Emma & hook, the civil war

jadeddiva:

She’s been living alone on this farm long enough to know what sounds normal and what just ain’t right, so she’s out of bed the minute the chickens start to cause a ruckus, rifle and candle in hand (she doesn’t care if she’s in her shift, doesn’t care if General Lee himself is in her chicken coop, she’s got two hens left and she’ll be damned if she’ll let him have one of them).

It’s ten steps to the porch but her rifle’s already loaded and she can hear the click when she cocks it (and so does whoever is out there, because she  can hear them too) and she shouts, “Leave my damn chickens alone, you savage” so loudly that it cuts through the night air like an ax through wood, cleaving everything in two.

“Sorry, miss,” she hears him say before she sees him in the low glow of the candle – scruffy jaw and shaggy hair, hands up in supplication, his sleeves tattered and definitely gray (a deserter she thinks but she would desert too if all the rumors about the army were true) “but I was hungry.”

“I’m hungry,“she says, “we’re all hungry, but that doesn’t mean it’s right or fair to take someone else’s food, not in the dead of night like a coward,” she spits out the last part, chin held up and gun steady and something changes in his face, something that makes her trigger finger less itchy.

“But if you promised not to rob me,” she adds, carefully, “I reckon I might share.”

(His name is Killian Jones, and he promises work for food, and he’s damn lucky she’s got near enough cornmeal still to feed his hungry self, but the chicken coop needs fixing and there are larger logs she can’t handle on her own, so she supposes she can share.)