It's hard to know true sadness until you've seen someone who thinks they're alone in the world. For me, that was Rosalie. It didn't take me long to see her; she stalked half the town silently, all blue eyes and quiet smiles. But she never seemed to see me, no matter how many times I tried to talk to her or get her attention. Nights were the worst, though.

Rose could and would walk around all day long, pretending to be fine, but when the sun went down and the town went to bed, she would wander aimlessly for hours, crying out for someone— anyone —to hear her. To help her.

And every night, I would call back to her that I was here, that she wasn't alone.

She never heard me. Eventually she would stop and go home to her little spot in the clock tower and cry herself to sleep without another word. Sometimes it got to be too much for me. I'd break my number one rule and wrap an arm around her so she would relax. And as creepy as I knew that was, it worked. She would fall asleep quickly and her tears would dry into tracks on her face. It was almost as if, even though she didn't know I was there, I was still helping her.

*~*~*

I don't remember how I got to Storybrooke. I just remember being there my whole life. No one ever noticed me, but I noticed everyone. One day, I saw a girl with hair even blacker than Regina's and the saddest, most intelligent gaze I'd ever seen. No one seemed to notice her either. No one except me.

Occasionally, she would talk to herself for lack of anyone else to talk to. That was how I knew her name: Rosalie Jones.

All at once I felt like an angsty teenager in one of those horrible rom-coms Ruby watched all the time. No matter what I did, I couldn't stop thinking about her. She was in my thoughts, my actions, even my words, though I didn't talk much. So I did what any normal teenage boy wold have done in my situation: I followed her everywhere. Creepy, I know, but what other option did I have?

In the space of a week and a half, I knew everything she knew about herself. Her name, her favorite color (dark blue), even her favorite person in town (the crazy girl in the asylum, Belle).

Rose had taken over my life completely, not that there was much to take over. This— whatever this was —was turning me into a freaking stalker. She was the first thing I thought about every morning and the last thing I thought about every night, and she didn't even know I existed. Literally. It wasn't like me to obsess about something this trivial, but I was doing it; I had been doing it for almost thirty years.

I first realized that I had a thing for Rose maybe five years after I saw her for the first time. It was the twenty first day of March, and it was raining like crazy. Rose was in Regina's office while she signed some paperwork that was probably important to someone or another. There wasn't anything remarkable happening; no fireworks or sparks. She just looked out the window and sighed in boredom and I had an epiphany: I think I'm in love with this girl. No, I am in love with this girl. Why did it take me so long to realize that?

For whatever reason, I knew it now and it wasn't going to go away anytime soon. I didn't want it to. But at the same time, I didn't know what to do with it. There wasn't much anyone could do in this situation. So I continued living as I had before, and it worked. For twenty three more years, it worked.

Everything changed when the blond came to town.

She bugged me, and I didn't know why. Maybe it was her attitude toward Regina, or they way she acted with Henry. Maybe it was the fact that she seemed to be more aware of Rose and my presence than anyone had ever been before. If we walked by her, she felt the displacement of air. If one of us laughed, she seemed to almost hear it. As exciting as this was at first, the novelty was lost when she stubbornly refused to believe in what she couldn't see.

Rose and I had accepted that something was unnatural a while ago. There was no way to live the way we did and not believe in magic of some sort, even if it defied all the laws of physics. Emma's blatant distrust if the idea grated on me, so I steered clear of her as much as I could with Rosalie's obsession with her. She shared Henry's belief that Emma was some kind of cure-all for the "Dark Curse," whatever that was. That being said, she followed the damn woman everywhere. She didn't seem to realize the fact that Emma freaking noticed her. Or maybe she did.

I'd seen it firsthand; Rose was starved for human attention, and it was beginning to wear on her sanity. There was only so long any one person could go without being acknowledged by those surrounding them. If the blond noticed her, it probably served as a relief of sorts.

I couldn't pretend I was completely okay with the situation, but if it made Rose happy... Wow, I really did sound like a rom-com hero.

I laughed a little, imagining the credits: Starring Rosalie Jones and Pietro Liberi. What a flop a movie like that would be, starring two people that were impossible to see, let alone film.