Thanks to those who reviewed, alerted, and favorited! This chapter is a little shorter than the last one, but it does feature the appearance of Mary Margaret, for those of you who were wondering where she was. This fic is definitely focused more on Emma and David, and hopefully this chapter explains a little of why Mary Margaret is choosing to stay out of the picture as much as possible for the 28 year curse. To answer another question, yes...Emma does know who David is. But the premise of this story hinges on the fact that he forgets her every time he's not around her - the curse won't let him remember the Savior, though he is drawn to her every time she comes into town to check on things. The question of Mary Margaret growing older will be answered later. :)

Hopefully that clears up the questions. There's no easy way to explain them in the story, so I thought I'd get them answered here to clear up potential confusion, though these ideas will become more obvious as the years go by.

Thanks for reading!

Emrose

PART TWO: 19 Years

David Nolan does not mind being alone. He has always enjoyed solitude, always enjoyed being alone with his thoughts or his work or just alone with nothing at all.

But sometimes he sits in the living room at just past midnight or in his empty office well after school hours and wonders if he's missing something. Sometimes he believes that the something he is missing is Kathryn, and that's when he stops by French's Floral on his way home from school and picks up a bouquet of her favorite flowers or sneaks up behind her in the kitchen and wraps his arms around her from behind just because he can.

But most of the time he does not think that Kathryn is the answer, and that bothers him very, very much. He is not the kind of man to look for love or affection or companionship from someone he is not married to, and even if he and Kathryn have never had a smooth marriage he would never even entertain the possibility of cheating on her.

Besides, he has never met a woman who has even managed to turn his head.

Until the evening he is taking a walk to cool down after a rather tense debate between he and his wife over the recycling (it was stupid, really, but somehow it had escalated until she was crying angry tears and he'd nearly bitten through his tongue with trying not to shout at her) and he sees two women across the street. They are walking the same direction he is, a little behind him, at about the same pace.

He does not recognize them—one is thin and blonde, wrapped snugly in a dark jacket, jeans, and a scarf, and the other is shorter, curvy, sporting a light blue beanie over cropped black hair, and quite possibly the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, and he cannot even see her clearly from here.

He starts across the street towards them almost before he realizes what he is doing. He stops halfway there, wondering what he is going to say, how he is going to introduce himself, and how much of an idiot he might look.

David Nolan decides it's worth it.

So he marches across the street, and before the two women have realized he's heading in their direction he is close enough to wave, smile brightly, and introduce himself.

"Hi," he says. "David Nolan. You look lost—can I help you find something?"

He glances at the blonde woman, and he cannot help but smile at the look of shock on her face. From the way she is dressed and the way she is staring from him to the woman next to her and then up and down the street, he figures she isn't from a place in which people offer directions often. But then he looks at the dark-haired woman, and he knows without a doubt that she is, in fact, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, and even more beautiful up close than she was across the street.

"I'm David," he says again before remembering that he's already said it.

But the dark-haired woman is looking anywhere but at him—she seems in even more distress than the blonde woman, and he realizes suddenly that he's probably walked straight into a very private discussion. He feels instantly awkward, and tries to apologize.

"Sorry, am I…am I interrupting something? I didn't mean to pry, I just thought you might use some help."

"Thanks, David," the blonde woman says, and smiles at him though the smile doesn't reach her eyes. One hand snakes around the other woman's waist, who has turned her face deliberately away from David. He is sure she is crying, and something in his heart cracks a little. "But we're fine. We were just passing through."

"Can I…can I help with anything? Anything at all?" He is looking at the blonde woman but addressing her companion, and he has the strangest urge to reach out and touch her shoulder, offer her comfort, but he doesn't think that would go over well, and he's not in the mood to be taken for a kidnapper or rapist or something.

"No, thank you," the blonde woman says, and she smiles again, more genuinely. "But it's charming of you to offer."

The dark-haired woman lets out what sounds like a snort, but it is accompanied by a wet sob, and she presses her hands to her mouth, turns, and starts to walk away from them both down the street. David stares after her, unable to help himself—he has a vague feeling that he is the cause of her distress, but he doesn't see how that could be, and the feeling is gone before he has even recognized it.

"Is she going to be alright?" he asks. "I'm sorry for running up to you like that. It wasn't charming of me at all, I should be ashamed of myself."

"No, it's not your fault," the blonde woman says. She twists her head to look down the street after her companion. "Thank you for offering. But I really should be going after her." She takes a step backward awkwardly, and her eyes are searching his face like she's trying to memorize him, deep and intense and none of the shyness she'd exhibited earlier. "Goodbye, David."

"Yeah, so long," he says, because she has very obviously ended the conversation and he does not want to be nuisance, does not want to bother her more than he already has. He watches her as she leaves—she can't be older than nineteen or twenty, a few years younger than the other woman, maybe, and he decides that maybe they are sisters, or cousins.

He watches the blonde woman reach her companion's side halfway down the street and wrap an arm around her waist, and together they walk away without looking back.

David thinks of nothing but the dark-haired woman for the rest of the evening. Ten minutes after he let the two women walk away from him he is ready to slap himself silly for being stupid enough to let them go. He walks the streets of Storybrooke looking for them, but they are nowhere to be found.

So he stops into Granny's, which is the hub for all gossip and interesting town activity, and sinks down onto a bar stool. He orders his usual, and when Ruby pours him the glass he asks her.

"Did two strange women come in here earlier tonight?" He tries to sound casual and faintly disinterested, but he knows he hasn't pulled it off when Ruby gives him the eye and a slightly flirtatious, comrade-in-arms sort of smirk.

"Why do you want to know?"

"I just…do," David says lamely. "And I can tell from the look on your face that they did. Happen to catch their names?"

"No, sorry," Ruby says, and scrubs half-heartedly at an invisible spot on the countertop, glancing at her grandmother as she does, who isn't paying attention. "But they were talking about finding someone. They didn't get a room, so they must have found whoever it was they were looking for."

"Oh." David is disappointed. More than disappointed. He doesn't feel in the mood to discuss it further, so he downs the alcohol in two swallows and leaves.

He walks the streets for a long time, thinking about nothing and feeling a great weight in his chest and a pressure in his skull that has nothing to do with alcohol. He feels melancholy, lost, and a little afraid, and so he walks and walks until it is past midnight and he finds himself at the toll bridge outside town.

He leans over the railing and watches the water tumbling downstream. The moon is bright enough that he can make out the eddies and currents and individual rocks and the tips of tangled branches from the surrounding forest sticking up out of the shallow riverbed.

The bridge creaks, and he turns to see the blonde woman walking towards him out of the darkness. His heart leaps, and he straightens and waits for her to approach with something like hope stirring in his stomach and chest.

"Hey," he says. "I heard you'd left town."

"On my way out," she says, and smiles. "I just wanted to thank you for offering to help earlier."

"It was my pleasure," he says, trying to push away the disappointed feeling at hearing she is leaving. "Really."

"And…" the blonde woman hesitates. "I wanted to apologize for my sister. She's been looking for someone for a very long time, and we thought he might be here in Storybrooke."

"And was he?"

She nods slowly. "Yes, he was. But he…he's not who he used to be. And I don't think she realized just how hard that would be on her."

"People can change," David says. He crosses his arms across his chest, unsure why he is suddenly so invested in these two women and their story. "Maybe he'll come around?"

The woman smiles brightly, but her eyes are bright too, too bright, and he has to resist the urge to offer words of comfort he does not think he could find even if it was appropriate.

"Oh, he will," she says, and though he knows she is on the verge of tears her voice is strong. "It'll just take some time. She's waited my whole life for him, so what's another few years, right?"

She sounds as if she is seeking comfort, and the urge to offer it surges strong and deep inside him, and before he knows what he's doing he is reaching out to touch her shoulder. But she backs away, turns, stuffs her hands in her pockets, and he pulls back.

"Well, I should be going," she says. "Thanks again."

"Yeah, sure," he says. "Sure. Anytime. Really. If you're ever back in town, just look me up. It's David."

"David Nolan, yeah, you said," she says over her shoulder. "Thank you, David."

He lifts a hand and watches her walk away for the second time, and as she vanishes into the darkness beyond the bridge the melancholy trickles back into his head and heart and chest, and he leans back over the railing and stares down at the water until a buzzing fills his head and he thinks and feels nothing at all.

He is kneeling on a hard wood floor and there is a great rushing of wind all around him. His hands are stretched out in front of him, palms pressed against something hard and flat, like a wooden panel or wall. He cannot breathe. Somewhere, a woman is screaming. A powerful, sickening stench of something sharp and sweet is in his nose and mouth, and he gags. It is dark and cold and his head is splitting with internal pressure, and a baby, somewhere far away, is crying.

He wakes on the couch in the morning with a splitting headache. As he fumbles around in the downstairs bathroom for Advil, he catches a sudden whiff of something sickly sweet. He takes a few deep breaths, but the smell is gone as fast as it came. So he downs three of the tiny round pills, brushes his teeth, and goes back out to the living room to turn on the game.

Review if you enjoyed! Or even if you didn't!