Killian Jones, former crime reporter, was not happy to be home. It hadn’t been home in a very long time, after all. Home was an abstract construct that existed for people who didn’t know as many adjectives for blood as he did. Home wasn’t New York City, but it certainly wasn’t Boston or New Orleans either and he’d always gone where the story was. And he was positive Emma Swan was one hell of a story.
Emma Swan, pro video game player, desperately wanted to find home. She thought she had, a million years ago in the back corner of a barn and a town and faces she trusted. But that had all blown up in her face and it didn’t take long for her to decide she was going to control the pyrotechnics from here on out. So now she was in New York City and a different corner and she kind of wanted to trust Killian Jones.
Neither one of them expected a year of of video games and feature stories to dredge up old enemies and even older feelings, but, together, they made a pretty good team.
Emma didn’t look up, didn’t look away from the screen, just hit her thumb, exactly, six times and David scoffed when the door clicked back into the frame. She heard him take a few steps forward, the floorboards creaking under his weight and he must have had a bag or something because it sounded like an anvil when it dropped on the floor.
She hit the ‘A’ button again. And then nearly growled when she drove off the track.
“Are you honestly sitting here playing MarioKart by yourself?” David continued, still talking and asking questions when Emma was positive he knew she didn’t want to do much of anything except play MarioKart by herself and, maybe, punch a hole in his Xbox controller.
He sighed when she didn’t answer, dropping onto the arm of the couch and leveling her with a stare he hadn’t used since he was nineteen. Emma didn’t look away from the screen.
“Alright,” David mumbled, toeing out of his shoes and resting his feet on the edge of the coffee table in front of him. Emma bit back her immediate reprimand, something about M’s is going to kill you when she finds out you did that because that would be talking and she didn’t want to talk and she just wanted to win this goddamn race.
There was a metaphor in there somewhere.
She should probably practice some more of the game, just a week removed from the opening round of the tournament and it had gotten absurdly cold in New York already and that felt like a metaphor too.
God, she’d driven off the road again. Track. It was called a track. She couldn’t even come up with the right words.
It All Starts With a Dance 