follow_the_wolf | Entries tagged with c: ruby

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.”

For the better part of thirty years he had been limited to the strict boundaries of Storybrooke, to a single small town and its surrounding forest where he had ranged so far and wide in his life before the Queen's yoke had settled across his shoulders. It was all but unthinkable, as even in those years before the dark curse he had been sent out on excursions into the villages and lands under Regina's control. Such expeditions had been rare in eight years and had never been times that Graham had in the least enjoyed who he was or what he had been made to do, but still the memory of them echoed in his thoughts until shoved forcefully away in favor of exploring the first new surroundings he had had in decades.

He wished to get the lay of the land, as it were, and had spent the majority of the past days devoted to exactly that task. Although he had avoided the doors not trafficked regularly (as far as he could see) by the hotel's other residences, the reminder of the Prince's words on the matter keeping him cautious, he doubted his caution would keep him from those for long. There was the matter of why he had been brought to the hotel that plagued him, as much as the how, although the latter he assumed had to do with magic. But whose?

He explored this new world carefully until a careful stock taken of his having only the clothes on his back and a few bills in his wallet had forced him to consider a slightly more long term concept, that of procuring employment at the hotel for the time being. It required some asking around and a visit to the hotel office, but a short time later he secured himself a position among the hotel's security, having little idea else what use his skills could be in such a setting.

The days since his arrival had allowed his memories to settle more sure in his head, the breaks between Huntsman and Graham lining up more neatly for all the fact that Graham's hazy experience when seen through the Huntsman's eyes left him nauseous too often. The complications of Regina and of Emma and of the feelings he had buried years and years before in order to keep them and the woman he harbored them for safe made no small tangle, but still he found himself drawn down to the hotel's bar with the understanding of who he was likely to find there.

He took a seat, setting his forearms on the table in front of him and tried to catch the eye of the woman with her dark hair spilling over her shoulders. "Hello, Ruby."

Memory throbbed like an exposed nerve as Graham wandered through the first floor of the hotel, attempting to look at everything at once but seeing little with wide, confused eyes as he set one foot in front of the other with no goal in mind beyond simply moving. The walls of his office had spun around him, leaving Emma and one last glimpse of her confused face in his wake before he had been dropped into the middle of the grand lobby, the gleaming wood and open spaces startling after the drab insides of his office.

He pulled to a stop in the conservatory, his head tipping back to feel the warmth of the sunlight on his face. There he sucked in a breath and allowed himself a moment, only a moment, to pretend that the lush greenery that surrounded him was of another world. The smells were all wrong, no wet earth or woody oak. The light was wrong as well, too clear without the dappling wrought by the sunlight being scattered by the leaves. Still, it allowed him to sort through memories old and new.

He could hardly think within walls on the best of days, he had forgotten that. He had forgotten so many things.

The Huntsman

Entries tagged with c: ruby

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