A girl walks into a bar...kind of...

Nothing of the marvel of being able to splay a hand flat out against his chest and feel not an echo but the real, true beat of his heart had worn off in the slightest. Not in hours, not in days. For the first time in decades no threat hung over his head. Between the newfound freedom of it, the reunion of heart and body along with that of the wolf who padded nearby, Graham’s thoughts strayed with curiosity toward the Nexus’ many doors.

 

He had walked through them before - had stepped through them by accident or by purpose when he had needed the emptiness that had lain outside of the hotel’s walls. There had been little curiosity in it then, no more than there had been a desire to touch any life not sheltered in the strangeness of the place he had found himself some months before. Where he was in no rush to make any decisions and less desire to see some of Storybrooke’s residents face to face as long as he lived, he could not deny that he missed the forest. The Nexus’ gardens were pale shadows compared to the enchanted forest he had grown in and known as his home for so much of his life.

 

All of which had led him to where he stood then. In the shape in which he stood then.

 

Graham sighed heavily as he looked down at himself, smoothing his hands over his thighs and encountering a shape that was entirely wrong beneath the cotton robe he had picked up in the hotel shop. Curiosity, he knew, killed the cat. A door and a wolf and a jungle he had fled quite soon after entering (no one had ever explained that dinosaurs were downed, wingless dragons!) and he had ended up as he was then…in dire, dire need of whiskey.

 

He tightened his belt as he padded barefoot across the lobby and toward the bar, assuring himself that everything (as it was) was fully covered as he had to step up to be able to sit on one of the bar’s barstool and lifted a hand to signal to the bartender. “One whiskey, please. Neat.”