I just have so many Captain Swan feelings. This is a little slice of headcanon right after Emma and Snow return from The Enchanted Forest. I own nothing, but if anyone wants to loan me Colin O'liferuiner, I'd be forever in your debt.

They made it. She was home, with Henry and her parents. Parents, such a strange thought for someone who'd been alone for so long. At that moment, Emma Swan felt an overwhelming sense of rightness and belonging. A powerful mix of emotions, enough to drown out a nagging little feeling involving a certain swashbuckling nuisance with a flair for innuendo and smirking.

After the hugging and well-wishing subsided, Emma found herself at the Storybrooke General Hospital.

A nurse was tending to the various cuts and scrapes she had earned on her quest to return home. A small cut on her knee from falling on the pebbled floor of Lake Nostros, scrapes on her shoulders from crashing into a tree, a nick on her arm, all gained outrunning one of the many dangers she'd faced alongside her mother, the freshly-woken princess and the fierce warrior. And him.

Killian.

Hook.

The nurse began to unfasten the no-doubt unsanitary, rum-soaked scrap of fabric wrapped around the palm of her hand.

She hadn't really given it a thought, honestly. Not of his hook catching her wrist, drawing her near to him, his hand cradling her wounded one, not his lips so close to her skin as he tightened the knot, not his eyes so, so very blue looking at her, beseeching her to trust him.

Nope, she thought, no thought at all. Those glimpses of their time together at the top of the beanstalk would remain deeply buried. That is, until the nurse made a fleeting remark.

"I'll just throw this away and get you a fresh dressing, Emma."

"Don't!" she blurted out, eyes wide and frantic. "I'd like to… keep it…as a memento of my time away." She added, responding to the nurse's quizzical look.

"Of course, dear. You've been through a lot. I'll put it with your things."

"Thank you." Emma breathed, relieved.

And with her momentary panic attack over, she buried thoughts of him down deep. Or at least she tried.

The next day, eager to return to a degree of normalcy (which she conceded was a little bit difficult when your mother is Snow White and your father is Prince Charming) she entered the Sheriff's office. She took off her leather jacket, draping it over the back of her chair, and sat down to catch up on events that had transpired in her absence.

Her cellphone rang, vibrating somewhere within her bag, disturbing the quiet.

In her haste to find her phone, she happened upon a small plastic bag containing the scarf. The nurse must have slipped it in there as promised. It reminded of her an evidence bag. Evidence of their time together; the only keepsake of that infuriating, insufferable man she couldn't seem to take a chance on.

Forgetting the buzzing of her phone, abandoned still in the depths of her purse, she carefully turned the bag over in her hands. She opened it slowly, almost reverently and carefully pulled out the dark material. Setting the bag aside on her desk, she draped the material over her hands. She hunched over the fabric, resting on her elbows on her knees, examining it closely as if it held the answer to the strange, unfamiliar feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She would soon admit, in the quiet emptiness of the Sheriff's station, that Captain Killian Jones had got under her skin. She pictured the look on his face as she left him in Anton's treasure rooms. The pirate had asked her to trust him, and she had…almost. But not enough. Part of her regretted her decision to leave him up there, but she needed to get back to Henry.

Her son was her priority.

Her son was her priority.

This would be a phrase she'd repeat to herself often, when she remembered ocean-blue eyes, framed with dark lashes. A mantra for time's when she'd recall the feeling of his body pressed against hers when she'd saved him from the trip wire. Despite his time on land, she noted at the time, he always smelled of the sea.

"It's about bloody time." He had murmured, in his deep, gravelly candor.

She decided, too late mind you, that it was about time. Maybe. Time to trust, time to lean on her loved ones. Her parents. Maybe.

Someday.

The material of the scarf still weighed on her hands. Her thoughts were thoroughly occupied with him. While the scarf remained in her grasp she wouldn't think of anything else. She rehashed her time with him over and over, and failed to hear the door open.

"Morning Emma, what have you got there?" David enquired, breaking her out of her reverie as he hung his coat.

"Oh, it's nothing." She replied, quickly opening her desk drawer and placing the scarf inside.

How was Emma Swan to know that at that very moment, as the desk drawer slammed shut, a gilded pirate ship was making its way to port. A gilded pirate ship, a marvel, sailed by none other than Killian Jones.

I was thinking about maybe extending this...perhaps our beloved Captain and a certain Swan have an encounter where he requests his scarf back? Banter and sexual tension ensue, naturally. Let me know your thoughts!