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The first time he sees her, her eyes are wild, searching the devastation; her hair is windswept and she is desperate and he does not love her. Later, she holds a knife to his throat and demands answers, ties him to a tree and he swears he believes she’d let him die if he gave her a reason. There’s a fire burning under her skin, something unwilling to be tamed, a desperation that screams to the things she’d do to get what she wants. It’s more than just self-preservation that makes him want to help her, to give her what she wants.
He doesn’t love her then, either, but something is different, and his heart beats an erratic rhythm he hasn’t felt in a very long time.
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She leaves him, once, twice, a third time; on a beanstalk and in a hospital and in another city in a foreign world. He might hate her if there was any room left to hate, but his heart is consumed by the Crocodile, and despite all the times she gets in his way, there’s nothing there for her. He is a wild thing, untamed, and all she wants to do have him forget his revenge.
(Nothing, he says, except a small flicker, a spark from a match, nothing important.)
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Neal(Bae, Baelfire, Milah’s son, the last thing left of her besides his revenge) is her boy’s father. Neal(Bae Bae Bae) is the man who left Swan like this, a jagged-edged wasteland full of overgrown wild grass and sharp teeth.
He’s dead, too, now.
It haunts him, the ghosts crowding his ship and spilling from every corner. It’s a ghost that turns his ship around, a ghost that offers to help find Henry.
It’s the slow beat of a just-starting-to-live-again heart that watches Emma Swan storm off into the jungles of Neverland.
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She changes him; marks him as surely as the ink in his skin that speaks of his first love, except this tattoo knows no bounds, it drums across his skin even as he begs it to be silent.
Without her he struggles to fit into his old life, the debauchery he used to embrace turning to ash on his tongue. He turns to more and more wild pursuits, his crew following him to the ends of the earth as long as it means coin, silver and gold.
He runs from the burn in his chest until he runs out of sea, and then he runs even further to get back to her.
Her hair is wild and unkempt again when he kisses her, and her lips are indeed as soft as he remembers before she pushes him away.
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His lungs burn and his lips tingle and everything is on fire when she sits back on her heels. He wants to shake her, to curse her, because she’s done it now, all for a man who didn’t deserve her, who barely deserved the breath she’d given him.
(She shakes and curses enough on her own; he doesn’t pretend to ignore her shivers and the trapped look she gives her own fingers, flexing them as though she can use what she doesn’t have).
He never stops believing in her, never stops following her, even when it means time travel and working once again with a creature that wishes him dead. He surprises himself too, the urge to travel even farther into the past entirely absent from his thoughts. The beat of his heart is timed to that of hers now, and he has never felt more alive than when he is chasing her. She is radiant and exuberant about correcting their mistakes, and he finds himself watching her far more than he has ever allowed himself before.
She clearly doesn’t mind, her eyes sparkling at the attention and her lips turned up at the corners. To think, she smiles for him when not long ago she pushed him away entirely. Her magic seems to flow from her fingers like, well, magic, and he can’t help the swell of pride, the smile it pulls from both of them.
It’s a wild assumption, he knows, but the next time he looks, he swears she looks back differently, and his heart beats a little faster.
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She looks every bit as untamed as the day he met her, but this time she smiles at him, a true smile, not some twisted grimace.
This time she whispers when she kisses him and wraps her arms around his waist.
This time, he does love her.