Chapter Text
Emma reaches down and covers Hope’s hands with her own, quickly snuffing out the small ball of magic before turning to look around her, making sure no one saw what she just did. But when she finds the only pair of eyes she finds on them are Killian’s — are her husband’s, watching them through the window over the sink.
The smile on his face gives it away. He saw what she just did, ensuring her that it was not all in her mind. He saw what she saw, saw the little ball of light held in her daughter’s small hands.
Whatever is happening in the kitchen must stop immediately, because Killian is out of the line of the window within moments, replaced by David’s confused face finding nothing exciting in the backyard. But moments later, Killian pushes through the back door of the garage and into the yard, rushing to fill the space between them before scooping Hope up in his arms.
“Oh, my little cygnet!” he cries, smiling at Emma as he wraps his arms around their little girl.
“You saw then?” Emma asks, even though she already knows the answer to the question, and he just nods excitedly. “What does this mean?”
Killian pauses for a moment, honestly not sure what it means, but their conversation is halted when David and Mary Margaret join them in the back yard.
“Is everything alright out here?” David asks, genuine concern in his voice, and Emma smiles brightly at him as a response.
She opens her mouth to speak, trying to come up with an excuse, but Killian beats her to the punch.
“I just remembered that we had promised Grace and Jefferson that we could meet them for ice cream tonight, and if we don’t leave soon we might miss them completely.”
“Jefferson?” Mary Margaret asks, her hands on her hips. “That guy that owns the bar down town?”
“His daughter and Hope have become fast friends over the summer, and they’ll be in the same class come the start of the school year.”
David’s face lights up at this revelation. “You’re — you’ve decided to stay?”
Killian smiles back, his hand resting on Hope’s shoulder. When he looks down at her, she is smiling, too. “Indefinitely,” he says, but stops any response from David or Mary Margaret with, “But for now, we have to go.”
“Jefferson, what the bloody hell does this all mean?”
“Daddy, watch your language!” Hope yells from beside him, hitting his broad forearm with her small hand, which elicits a small chuckle from the table.
“Don’t you understand?” Jefferson asks, his eyes wide as he leans across the kitchen table towards them. “This is it! I didn’t — I couldn’t see it before, it wasn’t in any of the books, but now it all makes sense! That’s what this all means, and now we know how — what — we need to do.”
“Jeff, please,” Emma begs, reaching across the table and placing her hand on his arm. “Slow down. Explain. You’re just rambling again.”
He stares at her for a moment, as if he doesn’t understand her, before his face softens and he leans back in his chair. “The curse,” he whispers. “This is it, this has to be it. How we break it.”
When he doesn’t continue, Killian prompts him with a wave of his hand. “The book — it says that one of the things Regina was sure to have in this world when she wrote the curse is her crypt, where she keeps her magic supplies, her collection of hearts, and her mother’s coffin.”
“Woah, woah, woah, her collection of hearts ?” Emma asks, at the same time Killian exclaims “Her mother’s coffin?”
And then, from Hope: “ That’s so cool!”
Henry giggles beside Emma, and when she turns to him, eyes wide, Killian turns in the other direction, down to Hope. “You and I will be having a conversation later about the meaning of the word cool.”
“How does her magic connect to the crypt?” Emma asks.
“According to the storybook, there are two ways to get into the crypt. Blood magic and light magic.”
“Why would she do that? Why would she give us that advantage?”
"I'm not sure if that was something she wrote in, or something that the Curse corrected itself. But she also never expected magic to follow her to Storybrooke, especially not through the little princess." When Jefferson says this, he smiles down at Hope, who beams up at him. No one had ever called her the princess before, Killian realizes. But that's exactly what she is.
"And what do we do when we get into this… vault?" Emma asks, her voice still dripping with uncertainty.
"That's where the dagger is," Jeff says cooly, as if it's supposed to make sense to Emma.
But Killian gets it, leaning further on the table. "Wait…" he says slowly, his eyes growing wide. "You mean, like, the dagger? The Dark One's dagger?"
Jefferson nods, somehow the only thing he does not do quickly, and Emma is starting to lose her patience.
"Can someone please explain to me what this all means?"
Jeff opens this month to speak, but Henry beats him to it. "Can I?" he asks, his voice small, as if he is afraid that he will get yelled at.
"Of course, lad," Killian says, and Henry's face lights up.
"The dagger controls the Dark One. Whoever controls the dagger can tell him what to do, and he has to listen to them."
"And you think we can get this dagger by breaking into her vault? And she won't realize it?"
"That's the point, though, mom," Hope says, and Emma feels her heart soar just as it does every time her little girl calls her mom. "She'll realize it, and by the time she gets there, there will be nothing she can do about it. We'll get the dagger, we'll get Uncle Liam's heart, and then we can defeat her. Both of us, together.”
Emma smiles at the sureness in her daughter’s voice, but it does not last long when she realizes a hitch in Hope’s plan. “There’s an issue with this, though,” she says, her smile quickly turning into a frown. “I don’t have my powers. I don’t have magic.”
The room grows silent for a moment, before Killian wraps his arm around the back of her chair, pulling her closer with the end of his brace. She turns to him, worry spread across her face, but she is surprised to see only genuine confidence on his features.
“But you do .”
“Come on,” she says. “I haven’t had magic for twelve years, since Regina cast this curse and sent us all to Storybrooke.”
“That doesn’t mean you don’t have it,” Killian says softly, pressing a kiss to her temple.
“Then why hasn’t it come back? After all we’ve gone through here, all the shit Neal and Regina have put us through, why hasn’t it come back to help me?”
“Magic doesn’t always work like that,” Jefferson says, flipping through a few pages of the book in front of him. “Sometimes it simmers beneath the surface, just waiting for something to help it burst through.”
“Like when you guys kissed in the hospital,” Henry helpfully comments.
Jefferson nods, his eyes never leaving the pages. “Exactly like that, actually.”
“What can we do to fix it?” Killian asks.
“I mean, True Love’s Kiss didn’t work for you, that would have been too easy, anyway,” he mumbles, the words coming quickly. “And there’s the possibility of Hope being the key to it all, but you said that you’ve already come in contact with her magic, so that rules that out.”
“Have you tried to conjure your magic while Hope is using hers? Maybe they’re tethered together, and once one of you is using them, the other one can tap into it, too.”
It’s a brilliant idea, really. And it might actually work — but Emma barely heard any of it. Because she’s too focused on the movement of his hand. His hand, which has hooked its pinky into one of the rings on the chain that has fallen out from under his shirt.
“The rings,” she says, almost under her breath, though she feels as if she’s discovered the answer to all of their questions.
Killian just looks confused. “Pardon?”
“Your ring, Killian,” she says, pointing to his hand, which is still pulling her wedding ring back and forth across the band. “Or, should I say, my ring.”
It takes him another moment, but then his eyes grow comically wide, his gaze turning down to the ring between his fingers. Not his mother’s plain gold band, but Emma’s small silver one, with the large sapphire in the middle, between two smaller emeralds. The one that he designed and had made specifically for her.
The one that —
It’s as if they remember it at the same time, turning to each other, eyes wide, meeting glances before they both look down at the ring. Killian pulls the chain over his head, disconnecting the ends of the chain so he can hand Emma back her ring.
Sliding it back into its rightful place on her left ring finger, it’s like the pieces of a puzzle falling into place, the warmth all over her body that feels familiar and strange all at the same time after being missing for twelve years. As she feels it spread through her body, she closes her eyes, allowing it to spread through her, into the tips of her fingers and her toes, brightening the edges of her vision — but it’s not quite right. It’s like pieces falling into place, but the pieces aren’t all there yet.
“Is that—” Henry asks, at the same time Hope says, “What just happened?”
Jefferson smiles. “Brilliant,” he whispers, staring at the two of them before he turns back down to the pages.
Emma turns back to Killian, who is carefully watching her every movement. “Did it work?”
She tries to smile, but even though it doesn’t cover her face, she hasn’t lost hope entirely — she has another plan.
It’s raining by the time they make it across town and onto the Jolly. Killian was hoping that the rest of their group could wait on the main deck while he and Emma went into the captain’s quarters to do what needs to be done, but with the large, hot summer raindrops falling around them, he can’t bring himself to ask them to stay behind.
Which doesn’t make it any easier when he watches Emma close her eyes, focus written into each small detail of her face as she runs her hands against the back of one of the storage drawers next to the bunk, waiting to hear the pop of the lock of the false bottom.
But after a few long moments, nothing happens, and he watches as her shoulders slump.
“Hope, honey,” she says, pulling one of her hands out to wave their daughter over. “I need your help.”
The girl rushes across the room from where Jefferson was keeping them all at the bottom of the steps, excited to be of help. Standing between Emma’s outstretched arms, Hope does just as her mother is doing, placing her hands on the bottom of the empty drawer, her eyes squeezed shut.
“Just like that,” Emma whispers, barely loud enough for Killian to hear. “Focus on the warmth in your fingertips, you feel that, right?” Hope nods, even though Emma’s eyes are now closed again. “Focus on that warmth, and on something happy, on having our family back together, yeah?”
Hope nods again, squeezing her eyes shut harder, and Emma’s face does the same.
The clock on the bookshelf ticks a few times, suddenly audible to Killian over the pounding of the rain on the deck above them. Once, twice, thrice.
And then he hears the bottom of the drawer come loose, Hope and Emma cheering together as Emma pulls out what she finds there, which pulls a gasp out of Hope first, then Henry and Grace when she turns enough for them to see.
His heart. His bright, pounding, beating heart, right where he and Emma put it a few days before the curse was cast, before Blue shrunk his ship.
Before their lives got absolutely flipped upside-down.
“Would you two, uh, like some privacy?” Jefferson asks, a hint of a smile in his voice, and Emma’s forehead falls against Killian’s shoulder. She doesn’t even try to suppress the laugh that rises through her body.
“I, uh, hate to ask,” Killian answers, his voice dark, deep, in a way that makes Emma’s magic hum. “But I would really appreciate that.”
A moment passes.
“Grace, Hope and I want to show you and your dad the rest of the ship!” Henry says excitedly, taking Grace’s hand in his own — a gesture Emma definitely doesn’t miss, even as they turn away and head back up the steps. Jefferson is the last one to turn around, winking at the two of them before leaving them behind in the captain’s cabin.
For a moment, the only sounds are the ones that come from the ship: the creaking of the wood, the water lapping against the side, the slowing raindrops on the deck. Emma feels the pounding of his heart in her hand, her other pressed against where it belongs.
“We’re going to fix this, alright?” she asks, but his eyes are set on the beams of the ceiling above them. “Killian?” she asks softly when he still does not respond.
“And then what?”
“Excuse me?”
Finally, he drops his eyes to hers. “What are we going to do once we have this figured out? Once we break the curse, once and for all? Are we going to stay here, in this stupid little town, where most of your memories are lies? Or somewhere, out in this world, where we have to hide who we really are?”
“Killian, what are you saying?”
She watches the muscles in his jaw tick, his eyes squeezed shut, as he takes a shaky breath, his hand on her shoulder.
“I want to go home,” he says softly, almost a whisper, and he rests his forehead against hers. “I miss Misthaven, and the life we had there. The happiness we found, it’s like… I’d never had that before. And I want to have it again.”
“Is Misthaven even still there? Did it disappear when the curse was cast, or has it just been… sitting there? Empty?”
“I don’t know, Emma. I don’t know, and I don’t care. I just know that those years that we spent together there were the happiest of the centuries that I’ve been alive, and after all of this, after everything we’ve been through since we learned about this curse, that’s what I want more than anything in the world — to be back there, living the life we had to leave behind, raising our children in the castle and on the water and throughout the Enchanted Forest.”
Emma takes a deep breath. “Okay.”
Killian pulls his head back, staring down at her. His love, his wife, the mother of his children, all these years later, and she’s still standing here, surprising him. “Pardon?”
He watches as she nods. “Yeah, okay. I haven’t — I haven’t thought about it until now, but I want that, too. There are some things I’ll miss about this land, of course, you know, pizza and smartphones and cars, but if that’s where you want to be, it’s what I want, too.”
He leans down to capture her lips with his, a soft, gentle kiss. He has missed this woman more than anything, more than it should be possible to miss someone, but he also loves her more than he ever thought possible — even without his heart in his chest.
“Can I have my heart back so I can kiss you properly?”
Emma laughs, then holds his heart up against his chest, above where it belongs. “Just be gentle with me,” he whispers, his lips almost touching the shell of her ear, just as she slams the beating organ back into his chest, very much not gently. He takes a few wobbling steps back, his hands steadying him against the edge of the bed. Once he finally gets his footing back, he stares up at her, eyes wide with amazement.
“Sorry?” she says with a shrug, but she is unable to keep the smile from taking over her face.
He surges back towards her, a growl escaping from deep in his throat as he wraps his arms around her, pulling her tight against him as he slams his lips into hers. This kiss is everything the last one was not — heated, hot, mere moments until Killian is pulling her back towards the wall next to the bed and sliding his tongue into her mouth.
He doesn’t want to stop, and if he couldn’t hear the footsteps of his children and Jefferson moving above them, he probably wouldn’t have.
“Come on, darling,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady even though he doesn’t fully pull his lips from hers. “We have a curse to break.”
When she pulls away, she finally feels it for the first time, the warmth that has finally reached the edges of her body, of her soul, of her vision, the piece of her that was hidden with Killian’s missing heart — the final piece of herself coming back together. She reaches down and takes his hand, staring up into his ocean-blue eyes for a moment before she nods. But, turning away from him, something on the desk catches her eye, something that she thinks might be helpful for their next task, and she reaches out to pick it up, the cool metal familiar between her fingers.
“I think you might need this,” she says, smiling at her husband as she holds his hook up between them.
Killian just smiles, a silent laugh passing through his lips, and he holds his arm out towards her. “If you’ll do the honor, my love?” he asks, and sparks fly from her fingertips as she twists the hook into its rightful place.
Now they’re ready.