He's here, oh god he's here and he's alive, is all she thinks when she runs up the stairs of the loft, throwing her arms around Killian the moment she's close enough. In her jubilance, she knocks him onto the bed, and she wants to stay there forever, wrapped in his arms, her face buried in his neck because fuck she watched him die. But she pulls back and looks down at him, her hand clasping his next to his head and she feels that same pulsing feeling in her chest that she felt when she ran, literally ran, into him in the passage way of the castle. You. Just you. Always and forever.

There you are, she thinks, and she smiles down at him. And the way he looks at her makes everything fade a little. If it weren't for the fact that she just watched him die a short time before, she could put the whole ordeal behind her, but the look in his eyes going lifeless is still sticking in the back of her mind. Her own thoughts watching him fall to the ground are still bouncing around her mind. The fact that her father killed her boyfriend no matter where they were and what they were is still irrevocably there.

Even as she's thinking it, he's reminding her that he's a survivor, even though in another realm, in another person's reality, he's not. But he's reassuring her that he will survive no matter what, because that's just what he does.

Emma hauls him up by the jacket so they're both sitting, so she can look him in the eye on even ground when she tells him she—

"Tell me what?" he asks, and his eyebrow is up, and the look in his eyes tells her everything she needs to know.

He knows, she thinks, he fucking knows. By the expression on his face and the way he seems to be smiling the words out of her, but she can't just can't say them when she swears she would be brave enough to tell him. So she lamely thanks him for sacrificing himself so that she and Henry could succeed.

She sees his chin dip down a fraction, his disappointment in the words she didn't say showing for a brief second, but then he's telling her it's all part of the job of being a hero, still smiling, still shining his seemingly endless supply of love right at her, and she knows the words will come when she needs them to.

At the moment she needs to tell him the most, they'll be there, coming from her lips, and they'll matter more at that moment than they will now, so she just caresses his cheek, feels the warmth of his skin beneath her fingers, and waits. They have all the time in the world, now, don't they?