follow_the_wolf | Ms. Scarlet in the Conservatory with a Dark Curse

The spinning of worlds was not something Ruby remembered, but the dizzy, floating sensation that followed her from the door of her Granny's diner into the opulent hall in which she now stood was almost strangely familiar. She felt a wave of unease so acute it almost buckled her knees as she looked around at what appeared to be a hotel and realized she had absolutely no idea where she was. For all that she yearned to leave Storybrooke and its confines behind her, the first, startling taste of freedom and a new place was frightening.

She took a few steps, her heels audible on the floor beneath her, and attempted to assimilate what could've possibly happened to her. She'd been on her way out of the diner, but instead of stepping out onto the street, she'd arrived here. Had she passed out?

Up ahead of her there was a tall, rangey man, and it took a second look at him to realize that, even from behind, there was something vastly familiar about him as well. She came to a stop as she realized that his was a backside she'd admired more than once, and for all that she rationally knew this couldn't be Sheriff Graham because Sheriff Graham had died weeks ago, she felt a jolt of certainty, and even more questioningly, joy, that it was in fact him.

"Sheriff?" She said, taking a few steps closer. "Sheriff Graham?"

How long he stood there sorting through the pieces of himself, he was not sure. It could have been a few minutes. It could have been the better part of an hour. Instinct told him to find a place more private or better defended than a spot right at the center of the room where his fingers brushed against the sharp fronds of a plant that bent towards the path between the pots, but for all its strangeness, the room did not feel unsafe. He needed the room to breathe. The Huntsman and Sheriff Graham scraped against one another in his mind and slowly, only slowly did they begin to settle into one another.

The click of heels across the floor might have squeezed that breath right out of him, but as his eyes screwed tighter shut and body went tense, the pattern of them was all wrong. Or all right, as the case might have been. The tension bled out of him on his next breath, and while he had every intent on ignoring whoever it might have been to allow them to pass him by, the voice that called to him had him immediately changing his mind.

“Re-” he began, eyes open and turning before he caught the name on his tongue and swallowed it down, “Ruby. You’re here.” The memories that belonged to Sheriff Graham supplied all he knew of Ruby Lucas - granddaughter of the battleaxe Granny, waitress at the cafe, well known for her incredibly short shorts and the streaks of color she always kept in her dark hair. The Huntsman knew her different, but whether she remembered or not was still an unknown and that fact alone had him tamping down the happiness at seeing her again, his expression smoothing out into something friendly but distant enough to not seem out of place.

There was so much relief in seeing his face that she couldn't quite pin down the source. She assumed it had entirely to do with finding herself in a strange, new place unexpectedly for the first time in as long as she could remember and still winding up there with a familiar face. One she knew could be depended upon for protection, even if said face happened to belong to someone she had spent weeks believing was dead. She wanted to ask what had happened but there were too many thoughts, too much initial fear in that moment for her to get it all straight.

When he turned toward her and she saw that it was actually him, heard his voice and listened to him speak her name, she crossed the distance to stand next to him, thinking that, somehow, proximity might make them all the safer. "I'm so relieved to see you," she told him, smiling a little shakily as she exhaled. "What is this place? I was walking out the door at the diner and then I was just... Here."

It was certainly a more swank hotel than Ruby had ever stayed in, she was certain, and since Granny ran the only bed and breakfast in town she was positive she was far from home. It was what she wanted, of course, exactly what she'd promised Granny she was going to do when she was storming out of the diner, but this was so foreign and unexpected and sudden. Ruby suddenly felt like a very small fish in a very large pond, and she looked around, worrying at her bottom lip. "I don't have much money or anything, and we have to be far from home, don't you think?"

The last time he had seen Red- no, Ruby, had been while been getting drunk. Embarrassingly, terribly drunk. Every dart he had thrown had met its mark, and every step had been as steady as the last, but he remembered with a pang of regret his having thrown a dart just shy of hitting Emma. Ruby had served him drink after drink and spared him her usual flirtations and he had hardly noticed, too intent on proving he was capable of something more than the emptiness that filled him.

He gave her a small smile as she moved in closer, hardly wanting to put her off when she was the only bit of familiarity he knew in that strange place. There was so much he wanted to say to her then that he understood he could not or should not, leaving him to swallow the words down in exchange of shaking his head and instead replying, “I don’t know. I was in my office - with Emma.” He paused there, tilting his head as he considered that with a hand rising unconscious to touch a spot over his heart but even that was soon pushed away and his thoughts turned back to the matter at hand. “And then I was here,” he finished.

At the uncertainty that rang in her voice and shone clear on her face, he reached out a hand to touch her shoulder in what he hoped was a comforting gesture. “Hey- it’ll be okay. Wherever we are, we’ll figure this out.” He gave her that small smile again, secure in nothing himself but that the place did not feel like one of Regina’s tricks. They always had an oily taint to them and he had certainly seen more than enough of them in his time with her to be able to recognize them.

When he touched her Ruby did not start away from him, but instead moved her gaze to meet his. She was aware in that moment of his touch, and of how little touch she'd experienced in what felt like forever. Granny was always there to break up anything that got started, and while she did not read his intention or their situation as even vaguely romantic, it did make her hyper aware that she was without Granny for the first time in her life. And, no matter where they were, whatever Ruby decided to do, she could do it. It was frightening but thrilling too, and she met the Sheriff's smile with a broader one of her own. It was her first taste of adventure, as far as her memories were concerned, and she was finding herself more than agreeable to it. "Yes, we will," she agreed.

She felt safer there with him than she would've on her own, and she smoothed her hands down over the sparse material of her shorts, breaking away from his gaze finally to have another look around. The sheriff was a devastatingly handsome man, she'd long been aware, but now was not the time to engage in flirting and she was afraid that no matter her fear or excitement or trepidation at their new surroundings, if she continued to look at him she might not be able to resist at least tweaking at him a little. The bizarreness of her entire situation was beating about her brain, but because she could not handle that much impossibility just then, not when she needed to focus on not losing her mind entirely, she just ignored it. It was terrifying and wonderful what the human brain could do when one sat their mind to it.

"There are people here," she said finally. "Should we ask one of them what this place is, or do you think it's not safe?"

When he sees two figures at the end of the hallway, Charming doesn't think much of it. People come and go all the time and Charming's learned to excuse himself by ducking in behind them, trying not to get in their way. He's learned that none of the doors lead him back to Hook's ship and they don't offer him a way back to Storybrooke and while the impatience and frustration is building, it also comes alongside a healthy dose of resignation.

That resignation starts to bleed away a little when he continues down the hall and realizes that he knows those two. Those aren't two strangers who have wandered into his way. He falters, slightly, when his gaze skitters from Red to The Huntsman, seeing a ghost long dead.

"You have no idea how glad I am to see the two of you," Charming exhales with a laugh when he gets close enough to see that his eyes haven't actually been playing tricks on him.

It was no more the time to consider the knot that tied itself in his stomach at the sight of her smile than it was to allow his hand to linger more than a moment at her shoulder, the recognition of the former pushed away as he removed the latter with a purposeful lack of haste. Storybrooke had had them as acquaintances and little more, and whatever else he might have remembered or thought, there was nothing of a recognition beyond that in her eyes. Emma and Snow- no, Mary Margaret had believed he was crazy when he had attempted to tell them what he remembered, and while he wanted to try to tell Ruby everything in the hopes that she would remember something, anything, he wasn't fool enough to risk her thinking him crazy too.

Focusing instead on her question, he nodded, but did no more than open his mouth to answer before movement out of the corner of his eye had him turning to see who it might have been.

In the lapse of a second Graham was glad he had never addressed the man by name in their old world. Spoken to him, helped him, but never had to figure out which name to call him by - whether it was the lie of Prince 'James' or Snow's moniker of 'Charming.' It gave him one less chance to trip up and say anything that might raise either Ruby's or the man's suspicions if he too was still under the Curse. "Mr. Nolan," he chose instead, trying not to look too interested in what reaction the name might spark. "You've been here...for awhile now?"

The apprehension and excitement of it all was blending together in Ruby and making her feel jittery, her hands coming together in front of her ribcage to allow her fingers to tangle together as she attempted to sort out what their next plan would be. The fact that she'd stepped from a familiar building into a hotel she'd never seen or visited before made the question over how Sheriff Graham could possibly be alive seem minor in that moment. Figuring out where she was and how she could leave, if she could leave, if she even wanted to leave, was taking precedence, though she'd have to dedicate some thought to the smaller wonders of her situation sooner rather than later.

She turned at the sound of David Nolan's voice, surprised, as she sensed Graham was as well. Was everyone from their town here now, or was it just them? If someone was picking members of the city for some sort of trip, it seemed strange that a waitress, a presumed dead sheriff and a former coma patient would be among them, but what did she know?

"Mr. Nolan," she said, then had a look behind him, wondering if anyone else would approach, like Mary Margaret. Or his wife. "What is this place?"

If anything in the world could make him wince enough to make his whole body jerk with an automatic reaction, it's being called David Nolan twiceover. Once, he'd stood on a truck and told everyone that they are both, but that doesn't mean that Charming likes to let David Nolan ride front and center. He'd been weak and indecisive, he'd hurt people. Charming accepts the learnings from that, but not the personality.

To have the both of them call him David Nolan is frightening and disappointing at once because he'd really thought he'd have someone to talk to. Apparently, what he's got is cursed bedfellows, so to speak. The wince is almost visible everywhere, from the tension in his shoulders, to the lines at the corner of his mouth. "...David," he corrects, even though he's not sure it will do much. He looks from the Huntsman to Red, wishing for some kind of recognition. "Your guess is as good as mine. I've been trapped here for a while."

Selfish though it might have been, he was glad for the minor violence of the other man's reaction to the name. Not for any desire to see him suffer, he had not known David Nolan as more than a John Doe who had disappeared from the hospital only to wander blind into the woods. No, David Nolan meant nothing to him, it was that there in that flinching reply that he saw the hope that he was not the only one to have remembered who he was. That the Prince had fought against the Queen would have been enough all on its own to allow him some leeway in the Huntsman's mind, but the fact of him being Snow White's love that gave him his allegiance.

He remembered Snow as Mary Margaret's reactions to his broken memories too well to not be cautious with what he said in front of Ruby, the desire to not drive the woman beside him away making him choose his words carefully.

"David," he began, his brow furrowing as he leaned slightly towards the other man. "Is anyone else here from Storybrooke?" He tried without saying directly to indicate in any way possible that he knew about the Curse, while still keeping his words vague enough to not alert Ruby. "Mary Margaret?" And then, with a strain he was unable to keep from the name he gritted out through his clenching jaw, "Regina?"

All Ruby knew of the man standing in front of her was that he'd been a former coma patient who her good friend Mary Margaret had fallen in love with, and he supposedly with her, despite the fact he was married to another woman. Whether or not Ruby thought Mary Margaret's decision was a wise one had little to do with anything, as Mary Margaret was Ruby's friend and therefore had her steadfast loyalty. If what Mary Margaret had done was wrong, this man was equally guilty, though as far as she knew this man hadn't had any of his property defaced or faced any sort of public shaming as Mary Margaret had. Even more so, he had hurt Mary Margaret, who was easily one of the nicest people Ruby knew.

Ruby, while generally pie sweet and good natured, felt not even one ounce of warmth for the man standing in front of her. She wouldn't be outright cruel as Ruby could never manage that, but she felt like she owed it to Mary Margaret to not pretend everything was peachy keen with him, either.

"Or your wife," she added on. "Mr. Nolan. Is Mrs. Nolan in attendance?"

"My wife isn't here," he says, picking his words carefully given that his ire at Regina for placing him and Abigail under the same doomed umbrella of marriage still eats at him. He still wonders if Frederick is going to come after him with a sword, some days. He looks to Graham, flashing a regretful smile. "Though I wish she were," he says. "And last I saw of Regina was...well, a world away," he says.

If they still think he's David Nolan, there's no way he can tell that he, Emma, Snow, Regina, and Captain Hook have joined forces with Rumplestiltskin on the high seas. They'll think him insane, for sure. "What about the others? ...Leroy?" he asks, faltering when 'Grumpy' nearly comes off his lips. "Mother Superior? Have you seen anyone else, Red? You, Graham?"

And that one, he doesn't even catch, so used to calling her by the right name.

With no idea of where they were or how they had come to be there, there should not have been a spark of disappointment in answer to the Prince's words. The last he had seen of Mary Margaret had been of her so concerned for his well-being and him so unable to assure her or truly appreciate that Regina's curse had done nothing to dim her kindness. It had buried the fearsome and bold woman he had met when they had met a second time in a forest, but the kindness of her had not changed in the least.

As for Regina, he bit out a "Good" before snapping his jaw shut to keep anything more from spilling out of him, glad as he was that the Queen was far from him. There was too much already at war in his head and complication enough in seeing Ruby and not Red there with him, he decided he would rather take a chance at the Prince's company (and perhaps commiseration for their time under the curse) and the sweetness of Ruby's smile and take what time he had to try to piece himself together once more.

The bite in Ruby's tone had his eyebrows kicking up, surprised, but while he was curious why she would be angry with David Nolan, he figured he would learn eventually. "No," he said instead, shaking his head in answer to the Prince. "But I haven't exactly seen much of this place yet."

Ruby admittedly knew little of the two man standing with her. They were not amongst the townspeople that had made themselves readily available to her for conversation and the like when visiting Granny's, though she knew something of each of them, just as she knew something of everyone in Storybrooke. The Sheriff had always been a welcome sight, even if he had maintained polite distances in all the time she'd known him, and while David Nolan was a recent addition to Ruby's life, he'd surely made an impression.

His words about wishing his wife were there made her want to grind her teeth, though even though she knew of the trouble he and Mary Margaret had stirred up together, there was something about David Nolan that made her bite back the urge to snap at him any further. Before she'd known what was going on she had thought him likable enough, and she suppose there had to be something about him if someone as generous and sweet as Mary Margaret had fallen so head over heels for him she'd been willing to do all that she'd done in order to be with him.

She took a deep breath through her nose and then exhaled to calm what was left of her brief spark of temper before speaking. The Sheriff seeming so pleased that the mayor wasn't here was an interesting twist, but then again she knew Madam Mayor was a bitch, just as everyone else in Storybrooke was aware of it. Not having her around certainly wouldn't dampen Ruby's stay, that was for sure.

"I arrived just a few minutes ago," she said. "I was walking out of the diner, and instead of out onto the street I was here. Graham was the first person I saw, and then you." She glanced around. "It looks like a hotel. Is that what it is? How is it even possible?"

It was on the tip of her tongue to add that she and Sheriff Graham had also come from apparently different points in time as in the place Ruby left the Sheriff had been dead for weeks, but she figured that was best left for a conversation in which the Sheriff wasn't present.

He can't remember the last time he's been so frustrated (which is a lie, given that he finds that frustration every time he tries to escape the hotel without any success). He watches Graham and then Ruby, stares at the both of them and wonders how things can be so different between them. He breathes out deeply and knows he shouldn't tell the truth, but he wants to.

Though, if they can't even remember who they really are, that might be one hell of a headache. "I have no idea what it is, only that I've been trapped here. This place doesn't want me to get back." Maybe it has something to do with this situation. Maybe he's supposed to be here to help them remember. "You don't remember anything else?" he asks the both of them cautiously, meaning heavy in his words. About who you are?

The truth of the matter was that the Huntsman had never understood why men (and women) played with their words in shades of truth and called it subtlety. It had seemed to him to be a waste of both time and breath, but where he wanted to keep from driving off Ruby by sounding like a madman if he spoke plainly to Snow's Prince and told him that he had guessed that the other man had remembered who he was as well, Graham found that he had little ability to play subtlety and be understood. He had tried by asking for Snow's counterpart in the hopes that it would do something - the only connection he knew of between himself and the man in front of him being through her - but he couldn't claim he was surprised it had failed. There seemed to be a certain finesse to it that lay out of his reach and he tried to keep his own frustration from spelling itself out across his face.

Between the flinch at the name he'd been cursed with and the slip of his tongue that had him misnaming Ruby as Red, it seemed clear the Prince remembered. Or as clear as anything seemed when their situation was what it was and his head felt overfull with clashing memories.

Where Ruby looked at their surroundings, Graham stole a look over at her and wished again that when she looked at him again it would be with recognition of more than who they had been in Storybrooke. The second looking over the familiar shape of her face in profile was an indulgence he allowed himself only a moment before he shook his head, turning his attention back to the Prince. Understanding where they were had to be a priority, the idea of being trapped anywhere after being kept in a cage for so long already one that hardly put Graham in anything like an amorous mood.

"I was with Emma at the office," he said, the quicksilver recognition of who the woman was to the Prince almost making him wince himself as it occurred to him. He continued, picking his words with care in the hopes of getting a message through to the other man still without alerting Ruby. "We'd been talking about a book Henry showed me. And then I was here."

Ruby listened to Graham's recollection of his last memory before arriving at the hotel, tipping her head slightly at the mention that he'd been with Emma. It seemed as though she'd heard a lot of that, through some various means of gossip or another, just before the Sheriff had died suddenly and unexpectedly in his office with the woman in question. Was that the moment he was referring to now? Instead of dying, had the Sheriff come here? Time travel and world jumping seemed too grand a thought to even start to process, though it would have to be entertained at some point, if nothing more reasonable presented itself.

"I was in the diner," she said. "I'd just had a fight with Granny, quit, and told her I was leaving town. When I walked out the door, I walked in here instead."

It seemed like a strangely morbid form of wish fulfillment, now that she thought about it, and felt a tug of guilt that when she didn't return home by dawn as Granny would expect, Granny would worry.

He wants to share his own story as to where he's been, but it might not go over very well. They might think he's insane, even the Huntsman, who has this flickering like he might understand. At least he's got something to base their timeline off, because he remembers the scandal of Ruby quitting like that. "Emma," he breathes out, unable to help his rueful smile, thinking of how his stubborn daughter had just dove into the ocean to save their lives. "She's okay," he says. "She's fine, where I am."

Even if Graham himself might not be and even if Charming has managed to maroon himself in a strange hotel.

He feels bad ignoring Red, but his focus is on the Huntsman now. "And Henry's book? Pretty fantastic stories in there, aren't there?"

While there was the likely chance that Ruby had had her argument while Graham had been wrapped up in chasing the fevered dream to Regina's crypt, Graham understood at least enough of magic to know one could never assume what its effects might be. She could have left from the very same moment he had thought to kiss Emma again, caught up in Sheriff Graham's infatuation and his gratefulness over being freed from Regina's control, but he would not have bet his life on matters being as straight forward as that. Not where David seemed to have remembered himself and Ruby showed no sign of the fierce creature he had met those few years before the curse had struck. All he could assume, he decided, even as he released a breath and nodded in something like relief to hear of Emma being safe, was that it was likely some magic was involved. How or why, he did not know.

He did not ask for calendar dates as he understood at least in a broad capacity that time did not work the same way within Storybrooke as it had anywhere else, the vagueness of it having lasted as long as he could remember of his time there - time enough for the daughter of Snow White to have been a grown woman.

"When I left you had only come out of your coma some weeks ago, David" he said instead, choosing a concrete event that should have stood as an important marker for both David and Ruby, Storybrooke's new ability to change making such news town-wide knowledge. "Am I right in guessing it has been longer for the two of you?"

He had to fight the pull to look over at Ruby when the Prince latched onto his comment of Henry's book, knowing that while he wanted to be able to search her expression for some hint of recognition, it was best not to work harder to make her suspicious of his behavior. "There are," he agreed, attempting to keep his tone mild, as if the book was only a book and no world changing artifact. "I rather enjoyed the story of Snow White and thr Huntsman that he showed me, but I have always been fond of the forest."

Edited 2014-02-06 19:19 (UTC)

"Snow White stories were always my favorite, too," Charming says, the stupid smile on his face completely clear about how his emotions lie when it comes to supposed wives. "And it's been a lot longer than a few weeks," he promises. "I haven't been in a coma for ... well, I think it's probably been close to a year, now? At least, that." Time gets hard to keep track of when you're under the thrall of a sleeping spell or jumping between worlds and he tries to keep it straight in his mind, but it's rough, sometimes.

Charming can't help a bemused expression when the Huntsman says his own is his favorite story. "He was pretty heroic, saving the Prince and all," he says. "The Prince probably was more grateful to him than anyone in his life, getting him back to Snow the way he did." It's the best way he has of saying thank you without outright telling him.

If it had not been for the fact that his choices, as limited as they had been, had allowed him to do some good and protected the woman who had never deserved the death sentence Regina had laid upon her, Graham would have likely never spoke of his own story as being a favorite. Not even in attempting to communicate his knowledge of the Curse to the Prince. He had paid too dearly for that mercy and for every small attempt of one after for him to be able to think of the fresh revelations in his head with enough distance to appreciate what he had done.

"She did seem a singular woman." He wished then that he knew more of what had happened to Snow in those intervening years of their first meeting and their second. Beyond what information he had gathered through his connection to the Queen, as unquestionably biased and incomplete as those reports must have been.

Unused to gratitude, Graham was taken a moment off guard by the Prince's words. He ducked his head slightly in acknowledgement and took a second to decide that he had to catch the Prince alone at a later time to talk, then remembered the situation at hand and turned back to Ruby, placing a hand flat over his heart in a show of apology. "Ruby, I'm sorry. It's been a long and tiring day, I did not mean to lose focus." He turned to the Prince to repeat Ruby's earlier question, "Is this place safe?" with the rider of, as exhaustion began to claw at the edges of him "Is there somewhere to sleep?"

"She really is," Charming says, beyond passionate about Snow's virtues. He could talk all day about them, but when the Huntsman looks to Red again, he's reminded that they're not alone. Ruby Lucas probably doesn't want to hear David Nolan rambling on about a woman from a fairytale. "It's beyond safe," he assures. "Some people say that if you open a door, you can't exactly expect where it'll lead, but I haven't had any kind of luck with that. Every time I open a door, it's only to more of the hotel," he says.

"If you find one that leads...well, home-adjacent, I hope you'll let me know. I'm very eager to get back there."

Ruby had grown up working in her Granny's diner, and because she'd put so many hours into being a waitress she still maintained a waitress' manners and instincts. The two men taking off on a conversation about Snow White and a book of fairy tales seemed strange to her. So strange, in fact, that she assumed it was some sort of inside joke she was not a part of and simply took a proverbial step back to let them have it out. She had no idea what their conversation stacked up to, but she supposed when put side by side with walking out of the familiar and into some sort of otherworldly hotel place, two grown men, one of them presumed dead for weeks, randomly discussing the merits of Snow White's character was definitely the less weird option.

When David began to speak of the hotel again, though, she left her bemused half-idling thoughts to the side to listen once again. "Well, good to know that it's safe," she said, as at least there was that much.

"Magic?" Graham asked immediately on the Huntsman's instincts, the word falling from his tongue before he had so much as thought to pause and consider the fact that of their number it was Ruby who would not think of magic as an everyday consideration. A day, two before and Graham would have laughed off the idea himself. The loss of the Curse's hold over him had changed far more than he had had time to consider properly, but while he had not seen any of the telltale purple smoke of Regina or Rumplestiltskin's magic in his having been transported to the hotel, he could not entirely rule out the possibility. "Or just talk?"

Whether he himself had any desire to go back to Storybrooke was too complicated a matter to understand with his head beginning to flat out ache and the weight of his bones seeming to double beneath his skin. Still, he nodded automatic to the Prince's request. The Prince without his Snow White made no sense in the world, the straight forward agreeing to the request seeming as much a part of helping the woman who was his friend as any act he had attempted to carry out for her. Easier than nearly any of them in the past, really.

"Good, good," he echoed, taking a deep breath and letting it out again. "I think I need some sleep- is there any way of keeping in contact here?"

"There's a fairly strange, magical, system where you write down information on paper and it gets distributed, though it goes to everyone," he warns. "And I think there's phones available for use." While David Nolan remembers how to use them, Charming himself isn't entirely as keen on the pieces of technology. "Maybe everyone should get some rest and we can regroup, try and find a way back home?" he suggests.

"Oh wow," Ruby said at David's announcement of a strange writing system. It had become quite obvious that they were dealing with something that was well beyond at least her understanding, and while she could read the tiredness plain on Graham's face, she herself was not ready for sleep, not even close. She would, however, relish the chance to be alone with her thoughts, and she supposed getting a room in this hotel, if that's what it was, and attempting to figure it all out would be as good an option as any.

"I think that's a wonderful idea," Ruby said. "Do we...Check in? Are their rooms?"

The idea was basic and a good one, and it had Graham nodding in immediate agreement. There was much to think on in the present and much to discuss later. Too much to swallow in a single sitting in a strange environment. He had to wonder on the Curse and the strange implications to do with the Prince having come from more than a year after his waking and disappearing from the hospital, the memory of who he had been so long ago clear in his eyes, while Ruby was...Ruby. Cheerful and bright and unknowing of who she had been before.

Both the writings the Prince talked of and the phones could be used, of course, for as much as the Huntsman might have preferred some more familiar way of communicating, it wasn't as if there were likely to be carrier pigeons to carry notes to one another.

He stood and waited for the Prince's answer, wondering why he of all people would be thinking of carrier pigeons. Wolves didn't keep carrier pigeons.

"I kept looking for a room until the door handle opened, but I don't think the front desk is a bad place to start, either," he says, watching Ruby carefully and looking for any indication that she remembers what's been happening. In a way, part of him is glad that she hasn't yet lived through George's manipulations, but he wants her to remember for his sake, at least.

"Maybe we can meet up again sometime soon and talk," he says heavily.

Ruby had to wonder yet again at the safety of her situation when the doors could be so volatile, but if David Nolan said it was safe she figured that would be enough for now. He seemed relatively unharmed if not stressed and a bit different than she remembered him, but that was likely just the newness of the situation.

"I would like that," she said in reply to David's statement of them all meeting up again. "Do you have a room number or someplace definite we can come find you/"

"1937," he replies. "It's on the first floor, you just have to keep wandering." He gives the both of them a grateful smile, aware that there are obviously some issues they're going to have to work out, but he doesn't care. They're here. "I really am glad to see the both of you," he confesses. "Truly."

Somehow there was some relief in having a plan in place. Released from the watchful eye of Regina and knowing that their surroundings were safe - he took stock in David's opinion on that matter as he doubted that years fighting of fighting the Queen would have made the man lax when it came to searching out threats in the world around him - Graham let out a breath and nodded. Where everything else was unsettled, he had to agree. He nodded, "We will talk more later."

Ms. Scarlet in the Conservatory with a Dark Curse

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