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.