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It was a slow night, by Storybrooke standards, and Emma was curled up against her boyfriend, listening to the sound of rain gently falling against the windowpane of the room in Granny’s they were inhabiting.
They did this, from time to time, now that they were ‘courting’, as Killian refused to stop saying, carved out space for themselves amongst everything else.
It was nice, Emma had to admit, the sense of security that it provided her with. The version of her that existed even a few months ago would have thought it unfathomable to be this comfortable with someone else.
She stared at him, then, her eyes glancing down and taking in his shirtless torso, the bare arms wrapping around her like she belonged within them.
Emma had the sudden urge to trace his tattoos, her eyes catching on one of the most noticeable ones dancing up his forearm.
Several more were littered across his chest and lower back, a tapestry of artwork inked into his skin.
She couldn’t recall all of them, not perfectly, anyway, and it struck Emma then had she didn’t even know what most of them meant.
A couple of them were names: names she didn’t know, and ones she did, like Milah, tattooed over colourful illustrations.
A sail.
A sun half covered in clouds.
A pocket watch.
“I can feel you examining me, Swan,” Killian murmured, rubbing a thumb against her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
“I was just thinking.”
“Oh dear,” he remarked dryly, and she elbowed him in the side.
“Shut up. I just… wanted to ask, I guess, why do you have so many tattoos?” She approached it tentatively, but couldn’t quite help her curiosity from peeking through.
“Would you like the short answer, or the long answer, love?” The words were causal, delivered with an underlying laugh, but Emma didn’t miss the edge to his tone.
“Whichever. You can tell me what they mean, instead, if you’d like.” She turned to look at him, waiting for a sign that she’d pushed too far, ready to back off if she had.
He mused, not quite shutting her out, but not letting her in, either. “You see this one here?”
Killian sat up slightly, shifting his arm to expose the tentacles creeping up his lower abdomen, curling in slightly at the ends.
Even though they were a simple green and gold in colour, there was something ethereal about them.
Emma nodded. She reached out her fingertips to touch it, slowly enough that he could move away if he wanted to. “It’s beautiful.”
A smile pulled at his lips. “It represents my faith.”
“Faith as in religion?” Emma couldn’t keep the shock out of her voice. She knew her parents were vaguely religious, but she and Killian had never discussed it.
That got a real grin from him. “Aye. Glad to see I can still surprise you, love.”
“I just… didn’t know you believed in that kind of thing.”
“Any sailor worth his salt has respect for the goddess of the sea. Especially as someone who grew up as a child on the rough waters, she was a lifeline. I didn’t want to forget that.”
Emma frowned at the delicacy of his phrasing. “Why would you?”
He swallowed, his gaze darting away from hers to some faraway place that darkened his eyes and clouded his mind. “Neverland messes with your mind, makes you forget things; it turns you into someone you’re not. I learnt that the hard way.”
Killian paused, his breathing shallowing ever so slightly.
Emma tried to fill the gap in the conversation, her eyes still burning into his tattoos. “Like how the Lost Boys forgot their parents or, worse, thought they chose to give them up, when they didn’t.”
She remembered Pan’s warnings that it would eventually happen to Henry if they let enough time pass.
“You have to understand that I was hurting,” Killian explained slowly. “And that even for the sanest of people, that kind of prolonged exposure to time-related magic messes with the psyche.”
“Sure,” Emma acquiesced easily, although she wasn’t quite following.
“Having time, so much of it, makes you forget what happened when. Even though, logically, I know now that Milah never met Captain Hook, I have memories of her aboard the ship after she was long gone, the centuries bleeding into each other in one giant melting pot of revenge. Peter-he used that to his advantage by making you doubt what was real and what wasn’t. Were you sure you made peace with that? Did you really see that person again? Can you really, truly remember a time when you were anything but Pan’s minion, when you wanted to be anywhere but Neverland?”
Dully, Emma realised he’d started shaking, and she pressed the palm of his hand against hers to ground him. A silent it’s okay, Killian, I’m here and I’m listening.
”At times, I began to forget things about myself,” he admitted, looking down at their interconnected hands. “Important things, things that I thought I’d never forget, like my mother’s name, or the day I was born. I became less of a person and more of a… concept, I think. A villain from a children’s tale, running around doing whatever Peter wanted.”
He didn’t need to say it: she’d finally figured out where he was going with this, but she let him continue anyway. It sounded like he needed to.
“That was why I got the tattoos. I realised after a while that tattoos are physical, inked memories that can’t be erased by any lies or tricks of the light. All I had to do was look down, and there was my story, as it should be told. I tried to preserve as much of it as I could.” From the breaks in his intonation, it sounded like he wasn’t entirely certain he’d succeeded.
But then again, after everything he’d just told her, how could he be?
“I guess I never really thought about the fact that Pan had you under his thumb for so long, or how he managed to keep you there,” Emma confessed. “If it was so easy to lose your identity on Neverland, why did you go back?”
“For you,” he said, like it was that simple. “And for Henry. Saving him from Peter’s mind games after I failed to save half of my crew was the least I could do, and it was the only shot at redemption I had.”
“I hate Peter Pan,” Emma declared, startling a bark of laughter out of Killian.
“Me too.”
“Thanks for telling me, Killian.” They sat there for a while in companionable silence before Emma suddenly grinned, and idea striking her. “Hey, do you want to see my tattoo? It involves a lot less psychological trauma and a lot more shots of vodka and encouragement from very bad influences.”