Sorry this one is a little shorter - I'm in the first semester of my Masters program, and we're just starting finals week. Needless to say, I'm going a little crazy right now. But thank you for all of your support - enjoy this short installment!

PART SIX: 27 Years

A year passes.

The air in Storybrooke is electric, static, like something is about to happen.

David works on his truck and teaches history and coaches his football team and volunteers at the animal shelter and goes out for pints with Leroy and chats over his fence with Archie and passes the polite time of day with Mayor Mills when she passes by his house with her dog when he's out mowing the lawn.

He dreams every night.

He dreams of wild, dark forests and clear blue lakes. He dreams of chasing a blonde woman with big, sad blue eyes who is always, always a few steps ahead, like Cinderella with her glass shoes from the old fairy tales. He dreams of fire and smoke and thick, thick air that catches in his throat and burns his chest. He dreams of holding a beautiful woman with long, dark hair in his arms, but he never sees her face and every time he tries he wakes immediately and abruptly and the dream wisps away from him.

He thinks he might go insane.

And so he talks to Archie, talks to Leroy, chats with Ruby, even considers going in to talk to Doctor Whale. Is it an illness to dream strange things every night that you never quite remember, that you can't make sense of, that repeat themselves over and over?

In the end, he does not want to be poked and prodded, and something deep inside him does not want to give the dreams away, even if Doctor Whale or Archie could give him medications to drive them out of his head.

So David works on his truck and teaches school and takes walks late at night, and a year passes. He withdraws into himself, and it becomes more of an effort to reach out to his friends and neighbors. He finds himself content to sit at home on the couch and read a book or watch a game or a mindless television show. Several nights a week he goes on a drive through the forest and park somewhere and just sits and thinks. Sometimes, in that place between waking and sleep, out there in the cab of his truck in the middle of the trees, impressions of his dreams come floating back to him. A voice, a feeling, a word or an image of the bluest sky he has ever seen spreading high above him…but they never last.

David lives in a dream, and he does not know how to wake and find reality again.

He feels as if it has been stolen from him, that the life he is living is not real life at all.

In his dreams, he is more alive than he is when he is awake.

Time is a funny thing. Sometimes he notices it passing, and sometimes it is like his world is standing still. He has been here as long as he can remember, wherever here is (for sometimes his surroundings aren't real either, and he wonders if maybe he's actually in a coma somewhere just living in his own head, and that's why time and the town and the people and he himself are less than real).

One morning, David looks at himself in the mirror while he is shaving and has the strangest idea that he hasn't aged a day in 27 years.

And then the moment is gone and he wipes away the shaving cream and heads down the stairs to work, whistling.

He passes Mayor Mills on the street, she in her sleek black compact, he in his old beat-up pickup, and wonders at the fact that they've been driving the same cars for…oh, as long as he can remember.

But then he smiles and lifts a hand at her in the window (she doesn't seem to notice, or if she does she doesn't respond), and thinks about how they just don't make cars like they used to.

David stands in front of his classroom and passes out papers, and as the students work silently on an assignment he stares at them and has the strangest feeling that he has been grading their work for years and years, and nothing has changed and nothing will ever change.

But then they pass in their assignments and he stacks them sloppily on his desk and starts a lecture about the American Revolution, and time jostles back into (or out of) place around him.

And so a year passes.

And since David is the only one (as far as he knows) to have these little fits of awareness or insanity (he is not sure which), he keeps it to himself.

Sometimes he catches Mayor Mills watching him. He does not interact with her often, but when they pass on the street or he sits in on a town council or approaches her with a proposal for the school, her large brown eyes see right through him like no one else's ever have.

He considers talking to her about whatever is happening to him, but something inside him recoils from the thought, and so he just smiles placidly and says, "Morning, Madame Mayor," and pretends that he cannot see her staring holes in his skull as he passes her.

He does not trust her.

Not when he cannot even trust himself.

And then one day he wakes, and the wind has changed.

It blows from the east, and it is cool and brisk and clean, and he stands on his front porch and turns his face into the wind and breathes it in.

A great swelling in his chest brings tears to his eyes, but he blinks them away, confused and embarrassed even though no one is around to see.

"Emma," he whispers, and though the young woman has come to mind often in the past 12 months, he has never said her name out loud.

He is worried that she has been part of this dream, this hallucination, this insanity that has gripped him, but right now, standing on his porch in the wind, she is the only thing that seems real. He can see her face clearly, can hear her voice in his head, and though he has never been the impulsive type, he knows there is only one thing he can do.

And so he goes back inside, puts on his shoes, calls in a sub to school, and heads out to his truck with keys in hand.

He feels powerful, like he did the last time he saw her (yesterday or that morning or a year ago, he does not know), powerful and competent and strong and decisive, and though it frightens him, this confidence, he lets it propel him down his drive and ease him into the cab of his truck.

He is going to find her.

He is going to find Emma.

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