The Words

bucklesomeswashswan:

Because Henry brought the book to the wedding, as if it needed one more chapter. And because I’m not sure if we’ll get season 7… but this story will forever be my favorite!

There was so much of their story he didn’t know. For the author that was a hard truth to swallow. 

Every story needed a beginning, a middle and an end. There should be something catchy to the first line, and something poignant in the last. But as he sat with the pen rolling between his fingers he didn’t even know where to start.

He wasn’t there when they first met, though he had heard a story of a beanstalk and grandma Cora. And he had seen his mom’s blush when Hook mentioned a sword fight, but he didn’t know the reason why. In Neverland they had been together for days trying to save him, but he had seen the way they looked at each other after, sailing back among the clouds, something new. Then in New York, Hook had found them, bursting into their rewritten lives, and the long drive back to Maine, the whispered words between them when they thought he was asleep, the words hadn’t made any sense at the time, and now he couldn’t remember them.

There were so many gaps, so many loose ends. Theirs was a story that was woven through so many other different ones, there was even a chapter that featured them in the story of his grandparents. Tucked into the storybook that started so much of this. An illustration of them dancing, words written by another, another author better able to untangle the story.

And after that trip back in time things had changed, a shift in the tone of their story, act two. Then the night after the ice wall he hadn’t gone to see, he’d been surprised to see Hook holding his mom tight to his side pressing kisses to her hair. And he wasn’t there when she took on the darkness, but he had seen Hook’s face after, the words written across it as plainly as those on the pages of any book. And he hadn’t been there when they said goodbye in the Underworld, but he had seen his mom’s face after, all the words carefully hidden from his view.

There was so much of their story he hadn’t been around for. And still he knew they must have hit each important narrative point in their own way. He knew it in the way they loved each other and the way they had become a family. He watched them and the way they smiled over cocoa at Granny’s, the way Killian slipped a little rum from his flask into it earning a smirk from his mom. The way they sat curled together on the couch reading on quiet afternoons as he spread his homework across the floor, the way they would steal a kiss as the sun set into the waves when they were all out on the Jolly Roger. And he watched the way their eyes would meet across a crowd, the way they stood next to each other in a fight, her magic flashing off his sword. The way they seemed to anticipate each other’s movements, no longer needing words between them. 

And perhaps they didn’t need words to know the other and still, now, surrounded by their loved ones, wrapped in golden sunlight and the breeze from the sea, they had found all the perfect words. Vows saturated with their love and memory, filled with promises and the future. And he marveled at the beauty of it, a moment that was both the end of a chapter and a whole new one.

He watched them, watched them share a secret smile and a kiss to seal a life together, and he was again at a loss. He wondered if perhaps this particular fairytale was never meant to be fully known by anyone but them. But if he could have written it down, somehow captured it onto a page, he knew what the last words would be, the ones tucked at the bottom, both a closure and a beginning: They lived happily ever after.