Killian knows, even before she exhales, that Emma has taken her last breath. Her body sags against his and her eyes close as the air leaves her, her hand dropping from its place on his chest. The sudden quiet startles his ears.

He holds his own breath and looks out to the night sky, his hand continuing its soft strokes through her hair. Numbness overtakes him then, a great, detached void settling in his chest as he stares into the darkness, paralyzed in place.

That blissful nothingness only lasts a few moments. His body screams for him to breathe and when he finally exhales it's a brutal, shuddering thing, the air burning his lungs as he gasps and pulls Emma closer, holding her slouching form upright against him. His hand shakes as he holds her - his entire body shakes, trembling just as violently as Emma had shivered, his heart dropped to the pits of his stomach and his head swimming, his thoughts a chaotic mess.

He'd always had people, before. Crew members who pulled him back while the ship's doctor tried to revive Liam. A first mate who dragged him, kicking and screaming, to be seen to before he bled out from the loss of his hand. People who told him where to go and what to do, physically carried him there if they had to. People who handled things.

Now he's nowhere to go and no one to aid him. And gods help him, he doesn't know what to do.

He blindly holds her, and for a few minutes he closes his eyes and pretends. Acts as though she's merely sleeping and he's simply keeping her comfortable and warm. Acts as though the lack of rise and fall in her chest is no trouble at all, that she'll wake soon and breathe and feel better, perhaps even listen to another of his stories.

He still shakes, buzzing with shock but heavy with dread. It takes the first touch of light in the sky, the first signs of morning, for him to look down at her and think about moving. It unnerves him to see her peaceful face resting gently against his chest, no furrow left in her brow and her eyelashes fanning across pale cheeks.

Move, he tells himself. You need to move.

And yet he can't find it within himself - what can he even do? Lay her on the cold - no. No, that won't do at all. But he can't hold her forever (not anymore, a cruel voice, one that sounds suspiciously like Pan's, slithers into his head to tell him), and it gives him someplace to start. He carefully lifts his coat from them both and shakes it out, spreading it on the ground next to him as best he can with one arm. It feels strange to do so, the compulsion to keep her warm strong though she doesn't need it anymore, won't ever need it again.

He lifts her easily, setting her on the coat and cradling the back of her head as he lowers her down. He finds himself at a loss once he lets go, a painful tug in his chest when he pulls his hand from her hair. He straightens out her legs and arranges her arms across her stomach in a daze, his body moving automatically as he tries to make her presentable - for whom or what he's not sure, but he finds himself wishing he had another shirt he could put her in, not one so torn and bloody. He idly wonders if she would even approve of him changing her clothes (would have approved, his mind corrects).

He settles for tugging her shirt down, arranging the torn bits to cover her exposed skin. His hand begins to shake once more when he touches the bloody fabric and he gulps in large lungfuls of air, making a fist and trying to steady himself. His hand hovers over her body, still unsure, until it drifts upward and he gently brushes her hair from her face.

He takes his time, combing out the tangles as best he can with his fingers and tucking the strands behind her ears. Once finished, he looks her over, making sure he's missed nothing, that there's not anything else he can -

He nearly collapses in on himself. If they're ever found, this is the best he can muster. Visions of her parents' faces if they do find them - he'll have to explain what happened, they'll deserve to know and he doesn't think he can ever tell this story to another soul, not do it and remain standing, and then her son, bloody hell -

Everything burns. His eyes, his throat, his chest, a white-hot pain searing through him that steals the breath from his lungs.

"I'm sorry," he says to an audience that can't hear him. He looks down to Emma again. "I couldn't - I'm sorry."

Guilt and heartache overwhelm him all at once as he leans down, fingers brushing her hair before he presses his lips to her forehead.

He feels the warmth before anything else, a sweeping sensation that starts in his lips against her skin and softly runs through him. It settles in his heart, sweetly knitting the shattered pieces back together and he gasps at the feeling, only barely registering the soft bloom of light and mild breeze that ruffles his hair.

Emma gasps below him, too.

Her eyes pop open and it's impossible, she was gone and lifeless but she's gasping, wildly looking around in confusion and -

"Emma?" The word is croaked-out, disbelieving, and he can only stare, his stomach churning and his chest squeezing with a wild, desperate hope.

"Hook?" Her voice is shot through with disuse and sleep - with death - but it's real and alive and he never thought he'd hear it again, and she bolts into a sitting position while he leans back to keep them from knocking heads, and he's grabbing her upper arm to keep her from panicking though he's so very near to it himself and her skin is warm, so warm beneath his palm. "What - what happened?"

He doesn't even bloody know but his smile splits his face for how wide it is, a disbelieving laugh escaping him. "You're alive." The words are even more beautiful out loud.

She shakes her head, grips the front of his shirt as she looks around - the cave, the coat he'd laid her out on, the sun slowly beginning to creep over the jungle below - and then back to him, and she laughs, actually laughs, a bewildered, joyous, staggeringly relieved noise emerging from an incredulous smile. "I'm alive. What - "

His arms go around her then, his hand pressed into her hair while his wrist settles at the small of her back. He's afraid to grip at her too hard at first but her arms latch around his shoulders, fingers digging in as she clings to him, pulling him in closer. A shared sigh of relief passes between them and they rock together where they sit, a nigh-imperceptible sway of their bodies while they both learn to breathe again.

She starts laughing again while they embrace each other and he joins in, both of them delirious and almost hysterical with it. His head is still spinning when he pulls back to look at her, his grin splitting his face. "Bloody hell, Swan, I thought you'd - "

His words are cut off when she hauls him into her, her lips closing over his and he forgets to think at all, can't possibly hold a thought in his head with her mouth on his and one palm pressed to his chest while the other curls into the back of his hair. Her lips are so, so soft and the rough press of her mouth melts into something deeper. It feels like a celebration, a thank you, so different from the last time she pulled him to her, her first kiss a fight and her second a dance. It takes a moment for him to catch up but when they finally move together it's glorious. It's measured and slow, only a soft swipe of her tongue before she pulls away, her forehead pressed to his as they breathe together.

"What - what happened?" she asks, and he notes with some satisfaction that she's as out of breath as he (she's breathing , bloody hell).

"I - " he pauses, trying to give his brain time to come to the present. He'd been staring at her lips, distracting as they were, but he lifts his eyes to hers when the full weight of what happened comes crashing down on him, exhilaration crossed with dread. He never in his wildest dreams thought - bloody hell, it means she's his -

"Hook? Hook." Her voice snaps him out of his reverie, her features growing concerned. "What's wrong? What the hell happened? What did you do?

His throat goes dry. "I kissed you."

She rolls her eyes, almost embarrassed, and he can't even enjoy it because part of him knows how she'll react when he tells her. "I think I kissed you."

"No, love." He takes her hand from his chest and squeezes, hoping she won't retreat back into herself. "You were dead." She pulls back slightly at his words. "You'd stopped breathing. You didn't have a heartbeat. You were gone." His voice shakes on the last word. "And I kissed you, here." He releases her hand to brush his thumb across her forehead. She doesn't flinch at his touch, frozen in place as she takes in his words. "And then you woke up."

She blinks, startled. "No. That can't be… that's not - "

"Yes," he says, willing her to believe him, hardly believing it himself. "That arrow wasn't poisoned. It was cursed."

She shakes her head, scooting back to place some distance between them and he deflates where he sits as she moves away from him. "That doesn't make any sense." She moves even farther, wincing as she goes - his kiss may have lifted the curse but her wound is still there. "Something else had to have happened, there's no way…" she trails off, unable to look at him.

"Doubt all you want, Swan, but it happened. Do you think I'm lying to you?'

She lifts her head her eyes meet his. He can feel her reading him, can sense that she desperately wants it all to be a fiction and sees when her face falls as she realizes it is not.

He sighs, the sting of rejection overwhelming his better judgment and the feel of her lips still burned into his. "Is this about Baelfire, then?"

She huffs. "No! I swear to God, if one more person thinks I want to get back with Neal…"

He files that away for later examination, his mind racing too quickly to ponder on it much. "What, then? What doesn't make sense? That the arrow was cursed or that I woke you with a kiss?" he asks, dejected.

"Either," she says, stunned.

That's what makes him snap, too many emotional swings in the last minute to allow him to keep calm. "Don't lie to me, Swan," he says, darkly. "A curse was bloody brilliant. Even if we hadn't been trapped here, everyone would have been scrambling for a way to cure you of poison. You'd have drunk that water to no effect, and even if any us - your mother, or father, or yes, even me - had kissed you, you'd be alive but stuck on this bloody island." He shakes his head. "No, it's not the curse that's unbelievable to you. It's that I was able to break it."

"But it doesn't - you - we barely know each other," she says weakly.

"You didn't kiss me like a stranger just now," he mutters.

"That was - "

"A two-time thing?" he interrupts, unable to completely keep the scorn out of his voice.

"Don't be an asshole. I was relieved, okay? Waking up from the damned dead was the first moment I've had here that didn't actively suck, and I just - "

"Are you really telling me you would have kissed just anyone in that situation? After last night, you know me better than any living person in all the realms," he reminds her. "And, I'd wager, the opposite is likely true as well."

"I was dying."

"I bloody well know that! In exquisite detail, in fact." Something in his words must reach her, because the fight visibly drains from the set of her shoulders as he speaks.

"Look," she says, burying her face in her hands. "I don't just go telling my life story to everybody I meet. I was scared, and you were - "

"I was what?"

She has no answer for that.

"Swan, you can't just sweep this under the rug and pretend this doesn't mean anything. It means everything. You and I both know what happened, and whether you like it or not that was a - "

"Don't say it." She sighs, but drops her hands and looks him in the eye. "Thank you," she tells him, and the sudden sincerity in her voice floors him. "For taking care of me. And for…" she hesitates. "For waking me up. But we're still stuck and Henry's still out there and I can't do this right now." She looks around (for an escape route, he's certain) before returning her gaze to his, imploring. "Please."

He can only stare back, for as desperately as he wants to press the issue he knows she's right. They have a mission, one he promised her he'd help see through, and he could no sooner get her to talk right now than convince her to jump off the cliff.

"All right," he finally allows. "But make no mistake, Swan, I won't drop the matter completely. When we get home - " he stops, but he knows she's remembering his words from a few days earlier. That's when the fun begins.

"I thought you didn't have a home," she says, soft.

"I don't," he agrees. "But perhaps someday I can find one."

When Regina's tracking spell finds them a few hours later and Emma is back in the arms of her parents, neither of them speak a word of what passed between them.

"She had a rough night, but was feeling better by morning," is all he says. David especially looks at him curiously, but the grateful look Emma shoots him makes him feel marginally better. He ignores the pointed stares from Regina and leads the way back to camp, trying to keep his heart from cracking in his chest.

In the end it's his own weapon that takes Pan down, a startling, almost anticlimactic moment where he's able to run the demon through when he was momentarily distracted by one of Regina's fireballs. He's never felt much satisfaction in killing another, found it more a chore than anything else even in his darkest days as a pirate, but this is different entirely - vengeance for Henry, for Bae, for Liam, for Emma - all wrapped up in one deadly swipe of a sword.

He falls to his knees from the exertion when he's done, the culmination of a long battle as he and the rest of the group stare at each other in stunned silence when they realize what has happened, when Pan's lifeless body falls to a heap in the middle of the jungle. Death, it seems, has returned to a form he is more familiar with - quick, brutal, and merciless.

He tosses and turns in his bunk, unable to sleep. He blames it on the unfamiliar mattress - the first mate's sleeping accommodations aren't up to his usual standards. He'd left Baelfire to steer the ship while they make their way back to Storybrooke, the last of his energy leaving him once Henry's heart was safely returned to him. But his swirling thoughts override his exhaustion and it must have been hours since he first put his head to the pillow.

True Love's Kiss.

It's the first time he's allowed the actual words to enter his mind, turning the phrase over and over in his head. True Love. He could have been ready for it, given a little more time. He was already prepared to love her.

He should have known the moment she offered him the chance to join them, to be a part of something, but it took a blistering kiss that left him unsteady on his feet and the hollowness he felt when she walked away from him to truly realize it. Until that point he'd written off his attraction to her as merely that, and after it'd taken him a sleepless night to convince himself that he wasn't somehow betraying Milah's memory.

He could love again, yes. He could fight for it with every fiber of his being, as he always did. But True Love? It feels bigger, somehow, like a responsibility he's not ready for. Like something he could ruin. But he can't lie to himself, not about this, not when he thinks on how he felt when Emma died in his arms - or how it felt when he brought her back, unnerving and surprising and beautiful.

In any other situation he'd proceed as he always does when his heart wants something - headfirst and full-speed. But that's impossible now, not with how Emma responded once she realized what happened. He'd heard so many similar stories over the years, even that of Emma's own parents, but a True Love's Kiss followed by disbelief and denial wasn't one of them. When he thinks back to what he knows about her, however, it doesn't surprise him.

Maybe I was in love once.

You and I, we understand each other. Look out for yourself and you'll never get hurt.

I can't take the chance that I'm wrong about you.

He should have realized in the beginning how absurd it was to try and pit himself against against Baelfire for her affections. He'd been too busy considering him as possible competition to realize Bae had obviously burned her badly. And now -

- now he has a True Love who's terrified of love itself.

(Is it really True Love if one party is unwilling?)

His only consolation is that somewhere, deep inside her, she feels the same for him as he for her. The kiss wouldn't have worked otherwise. But he can't help but ponder whether it would have worked at all were she not in the state she was in, barely conscious and likely just as unaware of her surroundings. Can she only accept love when she's on death's door and hardly able to think?

He rolls over in his bunk, trying to find a comfortable position. It seems sleep won't come for him tonight. He tosses and turns uselessly. He's so accustomed to the familiar rocking of waves against the ship to lull him into sleep, but their passage through clear air and realms and whatever else doesn't offer the same comfort. It's quiet - too quiet, but perhaps that's what allows him to hear the faintest of knocks to his bedchambers. He's upright in an instant, a shadow cast in the light beneath the door.

"Come in," he calls. The shadow hesitates for a moment before the door opens.

Emma hardly seems to be able to look his way when she steps inside. "Hey."

He pushes the covers back and swings his legs over the edge of the bunk, sitting upright to face her. "Hello."

"I thought you'd be asleep."

"And I you." He reaches to his bedside and lights the lantern sitting there, a soft glow cast about the room. He gestures towards to the lone chair next to the tiny desk pushed against the wall. "Have a seat, Swan."

She pauses, as though she's thinking the better of it, but moves to take the chair. She settles into it with her shoulders slumped, looking every bit as exhausted as he feels. She's not even in her nightclothes yet, still in the all-black ensemble she wore throughout the day. Belatedly he realizes he's shirtless. It doesn't seem to bother her one way or the other, but he's quick to slide his left wrist under the covers, his hook and brace removed before he'd first climbed into bed.

"Hey," she says softly when she realizes what he's doing. "It's okay."

It feels like an olive branch, one he's reluctant to accept lest it be snatched away again.

He slowly removes his wrist from the sheets and sets it in his lap, waiting for her reaction. She doesn't give much of one, merely lets her eyes fall to his blunted wrist for a few seconds to take it all in. There's no disgust or, thankfully, pity as she simply looks. It feels painfully intimate sitting before her like this, but there's no awkwardness in it, just a simple, quiet moment.

The discomfort returns where her eyes meet his once more. "So," she says.

"So." He sighs. "Is this how it's going to be between us?"

She slouches even further. "I don't know."

"Then why did you come to me?"

"I just felt like I should." She shrugs. "I don't really know what to do now. You hear all these fairytales about what's supposed to happen and I'm just… not that."

"Are you saying you don't want to immediately get married and ride off into the sunset on a white horse?" he asks, attempting levity but regretting it immediately when he sees the look of horror on her face. "Calm down, Swan. I'm not proposing."

She rolls her eyes. "Bad idea unless you want me to run away screaming."

He can't help it - he smiles. "It's strange. I can't picture you running away from anything except love. Why is that?"

She flinches on the word love but stays in her seat, which he takes as a victory. "It's complicated."

"On the contrary, I think it's rather simple. Your first and likely only love hurt you. Badly."

"That's putting it lightly," she mutters.

He doesn't press the issue, not now at least, but it tells him all he needs to know. "Has it really frightened you that much?" he asks softly. "That you'll never want to try again? I'm not him."

"I know you aren't. I just - I meant it when I said we barely know each other. We know a little bit about each other's childhoods, but beyond that, really? I don't know what books like or how you because a pirate or anything, and you don't know my coffee order or my favorite movies and - hell, you don't even know what movies are. And now fate is suddenly coming in and telling me how to feel about you?" She shakes her head. "It doesn't work like that. Not with me."

"I want to know you, Emma." He looks her directly in the eye when he says it, hoping she hears the sincerity in his words. "And I think you've got it backwards. Fate isn't telling you how to feel. It's telling you what's already there."

She stiffens in her chair. "I didn't think that… this was in the cards for me. It's something that happens to other people in fairytales, not out in the real world. All swelling music and miracles and - "

He raises an eyebrow. "Is that not what happened? You are raised from the dead, after all. And gave me quite a spectacular kiss immediately afterwards."

Even in the dim light he can see the flush crawl up her cheeks.

"Just answer me one thing, Swan."

"What?"

"Can you remember anything from right before you died? You couldn't talk, and I didn't know if you were… aware of what was happening."

She looks down, biting her lip. "Yeah, I do."

"What do you remember?" he presses gently.

"You keeping me warm."

"Is that all?"

She sighs. "Hook - "

"Please."

She glances up, looking like she wants to put him off but she must see something in him that convinces her to keep talking. "You telling me that Henry would be safe because he had so many people to watch over him." She looks up again. "Did you mean that? If I would have died, you still would have - "

"Yes." He doesn't hesitate. He waits for her while she studies him, no doubt putting her gift for detecting lies to use. Her face is nearly unreadable but her shoulders relax slightly after a few moments.

"All I'm asking is that you think about that. About how you felt. Be honest with yourself. And if you still think that I'm - that this isn't worth a try, I'll drop the matter entirely and speak a word of it to no one."

She takes a long time before answering, green eyes dark in the lamplight still locked on his, vaguely stunned. "Okay," she whispers.

He expects that to be it, for her to excuse himself and come to him later with an answer once they're settled back in Storybrooke. But her gaze drops to her hands in her lap and she says nothing, makes no move to speak or leave and he finds himself tensing where he sits, wondering what she's on about.

The silence grows between them and he waits, the knot in his middle tightening in anticipation of whatever else she might be gathering the courage to say to him.

"I, uh. Henry and I have been through a lot. I'm gonna need some time before I can - before we - try," she finally says.

He exhales with a sudden rush of relief, long and deep. It's so much more than the outright rejection he was expecting that he feels almost lightheaded with hope and surprise, but he can't just leave it there. "I can give you that, love. But that doesn't mean I'll let you use it as an excuse to put me off forever."

Her lips actually quirk up at that and she stands, slowly crossing the distance between them with careful steps and looking down at him where he sits on the bed. When she leans down it almost feels like a dream, time slowing as she closes the space between them and he barely remembers to close his eyes, to kiss her back before she's already pulling away, the brief touch of her mouth seared into his skin and his shoulders burning where her palms rested fleetingly.

It feels like a promise.

"Be patient," she whispers before exiting the room, leaving him to sit there, astonished.