Chapter Text
They were quiet for a moment again, before Killian broke the silence, with a question that held a sort of hesitance that Emma’s never heard from him before.
“Why… why did Baelfire accompany you?”
Emma’s eyes found his face, and in his eyes were a thousand attempts to find the answer to that question, that must have been in the back of his mind for hours.
And was that fear?
It stunned Emma for a moment, because hardly ever in her life has she been cared for by someone.
Never in her life has care overlapped.
And there was the smallest hesitance in his eyes, the smallest uncertainty.
Emma answered his question with as much muted irritation as she’d felt when she’d given Neal a piece of her mind on the ship. “Hell if I know,” she muttered. “When he heard I was coming here he volunteered himself as a guide, or whatever. And if he didn’t know how to sail your ship I would have pushed him overboard the minute he came back.” Still seeing that hesitation in his eyes, she said, “He told me he’s here to, like, win me back or something—” The jerk of tension in his muscles, so small she barely felt it, made her heart skip. “—but I promptly told him where he could shove it.” And she smiled a little, it easing that hesitation in his eyes, and the tension in his body. Emma laid her head back over Killian’s chest, both of them getting comfortable once again, in more ways than one. “And he was lying when he told me he was just here for me.” She sighed, old hurt mixing with new. “Whatever it is, he’s here for himself, not me.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I don’t think he was ever there for me at all.”
A kiss to her temple sent a soft chill all the way to her toes. His words just as soft as before, he whispered, “I will never let you down.”
The words were simple enough, but the promise they held was of the same depth as the one in New York.
“I promise you, Emma. I am not going anywhere.”
Emma smiled, only curling into him more, both a thank you and a promise of her own to do just the same for him.
One that he heard, for he only held her tighter.