I dreamed this last night and woke up with my heart hurting, so uh... here’s some fic for you?
Pure spec and completely not how s7 is going to go at all.
There’s a girl at the door.
Henry pauses at the foot of the stairs, keeping his grip tight on Lucy’s hand; strange that two weeks ago he had no idea she even existed, but now she’s the most precious thing in his life; he’d do anything to keep her happy and safe.
This must have been what Mom felt like after he found her all those years ago.
The girl is tracing the letters on Killian’s door, light glinting off the jewels in the small braids woven through her long, curling blonde hair. When she turns, hearing Henry’s footsteps on the stairs of the porch, he can see she can’t be old enough to have driven here; maybe fourteen or fifteen? Old enough to be out without supervision, but young enough that Henry doesn’t like the thought of her out alone.
More new feelings awakened by fatherhood.
“Henry?” the girl asks, peering at him curiously.
He looks at her skeptically. Something about her red jacket looks familiar, and the cautiously hopeful look in her blue eyes, but he can’t place it. When he tries to pin it down, the memory slips away like an eel. "Please don't tell me you're also my daughter, you look too old for that."
She grins and that also looks maddeningly familiar. Lucy drops Henry's hand and shoves him forward, making him stumble. "No, she's your sister."
Henry's jaw drops, old, buried memories of Mom’s pregnancy and a blonde toddler rushing back. No wonder he hadn’t been able to place her, he hasn’t seen her since... well, since before he met Ella. "Cassie?"
Her mouth sets in a line. "CJ," she states firmly. "It's been a long time, big brother."
He doesn’t ask, expecting she’ll explain when she feels like it, and steps forward to hug her. She hugs back fiercely and Henry wonders how long she’s been on her own. “What are you doing here?” he asks. “How’s Mom? And Grandma and Grandpa? And the town?” She steps back, swiping at her eyes and smudging her eyeliner a little; Henry holds back the urge to tell her she’s too young for makeup, remembering both what it felt like to have both his moms tell him he was too young for something and that any daughter of Killian Jones would probably have been born knowing how to apply the stuff. “Man, I can’t see how I missed it -- you look just like Mom.”
CJ makes a face at him. “Mom’s good. Well, to everyone else. She misses Dad. Grandma and Grandpa do what they can, but you know how Mom can be.” Henry did, in fact, know what Emma could be like. “Neal’s fine, if a pain in my ass. Everyone else is good. Where’s Dad?”
She has this hopeful look in her eye; if Henry remembers correctly (and this curse did a number on him, probably because he’d resisted just about every curse previous to this one, which was something else he had to add to the list of hunches), CJ would have been about four or five when Killian had sent Mom back home with a magic bean. She probably doesn’t remember him much, but if her hair decorations aren’t pilfered from one of the chests on the Jolly Roger, Henry will eat his author’s pen.
“He’s still at work. I’m Lucy, by the way,” she says, stepping forward and sticking out her hand.
CJ looks at Henry, then down at Lucy, and starts to laugh. She crouches down at shakes Lucy’s hand. “Nice to meet you, kid. I guess I’m your Aunt CJ.”
“Here, let’s sit down and we can talk while we wait for Killian,” Henry says, gesturing to the worn Adirondack chairs on the porch.
CJ catches them up on why she’s there; the curse had hit home too, and only recently had Mom and Maleficent (or “Auntie Mal”, as CJ called her, which made Henry’s head hurt to think about for too long) figured out a way for someone to safely cross the town line to go for help. Somehow, Henry doubts that his kid sister had been the intended messenger, but seeing her here and hearing her story of getting to her long-lost family proves that she’s family. She’d been train-hopping for more than a week to get from Maine to Seattle, stealing where she had to if necessary, and when Lucy asks if she’d ever been scared (because Lucy, being ten, had absolutely been scared coming all the way to Henry’s by herself), CJ reaches into her boots, whips out a pair of very sharp knives and winks.
Oh yeah, she’s definitely Mom’s kid.
After about an hour, she starts to look a little antsy, looking around the shabby neighborhood with no small amount of agitation. Her fingers tap her knees and her legs both bounce with pent-up energy. She tries to listen as Lucy explains their mission, talking about how Mom is now Roni and Killian is now Officer James Rogers -- Henry knows she’s not really listening, or else she probably would have laughed at that -- and Grandpa Rumpelstiltskin is... well, they haven’t quite figured that one out yet. He seems to like being a pain in the ass for Officer Rogers, but that’s not really anything the curse brought on.
She’s halfway through the explanation about why she goes by CJ when she leaps to her feet suddenly, seeing movement down the block. Henry looks over his shoulder and spots Killian with his backpack, the one Henry and Lucy deduced holds all the fishing gear for the pole sticking out of the top. “Must have been a rough day,” Henry says softly.
“Why d’you say that?” CJ asks, looking nervous and more like the young teenager she is.
“Officer Rogers likes to go fishing before work,” Lucy says. “But on bad days -- like if he’s stuck on a case, or if Rumple is bad to him -- he goes after work too. It’s why he’s so late.”
“You guys really did your homework here, huh?”
Killian eyes them as he comes up the walk. “Henry,” he says, sounding foreboding. “Bringing in more urchins for your games, I see.”
“Sorry, Officer Rogers, we were just -- hey, you feeling alright?”
Henry peers at him in the dim light; the sun’s down by now, twilight fading fast into night, and the porch light doesn’t provide much in the way of favors. The lines around his eyes look deeper, the shadows under them darker and broader, and the way he’s holding himself reminds Henry of a soldier not quite used to being off duty.
Officer Rogers looks spooked in the way that Killian Jones never has been.
“Fine. Need to get inside, kids, I’ve no time for games tonight --”
“You saw it, didn’t you?” CJ asks. Killian stops, his hand halfway to the doorknob. If Henry hadn’t been watching closely, he would have missed the way Killian’s hand shakes just a little, trembling from whatever ‘it’ is that CJ’s talking about. She rushes on. “You have to have seen it, no one looks like you do if they haven’t.”
“I saw something,” Killian admits, and CJ looks so relieved that she might collapse.
“Have you seen it before, in the Enchanted Forest? I thought you’d know for sure, all your travels --”
Killian cuts CJ off with a look. “I see you’ve been listening to Lucy. I saw something, lass, but it doesn’t mean it’s real. I skipped a dose last night and that causes hallucinations. I’ll thank you, Henry,” he turns and Henry feels like shrinking into himself, “not to bring further trouble to my doorstep. You should know better than to ridicule a sick man.”
With that, he opens the door, and CJ practically throws herself at his retreating back. “No, Dad! Dad, please, wait--”
The door slams shut behind him and she collapses in front of it, swiping weakly at the worn blue wood. “Daddy, we need you,” she whispers. “Mom needs you.”
Lucy goes to her, hugging her tight. Henry clears his throat awkwardly. He hadn’t thought it necessary to mention this version of Killian was much like the curse Emma had gone through with the Black Fairy; whoever this curse caster was, they were thorough, making sure that even Killian Jones couldn’t remember his family and believed himself sick with hallucinations and fantasies.
Henry needs to be better about this. He remembers the frustration he’d had with Mom during the first curse, how neither of them could share everything the other had because either Mom thought Henry wasn’t adult enough to handle it, or Henry knew Mom wouldn’t believe it. If he’s got his daughter and his sister on his side, two girls he knows will believe anything he throws at them, he needs to share everything. The good and the bad. “Sorry, Cassie.”
“It’s CJ,” she mumbles, digging a tissue from her pocket.
“What did he see?” Lucy asks, impatient. “If it’s something that’s bleeding over from Grandfather’s world, then we need to find out what it is and stop it.”
CJ blows her nose and shakes her head. “I don’t know. But...”
She points towards the east and Henry and Killian both follow the direction of her finger. Lucy gasps and Henry feels like someone’s sucker-punched him in the stomach.
“Auntie Mal says nothing good comes of a blood red moon, but she can’t divine what it’s for,” CJ continues, getting to her feet. “It’s been full every night for a month at home, and it’s been following me here. No one who isn’t fairy-tale can see it.”
Henry has the urge to hold his daughter, and pulls Lucy towards him with hands that shake. Just last night the moon had only been a crescent, waning towards new.
Just what has his sister brought to Hyperion Heights?
