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Every other time Killian Jones has sailed back into Misthaven’s harbor, he’s been excited to see the shores of his homeland. He’s felt the familiar adrenaline rushing through his veins, taken a deep breath to take in the familiar smell of the shore and the fields and home , waited impatiently to feel the familiar sand and dirt and gravel beneath his feet.
Not this time. This time, everything is different. This time, everything has changed.
He’s still not quite sure how it happened. It was just a skirmish, the size of Camelot’s ship not even supposed to be enough to worry the large Misthaven frigate. And it was fast — the ship appeared, as if from nowhere; the battle was over in what felt like moments, and in the blink of an eye, his whole world was turned upside-down.
He blinked, and it was over.
His whole world was over.
On one end of the deck, his best friend was bleeding out from a wound that the medics couldn’t seem to control. On the other, he sat with his brother’s body in his lap, watching the life drain from his face due to a wound that didn’t even exist — of course, just their luck, given this is the single trip they both went on, one of them usually staying behind to continue with their royal duties. His own wounds were small, seemingly meaningless, as the medic wrapped up his now-blunted arm, all compared to Liam dying in his arms. To Neal dying across the ship.
His mind stopped. His life stopped. It’s almost as if he left his own body, watching from the sidelines as the medics pulled Liam’s body off his lap. As they wrapped him and Neal and the other two men killed in the Camelot skirmish in linens and Misthaven flags, saluted to their captain, and gave them the burial at sea that they deserved.
But that wasn’t even the hard part. This , what he has to do now, this is the hard part.
Of course, she is waiting on the dock for them by the time they're getting off, a simple white cotton dress blowing around her from the breeze coming off the water, and the sight of her tennis shoes would make him smile on any other occasion, knowing that she would prefer to be barefoot. Of course she’s waiting there for them, because she always does, she is always there waiting for him, looking like an angel with her golden halo of curls and those damn white cotton dresses that haunt both his dreams and his nightmares.
She’s there, and he has to break her heart. Her, and that cute little boy that he knows can’t be far.
Neal’s boy.
He still remembers the night he learned Henry was Neal’s, whispered secrets over one too many glasses of rum and a few too many games of hearts under the lights from the Christmas trees in the hallway. He wonders if Neal ever got the chance to apologize to her, ever told her that he wishes he could have been a better man, the kind of man that could have stayed with her instead of running as far away as he could, that avoided all responsibilities of being a father save the money he sent to Emma when he got the chance, using Killian and Liam to communicate with her because she refused to even talk to him.
Or, he wondered, if it was finally too late.
He’s in love with her, of course. He has been since the first moment he saw her, since the moment he and Liam were introduced as her royal guard while she hid away from the world to have Henry — one of the downfalls of being the Crown Princess of Misthaven, even in today’s more modern, modest society. He’s been in love with her for eight years, and there has never been anything he could do about it, since she has a child with his best friend. Since Neal never stopped loving her back, but wasn’t in a position to treat her the way she deserved, even though Emma claimed that her feelings for Neal left the moment he left her behind with Henry, always trying to get off the dock with her son before Neal got onto the dock, if Neal even chose to leave the ship. She would come for Liam, would come for him, but hadn’t spoken to Neal since the day he walked out the door, only getting wired payments and updates about their whereabouts through letters from and conversations with Killian and Liam.
But when she smiles at him as he walks down to the dock, he forgets about everything else but her radiance, if only for a moment. For a moment, the only thing on his mind is Emma, her smile and her beauty and her perfection.
And then, the moment is over. She is looking over his shoulder, looking for evidence of the battle that he knows she must have gotten word about by now through the castle’s constant updates from the navy.
“Hello, love,” he says, trying his best to muster up a smile for her, but he can tell immediately that it doesn’t work.
Her eyebrows knit together low on her forehead, searching his face for the answer to a question she hasn’t even asked yet.
“Killian?” is all she says, and he can feel himself already losing control of his emotions, already beginning to crack under the pressure of telling her.
“Scarlett!” he calls, turning over his shoulder to find his newly-appointed first mate — and the man who remains to take the place as his best friend — coming down the ramp behind him.
“Yes, sir?”
“Take young Henry back to the castle with you and have him join you for lunch while I speak with the princess, we won’t be too far behind.”
“Of course, sir,” Will responds, knowing full well exactly what conversation he and Emma are going to have in the captain’s cabin — in his cabin — granted he even makes it that far.
“Killian?” she says again as her son and Will Scarlett, along with the small crowd of crew, head for the castle, but he catches the quiver of his lip with his teeth, taking her hand in the one he has left and silently pulling her behind him. “Killian, please tell me what happened,” she practically begs, following him into the captain’s cabin, but the moment he closes the door behind her, he loses all control of himself.
The dam of emotions breaks, and he is at full liberty to everything he has held inside since the day before. His legs crumble beneath him, half-catching himself on the desk, not yet used to being one limb shorter, before he finds himself sitting on the floor.
And Emma, the angel, sits right beside him. Sets her hand on his arm, making sure that he knows she is there for him, even as he crumbles further into her lap. He has never been like this before, never lost control of his emotions to the point where he was a crumpled-up heap of a person, relying on someone else to console him. Not when his mother died, and certainly not when his father died.
But today? Everything is different today. He’s always comforted himself with the fact that he still has his brother, his best friend and his rock, to keep him safe. To keep him sane. When their father passed, even though they hadn’t been talking, he had a larger system behind him, he had Neal and Emma.
Now, it’s just him and Emma. Emma, with her family and her position and her duties to the crown; and him, with nothing, floating all alone in the ocean with no one around to save him.
Except her.
“Oh, Emma,” he mumbles, turning to wipe his nose against his sleeve instead of all over her dress. “I know you’ve — figured it out by now but — they’re gone, Emma,” he gets out between sobs, trying his best to stay as strong as he can, especially when he realizes that the tremors he feels are from sobs of her own. “We were — attacked, caught blind, and they — we only lost four — four men, but L-L-Liam was — was one of them, and — him and Neal, both, they—”
He can say no more. With the weight of Emma’s hand on his back, her forehead pressed just below it as she leans on him, he knows there’s nothing more he has to say.
Killian loses track of the time that passes, sitting on the floor of the captain’s cabin, the cabin that rightfully belongs to his brother. Between the swaying of the ship on the waves and the thump-thump of Emma’s heartbeat — of his own heartbeat? — in his ears, he could almost fall asleep, more worn down by the past day than he feels he may have ever been.
“We’re going to be okay, Killian,” Emma mumbles after a while, her forehead still pressed to his back. He realizes just how much his back is starting to ache, and when he moves to sit up, she lets him, leaning into him when he wraps his arm around her shoulders, pulling her in to let him offer some of the same comfort that she has given him.
When he kisses her forehead, he wonders — not for the first time — if she knows. If she knows just how much he loves her, how much of his happiness comes from their companionship, especially now. Not that he can do anything about it now, any more than he could before.
“I know, love,” he whispers, keeping the rest of his thoughts to himself.
“We have to tell Henry, you know,” she says, turning to him as they head up the hill towards the castle.
“Aye.”
“He’ll be devastated.”
This time, Killian just nods. Henry and Neal had a fraught relationship, sure, but they still had a relationship, based solely on the times Emma let Neal see him, always with either Killian or Liam around. Even a fraught relationship with a father is still a relationship, though — Killian learned that with his own father — and he’s sure that Henry will be much more devastated learning of Neal’s death than Killian was when he learned of Brennan's.
“God, how do you tell a seven-year-old kid that his father’s dead?” Emma asks, running her fingers through her hair.
Killian tries not to laugh, but it doesn’t work. When his chuckle does pass through his lips, Emma snaps her eyes to him, slapping his arm with the back of her hand.
“Killian, I’m serious!”
“I know, love,” he says, not even trying to keep the smile from his face. “It’s just — you certainly don’t tell him the way you just asked, is all.”
She smiles for a moment, but it disappears, replaced instead by intense thought until she turns to him, her bottom lip pulled up between her teeth. “Pardon me for asking, of course,” she says, her voice soft, and she crosses her arms over her chest. “But, how did — who told you — when you learned —”
Even with just the words that she’s managed to stutter, he knows exactly the question that she is trying to ask and stops her before she embarrasses herself anymore. “It was very formal, actually,” he says, surprising her, and when she turns to him, her eyes are wide. “These two men in uniforms knocked on our door one night, Liam and I were splitting a pizza and watching Wheel of Fortune , of all things. They gave us the whole spiel that you hear in the movies, you know, ‘We’re very sorry to inform you, but your father, Brennan Jones, has recently passed away.’ They gave us the rest of his commission and the few belongings he had with him in the Navy, apologized again, and left. But, I mean, we hadn’t seen him in a few years, certainly wasn’t expecting him to come back to Misthaven to stay with us, so nothing really changed, we just had a little more money and my mother’s wedding rings back, and we threw everything else in the sea.”
With his eyes cast to the road in front of them, he doesn’t pick up on the sadness that fills Emma’s expression with his story. She can’t imagine a life where she’s not close to her family, a world where her mother isn’t her best friend and her father doesn’t take time to ask about her day at the dinner table. She’s always had a soft spot for Killian, for both of the Jones brothers, actually — but for Killian more than anyone, though that’s a secret that she prefers to keep to herself.
It’s no wonder that she fell in love with him, though that doesn’t make it easier for her to cope. He showed up at her weakest moment, when she decided to stay in the protection of the Misthaven Guard through her pregnancy. Even with all of the regret that drowns the rest of the memories of Neal, there was never a question of keeping it , though she knows that the phrase almost fell from her father’s lips. Neal was a mistake, through and through, but Henry is far from it. Emma regrets nothing about Henry’s presence in her life, even with all the changes to her plans that he brought about.
And the fact that he brought Killian and Liam around certainly isn’t a downfall.
“I’m sorry, Killian,” she says, not even sure what else she could do. When she turns to him, he tries his best to find a smile, though it only lasts for a moment before disappearing into thin air.
But when she adds, “And I’m sorry about Liam, too,” he reaches out to wrap his hand around her forearm, pulling her to the side of the road, out of the way of the other pedestrians.
“He loved you, you know,” he says, unsure of where the words are coming from, though the brightness in her green eyes, the proudness that flashes through them, keeps him going. “Growing up, he would always tell me that his life would be so much better if he had a sister, and he was thrilled that he finally found his sister in you.”
He feels his heart pounding in his chest as she looks up at him, swears that, even with her red-rimmed eyes and the flyaways from her braided crown, she has never looked more beautiful — thu-thump, thu-thump — and then she moves in an instant, wrapping her arms around his waist to hug him, her face pressed tightly against his chest.
He knows they’re drawing attention from the civilians, even in a realm where she has a lot of freedom, where people know how close she is to the Jones brothers. Being close to them is one thing; hugging him in the middle of the road when most people wouldn’t have heard about the battle is another. He wants to usher her along, to move her away from the crowd, at least, though he certainly is in no hurry to get to their impending conversation with Henry. But when she makes no motion to leave after a few more pounding beats of his heart, he knows he needs to do something.
“Emma, love, we should keep moving,” he mumbles, daring to press his lips into her hair.
“Why, are you in a hurry to get to the castle?” she asks with a soft chuckle. “To get to Henry?”
“My job is to protect you,” he says, looking around at the townsfolk turning their attention towards them as they walk past. “That includes protecting you from rumors, which are going to run rampant if we stand here for much longer.”
Pulling away from him, she nods. Killian is a lot of things, and while stubborn is one of them, he is also smart — there’s a reason that he was made a captain of her personal guard when he was just 22, even if it was under the watchful eye of his older brother. And he’s right, too, though that would be the last thing she admitted to him. She heard about the naval battle through the line from the ship and August, who updates her when necessary, but the townsfolk don’t have the same sources of information. They don’t know about the skirmish with Camelot, about the loss of some of Misthaven’s men, Captain Liam Jones among them. And even if they did, who’s to say they wouldn’t still make assumptions?
Emma’s dealt with more than enough rumors in her 28 years, especially in the last eight since she became pregnant with Henry. She’s more than prepared to deal with them, though she would never ask to have to go through it again.
She nods. “Alright,” she says, taking a step away from him, her hands falling to her side. “Yeah, let’s go.”
They don’t have to make it all the way to the castle before finding the young man in question, out on the lawn with Will, August, and some of the other navy men, but when he sees Emma and Killian approaching, he drops the ball in his hands and takes off towards them, wrapping his arms around Killian’s legs.
“Killy!”
Killian has to choke back the sob that rips through his body with Henry’s embrace. Such a clever, brilliant, and perfect young man — such a young young man, too pure to already be at liberty to the evils of the world. To already have lost so much before the age of eight, even younger than Killian was when he lost his mother. He’s too good for this world.
Swallowing the sob, Killian bends down to embrace the young boy back. “Hello, lad.”
“Do you know where my dad is?”
Right to the point.
Killian doesn’t know what to say. He’s not even sure that, if he did have the words, he would be able to get through them without breaking down.
Hell, he may break down without saying anything at all.
He does the only thing he can think of, turning his eyes up to Emma, pleading with her — with the universe to give her the strength — to take over for him.
One of them — Emma or the universe, he’s not sure — answers his cry for help.
“Henry, honey,” she says, reaching down to gently pull him away from Killian by the shoulder. “I think we should — why don’t we all go up to your room and you can show Killian your new video game, alright?”
“You can come with us? You don’t have to go back to work?”
Henry has a point. Killian knows it. Emma knows it. He has so much that he should be doing, more than a handful of royal duties that are now on his to-do list, both old ones and new, that he has taken up with the death of his brother.
But this is more. More important, more detrimental, more time-sensitive. It’s the least he could do, really, join them for the next few hours, help Emma share the news of Neal and Liam’s deaths with the boy, especially since he knows the moment he stops moving, his grief will catch up with him again, just like it did in the captain’s cabin. She must know this, of course, but still waits for him to answer Henry’s question.
“Of course I can come with.”
Henry’s smile, which disappeared for a moment, grows wide again. “Great!” he says, enthusiastically reaching up to take one of Emma’s hands and one of his.
They make it most of the way back to his room in silence, the halls echoing with their footsteps in the silence of the castle, with Henry smiling contentedly up at one of them every once in a while .
“Don’t think I’ve forgotten that you both avoided the question about my dad,” he says, walking under Killian’s arm as it holds open his bedroom door.
Pausing for a moment in the doorway, Killian and Emma share a look. They both know that Henry is much smarter than many people give him credit for, know that Henry must have asked more than one of his officers about Neal, and Killian is assuming that they all ignored the question the same way both he and Emma did.
Emma moves through the doorway, ducking under Killians arm; sighing, he follows her, closing the door behind them.
Apparently, Henry has run out of patience, deciding this is the moment when Emma and Killian need to come clean of whatever secret they have been hiding. He jumps up on his bed, crossing his arms over his chest, as if that somehow made him more adult-looking in his Star Wars t-shirt while sitting on his dinosaur sheets.
“Now, are you guys going to tell me what happened, or are you going to keep pretending you can hide it from me?”
Killian almost wants to laugh at just how unbelievable this whole situation is. Almost.
“I know something happened on the ship, because both my dad and Uncle Liam are missing, and they didn't come back with you guys when you sent me with Will and the officers.”
Emma sits down next to him on the bed, trying to figure out just how to break the news to him. But when she turns back to Killian, he somehow suddenly has the strength to be the one to tell the lad about what happened — and to treat him like the adult, albeit a small one, that he believes himself to be.
“The ship got involved in a battle yesterday with a ship from another land,” Killian starts, surprising Emma as much as he seemed to surprise himself. “We were taken by surprise, and they were much faster than us, so we had no hope of outrunning them and making it back to Misthaven safely, and we had no choice but to fight. And it was during this fight that both Neal — your dad — and my brother received fatal wounds, wounds that even your grandfather’s best medics had no hope of saving them from.”
He’s upset, sure, and rightfully so, but holding himself together much better than Killian anticipated.
Much better than Killian himself did. For a moment, everyone is silent, Emma sliding her arm around Henry’s shoulders to pull him closer to her, and he allows it, the quiver of his lip and a sniffle of his nose almost enough to set Killian off again.
But he has to be strong. For Henry , he tells himself, though he knows the real reason is for the lad’s mother. For the woman who has already held him while he cried once today, and now has to do it for her son. The least he can do is be strong in this moment.
“What did you do with them?” he asks, his voice weak with the tickle of a sob in the back of his throat.
It’s just about the last question Killian expected, but he answers it as honestly as the last. “All naval officers get buried at sea, unless they have family that specifically ask for something else. Both Liam and your dad are now resting beneath the waves.”
Nodding, Henry allows one tear to fall down each cheek.
“Did he happen to leave me anything to remember him by?” This time, the words are barely a whisper, as if Henry is afraid to speak them — or, worse, if he is afraid of the answer he is going to be given.
But here, Killian can take a sigh of relief. “He had a small chest of things near his bunk on the ship, and I think some items in the room he shared with a few of his friends when they were ashore here. I’ve already started to see to it that everything of his gets brought to you, since you were the only family he had.”
Same with Liam.
The thought stings Killian’s eyes, remembering one of Liam’s last wishes: Give the boy my bars . There were two others, as well, though remembering those was a task for another time, maybe a time paired with a glass or three of rum in the solitary comfort of his room.
“And I, uh, have something for you from Liam, too,” he adds, both sets of eyes snapping back to meet his, both filled with both sadness and surprise. Reaching into the pocket of his slacks, he finds the bars in question — a position passed down to Killian, but a memento passed down to Henry. “These were his captain’s bars, and he always credited you and your mother for giving him the chance to get that far, so he wanted you to have them.”
While Emma’s eyes fill with tears, Henry’s fill with excitement, taking the pin from Killian’s outstretched hand. “Cool!” he says, most of the anguish gone from his voice. “Wait, does this mean you’re a captain now?”
All Killian can do is nod, amazed at the boy’s quick change in composure.
It’s much later by the time he finally gets the chance to sit down with Emma again, the sun and Henry long since down for the night. He finds her not far from where he expects to, in a solitary corner of the library, a rocks glass with two fingers of her favorite scotch in one hand and a photo album balanced in her lap held with the other.
“I was wondering when you’d be around,” she says as he closes the door behind him, not even looking up from the book.
“Aye, I had a lot of paperwork to take care of before your father and Graham would let me go for the night.”
“It’s been a long day for all of us, I’m sure.”
When he doesn’t answer, pouring his own glass from one of the decanters over the fireplace, she finally lifts her eyes from the pages of the photo album to look at him. The stress of the day is written all over his body, from the sagging of his shoulders and the slump of his back to the bags under his reddened eyes, the dirt and blood on the gauze covering the end of his newly-blunted arm, and the way he throws back his first shot of rum before pouring a second into his glass.
There is so much she wants to do, so many ways she wishes she could help him through his grief, his exhaustion, his pain. Ways she wants to tell him that she’s here for him, that she has always been here for him, since he was barely 22 and walked into her father’s conference room for the first time. She wishes, as she always has, that she could wrap her arms around his neck, feel the warmth of his body beside hers as they embraced, tuck her head into the space between his head and his shoulder where she always had a feeling she would be the safest.
But, no. That would be unfair to him, using her position of power over him to use him for her own comfort.
Unless he feels the same way.
She has to shake the words from her mind, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. She has to stay put on the couch, keep her desires to herself, and just keep living in the way she has been, keeping this secret deep in the confines of her mind and only pulling it out when she is alone.
Or alone with him, which has been happening more often lately — and she’s afraid will continue to do so with his brother and partner in her personal protection team buried in the depths of the sea.
“Why did I let him go on this stupid voyage?”
Killian’s question pulls her out of her own mind — thankfully — and she turns her attention back to him, though he is staring into the fire, his arms crossed over his chest. He has changed out of his uniform, managed to find a set of his own clothes even though Emma is sure he hasn’t been able to leave the castle since he arrived here earlier. His dark jeans and grey tee-shirt make him look younger than the sharp edges and harsh blues of his uniform, his hair no longer gelled back but mussed up, a small amount of stubble beginning to grow across his cheeks. Like this, he reminds her more of the Killian that came with her to her college classes when she decided to go back, the man who no longer needed to to be strict and rigid and follow all of the rules when in her company, the man who finally started calling her Emma after years of oleading — the man she fell in love with .
“You can’t blame yourself for this.”
“Like hell I can’t. He was supposed to stay here with you and Henry this time, and he talked me into letting him come along because of that stupid crush he had on the princess from Arrendelle that we were going to visit.”
“Liam had a crush on Princess Elsa?” Emma asks, slightly taken aback, even though she knows that is not the point of what he’s trying to say.
Thankfully, he laughs, obvious more in the shake of his shoulders than the sound, and he takes another sip of his glass before turning away from the fire to face her. “Yes, he did. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and that’s the reason why he was on that damn ship and not here and safe and alive with you and your boy.”
“Killian, stop.” She closes the album, setting it and the glass down on the table next to her before pushing herself off the couch and closing the small distance between them. “You can’t go back and change what has already happened, and you know there is no way your brother ever would have let you talk him out of going after he made up his mind.”
His eyes turned towards the floor, he laughs again, a more obvious sound this time, and she is glad that she gets to be the one to help him see the light in his time of need. Still silent, he nods. A few beats pass, counted by the pounding of their hearts and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room, before he raises his eyes to her.
“And how are you doing, love?”
At first, she doesn’t even know how to answer. How is she doing? There are so many things she could tell him, so many different floodgates that could be opened — how does she choose just one?
Apparently, the answer is to just open her mouth and her brain will do the talking.
“How am I supposed to explain to Henry that, no, I’m not really upset over the death of his father because I stopped having feelings for the man before Henry was even born? That I can’t grieve for a man that I spent the last eight years avoiding because of how royally he fucked up?” Pushing the flyaways back towards her ponytail, she sits back down on the couch with her legs curled up under her, Killian taking the seat beside her with as much space between them as he can muster.
“All you can do is your best,” he tries, quoting a sure line from Liam, but Emma seems too caught up in her thoughts to hear him.
“Sometimes I just want to tell him just how much of an asshole Neal really was, especially to me, but he really seems to almost worship the man, the way he got to serve his country and travel all over the realms , when really he just did it so he didn’t have to be around here, be around me.”
“Let him believe what he wants for now.” This time when he speaks, Emma turns towards him, her bottom lip pulled up between her teeth. “He’s just a boy, he can have this perfect picture of his dad in his mind for a while still before it gets ripped out from under him.”
She nods, pauses, then opens another floodgate. “And what about Liam? He doesn’t understand why I’m more upset about Liam than I am about Neal, even though you and Liam have done more for me than that man ever even thought about doing. Henry lost his father, you lost your brother and your best friend, and what have I lost? Am I an asshole for not grieving too much for either of them, because neither of them are the person that I’m most afraid to lose?”
His eyes have never left her face, but the expression of surprise — of regret? — that passes over it with the last few words is almost enough to make him look away.
He doesn’t. And after a moment, she turns her whole body on the couch to face him, eyes wide and flickering with the light from the fireplace. It’s almost too much.
“I don’t know what I would do if it was you that I lost, Killian,” she says, her voice barely a whisper.
He swallows the lump that has grown in his throat. “You don’t have to worry about that, love.”
“What if the next voyage is the one you don’t come back from?”
It’s a question that he’s asked himself before, a question that he thinks about each time he heads towards the harbor to sail away from Misthaven.
But it’s only the first half of the question.
“As I said, you don’t have to worry about that. Your father has changed my position to one that never requires I sail away again, unless I’m accompanying you on a ship.”
“What? But Killian, you love the sea, you can’t let him do that.”
“The sea took my brother and my father from me. I accepted the offer because I couldn’t stand the thought of letting it take the only other thing I’ve ever loved from me, as well.”
The words don’t register with her right away. If he’s honest with himself, it doesn’t immediately register to him that he actually spoke them until her eyes are growing wider with the realization of what he meant.
She shuffles ever-so-slowly closer to him on the loveseat, stopping before her knees make contact with his legs. There aren’t even words to the questions rattling around her brain, because he simply cannot mean what she wants him to mean.
All she can do is reach out, gently place her hand on his arm, and she’s hoping that it’s all the question he needs — hoping that she’s not misinterpreting this whole situation and making a fool of herself.
“Don’t you know, Emma?” he whispers, too afraid that he would lose this moment if he looked away from her even for a second. Her hand on his arm is warm, her cheek under his hand even warmer, but he imagines that they are nothing compared to the warmth of her lips finally meeting his. “It’s you.”
He doesn’t have to fill the rest of the space between them, because Emma does that for him. Kissing her is somehow better than his imagination ever led him to imagine, though he learns it is nothing compared to the gentle, warm smile that covers her face when he pulls away just enough to look at her.
Just enough to smile back.
“It’s always been you.”