princehonorable | (no subject)

The walls had seemed to have begun closing in on him, reminding him in echoes of memories of the Queen's sharp, cold cage and his inability to leave its confines for anything but the excursions the Queen sent him on, each less palatable than the last. The stables had hardly been his first thought, for all that he had been drawn always more to the company of animals than he had of men. How could they be, when he had spent so much time in his youth confused as to why any animal would submit themselves to the control of men, and so much time later too aware that he understood the feeling of having been yoked too well.

Out in the openness of the air and the freedom from mirrors, he had roamed the hotel grounds for hours, loosing the tightness that wrapped around his chest under the guise of continuing his explorations of the Nexus. It was only later that he neared the stables and was drawn on by the faint knickering and pawing of the horses in their stalls, curious to see what animals there were under those roofs.

Names laced themselves into his memory, colored his thoughts with which personality they belonged to. Even as they were weaving themselves into one another with every passing day to allow him room to breathe without tripping accidental over some remembered horror done by or done to him. His being caught up in the mire of his thoughts and the senses that belonged to the Huntsman far more than Graham had him missing the latter being called out. Then the title Regina had bestowed on him. Finally the name the Queen had taken and turned into a title at her command, leaving nausea roiling faintly at the sound of it.

His head jerked over at the sound of it, ripped suddenly from his thoughts by one word. He turned the corner of the stables to see Snow's Prince standing there and found himself asking, "David? Or should I call you Prince?"

"Please, David works perfectly well," he says, bowing his head in greeting as the relief rolls over him at the fact that he recognizes his name from the Enchanted Forest. "Not many people actually know this, but David was my name before Storybrooke too. Sort of," he admits, narrowing his eyes as he tries to recall if Graham had ever heard the story of how Charming had become Prince James. "I was truly hoping that you remembered, but I didn't want to cause Red any distress," he says.

He holds out a hand for the Huntsman to shake, practically bursting with energy as he relishes the opportunity to speak freely.

Closing the distance between them until they stood at a more friendly space apart, the Huntsman lifted his hand to meet the other man for a shake. He hummed a thoughtful note, giving the hand in his grip a firm shake before dropping his hand to his side. "I'd heard you weren't actually Prince James, but beyond that all I know is that you were Snow's Prince. Honestly, that's all I needed to know."

"Graham," he said after a moment. "I remember - remembered just about a second before I got here, actually - but I'd rather you called me Graham." There was a halting set to his shoulders then, as he attempted to vocalize something of the difficulty of understanding himself both as Graham and the Huntsman when by all rights he should have pulled himself entirely back to being the Huntsman. Perhaps he would have if not for the eight years he had spent seeing that name turn to ash and blood in his mouth. Failing in his attempt to explain anything of the matter, he shook his head and instead turned to a different topic. "Ruby said she was from a few weeks after me, and you're a year or so. I take it that the Curse was broken somewhere between the two?"

"Graham, it is," he agrees. Now that they've settled on the business of who they are, they can get down to the more intensive discussions of what's happened to them. "The curse was broken some time ago and a lot has happened since then. Emma and Snow managed to get pulled back to the Enchanted Forest, though we got them back from Storybrooke and...well, let's just say I found myself in a realm I never thought I'd see. You ever heard of Neverland? Because I can't seem to get back to it, no matter how much I try and it's crucial that I do," he insists seriously.

"I have to get back to my family."

Nudged at his back by the nose of a horse greedy and in search for a treat, Graham moved a step to the side, lifting a hand to stroke over its cheek. The action allowed him space to think, then shook his head. "I can't remember ever hearing of it, no." There was a good deal of information in that one small speech and lacking context to put it together with what he knew, he had to work to fit the pieces of it together into something resembling sense in his world.

He zeroed on the most important question: "Are they in danger?"

"I don't know," Charming admits. "But Rumplestiltskin and Regina are there, we're being steered into an island of danger by Hook and Snow and Emma could very well have decided to jump overboard and start on their own." Charming's in a similar position, but apparently he abandoned them by coming to a ritzy hotel. "It makes me long for the simple days of the curse, almost."

While he listened attentively to the other man's words, Graham was pulled up short by his last statement. It had him shaking his head, lifting a hand to point at the other man's chest in a gesture that was insistent but by no means meant to be threatening. "Never. Never wish for that, you might not know who might be listening." There was much that he did not understand of how or why he had been taken from Storybrooke, but he had lived too long under the shadow of foul, black magic as the Huntsman to not be absolutely careful when it came to wishing for things. There was never the divide between wholehearted and misunderstood jest with some magics.

He dropped his hand with a suddenly weary expression, his tone gone reproachful. "Not all of us slept for twenty eight years. Some of us would have preferred it."

Charming doesn't want to point out that he was on the cusp of death when the curse was enacted and that Regina had probably saved his life, but he also knows that Graham had endured the curse like the rest of them had -- in a depressing state of sameness. "Then I'll wish that we were back home in the Enchanted Forest. We almost got there, you know. We'd been farming beans, but...well," he exhales, a dark look on his face. "That didn't work out so well."

The topic was one difficult enough for Graham to understand that he had to take a step back and breathe away from it, the whole matter a mess in his head that a few days could not have straightened out. He reasoned that the Prince had had a good deal more time to come to terms with what had happened, and it was hardly as if he could blame the man for having gotten that much needed perspective where he himself had not. For a second he nearly apologized, but was unsure how or even if he should. The words caught and died in his throat, leaving him to nod in something like understanding.

"You were farming...beans." He repeated, the sentence dragged out in his disbelief as his brows furrowed. "To get home?"

"Magical beans. You should see what a single one can do," Charming says, thinking of how they could have been back in the Enchanted Forest if not for the razed lands. "Even one could jump between worlds with ease. In the end, we only had one left, but we needed it to go after Henry when he was kidnapped."

He's aware how mad this must all sound to someone who hasn't been there with him the whole way. "I really wish Red would remember, just so she could back me up and I wouldn't sound so crazy."

"Henry was kidnapped? By who?" Where he was attempting to keep up with the information of a year's time, dealt out even as sparingly as their conversation allowed, Graham thought he was surely heading for either a great headache or dangerous waters concerning the knowledge of the future. Magic beans that allowed the passage between worlds, the curse broken but no one returned properly to their world, Rumplestiltskin and Regina still in residence...it all was a bit much. "By Rumplestiltskin and Regina?"

The mention of the woman who had been much in the center of his thoughts in the days since he had remembered who he had been, so long ago, and Graham left all else to the side. "Is she safe where you're from, Red?" He spoke with a great deal of concern, perhaps as much or more than he had in assuring himself that Regina was nowhere around or that Charming knew where Snow was. It did not occur to him to even not it, never mind to consider that he had no idea if David even understood they had known each other once.

Edited 2014-02-13 03:24 (UTC)

"Outsiders," Charming says, feeling a familiar pang that reminds him of how he had failed to protect Henry. He'd been a terrible deputy and should have been better. "Someone named Greg and his accomplice, Tamara. We still don't know why apart from the fact that they hate magic." And they hated it enough to want to take Henry, for some reason. "And here's where it gets complicated," he sighs. "Rumplestiltskin is Henry's other grandfather. And Regina being his adoptive mother..."

He lets out a rueful laugh. "You can imagine, things got complicated. And Red, she's okay," he promises. "There was a rough moment where the town thought she was killing people as the wolf, but she didn't do a thing," he insists firmly. "She's safe. She's with the others, making sure Storybrooke stays out of sight."

Graham could not help but lift a hand to his head, pressing his fingers against his brow in an attempt to stem a threatening headache. Without a year's context to slate the information David told him, he could not seem to sort out the familiar and unfamiliar names, the strange situations and ideas into anything resembling sense to a man who had only remembered himself mere days before. He knew it was his own understanding that was lacking and it was hardly the most flattering of feelings.

The comment of Rumplestiltskin being Henry's other grandfather was more or less the final nail in the coffin.

He sucked in and then let out a breath, shaking his head as he dropped his hand again to his side. "I think we should get a drink." That he was assured that Red was safe - and what was this about Red being accused of killing, he knew her as both woman and wolf and could not imagine her turning on her friends - allowed him that much comfort in a sea of confusion. As he told the other man, "A strong one."

Edited 2014-02-15 09:06 (UTC)

"I can't disagree with you," Charming says, given that he's been driven to drink more than once when it comes to the discovery of family secrets and how his family is coping with them. Some days before Emma had believed, really believed, he felt like he could use a beer in his hand at all times. "How about I get the first round?" he offers. "As a thank you for remembering and not leaving me to feel like I'm crazy," he suggests, patting the flank of one of the horses as he passes it, leaving the stables before he feels the pull to take one of the horses and get out of there, try and find a door to Neverland just to prove that a hotel can't separate him from his family.

"It's definitely been a rough few years. All twenty-nine of them." Because even after the curse had been broken, the year had been difficult and denied people of most happy endings.

Graham had no desire to then consider the implications of how or why Emma had apparently had a child with the son of the Dark One, the sheer mechanics of it as well as any confusion over Rumplestiltskin even having a son, let alone how he could have one available outside Storybrooke to father a child. He chose instead to focus on the relief over Red being safe and well back in that future Storybrooke. That as well as the knowledge that he could watch over Ruby there in the Nexus allowed an island of steadiness to his world he sorely needed.

"Sounds good to me," he walked alongside the other man and was surprised to find that he preferred the man's company and understanding to the idea of being left alone. Perhaps for one of the first times in his life. "If you need anything-" for a second he broke off, the words seeming unwieldy on his tongue before he gave the other man a rueful grin, "Well, I would give you a whistle as I did Snow, but we'll figure something out."

"I had a pretty decent whistle back on the farm, I could always summon you that way," Charming offers, given that he'd called the sheepdog in with the most piercing whistle he had. He shakes his head, wandering towards the bar. "You know, it hasn't failed my notice that you saved both my and Snow's life. You're a big reason she and I got together. In a way, that makes you instrumental in breaking the curse."

There was no more point in considering the fact that Snow had never had the chance to use the whistle he had cut for her than there was in attempting to imagine what the world might have been like for him had the Queen fallen for his lie at least long enough for him to have gotten out of her kingdom. Even had he not been taken off guard by the other man's words and the direct honesty of his voice that suggested David believed what he said. Graham's eyebrows rose and he was left a second speechless as they neared the bar, before he chose a seat for himself and turned his head towards Snow's prince.

"I'm not sure if I would count the first time I meant Snow, given what I had meant to do," he demurred, although his tone was thoughtful. "Save for what I could do for her and for her, I have done more bad than good." The thought of what he had been forced to do under Regina's command turned his stomach and left him quick to speak of something better. "Did she tell you that I met her twice before I ever saw you?"

"She only mentioned the time you helped her to escape the Queen's attempt to kill her, but we've been fairly busy. Snow and I are long overdue for some quiet time to catch up between the two of us," he says, ordering a few drinks for them. "I'd like to hear it, if you're willing to tell me about the second time."

As strange as it was to be sitting down with the man and ordering up a drink, he couldn't say it was an unpleasant feeling. Anything but, really.

The topic of Snow was one of the few he could find that was not painted in regret. While Regina had tried to twist those memories with her influence and the part she had played in them, she had ultimately failed. Graham took his glass from the bartender with a nod and a quiet thank you and angled himself toward David to speak.

"I only managed to escape Regina once. Years before the curse, she'd recruited a wolfpack to help her," he tipped his head before shaking it, lifting his glass to his mouth to take a drink. "When she took me out to watch what they did to a village that had resisted her, Red showed up."

Charming isn't surprised that Regina would stoop low enough to employ other people to do her work for her. He gives a rueful laugh, smiling when he hears that Red intervened. "I'm glad to hear that she was able to help stick a pin in Regina's plans. What happened next? I know Red managed to come out of it alive because she's here and she's been with us in Storybrooke for the past year. So...?"

"I was able to grab the box with my heart and escape while Regina was distracted, and-" he broke off to fiddle with the glass on the countertop a second in the remembrance of the long hunt to find the wolf who had quite literally stolen his heart out of his arms, and of the woman's shock and horror at seeing what it was she had stolen before she had given it back to him. "Once Red and I realized that we were not on opposite sides, that we both wanted to keep the Queen from finding Snow, we agreed to band together to find her ourselves instead."

He remembered the surprise in it as much as the enjoyment of the werewoman's company as they had followed Red's knowledge of the princess to discover her outside a tavern in the dead of night.

"We found her just as she had decided to turn herself in to the Queen in the hopes of stopping her reign of terror." He shook his head and took a drink, "Even if you and I both know that killing Snow would not have kept Regina from destroying everything in her desire for power."

Charming bows his head down, understanding all too well that Regina was unstoppable when she had a goal in her mind. "Graham," he says, cautiously. "Not to put a damper on your story, but the point in time that I come from, I know that Regina still had your heart," he says, wondering what the next line in this story is going to be. "How did she get it back?"

There was an embarrassed kick to his realizing that he had sunk himself into those remembered events and feelings so easily, in that surprising turn to adventure and of doing right, all without thinking too much of how it had ended. Graham lifted his glass to his mouth again to drain it in the hopes that the burn of alcohol could make it easier to speak matter of factly about it. Finally, he set the glass back to the countertop and turned his head towards the other man. "I gave it to her."

The words settled sour on his tongue and had him carefully adding, "It was the only way to allow Red time to get Snow away and still keep Regina from killing the Pack when they turned on her." As if his reasons could have made his decision any more palatable.

Charming tips his head to the side, biting back the disappointment with a sigh. "She always seems to get her way, doesn't she," he remarks, scoffing given that he's currently trying to get back to a situation in which they're working with her and two other villains. He's not even sure how they're trusting them and if he does get back to his family, there's going to be some stipulations.

"I'm sorry it had to be like that," he offers, raising his hand to order Graham another drink.

"I can't say I'm feeling optimistic about that not having changed," he told Charming, but his tone was commiserating and wholly without bite. He knew better than most exactly how fixated Regina could be. All along it had been about destroying Snow and making her pay for whatever slight, real or imagined, that the younger woman had dealt her stepmother. No matter how the Huntsman had pushed for mercy, for forgiveness, for the girl and not for himself, his attempts had come to nothing as far as he was aware.

He allowed the bartender to trade his empty glass for a fresh one before he spoke again, measuring his words with care. "I don't regret it. No matter all that happened and all I had to do, I would do it again if it meant they were safe." If anything he knows of the man proved true, he thought that David would understand that.

"I'd like to have seen it done without so much bloodshed," Charming admits, giving Graham a smile born from the many losses that they've been dealt as a result of dealing with villains. "It honestly feels, sometimes, as if there's no break to be caught. Sometimes, I think there will always be someone after me or after Snow. Considering she and I just want to be together, we seem to have made ourselves many enemies."

He turns on his stool, eyeing Graham curiously. "Do you have a plan, then? Are you going to try and get back to the Enchanted Forest?"

It sounded too fantastical to Graham's mind that there could be some other way than through bloodshed and too many lives lost against Regina's magic and her dealings with whatever dark creatures she could lure to her side. Regina was too fanatical, too seduced by power to be dissuaded by any means that he could see. She had proven time and time again that she would only trade one cruelty for the opportunity of another. While he allowed a sympathetic nod, he decided to keep his opinion on the matter to himself as he could see no way that it might help either of them to say so aloud at the moment. Instead he chose to say "And as many friends as enemies. It might help to remember that, that for all else you two will never have to stand alone."

David's question forced him to pause and consider how to say what he had only begun to turn over in his mind. Finally, he shook his head. "No, I will not." His brow furrowed, fingers brushing over the rim of his glass. "There's nothing left for me there. I had thought-" he broke off, uncertain of how to put it before he decided it was best to simply admit what he had not been able to in so many years. "I had thought I had a chance for something there once, beyond simply having my freedom, but now- Now she does not even remember who I am."

Edited 2014-02-21 04:23 (UTC)

Charming still yearns to go back. There's something nostalgic and wonderful about the notion that he can go back to a place like the Enchanted Forest and hope that it might welcome him there. "If Snow were here, I think I would stop at nothing to convince her to find a door home. And then we would steal Emma and Henry away with us and I'd figure out how to keep Regina and all the others out."

Selfish, true, but he thinks they've suffered enough and deserve some happiness. "Who might this she be? That doesn't remember you?"

He did not want to count through the years he had lost to Regina's control, those years too out of his control and yet ones he could not entirely absolve himself of what he had done. Eight years after Snow to the Curse, those years after the Curse lost to a haze. All moving beside people he had known and not known, and been entirely unaware of either.

What he was about to say he wasn't sure how David would react to, as without context it might have seemed entirely out of left field. He scrubbed a hand over the back of his hair and admitted, "Red, actually."

It's not who he would've expected, but then, he hadn't been privy to Red's life back in the Enchanted Forest beyond her helping him out when the Queen (or King George) came looking for his head on a pike. "Red?" he replies, his smile curving upwards wryly. He laughs warmly when he thinks about the wolf that the Huntsman always had with him, wondering now if it'd been a werewolf, too.

"You really like wolves, don't you," he jokes amiably.

Another time and he would have to admit to the man that he had kissed Emma, ignorant of the fact that she was Snow and David's daughter. That matter was as tangled as any and was sure to make his head hurt even if it wasn't already full of the clash of two lives and the complication of Red/Ruby. Another time, but not this one.

Ruby and Red pushed Emma too easily out of his head, and when the other man laughed, he let himself smile. He had realized it too late to have done anything about it before the world had forced his hand. What he had buried willingly to keep from Regina had been become what had been buried for him, and when the woman had stood in front of him and held nothing of those memories in her eyes, he had felt all the more lost for it. Still, she was safe, she appeared happy, and he was not alone for both her and the Prince's presence.

"I was raised by them, actually," he replied easily, taking a mouthful of his drink. Where his words that followed had come only with disdain in the past, just then they came with a note of amusement, "They make a whole lot more sense than your kind."

Charming's brow has been going up the whole time Graham has been speaking. "I've never really begun to understand people," he agrees. "Given my complicated life, I genuinely think that might be a result of the madness that afflicted me since birth." Their family, already struck by Rumplestiltskin's deal. "You know, sometimes I wonder what my life might have looked like if a deal had never been made. Calmer, probably, but I'd also never have met Snow."

"So maybe, maybe being raised by people who mold the way you think affects who you want to be with," he says with a shrug. "I know my mother taught me to look for friends and love in other good-hearted, honest people. I want to do right by her."

In all likelihood and outside the realm as was connected to Snow and the reports the Queen had hissed in rage over, he knew no more about the other man's life than David knew about his. It had him listening attentively, even as he curled his hand around his glass and tipped it onto one side of its bottom and swirled the alcohol round and round. The action helped divert something of the energy that buzzed through his fingertips and across his shoulders. He meant to allow the other man to speak without any needed comment, but the word 'deal' caught his attention too much to let pass him by. "Deal?" he repeated, "What deal was that?"

He could not disagree with the man on the other matter, no matter that his experience had been almost the exact opposite in those who had raised him. Those he had left behind. He lifted his glass to his mouth again but paused there, lowering it again as he attempted to make sense enough to explain his thoughts without simply overwhelming the conversation with them. "Red had what my pack lacked - this sense of honor and the desire to do right by more than just herself. The Pack was too driven by fear and anger, I had to leave them long ago."

Charming is grateful that the rumour of his childhood hasn't spread to the whole of the Enchanted Forest, though it's not as though it's the juiciest morsel that can be fed. "I have a twin brother. I had a twin brother," he corrects. "Prince James? King George's son. My parents made the deal to get money to save the farm and gave up my brother. And if James hadn't died, then I never would have become the prince I was." It sounds so simple when laid out like that, even though Charming knows very well how complicated it truly is.

"Speaking of Red..." Charming says, clearing his throat. "How do we make her remember? Do we have to send her back until the curse is broken or do you think there's something we can do here?"

That- that actually explained a good many things when it came to Regina's cryptic commentary, the smug tilt of her lips when she had spoken of the Prince and the King. The nature of having gotten his information only overheard or from the Queen's gloating had left his knowledge of the goings on of the world outside the Palace at once skewed and spotty. He had known that the man had not been King George's son, but had thought it fruitless to guess at how or why that situation had come about.

There was only one who the Huntsman could think of who would make such a deal, but he would not speak the creature's name aloud unless it was necessary.

"Huh," he said instead, tipping his head a degree at that new information before letting it be. Only for the conversation to open the way to the confession he had just set aside for a later time. "I do not know." He wanted, almost desperately, for Red to remember herself but could not say how it could be accomplished. He steeled himself, drank the entirety of his glass in one swallow and turned himself to look at David evenly as he told him in measured words, "I kissed Emma. That is when I began to remember."

He raises his brow and waits for a few seconds to let that piece of information sink in and for that to process. He licks his lips and clears his throat and nope, that's still sitting in a little bubble that feels a little like protective anger. "You kissed my daughter," Charming says, the words crisp, clear, and definitely not easy to mistake for anything else. "And then you left her," he says.

It's habit of twenty-eight years that had his hands lifting, palms forward in the universal gesture of 'wait wait wait' "Look, it wasn't like that-" A few days space was nowhere near enough for him to be able to forget the desire to kiss her or that he had done so while thoroughly sloshed. "It wasn't something I should have begun with her, I knew that - I just - I couldn't feel anything for as long as I could remember. Not until she arrived, and I couldn't understand why," He was rushing over his words, trying to make himself understood even where he had gone about everything the wrong way.

He stopped and sighed, "Without her I could not have freed myself from Regina, I would not have remembered who I am, and I am nothing but not grateful to Emma for what she has done for me. If she hadn't kissed me-" Even where he wanted to leave no doubt that he had nothing but respect and, yes, affection for the woman, he could not find the words to encompass all of what he felt then. He shook his head, "I did not mean to leave her, David, but if there is a chance in the world to be with the woman I love, shouldn't I take it?"

He's willing to listen to Graham's protestations for a little while, seeing if he's going to dig his way into the hole or whether he's going to try crawling out of it any time soon. "Seeing as how I nearly ruined my life many times over just to be with the woman I love, I suppose I can understand that." He musters up a smile, looking at Graham thoughtfully, because he knows that Emma is out of the picture now. "So, Red...do you think your connection in the past might be able to spark some of her memories?"

With his understanding of men limited to the cobbled together knowledge he had picked up before the Queen's collar had tightened at his throat, and twisted through the years of his captivity, Graham did not know what to make of the situation. Not involving a man and his grown daughter. Not to do with protocol or expected behavior. Certainly not when the Dark Curse muddied the waters beyond any hope of matters clearing on their own.

He managed a nod at what seemed to be the other man's upset settling, but felt no more sure of the situation. Or that he had been at all successful at making himself understood. As it was, Graham thought he would gladly take the man simply taking pity on him enough to let it slide. Only for him to have to lift a hand to his hair again at the question asked of him. The matter had taken up much of his thoughts where it had been able, but his understanding of the Curse was tenuous at best and his ability to break such powerful magics non-existent as far as he knew. He had not been able to save himself from Regina's manipulations, how could he hope to save Ruby from her magic? "I don't know," he admitted, finally. "I don't even know if she felt the same as I had, all those years ago."

Charming isn't sure he wants to touch that with a ten foot pole. He feels for Graham, he really does, but the last time he kissed Snow when she couldn't remember who he was, he'd wound up sucker-punched in the face for it, having learned a valuable lesson about not presuming true love's kiss would solve things so handily. "Maybe we need to bring her somewhere, or to someone," he says, still unsure as to who that could be.

He shakes his head, sympathy written all over his face. "I'm sorry that she can't remember."

Graham neither wanted nor sought the other man's pity, and so made to attempt to push further into the topic of what he had just admitted. Frankly, he was glad David left it as it was and did not prod at the confusion and frustration over the matter that Graham thought he needed a good deal more time to understand himself.

"I am too," he agreed, unable to stop the sigh that followed, though he would not forget to be grateful that Ruby was safe. That he stood not alone in a strange place, that he had an ally he knew could be trusted (as rare a thing as that was, to his mind). "Emma did break the Curse with time, didn't she?" As much as he hated the idea that Ruby might have to leave in order to remember what they had all lost, he could not deny that that might have been a strong possibility. "She is - as far as I am aware - the only one who holds the key to breaking the Curse."

"She broke the curse, yes," David agrees, his smile as bright as possible when discussing his daughter's ability and her incredible talent for being the saviour. "It didn't fix everything. In fact, I think we're all still struggling to come to terms with it. Emma included. She's nearly the same age as her parents. I'm a grandfather," he says, laughing at the madness of it. "She broke the curse, but there wasn't an immediate happy ending before us."

While he begrudged neither David nor Snow their happiness, having been witness for too long to the hatred Regina had nursed for the pair and the evil she had wreaked in her desire to destroy her step daughter, Graham did not smile then. He nodded, "I understand." Graham had little love of magic and less belief that it was the key to one's happiness, but even if it did not fix everything, breaking the Curse on Red was the least he owed her. "I don't expect a happy ending, David. I know better than to hope for that for me, but what matters is that Red be free of Regina's spell."