It’s the evening before Lancelot and Guinevere’s wedding, and Emma & Killian are spending a night away together for the first time as parents. What sexy shenanigans will they get up to on this rare night when they’re only responsible for themselves? [AO3]
Word count: 1420 Tagged: Post Season 7, Canon Compliant, Camelot Renaissance, first night away from the baby, mentions of Curious Archer, Lancelot and Guinevere’s wedding, public hanky panky, oral sex,
“Drop the phone, Jones,” Emma caught her husband in the middle of typing a message as she returned to their suite of rooms for their weekend in Camelot’s castle. “Hope is fine, you do not need to check on Alice and Robyn every half hour. They are responsible adults who will have their own child in just a few months. There is nothing to worry about.”
Killian set his phone down on the bed and scratched his ear in embarrassment. Hope was nearly a year old, but it was the first time he and Emma had spend the night away from her and he was having some separation issues.
“I know, love,” he moved closer to her, taking her hands. “And I also know that if they did have a problem, Regina, Rogers, and Zelena are all right there, ready to jump in and help them. I just don’t quite know what to do with myself; I’m not used to it being just us anymore.”
“No drops!” Hope cried, ducking out of Emma’s reach while clamping her hand over her ear.
“I know it hurts, baby, but the drops will make your ear feel better,” Emma insisted.
Tears leaked out of Hope’s eyes. “No drops.”
Though there was now less fire in her baby’s voice, Emma didn’t consider it a victory.
Four-year-old Hope had been diagnosed the day before with an ear infection and was utterly miserable. She was running a fever and the pain in her ear was so intense that she’d spent the better part of the morning crying. So far, Hope had no problem taking the antibiotics – apparently the medicine tasted like bubble gum – but she absolutely detested the numbing drops she’d also been prescribed.
Oh, the drops worked like a dream. The problem was the initial contact with Hope’s painful ear in order to get the drops in.
“Hope, you know the drops make your ear feel better,” Emma tried again.
“No drops.”
She sounded defeated now, sniffling as her tantrum wound down. A helpless and conflicted Emma looked up at Killian. She hated seeing her daughter so defeated, even though her defeat came from doing what was best for her.
When Killian nodded at her, Emma set the bottle of drops down on the end table. Apparently a little subterfuge was in order. “How about if Daddy tells us a story?”
Hope looked from her mother to her father as if trying to determine what the catch was. “Really?”
“Of course, little love,” Killian said as he scooped his little girl into his arms. “You and your mom can get comfortable on the couch for story time.”
The three of them settled on the sofa, Hope squeezed in between her mother and her father. “Once upon a time, there lived a pirate and a princess …”
And so Killian told Hope’s favorite story, the one of how she came to be. It was a story filled with adventure and monsters, of darkness and of light, of True Love and of faith, and it always ended with hope, both figurative and literal.
This time Hope’s illness was working against her. She was fast asleep before the pirate tracked down the lost princess in the far-off land of New York City. With her baby now comfortably resting against her, Emma squeezed a couple of drops into Hope’s little ear and tucked a tuft of cotton in after to hold the drops in place.
“She’s so miserable,” Emma murmured as she brushed a lock of Hope’s blonde hair out of her eyes. “I have all this magic but I can’t take away her pain with anything but these drops that she hates. I hate seeing her like this, Killian.”
“Aye, love,” Killian agreed, “I do, too. But the medicine will work its magic and she’ll be her typical rambunctious self in no time at all.”
Emma finally gave a little smile. “I know. And in the meantime, we take care of her and let her know that she’s loved.”
Killian leaned over and pressed a kiss to his wife’s temple. With the childhoods they led, they knew better than most how important love and comfort were to a sick child. “Always.”
“Oh, Mittens,” Emma sighs as she slips the plush cat from under her napping daughter’s arm, “you have certainly seen better days.”
The cat is gray with white paws (hence her name). She was a gift from Henry for Hope’s second birthday and she has been Hope’s constant companion in the year and a half since. She’s been misted with salt spray on the Jolly Roger. She’s been dropped in the muddy sheep pen and pecked by chickens at the farm. She’s even been run over by the Bug, though how she was left in the middle of driveway, Emma still isn’t sure. And no one likes to discuss the messiness that ensued during Hope’s bout with the 24-hour stomach bug. Mittens stayed by her side and practically needed to be decontaminated when it was over.
Even now, there are suspicious pink stains around the cat’s plush mouth. Emma brings the cat to her nose and sniffs. Strawberry.
Heaving another sigh, Emma slips from Hope’s room, eases the door closed, and holds the cat up to her husband. “Your daughter tried to share her Gogurt with Mittens.”
Killian swallows a chuckle. “At least she’s learning to share. I take it Mittens needs another delicate cycle?”
“That she does.” Emma reaches into the linen closet for a pillowcase and drops Mitten into it. She’s learned this trick from her mother, who used to wash Neal’s stuffed animals the same way. “Let’s hope we can get her washed and dried before our little pirate princess wakes up from her nap.”
—–
No such luck. Hope wakes with twenty minutes still left on the dryer. “Where’s Mittens, Mama?” she asks, still blinking away sleep.
“Mittens is having a bath,” Emma tells her gently while preparing herself for the waterworks to start.
To her surprise, Hope doesn’t cry. She simply frowns up at her mother. “Cats don’t like water.”
“Mittens seems to like sailing the Jolly Roger well enough,” Emma reminds her. Not wanting to linger over the missing cat and give Hope a chance to cry, Emma picks her still sleepy daughter up and carries her over to the sofa.
“But she’s not in the water when we go sailing, Mama,” Hope argues.
Sensing that his wife needs a hand, Killian smiles at his pirate princess. “Even though she doesn’t like water, Mittens knew her bath was important. She was very brave and now she’s having a lie-down in the sauna.”
Again, Hope frowns. “What’s a sauna?”
“It’s a room that’s very hot.”
“That doesn’t sound like fun. I don’t like being hot.”
“Cats like being hot, though,” Emma reminds her. “They sit right in the sun, remember?”
“Oh yeah! Can I have Mittens when she comes back from the hot room?”
“Of course, little love,” Killian assures.
And when the dryer cycle finishes, Emma hands a warm, toasty, and clean Mittens back to her daughter. “She smells like the towels,” Hope says, smiling as she hugs the cat to her chest.
Which is apparently a much better scent than hours-old strawberry yogurt.
Notes: Did I actually finish a story? Yes, internet, I did. And if you’re reading Once and Future and Playing Off Foul, I promise I will get back to it soon before I post my law school au. Anyway, this has been a wild ride and I have honestly loved all the responses I’ve gotten on this, particularly all of the panic and questioning of whether this last bit would be as angsty as the last bits. I’m going to say….you can be relax. This isn’t angsty at all. In fact, I think you’ll quite like it. Anyway, a special thank you to @katie-dub and @shireness-says for being so supportive. A thanks to @cssns and @drowned-dreamer whose gorgeous art will feature at the bottom of this epilogue. And as always, a huge thank you to @aerica13, my amazing beta. I couldn’t have done it without you babe! Word Count: 4,100+ AO3: [LINK] Chapters:Prologue | One |Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Epilogue Rating: T+
The Vineyard Sound was calm, the surface of the water almost as smooth as glass as Emma Swan sat down on the front porch of the yellow beach house. There wasn’t a single soul on the beach across the road, but it was only May and she could only imagine how crowded it got once the vacationers arrived. She knew from what Granny Lucas had told her that the beach was a private one and meant only for the residents of the neighborhood but Emma assumed the majority of the houses here were rental properties and soon the street would be crowded with strangers.
Emma hadn’t expected to remain on the Vineyard past November but something had felt wrong about returning to Maine, especially with Killian in tow. Nothing was waiting for her there while Memensha was full of ghosts, full of history that she had yet to uncover. So, she had given up her shitty loft apartment and decided to stay. She had appealed to the Lucases to remain in the house, offering to pay extra in rent. Ruby and Granny were more than willing to let them stay in the house but had refused their money, claiming that the property should have been hers in the first place because it had been Ruth Nolan’s before it had fallen into their possession. Granny had even forced Ruby to return the rental money, something that Emma was certain had more to do with her guilt than the debatable ownership of the beach house. Feeling awkward about the situation, she had insisted on paying utilities which they relented on.
Emma had taken to working shifts at the diner over the winter on top of working as a freelancer investigator alongside Killian. The majority of their work was on the mainland but Emma sensed that he enjoyed their near daily-ride over to Hyannis, his eyes glued to the ocean. He had yet to go near the water since he had lost his hand. More than once she had caught him looking out over the Atlantic with a mixture of longing and anxiety.
Inspired by that picture Raphael posted on IG of Colin and Andrew having a “Goodfellas” moment together, I wrote a little CS/Captain Cobra Boston Mafia AU
also on ff.net as part of my Every Page series here
family business
Emma Swan knows her son.
Who he is.
What he is.
She knows the Gold family business is a front, a facade, for other, unsavoury things. She knows about the guns, about the drugs, about the underage girls (after all she was one of them herself, once upon a time) she knows about the stacks of cash hidden in the walls and where the bodies are buried.
Summary: A chance encounter on the morning of her first day at work results in Emma meeting a mysterious, heavily tattooed, pretty-eyed Irish man. But there are some secrets he’s not yet willing to share with her.
As ever, all of my work can be found on both AO3 and FFN.
My endless thanks goes to @lisaz1972 and @jonirobinson64 who help make this piece both readable and pretty.
And big thanks to @hollyethecurious for making the beautiful banner for this story.
Emma shimmied out of the dress she’d only just pulled on and tossed it onto the bed, on top of three others she’d already tried on that evening. Killian had told her that he’d booked them a table at one of the fanciest restaurants in the city for the evening, and that if she felt up to it after they had eaten, there was somewhere else they could go to prolong their date.
But it was that uncertainty over a secondary venue that had her tearing through her wardrobe, trying desperately to find something to wear. If he was taking her to a classy restaurant, then she needed to wear something more sophisticated. But if he was planning on taking her to a club afterwards, then something shorter and easier to dance in would be the better option.
She was an inch away from picking up her phone to call off the whole damned thing when she pulled out the last dress she owned. It was one she’d bought on a whim for her graduation ceremony, before deciding that it didn’t look right underneath her gown. Emma hadn’t even looked at the dress since then.
She slipped the garment from its hanger, before stepping into the fabric and shimmying it up her body. When she finally managed to wiggle the zip all the way up, she ran a hand down herself to smooth out the creases, before turning to take in her appearance in the mirror.
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.
Summary: Into every generation a slayer is born: one girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness; to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their number. She is the Slayer
As ever, you can find all of my work on both AO3 and FFN too.
This is my contribution to the Captain Swan Supernatural Summer (@cssns, @kmomof4)
Artwork credit for this piece goes to my fellow Angel fan, @hollyethecurious
I’m gonna switch things up with this one and try and update it every other Wednesday from now on. Fridays are just too busy for us right now.
Emma was grateful for Zelena’s extensive knowledge of the town, as she made her way over to the large mansion on the outskirts of it. She’d never been to that part of Storybrooke before, but she assumed once she took on the full responsibilities of her new title, it wouldn’t take her long to get to know it all.
The mansion Killian had asked her to meet him at was unmissable. Its stately form loomed large in the distance, overlooking the only lake in town. It was clearly a beautiful home, at one point in time, but it was obvious the building was now abandoned. The hedges and lawns were overgrown; most of the windows had been smashed, with some boarded up and others left open to the elements; and there were large cracks in some of the exterior walls.
Emma assumed that Killian had picked it for its remote location and space, rather than its visual appeal.
“Hello?” she called out, as she made her way through one of the rotten doors into what was left of the interior. The ceiling had caved-in at some point in time, but it looked like someone had cleared away the debris from incident. “Killian?”
“To your left,” he called out calmly, startling Emma a little.
She turned through the first opening in the direction his voice had originated from, and emerge into a large room that appeared to have survived whatever ills had befallen the rest of the house. There was some furniture inside of the room that was covered in large dust sheets, and pushed against the walls. But the main space was completely free, and in the middle of it all stood Killian, wearing a pair of dark jeans and a black vest.
“Nice place,” she teased. “Not terribly romantic though.”
Hope has had him wrapped around her tiny, perfect finger from the moment she came screeching into the world, but the first time he hears her laugh — so unbridled and full of glee — Killian is overcome by the swell of emotion in his chest, and he swears he would move heaven and earth just to hear the sweet sound again. He damn near does, between playing peek-a-boo and making some of the most absurd noises a three hundred plus year-old man can make. He wears things on his head and puts food on his face and blows raspberry kisses to her rounded belly and the bottoms of her chubby feet, all to Hope’s endless delight.
“She adores you, you know,” Emma comments one day, watching them play while she finishes folding their laundry.
He’s sprawled out on his belly on the floor of the living room, Hope giggling and grabbing at his nose.
“Well, the feeling is quite mutual,” he smiles, puffing out his cheeks and crossing his eyes before releasing the air trapped in his mouth and making their daughter squeal at the noise it creates.
Emma places the last bib on the top of the pile and hefts the basket against her hip. She crouches down low when she passes by them to kiss at the top of his head. “I adore you too.”
Killian tilts his face up to hers. “That feeling is also mutual.”
That earns him a soft peck against his lips and a grin as pretty as Hope’s. Eager for another kiss, he catches her ankle with his hook before she can fully stand, and all it takes is one sharp tug to send her off balance and tumbling into his arms. The basket tips in the process and, to Emma’s dismay, all of their clean laundry winds up on the floor.
“Killian!” It’s part cry, part annoyance but mostly laughter as she lands in his lap with a solid ‘oof.’
Hope bursts into another fit of giggles and Killian glances over at her curiously, his brow arched high. He digs his fingers into Emma’s ribs, at the precise spot he knows she’s ticklish, and she jerks against him, her laugh even louder this time while she attempts to scramble away, and as he suspected it might, Hope loves the sound and responds in kind, her own grin gummy and wide, and her chortling boisterous enough to rival Emma’s.
The slow smile that tugs at the corners of his mouth is dangerous with the newfound knowledge he’s aquired. It takes Emma a beat to catch on, her gaze flitting back and forth between he and Hope, but by the time she does, it’s too late, and before she can even protest, he’s tickling her again and blowing raspberries against the curve of her neck.
Their home, already filled with love and messy, perfect bits of life — newly washed clothes on the floor, Hope’s toys in every nook and cranny, leather jackets strewn over the backs of chairs and couches, boots mismatched and misaligned by the front door, keys in the fruit bowl in the kitchen, stacks of unopened mail on the counter and unwashed dishes in the sink — fills with wild, exuberant laughter, too, and Killian wouldn’t have it any other way.
She wasn’t in the bedroom when he entered – he could hear her talking in a low voice in the kitchen, likely a phone call – and so he made do with falling into bed, burrowing under their blankets and pressing his face against her pillow, inhaling deeply. Any lingering unease faded as her scent surrounded him, undertones of their previous couplings seeped into every fiber of the sheets and even the mattress underneath.
Home. Den. Safe.
Not even the scent of food could rouse him from his cocoon, though his stomach begged to differ. The bed dipped slightly as Emma sat on it, her fingers gently combing through his still-damp hair. “Hey,” she said quietly. “I have some food and more salve. You should eat before you go back to sleep.”
He grumbled, burrowing under the blankets, and he heard her sigh with exasperation. He moved, reaching out from the sides to wrap his arms around her waist and this time she chuckled as he pulled her towards him. “Mine,” he mumbled against her thigh.
It All Starts With a Dance 