#yes they are going to have sex later after they totally kill sidney and their plan does not fail (real)

[stxr-crossxd-arts]

POV your boyfriend just stabbed you and is probably about to rawdog his best friend

[unfolded73]

This Graceful Path (5/19)

Summary: Emma has just moved in with Mary Margaret and started working as a deputy in the Storybrooke sheriff’s department when she meets Killian Jones, the town’s introverted harbormaster. When a prominent Storybrooke resident is found murdered, Emma tries to juggle solving the case with new friendships, parenthood, and romance. A Season 1 Cursed!Killian AU.

Rating: Explicit per CSBB guidelines (violence, sex); more of an M on unfolded73’s scale. The sex, when we get there, is not extremely graphic in nature. Same with the violence.

Content Warning: This fic contains two major character deaths, one canon and one not. (You’re already past them.)

Total word count: ~ 75,000

Acknowledgements: Thank you to @j-philly-b for betaing this monstrosity. Thank you to @caprelloidea for all of the read-throughs and cheerleading; not sure I could have written it without your excitement early on. Thank you to @teruel-a-witch for the original prompt on tumblr which sparked this fic. Thank you to @pompeiiablaze for the wonderful art which accompanies Chapter 3 and also will accompany later chapters. Thanks to the CSBB mods (@sambethe in particular, who had to look at my check-ins) for your support and for enduring my neuroses.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 – AO3 Link

Chapter 5

Regina Mills thought of makeup like armor.

She stood in front of her bathroom mirror, carefully drawing a black line across the edge of her eyelid, unflinching as the tip of the eyeliner pen traced from left to right. She repeated the process on the other eye.

Tonight was about power. The balance of power had undergone a seismic shift in Storybrooke the moment that Gold breathed his last, and Regina had spent too long hanging back and waiting for the new Dark One to show himself, to make a mistake. Waiting for someone else to take care of the problem for her, thinking that somehow the mundane law enforcement process of the Land Without Magic would deal with things without her having to lift a finger. Now was the time to stop waiting. Now was the time to go out and take the power while things were still in flux. Make it clear that she was the one who controlled this town now, curse or not.

She finished, as always, with lipstick: the most perfect red, the color of the apples that adorned the tree in her backyard. Pressing her lips together, she gave herself one more critical look in the mirror before she put her lipstick away and stepped out of the bathroom, armor in place. Running her hands down the form-fitting black dress she wore, Regina walked down the hallway and cracked open the door to Henry’s room, letting a thin shaft of light fall across his sleeping face. His chest rose and fell as he dozed on, unaware of what Regina was about to let into their house. Slowly and carefully, she pulled the door closed.

She detoured by the wine rack, selecting a Cabernet before moving on into the kitchen. Pulling down two wine glasses from the cabinet, she set them down on the marble surface just as she heard a tapping on the front door. Smiling her best smile, Regina walked into the foyer and opened the door to greet her late evening visitor. “Killian, how are you?” She stepped back and beckoned him into the house.

“Confused as to why you summoned me here, Madam Mayor.”

“Please, it’s Regina.” She watched as he looked around the foyer of her mansion, taking in the high ceiling and the grand staircase. “And I summoned you here because I thought it was past time to get to know the man that my son speaks of so highly.” She walked back toward the kitchen, expecting that he would follow. He did. “Would you like some wine? I was just opening some.”

He shrugged. “Don’t go to any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble. I like to have a glass in the evening, but I have no one to share it with most of the time.” She pulled a corkscrew from one of the drawers and smoothly twisted it into the wine bottle.

“Henry’s spoken of me, has he?”

Regina plastered on a sweet smile as she poured wine into the glasses. “He seems to admire you a great deal; your love of books, for example. I can’t thank you enough for lending him things to read. He’s a very solitary boy, as you’ve probably noticed.” She handed him a glass.

“Aye. Although he seems much happier since his birth mother came to town.”

Regina held her smile, feeling the wide bowl of the wine glass give slightly under her clenching fingers.

“It’s very big of you, allowing him to spend time with her,” Killian went on. Before she could respond, her cell phone started to ring.

She looked at the screen and rolled her eyes before accepting the call. “I’m sorry, Killian, I have to take this. Yes, Sidney.”

“Mayor Mills,” Sidney said, a slight tremor in his voice. “I got your message.”

She set her wine down. “Yes?”

“You want me to run for sheriff?”

“That’s what I said. I don’t make a habit of joking, do I?”

“No, of course not, but… I’m a newspaper man. I don’t know the first thing about being a sheriff.” His shaky, obsequious tone made her fist clench as she envisioned engulfing him with a fireball.

“You investigate things, don’t you? Then you already know more about it than Emma Swan does.” She drummed her fingernails on the countertop with impatience. “She’s a criminal, and inexperienced—”

“She worked as a bail bondsperson, that’s—”

“Don’t interrupt me, Sidney. You’re running for sheriff. Understood?”

There was a pause. “Yes, ma’am.”

“I have to go. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.” She ended the call and tossed her phone down. Regina took a sip of her wine, watching as Killian did the same. “I heard that Miss Swan questioned you about Gold’s murder; what a terrible business.”

“Aye, she had heard somewhere that I hated him. Can’t imagine what would have given her that idea.”

“Let’s be honest, Killian. We’re all friends here.” She took a step closer to him, her voice dropping. “A lot of people hated Gold, and a lot of people are better off now that he’s not in the world. Do you take my meaning?”

He set his glass down. “I don’t, actually.”

She smiled, her hand moving to touch his arm. “I mean, sometimes things like this happen for the greater good. Some things transcend the laws of this… pitiful world. It may be that, according to some higher law, the person who killed Mr. Gold deserves a medal, not a prison term.”

Regina watched his eyes carefully, but she could see no dawning understanding there, only confusion. “Well, when you find the person who did this, you can try to give him a medal, but I’m thinking Emma’s going to be more interested in serving up that prison term.” He took a step backward, putting some space between them. “So it’s a good thing I’m innocent. I’m not interested in either.”

Resisting the urge to pick up her wine and smash it down on the floor, Regina crossed her arms. “You are innocent, aren’t you? Or perhaps… unaware.” She stalked closer again, backing him into the countertop behind him. “Unaware of the dark power lurking inside you, hmm?”

The flash of fear in his eyes made her heart sing. “Why are you saying these things to me?”

“When you killed him, when you finally got your revenge on the Dark One after all those wasted years, what did you do with the dagger? Where did you hide it… Hook?”

He shook his head in denial, his hand starting to shake. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t kill anyone. Not good form… It’s not good form.”

“Somewhere in that curse-addled brain of yours is the information I need. But how. To get. It out,” she said, punctuating every other word with a thump of her knuckle on Killian’s forehead.

He ducked away from her, his face going suddenly very pale, and Regina wondered with annoyance what she would do with him if he passed out on the floor of her kitchen. Perhaps if he went completely mad, she could lock him up in the mental ward of the hospital, she mused. That would at least get him out of her hair while she conducted her own search for the Dark One’s dagger. But it would also guarantee that if the curse did break, if Emma Swan really was who Regina feared she was, Regina would have made herself a powerful enemy. Better to bide her time, and keep this sniveling, pitiful, nascent Dark One on her side.

She plastered on her fake smile again. “I apologize, Killian; I’m under a lot of pressure lately, and it’s starting to get to me a little bit. You can understand that, can’t you?” She picked up his glass and held it out to him. “Here, have some more wine.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Mayor Mills, I’d just as soon take my leave of you. I’m feeling quite ill all of a sudden.”

“Oh, of course, Killian. You’re free to go.” For now.

~*~

He tossed in his sweat-soaked sheets, trying in vain once again to find his way into sleep. It was like trying to dive off the end of a pier: putting his hands over his head, leaning over and launching his body into the water, only to find himself sprawled out on the hard wooden boards a moment later, sore and broken from the attempt.

And then when Killian did manage to plunge into the water, it was filled with monsters.

His dreams were unrelenting, technicolor horrors that left him sweating and gasping when he could finally pull himself above the surface. He saw his left hand lying on the deck of a ship like some dying sea creature as blood spurted from his wrist in a red parabola. He held a woman who looked like Milah in his arms and watched as the light of life died from her eyes, felt the numb certainty that her death was the end of everything good in his life. He saw himself, drunk and ruthless and cruel, forcing a terrified man to walk off the end of a plank into the murky depths of the ocean. Saw himself sink a knife into his own father’s gut.

He stabbed and stabbed, glorious great flesh-rending gashes as the life of the Crocodile drained out of him. The dagger sat heavy in his hand, the intricate hilt marking patterns into his palm.

Some of the dreams made a sort of sense. He had lost his hand in a sailing accident, that’s what he was seeing. But why did he dream over and over of Milah in such unusual garments? Why were his dreams so vivid with men cowering before his command when no such thing had ever occurred?

Blood ran down the dagger, blood coated his hand and soaked the sleeve of his shirt. He held the dagger up in the dim light, saw it waver as the writing on it disappeared. Saw it replaced by something else.

“You’re cracking up… mate.”

Killian sat up, jerking away from the hallucination that had materialized in his bedroom. He wrapped his arms around his legs, pressed his closed eyes against his knees until he saw white spots bloom behind his eyelids. “You’re not real. Not real, not real, not real,” he repeated out loud.

“I’m in your head,” the creature said. “Not the same thing as not being real.”

He looked up and saw the beast that had visited him before: the scaly, iridescent skin, the yellowed teeth, the clawlike fingernails waving at him impishly.

“Hello,” it said.

“Begone, demon.”

“Not so fast. I need to tell you some things first.”

Killian dragged himself out of bed, giving the apparition a wide berth as he left the bedroom. The chill of the apartment combined with his sweat-damp t-shirt set him shivering. He stumbled over to the kitchen, pulling a tumbler down from the cabinet with a trembling hand. More rum ended up on the counter than in the glass, but after he drained his first pour dry, Killian was able to put more rum in the glass with a steadier hand.

“You may have no recollection of what you did, but the queen has your number. She knows, but she’s going to bide her time. We’ll have to deal with her eventually, but best to wait on that. You’re not strong enough to face her. Not now. Not like this,” the beast said with distaste.

“Not real,” Killian whispered, taking another drink.

“But there are other problems,” the beast continued conversationally as if it wasn’t speaking to a man who had lost his last connection to reality. “If the queen controls the sheriff, then she controls your fate. We need to put a stop to that.” The creature uttered a horrifying giggle. “Sidney Glass was born to be a pawn; we just need to take control of the pawn for ourselves. I think even you can manage that.”

Killian felt rather than saw the apparition disappear.

~*~

Emma’s eyes raked over the chalkboard menu at Storybrooke Coffee Company. She desperately needed coffee before work, and she was getting a little tired of the standard diner coffee that Granny’s had to offer. She didn’t have much discretionary income, but today a three dollar mocha felt necessary to surviving the day.

She was stirring sugar into her cup when David Nolan walked in. They eyes met, and she smiled awkwardly.

What do you say to the guy who broke your roommate’s heart? she wondered. It’s not like she and David really knew each other that well; they’d only spoken a couple of times. Aside from the fact that he’d been in a coma and was in an unhappy marriage, she knew very little about him. He wore a flannel shirt, jeans, and a pair of practical work boots, and he walked up to the counter with a charming grin for the barista.

While he waited for his skim latte to be made, he shuffled over next to her. “How are you, Emma?”

She shrugged. “I’m okay, I guess. Sleep deprived thanks to the hours I’ve been working. Did you have a good Thanksgiving?”

“It was fine,” he said, but she saw sadness in his eyes. “Did you spend yours with… Mary Margaret?”

“Yeah.” She realized she was still absently stirring her coffee, and she tossed the wooden stirrer in the garbage with an eye roll for herself. “I thought you usually got your coffee at Granny’s,” she said, remembering when he and Mary Margaret had both been arranging to be there at 7:15 in the morning just to catch sight of each other.

“I did,” he said, glancing around. “But I… was afraid people were starting to talk.”

Emma decided to change the subject. “You work at the animal shelter, right?”

“That’s right.” He smiled agreeably. “It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t pay much, but I find it rewarding.”

“Graham used to volunteer there,” she said, and she was a little bit horrified to realize there were tears welling behind her eyes. Oh right, the other symptom of her lack of sleep — sudden and unexpected sadness.

“He did,” David agreed. “He had a way with the dogs. I’m sorry about what happened.” His eyes pierced into hers, and inexplicably, Emma felt a little bit better. “He was a good man.”

“He was.” The barista called his name, and David turned and walked over to get his coffee. She watched him; a strong guy, built like a farmer, like he’d be able to hold his own in a fight.

“Hey, David,” she called as she tried to press the lid back on her coffee cup without losing control of it and spilling it all over herself. He faced her, his expression expectant and pleasant. “Have you ever thought about doing anything different? I mean, besides working at the animal shelter?”

“Sure, I’ve thought about it; they can’t afford to pay me full-time. Like what?”

“Like being a sheriff’s deputy?” She wrung her hands together, suddenly nervous. “With Graham gone, I need help. I mean, I could probably only bring you on part-time at first, but once I officially take over as sheriff, I might be able to make it full-time. If you’re interested.” She felt a twinge of worry that she was betraying Mary Margaret by asking David to work for her, but he was the only person in Storybrooke she had met who seemed like he would be remotely useful in the job. Mary Margaret would have to deal.

He grinned. “Well, sure I’m interested, but why me?”

“I don’t know, you seem like you’d be suited for it. And there’s a lot to do and I’m all by myself there; I mean Graham had only hired me a month ago and suddenly I’m in charge.” She clenched her fist, letting the feeling of her fingernails digging into her palm distract from the stress and sadness she was feeling. She forced herself to laugh. “So what do you say? Can I hire you?”

~*~

“I have to admit, I imagined a little more action with this job and a little less reading,” David said, rubbing his eyes with a thumb and forefinger.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Emma said, stretching her back out and trying to find a position where it wouldn’t ache. “This is the only thing I can think to do at this point.” They were carefully going through all of Gold’s real estate holdings, matching them up against records of rental payments from the townspeople of Storybrooke to see if anyone owed Gold money. It was slow and terrifically painstaking work. Hours of reviewing documents had led to a very short list of names, and even those people had only been delayed in a few payments. No one owed Gold money for any length of time, which in and of itself was interesting; with so many tenants, it seemed likely that some fraction of them would have been delinquent in their payments. She wondered what Gold did to get the money he was owed so consistently.

Emma pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to stave off a headache, and flipped to the next deed. It was for a plot of land with a cabin on the property, and the address caught her eye for being quite different from any of the others she had been looking at: 10250 Rt. 83. That couldn’t be anywhere near the rest of the homes in town.

“David, do you see any tenant records for 10250 on Route 83?”

He flipped through the manila folders, then flipped through them a second time. “Nope, none.”

Emma pulled the plat map book that she’d borrowed from the town records office over and studied the index, then turned to the appropriate page. “Huh.”

“What is it?”

Standing up, she carried the book over to the detailed map of Storybrooke that was up on the wall of the sheriff’s station. “Gold had a cabin not that far from where his body was found. A cabin that he didn’t seem to be renting to anyone.”

David stood up and joined her at the map. “Do you think there could be a clue there?”

“Yeah, I mean, he was out there with a shovel, and we still don’t know what he was trying to bury. Maybe there’s a clue at the cabin that will help us understand what happened that day?”

Pulling his coat on, David grinned at her. “Well, what are we waiting for, Sheriff? Let’s go.”

“I’m not the sheriff, not yet. Regina’s already threatened to get someone to run against me,” she said as they climbed into the police cruiser outside the station.

He scoffed. “From what I’ve seen so far, you’re an excellent sheriff, Emma.”

“You’ve been working for me for two days, David.” But still, she couldn’t help smiling as they drove to the outskirts of town.

With David’s help navigating, they found the route to the cabin without too much trouble, pulling onto a dirt track that Emma probably wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t been looking for it. At the end of it, they found a rustic cabin, as well as Gold’s black Cadillac.

“Well, that solves that mystery at least,” Emma said. “All this time and no one knew where his car was.”

“How far is this from where the body was found?” David asked.

“Not far,” she said, studying the trail map she’d brought. “It’s maybe a quarter of a mile through those trees,” she said, pointing.

The inside of the cabin was extremely basic. Mostly just a single room with dark paneled walls decorated with deer antlers. Wrinkling her nose, Emma looked around. She couldn’t see any evidence that Gold had left anything here.

“I’ll go check Gold’s car while you look around in here,” David offered, and she agreed.

They found was one small bedroom and a bathroom, but both seemed as barren and unlived in as the rest of the cabin. She clicked the light on in the bathroom and took a quick glance around, and was about to turn it back off when something caught her eye. On the tiled floor, next to the sink, was a single, perfect drop of what looked like dried blood. Bingo.

Emma ran for the front door. “David? Get the evidence kits.”

Her hands shook as she pulled the nitrile gloves on, her palms sweating and making it all the more difficult to get the damned things on correctly. Finally, she managed it, and dropped to her knees, photographing the droplet of blood from several angles before she carefully scraped it up into a small plastic tube that she could cap and label. David watched her from the doorway to the bathroom.

“Wow, you really know what you’re doing,” he commented.

She laughed uneasily. “Not really, but I fake it pretty well. Do you see any more blood anywhere?”

“No.” They both looked around before agreeing that there were no more droplets of blood. “So what if it is Gold’s blood? He owned this cabin; what will that prove?”

“Nothing, but maybe it’s not Gold’s blood. Maybe it’s the killer’s blood. Maybe they fought and Gold managed to injure the person who attacked him.” Emma stood up. “Okay, let me spray the luminol.”

David handed it to her out of the bag. “Go for it.”

Emma sprayed the sink and the floor around the sink with luminol before handing it back to David, who held up the black light and turned it on. “Okay, here goes nothing,” she said, flipping off the light switch.

They both stared at the sink for a while. “Holy shit,” Emma finally said.

“I’d say someone washed off a lot of blood here,” David commented. The basin of the sink glowed blue. As did several spots on the floor. Emma took pictures of all of it before they turned the lights back on.

“So whoever killed Gold came to the nearest place they could to clean up, and washed the blood off their hands here,” she said, pacing back into the main part of the cabin and pulling her gloves off.

“Looks like it.”

“Okay, let’s back up a minute. Gold drove out here because he wanted to dig something up or bury something, right? So how did the killer find him? Was it someone Gold trusted, did they come in his car together?”

“Maybe the killer followed Gold out here in another car?” David asked, running a hand through his hair.

“That could be.” She took a breath and let it out. “So I just have to check every car in Storybrooke for any additional blood traces.” Emma dropped onto the sofa and put her head in her hands.

They searched the rest of the cabin but didn’t turn up anything else. The initial rush that had come with discovering the cabin and Gold’s car and the blood drained away, leaving Emma feeling tired and hollowed out. For as much as they’d learned, she didn’t feel like she was any closer to finding the murderer.

Chapter 6

[chiseler]

SYLVIA SIDNEY: Jailhouse Blues

“She always looked like she was gonna cry!” my grandmother would exclaim whenever Sylvia Sidney came up. In her 1930s heyday, Sidney was constantly cast as the victim of circumstance, hovering at the very bottom of the economic ladder, mixed up in crime and usually winding up in or near jail. “I was paid by the tear,” Sidney joked later, and that knowing comment is a measure of just how different she was from her on-screen persona. “My mother and I adored her and her films,” said Tennessee Williams. “She was always so fragile and plaintive. She appeared to need protection. Let me tell you: Sylvia needs no protection. She may look frail, but look in that exquisite purse she carries with her: it contains the balls of thousands of men who annoyed her; the hearts of those who crossed her; and the locations of those who betrayed her.”

Sidney was born Sophia Kosow in 1910 in the Bronx to a Russian-Romanian Jewish family. She studied at the Theatre Guild School as a teenager and was acting on Broadway at age 17. Sidney was unhappy with her screen debut, Thru Different Eyes (1929), a film made at Fox where she played a murderess, and she returned to the stage. While acting in the play Bad Girl, she was spotted by Paramount head of production B.P. Schulberg, who promised that if she signed with his studio that she would play in an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Tempted by that, and by Schulberg himself, she signed with Paramount and was soon rushed into the lead role in Rouben Mammalian’s City Streets (1931), replacing Clara Bow, who had had a breakdown.

Sidney gets quite an entrance in the arty City Streets, winking at a criminal accomplice before being seen in a screen-filling close-up where she is closing one eye to fire a gun in a shooting gallery. Her heart-shaped face looks vulnerable, but when she talks in this movie, the toughness of the Bronx comes through: “You oughten to be wastin’ yer dough in these joints,” she tells Gary Cooper, as they wander through a carnival and start to fall for each other. On a beach with Cooper, Sidney treats us to one of her secret weapons, a sunburst of a smile that transforms her face, puffing out her cheeks and nearly shutting her eyes with pure joy. Such joy never lasts long for Sidney on screen, however. She gets sent to jail here and then suffers some more and tears up most fetchingly when she realizes Cooper has joined her father’s criminal underworld. Sidney rarely played smart women in her youth. The girls she pretended to be were always a little dim so that fate could sock it to them as hard as possible. “I didn’t mind playing unhappy characters,” she said later. “Every young actress thinks she’s a tragedian—the more tragic the roles, the more you cry, the more you suffer, the better an actress you are.”

In Josef Von Sternberg’s version of An American Tragedy (1931), Sidney makes a far more appealing victim than Shelley Winters did in the remake, A Place in the Sun (1951). Her Roberta is an innocent girl, looking wide-eyed with shock when social climber Clyde (Phillips Holmes) first kisses her, but she falls deeply in love with him, pleading soulfully, “Please don’t go,” when he wants to sleep with her. Lovely as she is, Sidney’s Roberta is also a bit of a clinging vine and seems fated to turn slovenly and bitter through lack of money and opportunity. Sidney is alarmingly good at being pitiful here, and she’s particularly pathetic when Von Sternberg actually shows her drowning after a boat tips over, calling out for help several times before finally going under. In King Vidor’s adaptation of Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene (1931), Sidney is a bit of a flirt at first, but she soon suffers to the utmost. These three movies were all carefully made and designed to show off Sidney’s best assets, and together they made her a star.

She was framed for murder and sent to the hoosegow again in Ladies of the Big House (1931). Off screen, Sidney became Schulberg’s mistress, and you’d think that might have won her special privileges, but she started to get a reputation for being difficult when she complained about being stuck in bad movies like The Miracle Man (1932) and Madame Butterfly (1932). “They considered me a bitch,” she said, and the studio loved putting her in punishing positions in films. She wound up in jail once more in Pick-Up (1933), and in the sleazy Good Dame (1934) she is accosted by the infamous Pre-Code sex fiend Jack La Rue, who offers her a part in a girlie show. “I’m not a cooch dancer!” she protests to Fredric March. “I gotta take a job cuz I’m broke!” Thirty Day Princess (1934) was one of her few changes of pace, a bit of froth that might have made a meal for Claudette Colbert or Carole Lombard, but Sidney can’t function in screwball comedy. Her eyes look habitually anxious in Thirty Day Princess, as if she fears she might be thrown in the slammer at any moment.

Her relationship with Schulberg ended in 1934 when he returned to his wife. Sidney signed with independent producer Walter Wanger, who had produced her last credit on her old Paramount contract, an archetypal Sidney film, Mary Burns, Fugitive (1935), where her bad lot boyfriend helps to railroad her into prison for a crime she didn’t commit. At this point on screen, Sidney was starting to seem like a regular paranoid, constantly looking worried and speaking tentatively in her high, strained voice (all traces of the Bronx had been wiped out of it by this point).

While in New York, Sidney entered into a very brief marriage with publisher Bennett Cerf, who advised, “One should never legalize a hot romance.” She looked beautiful in three-strip Technicolor as a mountain girl in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936) and then followed that film with two masterpieces in a row, Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936). As Spencer Tracy’s sweet fiancée in Fury, Sidney ably carried her usual load of suffering, believably fleshing out her love for Tracy in the first scenes and then looking memorably stunned in close up as she watches a lynch mob try to burn her man up in a jail.

As Mrs. Verloc in Sabotage, Sidney runs a cinema, and she makes it very clear that this woman, who is only known by her married name, has made a loveless marriage to Mr. Verloc (Oscar Homolka) solely so her charmingly mischievous little brother Stevie (Desmond Tester) can be taken care of. She’s nice but not very bright, and so she doesn’t discern that Mr. Verloc is a terrorist until after her brother has been blown up by one of his bombs. When she realizes what has happened, Sidney faints. After she’s revived, she says, “I want Mr. Verloc, I want to see Mr. Verloc,” in a trance-like voice. This is a truly tragic film that does not let either her or the audience off the hook, and Sidney goes the full distance with it. She has the sort of face that looks like it knows the worst before it happens, and so when the worst does happen, it just confirms the anxiety in her eyes.

Sidney’s Mrs. Verloc sinks down into sheer misery when Mr. Verloc talks to her about her brother’s death in a callous, sociopathic way. She stumbles out into her cinema and hears people laughing at a Disney cartoon. Grateful for any distraction, Mrs. Verloc sits down in the theater herself and laughs a little at the cartoon until a bird is shot and a bass voice sings out, “Who killed Cock Robin? Who killed Cock Robin?” The smile on Sidney’s face dies away instantly—she looks like she’s been stabbed in the back. It’s an unforgettable moment, as is the piercing little cry she lets out when she stabs Mr. Verloc with a carving knife, not vengefully but fearfully, as if she has no control over what she’s doing, and what she’s doing simply needs to be done. “Stevie, Stevie,” she cries, in her high, helpless voice, after executing Mr. Verloc. This is Sidney’s finest hour on the screen, her flair for suffering put at the center of one of Hitchcock’s most unsparing looks at evil and its consequences.

Sidney then entered wholeheartedly into the l’amour fou of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) as a faithful lover of a convict (Henry Fonda) on the run who becomes a criminal herself. In William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), she wears little make-up and is not afraid to appear totally downtrodden, alternating between toughness and tears. Her third outing with the tyrannical Lang was You and Me (1938), a strange movie where yet again she is an ex-convict involved in crime. In …One Third of a Nation (1939), where she plays opposite a very young Sidney Lumet, Sidney looks dead tired of this type of socially conscious leftist ‘30s film. Watching a bunch of Sidney’s 1930s movies in a row, I couldn’t count the number of times I said, “Poor thing, poor thing.”

Nearly ten years of cinematic suffering had taken their toll on Sidney, and she had made many enemies. “I used to fight,” Sidney said later. “Yes, it’s true. I even used to throw telephone books and anything else I could get to at the time. Everything that didn’t go smoothly annoyed me terribly. And I flew off the handle and got myself terribly disliked.” She married the actor Luther Adler and returned to the theater for a number of years, making a brief comeback with James Cagney in Blood on the Sun (1945), where she played a glamorous half-Chinese woman. She was still typecast for suffering as Fanzine in Les Miserables (1952), and this was the beginning of an awkward period where her looks had changed and slightly coarsened so that she couldn’t play leading lady roles anymore but was still too young for character parts.

Sidney survived on stage and on television before making a second and very successful film comeback with a brief but flashy role as Joanne Woodward’s acidic mother in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973), which won her her only Academy Award nomination. This was followed by a steady stream of parts, some thankless, some juicy, in a variety of films and TV projects. A long-time smoker, Sidney’s high voice had lowered to a gravelly baritone, which was particularly amusing in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), where she played a caseworker for the dead who smokes through a long slash in her throat.

Burton used her again for her final film, Mars Attacks! (1996), in which she played a spacey, ill-tempered Grandmother in a wheelchair who foils the alien monsters with her favorite Slim Whitman records. “They blew up Congress!” she cackles at one point, seemingly glad that “the system” which landed her in jail so many times on screen was being destroyed. Off screen, Sidney enjoyed being thoroughly not nice, not the victim anymore but the gleeful victimizer. “She was a bitch on wheels!” says film distributor Gene Stavis, who knew her a bit. “A naturally nasty lady. She could never let an opportunity pass without laying a zinger on someone. I guess she didn’t want to be thought of as a sentimental old lady, so she went wildly in the other direction.”

by Dan Callahan

[unfolded73]

This Graceful Path (6/19)

Summary: Emma has just moved in with Mary Margaret and started working as a deputy in the Storybrooke sheriff’s department when she meets Killian Jones, the town’s introverted harbormaster. When a prominent Storybrooke resident is found murdered, Emma tries to juggle solving the case with new friendships, parenthood, and romance. A Season 1 Cursed!Killian AU.

Rating: Explicit per CSBB guidelines (violence, sex); more of an M on unfolded73’s scale. The sex, when we get there, is not extremely graphic in nature. Same with the violence.

Content Warning: This fic contains two major character deaths, one canon and one not. (You’re already past them.)

Total word count: ~ 75,000

Acknowledgements: Thank you to @j-philly-b for betaing this monstrosity. Thank you to @caprelloidea for all of the read-throughs and cheerleading; not sure I could have written it without your excitement early on. Thank you to @teruel-a-witch for the original prompt on tumblr which sparked this fic. Thank you to @pompeiiablaze for the wonderful art which accompanies Chapter 3 and also will accompany later chapters. Thanks to the CSBB mods (@sambethe in particular, who had to look at my check-ins) for your support and for enduring my neuroses.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 – AO3 Link

Chapter 6

The dart left his hand, tracing a perfect arc through the air and landing with a satisfying thunk into the center of the bullseye.

Killian blinked, surprised at the accuracy of the throw. He repeated the motion twice more with the other two darts he held loosely against his stomach with his prosthetic hand. They also landed in the bullseye, one above and one just a hair’s width to the right of the first dart.

A young man on his way to the bathroom  — Killian vaguely recalled his name was Sean — stopped and whistled. “Pretty good, man.”

Giving him a tight smile in return, Killian retrieved the darts and repositioned himself to throw them again. As Sean disappeared around the corner, Killian focused on the bullseye. It seemed to fill his field of vision, the sharp metal edges of the rings strangely bright and in focus. Throwing the darts into the bullseye again was as easy as dropping them into a bucket.

Rather than bringing a smile to his face, a cold chill ran up his spine, and he rushed over to pull the darts from the board before anyone else in the diner noticed his success.

In daylight hours, Killian’s nightmares and hallucinations usually seemed smaller, less significant. He had tried to convince himself that his lifelike imaginings of an infernal creature were a product of his exhausted brain and nothing more. If he could just get a good night’s sleep, he thought, the nightly visitation would go away.

He had taken to stopping in at Granny’s more often, glancing over at Emma and Henry’s accustomed booth and feeling his heart sink a little on the days they weren’t present. Today he had decided to linger at the dartboard in the hope that they might come in late. Killian tried not to think about the reason why he was so preoccupied with seeing Emma Swan.

His patience was rewarded. The door rattled, and Killian turned to see the woman in question entering alone. Emma approached him, holding out her hand for the darts as if this was a routine meeting between the two of them. Her blonde tresses tumbled in soft curls over her shoulders, and as he passed the darts over, he imagined what her hair would feel like sliding through his fingers.

“Where’s your boy?” Killian asked.

“He has an appointment with Dr. Hopper on Wednesdays,” she said as she threw the darts one after the other. Her form needed work, but she wasn’t a bad dart player. He sauntered over and retrieved the darts for himself.

“Are you off work already?” she asked him.

“Aye, there’s a storm coming, and all the fishermen came in early. I’ll go back by the harbor later to make sure nothing’s amiss, but for now…” He shrugged and smiled at her before throwing the darts in a tight cluster around the bullseye. Again. He’d always been good at darts, but this was getting spooky.

“You are insanely good at this,” Emma said as she walked to the dartboard.

Her next throw was a bit wild, and he could see anger in the set of her shoulders. “Picturing anyone in particular when you’re throwing those darts, love?”

Emma grimaced. “Regina has talked Sidney Glass into running against me for sheriff. You’ve probably heard about it. So I’m pretty sure I’m going to lose.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Come on, Killian. I’m new here. My whole checkered past got revealed on the front page of the paper. There’s no way I’m going to win this election.”

“Sidney Glass isn’t the most popular Storybrooke resident, so I think you might stand a chance. If it helps, I plan to vote for you.”

Emma grinned. “Thanks. Hey, maybe no one else will bother to vote and that will win it for me.”

Killian took another turn with the darts, missing the center on purpose with two of them. “Listen, Swan, I’ve been thinking… would you like to go out with me sometime? For a drink, maybe?”

She blinked at him for a few seconds. “Like on a date?”

He rubbed his sweaty palm off on the leg of his jeans. “Yes, exactly like on a date.”

“Oh, Killian.” He could see his ultimate disappointment in the uncomfortable smile on her face. “You’re a nice guy and, you know. Kind of ridiculously good looking. But I don’t really… date. And especially right now, with Henry, and dealing with what happened to Graham, it’s not something I’ve got room for in my life.”

He shrugged, trying to seem unaffected. “It’s quite all right, Swan. Just a fleeting idea.” He went over and pulled the darts out to give himself something to do and tried not to feel too crestfallen.

“I mean technically you are still a murder suspect,” Emma added, but her smile told him she wasn’t really serious.

“Isn’t most of the town made up of potential suspects?” he asked her.

She heaved a sigh. “Yeah. That’s one of my many problems.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out, Swan,” he said, feeling the need to reassure her, to make her smile again. “A clever and resourceful person like you? You can’t fail.”

Emma’s eyelashes fluttered a little bit at that. “Do you really think so?”

“I do.”

“Thanks.” She gave him a tiny little smile. “I’d better get back to work. I’ll see you around.”

Killian watched her go, and then absently threw the darts at the dartboard before leaving himself. Just as he stepped out onto the street, the sky opened up and rain fell down onto his head in sudden buckets. “Perfect,” he muttered.

~*~

The rum burned its way down his throat. With a small shudder, he gestured to the bartender at the Rabbit Hole to pour him another. The dimly lit bar, permeated with the sour smell of stale beer, was almost empty on this particular weeknight. Killian ran his hand over the thick finish on the wood, index finger unconsciously probing at a cigarette burn in the otherwise unmarred surface.

He waited for the numbness the alcohol brought, the way it would blanket over all of his fears and disappointments with a gauzy nothingness. He couldn’t fall asleep properly anymore, but at least if he drank enough, he could pass out on his bed later in a drunken stupor, and his nightly visitor would not penetrate the alcoholic fog.

Killian flushed with shame at the thought of his conversation with Emma that afternoon. Her embarrassed face before she shot him down was not going to be easily forgotten. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, that such an intelligent, striking woman would be interested in a man like him. Especially considering that she’d only just met him when she’d decided he might be a murderer. And then he had the audacity to ask her out on a date. With a groan, he dropped his head onto the bar.

“Having a rough night?” a voice to his left asked.

Looking up, Killian was faced with Sidney Glass sliding onto the bar stool next to him. He wore a well-tailored suit, his face shiny with perspiration.

Chuckling, Killian nodded. “You could say that.” He looked down and saw his glass was empty again. He flagged down the bartender.

“Same here,” Sidney said. The bartender came over to fill Killian’s glass, and Sidney ordered a vodka tonic.

“Your campaign for sheriff not going well?” Killian asked him.

“Oh, you heard about that?” Sidney asked. When Killian nodded, Sidney grimaced. “I’m supposed to be writing my speech for tomorrow night right now. Instead, I’m here.”

The bartender put Sidney’s drink in front of him, and Sidney held it up to Killian, who paused before clinking his glass against it.

“Sounds like a tough job,” Killian said. “I don’t envy you.”

Sidney swallowed half of his drink in one long swallow. “At least I have the mayor’s support. Miss Swan will never have that. Even if she wins, the mayor will never stop making her life hell.”

Killian took a deep breath and let it out. “Sure, but Emma’s got the stomach for it, I think. She’s a strong woman. She can go toe-to-toe with a suspect in a grizzly murder and she won’t back down.” He swirled his rum in his glass, considering. “It’s not going to be easy for whoever the sheriff becomes, these next few weeks. There’s a killer on the loose.”

Sidney fidgeted on his stool. “Of course.”

Killian leaned over closer, almost whispering in Sidney’s ear. “A killer who took a knife and plunged it into Mr. Gold over and over again, his heart’s blood gushing out onto the forest floor. Ripping until his entrails spilled out of his body. And now that murderer is out there. Maybe waiting to kill again. Maybe watching the sheriff to see if he gets close. After all, Humbert died, and he seemed to be perfectly healthy before he collapsed.”

Eyes as wide as saucers, Sidney leaned away and pulled at the collar of his shirt as if he couldn’t breathe. “Graham Humbert had a heart condition.”

Killian ran his finger around the rim of his glass and shrugged. “As far as we know, sure.” Standing up, Killian drained the rest of his drink. “Best of luck to you, Mr. Glass.” He threw some crumpled bills down on the polished wooden bar and walked away. It was only much later that he thought to wonder where those horrible words whispered to Sidney Glass had even come from.

~*~

When the townsfolk arrived to listen to the speeches by the two candidates for sheriff, they heard Emma Swan give a speech about her qualifications, how she’d overcome her past and was determined to do her best for the town, and how she intended to bring Mr. Gold’s killer to justice. Then Sidney Gold stood up and the podium and after a long pause, he said only one thing.

“I hereby withdraw from the race for sheriff.”

~*~

Emma awoke to the sound of the door downstairs closing softly. She glanced at the clock: 1:13 a.m. Another late night for Mary Margaret.

Christmas had been a fairly subdued holiday in Storybrooke. Several of the stores had decorated for the season, but there had been no government-sponsored lighting displays, no wreath on the door to the town hall, none of the things that festooned every other small town in America. Emma had thought it was odd but had found it somewhat refreshing not to be inundated with holiday cheer everywhere she’d gone.

With Henry on break from school and presumably confined to his house and Mary Margaret absent from the apartment more frequently than usual, Emma had continued to focus on her job, the job that was now officially hers: Sheriff of Storybrooke. She had returned to the crime scene and poked around in the dirt, continued to pore over Gold’s real estate and financial records, interviewed the few people who had ever made a late payment in rent to Gold, but everything was a dead end. She had even searched the pawn shop, and had been quickly overwhelmed with its seemingly infinite stock of strange items.

Christmas itself had come and gone with little fanfare; she’d exchanged gifts with Mary Margaret and the two of them had shared a big pancake breakfast and then had settled in on the sofa together to watch bad TV. Throughout the day, Emma had eyed the brightly colored wrapping paper on the gift she’d gotten for Henry, unsure of when to give it to him.

Now staring at the ceiling above her bed, Emma knew she needed to mind her own business, that what Mary Margaret did was not her concern. But in spite of her better judgment, she let curiosity get the better of her and found herself getting out of bed and going down the stairs to greet her roommate.

“Oh!” Mary Margaret exclaimed, her hand flying to her chest when Emma appeared. “You scared me; I thought you’d be sleeping.”

“The door woke me up.” She took in Mary Margaret’s smudged mascara and lack of lipstick, and the way her cardigan sweater was askew on her shoulders like it had been quickly pulled back on. “And no offense, but you could not look more well-fucked right now if you tried.”

“Oh God.” Mary Margaret covered her face. “Is it that obvious?”

“A little, but that’s okay. Also, it’s none of my business,” Emma said, wrinkling her nose. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Actually, would you mind staying up for a minute? I could really use a friend to talk to.”

“Sure.” Emma followed her and flopped down on her back on Mary Margaret’s colorful quilt-covered bed, watching as her roommate took her earrings out and dropped them in a jewelry box. Her bedside lamp cast a soft glow over the space, and Emma yawned. “I assume it’s not Victor Whale who’s keeping you out at all hours.”

Mary Margaret shook her head. “You know who it is.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s David.”

“Yeah, I figured that. I saw the way you looked at each other when you stopped by the sheriff’s station last week.”

“How did we look?”

Emma snorted. “Like you were about to devour each other whole.”

Mary Margaret pulled her sweater off and sank onto the bed, pulling her knees up. “Oh.”

“So what happened to him trying to work things out with his wife?”

Tears filled Mary Margaret’s eyes. “He says he’s in love with me, and I… Emma, I’ve never felt this way about anyone in my life. He’s… being with him is like coming home.”

“Oh, man. You’ve got it bad.”

“I know.” She wiped a tear from her face in frustration. Emma got the sense that she’d cried a lot of tears over David already. “He’s going to leave his wife, he just needs to wait for the right time. It’s tricky right now because—”

Emma sat up quickly. “Mary Margaret, are you listening to yourself? You sound like a cliche. You sound like Carrie Fisher in When Harry Met Sally. Look, I like David, and he doesn’t seem like a bad person. Clearly, he’s been through a lot, what with the coma and all, and it’s not that I don’t think his feelings for you are real. But that doesn’t mean he’s not going to end up hurting you. And the longer you continue this affair with him, the more hurt you’re going to be.”

She wiped away another tear. “On second thought, maybe I don’t want to talk about this,” Mary Margaret said in a near-whisper.

Reaching out and taking her hand, Emma tried to give a reassuring smile. “I’m sorry. I know you love him, and I really do hope things work out.”

“You just think it’s unlikely they will,” Mary Margaret said with a sniffle.

“Anything’s possible.” Trying to lighten the mood, Emma added, “Hey, at least someone in this apartment is getting some.”

Mary Margaret responded with a watery laugh. “You’re working too hard, especially since the election.” She traced the seams of the quilt on her bed. “Ruby mentioned that you’d been talking to Killian Jones in the diner a lot recently.”

“Ruby needs to mind her own business.”  

“Not much chance of that. So there’s nothing going on there?”

“Nope.” Emma watched as Mary Margaret narrowed her eyes. “He asked me out, but I said no. I don’t want to date him.”

“Why not? I always thought he seemed nice. And he’s…” She raised her eyebrows.

“Insanely hot?” The two women shared a smile. “I know. But seriously, I don’t date. And even if I did, I don’t think I would date Jones. He has issues.”

“We’ve all got issues, Emma, us included.” Mary Margaret slapped her hands down on her knees and shook her head back and forth quickly. “Do you know what we need, and soon? A girl’s night.”

~*~

“More shots all around!” Ruby gestured to their waitress, a wide grin on her face.

“I don’t know if I can drink with you like we used to, Ruby, my tolerance is shit after having the baby,” Ashley said.

“I’ll have yours, then. Or the sheriff will, right Emma?”

Emma took a swig from the beer bottle clutched in her hand and shrugged. She was trying to stick to beer because she figured she couldn’t get herself into too much trouble that way. The Rabbit Hole was crowded tonight, and she was sure not a few people had clocked that their newly elected sheriff was sitting among them, so she really needed to be on her best behavior. But the evening had that feeling to it, she thought as she watched Mary Margaret expertly pour the contents of a shot glass into her open throat, Ashley giggling and Ruby hooting and making a ‘raise the roof’ gesture with her upturned hands. That feeling that more often than not led to fuzzy memories and stumbling attempts to get home. She'd never had this many friends before, and it was making her feel good and a little bit reckless.

“I’m so sick of being needed all the time,” Ashley was saying. “Sean is working two jobs, and I’m spending more time with his laundry than I do with him. And the baby, I mean I love my baby, but babies need you every minute of every day. It’s like my body isn’t my own, you know?”

Emma looked down at the table, focusing on the wood grain and not of the fact that she most decidedly did not know because she’d given her baby away. Desperate for something to distract her, she downed the contents of the shot glass in front of her.

“Doesn’t sound any worse than being needed by Granny all the time,” Ruby said. “I’m basically on-call 24/7; I almost never get a break. And nothing I do is ever good enough for her.”

“No one you do is ever good enough for her,” Ashley supplied, giggling into her rum and coke.

“I don’t want to talk about sex or men,” Mary Margaret said.

“Who says I limit myself to sex with men?” Ruby said, her teeth flashing between red lips. “But fine, okay, what do you want to talk about?”

“Any progress figuring out who killed Mr. Gold?” Ashley asked Emma.

“I’m not really supposed to talk about that… but fuck it, there’s not really anything to talk about. No, I haven’t made any progress. My half hour of interrogating Mo the flower shop owner led me to the groundbreaking discovery that he’s been seeing Mrs. Hendricks who runs the bakery in town.”

“He has?” Ruby said, rubbing her hands together. “I didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t hear it from me,” Emma said. “The point is, I have no leads, and Regina wants to have my head on a platter for it. I mean, she wanted that already, but now she really wants it.”

“You’ll figure it out, Emma,” Mary Margaret said.

“Do you think I could get an uninterrupted night of sleep in prison? Because if so, I’ll confess right now,” Ashley said.

“How’s school, M. M.?” Ruby asked, sipping her drink through the tiny stir-straw.

“You know, it’s weird. My students have been really… different lately.”

Emma frowned, thinking about the fact that Henry was among her students. “Different how?”

“I don’t know, I can’t really explain it. I have this feeling that they’re changing, and I need to adjust my curriculum to keep up. It’s like things that have worked for me for years aren’t working anymore.”

“Ooh, look who just walked in, Emma,” Ruby said, excitedly kicking her under the table. Emma turned to look and saw Killian sit down at the bar.

“So what?” Emma responded, trying to keep her features blank, and ignoring the fact that her heart rate picked up a bit at the sight of him.

“Come on. He comes into the diner way more than he used to now that you’re there on your afternoon breaks. I can tell he’s disappointed when you don’t show. Sometimes he plays darts and oh-so-unsubtly watches the door until you show up. He really likes you.”

Emma snuck a glance at him again and then turned back to the table. “I’ve been with guys like that before. Full of angst and self-loathing, usually with a dark secret and a drinking problem. No thank you.”

“A Byronic hero,” Mary Margaret offered before taking a sip of her drink. The other women looked at her blankly. “It’s a literary archetype.”

“Whatever, he’s hot and he’s into you,” Ruby said, refusing to be derailed. “If he’s trouble, then use him and lose him.”

“That’s easier said than done in Storybrooke. I’m trying to be an upstanding person for my kid, I can’t go around having one-night stands with people, not with the way everyone is all up in everybody else’s business in this town.”

“Yeah, for instance, I just heard Mo is dating Mrs. Hendricks,” Mary Margaret said with a smirk.

“Shut up. My point is, I’m not going to sleep with, date, or in any way encourage Killian Jones. It’s not happening.” If she glanced at him a few more times during the night, admiring the way his ass filled out his tight jeans, well, you couldn’t blame a girl for appreciating the view, she told herself.

Chapter 7