The sting of the other man's words had perhaps little to do with the man himself and everything to do with the destruction that had been laid waste to all of Graham's and the Huntsman's lives by the woman who had told him once that they were like two souls of the same kind. The blessed hollowness he felt there then, in the place beyond the Nexus' door and in embrace of the same unfeeling state he had tried so hard to shake himself out of in Storybrooke made that sting more distant. As if the conversation was almost about someone other than himself.

And still it made it difficult to swallow that David's words seemed so flimsy then. "Don't talk to me of terrible things, David," he told him, voice gone more exhausted than angry. "You cannot possibly know all she has done. Not if you have not spent nearly forty years at her side." The length of that time felt as if it stretched on endlessly, making him wish that the memories of Storybrooke had faded along with the fuzziness of the false past she had planted in his mind. "I have-" his fists curled at his side as he remembered too many faces and too many punishments for having failed to be as cruel as she had urged him to be. "I have destroyed so many lives at her command. I have lost everything, and I will die at her hand."