#which kind of gave off same coin theory to me???? (or maybe i’m just severely brain rotted about it)

[itsallshowbizz]

we’ll start at the end

until we begin.

[duhragonball]

Disinterpretation

I finally finished the Sarah Z video about “pro vs. anti”.   It’s pretty long, and I ended up watching it in chunks over several days, but I think it’s worth watching, especially if you’re sort of partially connected to online fandom, but not enough to be aware of all the lingo. 

As I expected, the whole thing was vague and confusing because the people involved in the conflict made it vague and confusing.   In theory, the full terms would be “pro-shipping” and “anti-shipping”, but it seems like it’s more about particular kinds of ships that could be considered controversial.  But that’s a slippery slope, and apparently the whole conflict mutated into both sides deciding that every hypothetical relationship between fictional characters is either equally valid or equally dangerous.  

Long story short, it’s just purity culture, which was what everyone on Tumblr was calling it around 2012.  But now, if you’re a sane person who genuinely asks: “Who gives a fuck about Voltron?”, these people will jump your ass and accuse you of being on the side of their enemies.  “Children have died over the importance of Lotor/Hagger!   Your callous indifference proves that you yourself must have murdered children!” 

I think what Sarah Z really hit upon in this video was that media consumption has become so ingrained in our culture that people feel like it has to go hand-in-hand with our morality.   That is, it’s not enough for me to watch Star Trek, I have to justify Star Trek as evidence that I’m a good person.  Maybe this is where the expression “guilty pleasure” comes from.   Conversely, it’s not enough for me to not watch Dr. Who, I have to somehow convince everyone that Dr. Who was invented by the devil.

I’m pretty sure the Reylo ship has a lot to do with this, since it’s kind of understood to be a dark, problematic concept, and fans either embrace its flaws or recoil in horror because of them.   Star Wars itself is a dumb story about space wizards, so people try to give the debate more weight by linking it to freedom of self expression and/or enabling real world harm.   Suddenly it’s not enough to just think two actors would look cute making out instead of fighting.   Now it’s this battlefield for the soul of civilization or something.

I grew up in the 80′s, when “concerned parents” and grifters would accuse the Smurfs and metal bands of promoting satanism and witchcraft.   I used to hear stories of teens going out into the woods in the middle of the night to do occult stuff, and all I could ever think about was: “Why would anyone bother wandering out in the woods in the middle of the night?”  Which is why “concerned parents” turned their attention to things that were closer to home, like Saturday morning cartoons.   It had nothing to do with the content; it was just about finding a safe, accessible target for their hysteria.   Some people want to go on a crusade without leaving the house, so they pick a fight with Papa Smurf instead of confronting the real evils in the world.  Even as a kid, I knew this was a con, because I’d watched the show for myself and knew it was too saccharine to be threat to anyone.

The pro/anti folks have tried to disguise this with a lot of terminology.   I wondered why they seemed to reluctant to use the full terms “pro-shipper” and “anti-shipper”, and it’s probably a couple of things.   First, the word “shipper” is basically an admission that this is pointless bullshit that doesn’t matter, and they’d like to avoid that connotation.   Second, they seem to have decided that this goes beyond shipping itself, into practically anything else they want it to involve.  It’s all part of the con, which is to make you believe that it’s “us vs. them”, and you can be part of “us” by curating specific attitudes about Steven Universe.

Seriously, “about Steven Universe” is such an incredible punchline.  You can make anything funnier by adding those three words to the end of a sentence.   “Do not interact if you blog about Steven Universe.”   “Hey, what’s up, YouTube, this is SSJ3RyokoLover69, and this is going to be kind of a serious video about Steven Universe.”   “Mrs. Johnson, the results of your biopsy are in, and I have some bad news about Steven Universe.”   It’s a fucking kids show.   “Oh no, all the characters look like the characters in all the other kids shows!”   Yeah, that’s because it’s a kids show.   Marvin looks like Garfield, this isn’t new.

The common denominator here seems to be that both sides try to wrap themselves in the flag of vulnerable groups: impressionable minors, trauma survivors, harassment victims, etc.   The “pros” want to protect those people so that they can feel free to explore weird subject matter on their own terms, and the “antis” want to protect the same people from being exposed to weird subject matter that they might not want to see.   It’s all about establishing a moral high ground.   Back in the day, it was called “sanctimony”. 

But people get roped into this, because at their core, people want approval, and this stupid conflict offers them a sense of community.  As long as you support the cause, whatever it may be, you’ll have this online friend network that appears to support anything you do.   But if you deviate from their norm, you’ll be cast out.    Does this sound familiar?

To use a more familiar example, I still sometimes find people clamoring about Gochi vs. Vegebul.   I’ve never understood this, because both ships were canon, and I never saw much direct evidence of a war between them, but people would still talk about how crazy the Vegebul shippers were, and how crazy the Gochi shippers were, and it was like some huge thing going on just over the hills.   It’s the same idea, since the idea that you could like both or neither never seems to occur to anyone involved.   I never gave a shit, because I used to see the same dumb agendas in the Harry Potter fandom.

Okay, so let me take you back.  It’s 2005 through 2011, and I’m hateblogging all seven Harry Potter novels, because fuck you, that’s why.  The funny thing I encountered was that occasionally fans seemed to want to pretend like my bashing of certain characters was proving them right somehow.    They were like “See?  He hates Ron Weasley too!  That proves that Seamus Finnegan is the coolest guy ever.”   The Slytherin stans would do this all the time, because I would constantly take the piss out of the Gryffindor characters for being self-important dopes.   I think they just liked hearing it from an outside perspective.   But I had to keep reminding them all that I hated all of them.   Every character from Harry Potter sucks ass. Voldemort was my favorite, but only because he was the one guy who wanted to kill all of the others.   But he sucks too because he failed. 

And the shippers were the same way.   I’d say something shitty about Ron, because Ron sucks, and some smartass Joss Whedon fan would be like “Yes!  Boost the signal!  That is why Harry/Hermione is the best ship!”  And I’d be like “No, Harry and Hermione suck at least as bad as Ron does.  They’re all terrible and I hate them.”   I really do think there was some sort of Stockholm Syndrome going on with Harry Potter books, where everyone secretly knows they suck, but the fans sort of latch on to one or two characters and go like “Well, he’s not as shitty as the rest.”   Like finding spaghetti in the trash and picking out the meatball with the least amount of lint on it.   Then you’d go and start a flamewar with some other starving person over whether your meatball is shittier than theirs.  This is what people mean when they say to read another book. 

Anyway, the big thing I picked up from Sarah Z’s video is “disinterpretation”, a term coined by MSNBC columnis Zeeshan Aleem.   The Twitter thread is worth a read, but the short version is that he once remarked that a Julia Louis-Dreyfus routine wasn’t very good, and someone got mad at him for insinuating that women are incapable of being funny.    They just took his dissatisfaction with one performance by one comedian as being a universal condemnation of women comedians in general.  And this sort of thing is all over the internet.   Everyone sees what they want to see and then they take it as permission to overreact.  

I ran into this myself a while back, because someone saw who I interacted with on Twitter and decided that they’re all bad guys and if I have any interaction with them, then that makes me a bad guy too.   At the time I tried to play it cool, but the more I think about it, the more it ticks me off.   And over the course of that conversation, it was said that I don’t talk about myself much, and that’s kind of funny, because all I ever do on social media is write long-ass blog posts like this one.  I don’t expect anyone to memorize them, or even read them all the way through, but when I write all this stuff and someone goes out of their way to say they don’t know anything about me, the message is that they just didn’t pay attention to what I was saying, and they didn’t bother to try.

So I’m a little jaded from that, because I got called out for a bunch of stuff I didn’t even do or say, and apparently that’s just a thing that happens.   People will reject you for completely arbitrary reasons, not because of anything you actually said or did, and you’re left thinking you made some terrible mistake.   Except, no, I’ve seen it happen to other people, people a lore more conscientious than I am, and if they can’t satisfy the bullshit purity standards, then I never stood a chance.   If the game is rigged so I can’t win, then I’m not going to play.  

And it’s that same condition that probably draws people into these online holy wars, because if you declare yourself for the pro or anti side, at least then you’ll have a posse backing you up.   Only they don’t support you, they support your willingness to support them.    Once your commitment to their agenda wavers, even in the slightest, they will turn against you.   

Sarah Z suggests that both sides of the war drop the pro and anti terms, since they lost all meaning long ago.   But that just invites a new set of useless terms to perpetuate the same cycle.   Her more useful advice is for fandom people to broaden their horizons.   She got a lot of flak for tweeting “Go outside” once, but the ironic thing is that it’s sound advice.   I had lunch with my mom yesterday and it was just nice getting away from things for a while.   People need to do that more often, and unfortunately it feels like it’s harder to do than ever before.

But “go outside” isn’t just a literal thing.   It can mean going beyond your usual haunts, reading the same books, watching the same shows, rehashing the same conversations.   I think the reason this stuff always revolves around “shipping” is because there seems to be this deep-seated compulsion to pair fictional characters off like this, and for a lot of folks it’s the only way they can consume a story, so they do.   And they do it lot, and there’s a lot of them, and they do it the same way every time, and lo and behold the same old conflicts start up.   So maybe “go outside” should mean “go outside of that cycle once in a while.”   Just a thought. 

[smallmediumproblems]

It was surprisingly easy to find a pet shop in the Arcade. The difficult part was finding the one they were looking for. Almost as soon as they’d left Spider Empire, they turned a corner to find a neat looking storefront with a sign that read Petland over the door. Nick headed straight for the entrance, but stopped when he heard Jon make an uncertain noise behind him.

“Not that one,” said Jon.

“Is it dangerous?” Nick asked. He took a preemptive step back from the store.

“Well, since none of you are allergic to cats, not especially,” said Jon, “But it won't have what you need.”

“Of course not,” Nick sighed. “Alright. Lead the way.”

They continued to wind through the halls of the Arcade apparently at random. Jon paused every now and then to get his bearings as the layout of the place changed, once or twice turning around completely with a frustrated little scowl. The longer they walked, the more pet stores they passed. Fish ‘n More had a tank that spanned the front of the store, and which, upon closer inspection, seemed to make up the entire interior as well. Static Man insisted that they stop at Too Many Legs to admire several six-legged golden retriever puppies pawing at the window. There was one store that had a gaudy assortment of crystals, medieval weapons, and gold coins littering the front display, under a sign that read DRAGONS! in a friendly cartoon font. To everyone’s dismay, it was closed.

“Should we be worried about this?” prompted Morgan as they passed a store labeled One Big Snake. “Maybe it’s trying to throw us off.”

“No, this is good,” Nick said. “I think it’s more like targeted advertising. We’ve already made a couple purchases, so the Arcade knows we’re not here to cause trouble. If it’s overheard what we’re looking for, it could be trying to help.”

“Boy, it sure is important that we get a frappucino for this ritual, huh Nicholas?” Static Man added loudly. A couple of turns later, a cozy-looking Starbucks appeared on their right.

“Considering the fact that it moved a whole city block to get here, I’d say that’s a pretty sound theory,” said Jon. “Mind you, that added a substantial detour to our walk.”

“Relaaax, drinks on me,” said Static Man, leading them inside.

“Do I want to know where you got money from?” Nick asked doubtfully. “Or where you’re keeping it?”

“It’s cool, Starbucks usually takes teeth,” said Static Man. “So, y’know. Ka-ching! Pop ‘em right out like a pez dispenser.” To demonstrate, he rummaged around in his face and pulled out a tooth with a small click. He held it out to Jon, who wished for the second time in his life that his career involved fewer people trying to hand him teeth.

Nick cornered Jon as they were waiting for their coffees. “Round two?” he suggested. Jon could taste the start of his statement already, a treacherous door and a maddening landscape behind it.

“You sound like you’re enjoying these as much as I am,” said Jon, settling in at one of the rickety tables.

Nick gave a short laugh as he sat across from him, then another more uncomfortable one as he mulled this over. “It’s weird, it almost feels familiar. You… feel familiar. Is that normal?”

“It’s certainly not good,” said Jon. “I don’t think it’s me so much as the Eye. You’ve probably stumbled across it before. I’m genuinely surprised you haven’t been caught up in one of the Fears by now. Mine in particular would be too easy for you to fall into, I think.”

Jon was struck with the sharp, warm sensation of being realized. He could feel Nick starting to put together that his rumpled blazer and secondhand mug weren’t just an affectation to make his supernatural nature seem human. That, if anything, the opposite was closer to the truth. Nick wanted to ask him how it had happened; whether it had crept up on him slowly, or if it was something he’d done to himself. Jon didn’t quite know how to explain that it had been both.

“So there’s more of these things,” Nick asked instead.

“Each one more terrible than the last,” said Jon. “That place belonged to one of them. I told you, spiders are a problem where I’m from.”

“And they’re all, what, fighting each other? Working together?” Nick pressed.

Jon laughed mirthlessly. “Depends on the person. Some of us are almost palatable. Others will tear your skin off just to say hello.”

Nick went very still for a moment. He seemed to come to some conclusion as to which kind Jon was. Jon was very aware of his eyes shifting across his scars. “Do you need help?” Nick asked gently.

“Probably.” Jon followed the statement with a very tired smile. “I can’t have it too bad if I’ve survived this long.”

“I mean it,” said Nick, “I don’t know if you’re trapped, or being blackmailed, or what, but whatever it is, I’m sure we can help. That’s kind of what we do.”

Jon didn’t need to look up at Morgan and Static Man to know what he was being offered. He wondered how many other people Nick had spirited away like this, with promises of freedom or adventure or just plain companionship. It didn’t take much effort for him to picture a scenario where he would have said yes. It wasn’t even too different from his current one.

“Thank you,” he said. “Really, I- You have no idea how many of my problems that would solve. But I have people I need to get back to. There’s someone I’d very much like to see again.”

Nick nodded. “I understand. Still, we’ve got two more stops- offer’s on the table if you change your mind.”

The Arcade had shifted again by the time they left, and Jon led them back in the direction they came from. To no one’s surprise, the shops had all changed as well, though they maintained the same ratio of pet stores.

“If this place is so intent on bringing you what you want,” said Jon, sloshing his macchiato around the flower mug. “That does raise the question of why you actually need me. I’m sure it would figure out where you need to go eventually.”

“Intent is what I’m worried about,” said Nick. “We haven’t had the best track record with sentient landscapes. And ‘eventually’ could take years. We did our research. Plenty of people come to shop in the Arcade. Not a lot of them get back out.”

“After we heard that this place would have what we needed, the first thing we did was try and figure out why so many people went missing,” Morgan chimed in. “I thought people were dying of starvation, but there’s no shortage of resources. None of the survivors talked about roving monsters, or rules you have to stick to to avoid being punished. By all accounts, it’s just an infinite maze of stores.”

“Maze being the operative word,” Jon realized aloud.

“It’s dead simple, when you think about it,” Morgan continued after a sip of her coffee. “It’ll bring you anything you could ask for in a shopping mall, except an exit.”

Jon stopped to concentrate on the layout in a moment of panic. “But it does have an exit. I know where it is.”

“And that’s why you’re rolling with the cool kids,” said Static Man, shooting Jon a finger-gun with his free, un-frappuccino’d hand. “The shops will come to us. We just need you to get us out of here when it’s time to leave. Plus, we can give you a makeover on the way out, right Nick?”

“That’s between you two,” said Nick. “Assuming we can find a JC Penny that accepts teeth. How close are we to this place?”

Jon turned to face the other side of the Arcade hall. “Here, actually,” he said. Across from them was a small storefront done up in pastel, with a display painted onto the front window that read Advanced Pets. His head buzzed with little details about the interior, a wash of comfortingly mundane facts. "It looks quite safe."

“Sick. Hey, you think there’s a Beginner’s Pets?” Static Man asked no one in particular as they crossed the hall. “Or maybe Simple Pets.”

“Band name,” Nick said immediately.

“Band na- dammit!” Morgan swore, half a second too late. Nick laughed, pulling out a cheap notebook and adding the phrase “Simple Pets” to a column under his name. There were matching columns for both Morgan and Static Man. Static Man’s was as long as the other two combined. Jon was struck with an image of Tim, Martin, and Sasha gathered in the Archive breakroom, joking about some piece of office drama over lunch. The sound of Sasha kicking her legs off the countertop she was perched on. Tim sitting backwards in a chair, tipping forward so it balanced on two legs, then back down to safety. Martin’s hands gesturing wildly, careless and mesmerizing.

“Everything alright?”

Jon blinked the memory away. Morgan and Static Man had already gone inside, and Nick was waiting for him in the doorway.

“It’s fine,” said Jon.

It was as fine as it was ever going to be.

The interior of the shop was an orderly mosaic of mint green and orange, soothing after the Arcade’s dim lighting. It was laid out more like a book store than a pet shop, with little alcoves lining the room and a few islands down the center aisle with clear plastic walls and no lids. The instrumental break of a motown song played distantly over the speakers. Most of the pets were recognizable; Morgan was hunched in front of a tank full of axolotls, watching them follow her finger as she traced it across the glass. The closest center island was a roomy enclosure of rabbits. Jon could make out guinea pigs and leopard geckos in the islands further back. As he drifted towards a stack of cat cages, he picked out a few specimens that were less familiar. The next alcove over had terrariums full of something that looked like a turtle with incredibly furry limbs. A section of the store towards the back was blocked off with thick velvet curtains, and had a standing sign in front that read Quiet area! Please do not disturb the ghosts. The music congealed into Patti LaBelle singing Danny Boy.

“You folks let me know if you want me to introduce you to anyone,” Jon heard from the middle of the store. He leaned around a metal rack of squeaky toys to see a late middle-aged woman wearing a pair of chunky plastic earrings and a romper that looked like it had been made from a bowling alley carpet. She was lounging against the register countertop, staring openly at Static Man. When he looked up at the sound of her voice, she gave him a coy smirk and pretended to be preoccupied with a ferret that was draped over her shoulders. This seemed to catch him off guard, but he quickly recovered, striking what Jon could only assume was supposed to be a casual pose next to an iguana enclosure. Jon shuddered.

“We’re looking to buy a pet rock,” said Nick.

The shopkeeper glanced between the four of them. When she looked at Jon, he noticed that her name was Nellie. “You all gonna share just the one?” she asked, the hint of a smile lingering in her voice.

“We’re not what you’d call a conventional household,” Nick replied.

Nellie bounced up from the countertop with a laugh. "Thank goodness! Those things give me the heebie-jeebies. What kind of rock are you interested in?”

“What kinds do you have?” Nick asked hesitantly. It seemed like the appropriate thing to say. Nellie led the party to an alcove lined with shelves, each one bearing at least a dozen rocks in all different shapes, sizes, treatments, and colorations. Most of them were wonky river rocks in varying shades of black and gray. A few towards the back of the shelves were glowing faintly. Some seemed quite valuable, including part of an amethyst geode and something that Jon identified as an absolutely massive uncut diamond. There was a little standing desk off to one side littered with googly eyes and Sharpie markers.

“Take a look around, they’re not shy,” said Nellie.

Nick looked between her and the rocks, and plucked a specimen from the nearest shelf. It was large and gray, with pockmarks that made it look volcanic. “I guess, this one?” he said.

“Hmmmm,” said Nellie. She scratched under the ferret’s chin and squinted at Nick suspiciously. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Ok,” said Nick, forcing a patient tone, “Which one would you suggest?”

Nellie shrugged. “It’s not my rock. But I do know a bad match when I see one. Pick one that speaks to you. These fellas are looking for a forever home, just like everyone in the store.” At this, she looked pointedly at Static Man, batting her eyelashes. Static Man did something horrifying with the multitudes of teeth that protruded from his face like shrapnel. Nellie smiled back.

“Right. Little help, guys?” Nick asked, turning to the others.

Jon tilted his head slightly at Nellie with a small, concerned frown. “Do you want me to…?”

Nick looked panicked. “Help me pick one out,” he clarified quickly. “Please.” The four of them went to work inspecting the rocks and presenting them to Nellie, progressively less and less sure of what they were looking for as each offering was dismissed. More accurately, three of them went through this process while Static Man flirted with her. Jon eventually found himself turning the same rock over and over in his hands, listening in idly on their conversation.

“You didn’t have anywhere to be today, right?” Morgan commented, reaching across him for a small black rock that was keening pleasantly.

“That’s a good question,” said Jon, half to himself. His watch - which he’d neglected to take off while he was dozing in the breakroom - read 5:17. Still a couple hours before anyone might notice he was gone. “Does time work the same way, here?”

Morgan made an unworried noise. “Who knows. That’s one hazard we don’t usually worry too much about. One of the perks of not having someplace to get back to.”

“Not… Not at all?” said Jon, “You just do this all the time?”

“Pretty much,” said Morgan. “We’re not homeless, we do crash on Nick’s couch whenever we need a day off. But mostly, yeah, we just do stuff like this.”

“That sounds exhausting,” Jon marveled.

“It can be,” said Morgan. “Better than being trapped in one place.”

Jon wasn’t sure what kind of expression his reaction had translated to, but whatever it was drew a long, sympathetic look from Morgan. “Mmmh,” she hummed gently. She set her rock down and leaned on a shelf. “You too?”

Jon paused. He nodded.

“You mentioned an archive,” said Morgan, “Is it just you, back home?”

“No,” said Jon, “No, I’ve got… well, not friends, exactly. I know, that sounds bad, it’s… Well, it kind of is. The Archive, not the people. They’re the only thing worth staying for.”

“Always are,” said Morgan.

“You were all alone, weren’t you?” Jon asked. The parts of his situation that Morgan found familiar were painting a clear, bleak picture of what she’d escaped to be here. The dark places in here eyes were filled with more long, quiet nights than she cared to count.

Morgan studied him with the same serious appraisal she’d been giving the rocks. “Watch out for that. I hope you find your way out. But until you do? Don’t be alone.”

They both turned their attention to the other side of the alcove, where Static Man had dragged Nick in as a reluctant wingman. Nick was desperately trying to focus on the rocks while still making the appropriate comments on whatever Static Man was saying.

“Even if you end up stuck with dorks like these,” Morgan said fondly.

She turned back to the shelves as Static Man continued recounting the time he and Nick had fought a tribe of cyborg motorcycle centaurs.

“And then I was like, ‘Hands off my friend, you gas-guzzling son of a bitch!’” he exclaimed, and grabbed Nick’s shoulder for emphasis.

“That still doesn’t make sense,” Nick complained, holding a rock with a vein of crystal through it up to the light. “They didn’t even use gas, they had biofuel. It’s the whole reason we were there, remember? Those bugs were eating all their crops.”

“It was a drought,” Jon corrected him. Nick and Static Man looked over in surprise. “The bugs were just there looking for water. The sonic generator you used to drive them away shook loose an underground spring that saved the plants. Sort of an adjacent solution, I suppose.”

Jon tensed, waiting for the inevitable backlash. Instead, Nick rounded on Static Man with a triumphant fist upheld. “I knew it!” he crowed, looking between him and Morgan. "And you were worried it would cause structural damage!"

"Uhh because it did?" she said, "That's one step away from a sinkhole, in my limited knowledge of dirt things."

"Hey, Archivist? New rule," Static Man grumbled, "You only get to use your psychic powers to help me win arguments, got it?"

 "I'll take that under advisement," said Jon, offering him an awkward smile. He tapped on the rock he was holding, and held it out to Nellie. “How’s this one?”

“Ohh, look at that,” she cooed. “It likes you!”

Jon stared down at the rock. It was not pretty, an unremarkable brown with a large black spot on one corner. The surface was smooth but not glossy, as if from wear rather than polish. It had an oddly comforting weight to it. Somehow it felt solid and dependable in a way that nothing else in the Arcade had. He could feel his own warmth reflected back towards him from how long he’d been holding it, magnified and radiating up his arm. My Girl by the Temptations had started playing over the store speakers.

“It does,” Jon said incredulously. “I don’t- how? Why?”

“How much is it?” asked Morgan.

“For him?” said Nellie. She studied Jon, eyes flicking between him and the rock. “I’d settle for one of those scars.”

Jon looked up. “Excuse me?”

Nellie traced a little crescent on her cheek where Jon had a scar from Jane Prentiss’ attack on the Institute. The ferret crawled up to nuzzle her fingers as she did so. “They’ve got a real arte povera vibe,” she explained, “I know a fella on the collector’s circuit who’d trade something good for one like that.”

“Riiiight,” said Jon, more a signal of acknowledgement than understanding. “If we’re ignoring the obvious questions as usual, am I allowed to haggle? There’s one on my leg that I’d like to be rid of.”

With an appraising sort of hum, Nellie leaned down and inspected the leg in question from a respectful distance. Jon clutched his rock a little closer.

“What’s wrong with that one?” asked Static Man, “Like, as opposed to the ones all over your face. And your hand. Man, you have a lot of scars, how did I not notice that before?”

“It’s a reminder,” explained Jon. “I suppose they all are, but this one’s different. It... hurts differently.”

“I gotta stop asking you questions, because every time you answer one I have, like, five million more,” said Static Man, a distinct tone of admiration in his voice.

“Nice to see that I’m not the only one,” Jon said dryly.

Nellie straightened to face Jon again. “I’m sorry, but I can’t budge on the price,” she said. “That one’s in deep. Now, the ones up top, you’ve got a few to spare.”

“Worth a shot,” said Jon, shrugging. “I’ll take it.”

He resisted the urge to squirm away as Nellie tugged down the neck of his shirt, revealing a scar just under his collarbone. She scrubbed at the edges of it gently until a sliver curled up into itself, then took the edge between two fingers and pulled. It came away to reveal smooth, unblemished skin underneath, as if it had never been there. Jon rubbed the spot with his free hand. He’d expected it to hurt. It just felt like peeling off an old band-aid.

“Thank you for that,” he said.

“My pleasure, dear,” Nellie said with a smile. She rolled up her sleeve around the ferret and carefully placed the scar on her shoulder, smoothing it down until it stuck in place.

“It looks good on you,” Morgan commented.

“Yeah, you look like a badass,” said Static Man appreciatively.

Nellie laughed. “What sweet young people you are! Are you sure there’s nothing else I can help you with before you go?”

“Actually,” said Nick, “There was one other thing. I was hoping to buy some pet food. We need birdseed and something for rats, mice maybe.”

Nellie gave him a knowing look. “The tailors. I thought it might be that one. You’ll want some fish food as well, everyone forgets to feed the fish. Tell you what, mister magic man. I’ll give it to you for free on the condition that you make sure that rock has a home after you’ve used it.”

“You’re familiar with the ritual, then,” said Nick. “You understand what I have to do to it?”

“It’ll survive,” said Nellie, waving her hand dismissively. “It’s a rock, not a champagne glass. I’ve just seen too many of the poor things thrown in the gutter after some hooligan has their way with them.”

Nick nodded. “I don’t see that being a problem. The Archivist seems pretty attached already.”

“Its name is Shirley,” Jon interjected. He was now clutching his rock in both hands and brushing his thumb absently back and forth over its spot. “And I’ll take good care of it.”

[suzanneshannon]

Chapter 1: Birth

Tim Berners-Lee is fascinated with information. It has been his life’s work. For over four decades, he has sought to understand how it is mapped and stored and transmitted. How it passes from person to person. How the seeds of information become the roots of dramatic change. It is so fundamental to the work that he has done that when he wrote the proposal for what would eventually become the World Wide Web, he called it “Information Management, a Proposal.”

Information is the web’s core function. A series of bytes stream across the world and at the end of it is knowledge. The mechanism for this transfer — what we know as the web — was created by the intersection of two things. The first is the Internet, the technology that makes it all possible. The second is hypertext, the concept that grounds its use. They were brought together by Tim Berners-Lee. And when he was done he did something truly spectacular. He gave it away to everyone to use for free.

When Berners-Lee submitted “Information Management, a Proposal” to his superiors, they returned it with a comment on the top that read simply:

Vague, but exciting…

The web wasn’t a sure thing. Without the hindsight of today it looked far too simple to be effective. In other words, it was a hard sell. Berners-Lee was proficient at many things, but he was never a great salesman. He loved his idea for the web. But he had to convince everybody else to love it too.

Tim Berners-Lee has a mind that races. He has been known — based on interviews and public appearances — to jump from one idea to the next. He is almost always several steps ahead of what he is saying, which is often quite profound. Until recently, he only gave a rare interview here and there, and masked his greatest achievements with humility and a wry British wit.

What is immediately apparent is that Tim Berners-Lee is curious. Curious about everything. It has led him to explore some truly revolutionary ideas before they became truly revolutionary. But it also means that his focus is typically split. It makes it hard for him to hold on to things in his memory. “I’m certainly terrible at names and faces,” he once said in an interview. His original fascination with the elements for the web came from a very personal need to organize his own thoughts and connect them together, disparate and unconnected as they are. It is not at all unusual that when he reached for a metaphor for that organization, he came up with a web.

As a young boy, his curiosity was encouraged. His parents, Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, were mathematicians. They worked on the Ferranti Mark I, the world’s first commercially available computer, in the 1950s. They fondly speak of Berners-Lee as a child, taking things apart, experimenting with amateur engineering projects. There was nothing that he didn’t seek to understand further. Electronics — and computers specifically — were particularly enchanting.

Berners-Lee sometimes tells the story of a conversation he had with his with father as a young boy about the limitations of computers making associations between information that was not intrinsically linked. “The idea stayed with me that computers could be much more powerful,” Berners-Lee recalls, “if they could be programmed to link otherwise unconnected information. In an extreme view, the world can been seen as only connections.” He didn’t know it yet, but Berners-Lee had stumbled upon the idea of hypertext at a very early age. It would be several years before he would come back to it.

History is filled with attempts to organize knowledge. An oft-cited example is the Library of Alexandria, a fabled library of Ancient Greece that was thought to have had tens of thousands of meticulously organized texts.

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At the turn of the century, Paul Otlet tried something similar in Belgium. His project was called the Répertoire Bibliographique Universel (Universal Bibliography). Otlet and a team of researchers created a library of over 15 million index cards, each with a discrete and small piece of information in topics ranging from science to geography. Otlet devised a sophisticated numbering system that allowed him to link one index card to another. He fielded requests from researchers around the world via mail or telegram, and Otlet’s researchers could follow a trail of linked index cards to find an answer. Once properly linked, information becomes infinitely more useful.

A sudden surge of scientific research in the wake of World War II prompted Vanneaver Bush to propose another idea. In his groundbreaking essay in The Atlantic in 1945 entitled “As We May Think,” Bush imagined a mechanical library called a Memex. Like Otlet’s Universal Bibliography, the Memex stored bits of information. But instead of index cards, everything was stored on compact microfilm. Through the process of what he called “associative indexing,” users of the Memex could follow trails of related information through an intricate web of links.

The list of attempts goes on. But it was Ted Neslon who finally gave the concept a name in 1968, two decades after Bush’s article in The Atlantic. He called it hypertext.

Hypertext is, essentially, linked text. Nelson observed that in the real world, we often give meaning to the connections between concepts; it helps us grasp their importance and remember them for later. The proximity of a Post-It to your computer, the orientation of ingredients in your refrigerator, the order of books on your bookshelf. Invisible though they may seem, each of these signifiers hold meaning, whether consciously or subconsciously, and they are only fully realized when taking a step back. Hypertext was a way to bring those same kinds of meaningful connections to the digital world.

Nelson’s primary contribution to hypertext is a number of influential theories and a decades-long project still in progress known as Xanadu. Much like the web, Xanadau uses the power of a network to create a global system of links and pages. However, Xanadu puts a far greater emphasis on the ability to trace text to its original author for monetization and attribution purposes. This distinction, known as transculsion, has been a near impossible technological problem to solve.

Nelson’s interest in hypertext stems from the same issue with memory and recall as Berners-Lee. He refers to it is as his hummingbird mind. Nelson finds it hard to hold on to associations he creates in the real world. Hypertext offers a way for him to map associations digitally, so that he can call on them later. Berners-Lee and Nelson met for the first time a couple of years after the web was invented. They exchanged ideas and philosophies, and Berners-Lee was able to thank Nelson for his influential thinking. At the end of the meeting, Berners-Lee asked if he could take a picture. Nelson, in turn, asked for a short video recording. Each was commemorating the moment they knew they would eventually forget. And each turned to technology for a solution.

By the mid-80s, on the wave of innovation in personal computing, there were several hypertext applications out in the wild. The hypertext community — a dedicated group of software engineers that believed in the promise of hypertext – created programs for researchers, academics, and even off-the-shelf personal computers. Every research lab worth their weight in salt had a hypertext project. Together they built entirely new paradigms into their software, processes and concepts that feel wonderfully familiar today but were completely outside the realm of possibilities just a few years earlier.

At Brown University, the very place where Ted Nelson was studying when he coined the term hypertext, Norman Meyrowitz, Nancy Garrett, and Karen Catlin were the first to breathe life into the hyperlink, which was introduced in their program Intermedia. At Symbolics, Janet Walker was toying with the idea of saving links for later, a kind of speed dial for the digital world – something she was calling a bookmark. At the University of Maryland, Ben Schneiderman sought to compile and link the world’s largest source of information with his Interactive Encyclopedia System.

Dame Wendy Hall, at the University of Southhampton, sought to extend the life of the link further in her own program, Microcosm. Each link made by the user was stored in a linkbase, a database apart from the main text specifically designed to store metadata about connections. In Microcosm, links could never die, never rot away. If their connection was severed they could point elsewhere since links weren’t directly tied to text. You could even write a bit of text alongside links, expanding a bit on why the link was important, or add to a document separate layers of links, one, for instance, a tailored set of carefully curated references for experts on a given topic, the other a more laid back set of links for the casual audience.

There were mailing lists and conferences and an entire community that was small, friendly, fiercely competitive and locked in an arms race to find the next big thing. It was impossible not to get swept up in the fervor. Hypertext enabled a new way to store actual, tangible knowledge; with every innovation the digital world became more intricate and expansive and all-encompassing.

Then came the heavy hitters. Under a shroud of mystery, researchers and programmers at the legendary Xerox PARC were building NoteCards. Apple caught wind of the idea and found it so compelling that they shipped their own hypertext application called Hypercard, bundled right into the Mac operating system. If you were a late Apple II user, you likely have fond memories of Hypercard, an interface that allowed you to create a card, and quickly link it to another. Cards could be anything, a recipe maybe, or the prototype of a latest project. And, one by one, you could link those cards up, visually and with no friction, until you had a digital reflection of your ideas.

Towards the end of the 80s, it was clear that hypertext had a bright future. In just a few short years, the software had advanced in leaps and bounds.

After a brief stint studying physics at The Queen’s College, Oxford, Tim Berners-Lee returned to his first love: computers. He eventually found a short-term, six-month contract at the particle physics lab Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), or simply, CERN.

CERN is responsible for a long line of particle physics breakthroughs. Most recently, they built the Large Hadron Collider, which led to the confirmation of the Higgs Boson particle, a.k.a. the “God particle.”

CERN doesn’t operate like most research labs. Its internal staff makes up only a small percentage of the people that use the lab. Any research team from around the world can come and use the CERN facilities, provided that they are able to prove their research fits within the stated goals of the institution. A majority of CERN occupants are from these research teams. CERN is a dynamic, sprawling campus of researchers, ferrying from location to location on bicycles or mine-carts, working on the secrets of the universe. Each team is expected to bring their own equipment and expertise. That includes computers.

Berners-Lee was hired to assist with software on an earlier version of the particle accelerator called the Proton Synchrotron. When he arrived, he was blown away by the amount of pure, unfiltered information that flowed through CERN. It was nearly impossible to keep track of it all and equally impossible to find what you were looking for. Berners-Lee wanted to capture that information and organize it.

His mind flashed back to that conversation with his father all those years ago. What if it were possible to create a computer program that allowed you to make random associations between bits of information? What if you could, in other words, link one thing to another? He began working on a software project on the side for himself. Years later, that would be the same way he built the web. He called this project ENQUIRE, named for a Victorian handbook he had read as a child.

Using a simple prompt, ENQUIRE users could create a block of info, something like Otlet’s index cards all those years ago. And just like the Universal Bibliography, ENQUIRE allowed you to link one block to another. Tools were bundled in to make it easier to zoom back and see the connections between the links. For Berners-Lee this filled a simple need: it replaced the part of his memory that made it impossible for him to remember names and faces with a digital tool.

Compared to the software being actively developed at the University of Southampton or at Xerox or Apple, ENQUIRE was unsophisticated. It lacked a visual interface, and its format was rudimentary. A program like Hypercard supported rich-media and advanced two-way connections. But ENQUIRE was only Berners-Lee’s first experiment with hypertext. He would drop the project when his contract was up at CERN.

Berners-Lee would go and work for himself for several years before returning to CERN. By the time he came back, there would be something much more interesting for him to experiment with. Just around the corner was the Internet.

Packet switching is the single most important invention in the history of the Internet. It is how messages are transmitted over a globally decentralized network. It was discovered almost simultaneously in the late-60s by two different computer scientists, Donald Davies and Paul Baran. Both were interested in the way in which it made networks resilient.

Traditional telecommunications at the time were managed by what is known as circuit switching. With circuit switching, a direct connection is open between the sender and receiver, and the message is sent in its entirety between the two. That connection needs to be persistent and each channel can only carry a single message at a time. That line stays open for the duration of a message and everything is run through a centralized switch. 

If you’re searching for an example of circuit switching, you don’t have to look far. That’s how telephones work (or used to, at least). If you’ve ever seen an old film (or even a TV show like Mad Men) where an operator pulls a plug out of a wall and plugs it back in to connect a telephone call, that’s circuit switching (though that was all eventually automated). Circuit switching works because everything is sent over the wire all at once and through a centralized switch. That’s what the operators are connecting.

Packet switching works differently. Messages are divided into smaller bits, or packets, and sent over the wire a little at a time. They can be sent in any order because each packet has just enough information to know where in the order it belongs. Packets are sent through until the message is complete, and then re-assembled on the other side. There are a few advantages to a packet-switched network. Multiple messages can be sent at the same time over the same connection, split up into little packets. And crucially, the network doesn’t need centralization. Each node in the network can pass around packets to any other node without a central routing system. This made it ideal in a situation that requires extreme adaptability, like in the fallout of an atomic war, Paul Baran’s original reason for devising the concept.

When Davies began shopping around his idea for packet switching to the telecommunications industry, he was shown the door. “I went along to Siemens once and talked to them, and they actually used the words, they accused me of technical — they were really saying that I was being impertinent by suggesting anything like packet switching. I can’t remember the exact words, but it amounted to that, that I was challenging the whole of their authority.” Traditional telephone companies were not at all interested in packet switching. But ARPA was.

ARPA, later known as DARPA, was a research agency embedded in the United States Department of Defense. It was created in the throes of the Cold War — a reaction to the launch of the Sputnik satellite by Russia — but without a core focus. (It was created at the same time as NASA, so launching things into space was already taken.) To adapt to their situation, ARPA recruited research teams from colleges around the country. They acted as a coordinator and mediator between several active university research projects with a military focus.

ARPA’s organization had one surprising and crucial side effect. It was comprised mostly of professors and graduate students who were working at its partner universities. The general attitude was that as long as you could prove some sort of modest relation to a military application, you could pitch your project for funding. As a result, ARPA was filled with lots of ambitious and free-thinking individuals working inside of a buttoned-up government agency, with little oversight, coming up with the craziest and most world-changing ideas they could. “We expected that a professional crew would show up eventually to take over the problems we were dealing with,” recalls Bob Kahn, an ARPA programmer critical to the invention of the Internet. The “professionals” never showed up.

One of those professors was Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA. He was involved in the first stages of ARPANET, the network that would eventually become the Internet. His job was to help implement the most controversial part of the project, the still theoretical concept known as packet switching, which enabled a decentralized and efficient design for the ARPANET network. It is likely that the Internet would not have taken shape without it. Once packet switching was implemented, everything came together quickly. By the early 1980s, it was simply called the Internet. By the end of the 1980s, the Internet went commercial and global, including a node at CERN.

Once packet switching was implemented, everything came together quickly. By the early 1980s, it was simply called the Internet.

The first applications of the Internet are still in use today. FTP, used for transferring files over the network, was one of the first things built. Email is another one. It had been around for a couple of decades on a closed system already. When the Internet began to spread, email became networked and infinitely more useful.

Other projects were aimed at making the Internet more accessible. They had names like Archie, Gopher, and WAIS, and have largely been forgotten. They were united by a common goal of bringing some order to the chaos of a decentralized system. WAIS and Archie did so by indexing the documents put on the Internet to make them searchable and findable by users. Gopher did so with a structured, hierarchical system. 

Kleinrock was there when the first message was ever sent over the Internet. He was supervising that part of the project, and even then, he knew what a revolutionary moment it was. However, he is quick to note that not everybody shared that feeling in the beginning. He recalls the sentiment held by the titans of the telecommunications industry like the Bell Telephone Company. “They said, ‘Little boy, go away,’ so we went away.” Most felt that the project would go nowhere, nothing more than a technological fad.

In other words, no one was paying much attention to what was going on and no one saw the Internet as much of a threat. So when that group of professors and graduate students tried to convince their higher-ups to let the whole thing be free — to let anyone implement the protocols of the Internet without a need for licenses or license fees — they didn’t get much pushback. The Internet slipped into public use and only the true technocratic dreamers of the late 20th century could have predicted what would happen next.

Berners-Lee returned to CERN in a fellowship position in 1984. It was four years after he had left. A lot had changed. CERN had developed their own network, known as CERNET, but by 1989, they arrived and hooked up to the new, internationally standard Internet. “In 1989, I thought,” he recalls, “look, it would be so much easier if everybody asking me questions all the time could just read my database, and it would be so much nicer if I could find out what these guys are doing by just jumping into a similar database of information for them.” Put another way, he wanted to share his own homepage, and get a link to everyone else’s.

What he needed was a way for researchers to share these “databases” without having to think much about how it all works. His way in with management was operating systems. CERN’s research teams all bring their own equipment, including computers, and there’s no way to guarantee they’re all running the same OS. Interoperability between operating systems is a difficult problem by design — generally speaking — the goal of an OS is to lock you in. Among its many other uses, a globally networked hypertext system like the web was a wonderful way for researchers to share notes between computers using different operating systems.

However, Berners-Lee had a bit of trouble explaining his idea. He’s never exactly been concise. By 1989, when he wrote “Information Management, a Proposal,” Berners-Lee already had worldwide ambitions. The document is thousands of words, filled with diagrams and charts. It jumps energetically from one idea to the next without fully explaining what’s just been said. Much of what would eventually become the web was included in the document, but it was just too big of an idea. It was met with a lukewarm response — that “Vague, but exciting” comment scrawled across the top.

A year later, in May of 1990, at the encouragement of his boss Mike Sendall (the author of that comment), Beners-Lee circulated the proposal again. This time it was enough to buy him a bit of time internally to work on it. He got lucky. Sendall understood his ambition and aptitude. He wouldn’t always get that kind of chance. The web needed to be marketed internally as an invaluable tool. CERN needed to need it. Taking complex ideas and boiling them down to their most salient, marketable points, however, was not Berners-Lee’s strength. For that, he was going to need a partner. He found one in Robert Cailliau.

Cailliau was a CERN veteran. By 1989, he’d worked there as a programmer for over 15 years. He’d embedded himself in the company culture, proving a useful resource helping teams organize their informational toolset and knowledge-sharing systems. He had helped several teams at CERN do exactly the kind of thing Berners-Lee was proposing, though at a smaller scale.

Temperamentally, Cailliau was about as different from Berners-Lee as you could get. He was hyper-organized and fastidious. He knew how to sell things internally, and he had made plenty of political inroads at CERN. What he shared with Berners-Lee was an almost insatiable curiosity. During his time as a nurse in the Belgian military, he got fidgety. “When there was slack at work, rather than sit in the infirmary twiddling my thumbs, I went and got myself some time on the computer there.” He ended up as a programmer in the military, working on war games and computerized models. He couldn’t help but look for the next big thing.

In the late 80s, Cailliau had a strong interest in hypertext. He was taking a look at Apple’s Hypercard as a potential internal documentation system at CERN when he caught wind of Berners-Lee’s proposal. He immediately recognized its potential.

Working alongside Berners-Lee, Cailliau pieced together a new proposal. Something more concise, more understandable, and more marketable. While Berners-Lee began putting together the technologies that would ultimately become the web, Cailliau began trying to sell the idea to interested parties inside of CERN.

The web, in all of its modern uses and ubiquity can be difficult to define as just one thing — we have the web on our refrigerators now. In the beginning, however, the web was made up of only a few essential features.

There was the web server, a computer wired to the Internet that can transmit documents and media (webpages) to other computers. Webpages are served via HTTP, a protocol designed by Berners-Lee in the earliest iterations of the web. HTTP is a layer on top of the Internet, and was designed to make things as simple, and resilient, as possible. HTTP is so simple that it forgets a request as soon as it has made it. It has no memory of the webpages its served in the past. The only thing HTTP is concerned with is the request it’s currently making. That makes it magnificently easy to use.

These webpages are sent to browsers, the software that you’re using to read this article. Browsers can read documents handed to them by server because they understand HTML, another early invention of Tim Berners-Lee. HTML is a markup language, it allows programmers to give meaning to their documents so that they can be understood. The “H” in HTML stands for Hypertext. Like HTTP, HTML — all of the building blocks programmers can use to structure a document — wasn’t all that complex, especially when compared to other hypertext applications at the time. HTML comes from a long line of other, similar markup languages, but Berners-Lee expanded it to include the link, in the form of an anchor tag. The <a> tag is the most important piece of HTML because it serves the web’s greatest function: to link together information.

The hyperlink was made possible by the Universal Resource Identifier (URI) later renamed to the Uniform Resource Indicator after the IETF found the word “universal” a bit too substantial. But for Berners-Lee, that was exactly the point. “Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished,” he wrote in his personal history of the web. Of all the original technologies that made up the web, Berners-Lee — and several others — have noted that the URL was the most important.

By Christmas of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had all of that built. A full prototype of the web was ready to go.

Cailliau, meanwhile, had had a bit of success trying to sell the idea to his bosses. He had hoped that his revised proposal would give him a team and some time. Instead he got six months and a single staff member, intern Nicola Pellow. Pellow was new to CERN, on placement for her mathematics degree. But her work on the Line Mode Browser, which enabled people from around the world using any operating system to browse the web, proved a crucial element in the web’s early success. Berners-Lee’s work, combined with the Line Mode Browser, became the web’s first set of tools. It was ready to show to the world.

When the team at CERN submitted a paper on the World Wide Web to the San Antonio Hypertext Conference in 1991, it was soundly rejected. They went anyway, and set up a table with a computer to demo it to conference attendees. One attendee remarked:

They have chutzpah calling that the World Wide Web!

The highlight of the web is that it was not at all sophisticated. Its use of hypertext was elementary, allowing for only simplistic text based links. And without two-way links, pretty much a given in hypertext applications, links could go dead at any minute. There was no linkbase, or sophisticated metadata assigned to links. There was just the anchor tag. The protocols that ran on top of the Internet were similarly basic. HTTP only allowed for a handful of actions, and alternatives like Gopher or WAIS offered far more options for advanced connections through the Internet network.

It was hard to explain, difficult to demo, and had overly lofty ambition. It was created by a man who didn’t have much interest in marketing his ideas. Even the name was somewhat absurd. “WWW” is one of only a handful of acronyms that actually takes longer to say than the full “World Wide Web.”

We know how this story ends. The web won. It’s used by billions of people and runs through everything we do. It is among the most remarkable technological achievements of the 20th century.

It had a few advantages, of course. It was instantly global and widely accessible thanks to the Internet. And the URL — and its uniqueness — is one of the more clever concepts to come from networked computing.

But if you want to truly understand why the web succeeded we have to come back to information. One of Berners-Lee’s deepest held beliefs is that information is incredibly powerful, and that it deserves to be free. He believed that the Web could deliver on that promise. For it to do that, the web would need to spread.

Berners-Lee looked to his successors for inspiration: the Internet. The Internet succeeded, in part, because they gave it away to everyone. After considering several licensing options, he lobbied CERN to release the web unlicensed to the general public. CERN, an organization far more interested in particle physics breakthroughs than hypertext, agreed. In 1993, the web officially entered the public domain.

And that was the turning point. They didn’t know it then, but that was the moment the web succeeded. When Berners-Lee was able to make globally available information truly free.

In an interview some years ago, Berners-Lee recalled how it was that the web came to be.

I had the idea for it. I defined how it would work. But it was actually created by people.

That may sound like humility from one of the world’s great thinkers — and it is that a little — but it is also the truth. The web was Berners-Lee’s gift to the world. He gave it to us, and we made it what it was. He and his team fought hard at CERN to make that happen.

Berners-Lee knew that with the resources available to him he would never be able to spread the web sufficiently outside of the hallways of CERN. Instead, he packaged up all the code that was needed to build a browser into a library called libwww and posted it to a Usenet group. That was enough for some people to get interested in browsers. But before browsers would be useful, you needed something to browse.

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[jarienn972]

The Recreant - Part Eight

Finally had a moment to sit down and get this chapter posted.  I throw a lot of angst into this installment as it sets up the final two chapters (and a little epilogue that I decided to add based on some feedback I’ve received from the fan fiction sites. The epilogue doesn’t yet appear on the AO3 or FF.net versions, but I’ll be adding there soon for anyone who’s reading ahead.)

From the beginning on Tumblr:  One  Two  Three  Four  Five  Six  Seven

6:02pm

This isn't right was the first thought that crossed Emma's mind as she bolted awake from a dream, an enveloping air of dread encroaching around her. She recalled stopping at her parent's loft at her mother's insistence having been promised a shower and some easy to transport food and snacks that wouldn't require heating or refrigeration – items that Snow was already preparing as soon as she'd arrived. At some point, she'd settled down onto the sofa with intentions to have a family conversation, but as she'd allowed herself to relax, she'd fallen asleep before they'd even begun to talk. Knowing how difficult the past few hours had been for her, her parents had allowed her the rest, but now, Emma was regretting not remaining alert.

"What time is it?" was the first question out of her mouth as she awakened, slightly startling her mother who'd been busy making dinner.

"It's a little after six," Snow told her while passing a roll of paper towels across the island to David who was actively engaged in battle with nearly three year old Neal who was more interested in launching his dinner than eating it. "Emma, are you okay, honey?"

"How long was I asleep?" was her second question, deflecting her mother's query.

"About forty five minutes. You were exhausted – at least you must have been to sleep through meal time with this one…" Snow gestured toward the toddler as he squealed an eardrum shattering "NO!" while flinging a green bean from his high chair tray.

"I've got to go," Emma said as she pushed herself up from the sofa with a somewhat distraught look on her face that her mother recognized instantly.

"What's wrong?" Snow demanded, abandoning the pots and pans ob the stove to confront her daughter.

"It's Killian," Emma replied with a note of fear making her voice quiver and a hint of not fully awake desperation in her gaze that would have concerned any mom. Emma's instincts were rarely wrong when it came to the connection she and Killian shared. "Something's wrong. I've got to get back over there…"

"Okay, why don't you let me drive you?" David offered, happily jumping at an opportunity to no longer be the target of his son's flying food scraps. She almost told him no, but as she dug through her pockets to locate her cell phone, she found a message indicated on the display, her words catching in her throat before they could formulate.

"Dad, where is Killian's phone?" She asked after a moment of silence when she opened the text message that was waiting for her.

"Unless you retrieved it when you were at the station earlier, it should still be in the evidence locker with the rest of his stuff."

"I haven't touched any of his things in that evidence bag. You're certain you didn't leave it with him at the hospital?"

"There wouldn't have been a reason to since he was unconscious and I'm pretty sure the phone was listed on the inventory sheet they gave me. I'm sure everything is still together…"

"Ok, then who the hell sent me this?" she asked, turning her phone around to show them a message that she'd received just fifteen minutes earlier – a message that simply repeated the same three letters over and over again – S.O.S.

"What the hell?" David was as dumbfounded as she was seeing that the sender was listed as Killian. How could a phone that was locked in evidence be sending out a text message – especially an SOS? There wasn't much time to even contemplate the origin of the mysterious text message when Emma's phone started to vibrate and the Caller ID revealed it to be from Storybrooke Hospital.

"It's the hospital," Emma blanched, bracing herself for whatever the call might be. Snow scooped up the unruly toddler and ushered him quickly into the bathroom to clean him up – and to give his sister some quiet as she answered the call. "This is Emma," she said stoically as she picked up.

"Emma, I'm glad I reached you. It's Dr. Whale," he identified himself, although she'd already recognized the voice. "Are you heading back here soon?"

"I can be there in a few minutes. Is something wrong?" she asked, but in the pit of her stomach, she already knew the answer to the question.

"We've had a bit of a setback…" the doctor said.

"Setback? What kind of setback?"

"As you know, I don't really like to go into detail over the phone, but one of the nurses found your husband unresponsive a few minutes ago. We're running tests to be certain, but it appears he suffered a massive seizure which may have renewed the intracranial bleeding. He's in Radiology undergoing a CT scan right now to determine if that's the case and he's slipped back into a comatose state, but I'll fill you in on the rest of the details when you get here."

"I'm on my way," she replied, tapping the end call button.

"Emma, what is it?" David asked her. He'd heard the word 'setback' in the conversation and seen his daughter's reaction to it. Things definitely weren't looking good.

"That was Whale. Killian may have suffered a seizure. Whale said he slipped back into a coma and they're worried the bleeding started again…" Her voice was shaking as she shoved her phone back into her pocket and made her way toward the front door.

"That settles it," David said as he reached over and tugged his jacket off the back of the chair where it had been hanging. "You're not going alone. I'm driving." He knew she was about to object so he threw up a hand to stop her before the words could exit her mouth. "No arguments."

6:24pm

Less than fifteen minutes later – and several broken traffic laws by the Sheriff – Emma found herself back in the same position she'd been facing exactly one day earlier. She stood at Killian's side, eyes fixed on his face as he lay there silently. Just a few hours ago, she'd left him here sleeping, but now… Not even the sweet sound of her voice could wake him. Just behind her, she could hear Whale's voice attempting to explain what had happened, but she was only hearing a portion of his words as her gaze remained transfixed on her comatose husband. His skin had gone pale and ashen again and she didn't even need to imagine that there was no sparkle left behind his closed eyelids. Maybe she shouldn't have left… She should have stayed at his bedside earlier until he woke. Maybe she could have prevented the seizure…

By Whale's own admittance, they really didn't know what had transpired. The theory was that sometime in the past hour, Killian had suffered a massive seizure – either just before or potentially just after the hematoma had begun reforming inside his skull. His heart rate and blood pressure had shot up to dangerous levels in the midst of the seizure, but by the time the alarms sounded on the monitors, the nurse arrived to find him slumped against the bedside railing in full arrest. They'd been able to resuscitate him quickly, but he'd lapsed back into a coma. The latest CT scans showed renewed and substantial bleeding that had expanded into a larger area than yesterday and it was clearly something that Dr. Whale was extremely concerned about. He rambled on about blood clots and aneurysms and potential for a stroke, but it was all too much to take in. All she could do was stand there as a single tear rolled down her cheek, ending up at the corner of her mouth were she could taste the bitter saline, her unraveling emotions not knowing if she should be morose or angry right now.

Just a few hours ago, he'd been laughing and smiling. He'd been actively trying to help them solve the mystery behind that Greek coin and how it had ended up inside his watch, but now, they were right back to where they'd been yesterday with his head injuries. He was just lying there so still as Emma stood above him, clinging to his hand as though she could squeeze the life back into him while Whale spelled out their options. And there weren't many. As far as Whale was concerned, surgery was Killian's best option, but it wasn't without risk. This hematoma was quite a bit larger than the one they'd drained yesterday and had formed in a different part of his cranium. It would require cutting through his skull very close to a vital lobe of his cerebrum to reach the expanding pool of blood that was extruding so much pressure on his brain.

The surgical option wasn't without hazards, but their second option so far remained entirely unspoken and while equally dangerous, it was the only possibility that was on Emma's mind. Whale implored her to agree to the surgery knowing they were running short on time. It had been successful before, he'd reminded her, despite the current setback, but she wasn't even considering it.

"No," she finally spoke up, interrupting the doctor's surgical sales pitch. "No, I can't put him through all of that pain again." She squeezed his hand again tightly, knowing that her decision was going to have repercussions for more than just Killian's survival – the painful reminder of that tucked away in the pocket of her jeans. Placing his hand down atop his chest, she let go long enough to locate the folded ultrasound image and retrieve it from her pocket. Tears continued to well in her eyes as she unfurled the three inch by five inch print, sliding her thumb across the shiny surface of the paper, pausing atop the slightly blurry image of the tiny person growing inside her.

No one dared say a word as she placed the ultrasound printout on top of Killian's chest – directly over his heart, then she lifted his hand and tenderly positioned it over the image of their baby. Her mind was already made up. She knew using magic could come with a price, but she'd already seen him suffer enough.

"Emma, are you sure about this?" she heard her father ask.

"There's no other choice as far as I'm concerned," she replied in a whisper. "Surgery is as much of a gamble as me attempting to heal him. One wrong move either way and I'll lose him forever – we lose him forever," she corrected herself, then turned around to face Whale. "We tried it your way once, and while I do appreciate everything you did," she stated as she justified her decision, "now, we try it my way…" She was determined that this would work and she knew in her heart that her husband would agree that it was worth the effort. There were just no guarantees either way.

She held her open palm just above his face with her palm toward him, trembling slightly as she closed her eyes while the bright pale golden glow emanated from her fingertips. Squeezing her eyelids even tighter, she concentrated on her task, slowly waving her hand over her husband's head, moving from left to right as Dr. Whale and her father looked on. The process was quick but she didn't have many visual clues to let her know if she'd been successful. She had no way to know if the fractures were healed or if the bleeding had ceased unless Killian woke instantly to tell her – but he didn't.

He remained unconscious as she gingerly lifted the edge of the gauze bandages covering the site of the surgical incision over his ear – the only actual visual reference she had - relieved to find the wound completely healed (although she'd have to fix the little bare patch of scalp where his hair hadn't grown back). If the incision was healed, she had faith that she'd healed the rest of his wounds but his system needed a little more time to recuperate.

"Do you think it worked?" David asked, placing a comforting hand onto his daughter's shoulder as she let out a deep exhale and settled down into the armchair at Killian's side once again.

"I think so," she replied, still trying to exorcise that little ghost of doubt as to whether or not she'd done the right thing while they awaited a response from Killian.

"We should probably give him a few minutes to come around. He's suffered a great deal of trauma," Dr. Whale stated as he scribbled notes onto the chart while glancing over at all of the monitors and recording various readings. "We'll certainly need to run some additional tests to ensure that all of the damage is healed since the majority of his injuries aren't visible externally." The doctor completed his tasks and exited the room to relay the latest developments to the nursing team, leaving Emma and David there without another word.

Finding it slightly – and rather awkwardly – uncomfortable standing over his grown daughter as she waited for her husband to open his eyes, David had to think of something that would allow him to step away without offending her. Food was the first thing that crossed his mind as he remembered what had worked best when Snow was pregnant.

"Do you want me to go get the bag of snacks your mother sent for you?" he asked, perhaps a bit too eagerly. "You know she wasn't going to let me out of the loft without it. I left everything down in the truck."

"Thanks," she replied with a miniscule but genuine smile. "I'm not really hungry right now, but then this kid has been ravenous today. Guess I'd better eat something before I get the urge to devour everything on Granny's menu."

"I'll be right back," David laughed. "I remember those days with your mother. Never been more frightened in my life…"

"Dad!" she exclaimed with a chuckle. "I'm going to tell her that!"

"Go ahead. She knows it anyway," he grinned as he strolled out of the room and made his into the corridor. "Be right back." Seconds later, he disappeared behind the closing elevator doors and it wasn't even a full minute after he'd exited when Emma spied a sly smile stretching across her husband's lips as he slowly rotated his head toward her.

"Thought they'd never leave," he smirked as he opened his eyes to meet his wife's gaze which reflected a mixture of emotions from relieved to slightly perturbed.

"How long have you been awake?" she demanded with a forced frown on her face, but his sparkling lapis eyes were already making it difficult to maintain her fierce front.

"Long enough to hear your father heading out to make sure you had something to eat," he laughed, seeing the cracks in her stern visage, but after that moment of brevity, he allowed his tone to shift to a more serious one. "What made you finally decide to usurp Whale's concerns?"

"You didn't exactly leave me with much of a choice. It was either put you through another painful, possibly dangerous surgery or take a gamble on using magic to heal you myself. Seeing you awake right now means that at least part of my efforts paid off, but be prepared – Whale still plans to subject you to a slew of tests and scans."

"I'll forgive the inconvenience if it means the splitting headaches will soon subside," he stated as he pushed his elbows into the mattress in an attempt to force himself into a more upright position. While the movement wasn't as painful as it had been earlier, he still found himself failing as he was forced back by a bout of vertigo.

"Easy…," she scolded him, gently pressing his shoulders back against the pillow. "I may have healed some of your physical injuries, but we don't know for sure if you're 100% yet."

"Clearly not," he frowned, frustrated with himself for attempting such a rash action. "It would appear that my recovery isn't quite progressing as you'd expected…"

"Your recovery is progressing just fine," she assured him. "Thankfully I know you and that stubborn, hard head of yours."

"Indeed," he smirked, his left eyebrow lifting up as he noticed a slip of paper that had fluttered off of his chest when he'd made the attempt to sit up, falling onto the mattress beside him. "What's this?" he wondered as he retrieved it, looking quizzically at it until he suddenly realized that he'd seen something similar once before – an image that Robin Hood had once shown him on that tiny electronic screen. The blurry image of the infant inside Zelena's womb. He couldn't stop the tears that welled in his eyes as he raised his chin to look up at his wife. "Is this an image of our child?"

Emma smiled softly, trying desperately to rein in her overwhelming joy in an effort to prevent smothering him with an abundance of overdue kisses. "First photo of Baby Jones."

"I'll wager a bet that she'll be every bit as beautiful and brilliant as her mother," he stated, an expression of complete and utter elation plastered on his face as he clutched the ultrasound image.

Emma leaned in to kiss him before they were inevitably interrupted and then as she gradually pulled her lips away from his, she asked: "What makes you so sure it's a girl?"

"Call it a hunch," he grinned, but she wasn't buying it. "Alright, suffice it to say that part of me hopes it is a girl because if she's half as strong and fearless as her mother, I know she'll have a bright future." Even after all their time together, Emma still found her cheeks flushing a bit at his compliment. After everything they'd been through, he could still make her blush like a timid little school girl. How did he have that effect on her?

"Well, if it's a boy, if he's half as clever and selfless as his father, he'll have an equally bright future."

"Aye, Love," he replied, finding his own cheeks and ears reddening a bit as she returned the compliment. Oh, how he loved this woman! "Just glad the bloody crocodile didn't succeed in taking me away from our child."

"Gold was here?" Now she was even angrier with herself for not staying at his side earlier.

"Aye, he paid me a visit. He knew about the watch and the coin inside and had already speculated that it had something to do with a very specific memory of mine that Hades tampered with. He coerced my first mate into stealing the watch for him, but when that didn't go as planned, he made things a little more personal."

"So that would mean my theory was right," Emma told him, noting his confusion at her statement. "The way you reacted to the coin after touching it…It released the memories, right?"

"It would appear that way," he responded, now realizing what she'd been implying. "The Dark One was hoping to intercept the coin before I discovered it and had the fortune to touch it, but when that failed, he used his dark powers to force the bleeding to recur after immobilizing the hospital staff under a spell so they couldn't respond to any of the warnings from these machines."

"Gold was worried about you touching that coin…Why?" She already had a very good idea of what his answer was going to be, but she needed Killian to confirm what she'd theorized.

"He was determined to prevent me from discovering that I'd died still possessing light magic – which I likely would have learned quickly in the Underworld had Hades not interfered. I have no idea the extent of the powers or even how to utilize them, but they're apparently enough that Hades intended to make me forget them permanently and when his initial efforts of physical force failed, he utilized that coin as a conduit. I'm assuming that he confided this in the crocodile at some point because he of all people wouldn't have wanted me to learn that secret either…" He paused a moment before continuing, recognizing exactly how fortunate he'd been. "I have to admit that I was fearful you wouldn't reach me in time…"

"Well, unfortunately, there isn't a way to prove that Gold magically tampered with a blood vessel in your brain, but you must have found some way to access whatever powers you have to have sent me that text message."

"Text message?" he looked completely puzzled.

"The SOS you sent to let me know you were in trouble?" She pulled out her phone and displayed the message on the screen for him to see. "This – it would have taken magic to send it considering that your phone is still in the evidence locker at the Sheriff station."

Seeing the repeated distress message on her phone didn't make him any less befuddled. "Emma, I've no idea how I would have sent that. The thought of sending you a message through that device never once crossed my mind – especially not having access to it."

"Well, someone sent it, but that's not important right now. What matters is that I got it and you're safe. What we need to do right now is to figure out how to get Mr. Smee to crack and roll on Gold…"

Killian already knew the answer to that.

"Bring him to me," was all he needed to say.

7:21pm

Enlisting the aid of everyone in town she could reach at this hour, Emma put out an alert that she was searching for Mr. Smee figuring it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to track him down. And she was correct - it took less than twenty minutes for several people to report back that they'd seen Smee cowered away at the end of the bar downing a drink at the Rabbit Hole. Shortly after, David had him handcuffed and in custody, but instead of dragging their nervous suspect to the holding cell at the station, he surprised his prisoner by pulling the Sheriff cruiser up to the front entrance of the hospital.

"Um…May I ask what we're doing here?" Smee wondered as David parked the car. "And you haven't even informed me what I've been arrested for?"

"For now, public intoxication, but I guess you hadn't heard – Hook's awake and he asked to see you," David replied as he exited the car, then pulled open the rear door to let Smee out.

"The Cap'n's awake?" Smee stammered. "That's good news…" David found himself having to stifle a smirk when he saw the look of guilt and perhaps a bit of sheer terror cross Smee's face.

"It is good news. We were worried for a while that he might not pull through this, but now that he's awake, I'm sure he'll be happy to help shed some light on the other reason you were arrested…," David stated as he unlocked and removed the handcuffs from the pirate's wrists before entering the hospital. There was no use making a scene here and Smee certainly wasn't going to run – at least not far. He was too frightened right now to even budge from his spot next to the car. "Come on. I'm sure your captain doesn't like to be kept waiting…" He gave Smee's arm a tug toward the entrance doors.

Smee was silent and sweating profusely as the elevator doors opened and he immediately spotted Emma standing outside of one of the rooms, casting accusatory glances his way which were only making him increasingly anxious. He was fairly certain the captain hadn't seen him – at least not enough to be able to identify him as his attacker, but they knew. He thought he had covered his tracks well, that he'd answered their questions successfully and yet, they still knew…

The first sight of his captain – his friend – stopped him cold as he hadn't really envisioned he would have to come face to face with such a vivid image of exactly what he'd done. He hadn't even thought about what the aftermath might be when he'd stealthily picked up that ax handle from one of the many trash heaps in the alley and swung it at Hook's head. He'd simply been a man on a mission – just wanting to temporarily incapacitate his friend so he could get the watch. He'd only intended to knock him out, but in the heat of the moment, adrenaline and fear had taken control and he'd done far worse. He was now seeing the direct result of his actions, which unbeknownst to him had been magically altered to provide the full effect that Emma had been forced to witness. She'd made sure that Killian's appearance reflected all of the cuts and bruises so he'd look exactly like he had the previous night before she'd begun healing his injuries. They'd gone for the full shock value, and they got it.

"Something wrong, Mr. Smee?" Emma asked as she watched him twitch and tremble in the corridor.

"I…uh…I didn't think the Cap'n would look so…so beat up," Smee fumbled to come up with the words.

"You shouldn't be so surprised," she stated. "Isn't this what you expected when you started hitting him with that ax handle?" Smee looked up at her with the petrified, remorseful gaze of a child who'd been caught in too many lies. "We already know it was you. There was blood on Killian's hook which got there when he scratched your arm with it. Of course, he got the worst of it, didn't he?"

"Emma, I'm…" Smee didn't know what to say as she wrapped her fingers tightly around his upper arm and all but dragged him into the hospital room to face the man he'd betrayed.

"Come on in. I think you should get a closer look at your handiwork – a nice, up-close view of the injuries that you inflicted on your captain. And yes – he knows it was you…" She tugged the reluctant first mate all the way inside the room, not releasing her grip until he was mere inches from Killian's bedside. "You want a moment alone with him?" she asked, her question clearly directed to her husband who had been laying there in silence with his eyes closed – until now.

"Aye," Killian replied as he opened his eyes to stare at his petulant first mate, his gaze cold and steeped with vitriol.

"I'll be right outside if you need me," she reminded him, not that she was overly concerned for Killian's well-being. Smee had no way of knowing that she'd already healed most of the injuries, but still – seeing that he was the one who had inflicted them, she wasn't going to wander too far, falling back into the corridor with her father. Killian nodded in acknowledgement as he shifted his position and pressed a button to raise the head of the bed more so that he was more level with Smee. He wanted to be able to look his first mate in the eye when he called him out on his traitorous act.

"Mr. Smee," he began, feigning that his voice was still weakened from injury. "It's come to my attention that you and I need to have a bit of a conversation regarding the events that transpired yesterday morn – certain events that put me here…"

"I'm sorry, Captain," Smee said timidly, his eyes fixed on the grey floor tiles. He couldn't dare make eye contact with the captain right now. He honestly didn't want to look at him at all as he became overwhelmed with the guilt that haunted him.

"What was that?" Killian asked, having heard what had been said clearly, but wanting to get the full confession. "You'll have to forgive me. I've had a constant ringing inside my head since I was waylaid in that alleyway yesterday. You'll have to speak a tad louder." He certainly knew that Smee was intentionally avoiding looking at him, unable to bear the realization of what he'd done. "And generally, my crew knows to look me in the eye when I'm addressing them."

"I'm truly sorry, Captain," Smee repeated, a tiny bit louder this time and completely crestfallen. "This didn't go at all the way I'd planned…"

"What pray tell didn't go as planned? You taking a stick to beat me to a bloody pulp or your failure to obtain the pocket watch for the crocodile?" At the mention of the Dark One, Smee's eyes immediately shot up to meet the angered stare of his longtime friend. He had no way of concealing his regret for his actions, but it was far too late for a weak apology.

"I was only supposed to get the watch," the confession came in babbles. "That's all…I never intended to harm…, but…"

"But what?" Killian demanded. "What do you intend to use as your excuse for your recreant behavior? You've been my first mate for centuries and I counted you a friend as well!" Smee shrank away from him as the weight of his actions became heavier by the moment. He had betrayed his captain – his friend. He was a traitor and he deserved every bitter, stabbing word that Killian spat in his face. "What the devil was the crocodile holding over you?"

"He came to me and asked me to get the watch," Smee responded meekly. "He said he knew that I'd pilfered a few gold coins from your personal stash and threatened to turn me back into a rat if I didn't do as he'd said…"

"You nearly killed me over a threat of being turned into a rodent?" Killian exclaimed, springing forward and grasping the front of Smee's grungy greying sweatshirt, pulling the now very frightened man toward him until they were nearly nose to nose. Smee's skin broke into an instant smattering of perspiration as he faced the intensity of the Captain's anger. "Perhaps I should have Emma change you into a little sniveling rat right now…"

"I'm sorry! I don't know what else I can say to you right now to make up for what I did, Cap'n…"

"Why didn't you just come to me? Why didn't you inform me that the bloody crocodile was up to his usual nefarious deeds yet again? Did you plan to just keep beating me until I gave up the watch?"

"No…I…" Smee stuttered, unsure of what to say.

"Then what?" Killian demanded once again, his voice growing louder and more impatient. "You intended to keep striking me until you split my skull open?"

"You wouldn't stay down!" his first mate snapped. Somewhat stunned by the outburst – and the honesty - Killian released his grip on Smee's shirt and backed away. "I only meant to knock you out so I could get the watch, but you – you're so stubborn! You just wouldn't stay down! I kept swinging and swinging until you finally stopped moving…I didn't mean to…I really didn't intend to…"

The surprising admission left the captain at a rare loss for words – his ire somewhat abated by the revelation – one that Emma had heard as well as she'd stepped into the doorway to block any attempt by Smee to flee.

"No – let him go," Killian stated, shrinking back against the pillow. "Get him out of my sight." Diverting his gaze from the first mate whose betrayal stung like a fresh wound, he stared at the wall until Mr. Smee was allowed to back out of the room – not that he was going to get far. David promptly took him back into custody while Emma lingered at her husband's side, taking a seat on the edge of the bed in an attempt to help calm him as the confrontation had sent his blood pressure soaring.

"Are you okay?" she asked, already knowing the answer simply based on how tightly he'd clenched his jaw.

"Fine," he stated, but she wasn't about to believe that. "My first mate just confessed that he'd repeatedly struck me and nearly killed me because of my tenacity? I didn't lose consciousness fast enough for him?"

"Killian – you're not to blame here. He attacked you – not the other way around. He was acting out of fear and malice when he hit you. He was simply after the treasure – the watch. If he'd really cared about what happened to you he wouldn't have been so easily coerced into it in the first place. He betrayed you and nearly killed you all to do Gold's dirty work…"

"Ah, yes – back to the crocodile…"

"He's ultimately the one responsible, but there's no direct proof. Even with Smee's confession, it's still his word against Gold's and Smee isn't exactly the most reputable person in Storybrooke. Well, neither of them are, but you know Gold will just deny it."

"So the Dark One gets away with yet another crime?"

"Not a chance – but we'll have to tread carefully." She contemplated what to say next that wouldn't sound as though she were attempting to placate him, but an unexpected flinch of his hand against her thigh pushed those thoughts to the back of her mind. "What's wrong?"

"This entire situation has my head aching with frustration," he sighed as he raised his hand to his forehead to massage his pounding temple.

"I know," she empathized, echoing his deep sigh as her eyes drifted up to his face, but instead of offering the encouraging smile that she'd intended, she suddenly grew concerned as she realized he had a faint nosebleed. "Are you sure you're okay? Your nose is bleeding…"

"Is it?" He touched the narrow patch of skin between his nostrils and the whiskers adorning his upper lip then drew his fingers back to see the crimson blood that now stained them. "I don't know. Probably just the strain of dealing with Mr. Smee."

"I don't think so. Look at me…" He rotated his head slightly so that his eyes met hers and she knew right away that something was wrong. His pupils were wide, despite the bright overhead lights and his glassy stare gave her chills. "Hang on. I'm getting Dr. Whale. Something isn't right."

He didn't remember blacking out. Wasn't even sure if he was awake now. Maybe all he was remembering was simply a drug-induced hallucination. Maybe Emma hadn't really healed him because the throbbing inside his skull was again as intense as it had been earlier. In fact, if he wasn't in such severe pain, he'd swear this was all still a dream.

"Welcome back, Captain," he heard Dr. Whale say as he opened his eyes.

"Back?" Killian wondered, his recollection still foggy. "What happened?" He grimaced as the beam from a small penlight was shone directly into his pupils.

"While Emma may have healed the fractures and stopped the bleeding, you were still left with a severe concussion. Stress and fatigue caused you to lose consciousness for about an hour." Whale then switched off the tiny but ridiculously bright flashlight and turned his attentions toward Emma. "Everything seems to check out and from what we saw on the CT and X-rays, I'm going to keep him here at least one more night just to be certain, but I'm not seeing any sign that this was more than just too much strain."

"Thank you," Emma replied as she stepped closer to the bed. "I'll make sure he doesn't overdo it again."

"So nice to see the two of you carrying on a conversation as though I weren't present," Killian admonished them. "Was I not to be privy of the details?"

"Sorry," she apologized as Whale stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him.

It wasn't until that moment that Killian realized his surroundings had changed. Aside from having a door, this room was larger and just beyond the curtain he could see that there was a second bed closer to the window. He also noticed it was much quieter as many of the machines that had been at his side or behind his head earlier were no longer present. Noting his confusion, she smiled and quickly explained: "Yes – it's a different room. You didn't need to be monitored in ICU any longer, so Whale had you moved upstairs to a regular room – one where I can spend the night here with you without having to sleep in an uncomfortable, awkward armchair."

"I did appreciate your discomfort though," he grinned. "You didn't have to spend the night at my side while I was unconscious, but I'm thankful that you did."

"Well, you've got at least one more night here. As you've already heard, I didn't completely heal the bruising that caused the concussion and there's still some swelling which was partially what caused you to black out."

"I assumed as much when the extreme headache returned," he sighed. "I supposed I shouldn't have pushed so hard to get Mr. Smee to confess his misdeeds."

"Probably not, but part of that was my fault. I shouldn't have allowed you to do so much until we knew for certain that all of your injuries were healed, but we're not going to discuss that tonight. No talk of any of this. We are going to spend tonight ignoring everything else and planning for our family. Might as well use this time to start thinking of baby names and pick out a nursery design…"

"Sounds wonderful," he smiled. He was more than ready to focus on his impending fatherhood. He still couldn't help but think that the crocodile was going to get off easy, but for now, that could wait.