allyourdarlingswans:

When
Emma meets an alternative version of Killian Jones, she realizes she has to
make her own fate.  For him as much as
for her. 6×11 AU, with a different Old Hook.

***

Emma had to admit – though
this realm had been created by a wish, every unreal person had been reliably
consistent with their counterpart back home.
Pinocchio may have had good intentions but he was pretty damn good at
getting lost.  They wasted half the day
trying to find the Enchanted Grove before he sheepishly explained he didn’t
quite remember where it was.

“I didn’t want to disappoint
you,” he explained on their way back to her parents’ castle.

“I understand,” she gritted
out – she decidedly did not – “but
really, next time let’s just get the map first.”

“I have to warn you, that
old mapmaker does not like to be disturbed.”

As though that was the problem.

“Well too bad,” Emma
muttered as they snuck into the castle.  

It was odd having two sets
of memories, to be familiar with the unfamiliar, to know all the hidden
passageways with uncertain certainty.  It
was even odder to know that she knew the castle this well not because she had been innately curious as a child but because
she had been lonely.  It didn’t seem
right that she should have been lonely in both realms when in one, she had in
fact been abandoned and in the other, she had been loved and doted upon but
without any true peers.

Emma shook her head.  There was no reason to dwell on a parallel
realm of loneliness.  She wasn’t lonely
anymore.  She had her parents, her
brother, her son and her pirate
now.  She needed to get back to them.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve
even been in the map room,” she said as she pushed against the plain wooden
door.  She knew the whole layout of the
castle, had memorized a blueprint as a child, but she couldn’t recall what the
interior of the room looked like or if she even seen the formidable mapmaker.

As such, she was unprepared
for the sight that greeted her – shelves upon shelves of neatly rolled up maps,
lining each wall, stretching up and up to cathedral high ceilings.  

“Shit.”

“I guess we better get
start,” Pinocchio said almost cheerily, as though it wouldn’t take several
years to unroll and consult each map.

“No, no,” Emma said, holding
her hand out to prevent her friend from taking on another wasteful
endeavor.  Emma shook her head – when had
she held the line of reason instead of plunging head first?  But she could almost hear Killian in her
head.  They needed a plan.  And then Henry following up with an operation
name.  Operation Get Home?  Operation Enchanted Wood?  She really needed her son for that.  But maybe she could think more methodically
like Killian.  He had a system for
everything.  Maybe the mapmaker did too.

That was it!  She sent a silent ‘thank you’ to Killian for
having a damn color coding system even for breakfast foods. Orange for citrus
fruits to prevent scurvy.  Brown for
grains.  She scanned the shelves, trying
to figure out where to start.  She pulled
a couple of maps in order and tried to match them up.  Everything looked neat and orderly but she
couldn’t make the puzzle pieces fit.  Maybe
only the mapmaker knew… “Where’s this mapmaker friend of yours?” She asked
looking around, wondering if perhaps he had been hiding in the dust of this
cavernous room the whole time.

“Oh, he’s not a friend of
mine.  I’m not sure he has any friends,”
Pinocchio defended.

“Right, well that’s not what
matters.  Where else would he be if he’s not
here?  We have to find him.”

***

The tavern.  Of course, Emma thought, as she followed a
wary Pinocchio, a man brought up by a father’s careful guidance, less
susceptible to temptation, less tempted by adventure. If you could call the
quaint and well-kept tavern by the water adventurous.  By the eager looks Pinocchio was giving her,
she supposed he might.

She couldn’t help but wonder
where Killian was in this realm as they made their way into the rather quiet
and genteel space.  Her pirate wouldn’t
be caught anywhere near a place like this.
She made a face as she thought of him pillaging and plundering his way
through taverns and ports more like the ones where they found the past version
of him, even if he was unreal in this realm, even though he did not belong to
her here.  She tried to turn her
thoughts. Maybe he had aged like her parents.
Hair grey and longer.  Perhaps the
rum had long term consequences on him.
She tried to imagine it but Killian was so fastidious about his looks,
she couldn’t even bring up a caricature in her mind’s eye.

Occupied by thoughts of her
pirate, she didn’t even realize they had found their mapmaker until she ran
into Pinocchio nose first.  “The irony,”
she muttered as she rubbed her nose.

Pinocchio reached back to
touch her face.  

“I’m fine,” she waved him
off in reply to his over-concerned look.  Princess Emma never realized her friend was
besotted with her but this Emma could tell.
Pinocchio was a better person in this realm but he was no Killian Jones.

They turned back to the man
hunched in a dark corner, slid so far back in the shadows she could only see
the fringe of his salt and pepper hair dipped over his tankard of ale.

“We need your help,
mapmaker,” Pinocchio said with as much authority as she had ever seen him
exhibit in this realm.

The man barely moved.  “I’m off duty,” he said into his drink, voice
rough and gravely.

“You are never off duty when
it comes to the princess,” Pinocchio protested.

“I’m sorry Princess Edna has
lost her tea set but perhaps mummy can buy her a new one, eh?” he replied
mockingly.

“It’s Princess Emma!”
Pinocchio cried, clearly offended on her behalf.  

Emma was actually quite
amused and had to bite back a laugh.

“My deepest apologies, your
highness,” the mapmaker threw her way.
He barely looked up at her – it was still dark and hard to see but it
was enough.  She saw the blue of his
eyes.  It was unmistakably Killian.

Emma’s smile dropped and her
heart clenched.  She knew he wasn’t real,
and in the wish realm, it was unlikely for them to have crossed paths but it
still hurt to see his eyes pass by her without any recognition.  She reflexively gripped at the place where
her necklace usually hung, the one with Liam’s ring, but it wasn’t there.

“Please, this is important.”  I need
to get back to the right you.

“Everything’s bloody
important to you lot, ain’t it?  I’d
wager choosing the right cape this morning had been important to you,” he
huffed before turning away from them, towards the wall.

“How dare you speak to the
princess that way!”  Pinocchio reached
across the table and pulled roughly on Killian’s arm before she could stop
him.  A notebook under his elbow slid off
the table with the movement of his arm and the previously enclosed papers
scattered all over the floor.  Killian
cursed and immediately struggled out of his chair.  It was clear one of his legs was giving him
problems as he stiffly dragged it to the side.
He finally managed to push back the chair and drop hard to his knees as
he gathered the papers.  Emma was
arrested by the frantic and pained look on Killian’s face and it took her a
moment to stoop down to help him.  When
she did, she understood his expression.
There were dozens upon dozens of beautiful sketches of Milah, done up in
charcoal, painfully detailed, drawn with care and devotion and knowing him,
carried with him at all times.

In this realm, he never
recovered from losing his first love.  In
this realm, he lived another three decades without love, without hope, and
finally without the will and ability to seek the revenge that had driven him
for centuries before.

She wanted to gather him in
her arms, hold him close to her and let him weep.  But here, in this realm, they were
strangers.  He didn’t even know her name.

Still, she reached out and
laid her hand on top of his.  He paused
and looked up at her. She smiled at him, wondering if he felt it too.  Even in this realm it seemed, there was magic
between them, she could feel it in their touch, in the warmth that spread from
him to her and back again.  

But he dropped his eyes,
pulled back his hand and resumed his task.

“I’m sorry for this,” she
said as she handed the last remaining drawings to him.

He barely gave her a nod of
acknowledgment as he straightened them with care and reverently placed them
back in his notebook.

She watched him silently,
not wanting to interrupt a task far more important to him than helping an
unknown princess.  But as always, she
needed him as much as he needed her.  So
when his drawings were finally secured and he struggled to stand, she offered
him a hand.  He glared at her hand for a
moment before accepting it.

“Please,” she said, her eyes
meeting his. “I do really need your help.  Will you at least hear me out?”

Emma could never be sure if
it was because in all worlds thus far, Killian Jones was a gentleman or because
he had never truly been able to resist her, but she was not surprised by his
answer.

“As you wish.”

***

Killian of course had a
system.  It took him all but a minute to
locate the map. Emma was disappointed.
As desperate as she was to be in her
Killian’s arms, she didn’t want to leave this one all alone with his maps and
dust and drawings of lost love.  Though
he wasn’t real, he was real to her.  

“I…uh, thank you.”

Killian nodded his head and
wearily leaned back against a shelf.  His
right leg, the one that gave him trouble earlier, was bent at an uncomfortable
angle.

“What happened to your leg?”
she found herself asking.

“I thought you had another
realm to reach?” he asked, raising a questioning eyebrow.

Behind her, Pinocchio huffed
loudly.

“Methinks your beau is upset
with the likes of me.”

“Pinocchio is not my beau”
she dismissed.  She winced when Pinocchio
marched out of the room.  He did try to
be a good friend, even if he was not so good at it.

Killian hummed in response,
a familiar smirk flirting in the corner of his mouth.  

It took no small effort on
her part not to lean forward and kiss him there, not to respond to him as she
normally would, when he was hers and she was his.  

He seemed to notice her
distraction but instead of throwing innuendos her way, he frowned at her. “Truly,
shouldn’t you be on your way?”

“Really?” she demanded,
hands on her hips.  When had he ever
turned her down?

He didn’t meet her challenge,
only deepening his frown.  She didn’t
think he would respond at all but after a pause, he actually scolded her.  “I’m old enough to be your father.”

“You’ve always been old
enough to be like my great great great grandfather,” she protested.  “Okay, I usually try not to think of that,”
she half-heartedly tried to amend.

“So you do know who I am,”
he accused.  “Why even ask about me?”

“I…I uh know you’re
Captain Hook, yes.  But I don’t know what
happened to you,” she replied, gesturing at his leg.

“You mean how I went from
scourge of the seven seas to a useless double cripple?”

Emma’s annoyance
deflated.  This was the Killian from
Neverland, the one who thought he was too unworthy to be loved again, the one
who never found another reason to believe in his worth.

“I…I just would like to
know.”  She softly laid a hand on his
forearm.  “Please.”

He was glaring at her hand
again but made no effort to remove it.  “A
Crocodile smashed it with a dwarf’s pick.
Happy?”

Emma’s eyes widened at his
response.  “But how did he get to
you?  He’s been locked up in my parents’
dungeon since I was born.”  No need to
provide him the details of the Dark One’s release if this realm was going to
cease to exist.  There was no Killian out
there that would appreciate it.

“I went to him.  I didn’t have magic but I had three hundred
years of hate and pain.  And the funny
thing was, I had hope.”

“Hope?” she didn’t expect to
hear those words from this Killian.

“Aye, your mother.  You know the story, she was an orphan,
stripped of her birthright, of everything she knew, fleeing for her life, and
yet she managed to defeat the Evil Queen and imprison my greatest enemy.”

Emma listened with
care.  She had never heard him speak of
her mother this way but she could understand his admiration, see how much of
him was also in Snow White.

“I thought I could do it
too.  I could do the impossible. I could
survive my encounter with the Dark One, enjoy my vengeance, let Milah have her
peace and…”

“And…?”

Killian shook his head.  “It doesn’t matter.”  But it did matter, his eyes lingering on a worn
blue blanket, carefully draped over the back of a wingback chair.  She drew in sharp breath; she had seen that
same blanket on his ship before. She had joked about it being for babies, it
was soft and small, like her own baby blanket, but he had drawn her attention
away from it. Yet, it was here, it was still here with him. Did he and Milah
lose a baby or had he wanted one with Milah that he never got?  Killian and her had never spoken about
children, not yet, but the thought of it warmed her from the inside out.  

Killian laughed harshly,
drawing her attention back to his face. “He got the upper hand. Wanted to make
me the kind of man he was.”

“Your father saved my life,”
he bit out, “came just in time.”

“That’s a bad thing?” she
asked softly.

“I’m a crippled palace
servant who never avenged my love, only alive due to the pity of others.  Aye, they should have let the Crocodile
finish me.”

Emma couldn’t help it, she
pulled Killian into her arms.  Her
Killian had never given up, would never give up.  It was his willingness to live, his
persistence to fight, that enabled him to be in the same time and realm as she
was, that allowed them to be together, to realize their True Love.  This Killian had nothing to live for, he
merely existed beyond his tragedies.

He patted her back awkwardly
with his one hand. “According to your own theory, your highness, I’m not even
real, I don’t truly exist.  It doesn’t
matter what happens to me.”

Emma pressed her forehead to
his, only tilting back her chin enough to see his eyes.  “What happens to you always matters to
me.  I didn’t tell you because I didn’t
know how, you are the one better with words, but you exist in my world
too.  And you are loved, so much.”

Killian’s eyes widened in
disbelief.  He tried to move back, away
from her, but Emma grabbed the sides of his face to force him to look at her, to
see the truth in her eyes.  “You are, you
are. No matter where, no matter when, I will always love you.”

Killian studied her with as
much intensity as her own Killian.  He
wiped a tear with his thumb as softly as her own Killian.  “Don’t worry about me love, I will just
disappear when you go away, eh?  It will
be like I never existed.”  

“You exist to me.”  And she realized he did exist, in the future,
if the prophecy was fulfilled, if she died.
This would be him, this man, this shadow.  He wasn’t just an alternative version in a
fake realm, this was Killian, in a future without her.

As though he was reading her
like an open book, he breathed against her lips, “Then don’t let myself ever
forget how much you saved me.”

“You saved me too.”  Remember
it, remember it always.

“Then return home,
Emma.  Don’t let us be parted any longer,”
he cajoled, like the gentleman he was, like the gentleman he always was.

And then he smiled at her.

It was same smile she had
come to know and she felt a fierce need to see it on her own Killian’s face
thirty years later.  And she would, she
thought as she tightened her hold on him, she couldn’t let some prophecy take this
away from her, take Killian’s smile, his fight, his future, maybe even a baby
of their own, she was going back, she was going to fight for them both.  “I’ll
be seeing you, Killian.”

It was a promise Emma Swan
was going to keep.  Operation
Promise.  She had the power to change her
fate, to change Killian’s.  She believed
that, she had to.  She wouldn’t let him
down or herself.  She took another look
at Killian, at the face she would see in her future.  She was going to make her own fate.

***

A/N: This was actually my
fix-it for August, not Killian.  I didn’t
think August was worthy of this new narrative where he was friend, hero, Swan
guider.  I thought Emma could save
herself.  She didn’t need a half-friend
to keep tabs on her.  (No one needs a
half-friend.)  I don’t really have an
issue with OUAT’s Old Hook (Colin looked like he was having fun) but I didn’t
think it fit Killian’s narrative.  If he
never met Emma, it didn’t make sense to me that he would become unkempt and develop
a delusional idea of his appeal.  The
wish realm didn’t offer any other caricatures, everyone pretty much acted
within the (albeit somewhat loose) confines of their changed circumstances
(other than Emma for obvious reasons).  Without
his vengeance driving him, I saw Killian drowning deeper in his own tragedies.  And Emma is good at putting other people
first before herself but in saving Killian, she can put both of them first and
it’s in this that she finds the power to believe that she can save the man she
loves and herself.  #justsaying

A/N2: @flslp87 and @thetaleofcaptainswan, got inspired…