Silence had become a companion to me over the centuries. A familiar old friend that had shared more than one bottle of rum with me along the many travels I had embarked on. Silence was comfortable. Silence would leave at times but not for long. It returned with a reliability that I had never had been allowed to have with a flesh and blood person.

I knew she hadn't been ready to hear much more handle how I felt. I knew she didn't and wouldn't return it. Not yet. But the cave demanded it and she needed him. He was her happiness; her happy ending. That was all that mattered despite how much it hurt. It knocked the breathe out of me how much it bloody hurt watching her go to him. I thought the Crocodile or Regina had showed up from wherever they had gone and ripped my heart out in that moment. It would have been kinder.

Now silence kept me company once again as I sat on a fallen log not far from the camp we had set up shortly after we rescued Baelfire. I couldn't bring myself to be around the others, around her, at that moment. I couldn't stand to see them together. Not after the cave. Not after seeing her embrace and talk to him like she already had. I couldn't let her see how much it bloody hurt. I didn't want it to influence what she thought or did. Anything that came from her new knowledge had to be from her and her alone. Because it was all for her. Only her.

I shook my head trying to banish those thoughts chasing one another through my mind. The faint rustling sound of movement echoed through the trees making me turn my head. I was greeted with the sight of no one. Air rushed from my lungs in the form of a ragged sigh just a second later. I felt my eyebrows raise at the thought I hadn't realized I had been holding my breathe.

The others hadn't yet came to find me but it had been becoming clear it wouldn't had been much longer before they would. Time had been growing shorter and I hadn't finished gathering myself back together. What the others hadn't fully realized yet was what the land itself did to someone. A soul didn't age and that meant never growing up or growing older. It meant there was only a frozen present. If the present was frozen, you couldn't move forward. Without moving forward, never changing, you could only dwell on the past. Dwelling on what had been without changing led to becoming shackled to it. It meant there's wasn't nor wouldn't ever be a future. Not in Neverland.

The others didn't understand Peter. They didn't realize what all this really was to him. It was just a game and a game he fully intended to win. Yet, I couldn't shake the feeling that wasn't entirely true. Peter had always claimed ownership of those who came to the island and he was possessive of them. But never before to this extent. He wanted something specific of the lad and not just gaining him as a Lost Boy. The Lost Boys had indeed given him power but there was something different with how he fought for the lad. More visceral. Like his very existence depended on it all because he fought so hard for him.

It couldn't be said that he feared that it was his parents that had came for him. Peter was too powerful to have feared that. No, something else was navigating his motivations in regards to the lad. What had became clear had been Peter viewed Emma as a threat to whatever he had in mind. He saw that Emma was the only thing that would keep the lad from fulfilling what it was Peter wanted from or of the boy. It was a race against time in regards to that and Emma needed to be distracted enough to make her too late to save her lad.

We needed to get her lad back. That was the focus and the whole business with the cave was a diversion by him to keep us from getting the lad back before he became a Lost Boy. Why he wanted us to rescue and have Baelfire. He wanted her past to overwhelm and destroy her to keep her from her lad. He also wanted the rest of us just as destroyed to prevent us from being able to stay focused and keep her focused on getting to her boy.

But he also wanted Emma herself. I had heard what he called her once. A Lost Girl. He recognized the same look in her eyes as I had while climbing the beanstalk. That look of fear of being alone. The look of an orphan. The look all the Lost Boys had in their eyes. Of course he of all people would have recognized it immediately. It was at the center of what he dealt in. Fear, insecurities, guilt and pain. It was how he manipulated those around him into whatever he wanted. It was how he bound people to the island and to him.

David's voice calling my name from the boundaries of the encampment brought me out of my revelry. Time was up. I schooled my face to a mask of determination as I stood up from the fallen log and slowly began the walk to the camp. No, she wasn't going to see the price I paid for her in the cave. It wasn't a price to me.

She bloody well wasn't going to be bound to the island or him and neither was her lad. She deserved better than that. She was going to get better than that. She was going to have her family. She was going to have her lad. She was going to be happy. She was going to have her happy ending whether I did or not.

After all, it was all for her.