I agree! Emma never got to fully know the man she’s loved for over a decade. Now she probably feels robbed of the chance to ever get to know him fully as she would have wished. Here Emma is doing pull-ups for a fight, and probably thinking to herself that if she could only have been stronger, she could have held onto Neal longer to save him. *I’m making myself tear up.*
You’re making me tear up too! Urgh! 🙁 Don’t remember if it was someone on the forum or someone on tumblr, but I read a comment somewhere that suggested that Emma’s run in with Rumple could have been him blaming her for not having held onto Neal’s hand. Which, just, FEELS, because Rumple’s spent centuries beating himself up for not having held onto his hand, and now he’s transferring that self loathing onto Emma. Same thing as what he did when he beat up Mo, screaming about how he’d hurt Belle.
Being in NL, the place where Bae lived for a couple hundred years, will give her some new insight into him. When she sees what he had to go through just to be able to survive, having to deal with the likes of PP and Felix, it’ll give her a new understanding of the guy he was when she met him. And Hook will probably fill in some Bae details for her along the way as well. Basically, her whole time in NL, she’ll be learning more about Neal, and will have a physical connection to him too, because of that sword. I can see her having a whole new appreciation for him by the time they meet up again.
Hook’s account just went up in her book, but I think it also went out of the flirty-fun let’s Dr. Whale it up here zone for both of them. I don’t think it was ever really in that zone for Emma, but I think Hook is reevaluating her. Ironically, that means if something happens I think it would be more serious to both as I think they will build up a real friendship.
This is why I’m not overly worried about the “triangle” being one of those sensationalistic things that’s just done for romance drama. If/when Hook and Emma do become closer, it’s because Nealfire is bringing them closer together, because they each have their own personal relationship with him too. So any emotional drama will be genuine, meaningful evaluation of feelings on each of their behalves, as opposed to flippant, sexually fueled desire type drama. I think it’ll be really interesting to see how it all develops.