The weight of Emma's revelation had grown too much to bear long within the Nexus, having changed the circumstances of his stay enough to push him past his aversion of the doors. How quickly he had agreed to David's plan. How desperately he had wanted to do anything but stand still and think too long on what seemed the inevitable conclusion to everything he had yet been through.

The distance that stood between him and the other man soothed something of the hurt of having been kept in the dark about his own death. For all their history, their ties lay in Snow first and foremost, and as counter-intuitive as he might have thought it to be, Graham did not deny that the fact that they had known each other only in a cursory way and only through the man's True Love did allow him to feel something other than anger at what had been kept for him for months.

Whether he could yet face Ruby was another matter entirely.

Pulling the thick fur of his coat tighter around his throat, Graham took a moment to observe the wide, white world as it existed around them. The brightness of it was all but blinding, the wind sharp as knives and bitter cold, almost unlike anything he had experienced himself but for the northern reaches of the kingdom so long ago. "Further North," he shouted back over the whipping sound of the wind around them. "We may find a fishing or whaling station there."