Summary: “You live in the apartment next to mine and you’re
always blasting music while I’m trying to sleep but you’ve been silent
for the last two days, are you all right?”
Emma Swan never minded
the music. Not until she broke her ankle and her shift moved to days.
Now she just wants to sleep. But Killian Jones doesn’t seem to notice.
So when the condo next door goes silent, she’s understandably concerned.
When she finds Killian after he got the phone call about his brother he
never expected, they’ll have to figure out if everything is as it
seems.
Rated:T
Content Warnings:Alcohol poisoning, perceived character death, hospitalization, whump (it’s actually minor for my fics but I don’t think I can post a fic without a whump warning)
Art credit/link: Guys! Take a look at the aesthetic above that @katealexandra26 made for this fic! You can find it HEREon her blog. And be sure to check out the illustration that @ladyciaramiggles painted for me further down in the fic. You can find that work HEREon her blog!
Beta reader:A huge thank you to the spectacular @spartanguard who stepped in to help beta read!
A/N: This was a prompt that I found at a far too late time of night and
promptly (pun intended) dropped it in @gusenitsaa’s inbox for her to find.
She ran with it, probably while cursing me out the entire time (it
*was* three am) and came up with a ficlet which you can find on FFN (Spinning Yarns Ch 102) and on Tumblr. With her permission, I came back to it and fleshed it out into this monster.
Written as part of the 2017 Captain Swan Big Bang Challenge. You can catch up with all the other fics that are complete by
following @captainswanbigbang and/or subscribing to the Group Collection on AO3 and/or the C2 on FFN. This is a complete one-shot as a part of the Little Bang 2018 challenge. And yes, there is a happy ending after all this… just so you know.
So you
say you fell in love And
you’re gonna get married Raise
yourself a family How
simple life can be…
Emma groaned, resisting the urge to bang her head against the
headboard as the opening lyrics to another Dropkick Murphys’ song blared
through her condo.
At three thirty in the morning.
Jones, I’m going to kill you, she thought loudly at the wall, too tired to contemplate
shouting. Again. For the third time this week.
It was Wednesday.
She got it. She did. Jones was a bartender
and had the advantage of an end unit – he only had her to annoy with his late
nights. For the past two years since he’d moved in, it hadn’t been an
issue. Emma worked nearly the same hours as he did. Bail bonds
didn’t exactly conform to the normal nine-to-five hours, after all.
Hell, they’d met over an out-of-order washing machine at four in
the morning, both fresh off shifts and nowhere near ready for sleep.
Then last week happened. Emma had chased a skip
through Boston Common and ended up sprawled out at the bottom of the stairs to
the T station just after midnight, her foot facing the wrong way and the barrel
of a gun aimed between her eyes. It was only the convenient timing of a
train pulling into the station that saved her life and her reward was six weeks
to three months of sitting behind a desk answering phone calls.
Emma wasn’t sure what was going to drive her to drink first –
the endless ringing of the phone in the office or her neighbor’s incessant need
to unwind from a night behind the bar with loud punk rock.
At least she liked the punk rock. She’d been to
Jones’s bar often enough, a run-down attempt at a honky tonk in the middle of
downtown Boston. The drinks were good and the likelihood that she’d run
into one of her colleagues was small. And the Jones brothers were easy to
look at, not that she’d admit that aloud, and there was just something about
them – about Killian – that kept her going back to the little hole in the wall.
But, oh God, the country music.
Emma didn’t know how he did it every shift.
Resigned to not sleeping in her bed if she wanted to get up with
the alarm at seven, Emma grabbed her pillow and cell phone and limped down the
stairs, ignoring the mandatory crutches. She could still hear the
echoes of the album Blackout as she settled down on the lumpy couch
cushions, but at least it was more white noise than Irish punk at this
distance.
It All Starts With a Dance 