Part Four: Planted Us In Foreign Soil

The door to the world of fairy tales— Jefferson's erstwhile homeland— opens onto a grassy knoll within shouting distance of a castle that used to belong to someone— he can't remember who. Someone who had been important, though. Whoever it was. There are trees behind them and the sun is just beginning to rise.

Emma rubs her eyes, but the world's still there when she looks again. Jefferson, half behind her and half to the side, sneaks a wide rough grin at her expense. He wants to elbow her obnoxiously. He wants to say I told you so.

"Well?" he says.

Emma shakes her head and sighs harshly. "This is it?"

"This is it."

"The land of fairy tales," she says, and her voice is unexpectedly soft. "Oh. I can wake up any moment now." She lifts her head and says it to the sky. "Any minute. Now would be good. This would be a convenient time."

"Oh," Jefferson says, strolling away from her a little, hands in his pockets. "No one's listening to you. No one's here. In fact, we're not really even here. Here isn't even here. Nothing is here."

"What?" She squints at him. "I'm not really complaining if you want to tell me that this is all some dramatic hallucination brought on by overwork and too much caffeine, but— isn't that kind of the opposite of what you've been saying all this time?"

"Look." He bows to her, continues the movement downwards, and fumbles for a moment somewhere in the grass. It's invisible to her, he knows, and difficult enough for him to make out, for that matter. But the leylines are unmistakable for those with the right type of experience, and if there's one thing he knows, it's the shapes of things. So he finds the edge, and slips his fingers underneath, and pulls. There's a dead nothing underneath, a vicious sort of nothing, that bites at their eyes and their throats and twists and pulls. It's not meant to be seen by humans. It's not really meant to be seen by anything, this underlying warp and woof of the fabric of reality. Emma gags slightly behind him and he drops the edge of the world back hurriedly, stands, and swallows. "It's really a beautiful illusion," he says. "This whole world is mad, and pretending to be sane. Look, it's me, if I was an entire planet."

"I don't—" Emma's having trouble getting hold of herself. He turns to look at her, and steps forward, puts a hand on her arm. Her gaze slips down to rest on his fingers, which tense on her sleeve. "Um. I don't understand."

"This is an illusion," he says softly. "No one's here. Not really here. We could go looking for the citizens of this world, and we'd find silent-mouthing mereghosts, nothing more. Facsimiles. Mirror images. Nothing real. Everything's just— placeholders. Because of the curse."

"The curse," she says faintly. She lifts a hand to her forehead.

"Emma," he says, firmly. She reacts to the tone, turns to him, straightens her spine and squares her shoulders. "This is what you need to do. You need to break the curse, and bring everything to reality again. Breathe life into it."

"How?" she says, and then, "You're being ridiculous." But at least the how? is first. Jefferson bites his lip, and shrugs gently.

"I don't know yet," he says. "I just know it has to be done. But if you'll help me, instead of insisting that I'm being ridiculous all the time, it'll go a little faster."

"Uh," says Emma, noncommitally. She stands with her back to him and looks out over the shallow bowl of the valley below, eyes drifting along it to the silent castle. Everything has ceased, here. Everything is waiting.

Time has stopped.

It makes him want to howl.

"Is this what you wanted?" She glances back at him, and waits with strange patience for his attention. "Jefferson? Is this what you wanted?"

He forces his eyes away from the empty castle windows, back to her. "No. This isn't it."

"Then why were you in such a hurry to get home?"

Jefferson swallows, hard. "I didn't know it would be like this. I should have known. I should have expected it. You can't empty a land of its soul and expect it to still be alive; the curse took us from where we were meant to be, planted us in foreign soil, and none of us are thriving. None of us are who we really are, Emma. Apart from you."

"I wonder," says the sheriff, and her glance is speculative. She looks at him thoughtfully for a moment, then throws her hands up in the air. "Okay. Okay. I've been here, I've seen it. What do you want from me, now?"

He takes her hands— she tries to resist, but only a little— and steps close to her, bending to look in her eyes.

"Save us," he breathes. "Be our hope, Emma Swan."

Emma sighs, and her eyes search his.

"Oh, boy," she says, quietly.

The land of fairy tales shifts and chirps around them, restless, dreaming.