A wild Christmas-y epilogue to this oldie (that still holds my heart) appears. You can thank the absolutely wonderful and so very thoughtful and sweet shady-swan-jones tumblr who still remembers it!

All her life Emma's Christmases have been marked by one defining characteristic – noise.

Christmases in group homes were loud with the screams of a multitude of kids, the yells, the trampling feet, the fights over the few good toys that people had dropped off – more often to make themselves feel good rather than the children.

Christmases in foster homes were loud with the shouting of foster parents, the never-ending arguments, the pointed hints about how grateful one should be there – an indebtedness that made the hardest of cookies even harder to swallow.

Christmases in bars were loud with the merriment of other people, the clanking of forks on plates, the jokes and conversations that you were decidedly not a part of – the very invisibility of those that were there to be pretty, to bring plates and take them away, to get up on stage and entertain, to welcome, to clean up after – never to be part of it all.

Christmases at LA wanna-be parties were loud with the laughter of people you didn't know, the compliments of people whose opinion you didn't care about, the seizing glances and occasional glares of people who didn't care for you – the fakeness of it all.

Christmases at Hollywood supposedly-made-it parties were loud with the expectations of glamour and glitter, the necessary witticisms, the inescapable over-the-top flattery, the eventual scheming for the awards season – the anonymity of the dazzling crowd.

But her first Christmas with Killian is quiet.

David takes Mary-Margaret to visit his mother without his usual apprehension that Emma will be spending the holiday with a bottle of wine and some store-bought slices of turkey. It is the first time since he became her agent that he doesn't try to convince her to make an appearance at one of the multitude of parties she has been invited to.

It's been a little over half a year since Killian's accident and neither of them has shown much interest in rejoining the world of flashing lights and black-tie celebrations.

It is the first time she realizes exactly how much tact David actually has sometimes, definitely not the first she sees how much he always looks out for her – for the both of them now.

Ruby is a bit harder to shake. But her obvious desire to take Belle somewhere high in the mountains with plenty of reasons for them to snuggle together under warm blankets and warmer caresses is… well, obvious.

And Gold's secretary that came forth with all her knowledge and unexpected bravery and solidified their case while winning the heart of the plaintiff's sister is a whole other story-

And Emma can't help but be glad. She knows that Killian loves Ruby with all his heart but sometimes… sometimes she can tell how hard he tries around his sister, how desperately he fights to go back to someone he was before he lost his hand and then even further back – before he knew loss at all.

And much as Emma knows how special a family Christmas can be for all of them, she also knows there will be time.

A happily ever after worth of it.

There will be time for huge trees and lavish dinners and tons of presents under said trees and the whole patchwork family around the table. In a year or two.

But for this year, maybe they are still too fragile, maybe they are still sweeping their broken pieces together, maybe they are still trying to fit them with each other's. Maybe Emma just wants what she has never had – a quiet Christmas. And she doesn't think Killian minds one bit.

They think about staying at home at first.

Yes, 'home' is now one and the same thing no matter which of them is talking and that's still new and exhilarating and scary and just…

Or rather, they don't think about it so much as for the first two weeks of December they just wake up as usual – with the sunlight shining on Killian's back as Emma stubbornly hides her face in his chest, with her lips eventually reaching his ribs and waking him with little kisses and nibbles, until she feels his hand looking blindly for the waistband of her pjs and his stump brushing away her hair so he can lavish the same kind of attention on her neck.

For the first two weeks of December Emma resolutely starts her days with her morning run, while Killian fluctuates between joining her – mostly so that he can join her in the shower as well afterwards – or staying behind so he can greet her with breakfast – an endeavor whose success rate also fluctuates – from a welcome of aromatic coffee and perfectly golden pancakes and syrupy kisses to a flour-littered floor and a smashed plate and a frustrated Killian with nailmarks on his left bicep.

For the first two weeks of December Emma works on her script and Killian works on her pirate vocabulary, she familiarizes herself with the production side of motion pictures and he goes to physiotherapy and fixes things around their new place that Emma thinks they can simply call someone for just to prove that he can.

He can. 6 out of 7. Not that she ever doubted him.

For the first two weeks of December they just fall asleep as usual – with Emma's nose buried between Killian's shoulder blades, hand stroking through his hair or over the valleys of scars on his forearm, or with cooled mugs and a laptop glowing in the dark while they try to fit all their limbs on the small couch that they keep meaning to replace.

For the first two weeks of December they don't plan on doing much of anything with the last two weeks of December. At some point Emma buys some plain white Christmas lights and presents them to her boyfriend with a shy smile because lights and a boyfriend happen to be two things she has never had before on Christmas – let alone together. And Killian smiles at her and kisses her forehead and her nose and does his best not to get frustrated at the process of untangling strings upon strings of little bulbs one-handed, until Emma herself says fuck it and decides that huge balls of bunched up lights are a good enough decoration for the time being.

Almost all those damn lights are properly spread out and illuminating the windows by the time – well into the third week of December – Killian suggests they follow little sis's example and go somewhere with an actual chance of a white Christmas. Somewhere less populated and sports-orientated than the resort Ruby and Belle had chosen. Somewhere warm and cozy.

"A little cabin in the middle of nowhere. Big fireplace, small bed we have to share. What do you think, Swan?"

What could she think about anything that makes his eyes sparkle like that?

He pulls some strings to get that perfect place that she is pretty sure he had his eye on even before mentioning it to her and Emma packs for the both of them with the kind of confidence and ease that makes her stop half-way through to go find Killian typing away on his laptop and throw her arms around him.

She drives and he presents her with a roadtrip playlist made to be sang to. She drives through Nevada belting Mr Brightside so hard Killian's ears must ring all the way to Utah but he grins at her as if she just discovered a new note and makes her pull over just so he can mess up her ponytail and kiss her until she cannot remember the lyrics to any song she has ever heard besides the one her heart is beating out against his chest.

They drive through the night with only stops for coffee and hot chocolate and Snickers bars and somehow manage to eat all the sandwiches Emma rolled her eyes at the day before while Killian just shook his head and spread butter with the patience of a man who has never used margarine.

What are we, a football team of teenagers?

Well, you can certainly eat like one, love.

His shoulder is probably still slightly purple from that one.

It's the winter wonderland they promised themselves. Plus cheek-cutting gusts of wind and precariously swaying icicles and three feet worth of snow that they have to trudge through with their bags slung over their shoulders after taking the car as far as it could possibly go.

The wind convinces Emma's scarf to whip her in the face four times before she unwounds the bastard and then has to chase it in a direction that is most certainly not the direction they are going in. Killian finds her dropping her bag to run after her errant piece of clothing as some sort of an invitation for a snowball fight. Once her indignation has blown away with her scarf and she actually takes aim at him, he realizes exactly how long it takes him to make a proper snowball with one hand and seems to think tackling her into the snow an appropriate change of tactic.

Her scarf ends up on a branch that she fruitlessly jumps at for a solid five minutes before Killian lifts her onto his shoulders.

Without satisfactory warning or preparation, mind you-

And Emma takes great pleasure in pulling hard on the branch and watching the snow come down on his head even as she faces a similar fate.

It's the cozy little getaway they were aiming for. Plus a boiler that takes a couple of hours to heat up enough water for one person (Killian thinks it the perfect excuse for joined showers but Emma knows their joined 'showers' last three times as long as her regular ones), an intimidating fireplace with a much less intimidating pile of firewood beside it and a Christmas tree that somehow found itself in the living room but avoided the weight of a single ornament.

Killian 'teaches' her how to chop firewood for a solid hour before she discovers that he has never held an axe, even a prop one. She 'learns' how to chip off splinters from a log for another half hour before they discover the little closet-like space filled to the brim with firewood. She lets Killian carry all of it inside just because she can still see the tense set of his shoulders from when she got one of those splinters in her palm and watching her act the lumberjack stopped being a source of amusement and endless innuendoes. He arranges the logs inside the frankly outrageous fireplace and she strikes the match and settles in his lap to kiss his red nose and each corner of his mouth and brush away the cobwebs in his hair that he seems to have gathered along with the wood.

They make tree ornaments out of the dozen pinecones they manage to dig out of the snow and the tinfoil left from their sandwiches and check two boxes of Christmas lights to end up with barely three short strings of working ones.

They are drinking cocoa made with hot water, buried in enough blankets for ten people, in the feeble glow of those three strings and the roaring fire and she can still see the way his fingers rub nervously at the cup handle.

"A little cabin in the middle of nowhere, big fireplace… we might not even make it to the bed," she whispers in his ear and buts her head under his chin until he chuckles helplessly and slings his left arm around her shoulders to draw her that last breath closer.

"You are awfully bad at keeping your hands off me, darling."

She scoffs and puffs and grumbles but there's nothing quite as telling as the way her fingers have slipped under his sweater to play along his collarbone.

"Do you foresee that changing anytime soon?"

It takes her a moment to process the question and another to detect the slight change in tone. She pulls back to give him her most incredulous look but his gaze is firmly focused on their scanty lights as his jaw ticks away with the seconds and the crackling of the fire. So instead she turns around and takes the cup from his hand to set it on the floor and straddles him with little preamble.

Her lips find his Adam's apple and the scruffy line of his jaw, his cheekbone and the light arch of his eyebrow. Her hands drift down both his shoulders to cup his left wrist and intertwine with the fingers on his right hand and she waits for him to look straight at her, takes a moment to appreciate the soft yellow-red light reflected in his blue eyes and shakes her head for a good ten seconds before finally replying.

"No."

He waits a beat, looking at her, into her, reading the soul she has bared to him long before they made it to a cozy fire and a pile of blankets in the middle of nowhere on Christmas Eve. Then he nods, lips quirking up in almost-melancholy, almost-joy, almost-certainty.

"Thought as much."

She looks at him as he looks down at their hands and plays with her fingers in movements reminiscent of the way he was fidgeting with his coffee mug mere minutes ago. She looks at him as he looks up and the tears in his eyes make every organ inside her body seize up as her fingers clamp harder around him.

"It's…" he swallows and his gaze slips back to the little lights. "It's not terribly different from the way you check each bulb in a string to make sure they lights up. Except…"

He wets his lips and squeezes her hand and Emma desperately needs him to get where he is headed with all this so she can breathe again.

"Except they were all out. All the lights. Each one would… flash up for a moment… and then go out. And then there was you."

His eyes find hers again and she almost startles as she feels a tear make its way down her cheek instead of his.

Killian's left wrist twitches in her hand for a second, another has him furrowing his brow, head tilted as he slowly, consciously and so very slowly reaches up and brushes the teardrop away with his stump.

"You were the only light that kept on shining, glowing in the dark so steadfastly that soon the dark was just shadows and even those often… scared away by the sheer luminance of… of you."

"Killian-"

"I don't… I didn't think… I couldn't come up with a metaphor that didn't make me the darkness to your light."

She shakes her head, violently and desperately and-

"But then I thought… maybe I could be the tree you wrap around. Maybe-"

She drops her forehead to his and it earns her the breath she needs to tell him.

"No."

"No?"

She shakes her head and feels a strand of hair stick where his own face is not dry any longer.

"No. You-" another shake and a choked laugh. "You are the one that dug me out and finally plugged me in."

Her head tilts with his as he seems to consider her metaphor submission.

"You are the one that lit me up."

He is about to say something. He reconsiders and kisses her instead – firm and thorough and putting the fire at her back to shame.

"It might very well be selfishness and self-service rearing their ugly heads," he says when he pulls away and she hurries to blink away the fog of his mouth to follow what is coming from it now. "But I feel like I have done what I could to assure you that you can do much better than this one-handed ex-HanSolo-wanna-be."

She growls at him and digs her fingers into his ribs in admonishment.

"Ah-ah, Swan. I said I feel I've done what's within my power – I have probably broken a full set of your pretty daffodil plates by now-"

She doesn't give a flying fuck about the daffodil plates, they can eat off the counter for all she cares-

"and I have inflicted multiple shopping trips with Ruby on you. And yet…"

His hand runs down her hair and twirls the strand it ends up with and his lips go up again – almost-wistfulness, almost-delight, almost-certainty.

"And yet here you are. Shining… Supposedly because I plugged you in," he tackles on with a face that tells her exactly how much her metaphor is ruining his pretty speech and yet.

His eyes are amusement and fondness and so much love and almost-almost-certainty.

"And… and I want nothing more than to be in your light, to… hopefully, possibly… reflect some back to you… for the rest of our lives."

He lets go of her hand for what feels like the first time in hours and she almost has a chance to miss him before he digs the ring out of his pocket.

"Emma Swan, light of my life… do you think you can possibly find your happily ever after… as my wife?"

She doesn't watch the light play in the diamond, she watches it play in his eyes and she reaches up to cup his face so she can feel his smile when she says it.

"I don't think I can find it any other way."

He smiles and she kisses him – light and warmth and love and certainty.