Chapter Text
“Okay, I’m off,” Emma announced, plucking her keys from the basket she kept them in on the entry table. “The realtor said she’s got some showings lined up for later today, so be sure and make yourself scarce.”
“Aye, Swan,” Killian’s voice answered from somewhere in the back of the house. “I will do. Have a good day, love.”
~/~
“Killian Jones!” Emma bellowed. The front door slammed so hard behind her it rattled the windows. “Get your ass out here!”
“Have you ever noticed, Swan,” Killian said as he materialized off to her left, “that it is only ever my arse’s presence you request?”
“Don’t,” she growled, determined to not be charmed by his insufferable smirk and coyly raised brow. “I am in no mood for your antics right now.”
She stormed past him towards her office to deposit her things with his voice chasing after her. “What has you so vexed, darling?”
Emma rounded on him, arms crossed tightly over her chest as she glowered at him. “Guess.”
He wouldn’t look at her, but instead focused his attention on fiddling with the rings on his right, and only, hand. “No offers on the house as of yet, I take it?”
“No, you idiot,” she snapped. Though he’d never admit to it, Emma knew she’d made him flinch with the tone in her voice. “Why would anyone put an offer on a house where the lights flicker and scratching sounds echo from the walls all through the showing? At best, they think the place is a money pit that needs all new electrical and an exterminator, at worst, they realize. It. Is Haunted!”
Killian sheepishly scratched at the back of his neck before pointing out, “Haunted is not entirely correct.”
“Don’t start,” Emma exasperated. Her arms fell back to her sides, and it was now her turn to avoid his gaze. “You know I can’t move in with Walsh until I get this place sold, so would you please explain to me why you keep sabotaging the showings?”
“You know why,” Killian replied in a low murmur.
“Killian.” Emma let go a heavy sigh and took a step forward, now close enough to him to touch… if such a thing were possible. “We’ve been through this. You’re dead. What sort of future is there for two people when one of them is a ghost?”
“Aye, we have been through this,” he shot back, irritation and pleading warring within in his blue irises, which had always stood out so strongly despite his transparent nature. “Yet you still refuse to believe the truth. I have told you time and again, Swan. I. Am. Not. Dead. I am trapped betwee-”
“Between realms. Cursed to exist in the void that connects two realities, because some witch got her broom in a twist when you rebuffed her advances,” she interjected, parroting back the story he’d spun to her numerous times.
“Exactly… Though, I do not believe I ever mentioned a broom.”
“Whatever.” She waved off his teasing remark, knowing he’d only said it to get a rise out of her. “The point is, even if what you say is true, there is nothing either of us can do to un…” Her face scrunched in the way it usually did when she had to say these impossible and ridiculous things, “curse you.”
“Maybe not I, but you can, Swan,” Killian insisted, not for the first time. “Stop denying your gift. I have seen the power inside you. Not all of the levitating trinkets and flickering lights are my doing, you know?”
Emma’s heart clenched at the way he was looking at her. Like she was something extraordinary. Someone exceptional. But she wasn’t. As much as she wished she could be the thing he needed to escape the prison he’d resided in for decades, she knew she wasn’t. She was just… Emma. A poor little lost girl, who no one had ever wanted.
No one, except a centuries old pirate captain who haunted her home, but insisted he was not a ghost.
“Look,” she began softly. The emotion building in the back of her throat made it difficult to apply any sort volume to her words. “I’m sorry you’re not able to move on, or… whatever, but I have to.” Tears began to sting her eyes, causing her to blink past the blurriness. A blurriness that did not hide the stricken look now taking up residence on Killian’s face. “I can’t… I can’t stay here, pining after a man I can’t even touch. A man who can’t step foot outside this house and live a life by my side.”
Killian reached up, as if on instinct, to wipe away the tear that had escaped her lashes, but only proved her point when his fingers failed to make contact, leaving only a cool sensation upon her cheek.
“I may not love Walsh,” she continued, brushing away the tear herself. “But I do care for him, and at least he’s real.”
“No,” Killian protested in quiet defiance. “He’s safe, and comfortable, and easy.” His eyes bore into hers with an intensity that made her shiver. “I think the real reason you refuse to admit to your powers is you’re afraid. Afraid of staying and building a future here, a happy one… with me.”
“There is no future here.” Her words seem to defeat the last bit of resistance within him. Solemn acceptance, tinted with a hue of sorrow, colored his eyes almost making it impossible for her to utter her next words. “I’m sorry Killian, but I have to move on. I can’t stay here. You have to let me go.”
“As you wish,” he exhaled before dissolving into thin air.
~/~
“Did you hear me, Emma?” Regina, Emma’s real estate agent, said over the phone. “She’s offering the full asking price, in cash, but wants a quick closing.”
Emma still couldn’t respond. An all cash offer, no contingencies, and a closing date of one week. It was everything Emma could have ever dreamed of. So why was she hesitant to accept?
She knew why.
Killian.
The ghost of a man she loved more than she thought it possible to love another person. The ghost of a man who loved her too, and almost had her convinced that he wasn’t dead, but merely cursed, and that her magic could free him.
But there was no such thing as magic, or true love, or other realms with vindictive witches, and Emma had to face facts. Killian had concocted the story in order to cope with his death and inability, for whatever reason, to enter the after life. He didn’t need her nonexistence magic to save him, he needed to go into the light.
If she was no longer there to serve as an excuse for him to stick around, the only person to see and hear him since he’d been tethered to the house (according to him), then maybe he finally would move on. Maybe if she left, he’d be free.
“Tell her, I accept.”
~/~
Emma entered the title company office with a heavy heart. Killian hadn’t manifested himself to her since their argument over a week ago, before the woman who’d bought her house had taken a tour of the place and made her offer. Prone to fits of brooding, she’d expected him to avoid her for a few days, but never imagined he’d abdandon her altogether. There had been no final pleadings, no annoying advice or admonishing statements about the way she packed her things, no for old time’s sake evenings spent together, not even a goodbye.
“Emma!” Regina called out from the other side of the lobby. Emma made her way over to where Regina was talking with another woman. “They’re almost ready for you,” Regina told her when she reached them. “I’m going to go see if there’s anything I can do to speed this up, but wanted to introduce you to the woman buying your house.” She gestured to the woman beside her. “This is Eloise Gardener. Eloise, meet Emma Swan.”
“A pleasure,” Eloise said, extending her hand as Regina excused herself.
“Um… yeah. Nice to meet you.”
Emma shook the woman’s hand and a raw feeling of something primal, almost instinctual, swept through her. The woman’s eyes widened briefly then narrowed in an assessing gaze as she released Emma’s hand.
“All that power and you never freed him?”
“Excuse me?”
“You had to have been able to see him,” Eloise surmised. “Most gifted witches are able to see into the void between worlds, so you must have seen him in all that time you lived in the house.”
Emma’s skin began to prickle, the fine hairs covering her body stood on end and her throat went dry.
“Be able to see who?”
“Why… Captain Jones, of course.”
A pulse of pure possessive rage erupted within Emma’s chest at the way the woman practically purred Killian’s name.
“How do you know about Killian?”
A simpering smirk toyed at the edges of Eloise’s mouth. “I’m the one who trapped him between realms,” she confessed quietly. “It took me longer than planned to make my way to this world and locate the place he’d become tethered to, but as fortune would have it, once I did, I found the place for sale with him still safely imprisoned. Now tell me. Why didn’t you use your magic to free him?”
Emma balked at the woman’s words even as her brain frantically tried to register all she was saying. “Um… because I don’t have magic?”
“Oh, but you do,” Eloise oiled. “I felt it quivering beneath your skin when we shook hands. Even now, I can see it humming through your aura. Didn’t you know?”
Emma opened and closed her mouth a few times, failing to give utterance to the thoughts swarming her mind.
Eloise hummed. “Interesting. You’ve yet to fully unlock your powers,” she mused. “It usually takes an extreme emotional event, but I sense you tend to bury those deep down rather than release them.”
Shaking her head to rid herself of the chaos, Emma focused her attention back on the woman before her. “Thanks for your concern, but my emotional well being is none of your business.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Eloise replied, seemingly unaffected by Emma’s snark. “Once our business here is concluded we needn’t concern ourselves with one another ever again.”
The reminder of why they were there hit Emma with a tumultuous force of alarm. “What are you going to do to him?”
“Don’t worry about our dear captain,” she soothed facetiously. “I plan to free him from the void.”
“And then?” Emma demanded, knowing full well the woman wouldn’t have crossed realms to free Killian out of the goodness of her heart.
“Then,” Eloise smiled a wicked smile, “I will bind him to me, making him mine forever.”
“No. You won’t,” Emma clipped sharply. “I won’t let that happen.”
Eloise gave her a bored sigh. “You had your chance with him, and now that I’ve restrained him from being able to manifest you won’t be able to open the portal to free him.”
Emma’s heart felt as though it had simultaneously dropped and soared. He hadn’t abandoned her. Eloise must have cast some sort of spell when she’d come to the house for the showing, one that kept him from reaching out.
“You won’t get away with this,” Emma hissed. “I’ll find a way to stop you.”
Regina’s heels clacked down the hallway, forcing the two women to back away from each other.
“We’re all set,” she announced. “Emma, if you’ll follow me?”
“No.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Regina,” Emma said, already making her way towards the exit. “I’ve changed my mind. No sale.”
She rushed out of the office with her agent’s bewildered protests following behind her. She had to get home. She had to get to Killian and find a way to free him before Eloise did.
She just wished she had some idea as to how.
~/~
Emma burst through her front door shouting Killian’s name. Of course, there was no answer. No evidence that anyone else was in the house until she rounded the corner to the living room and stopped short in her tracks.
“How… How did you get here so-”
“Teleportation spell,” Eloise explained haughtily as she finished laying out objects in a specific pattern on the hardwood floor. “You should definitely work on unlocking those powers.”
Before Emma could respond Eloise began to murmur some sort of incantation and a round doorway of spinning fire flared to life in the middle of the room. Through the sparks, Emma could make out Killian’s solid form, standing frozen within the void.
“Emma!” he cried out desperately. “I didn’t leave you, love. I would never leave-”
“I know,” she assured him. “It’s okay, Killian. I know it was Eloise’s doing. Come through the portal and we’ll deal with her together.”
“I can’t,” he told her. “I can’t bloody well move!”
“That’s because I added a little something to the spell,” Eloise informed them as she made her way to stand before the portal. “The only way to escape the void is to bind yourself to the person who pulls you free. Binding spells only work if both parties agree.” She reached her hand out towards him. “So, take my hand, or spend the rest of eternity in the void.”
“No,” Killian spat. “My Emma will find a way to free me.”
“Not if she’s dead, she won’t.”
Eloise flicked her wrist and a vine appeared, wrapping itself around Emma’s neck and squeezing it tightly. Emma clawed at it, but it was impervious to anything she did.
“No!” Killian shouted. “Eloise, stop! Don’t do this!”
“Take my hand, and I’ll let her live,” Eloise vowed. “The portal won’t stay open for much longer, captain. If it closes before you step through, my vine will snap her neck.”
Emma could see Killian’s jaw tighten. His hand balled into a fist and he cast an apologetic look her way.
“Killian, no,” Emma croaked. “Don’t do it. Don’t give in to her.”
“I’m sorry, Swan,” Killian forlorned. “I won’t let her hurt you. Not if it is within my power to stop her.”
Panic forced its way up from the pit of Emma’s stomach as she watched Killian reach out to take Eloise’s hand. Without thought, Emma pulled her hands away from the vine around her neck and cast them out in front of her.
“No!”
A blast of white light expelled itself from her hands and hit Eloise before she could grasp onto Killian’s hand. The woman flew across the room, hitting the far wall with a loud thud before slumping to the ground in a heap. A gasping breath forced its way into Emma’s lungs as the vine withdrew its hold, and she stumbled towards the portal that was now shrinking.
“Killian! Give me your hand!” Emma reached out for him, but was met with a conflicted forget-me-not gaze.
“I can’t, Swan. If I do, we’ll be bound together for all of eternity.”
Emma gave him a reassuring smile, and declared, “We already are.”
The air whooshed out of his lungs before he matched her smile and grabbed ahold of her hand. With a firm tug, Emma freed him from his paralyzed state and he stumbled through the portal, right into Emma’s arms. They had only a moment to enjoy one another’s embrace before a shriek sounded from behind.
“Swan, watch out!” Killian pulled them away from the portal and out of Eloise’s path as she charged towards them. Their feet tangled together, landing them on the floor where they watched as Eloise fell through the portal just before it closed on her scream.
“Is she… Is she gone?” Emma asked, sitting up and staring at the space the woman disappeared into.
“Aye,” Killian confirmed. “Trapped in her own prison. Forever.”
“Good.”
Emma cast her eyes on Killian and marveled. He was here. In the flesh. Lightly, she cupped his cheek and relished the feel of his stubble against her palm and they way his eyes fluttered shut at her touch. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his, savoring the way he tasted, the way his tongue moved with hers, and the sounds he made when she nipped softly at his bottom lip.
“Does this mean,” Killian inquired softly, opening his eyes to gaze at her when they paused for air, “that you won’t be selling the house and moving in with Walsh?”
Emma giggled and swept his dark bangs away from his forehead. “I’m not going anywhere,” she promised. “But if that witch ever shows up as a ghost from the void… we’re moving.”
“Couldn’t agree more, love.”