

“Don’t bullshit me, cop,” he says.  “Tell me what happened.  Were there others?  Did they all get strung up like that?”

August pours himself yet another generous helping and Victor gets up, walks over to him and puts his hand over the glass.

“Stop it,” he says.  “I didn’t ask you up here to watch you get drunk.  I asked you up here to get some answers.”

  There are so many things August could reply to that.  So many things he wants to reply to that.  Witty comebacks laden with double entendres and flirtatious intimation, or a quick and dirty line leading straight to the point.

He can’t bring himself to do either.

Victor is looking at him with wide, worried eyes, and the words marked for death start caroming around August’s head on a screeching loop, and for a moment all he can see is Will, and Eric, and the first victim, the woman; all of them prostrate, dressed in rough linen, their backs bloody, their hands outstretched, holding a quill.

And then Liam.

Who vanished before three pairs of eyes and became nothing but a pile of ash.

  “August?”

His hands are shaking, shaking so hard Victor’s palm on his glass is shaking right with him, and August takes a deep breath.  Victor lifts his hand and August drinks as the doctor sits down, this time across from him, at the foot of the bed.

“No,” August grinds out.  “They didn’t all get strung up like that.  Actually, this is the first one.  All the others were on their knees, bent down and forward, as if they were offering up a gift.”

“How many others?”  Victor’s voice is a raw whisper.

August shakes his head, but the screeching loop is still rolling.  “There was a librarian named Belle who disappeared and then turned up dead with markings all down her back.  There was Detective Prince, who was a good man, and amazing at spinning theories from trace evidence.  And Detective Scarlet, who was his partner, and---”

August’s voice cuts out and he has to swallow several times before he can go on.  Victor is very still, looking at him with large, frightened eyes.

August wishes, truly wishes, his tale was one that ended in hope.

Not despair.

  August takes a deep breath.  “Scarlet was a very good cop.  And an even better man.”

“And Killian’s brother?”  Victor’s voice is barely audible now.

“Liam.”  The word sits between them like a lead balloon.  “My partner.  He turned to cinders without fire before our very eyes.”

Victor blinks, and August sighs.

“Look,” he says.  “This is not a tale of triumph.  Some extremely strange things happened, none of which I can explain, but mostly there were a string of dead people and we never found the culprit and then the murders just stopped.”

He pours another shot, knocks it back, and then fixes Victor with a hard stare.

“I left the Force and tried to forget and now the fucking bastard is back , and he’s not going to take anyone else, do you hear me?  I have lost enough people to this goddamn psychopath.  I am done with it.  This time, he bleeds.”

-/-

  “Did you get him to lie down?  Or did you have to knock him unconscious?”

Mary Margaret, it seems, has everybody’s number.  Including Killian’s.  

“No force was necessary.”  Emma grins.  “Although it was a near thing.”

  Mary Margaret laughs, and then Emma looks at the boxes, looks at the wall space David is clearing, the whiteboards they’ve already brought in (more boards than the station owns, Mary Margaret has clearly raided the elementary school), and then back at the teacher.

Mary Margaret is currently studying a large satellite area map, on which the tracking points of Graham’s cell phone are marked.  It’s an absolute mess.  Apparently the Huntsman ran around the woods, woods he knew extremely well, in a mess of spikes and circles and double-backs.  For hours.

Even Emma can tell that there is no rhyme nor reason to his movements at all, even when accounting for following nocturnal animals.  His tracks span a vast area, and never go in a straight line until they reach the top of the incline leading down to the river.

Then they become a very straight line down, towards the bridge.

  Mary Margaret looks at Emma with no small amount of apprehension, and says, “This doesn’t make any sense.  None at all.  A tourist who’s never seen this forest wouldn’t make this mess.”  

And Emma makes a decision.

“I’m going to deputize you,” she says.  “There is no way we can go through all this alone, and also, you’re already looking at some extremely confidential information.”  She rolls her eyes at David.  “Protected by several privacy laws.”  

Mary Margaret ducks her head and David draws breath, no doubt to defend her, and Emma smiles and holds up both hands in supplication.

“I was not chastising either one of you.  Mary Margaret, I think you’d be a valuable asset to this investigation.  You have a very useful pair of eyes and a very sharp brain..”

  David chokes behind her, and Emma rolls her eyes.

  “What would deputizing entail?”  Mary Margaret might as well have said, am I going to be able to give  David orders? and David sputters.

Emma has to bite down hard on a grin.

“You’re not a deputy, like David.  But you will be part of this investigation.  And you must sign a few very binding legal forms, including a non-disclosure agreement.  Which means you cannot talk to anyone about this case.  Anyone.  Not even your mother.”  Emma decides to throw David a bone.  “Not even your boyfriend.  No one who’s not a cop, working this case.  Do you understand?”

Mary Margaret’s eyes are very serious.  “My mother passed away when I was a baby,” she says.  And even more seriously.  “And I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  Both women pretend not to hear the massive sigh of relief behind them.

-/-

  “So tell me, doctor.  How long you been crushing on Detective Jones?”

Victor rolls his eyes so hard, he nearly falls back onto the mattress.  

“ Crushing? ”  He laughs out loud.  “Are you kidding me?  You’re a hard-boiled detective pushing 40 and you just used the words crushing on? ”

“I’m a hard boiled former detective and you’re evading the question.”  

August watches Victor’s face fall.  He doesn’t answer, just shrugs, defeated.  

  August sighs.  

  “I know about that,” he finally says, quietly.  “I liked Will.  A lot.”

Victor looks up.  “The detective on your task force?”

“Yeah.”  August nods.  “So, you know--- for what it’s worth, that way only heartbreak lies.”

Victor chuckles.  “I know.  I do know.  But it doesn’t change how I feel.”  He smiles.  It’s a sad little thing, and August’s chest contracts for a moment.  “But if you ever find a way to turn off an emotion, detective, you let me know.”

“Former detective.”

Victor smiles again, and it’s full of empathy.  “You keep saying that.  But - I don’t think it’s true.  You still observe everything around you.  You still watch and deduce and recognize patterns and collect information.  You may no longer be on the police force, but I think you are very much still a detective.”

  August’s eyes get very wet, very fast.  He has trouble breathing for a long moment.

Victor winces.  “I’m sorry, August,” he says.  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

August laughs and if it sounds more like a sob, Victor doesn’t comment.  

“It’s fine.”  August tries to mask a sniff as a chuckle, sees that Victor isn’t fooled and chuckles for real.  “You just---- it was a nice thing to say.  Thank you.”

Victor nods and shifts.  His knees are now almost touching August’s.  He leans forward, and suddenly he’s close, so close, and looks straight at August, his eyes kind.

“Why did you leave the Force?”  His voice is quiet.

  August can’t answer for almost a minute, because there is something hypnotic in the doctor’s gaze and he is powerless before it.

So powerless that he answers with the naked truth.  

“Will died,” he whispers.  “He was murdered by this--- this thing , and---”  He tries to take a deep breath, but his throat is too tight.  He feels Victor’s hand pat his knee, but it feels remote, as if his leg isn’t part of his body.

He has to close his eyes.

“There was no point in going on once Will was gone.”  August doesn’t just mean the investigation, and he knows Victor heard him, because his hand now squeezes his knee, in a silent show of support.

When he opens his eyes Victor is still looking at him, blue eyes full of understanding.

August laughs, brittle and dry.  “Not that anything was ever going to happen.”

“Don’t I know that feeling.”  Victor sighs.  “Let me guess.  Will was----”

“As straight as they come?  Yes.  He absolutely was.”

Victor raises an eyebrow and his look turns mischievous.  “Come a lot, did you?”

  It takes August a full thirty seconds to assimilate this comment.

To realize that Victor is joking with him.

To realize that Victor is flirting with him.

To realize that Victor is fucking funny .

  And then August stands, pulls Victor up by his crisply starched white collar and marches him across the room, slams him into the wall as he presses the entire length of his body up against him, and kisses the living daylights out of the surgeon as if tomorrow didn’t matter at all.

  -/-

“Proto-Celtic!”

  Killian bolts upright on the couch, his eyes wide open, the words still echoing through the room.  He tries to catch his breath.  His head hurts.

But his dream did yield an actual idea.  Maybe it is good that he slept.

He gets up and carefully folds the blanket, and then makes his way to the washroom to splash water on his face.  The man in the mirror is pale and drawn and desperately needs a shave and a trim.  He’s a mess.

Emma deserves better.

  He shakes his head at himself and rolls his eyes, because he’s procrastinating, and time is what they don’t have.  Forty hours between victims, give or take, since the first one.  Less than two days.

  When he enters the main room, the sight is somehow unexpectedly breathtaking.  The entire far wall is covered with pictures and notecards and press clippings, just like the one in his apartment had been.  There are whiteboards with timelines and victim bios, open boxes, open file folders, and three people so immersed in their contents that they don’t notice him at all.

He stands there for a full minute, looking at the sheriff and the deputy and the teacher, sifting through the bane of his existence.

It’s almost too much to bear.

  Finally he steps all the way into the room and softly clears his throat.

“Killian!  Did you get enough sleep?”  Emma turns her head, smiling, but one look at him brings her up short.  “Killian?  Are you all right?”

She crosses the distance between them in three large strides and he barely has time to register that he has scared her before she is standing before him, lightly rubbing his left arm.

“What happened?”  Her voice is soft.  Like she’s trying not to spook him.  As if he could be spooked.

He looks at her, eyes clear and green and her expression so open, and for a moment he wants to take her and run, run far, far away, and never come back.

  Outrun it , whatever it is.

  It’s a beautiful thought, but that’s all it is.  Wishful thinking.  And there’s no time like the present.  

“I think I have an idea.”  He says it loud enough for everyone to hear, and David and Mary Margaret both look up.  “I think I have an idea about the languages.  But first, is there any more pizza?”

-/-

In the Bangor morgue, Dr Ashley Boyd opens the stainless steel door of mortuary refrigerator compartment 2A, pulls out the castor and transfers the body of Graham Humbert to her examination table.  Per her instructions the Huntsman’s remains have been divested of all clothing, but his hands and arms have not been touched.  From the wisps of wool fiber gently dancing in the chill of the climate controlled air, Ashley can see that they had to cut upper-body clothes off the victim, and she resolves to give both of her assistants a stern lecture about introducing new evidence into existing closed systems.  They should have been more careful.

Fibers shearing off scissor blades are rookie mistakes.

  She pulls out her recorder and turns it on.

“This is Dr Ashley Boyd, commencing the autopsy on Graham Humbert, November 18th, 11:07 AM.”  As she talks she starts to walk around the table, doing her initial visual examination.  “Victim is a caucasian male, 37 years old, 5’11”, 179 pounds and 4 ounces, reasonably well---”

It is at this point Dr Boyd reaches the bottom of the examination table, casually reaches out to check the toe tag, and then catches sight of something odd.

  She steps closer and pushes back the toes to get a clear view of the soles of Graham’s feet.  She stands there for nearly a minute, just staring.

Then she turns around, goes to her adjacent office, and gets the camera.

-/-

“I can’t believe I never thought of it before.”

Killian is sitting cross-legged in front of one of his cardboard boxes, a slice of pizza in his left, digging through files with his right.

“Thought of what before?”  Emma is sitting next to him, their knees almost touching.

“That the language might have something to do with the object.  Or rather, the target.”  He shakes his head.  It’s so simple .  He is so stupid.

“The object?”  David says.

“The target?” Mary Margaret says.

Emma’s brow crinkles.  “Please explain?”

  Killian sighs and looks at her, and then cuts his eyes over to the other two members of their little task force.  And then looks back at Emma, hoping she’ll understand.

Emma doesn’t understand.  

David, however, does.  

  “If you’re trying to get us to leave the room, forget it,” he says, all Deputy Huff.  “We are in this, and I am a police officer, in case you hadn’t noticed.  A police officer working this case.”

It’s really endearing how flustered he gets.

“It’s OK,” Emma says, and puts a warm hand on Killian’s wrist.  “They have to find out sometime.  And we need them.”  She turns towards David and Mary Margaret, who - Killian swears - are wearing identical expressions of sheer determination.  

“Look,” she says.  “You’re going to be hearing a lot of strange stuff now.  A lot.”

“Stranger than people strung up with runes carved on their backs?”  David really does love a good snit.  Killian nearly smiles.

“ Much stranger,” Emma answers.  “Way way outside what you think is possible.  As a matter of fact, you’re both probably going to think we’ve lost every last one of our marbles.”  She holds up a hand, stops David from commenting.  “Just go with it, OK?  Go with it and we’ll answer all your questions afterwards.”

They both nod, and Killian looks at Emma.

  It’s time.

-/-

By the time he has to pull back and catch his breath, August is painfully hard.

“ God, ” he says, “I’ve been wanting to do that since I got into your car.”

“Don’t stop.”  Victor’s voice is a broken whisper.  “Please don’t stop.”

His mouth chases August’s but he pulls back further to look at the doctor, really look at him.  Victor’s hands are trembling.  His breath is erratic, and not from desire, and his eyes have a look of barely concealed panic, and August takes a step back.

“Wait,” he says.  “Wait a minute.”

Victor’s hand firmly grabs the front of his pants and August gasps in equal parts pleasure and pain.

“This doesn’t feel like you want to wait, detective, ” Victor’s voice is rough.  “And there’s no time like the present.  I should know, since it turns out that the present is all I have.”

“Stop,” August grinds out as Victor’s hand starts to rub up and down, and it takes August every ounce of willpower to step out of his grasp.  “Hang on.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.”  Victor lets his head fall back against the wall with a bang.  “But you’re making it fucking hard.”  He rolls his eyes.  “Literally.”

  Humor.  It turns out humor is Dr Whale’s secret weapon.  Go figure.

  August takes a deep breath, and exhales long and slow.  And then goes for broke.

“Victor,” he says quietly.  “This won’t solve anything.”

The doctor grabs him by the lapels and spins them around and slams him into the door.  With force.  August’s head connects with the frame and his vision sparks for a second.  Victor pays no attention to it at all.

“I know ,” he hisses, his face so close to August’s he can see specks of grey in Victor’s blue eyes.  “Don’t you think I fucking know that?  None of this will solve anything.  I. Am. Fucked.”

He laughs out loud, and it’s bitterness made sound.

“Or rather, not fucked, since you turned all Emily Post suddenly.”

“Did you---”  August sputters.  “Did you just compare me to a 19th century socialite ?”

“If the Adelaides fit.”

“What?”  August’s head is spinning.

“Adelaides were a popular women’s shoe in the late 19th century,” Victor says in a long-suffering voice  like he’s explaining Sand Castle 101 to a 5-year-old, and something inside August snaps.

“Fuck you,” he snarls and pushes Victor back so forcibly he stumbles and sits down hard on the bed.  “Fuck. You.  Fuck you and your prevarication.”  August shakes his head.  “I am not your goddamn stopgap.  You don’t get to use me for one last desperate ride into oblivion while you fantasize about someone else.”

  Victor deflates all at once and his shoulders slump until he looks like a heap of pure misery.

“I don’t---”  His voice cuts out.  He clears his throat several times.  

When he finally looks up, his eyes look defeated.  And brimming with tears.

“You’re not a stopgap,” he whispers.  “And I wasn’t going to picture anyone else, I promise.”  He takes a shuddering breath.  “But I was going to use you for one last ride.  I’m sorry.”

Tears start to roll down Victors cheeks.  August can’t move a muscle.

“Please, August.”  Victor’s voice is barely audible.  “Please give me this.  I need it.”

  August crosses the space between them in two long strides, sits down on the mattress next to Victor and grabs him by the shoulders.  Hard.

“I am not your coping mechanism,” he says and watches Victor blink.  More tears roll.  “And you’re not going to need one anyway, because you are going to fucking live.  I am not letting you die, if it’s the last thing I ever do.  Do you hear me?”  He shakes Victor’s shoulders.  He sways boneless like a rag doll.  “You are going to survive this.”

  Victor leans forward, very slowly, and again August can’t move, can’t do a thing until he feels Victor’s lips brush his own, soft and chaste and gentle.

“If I wanted a coping mechanism,” Victor says quietly, “I could have driven to Portland and found the nearest back room.  I do want a ride.  But--- I want it with you .  Idiot.”

  And then Victor smiles, and August capitulates.

  He pulls them both up, mauls Victor’s mouth as he pushes him back, back, back against the door again---

as he rips open the white shirt and listens to the buttons ping across the floor---

as Victor’s hands frantically undo his belt buckle and wander south and oh god----

  August moans and spins the doctor around and bites his neck, while he pulls down Victor’s pants and then pulls down his own, and then everything is hot and wet and ready and pumping, and downstairs the widow Lucas listens to the rhythmic slams against a wooden door, rolls her eyes, and then turns to ask Dr Hopper whether he wants fries or onion rings with his burger.

Dr Hopper wants both.

-/-

“Elsa’s family originally came here from Norway,” Killian says and finally locates the folder he’s looking for.  He hands it to Emma and gives her a minute to glance at the report inside.

“It says they were from Trondheim?”  Emma looks up and passes the folder to David.  Mary Margaret scoots closer to him and looks over his shoulder and Killian can see the deputy go very still, like he’s afraid moving will cause Mary Margaret to back away.

Which is ridiculous.  Her chin is nearly on David’s shoulder.

  He exchanges a knowing glance with Emma, who smiles at him in such a way that he wants to pull her into his lap and kiss her thoroughly, their audience be damned , but there is no time.  It’s been 8 hours already, and he shouldn’t have slept.

No. It’s good that he did.  This idea is the first good theory he’s had in----

This idea is the first good theory he’s had.

  Killian nods.  “Yes.  Trondheim is in central Norway, on the Trondheim Fjord.  It was established around 997 as a trading post by Viking King Olaf Tryggvarson.”

Emma smiles and Killian suddenly realizes with absolute certainty that she’s smiling because he remembers obscure dates and arcane details and the names of Viking kings.  And that she likes that about him.  

“It has a rich and vibrant Viking history,” Killian goes on, smiling back at her fondly.  “And since it was an important trading post, and the only one of its kind so far north, it became a melting pot of early languages, which is how I first heard about it.”

It feels good to finally be able to explain, something.  Something tangible, based in fact.

“The name Trondheim alone exists in at least 20 languages from Suomi to Mandarin Chinese, just to give you an idea.  But the prevailing factor here is Old Norse.  The language of its founders.”

  Killian gets up and walks over to the wall, where the photocopies of the first notecards, the ones Liam showed him a lifetime ago, are pinned neatly to the wall.

He’s an idiot.

His inability to make this connection years ago has cost so many lives.

So many lives.

  For a moment he can’t breathe and then he feels Emma’s hand on his back.  Not moving.  Just there.

  “Elsa was the first target.  I am starting to think the killings were incidental, that they were a means to an end.”  His throat is too tight, but he manages to grind out the rest.  “ Elsa was the target, or rather, the magic she had.  Has.  Had.”

He can hear twin gasps behind him, but they sound far away, because his focus is solely on the cards before him.  There are no interruptions, because Emma is probably shushing everyone.

He is so grateful.  Her hand is warm and solid on his back.

  He lifts his own hand and traces the runes before him and then he turns to Emma.  Her eyes are wide, and there is an odd determination in them.

“I think this is a version of Old Norse,” he whispers.  “I think they were directed towards Elsa’s origins.”  He walks over to the whiteboard where copies of the current case’s notecards hang next to pictures of bloody runes, and lets his fingers once again trail across the letters.

“I think these are targeted towards you.”  He looks at Emma even though right at this moment he’d rather look anywhere else.  “I think your magic is the target this time---”  gasps again, louder this time, and Emma throws up a hand to halt any comments in their tracks--- “and that’s why it’s not Old Norse.  That’s why it’s different.  Your origin is different.”  He takes a deep breath and locks eyes with Emma.  

“Tell me, Emma Swan,” he says, his voice so low that it’s no longer even a whisper.  “Is it possible that your ancestors came from the Isle of Man?”

-/-

.

David’s brain pulls the emergency brake and goes into a tailspin.

This is insane.  What they’re talking about is insane .

Did he hear the word magic fall?  Twice?

There is strange and then there is impossible and then there is insane, and this is insane .  It has to be.

He glances at Mary Margaret and she looks perfectly calm.  As if people were not losing all their collective--- wait.  Isn’t that what Emma said? That they’ll think this is crazy? Well.  Wasn’t that the understatement of the century.

This is insane.  

  Great.  Now his mind is stuck in a loop.

  Killian and Emma are still talking and Snow appears to be listening intently and he doesn’t care, because where they are diving there is no bottom and it is insane and before he even knows what’s happening he finds himself leaning forward and bellowing, “Have you all gone completely around the fucking bend?”

  It’s his first f-bomb ever.

Well.  His first one in public.

  Mary Margaret turns to him with a disapproving slant of her mouth that Professor McGonagall could not have matched and snaps, “David.  Now is not the time.”

  It’s the perfect combination of chagrin and fond exasperation and she is both so much the teacher and the friend at this very moment that David realizes with terrifying clarity that he is hopelessly in love with Mary Margaret Blanchard and wants to spend his goddamn life with her after only knowing her these past few days.

Well, 8 months and 27 days plus the past few days.

And that is insane as well.

This does not bode well for any kind of rational behavior in his future.

  But he can’t pay attention to how insane all these things are right now because Mary Margaret is looking at him like she’s an x-ray machine and he’s, well, David, in the flesh, and he couldn’t look away if he tried.  Killian and Emma fade at the periphery of his vision and what remains is the woman before him, her smile dazzling, her eyes knowing, and then she winks at him.

She winks .

And David’s life suddenly has a meaning it’s never had before.

  Then Mary Margaret turns back to Emma and Killian and says, “ Go on.”

As if nothing happened. As if David’s life hasn’t just changed in every single aspect ever.

He nearly laughs.  But he doesn’t want another reprimand.

  “Why the Isle of Man?”  Emma is spooked.  Her voice is not quite steady.  She is very good at putting on a brave face, but this whole thing has shaken her down to the foundations.

“Because if the writing in my former case was based on Old Norse, then the writing in your case could be Proto-Celtic.  Or rather, attempting to be Proto-Celtic.”

“I don’t understand.”  Emma’s voice is shaking now, and David thinks what he wouldn’t give to just wave a magic wand and make this case disappear.

  Wave a magic wand .  He is going insane after all.

  Killian nods.   “Look, this is all conjecture, obviously, but let’s assume - for the moment - that you are the target of all these runes.  They are meant to evoke or channel or siphon energy from you.”

David is very glad Killian says energy, and not magic.  He’s also amazed at the change in the detective.  He is every inch a professor now, limbs loose and hands moving; animated, spirited, energized - he hardly recognizes the man.

Then Emma looks at Killian and he simply reaches for her hand.  She visibly calms down and David can see that they are connected by more than just attraction.

A lot more.

“Imagine there was someone out there who wanted to harness your powers and to do so had to somehow tap into the primal part of your beginnings, your origins.  In Elsa’s case, that would have been Old Norse.  In your case, it looks like Proto-Celtic, which was first spoken on the Isle of Man.  Or rather, our first evidence of it is found on the Isle of Man.  It would make sense, too.”

The last sentence he says nearly to himself.

“The Isle of Man is a place full of old magic.  Its history is full of stories of mooinjer veggey and spirits and buggane and---”  Killian looks up, clearly only now noticing that he’s lecturing them, and using terms they cannot possibly know, and he cringes.  David watches Emma’s eyes grow very soft as she looks at him, watches her take a step closer and squeeze his hand, and then sees Killian relax and straighten back up and exhale a long breath.  

“I meant, it has a history full of faeries and ogres and spirits and places imbued with ancient magic.”   Killian smiles a self-deprecating smile in David and Mary Margaret’s direction, before he turns back to Emma and says, “Is it possible?  Could your forebears have come from the Isle of Man?”

  David leans forward.  He can’t help it.  For as long as he’s known Emma Swan, which is ever since she showed up in Storybrooke 15 years ago, he has never heard her talk about herself, her family, or her past.  He has given up trying to elicit information from her years ago, because at best Emma won’t answer prying questions, and at worst she will get snappish and withdrawn, and he hates all of the above.  

  Emma shudders and doesn’t answer for a long moment and then finally she says, “I don’t know.  I was found by the side of a road.  I have no idea where I come from.”

  The room goes silent.

Nobody moves, nobody speaks-- it seems like nobody even breathes, until Killian takes a step forward and puts their intertwined hands over his heart and whispers quietly, “I’m so sorry, love.”

  And then a loud, persistent series of beeps sounds out and David gets up to check his computer while Emma says, “ME urgent findings alert”.

David pulls up Ashley’s email and then looks up at three pairs of apprehensive eyes staring at him.  He scans the report.

“Seems like the doc found something on--- wait a minute.  That can’t be right.”  

  They all walk over to him until they’re standing behind him like a freaking gallery and reading over his shoulder (David loathes people reading over his shoulder, unless it’s Mary Margaret leaning in closer, then he doesn’t hate it), and Emma says, “Ashley found something on Graham’s feet?”

“The soles of his feet, it seems,” David answers.  “That’s ridiculous.  Who goes through the trouble of taking off a victim’s shoes and socks, carves symbols into them, and then puts the socks and the shoes back on?”

Emma steps aside to let Killian get a better look.  “It makes very little sense.  But it also says there are beginning signs of healing?   Which means those wounds were inflicted very much ante mortem .  By a sizeable amount of time.”

“At least 24 hours.”  Killian squints at the screen and adds, “She says she can’t be sure, but that’s her best professional guess.”  He finally leans back, giving David some space.  “I think your ME is eminently competent.  I believe we can assume her guess is correct.”

“How?”  It’s Mary Margaret who speaks, and David has never heard her sound so scared.  She sounds small .  “How on earth could Graham have gotten the soles of his feet carved up a day before he died?  And go about his life as if nothing happened?   How could he not have noticed?”

“Well, you very rarely look at the soles of your feet---” David starts and Mary Margaret cuts him off.

“Are you seriously saying you wouldn’t notice it if I took a sharp instrument to your feet?”

“The cuts weren’t as deep.”  Emma has wandered over to her own computer and presumably pulled up the same email, and now Killian is leaning over her shoulder, and that is much better.

Then Emma looks at David, brow furrowed.  “Could it be done?  Was he a heavy sleeper?  Or maybe he got dosed with a sedative?  The cuts are superficial, it says here, more scratches than actual wounds.”

  “He was a heavy sleeper,” Mary Margaret says, and David’s heart drops to somewhere between his knees.  “We went on a hunting retreat every year, the whole club.  Camping, out in the woods, you know?  Graham once slept through four absolutely wasted men singing at the top of their lungs for an hour.”

And just like that David’s heart slots back into place.

“So yes,” Mary Margaret goes on, “He was a heavy sleeper.  But I still think he’d wake up if someone carved markings into the soles his feet.”  Her eyes narrow.  “What’s the attachment?”

“The official report,” David says.

“No, not that.”  Mary Margaret points to the header.  “Next to it.  Your ME sent a picture.”

And David clicks on it.

  It’s a picture of the symbol carved into Graham’s skin, and contrary to the runes they’ve been faced with, this is a symbol he has seen before.  A stylized triple spiral, in the shape of a symmetrical pyramid.  The inner space forms a triangle.

“A triskelion? ”  Killian says, and his voice sounds strangled.  “There were triskelions carved into Graham’s feet? ”

This obviously means something to the detective, but David cannot pay any attention to that because next to him Mary Margaret has gone completely still.  

She just stares and stares, eyes narrow, brows crinkled; her shoulders stiff, her mouth a thin line.  And then she says, “Does anyone have a grease pen?”

David scrambles to get one from his drawer and Mary Margaret takes it, walks over to the wall, to the satellite image of Graham’s cell phone pings, marking all of his tracks before he died, and then draws the connecting lines, and there it is.

  The rhyme and reason to his movements.

His tracks are one large triskelion.

-/-

“Wait,”  Emma says.  “Wait, please.  Wait.”  

  She shakes her head to clear it.  There are all these clues, and they all look like they should fit a larger picture, like they are pieces of a puzzle , and all they do is just muddy the waters.  She can feel her brain overloading.

  In the end it’s David who breaks the silence.  “What is a triskelion?  What does it mean?”

Killian scratches behind his right ear as he answers, a sign Emma can now identify as one of distress.   “Bear in mind that I am not a historian,” he says.  “So all of this explanation will be rather crude.”

Emma nearly laughs.

Not a historian.   Killian is one the most educated men in the county, probably the state.  Maybe the country.  None of his case research, nor his explanations, could ever be considered crude.

Only a professor would judge his own knowledge this harshly.

  “The word triskelion comes from the Greek, triskeles , meaning three-legged.”  Killian’s voice is thoughtful and he looks almost preoccupied.  As if his brain was chasing down an elusive thought while explaining the mundane.  “It was prevalent throughout the European Neolithic and Bronze Age, but originally the symbol consisted of three literal legs, arranged in a circle.  It’s found on Ancient Greek pottery and later appears in heraldry and many other iterations, but since the Iron Age its use has centered most significantly in the Celtic culture, where its name is ny tree cassyn .”

He looks up.

His gaze is clear and unflinching.

“Emma,” he says.  “Its most explicit and definitive association today is with a very specific place.”  He looks at her almost in apology.  “It is the symbol for the Isle of Man.”

“Wait.”

Emma feels like her brain is caving in on itself.  There is too much information and none of it leads anywhere useful.

Every piece just adds to the mystery and now there is this whole component which might pertain to her, a component with which she cannot help because she knows nothing about her own past, nothing about herself other than what she can remember, and for a moment she feels so useless and desperate that she wants to scream in sheer frustration.

Killian looks at her full of worry and empathy.  He’s trying so hard to make this as easy as possible, but there is no way to lift this burden for her.

Things weigh what they weigh.

  Emma takes a deep breath.

  Start with something tangible.  Something logical.  Pick a thread, and actual thread, and see where it leads.

Be Ariadne. Find the minotaur.

Oh god, mythology is starting to rub off on her .

“Let’s forget about Graham and the symbols for a second,” she says, her voice almost steady.  “You said the killings were incidental.  That they were a means to an end.”

Killian nods.  She has his full attention.

“And that the first ‘end’, if you will, was Elsa.”

He nods again.  Everyone is looking at her, spellbound.

“Then why those people?  Why kill those particular people?  To get to Elsa?”  

She clears her throat and wishes to every god she doesn’t believe in she didn’t have to say this next part.  But she does. “Liam---”  Her voice cuts out, and she tries again.  “Liam I understand.”   

Killian’s face twists and her vision gets blurry as tears start to fill her eyes.

“I’m so sorry.  I’m not trying to hurt you.”

He nods and very gently takes her hand, takes her hand to comfort her while she’s talking about the death of his brother, and she feels like her soul might crack and shatter.

It takes her a long moment to go on.

“But why the others?  Why Detective Scarlet and Detective Prince and--- who was the woman again?  Belle something?  Why them?”  She sniffs and blinks her tears away.  “What do they have to do with Elsa?”

  “That’s a really good question.”    Once again Killian’s eyes drift away, unfocused, lost in thought.  “The only connection we could ever establish was---- the case.  Except of course for the librarian.  I think the assumption was that the culprit was getting rid of all the people on his tracks.”

He looks at Emma, eyes back in focus.

“I wasn’t part of the police force then, just the consultant, so I don’t know exactly what the hypothesis was, but from what Liam said, it was something along those lines.”

“But that doesn’t track, does it,” Emma says, and Killian shakes his head.  

“If Elsa was the target, it had to have something to do with her .”

Killian nods.  “Or Liam.  Maybe they were trying to get to Elsa through Liam.  They were married, after all.  And Liam was killed in an entirely different way from all the others.”

  Emma wants to ask how.

There is nothing in the files on how exactly Liam Jones died.   

But she can’t ask. Not now.  Not Killian.  She won’t put him through this.  

Maybe August will tell her.   Later.

  Instead she nods and squeezes his fingers.  He squeezes back.  Hard.  

“That would explain the detectives,” she says, slowly.  “But not the woman.  How on earth does she fit into the puzzle?”

“She was Will’s girlfriend,” a voice says from the door.  “They’d just started going out.  I was the only one who knew.”

  August saunters into the room, Victor trailing behind him, both men looking somewhat disheveled.

  “ What? ”  Killian’s eyes narrow as he fixes them on August.  “Will went out with the first victim?  How on earth are you only bringing this up now?  IT’S BEEN YEARS.”

He’s yelling.  Emma squeezes his hand again, and he takes a deep breath.

“It wasn’t pertinent.”  August’s face is blank.  “They’d only been dating a few weeks.  But he was fucking gaga about the girl already, came into work with puppy dog eyes every day and would not shut up about her.”

He rolls his eyes.  Killian watches Victor nonchalantly walk over to August and stand next to him.  Stand very closely next to him.

August quirks a small grin and then looks straight at Killian.  His gaze is sharp, his mouth a hard line.  “And then she went missing, and Will went bonkers.  Couldn’t get in on the case so he searched for her himself, and I don’t know how on earth he kept it from Eric, but - well, you know.”  He sighs.  “Eric was unbeatable when it came to combining evidence with hunch to come up with a theory, but he was a bit, well----”

  Killian remembers Eric Prince - young, smart, articulate, and with just enough ambition to provide ample drive, but not so much as to dip into opportunism, mostly because he was nothing if not pragmatic.  Back on the task force he had hyper-focused on the puzzle to the exclusion of all else - a trait Killian was told was Detective Prince’s trademark.

  Killian nods.  “I know.  Not exactly observant of his surroundings.”

August tries to smile and fails.  

But he does go on.  “Anyway.  The Belle girl turned up dead and Will lost it.  Swore me to secrecy, because he was never going to get anywhere near the case with a personal connection to the victim, and when Liam and I got assigned the homicide, he marched straight into the Chief’s office and convinced him it needed a task force.  I have no idea how on earth he got King Midas to agree, but he walked out with himself and Eric attached to the case.”

  “King Midas?  Your chief’s name was Midas? ”  David sounds as incredulous as Killian did the first time he’d heard that name.

August turns to the deputy.  “Former detective with a stellar career.  Youngest police chief of all time.  He got the nickname because everything he touched turned to gold.  Man could do no wrong.”  He looks back at Killian.  “Except for assigning us all to this goddamn case, and don’t I wish every day that he hadn’t, because then Will would still be alive.”

  Killian looks at August as if seeing him for the very first time.  Looks at Victor, standing so close to August, who surreptitiously wipes his eyes with his left while searching for his flask with his right.  Watches August take a long pull, watches Victor gently take the flask from him afterwards, and then realizes.

Jesus Christ.  August was right.  Killian doesn’t notice shit .

  “Anyway.”  August clears his throat.  “That is the story of how all the fucking victims were connected to Liam after all.  Including the librarian.”

  There is a long moment of silence and then David gets up and walks over to the whiteboard.  

“And you’re saying Emma is the new target?”  He sounds equal parts scared and determined.  “But it doesn’t make sense.  She had nothing to do at all with Graham.  Did you?”

  Killian looks at Emma, and for a moment a spike of pure jealousy rises in Killian’s gut, but then Emma shakes her head, and it subsides.  He almost laughs.  

It’s too ridiculous, this normal, run-of-the-mill rivalry in the middle of this insanity.  Rivalry with a dead man.  He should be ashamed of himself.

  “And Emma and I never met before last night.”  It’s the first thing Victor has said at all, and five pairs of eyes snap to his face.  

He looks at Killian.  Gives him a self-deprecating smile.

“Well, you know.”  Victor shrugs.  “Might as well name the elephant in the room.”

“It’s not going to get you,” August whispers, and again Killian is overwhelmed by the fact that apparently he is no better than Eric was, and doesn’t notice things until they are shoved straight into his face.

He should give his badge back.

“Either way,” Victor says, “we’ve known each other barely 24 hours.  That cannot be a connection worth exploiting.”

“What about Leroy?”  David says.  Killian can see him straining to remain calm.  “Did you know Leroy, Emma?”

  And Emma nods .

  “Yes,” she says and fear drops into Killian’s stomach like a ball of lead.  “I knew him.  I knew his brothers, too, but I knew Leroy best.  He was the boyfriend of the woman who ran the group home where I stayed the longest.  I saw him every day for two years, back when I was a teenager.”

She shudders.  The fear inside Killian turns to ice.

“The woman died and we were all transferred and he disappeared.”  Emma’s voice is a whisper, and god--- Killian just wants to wrap her up and keep her safe and never let go.  Instead he stands still as a statue, just holding her hand, while she goes on.  “He and a few of his brothers ended up at the docks about a year ago, and he was in bad shape.  They all were.  I got them into the halfway house, got him into counseling.  He was sober and was really starting to do well, and---”

  A small sob escapes her and Killian finally steps forward and puts his arm around her and she presses her face into his chest as her shoulders shake, and he just hugs her tightly.

  “So there’s a connection there,” David whispers.  It rings in Killian’s ears like a death knell.

Emma pulls back, looks up at Killian, and presses a small kiss to his neck, before she wipes her eyes and steps back.

It feels like loss.

“There’s the matter of touch,” she says, her voice once again calm and steady, and god , she’s magnificent.  “Graham probably touched Leroy.  Victor touched Graham.”  Her eyes cut to the doctor and she cringes.  “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Victor nods.  “You’re reciting facts.  Go on.”

She takes a deep breath.

“From what I can tell from your files and August’s story, it’s very likely that Eric touched Belle.”  

David’s brow furrows.  “Where did you get that?”  

“He was going out with the ME.”  Mary Margaret’s voice rings out clear as a bell, and Killian looks up in surprise.  He’d completely forgotten she was there.

She bites her lip, but then points towards the wall.  “You can tell by the nature of his report and his findings.  The coroner’s evidence he listed is incredibly detailed.  But also--- the ME’s findings are recorded and time stamped.  You can see it in the transcripts.  Some of the recordings were done very late at night, two or three AM, and yet their results appear in Detective Prince’s reports and logs first thing the next morning.  Before they were even transcribed.”

She shrugs, a little abashed.

“There’s only one logical explanation for that.”

  Killian has to resist the temptation to slap his forehead, because Jesus Christ they are all so stupid , but August bursts out laughing.

“Oh my god,” he says, shaking his head.  “How are you a school teacher?  How are you not the next Sherlock Holmes?”

And then Victor says, “Elementary school, my dear Watson,” and all of them stare at the doctor for a long moment and then everyone laughs out loud.

August’s hand briefly squeezes Victor’s ass, and Killian cannot believe he has been this blind.

When they’re finally done, Emma reaches for Killian’s hand again, and the warm, golden sense of safety and belonging comes on so strong, they both stare at each other for a full minute before she turns and says, “Belle is where we should start.”

Killian squeezes her hand.  “How do you mean?”

“We have touch as a connection for everyone but the very first victim.  Right?  Will found Eric’s body, didn’t he?  It is reasonable to assume he did what Graham and Victor did -- look for a pulse first.”   

Killian nods.  As does everyone else.

“So.  That leaves the first victim.  In my case, there is a connection to Leroy.”  She shudders, but presses on.  “Now - we have a link between Belle and Will, and it’s tempting to leave it at that.”  She looks over at August.  “I get why you didn’t tell on him, but I don’t think Detective Scarlet is the link.  I think there’s a connection between Belle and Elsa.  And we have to find it.”

.

.

.

“Call me Mary Margaret.”  Emma smiles at Ms Blanchard’s very firm handshake.

“Sheriff Emma Swan,” she replies.  “I heard you ran circles around my tracking?”

Ms Blanchard blushes a very pretty shade of pink, which almost immediately mirrors in her deputy’s cheeks, and Emma files that information away for much, much later.

“I, uh, didn’t mean to---”

“I’m not complaining,” Emma cuts off the beginnings of her apology.  “I only know the basics, and my experience is more reading crime scenes than spoor.  I’m glad you’re here.”

Mary Margaret smiles an absolutely radiant smile, and David behind her blushes even more, and oh god, he’s got it bad.  Emma will spend many a future night making merciless fun of him.

  If they get future nights.

  A spike of pure fear makes Emma’s breath hitch and she pushes it down.

  “David said you had something to show us?”

Mary Margaret nods, and lets her gaze wander up over the surrounding trees, their branches creaking in the wind.  She spends a long time looking, and they all follow her example, but Emma can’t make out anything but evergreen needles and the last falling leaves of the deciduous.  

Mary Margaret’s brow furrows, but she doesn’t comment before she finally motions towards the bridge itself.

“Here, let me show you,” she says, and leads them all to the middle, before turning to Emma and pointing at the slats.  “We have to lie down.”

  Emma gets down on cold, rusty metal, and can feel Killian lie down down beside her.  He’s warm next to her, and just close enough to touch down the length of her side, and she smiles at him briefly before looking back at Mary Margaret on her other side.

Mary Margaret, who lifts her hand and points.

Up.

  The moment Emma sees the symbols down the length of the bannister, she can feel Killian beside her go rigid.  His breath stops .  The letters look exactly like the ones on the note cards, like the ones on Leroy’s back, but they don’t look carved into the metal, they look etched.

As if they were made by acid, something corrosive.

  She lifts her hand to trace them when an iron grip closes around her wrist and Killian next to her yells, “ DON’T! ” and yanks her arm away so forcefully, her shoulder protests loudly for a brief moment.  He sits up, breathing hard, and when he speaks, his voice is a gravelly hiss.

“Don’t touch anything.”  He looks sharply at Emma and Mary Margaret.  “Nothing at all.”  Then he turns to David.  “We need to photograph all of this.  Do you have your crime scene kit and camera?”

The deputy nods, and Killian looks at August. “Go with him,” he says.  “Help the deputy get his gear, take the photos.  You know what to do.  Touch nothing. ”

It is only then that he seems to come back to himself and looks at Emma, ducking his head.  “Sorry.  I’m sorry.  This is your crime scene.  I just-- I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK,” she says, and sits up, nodding.  “Go ahead, David.  Get the camera, document all of this.  Make sure it’s sequential, and stays in order.”

  She stands, helps up Mary Margaret, and Killian looks relieved and contrite in equal measure.

“Did I hurt you?”  He whispers.  “Your arm, did it hurt?  I’m sorry.”

“I’m fine,” she says, and smiles.  “Don’t worry about me.”  

Then she drops her voice low.  “Have you seen this kind of thing before?  Symbols on structures?”

Killian’s eyes are large and worried as he shakes his head.  “Never.  I don’t know what to make of them.”  

  Emma watches as his eyes drift over to August and the doctor, bent over the CSI cases with her deputy.  It’s a sign she has learned to recognize.  Killian looking away in that manner is a clear indicator that he’s completely caught inside his own head.

So she waits.

  “They weren’t made by a quill,” he finally says.  He turns his head back to her, his eyes focus slowly on hers.

Emma nods.  “I don’t think they were made by any type of blade or point.  It looked chemical, like the top layer of the steel was stripped.”

“We have to swab it.”  Killian shakes his head.  “We have to test it for particulates, residue, anything concrete---”

“And we will.”  Emma slowly puts her hand on his arm.  He looks so very strained.  

“Killian.”  She waits until he meets her eyes, gives her his full attention.  “We’ll take all the samples and do all the tests, OK?  And we’ll be careful.”  He gives her a wan smile.  “But now let’s sweep the area one more time and find out what Ms Blanchard wanted to----”

  “ SHERIFF! ”  It’s Mary Margaret’s voice, from the other side of the river.  Its pitch is easily an octave above normal, and somersaulting all over her words.  “ SHERIFF!  YOU HAVE TO COME HERE! ”

David sprints past them with a clatter of hard-soled shoes, and Emma and Killian break into a run to follow.

Behind them Emma can hear both August and Whale, but slower.

On the other side of the bridge is a clearing which runs in a very gentle slope down to the wide, generous bank of the river.  This side belongs to the forest - there are neither roads nor paths, just the trees and many, many animal prints leading down to the watering hole.

Mary Margaret stands at the far edge of the clearing, right at the tree line, white as a sheet and shaking.  

“I knew they couldn’t have just disappeared,” she says.  Her eyes are glassy and she’s mumbling to herself.  “They couldn’t have, it’s just not possible.”

She looks at David.  “I said it the first time, didn’t I?  That it’s not possible?”

Emma watches her deputy slowly take Mary Margaret’s hands and ask quietly, “What are you talking about?  What’s impossible?”

Her eyes fill with tears.  “Graham’s tracks, they just disappeared, and now I know why.”

She swallows hard, and more tears fall. “Look!”  Her voice cuts out and she tries again.  “Look up.”

  And six pairs of eyes lift to look at the trees above.

On a high branch in the tree to their left - an enormous rowan with quite a few leaves left - a figure swings gently in the wind.

Wearing a coarse linen robe, strung up by the wrists which are bound together underneath cupped hands, hangs the Huntsman.

-/-

“What.  The Fuck.”

Victor’s eyes are enormous as he looks from the corpse dangling up high to each member of the group and then back again.  He looks thoroughly bewildered and not a little afraid.

August can’t blame him.  It’s a gruesome sight.

  The Sheriff and Killian subconsciously step closer to each other, but they don’t touch.  August can see Killian’s hand twitch like he wants to take hers and stops himself at the last moment.  Repeatedly.  Not like the deputy and the woman with the rifle.  David is hugging her hard.  It looks like she knew the victim.

  “We have to cut him down,” August finally says, trying to keep his voice quiet, calm.  While every fiber in his body is telling him to Run.  Now.

Killian nods.  “Without touching anything.”  He looks up again, squinting.  “Emma?  Are there carvings on the branches?”

Sheriff Swan whispers, “I can’t tell.”  And steps even closer to Killian.  There’s barely an inch of space between them now, and August can see them for what they are: A unit.  

This is new, and it takes him completely unawares.

The fact that Killian is part of something again.

Back in Boston, a lifetime ago, when August and Liam were partners and caught the first in that string of strange homicides which would end their lives figuratively for one and literally for the other, Killian was just a stuttering image and lagging audio across an old computer screen.  Just someone Liam had videoconferenced to consult, because he’d had the sinking feeling that the randomly carved lines on the notecards were in fact not random at all.  Especially not after they found similar ones across the back of the victim.

And Liam had been right.

The lines were not random, they were an ancient phonetic alphabet which had been used to transcribe another ancient language, and Liam asked his brother to come and consult.

August remembers it well.

He remembers the Killian who first came to Boston, a walking cliché in tweed and elbow patches, with his messy hair and his scruff and his eyes constantly laughing.  They’d ribbed each other, Liam and Killian, like only brothers who truly love, truly understand each other can, and through it all Liam made sure everyone knew that his little brother was the smartest man in any room he walked into.

To which Killian would blush and half-smile, and then roll his eyes and make another futile attempt to get Liam to say ‘younger brother’.  Which he never did.

  And then tragedy struck and that Killian, the one with the quick jokes and the easy smile and the laughing eyes vanished.  He disappeared like the body of his brother they never found, and changed his life’s calling and purpose to the pursuit of atonement. 

  Years now, years of this, of penance and pain and the weight of the dead.

Of sifting the wreckage of lives destroyed and deaths unavenged, while August dove into a bottle and never came back up for air.

  And now Killian is here, broken and damaged and yet functioning, and it throws August for a loop, hard, the way Killian and the Sheriff seem to vibrate along the same frequency.  The way they are in tune, attuned, in this perfect sync and click which Killian has never had with anyone save his brother.

It’s simultaneously the most hopeful and the most terrifying sign yet.

There’s a deafening crack , and Killian and David both shout, “ GET BACK! ” as the branch breaks off and slams to the ground, corpse and all.

“Everybody OK?”  Emma’s voice is unsteady.  “Anyone hurt?”

August looks around, but everyone seems fine, and he breathes a sigh of relief.

Killian pulls at Emma’s shoulder to look at her, and she smiles at him, tells him she’s fine.

David is looking up at the tree, trying to gauge the damage.

The short-haired brunette has pulled the rifle off her back and is holding it in a firm regulation grip, barrel-down, index finger well away from the trigger.  She definitely knows her weaponry, and seems to have a handle on her emotions now.  She’s no longer crying.

And Victor----

  It’s a second too late.  He looks for Victor a second too late, a fleeting moment, a blink, a fucking fraction of time too late, because Victor has of course stepped forward

he’s a doctor, He’sADoctor

up to the corpse

how could you forget he’s a fucking DOCTOR

and knelt down next to it

and he knows nothing about this case, nothing

and stretched out his hand, his bare hand

why didn’t you check on Victor first

to touch----

  Killian and Emma and David and August simultaneously scream, “ DON’T ”, scream “ STOP! ”, and August leaps forward, but it’s too late

it’s too late

and Victor’s outstretched, bare fingers touch the cold, dead skin of Graham’s wrist.

  August’s momentum rips Victor away a split second later, but it’s not enough, and he knows it’s not enough, and they both tumble to the ground amidst brown leaves and cold earth and August swears he can hear the jaws of fate snapping shut.

  And then there is silence.

-/-

How long?

  It’s the question on everybody’s mind.  In everyone’s eyes.  Emma can almost taste it in the air.

  How long does he have?

  David is busy cordoning off a perimeter.  For all the good it will do now.  

Emma has called the ME, and Ashley says she’ll come down here with the siren, cut her driving time in half.  Like it’s going to make a difference.

Victor sits on a tree trunk off to the side, pale, shaking, listening to Killian and August.  Tell him about how he is going to--- how he is going to---- 

  “What’s going to happen to him?”

Emma turns and finds herself facing Ms Blanchard, her eyes narrowed, the rifle across her shoulder.

Emma shrugs.  “I’m not sure, exactly.”

“I realize I’m just a civilian.  And an elementary school teacher to boot.”  Ms Blancha rd’s tone is resolute and firm.  Emma has no trouble believing she can keep infinite numbers of 4th graders in a very straight line.  “But I have eyes.  There’s no need for discretion with me.”  She shakes her head.  “That guy over there, he’s the next victim.  Isn’t he.”

Emma looks at the woman before her, and it’s almost a relief to be able to nod.  “I think he might be.”

“Graham found the last victim, didn’t he.”

Emma nods again.

“Do you think Graham touched him?  Do you think that’s why he died?”

Ms Blanchard’s voice shakes on the last bit, and Emma remembers that she was friends with the hunter.  

“I think it’s very likely,” she says gently.  “Leroy was prostrate on the bridge, not displayed in a tree.  Graham probably tried to help, or check his pulse.”

“That makes sense.”  Ms Blanchard’s voice is very quiet now.  “He knew first aid.  And he was a very decent person.”  She looks up at Emma and sniffs, once.  “Did you know he tried to call me before he died?”

“He what?”

“It’s in my statement.  I--- I told David?”

Emma shakes her head to clear it.  

“Ms Blanchard---”

“Please Sheriff.  I told you to call me Mary Margaret.”

Emma can’t pay attention to niceties right now.

“When you say Graham called you before he died, what do you mean?  How long before he died?  What did you talk about?”

“We didn’t talk.”  Mary Margaret looks supremely unhappy now.  “He called sometime after midnight.  He tried, at least.  I woke up to 23 missed calls.”  She sniffs again.  “I’m a heavy sleeper.”  It sounds like an apology.  “Anyway, by the time I woke up and found my phone, he’d stopped, and I tried to call back, but all I got was his voicemail, and I----”  her voice breaks--- “and then I never saw him again.”

She’s holding on by the barest of threads.  Emma feels a pang of empathy.

“I’m sorry Ms Blanchard.”

The brunette rolls her eyes.

“I’m sorry Mary Margaret ,” Emma says, and gets a wan smile in return.  “But thank you for telling me.  This is incredibly helpful information.”

“How so?”

“Because this area is remote and wooded, and we have no less than five cell towers covering it.”  Emma feels a slim ray of hope for the first time in a long time.  This is tangible evidence.  This is what she does.  “And now we can triangulate the signals and track Graham’s movements.  His exact movements.”

-/-

“We are not joking, Victor.  This is real.”

  August’s voice is as soft as Killian has ever heard it, and Victor grows very, very still.

Only minutes ago he was rolling his eyes at Killian and August and laughing out loud at the preposterous notion of tangible evil that chooses its victims by touch, and Killian can’t blame him for thinking they are short all the fries of a Happy Meal, but he is also so, so tired of fighting this fight.

Of explaining every preposterous aspect of this godforsaken case.

Over.  And over.  And over.

  He looks at Emma, talking to the school teacher, and she feels his gaze, meets his eyes, and smiles.  It gives him enough strength to turn back to Victor, now pale and quiet, looking up at them with uncertain eyes and no small amount of fear.

He feels his gut tighten into nausea.

This is his friend. His friend who is going to----

  Victor was Elsa’s friend first.  She met him long after Liam died and she went back to work, met him at the hospital where she did her assessment sessions for insanity pleas.  Suddenly the word ‘Victor‘ crept into a lot of her stories, and Killian was so suspicious of him at first, just poised to hate him.

Until Elsa finally invited them both out for drinks, and Killian realized that Dr. Whale was just helping Elsa through things, and was not going to tarnish Liam’s memory.

He was also smart and wickedly funny and obviously cared a great deal about Elsa, and it was just so wonderful sometimes to have someone to talk to who knew nothing about impossible cases and deadly quills and runes carved in blood.  Especially since August had disappeared down a long liquid spiral, and Elsa spent her nights surrounded by framed memories.

Killian had just completed his rookie year at the Boston PD and was spending all his time either trying to untwist Liam’s death or studying for the detective’s exam, and it was just such a pleasure to go meet Victor for drinks and talk about none of it .

  To just have a conversation about the Bruins (Killian doesn’t know hockey, but he does know how to let other people talk about hockey), or about the Red Sox (same principle), or about the absolutely insane practical jokes surgeons play on each other (he’s now convinced they’re all eternally just hitting puberty).  So he went to whatever bar whenever Victor called to meet him, and for one night didn’t think about anything, and simply enjoyed the fact that Victor was smart and wickedly funny and knew nothing.  

And he didn’t have to carry the weight of the dead for a little while.

  And now this friend, this friend, is going to----

Is going to----

  Next to Killian August crouches and pats Victor’s knee.

“Hey,” August says, and his voice is still soft and careful.  Not a hint of its usual mix of bitterness and irony.  “We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”

Victor’s eyes follow August’s movement, but don’t seem to see him.  August looks up.  

“Right, Killian?”

Killian nods.  There is no way he is losing another----

“Right.”  August gets up and holds his hand out to Victor.  “Now come with me.  We are going to go back and have a fucking drink.”

Victor’s empty eyes blink.    “It’s not even 10AM yet.”

“Trauma exception,”  August says, and pulls the doctor to his feet.  “Killian, can I borrow your car?”

Killian watches them both walk away, and doesn’t notice Emma until he feels her hand fold into his.  Like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Which it is.

“Where are they going?” He turns to look at her.  

Standing there, in the middle of these woods, in the middle of this cursed case, faced with impossible odds and improbable facts, with nothing but a deputy who’s never worked a homicide and an alcoholic ex-cop and a burned-out detective and an elementary school teacher on her side, Emma is holding his hand and offering comfort and care and support, and he lets go of her hand, catches the flash of hurt in her eyes, but he needs both of his hands, right now---

right now---

to lean in 

and take her face 

and tilt it up

and kiss her.

  Like he means it.

Like he has never meant anything ever in his entire life.

His entire.

Life.

  She stiffens for a moment.

And then melts against him, like a key sliding into a lock, and she kisses him back

back

back

and it is everythingeverythingeverything.  

  Everything.

.

There have been lessons in Emma’s life, hard-won and arduous; lessons she fought and bled for for years.  

She has learned that trust must be earned and sparingly given, promises are more often broken than kept, and that that which you do not feel cannot hurt you.

She has learned to be prudent with people and wary of good fortune, to not give without cause nor receive without caution, and that to be safe is always better than to be sorry.

She has learned that to be free of attachment, unbound by people or places or things, is the safest way to live.

  None it matters the moment his lips touch hers.

For one, brief, fleeting moment the lessons learned and the defenses built in their name scream in protest, and then---

and then---

  The warmth and peace and utter sense of belonging, and closeness, and oh god, home .  The sense of being seen, and treasured, and fucking cherished .  It’s almost too much.

She has to breathe through the tears that are threatening to come, because he is kissing her like he is the river and she is the sea.

  And she should be afraid.  

This is how they kiss on the rooftop in her vision amidst lightning and thunder and a storm raging destruction, which means they are another step closer to their inevitable demise, but she can’t because nothing

nothing 

nothing can feel like this and be bad.

When he pulls back his eyes are soft, and he smiles a small, shy smile, and then whispers, “Emma?”

She nods.  Her voice is not working.

“I’m not sorry,” he says.  “I’ve wanted to do that since----”  He exhales, slowly.  His hand runs down her arm until it reaches her hand, and he folds his fingers through hers.  

And squeezes them, hard.

“I’ve wanted to do that since the night we spent at Elsa’s house.”

Once again his voice is a whisper, and Emma thinks of that morning, when she woke up in a panic from the first vision and he came downstairs to comfort her, and in the middle of that room full of memories of everything he’d lost promised her they would prevail.

Promised her he would not let anything happen to her.

  Her eyes fill with tears and she simply stands up on tiptoes and kisses him again.  He wraps himself around her with a sigh, and when they finally break apart he doesn’t let go, leans his forehead against hers, rubs his thumb across her cheek.  Takes a few deep breaths as if he’s about to say something - but remains silent.

  Then David very pointedly clears his throat and Emma remembers they’re in the woods with her deputy and a civilian and a corpse .  

“Back to work,” she whispers, and Killian smiles.

“Yes,” he says.  Just that one word.  But she doesn’t need anything else.

  Then she turns to David, and he lets go of her hand, and the loss of warmth is simply awful.  But there is a killer to catch.

Also, David is scowling like thunder while Mary Margaret is rolling her eyes, and Emma nearly laughs out loud.  It’s so normal .  Their reactions are so very much part of How Things Are Supposed To Be.

Not the Twilight Zone version her world has become.  She half expects David to break out a lecture.

But instead he points across the bridge.

“I think Ashley is here,” he says, and they all watch the ME as she comes down the hill.

  Ashley looks around when she gets there; at the corpse on the ground, still tethered to a tree branch, at the blood-smeared rough linen of his gown, at his closed hands which are obviously holding an object, an object with brown barbules sticking out past his fingertips, and then she puts down her case.

“Something brought down the Huntsman? ”  Ashley’s voice is not quite steady.

David’s brow furrows.  “You knew Graham?”

“We met once,” she says, shaking her head.  “I took an orienteering /survival course years ago.  He was the guide.”

Then she straightens up and puts her hands on her hips.  “I think you owe me an explanation.  Because whatever is being played here, it’s not a game.”

-/-

Back at the diner, August puts the cruiser in park and shuts off the engine.  The man next to him hasn’t said a word the entire drive.

“Hey.”  August keeps his voice quiet as he turns to the doctor.  “How about we---”

“I always knew there was something,” Victor cuts him off.  Toneless and distant.  “With Killian and Elsa and the brother who died, I knew there was something.”

He looks up at August, and for the first time, he sees him.  “I’d read about the cases, of course.  I mean - for a while you couldn’t get away from them, you know?”

  August does know.  Serial killer on the loose.  Random, mutilated victims.  Unknown cause of death .  It was in every newspaper, every news cycle, for weeks.  For months .

And once Will had been killed----

August had known, then and there, that the case was going to get him, and not the other way around.  But the notoriety, the constant press, had magnified each loss a hundred times over, until all he could do was disappear away from it all.

  “And I’m not stupid,” Victor goes on.  “I knew there were things the news didn’t tell us, things Elsa and Killian didn’t tell me, weird things.”  He sighs.  “Things that were---- odd.  Strange, you know?  They both seemed to carry something so--- heavy.  More than the loss of a loved one.”

His blue eyes get very shiny.  August has to actively stop himself from taking Victor’s hand.

“Anyway, I always thought there was something .”  He shrugs.  “And now I know.”

He lifts his hands, only to let them drop back into his lap.  It looks utterly helpless.

“Now I know, and I wish I didn’t.”

  “I know.”  August takes a deep breath, and then he does reach for the doctor’s hand.  “Trust me, I know.”

Victor looks up in wonder and doesn’t pull away, and it gives August hope of a kind he hasn’t felt in years.

“Come upstairs,” he whispers.  “Let’s go upstairs and have a drink and talk this out.  Because that thing is not going to get you, whatever it is.  We are going to beat this, if it’s the last thing I do.”

And the doctor looks up and gives him a smile that’s both terrified and hopeful and says, “Good.”

-/-

“And now?”

  They have documented the crime scene.  Ashley has finished her on-site examination.  They have loaded the corpse into her van and watched her drive off and promised to come by later to get her results and tell her what they know.

Mary Margaret looks pale and David looks worried and Killian looks dead on his feet.

  “It’s been hours,” Emma answers Mary Margaret’s question.  “It’s freezing and none of us have eaten and Killian has boxes worth of files we haven’t even opened yet.”  She looks around.  “Killian and I will go back to the station and order pizza and get started on my report and his files.  David, can you take Mary Margaret home?”

“Don’t even bother,” Mary Margaret says.  “I’m coming to the station with you.  I know you can’t use me as a cop, because, well - I’m not a cop, but I’m coming.  I make very good coffee, and you might need my expertise.”  At their puzzled faces she adds, “You have pictures of previous crime scenes, right?  Were any of them outside?  Is it possible that a tracker could be a helpful second pair of eyes?”

David says, “We can’t ask you to do that,” and Mary Margaret rolls her eyes hard.  It’s fast becoming Emma’s favorite expression.

That woman plays her deputy like a fiddle already.

“I don’t want to be home alone,” Mary Margaret says quietly.  “And besides - the other two guys took Killian’s car.  Which leaves us with exactly one vehicle.”

Well, she has a point.  That woman is not a teacher for nothing.  

David says, “You really shouldn’t---” 

And Emma cuts him off.  “Of course you can come with us.  There will be things we can’t officially share with you, but your input could be valuable, and the safest place to be is the station.”

David blushes as Emma silently dares him to object, and she nods.  “Go ahead and start loading the gear.  We’ll be right up.”

  And then she turns to Killian.  

“There’s a couch at the station,” she says.  “You can take a nap while we wait for the pizza.”

He smiles and cups her cheek.

“I’d much rather go to my room.  With you.”  His smile gets a wicked edge.  “To talk about the case, of course.”

“Of course,” she says, and he leans in to kiss her.  It’s just as wonderful as it was the first time.   When they break apart, he sighs.

“Emma,” he says, and now the laughter is gone from his voice, and it’s so, so earnest.  “I know you’re worried, and you have every right to be.  And I know now we have to figure out impossible clues and an ancient unknown language and bloody magic , and save Victor’s life.”  He takes a deep breath.  “But this?”  His fingers brush past her lips, whisper down her jawline until they tangle in the hair at the back of her neck, warm and sure.  “This?”  He repeats.  “This is not a mistake.”

He kisses her one more time, short, and urgent, and then looks at her and his eyes are burning.

“Nothing that feels so right could ever be a mistake.”

  And Emma nods, because she feels the absolute truth of it down to the bottom of her battered soul.

.

.

A/N II: Hey, look everybody!  The slow burn is finally catching fire!  i really hope you enjoyed that, because OMG you all have earned it several times over.  You really have waited long enough.

-/-

Emma doesn’t know how long she’s been standing there, crying, and doesn’t want to think about it.  Killian is silent, unmoving, his arms wrapped tightly around her.

Solid.

Reassuring.

If only she weren’t so terrified.

  She lifts her head and his arms relax, let her go slowly, his eyes never leaving hers.

And then he says, “Did you see a rooftop?”

Her knees buckle.

He simply pivots until they’re both sitting on his bed, facing each other. 

Emma blinks slowly.

There’s a faint feeling of nausea and vertigo.

  “You saw a rooftop?”

He nods.  “I did.  A flat rooftop.  Lots of wind.”

The nausea increases.  So does the terror.

“What else did you see?”  She can barely whisper.

“A thunderstorm,” he says, and Emma starts to shake.  It can’t be a coincidence.

“Emma?”  He leans forward and very, very slowly reaches for her hand.  He stops an inch above it and looks up, waiting for permission.

She’s afraid.  So afraid.  Of skin-on-skin contact.

But she nods.

  He puts his hand on hers, and nothing happens.  Nothing but the familiar spreading of warmth and the feeling of being safe, safe and---

“Whatever this is, you’re in the middle of it.”  It hurts her to say, but the time for denial has passed.

He saw the rooftop.

He heard the thunder.

“It only comes out when we touch.”

He nods.  Waits for her to go on, to work through it.

“I know it happened when I touched Elsa, but--- this thing ,” she waves a vague circle in the air, “Elsa had it, too.  It might just be---”  

  It’s too strange and too fucking complicated.

And too impossible.

  “OK.  I can’t explain Elsa, not really, but I think when we touch, you and I, I think maybe you’re like-- like an amplifier?  For energy that’s already inside me?  Or maybe a conduit?  And the more often we touch, the stronger the current, and the stronger the current, the more--- fuck .  I don’t know.”

She looks up at him, helpless.

“I can’t explain it, Killian.  I don’t even know what it is.  What does it mean?  And why can’t it just mean that I’m losing my mind?”

  “You’re not losing your mind,” he says, and she shouldn’t be as relieved as she is that he sounds so very sure.  “And we might not be able to figure it out tonight.  But,” he squeezes her hand and his eyes look grave, “I think we must simply be open for anything.  Not deny what is happening, no matter how outlandish.  Not ignore anything, not repress or rationalize.  I think we need to be vigilant for more signs.  And you need to listen.”

“Listen to what?”  Her voice is small. 

“Yourself.  Everything that’s happening inside your head.”

She shudders.  “Like I’m not terrified enough just sitting here.”

He lifts her hand again, puts it over his heart.

“I know,” he whispers.  “I know.  But I think it’s the only way.”

  She nods. He’s right. She can’t think of a single alternative.

  Then he slowly lets go and gets up.

“Neither one of us has eaten since breakfast, and it’s dinnertime.”  He holds out his hand.  “Let’s go downstairs and have some food and then you can tell me exactly what you saw.”

She feels cold and numb and helpless, but then she takes his hand and he pulls her up.  

“See?”  His eyes are soft as he smiles at her.  “Whatever it is, it’s not a bad thing when we come in contact.”  The tips of his ears turn bright red as he scratches behind the right one.  “Nothing that feels--- nothing this warm and---”  he shuffles and huffs and looks away.  “It can’t be bad.  It can’t feel like this and be bad.”

  And no matter what else, Emma has to agree.

-/-

“Where are you coming from?”

  It’s the first thing August has dared say since they exchanged names.  The man next to him is intimidating in his incongruity, in the way he seems both put together and yet unbalanced.  It looks like a carefully constructed image in which Dr. Victor Whale has created himself, one which doesn’t quite suit him, but which he takes great pains to maintain.

His eyes are a dead giveaway that all is not what it seems, and that the careless entitlement proclaimed by the wrapper is most certainly not the content of this package.

  Sometimes August misses being a detective.

  “Boston,” the man says, and August frowns.

“Boston-- how on earth did you come to pick me up along Route 2 in fucking New Hampshire?”  He stops himself and smiles, chagrined.  

“Sorry,” he says.  “Sorry for the language.”

Whale laughs out loud.  It sounds heartfelt, but like he’s out of practise.  “Are you kidding?  I’m a surgeon .  You don’t know language until you’ve been in an OR.  Tarantino on his best day couldn’t write what we say in there.”

August has to grin.  “You should see a metropolitan precinct bullpen at 4AM on Halloween.  When you’re questioning suspects as they puke on you.”

The doctor laughs again.  It sounds marginally more relaxed.  “Is that what you do?  You’re a cop?”

  It hits him out of nowhere and August has to take a very deep breath.

  And another.

  And another.

  “I used to be,” he finally manages, and opens his backpack.  “Is it OK if I have a beer?”

Whale turns, and looks at him with uncomfortably sharp eyes, and then nods.  

“It’s fine,” he says quietly.  “Go ahead.”  

He looks back at the road.  “But to answer your question, it’s because I’m an idiot.”  At August’s puzzled look he clarifies, “The reason I picked you up in New Hampshire, way off course.”

“You can’t be an idiot.  You’re a fucking doctor.”

Whale shakes his head.  “Yeah, well, I’m also a very tired man coming off an 18-hour shift, and didn’t realize I was going up I-93 instead of I-95 until I was in the middle of White Mountain National Forest.”

  There it is again. Another sign.

This man, who picked him up off the side of the road while August was still contemplating changing his mind and continuing to run wasn’t even supposed to be there.

Was supposed to be on a freeway a hundred miles east. Yet here he is instead, on the same road as August, on his way to the same fucking town, and it can’t be a coincidence.

  “In that case I am both extremely lucky and very grateful you came along,” August says, and takes a large sip of his beer.

Whale throws him the first smile that reaches his eyes.  “My pleasure,” he says, and turns back to the road.

.

-/-

“David?”

When he hears his name he snaps back to reality and it feels like coming out of hibernation.  He realizes that he is still holding Graham’s file in his hand, and that the only light inside the station comes from Emma’s desk.  When he looks up he sees Mary Margaret looking down at him, her eyes sharp and her lips pinched and worried.

  “David?”  Definitely worried.  “What are you doing here, sitting in the dark?”

  He doesn’t know.  Doesn’t remember what he was thinking.  Doesn’t remember why he is here.

  “David - are you all right?”

Possibly.  Maybe.  But that is not her concern.  It shouldn’t be.

“I’m fine Ms--- sorry.”  He blinks and shakes his head.  It’s like his brain is on a delay.  He blinks again, gets up and turns on the overhead light.  “What can I do for you?”

“You---  David, you look really out of it.  Are you sure you’re OK?”

  He won’t admit it under pain of death, but that note of worry in her voice is the nicest thing that’s happened to him, ever.

  “I’m fine,” he smiles, and she beams back at him.  “What do you need?”

“I was thinking,” she says, “about Graham.  And how his tracks disappeared.”  

David can feel his whole body stiffen in fear.

“Tell me you didn’t go out to the bridge by yourself.”  He grabs her arm, squeezes tightly.  “Tell me you didn’t.”

“Of course not,” she says with a full-body eyeroll.  “I’m not an idiot.”  Her eyes grow marginally softer.  “And besides.  I promised you.”

He breathes a sigh of relief.  

“But a thought did occur to me,” she goes on, her voice pensive.  “And it’s crazy, I know that, but the whole time we were checking out the scene, all three times we went there, you know what we never did?”

David slowly shakes his head, and the fear comes back fast and hard.

“What?”  He rasps.  “What didn’t we do?”

Mary Margaret meets his gaze head on.  “Look up.”

-/-

“So this is the diner you said also has rooms?”

  August stretches and nods at the doctor.  He’s hungry, and he did like Granny’s, back when he stayed here.  Did like the rooms, whenever he wasn’t sleeping in Sheriff Swan’s holding cell. The rooms were infinitely more comfortable.

He nods, smiles a bit and motions towards the door.

  “It’s probably not what you’re used to, given that your shoes probably cost more than my rent back in Boston, but Granny makes a mean onion ring, and the rooms are clean.”

The doctor’s eyes narrow.  “How would you know what I’m used to,” he mumbles as he opens the door.  

And then freezes.

Just stands in the doorway, still as a statue, and just as immovable.

August follows his line of sight and sees two people facing each other in a booth on the left.  A woman with blonde hair and her back to him, and a man with dark hair and enough scruff to nearly qualify as a beard.

  Killian is here.

Killian is here, talking to Sheriff Swan.

And the doctor is staring at them both.

  He knows them. He knows at least one of them.

He’s here because of at least one of them.

  “Killian?”  Whale finally shakes his head and releases the door.

“ Victor? ”  Killian looks up, surprise clear on his face, and then his eyes wander over and settle on-- 

“ August? ”

The sheriff’s head whips around at that and August can tell that she knows a lot more than she did the last time he saw her.  A lot more.

“We were trying to find you,” Emma says, and gets up.  “Killian said we needed you, needed your help, but I couldn’t find a trace of where you’d gone.”

“I wasn’t a detective for nothing.”  August grins for a moment.  “If I don’t want to be found, I---”  

But one look at Killian’s face tells him exactly why Killian needs help, and August wishes fervently that back at that rest stop he’d told his conscience to shove it and kept running.

Also, he should not have stuck to beer.  He is way too sober for this.

  “Can somebody tell me what’s going on?”  Whale’s voice sounds strained and uncertain as he looks at the Sheriff, and August picks up an undercurrent of--- something.  He fixates on it, concentrates on it, in order to not have to think about anything else.

“And who are you?”

“Sorry,” Killian gets up as well.  “Victor - this is Storybrooke’s Sheriff, Emma Swan.  Emma, this is Dr Victor Whale, a friend of mine from Boston.”

“Victor will do,” Whale says and shakes Emma’s hand, but his movements are stiff.

  August slides into the booth next to Emma and backs into the corner to get the best possible view of all the actors in this little drama.

Because there’s no way he’s thinking about blood-soaked symbols and bloodier quills before he’s had a lot more alcohol.

No way.

He orders a double shot of rye.

  “Tell me again why you’re here?  And--- how on earth did you two meet?”  Killian sounds puzzled, like this is too big a coincidence.  August is inclined to agree. 

“Elsa called me,” Whale says, his voice strained.  “She said you’d gone hunting down old ghosts.  Said someone had to keep an eye on you.”

  The last part is a lie.  The doctor is not here because he was sent by anyone.  He is definitely here out of his own free will.

  “And you?”

It’s the sheriff who asks, and August quirks a brow at her.  Don’t think .  “Missed the cot in your holding cell.”

“Smartass.”  She smiles at him, and August watches as Killian’s face grows soft as he looks at the sheriff, watches as Whale’s expression goes blank as he looks away.

  “I was almost in Lancaster,” August says, because not thinking will only get him so far, and he might as well accept that he’s here now, back in the fucking thick of it.  “I almost kept running.”  He shrugs.  “But then I thought, I’m never going to be able to run far enough or fast enough to escape it.”

The waitress brings his double shot just in time, and he slams it down and orders another.

Then he sighs, and the sheriff pats his arm, her eyes kind.

“I know I haven’t been a detective in forever,” he goes on, and does not count the number of years it’s been.  “And I know I’m not exactly, well---”

He can’t finish that sentence, not with everyone looking at him full of empathy.  Where is that damn rye?  

“But I’m here to help.”

“I’m glad you came back,” Sheriff Swan says, her voice low and sincere.  “We definitely need help.”

  And then her phone rings.

The longer she speaks, the tenser her shoulders.  The muscle in her jaw jumps, and Killian leans forward, worry clearly written all over his features, and almost touches her hand.

The Sheriff smiles at Killian, strained but grateful, and then August catches the expression on Victor’s face, and oh.

Oh.

  Well.

This is going to end in heartbreak.

  “David says Ms Blanchard came up with some interesting theories regarding the tracks surrounding the bridge,” Emma says as she hangs up.  “And he also says he has to show us something on the bridge itself.”  She quirks a tired eyebrow at Killian.  “He was going to show us after we got back from the cabin, but apparently, we never did make it back to the station, and now it’s too dark .”

She does a perfect impression of her Deputy in full huff, and Killian laughs out loud.  A faint blush creeps across Emma’s cheeks and Whale across from her looks like it physically hurts him to sit in the booth.

  Then Emma checks her watch.  

“It’s late,” she says, “and there is nothing else we can do tonight.  Let’s all get some sleep---” she looks pointedly at Killian, who has dark purple shadows under his eyes, “and meet back here at 7 for breakfast, OK?”

August nearly chokes on his second double shot and coughs for a solid 30 seconds.  

“Oh god,” he finally croaks, “by all that is good and holy, Sheriff, please make it 8.”

She rolls her eyes, but nods, and they all awkwardly slide out of the booth.

  “You can stay here,” Killian says to Whale.  “The rooms are decent.”

“So I’ve been told,” Victor smirks, and August has to smile.

He watches as Victor walks up to Granny and asks about her rates, and admits to himself that the doctor has a very nice smile, and a very nice ass.  Even if he’s crushing on the impossible get.

  Yes, this definitely has the potential to end in heartbreak.

Unless.

-/- 

    “I’m walking you home.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

  It’s a standoff without winners.  Killian looks as determined as Emma has seen him yet, and she feels equal parts touched and supremely annoyed.  

She does not need a chaperone.

But he doesn’t blink.

  “Stop it,” she says.  “I’m a sheriff.  I can take care of myself.”

“Swan,” he sighs, but his voice has no give.  “Don’t you think I know that by now?”  A note of steel creeps into his tone, subsumes the permanent exhaustion.  “Do you really believe I doubt your abilities?  Still?”

The note of steel isn’t irritation, she realizes.  It’s--- distress.  

“Emma.”  Even quieter now.  Even more urgent.  “This is no time for----”  He stops.  Clears his throat.  “I know you are tough and skilled and resourceful.  Everyone so far has been tough and skilled and resourceful.  Every one.” Oh god.  

“Please---”  His voice cuts out, he shakes his head.  “Just let me see you home.  If for nothing else but my own peace of mind.”

  And suddenly it is easy to concede.

  “Bring your overnight bag,” she says, amazed that it took her so long to suggest it, dancing around misplaced pride and unnamed emotions as she has been for days now.  “You can crash on my couch.”

He looks unspeakably relieved.

She waits as he runs up to his room, shakes her head at herself.

Maybe on her couch he will finally get some sleep.

.

“Boy Scout packing his toothbrush?”

August’s voice tears her from her thoughts and she watches as he slowly makes his way down the diner’s front steps.

“Did you just call Detective Jones a Boy Scout? ”

August laughs and pulls out a flask.  “Trust me, Sheriff.  The shoe fits.” “Apart from the fact that he breaks all the rules and he drinks like a fish.”

“Does he now,” August says, and lifts his flask.  “Cheers.”  

He takes a long sip and sits down at one of the empty tables.  “From where I’m standing the boy is stone cold sober and has his demons well on a leash.”  He holds the flask out to her.  “Drink?”

Emma shakes her head.  

“Be careful, Sheriff.”

She scoffs and gears up to tell August exactly what she thinks of his advice when he cuts her off.

“Don’t.”  August’s voice is pure flint.  “Don’t even think you know what this is all about.  What it will do to you, to your town, to your deputy.  Don’t you dare look at Killian as a piece of damaged goods.  You wait and watch everyone you love die and then, maybe , you get to have an opinion.  If you have enough sanity left for one.”

He looks at her like a piece of refuse, and she realizes that she couldn’t speak if she tried.

He takes another sip.  “He’s a fucking university professor charging headfirst into dark alleys and crack dens and shots fired, so don’t you dare .  He’s still on the job.  He’s still functioning.”

  “I don’t think of him as damaged goods.”  Emma’s voice is gravel and shame.  “I never thought that.”

August gets up, takes a step towards her, enters her space.  Focuses his eyes squarely on her.  She can smell cheap whisky on his breath.

But his eyes are clear, and she holds his gaze.  Doesn’t blink until he finally nods.

“Good,” he says, and she feels like she just passed the most important test she has ever taken.

  “What’s going on here?”

Killian looks puzzled and August leans back as he and Emma both say, “Nothing.”  And Killian’s brows furrow.

Emma stands frozen and August whispers, “Sorry if I came on a bit strong.  Old ghosts.”

She nods, and he turns to Killian.  

“I wish I could say I’m happy to be here.”  

He holds out the flask, but Killian declines, and August shoots Emma a look that could have cut glass.  She bites her lip hard, needs the pain to anchor her to this moment.  To stay in the present.  

Then August turns back, shrugs, and smiles at the detective.  “But it is good to see you, old friend.”

Killian grins, small and wistful.  “It is.  You staying here?”

August nods.  “Clean sheets and a liquor license?  I could do worse.”

“Much worse.”  Killian’s grin widens for a moment, before once again turning somber.  “Keep an eye out for Victor?  I don’t know why he’s here, and he looked a bit spooked.”

“You don’t know why he’s here?”  August laughs out loud.  

Killian shakes his head, and Emma gets the feeling she is missing something big.

“I can’t believe they ever made you a detective.”  August laughs again.  “You don’t notice shit.”

And with that he takes another long swig and makes his way up the steps.

“But don’t worry, princess,” he shoots back over his shoulder.  “I’ll keep both eyes peeled.”

Emma can hear him laughing all the way up the stairs.

.

“You all right, Swan?”  

She hasn’t spoken the entire way to her house, and his words sound strangely loud after the perfect silence of their walk.

“Fine,” she says, unlocks the front door, and turns on the light.

  The living room looks--- lovely.  Bright and homey, with a comfortable-looking couch and an overstuffed chair and books everywhere .  It’s how his own living room used to look, more or less, back when he had a life.  It’s how he would like to live again, someday.  When he gets his life back.  

If he gets his life back.

  Emma is walking around, rambling on about sheets on the couch and blankets to spare and does he need pillows? - and he reaches for her arm.

She stills in her tracks, an afghan in one hand and a cushion in the other, and he swears she is vibrating .  “Emma,” he says, and she’s not looking at him, not moving, not breathing, and he asks again.  “Are you all right?”

“I think you’re the smartest man I ever met,” she says, and turns towards him.  There are tears in her eyes, and the words sound like they were ripped straight from her soul.  “I think you’re brilliant and brave and stronger than----”

Her voice breaks on a sob and she yanks her arm from his grip with force.

“And I never thought you were damaged goods, I never thought, I----”

She sobs again, and tears start to roll down her cheeks.

“But I did.”  Her voice is a cracked whisper.  “Oh god, Killian, I did.  I thought---  oh my god, I did .”

She wipes her cheeks in hard, angry swipes, and he wishes there was something he could say, because she’s obviously distressed, but he doesn’t even know what’s happening.

“You said you were all those things, but you’re not, you’re not , and I thought all the wrong---” her voice is somersaulting--- “and then August came and said all the--- and I just--- I just----”  

A sob hits her so hard, it sounds like she’s choking.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers.  “I’m so so so sorry.”

She hands him the blanket and the pillow.

“Please make yourself at home.  Help yourself to anything in the kitchen.  The bathroom is down the hall.  What’s mine is yours.”  She wipes her cheeks again.  Tries to smile.  Fails.  “I’ll see you in the morning.  Just - take anything you need.”  

And then she turns to go upstairs and leaves Killian standing in the middle of the room.

Completely bewildered.

  .

“Hey.”

  It’s pitch dark out still.  She was trying to be as quiet as possible, but there he is in her kitchen doorway, running a hand through his disheveled hair as he looks at her closely.  She knows her face is still red and puffy.  She can’t bring herself to care.

  She puts down the coffee can and looks up.  “Did you get any sleep?”

He smiles.  It’s happy and unguarded and makes him look so very young .  “I did.  Best sleep I had in years.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, because it can’t wait.  “I’m sorry about last night.  I don’t know what came over me.”

He takes a small step towards her.

“Emma.”   His voice is as kind as his smile.  “You’ve had some cruelly hard days and barely any rest.  I’m amazed you’re ambulatory, never mind sane.”  His hand reaches for hers slowly, and the moment they touch the lovely warmth spreads through her again, and oh, how she missed it.

“You’d be entitled to a bona fide nervous breakdown by now, and yet you’re just plugging away as if this were any other case.”

He takes her other hand.  It feels so safe, she nearly cries again.

“So give yourself a break.  You have nothing to be sorry about.  I’ve been where you are, and trust me, I was in much worse shape then than you are now.”

  She swallows hard.

Part of her wants to tell him to leave, not to go through all of this again.

Part of her wants to figure this out and put an end to the whole thing, once and for all.

Most of her just wants to remain here, in limbo, holding his hand.

  “So please don’t be sorry,” he says.  

She nods and silence descends upon them.  His hands are warm, folded through hers, and he pulls both of them up, against his heart, and they just look at each other.

Breathing in rhythm.

Emma thinks she can hear their hearts beating.  Together.

She can’t think, can’t move, can’t do anything but stand there in her kitchen, with his blue eyes on hers and his warmth in her veins.

  After an eternity he whispers, “This too, shall pass.”

And for a moment Emma gets the feeling that that’s not what he wanted to say at all.

.

.

THANK YOU ALL - for reading and for being so incredibly patient.

And about that new pairing that's starting to emerge here, all i have to say is that i did NOTHING. OK? NOTHING. August got into Victor's car and they started making googly eyes at each other totally without my doing. 🤣

And then @profdanglaisstuff​ came along and coined this pairing DOCTOR WOOD, (which is brilliant and perfect and i laughed out loud when she suggested it), and egged me on - and there you have it.

DOCTOR WOOD has all the earmarks of becoming my new favorite chew toy.

-/-

They haven’t spoken in minutes, many long minutes, and Killian just stands there with his arms around Emma.  She is warm, and her breathing is relaxed and even, and it’s all he can do to stop his mind from racing down every single awful path of premonition and just stay in the moment.  He’s terrified and warm and safe at the same time and his mind balks at the contradiction, fight or flight knocking at the edges of his consciousness, but he stays still and listens to her breathe.

It’s his first peaceful moment in forever.

The sound of a door opening somewhere upstairs makes them both straighten up and move apart slowly.  By the time Elsa enters the room, there are three feet between them and a sense of loss that remains.

  “You guys sleep OK?”  Elsa twists her hair up and doesn’t wait for an answer.  “Want some breakfast?”

They follow her into the kitchen.

It’s bright and welcoming even in the flat November morning sunshine, and he looks at Emma as she sits down at the table, with just her t-shirt and her hair all tousled, smiling gratefully at Elsa as she takes a proffered mug and the smell of coffee in the air, and he can’t .

  “We can’t do this here.”  His voice is sharp, and he doesn’t care.  “We have to go to my place.”

  He can’t sit here in this lovely kitchen with the sunlight and the toasting English muffins, can’t do this in this house of sadness next to the pictures of Liam and laughter and happier days, can’t talk about Evil while drinking Elsa’s premium roast, because he’s absolutely terrified and he is T minus 5 for a meltdown. They have to leave.  Have to.

  Elsa’s mouth opens in protest and he cuts her off.  

“There are things I have to show Emma.  From the last case.  Your explanations won’t make any sense otherwise.”

Elsa quirks a supremely sarcastic eyebrow.  “Like they were going to make much sense either way.”  

“She needs context.”

Elsa gives him a long, sharp, figuring look, and finally turns to Emma, who has been watching them in silence.  

“Do you want to take a shower first?  Get out of these clothes?  You can borrow some of mine.”

Emma nods.

Killian breathes a sigh of relief.

-/-

“Graham is missing.”

  David has just managed to put on clothes and Mary Margaret has somehow managed to have two steaming cups of strong black tea ready in the short time it took him to do so.  Her hands are unsteady as she hands him one cup, and he has to stop himself from reaching for her.

That’s not professional.

  Instead he sits down at his kitchen table with her and pulls out a notepad and pen.  “Graham?  Graham Humbert?”

She nods.

“What makes you think he’s missing?”

Mary Margaret’s eyes harden like flint at What makes you think , but her voice stays even.  She has incredible self-control.

“I got 23 calls from Graham.  23 calls in the space of just over 10 minutes.  That’s a call every 30 seconds.”

David notices the back of his neck get hot.  

“Does he---” he clears his throat-- “does he call you often?”

Mary Margaret gives him a full-body eyeroll that lets David know exactly what she thinks of this sudden surfacing of misplaced jealousy and says, “Have you ever hit redial every 30 seconds for 10 minutes?  Ever ?”

David can feel an atomic-heat blush start to creep up his neck and shakes his head no.

“Well then, Deputy ---” oh, the superiority that woman can pack into a single word--- “in that case I’m thinking Graham had a very urgent reason to do so.”

  She has a point.

David is now wondering why Mary Margaret never went for law enforcement. He’s also thinking that whatever grade she teaches must bring forth the most well-behaved and comprehensively educated children in the county.  At least.

  “True,” he says.  “His reason must have been compelling.  However---”  David makes a note to do the most thorough background check he’s ever done on Graham Humbert--- “I still don’t know why you think he’s missing.”

“He’s not at home,” Mary Margaret says, point blank.  “I missed his calls, all of them, because I was asleep.  I called him back several times and got his voicemail each time.  So I went to his house.  I know where he keeps his spare key.”

David bites down hard on ‘ oh you do, do you ’ and nods.  “Go on.”

“His house is empty and his bed has not been slept in.  His rifle and hunting pack were gone.”

“Isn’t it much more likely that he’s actually on a hunt?  That he’s out somewhere with no cell reception and just hasn’t come back yet?”

  Mary Margaret shakes her head, but both her superiority and her impatience have vanished and made way for worry.  Very real, genuine worry.  David forbids himself to react.

  “I thought that too, at first.”  Her voice sounds small now, and not at all like the formidable woman she was just moments ago.  “But it was so strange.  He never calls, unless it’s about community business---”  David isn’t relieved by this, not at all --- “and he very rarely hunts at night.  None of us are really night hunters - we don’t have that many nocturnals worth hunting in the area, and it requires a lot more skill and a lot more equipment.  Just--- boar, occasionally.  But that’s what I thought at first, you know?  Razorbacks have been spotted and Graham loves them in stew.”

She takes a deep breath and looks at David, and he can see panic in her eyes now.  It’s kept on a tight rein, but it’s there.

He puts down his notepad and tries to make his voice gentle.  “But--- you don’t think that’s what it is?”

Mary Margaret shakes her head.  “I followed his tracks.  From the house.  I had to----  I don’t know what I was thinking.  I wanted to see for myself.”

  Fear, real, palpable, genuine fear starts to pool in David’s stomach and without thinking he takes her hand.  It’s cold.  

  “It was hard going - he’s a skilled hunter and it was pitch dark, although I do have a really good flashlight.”

He smiles a wan smile.

“His tracks zigzagged a bit, but eventually they headed to the watering spot at the river.  By the bridge.”

David’s breath stops.

It cannot be.

  Mary Margaret nods slowly, and looks up at David, tears in her eyes.  “His tracks go all the way down the hill, and then---”  she takes a deep breath that sounds more like a sob---  “then they just--- disappear.”

-/-

As the three of them climb the stairs to his apartment, Emma can hear Killian breathing much harder than he should going up a few flights.  She remembers just how tired he’s looked ever since he showed up at her crime scene, remembers that she herself woke him up to get answers not 24 hours ago.

Was it really just yesterday morning that she knocked on his door?

  The building is run-down and ugly.  There is marker graffiti on the walls, spaced around cracks and chipped paint and splintered bannisters.  The stairwell bulbs are flickering neon, the steps creaky and uneven.  Killian pulls open the door to the 3rd story corridor and finally stops in front of a door with four deadbolts that doesn’t quite fit its frame.  There’s an actual gap above the top hinge.

Emma shudders.

This is not safe, not at all.

  Killian turns around and looks at her.  “My place is not exactly---”

He huffs and tries again.

“I don’t do a lot of entertaining,” he says, and his attempt at self-deprecating humor makes Emma ache.  He smiles, but it’s small and apologetic.  “Anyway, I’m really sorry for the mess.”

She nods and tries to look reassuring, but he’s already turned back to the door, unlocking the deadbolts.

Then they enter and Killian flicks on the light and Emma’s breath catches.

She can hear Elsa behind her gasp.

  It’s only one room, with a small kitchenette in the far left corner and a mattress in the far right.  At the center of the room is a ratty couch with a leaning coffee table covered in empty bottles, 

Empty liquor bottles. Rum, from the looks of it.

There’s brown shag carpeting, and a small TV on top of a milk crate, and a stack of empty pizza boxes next to a side door which Emma assumes must lead to the bathroom.

There is not one personal item anywhere.  The room is utterly transient.  It is not a home, it is merely a place to stay.

  But that is not what has made their breath catch, hers and Elsa’s.

The side wall looks like it’s straight from the set of a serial killer movie.  It is full of newspaper clippings and post-its and photos, notes and explanations and printouts.

On the floor before it are almost a dozen cardboard file boxes, some open, some stacked.  File folders are everywhere.

Everywhere.

Emma counts no less than three notepads, filled with neat, tightly-spaced writing.

  Behind her Elsa exhales slowly.  

“Killian.”  It’s a whisper.  “Oh, Killian.  You should have told me.”

He turns and looks at her and Emma’s heart constricts.

“There was nothing to tell,” he says, and it sounds final.  

Then he looks at Emma.  “Come sit down,” he says and points at the couch.  “This is not going to be easy to hear.”

  Emma sits down on the couch and the springs dig into her backside.  No one could possibly get any rest or relaxation on this instrument of torture.  

Killian in turn plucks a few photocopies off the wall and hands them to her.  They are notecards, the by-now familiar symbols smeared in places.  The smears are eerie and ominous, even in black and white.

“Are these from your case?  From before?”  

He nods.

She can practically see the rusted red of the originals.  “They look the same?  Like-- they’re the same symbols?”

He nods again.  “They are.  It’s a script called Ogham - a very early alphabet which originated in Ireland.  There is some dispute over its inception, but there is compelling evidence that it originated within the 1st century BC.”

Emma looks down at the photocopies in her hands.  “So this is Irish?”

“No.”  His posture changes, becomes straighter and yet more relaxed somehow.  “The alphabet used on the cards originated in Ireland.  The language did not.”  

  The lines on his face smooth out, his features become animated, his voice utterly self-assured.  He knows this.

Knows it, and loves it.

  “There are far fewer writing systems than there are  languages, because many languages use similar alphabets, or variants thereof.  For example, French and English and German and Spanish and Dutch and about a hundred others use the Latin alphabet.  There are dozens of countries using variants of Cyrillic, and a dozen more using variants of Arabic.  This of course is a broad generalization.  It’s a lot more complicated than that, and I’d be happy to explain this in detail some other time.”

  His eyes are shining, his hands in constant movement, gestures punctuating each of his points.  He looks like a completely different person.

Here, here is the man from the photograph.

“Now, the thing about Ogham is that it’s phonetic ,” he goes on.  “Which means it can be adapted to any language that uses the same or similar enough phonemes.  It wouldn't suit tonal languages or other ones that had very different phonetic structures, but---”

  Elsa clears her throat, and he looks up in surprise.  Like he just now realizes where he is. “Sorry.  Got a bit technical.”  His right hand comes up to scratch behind his ear, and it’s ridiculously endearing.  “What?”

Emma smiles at him.  

“It’s just---”  She shakes her head, still smiling..  “Elsa said you were a professor at Oxford, but I couldn’t picture it until just now.”

.

If there were any justice in this world, this sentence would not hurt as much as it does.

There is no justice in this world.  It feels like a knife to his heart.  

  “That was a long time ago,” he says, and his voice is harsh and cutting as he turns away.  From out of the corner of his eyes he can see her smile fall.

He walks over to the kitchen and pulls a bottle of rum from a cabinet, never mind the fact that it’s not even noon yet.  He takes two long sips, and a third one, and then walks back to the couch.

Emma is staring at the papers in her hand.  She doesn’t look up and doesn’t say a word, and that hurts, too, with a dull, aching pain he hasn’t felt in forever.

Doesn’t want to feel.

He almost walks back to the kitchen to get the bottle, but Elsa fixes him with a gaze that could have melted steel, and so he clears his throat instead.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he finally says, and he’s not sure himself to what he is referring.  “Anyway, I never did figure out what the actual language was.  I tried transcribing it phonetically, but couldn’t place it at all, couldn’t match it to anything I’d studied or encountered, and I was still trying to consult with my colleagues when---”

He can’t say it. He can’t think it. He can’t look at Elsa.

This time he does go to take another pull from the bottle on the kitchen counter.  When he walks back, he keeps his eyes glued to the shag carpet.

  “This new case, your case,” he vaguely motions in Emma’s direction, “it’s different.  I think this is a language I know.  I think it’s related to Manx.”  He rubs his eyes.  “It’s not exactly the same, there are vital differences, but it’s close enough.  Close enough that I think I can figure out---”

  He stops himself and finally looks up.

Emma is staring at him, wide-eyed.  She looks almost shell shocked.

  “I can explain that later.”  He tries to soften his voice.  It comes out gruff  instead.  “But I think that nobody has ever actually encountered either language.  Ever.  I’m not sure it’s--”

Emma blinks, and Elsa shifts in her seat.

God, he doesn’t want to do this next part.

“Look, Emma.”  He crouches down before her.  “This is all important information, but it’s not why we’re here.”

He looks at Elsa, who nods.

“We want to tell you why you’re having these--- visions.”

“Because I’m going insane?”  Emma bursts a short laugh, harsh and joyless.  “Because my whole life has become a fucking exhibit of the absurd?  What with the dead languages and the dead bodies and the runes written in goddamn blood?  Why wouldn’t I have visions, too?  I mean - isn’t it high time I lost my mind?”

“Not at all.”  Elsa leans forward and puts her hand on Emma’s.  “You are not going crazy, that I promise you.  The reason for all this, the reason you’re having visions is as simple as it is hard to believe.”

Emma looks up and Elsa nods.

“It’s magic, of course.”

-/-

The coffee at the station is bitter and thin and David wishes he’d thought to stop at Granny’s along the way.  Then he looks at Mary Margaret’s anxious face, at the way she is holding herself together, and is glad they came straight here to make an official report.

He waves at the pot.  “I’d offer you a cup, but I think this qualifies as torture.”

The left corner of her mouth ticks up, like she appreciates his efforts, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

David pulls up the form for missing persons and Graham’s records and inputs all the bits and pieces he already knows.  Graham’s middle name is Chase.  Chase.

  When he gets to the part where Mary Margaret’s story arrives at the bridge, he stops and closes his eyes for a moment.

“So,” he finally says, trying for calm.  “Tell me exactly what you mean by ‘his tracks disappeared’.”

She looks at him as if she wants to look exasperated but can’t, because she’s simply too scared.

“Exactly what I said,” she grinds out.  “There are very clear tracks leading down to the bridge.  In order to hunt that watering spot, you have to cross the bridge, go in a wide circle, and approach again from the rear.  Unless you want to wade the river, and in November, you don’t want to wade the river, even if you had waders.  Especially not at night.  And Graham didn’t have waders.  He hated fishing.  He hated water.”

  David files this away for later, and doesn’t interrupt.  Mary Margaret’s eyes are fixed somewhere in the middle distance, and her hands are clutched together so tightly that her knuckles have turned white, but her voice is steady.

  “Anyway, this is part of the reason I was able to track him at all, seeing as he’s an excellent hunter who doesn’t exactly trample a freeway through the woods---” she looks at him pointedly and he shrugs--- “and it was dark.  But it was highly probable that he was headed for the bridge, and so I did the same.  It’s the only one in a 20-mile radius.”

  Her voice trails off and he waits.  It takes Mary Margaret almost a minute to go on.  When she does, her voice is low and apprehensive.

“I told you there were clear tracks down that hill, going to the bridge.  It’s true, there were.  Are.”  She stops, shakes her head.  “There are clear tracks.  The reason they are clear, is that they were made by someone who no longer sought to avoid sign.  Who was not being careful, didn’t watch where he was going.”  She takes a deep breath.  “Someone who was most likely running.  Running very, very fast.”  

Her gaze focuses on David.  Her eyes are burning.  “They’ll tell you that you can tell running tracks from walking ones by indentation, which is mostly bullshit .  There are so many factors - surface density and type of shoe, type of sole worn, and that’s not even counting body type and individual movement.  But---” another deep breath--- “Graham was running.  I’d bet my life on it.  There’s almost no heel, it’s all toeprints right down to the bridge, and they’re very far apart.  I tried to match his stride and I was short nearly a foot.”

Her brows furrow.  

“Don’t say it.  I know I’m a lot shorter.”

  David nods.  She doesn’t look shorter at the moment.  

  “So anyway,” her voice drops down to low and careful again, and her eyes drift back to the wall.  “I followed the tracks to the bridge, and then of course lost them, because it’s made of steel.  But here’s the thing.  They do not pick up on the other side.  I looked for an hour.”

The cold fear inside David starts to pool again in the pit of his stomach.  Mary Margaret spent hours, hours , in those woods by herself.

In the dark.

Alone.

“There was nothing.  Then I went back and noticed that the tracks don’t actually go all the way to the bridge.  They stop a good ten feet before it.  Much farther than Graham could have leapt, even when running for his life.”  Her hands clench together even harder.  “And he was running for his life.  I know he was.”

  She falls silent, her eyes blank, her knuckles white.  David leans forward and gently puts his hand on top of hers.

She snaps back to the present and looks at him, her eyes still full of tears, but none of them fall.

“I know he was,” she whispers.

“I believe you,” he says.  “It’s daylight now, so we can go to Granny’s, get a cup of real coffee, and go back out there and you can show me everything.”

She nods, and the first few drops roll down her cheeks.  She wipes them away angrily with her left hand.  Her right stays in David’s.  It’s warm now.

“But you have to promise me something,” he goes on, and waits until she looks at him.  “Promise me you won’t go out by yourself again.  Not anywhere near that bridge.  Not at night.”

Her brow furrows.

“ Promise me.  Promise you won’t.  I am not above locking you up.  You can spend every night in this cell from now on if you don’t.”

At that she laughs, actually laughs, and it sounds oh so lovely.

“OK Deputy,” she says.  “I promise.”

“Swear,” he says.  He can’t help himself.  The thought of her missing is--- he can’t.

“I swear,” she says solemnly, with just a hint of a twinkle in her eyes.  “I swear on your grandpa pajamas.  Which were really cool by the way.”

And then she laughs out loud again.

He will never get tired of that sound.  Even if he now has to go and buy all new sleepwear.

-/-

“You can’t be serious.  There is no such thing as magic.”

  Emma makes a move to get up and he reaches for her wrist.  Right before his hand touches her skin Emma yanks her arm out of reach, and Elsa leans forward.

“It’s OK,” she says as he looks at Emma, her eyes huge and apprehensive, and he just wants her to not be afraid of him.

“It’s OK,” Elsa repeats.  “Tell me what happens when you guys touch.”

  Emma clears her throat.  Her hands are folded together, pulled back, against her chest.  It’s a study in defense.  Pressed into the corner of his ancient couch, wearing Elsa’s borrowed clothes, she looks more fragile, less solid somehow.  She also looks tired and suspicious and not a little angry, and he can’t blame her.  It’s going to be a lot to take in. And she probably won’t believe them anyway.

When she looks back up at him he tries to nod reassuringly, but he’s exhausted.  Like he could sleep for the rest of his life and it would not be enough.

He sits down on the floor in front of her and doesn’t go get his bottle of rum.

“It’s not always the same,” she finally says.  “The first few times there was this heartbeat that wasn’t mine,  fast and irregular.  And this weird howling that’s not human.  And my vision kind of goes out, there’s just blackness with red sparks.”

“You never told me that!”  It sounds much too accusatory.  Emma’s head snaps around, and she looks disconcerted, and he makes an effort to soften his tone.  “Sorry.  It’s just - you never told me it affected your perception.”

“It’s never very long.”  She shrugs.  

Elsa’s eyes narrow.  “Is this what happened last night as well?  All of it?”

Emma nods.  “It was really strong, too.  Loud.”

“Anything else?”

Emma nods again.  “It’s not always like that.  I mean--- twice when I...”   Her voice trails off, and she looks at Killian.  “Twice when we---”  her hand waves in his general direction--- “it was just--- ”

“Lovely.”  He just blurts it out, and Emma bites her lip.  

“Yeah.”  Her voice is so low he can barely hear it.  “Sort of safe and warm and---” she shrugs-- “yeah.  Lovely.”

She takes a deep breath, and Killian gets the distinct feeling she’s about to say something important, but instead she exhales and shakes her head.

  Then her entire bearing changes.  She sits up ramrod straight, shoulders pulled back, eyebrows pinched, and her voice turns to steel.  “Don’t tell me this is fucking magic.”  Her voice is hard now.  “That’s not just crazy, that’s impossible.”

  He looks at her.  The stiff posture, the clenched jaw - but somehow she doesn’t sound nearly as affronted as she should, given the topic at hand.  She sounds like she thinks she should sound incredulous and doubtful and condescending.  

  Elsa smiles, unruffled.  “You don’t think magic exists?”

“Of course it doesn’t exist.”

There it is again.  Emma’s voice, hitting every note in the required symphony of indignance, but---

“You think thousands of years of oral and written history and hundreds of different kinds and types and practices, through every time period, every continent, every tribe and nation were all made up?”

He watches Emma’s face turn thoughtful.

“You think somehow everyone across time and space just came up with magic?  By themselves?  All of them?”

“Legends and fairy tales and superstitions sprang up across time and distance and tribes all over the globe, and are remarkably similar.”  She looks hard at Elsa.  “So that argument’s not going to fly and you know it.” 

Killian can’t help it, he has to smile.  She’s so smart, and just so---  

He can’t find the right word, not even in the privacy of his own mind, and the smile hurts his cheeks.

“Magic is just something people needed to invent in order to explain the laws of physics.  Or to hold on to something.”  Emma looks at Elsa, her voice sharp, accusatory.  “And I’m positive it has nothing at all whatsoever to do with the fact that I’m losing my mind and hearing heartbeats and seeing sparks and---”

  She cuts herself off abruptly.  She turns and her eyes meet Killian’s, her expression unreadable.  Her eyes grow soft and then narrow and become pure flint.  She slumps only to straighten again, and then slump once more, and she looks in turns resigned, scornful, and crushed.  There is a war waging inside her head, that much is clear, and he watches her eyes fill with tears twice, watches her wipe them in anger and frustration, watches her shudder and open her mouth several times only to close it again.  

He wishes he knew what to say.

Wishes he could take her hand.

  Then Emma looks up.  “There are a million reasons why I should tell you both that you’re crazy.  Why I should get up right now and leave and make sure I never see either one of you again.”  

She bites her lip hard, and his hand is halfway to her mouth before he can stop himself and divert it to run through his hair.

“I should walk out of here right now.”  Emma’s voice is a whisper.  “I should get a restraining order for the both of you.”  She points at his wall, and he cringes.  “ Definitely for you, Killian.”

She closes her eyes.  “Except that----”

  Her voice drifts off and there is silence for a long, long moment.

Killian can hear his heart beat.  

Wonders if Emma can hear it.  Wonders if his is the heartbeat she keeps hearing. Hoping it is.

  “Hypothetically,” Emma finally says, opening her eyes to look at Elsa, “if it were magic - what made you….”  She grimaces, starts again.  “What--- how do you know what’s happening to me?  And why do you think it’s magic?”

  Elsa’s face twists and even though he knew this was coming, Killian feels a sharp stab of pain.  It is the pain of memories unburied, and of having to watch Elsa’s face as she gets ready to answer.

Having to watch Emma start down the same path of ruin and destruction.

He just wants it all to be over.

  “It happened to me,” Elsa says.  Her voice is quiet and yet it cuts to the bone.  “The first time this thing ran around killing people, Liam brought copies of the notecards home to study, and I kept hearing a humming buzz.  And then one day we met at the station and he showed me the originals.  And I heard a howling voice and saw black with red sparks.”  She shudders and Killian would have given anything in that moment to not have to listen. To not have to be here.

To spare Elsa from having to relive it.

To spare Emma from what’s coming her way.

He leans forward and takes Emma’s hand, and she lets him.  Warmth spreads in his chest, warmth and a feeling of calm, and it tethers him, doesn’t let him fall into the abyss of despair where he lives most of his days.  He’s unspeakably grateful for it.

  “No heartbeat though,” Elsa’s voice severs the calm.  “That’s new.”

Emma shivers and he squeezes her fingers until it stops.  Her voice is a whisper.  “Why magic, though?  How did you-- why do you think it was magic?”

“It told me.”  Elsa’s voice is low and infinitely sad.  “When it came for my husband, it told me.  The red sparks exploded and the howling turned into a voice and it told me to unleash my magic or it would take Liam.”  

Tears start to roll down Elsa’s face, but she doesn’t move.

Doesn’t speak for minutes, just sits there, head bowed, tears dripping freely.  Despair rolls off her in waves, and Killian is about to tell her to stop, to not finish the story, when she looks up again.

  “It told me it needed my magic .”  Elsa’s voice is a hiss now, angry. Furious .  “I didn’t know what it was talking about.  You think howling heartbeats are hard to take?  Try being spoken to by the voice in your head, and then have that voice tell you it needs your fucking magic.  Your magic .  Like I have magic.”

Elsa is nearly vibrating with rage, and Emma just sits there, spellbound.

“It said it was here for my power.  My power .”  Elsa laughs.  It sounds terrible.  “But whatever power, whatever magic it wanted, I couldn’t----”

She sobs once, and then takes a deep breath.

“I didn’t know,” she whispers.  “I didn’t know and I couldn’t do what it asked, and then my husband died  and my life----”

  Emma’s phone rings, loud and hard and unforgiving, and she flinches hard.  She pulls it out, but does not let go of Killian’s hand, squeezes his fingers to the point of pain.

She listens for a minute and finally says, “OK, we’ll be there as soon as we can.” 

Then she puts her other hand on Elsa’s.

He can tell from the way they are looking at each other that neither one is hearing a thing other than the silent humming of the traffic outside.

  “I am so sorry.”  Emma sounds utterly, heartbreakingly sincere.  “So sorry.  And I want you to know, I believe you.  I do.”

She shrugs and turns to Killian.  There are tears in her eyes.  “I don’t know what to do with this information, but I believe you both.”  Then she shakes her head and gets up.  Killian feels the loss of her warm hand like the loss of a limb.  

“I have to go back to Storybrooke,” she says, looking at his wall, at the result of hundreds of hours worth of obsessive investigation.  “There’s been another disappearance.”  She turns back to him, her face blank.  “Killian - are you coming back with me?”

  He exhales slowly.

Like that’s a question.

Of course he is.

 .

“LB?”  She asks.  “Is that a nickname?”

Elsa turns to her, eyes somewhere in the middle distance.  “It’s something Liam used to call him, and I guess I just ---”

“Usurped it.”  Killian shrugs.  “Woman has no respect for her elders.”

“We’re the same age.”

“Then you just have no respect, period.”  He turns to Emma, a self-deprecating grin on his face.  “It stands for Little Brother.  I tried to get Liam to stop calling me that for two decades, but---”

His smile falls.

“Sorry.”  Emma doesn’t know what to say.  Talking to these two is like walking through a field of landmines.  

“No, don’t be sorry,” Killian’s eyes are soft now, and his voice is low.  “It’s--- it’s good to talk about Liam without constantly having to dredge up tragedy.  It’s nice.  And he was a bit of a wanker.”

“He was a colossal pain in the ass,” Elsa says, wiping her eyes.  

Killian walks over to hug her and Elsa lets him.  

“Such a fucking pain in the ass,” she repeats, muffled by his sweater, and Emma looks at them, looks at him, looks at his face as his eyes search the room and finally land on her and stay in hers and don’t look away.

  And she knows she has never ever been looked at like that.

  Then Elsa pulls back and breaks the moment.  

“Be careful,” she says, eyes roaming from Killian to Emma and then back again..  “Promise me you’ll be careful.  Both of you.”

All Emma can do is nod, all Killian does next to her is nod, and then Elsa leaves.

Without another word.

  Emma stares at the door for a long time after she’s gone.

  When she finally turns back, Killian is staring at the wall, eyes narrowed, lips a tight line.

“We’ll have to take some of this stuff with us,” he says, motioning at the clippings and the boxes below.  “Will you help me take it down?”

He turns to her with his sharp gaze and exhaustion written in every line on his face and Emma just blurts out, “I’m sorry.”

His brow furrows.  “Whatever for?”

“I was so mean to you.”  

His brow furrows even more.  “Mean to me?  You were never mean to me.  As I recall it was I who wouldn’t give you the time of day in the begin---”

“In my head.”  Emma’s voice has stopped working and she has to clear her throat.  “I thought you were--  in the beginning, I thought you were---”  She tries to take a deep breath.  And can’t.  “And then, even after you showed up, and then in Elsa’s house, and all the pictures, and the---”

A sob catches her completely by surprise, but she fights it down with iron resolve.

“I thought you were----  I thought you were---” Her throat is tight and hard now, and it’s hard to swallow and impossible to go on. 

  Killian walks over to her, slowly, stops only a few inches away.  She can feel his closeness like a current.

“You weren’t wrong.  You aren’t wrong.  I am all those things.”

The sob comes back with might and she cannot stop it.  Tears spring to her eyes.  She can’t breathe right.

He lifts her chin, forces her to look at him.

His eyes are warm, and soft, and god, so tired.

“Emma.”  He says.  Just that.  Nothing else.

“I’m so sorry.”  It’s not even a whisper.  It’s a mouthing of words.

His thumb very slowly rubs her jawbone.  “Don’t be.  You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  If he hugs her now, she’s sure she’ll break.

  He doesn’t.  Just cups her cheek and then lets go, mercifully turns back to his boxes and the wall.

“Let’s get this packed up, shall we?”  he says quietly, and Emma puts a hand on his arm.

“Thank you,” she whispers, even though she doesn’t know exactly what for.  

  The thing about being understood is that it will throw your whole world off-kilter the first time it happens.

If it ever does.

  He covers her hand with his and the connection goes live in a flash of warmth and something else, something bigger, something greater than the sum of their parts, and everything is SafeBlissRelief for an eternal moment until they both withdraw their hands.

Their eyes stay locked.

“Did you feel that?”  he whispers.

Emma nods, and then blinks and breaks the spell.  She can’t .  It’s not just emotional overload.  It feels like she physically cannot uphold this connection, like her muscles and tendons will snap like overextended rubber bands and her neurons will simply stop firing if she spends one more moment inside it.

  “We have to get going,” she rasps, and grabs the first box in front of her.   After a few moments of tense, silent packing, she adds, “I’ll drive.”  

She straightens up and looks back at him, thumbtack in one hand, a newspaper clipping in the other.  

“You need sleep.”  She says firmly.  “Promise to try and get some rest on the way?”

He hands her the keys.

  .

He falls asleep almost as soon as they hit I-95 -- just slumps down in his seat, face smushed into the folds of her standard-issue bomber jacket pressed up against the side window, and his breaths become long and even.  She pushes down on the accelerator, flies past all the people going 65 on the dot once they see her cruiser, and tries not to notice just how much younger, how much more vulnerable he looks.

She remembers his face back at his apartment when he started to talk about the languages, the way his eyes shone and his features became animated, and she wishes that that person hadn’t been leeched from him by trauma and tragedy until nothing but the shell remained.

He deserves to be that person.

Nothing about this is fair.

  She lets her thoughts circle the drain of the hard, cold facts of her present case, and his previous case, and Killian’s demise, so she won’t have to think about the huge, pink, sparkly elephant in the room, holding the magic wand.

Because she’s absolutely not going to think about that.

At all. EVER.

.

-/-

.

“Emma’s on her way.  She’s bringing the Boston detective back, too.”

“She’s bringing a detective?  From out of state?  Why?”

David shrugs and tries for nonchalance.  “Seems he had a similar case a few years back and has some useful information.”

Mary Margaret laughs out loud and pats his arm.

“Wow.  Do you ever not have a poker face, Deputy.”

  She’s laughing at him.  She’s laughing at him, but her cheeks are rosy and her eyes shine, and he can’t be mad at her.

Especially since she happens to be right.

  “Admit it.  This is bugging the crap out of you.”  She quirks a sardonic eyebrow.  “Big-city detective on your turf, taking up all of Emma’s attention.”

David starts to nod and only then realizes what Mary Margaret is saying.   

“No!”  It comes out much louder than anticipated.  “I don’t care that he takes up Emma’s time.”  

She laughs again.  “Deputy Nolan, it’s OK.  You can be a little pissed off that people are infringing on your territory.”

“ You’re not infringing,” he mumbles, and then wants to slap his forehead.  He has absolutely no game, it turns out.  None whatsoever.

She pats his arm again.  “Let’s go to Granny’s, OK?  I’ll buy you breakfast.”

David looks up and god, it’s just so wonderful the way she smiles at him.

The way her eyes sparkle.

“Don’t you have to teach today?”  he asks, and immediately wants to kick himself.  He’s literally handing her an excuse to back out of spending time with him.  After she suggested it .  Oh, if self-sabotage were an Olympic sport.  

“It’s fall break,” she says, and he sighs with relief.

“In that case, I would love some real coffee.”  He locks the computer screen and gets up.  “But you don’t have to buy me breakfast.” That gets him a very stern look.  “Deputy, when I come pounding on your door at five in the morning, the least I can do is buy you waffles.”

He can feel another searing hot blush spread hard and fast.  “How did you know---”

“I’ve seen you around.  It’s interesting how you and I have such similar schedules.”

  Surely the current blush has burned off his face by now. Surely.

  “And you don’t always eat, but when you do, you have waffles.”

The grin she gives him is the biggest and most brilliant and most mortifying thing he’s ever been subjected to.

“Ah, well---”

“So come on, Deputy.  Let me buy you some damn breakfast.  It’ll be fun, even if we talk about nothing other than your case.”

Yep.  His face is clearly melting.

But he pulls himself together.  “Fine,” he concedes, and if possible, Mary Maragret’s grin becomes even wider.  “But on one condition.”

“I already told you I’m payin---”

“You call me David.  Just David.”

Oh, her laugh is just his very favorite sound on the planet. “OK,” she says.  “David it is.  Let’s go.”

.

-/-

.

Killian sleeps all the way to the station.  When Emma pulls into the parking lot behind the building, it takes her a few moments to bring herself to gently shake his shoulder.

But then she does.

  He bolts upright with a strangled scream and looks at her in absolute panic .  She tries to reassure him with soft words, calm words, but his body twists like a tightly-coiled spring and it’s obvious he doesn’t hear her at all, his breathing hard, his eyes darting everywhere.

Emma bites her lip, hopes for the best - and touches his hand.

Warmth immediately floods into her and he relaxes.

His breathing slows, his eyes focus.

“Emma,” he says, and she nods.  “Are we here?”

She nods again.  She wants to ask why he was so afraid, but she knows it’s not the time.

  There are so many things she wants to ask him.

But the time might not be ever.

  She lets go of his hand instead.  The warmth dissipates, and reality settles back in.  

“Ready?  I think David’s waiting for us with a witness statement.”

He nods and starts to undo his seatbelt.

“See?”  He says, not looking at her.  “You were right.  I am all those things you thought.”

And before she can answer, he gets out of the car.

  .

“So what do you think?”  

Emma’s face is a picture of worry as Killian puts down the report.

“This is the witness statement you took?”  He turns to David, who nods.

“Mary Marg--- Ms Blanchard came to see me early this morning.”

Emma leans across to look at the document, and Killian can feel her nearness like a current, before she leans back and her brow furrows.  “This says 5:23 AM.  You were at the station at 5 AM?”

“No.  Uh---”  Killian watches David’s Adam's apple do a nervous dance.  “She came to my house.”

“She came to your house? ”

  Killian nearly laughs at the indignation  in Emma’s voice.  It’s all thou shalt not play with my chew toys .  Meanwhile David blushes fire engine red again, and Killian feels for the Deputy.  It must be awful to navigate life with that kind of tell.

  “Look, it’s a small town.  Where I live is not exactly top secret,” David says, and it sounds a little annoyed.  “I called her yesterday to read the crime scene at the bridge.  She’s a really good tracker.”  He clears his throat, drops back into professional demeanor.  “It was after the scene was cleared.  I thought she could help.  And she did find lots of useful information.  It’s all in my write-up, but I think it’s better if I just show you later.”

  There is more to this story, Killian can tell, and it has nothing to do with the crush the deputy quite obviously has on the teacher.  There is more to the case .

  David is a good police officer, that much is clear.  Thorough, detail-oriented, meticulous - his report is impeccable.  His observations are keen and judicious, yet steer clear of excessive conjecture.  His deductions are logical, and more importantly, rational.  And he seems to be just the right amount of jaded - enough to not be gullible, not so much as to be indifferent.

Killian himself has never been like that, not as a police officer.

He went in broken.  This has not changed.

  He hands the report back to Emma.  “It doesn’t look good.”  

  He wishes he could say something else.  But the truth is, Graham Humbert is most likely going to be found soon, dressed in a blood-smeared linen gown, symbols carved on his back, and holding a quill between his frozen fingers.

  He looks at David.  “You didn’t find any notecards?”

David shakes his head.  “Not even at the cabin.  We went there on a hunch, and--- nothing.”

“How many days between finding your last victim and Graham’s disappearance?”  There is a ball of frozen fear at the pit of Killian’s stomach.  It’s making him nauseous.

“40 hours,” David says.  “Give or take.”

“When you found--- wait.”  Killian looks at Emma.  “How did you find--- what was the victim’s name again?”

“Leroy,” Emma says slowly.  “And I didn’t find him.  David called me.”

They both look at David, who has turned very pale.

“Graham called me,” he whispers.  “He came upon the body while he was out hunting.”

  Silence descends, heavy and suffocating.

Somewhere in the distance, the clock strikes three.

.

-/-

.

142 miles west of Storybrooke, a tall man with unkempt brown hair and haunted grey eyes stumbles out of a rest stop mini mart and slams a can of beer.  He reaches into his backpack and opens another before he looks up at Route 2 stretching before him.

There are only two directions here - the one he came from, and the one he’s going in.  He looks at the road for a long time, slowly sipping his beer.  It’s Monday afternoon, and there aren’t many cars.

Finally he throws away the second can, crosses the road, and starts to hold out his thumb.

  . 

247 miles south a blond man wearing scrubs and a white coat puts his phone back in his pocket and walks over to the nurse’s station.

“I have to leave,” he says.  “It’s an emergency.  Who can cover for me?  I’m done with rounds.”

The nurse looks at him and asks if he’s all right.

He’s definitely not all right. But he’s not telling her that.

.

And somewhere outside earth’s time and space, a pair of eyes opens and a head perks up.

And then something howls .

.

-/-

.

“Are you up for this?”

  Killian puts the cruiser in park and looks at Emma.

Emma bristles.  “I’m the Sheriff.  This is my crime scene.  Of course I’m up for it.”

He wishes she sounded less like she was convincing herself.

This is stressful for her, he can feel it.

But he has to see the crime scenes, all of them, in order to get the full picture, and this is where it all began.

Leroy’s last known location.

  The cabin is empty and sparsely furnished - just a cot in one corner, a wood-burning stove, and a few rickety chairs.  It’s clean and orderly.

The cabin in the crime scene photos he’s holding is a mess of empty food wrappers and drained vodka bottles and yellow caution tape.  

“I had to mark the scene somehow,” Emma says, and cringes, as if she’s embarrassed.  “And I don’t exactly have Boston PD resources.”

“This is exceptional work,” he pats her briefly on the shoulder.  “Our techs would be hard pressed to do better.”

She laughs like she doesn’t believe him, but wants to.

And it is exceptional work.  He looks at the photos in his hand, professional and competent, cataloguing all evidence.  

  Emma points to the bottles and the plastic wrappers in the pictures.  

“I finger-printed everything.  Every scrap I could get my hands on.  And I luma-lighted the entire cabin that night.” 

She points to another set of pictures, marking innocuous-looking spots in daylight, and their blacklight counterparts, which look like Jackson Pollock paintings.

She shrugs.  “I’m guessing people come here to ‘relax and unwind’ quite a bit,” she says, miming air quotes.  “And it is a hunting cabin.  Blood residue is not uncommon, and in fact - most of this is blood, not semen.  Animal blood mostly, very little human.  We tested most of it.  The human blood must be from superficial cuts.  Leroy was definitely not killed here.”

She shakes her head.  “Sorry, conjecture.  We don’t know cause of death, yet.  He was not---”

Her voice trails off, and Killian looks at her, pale and tense and biting her lip.

“Marked,” he says gently.  “He wasn’t marked here.  And you’re right.  He was not.”

He looks back at the photos.  “The cards?  Were right around here?”

He points at a spot in the middle of the cabin, and she nods.

Even paler now.

  “Emma?”

He doesn’t like the expression on her face, doesn’t like how far away she looks.  He takes a step closer.

“Emma?”  He repeats.  “Are you all right?”

Her head turns to him in slow motion.  Her eyes are blank .

The cold ball of raw fear in the pit of his stomach expands rapidly outwards, shoots terror through his veins.

“Killian,” she whispers, but she says it as if she doesn’t know what the word means.  “Killian, there is---”

Her voice cuts out abruptly, and she tilts her head as if she’s listening to something.

Listening for something.

  He takes one more step towards her and reaches out to take her hand, and---

It feels as if he’s the ground for a live wire, like a current running through him, running through them both, connected as they are by touch, and it feels like power, 

pulsating

beating

alive .

  He can’t move, couldn’t if he tried; can’t let go of her hand, and doesn’t want to.

  “Killian,” she says again, but he can hardly hear it through the ringing in his ears, “Killian, there is something here .”

It’s the last word that gets him, because he can feel it, the presence of something , and it galvanizes him into action, into motion--- 

and he picks her up, simply picks Emma up off the floor, crime scene photos still in his hand; crosses the cabin in four long strides and stumbles out the door and down the steps and to the car.

He leans against it, breathing hard.

“Killian.”

The voice slowly filters back into his consciousness.

“Please?”

He shakes his head.  Slowly opens his eyes. Sees Emma’s face, her eyes enormous, and so very close.

“Let me down, Killian.  Please.”

He becomes aware that she is still in his iron grip, and he lets go so fast she nearly falls.

Nearly.

  “What was that?”  He doesn’t want to know.  But he has to know.  “Is this--- is that what you’ve been--- all this time?”

She shakes her head, her eyes still large and anxious.  “Not at all,” she says.  “This is something completely new.”  She shudders, and then looks up.  “Wait.  Wait a minute.  Did--- did you say you felt this?  You felt it, too?”

  He’s so helpless in the face of all these things he doesn’t understand.

Helpless, and afraid.

“I don’t---  I don’t know if it was the same thing.  It felt like---  power.  Like a current.”

She nods.  “There was, there was a hum at first, you know?  Kind of like a freeway.  Busy, far away.  I was trying to listen, and couldn’t quite place it.  But I had the distinct feeling it was trying to tell me something.  And then---”

She looks down at her empty palms.

“And then you took my hand,” she says.  “And it became this flood of energy.”

  She balls her hands into fists and looks up again, straight at him.

  “Fuck.”  Her eyes are burning.  “ Fuck .”

She shrugs.  It looks helpless.  

“I wasn’t going to believe Elsa, you know.  I mean---” her brows knit together, “I believe that she believed it.  I wasn’t sure about you, but I was sure that you were supporting her no matter what.  But this---”

She looks up at the sky.  There are tears in her eyes, but they do not fall.

“There was something there.  I felt it.”  Her lip trembles and she bites down hard on it before she continues.  “I felt it.  All of it.  And so did you.  Fuck! ”

She shakes her head.  

“Now we’re going to have to have a conversation about magic.”  She rolls her eyes.  “About magic .  Aren’t we.”

  He wraps his hands around her fists and pulls them up to his own racing heart.  There is nothing but warmth now, no current, no sound.

“We are,” he says.  “We need to talk about that.  But Emma--” he waits for her to look at him again.

She finally does, tears still in her eyes.

“It is going to be all right.  I promised you that I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.  And I won’t.”

  He can’t make that promise, and he knows it. But he will die trying, if need be. This time he will keep that promise.

.

-/-

.

Emma says nothing the whole way back to town, can’t bring herself to speak at all.  Silence is keeping her numb, and numbness is what she desperately needs.  She focuses her eyes squarely on a spot of nothing past the windshield and ignores every one of Killian’s hesitant looks.

When he pulls up at Granny’s instead of the station, she doesn’t notice until he’s put the car in park and switched off the engine.

  “What are we doing here?”  Her voice sounds rusty and broken.  She doesn’t care.

Killian’s voice is soft as he answers.  “I thought we could go up to my room and talk.  Away from prying eyes and phone calls and interruptions.  And also, because that way you can just leave any time you want.”

  It’s so tactful and thoughtful and right, this plan, that she shudders.  Rage bubbles up to the surface, starts to burn through her veins, because how fucking dare he be this considerate, and she has to take several deep breaths to get herself back under control.

He pulls out a flask and takes a sip, and it goes a long way towards restoring her equilibrium, because this Killian she knows.  He hands her the flask and the rum burns hotter than the rage did, and settles her more.  She can handle this.

  “It’s OK to be afraid, you know,” he whispers as he screws on the top, not looking at her, and suddenly she’s angry again.  He should not be this understanding.

He should not be reading her like a goddamn book.

She takes another deep breath and exits the car before she says something she won’t be able to take back later.

.

Upstairs in the room she’s almost back to numbness.  It’s nice.  It would be nicer if he wouldn’t keep looking at her with those worried eyes.

They are not conducive to apathy.

He steers her towards the only chair and takes her jacket before she sits down, and then crouches before her.

“Emma,” he says.  “Are you sure you’re---”

She snatches the flask from his hand in an effort to cut him off, and their fingers.

Touch .

They are on the rooftop again.

A flat, barren, level rooftop, with the wind howling around them and a clear view of the clock tower in the distance.  

The clock tower is new.

They’re in Storybrooke .

  Emma wants to shudder, but she can’t, because his arms are around her, and he’s warm and solid and so very real.

“Hey,” he says, and leans forward, his nose brushing hers.  His forehead against hers.  “Don’t be afraid.  I’m here.”

“What if I can’t do it?” she whispers, because she feels empty, empty and useless, and he shouldn’t have so much faith in her.  He shouldn’t have any faith in her.

“You can do it love,” he says.  “I know you can.”

  Lightning cracks like an explosion, a living release of unspeakable force, and he is ripped from her, 

ripped from her---

and she knows how this ends

With a scream she comes back to herself and it’s a room at Granny’s she’s in, his room at Granny’s, with its fucking flowered wallpaper and the meticulously made bed and the warm light from the tasteful sconces, and how can everything be so normal when she’s going insane?

  She can feel his hand on hers, warm and sure, and there’s no howling at all as he pulls her up without saying a word, pulls her up and wraps his arms around her and she cries .

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