princehonorable | How the hell am I supposed to find a room with no door?

How the hell am I supposed to find a room with no door?

At first, the oppressive weather had been a fairly big detriment to the door, but it had lurked in Charming's mind the more he'd been away from it. The cold had stopped the pain of the dreamshade and the quiet had been peaceful, almost soothing. He doesn't want to go there alone, though, because the fear of getting lost out there is too great and he does need to find Neverland. He'd figured out quickly enough that he needed someone who could track, someone who could hunt.

Seeing as Snow isn't here, he's got the next best thing.

Once he's equipped them both with packs of food and thick coats, Charming leads Graham to the icy world behind the propped open door, realizing once they're in the midst of snow and ice that it's actually exactly what he needs right now. The air is brisk and freezing and it makes his face hurt, but the dreamshade is a world away and the world is a blank canvas for them to explore.

He sets his pick in the ice, grinning at Graham like a madman. "What do you think?" he shouts above the high winds. "Should we keep heading West?"

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It would be something, Charming thinks, to go back to his old ways. While he hadn't done much hunting, there had been a lake close to the farm and fishing had been a cheap and easy way to provide dinner for himself and his mother. True, this landscape is a far cry from the old fishing hole that he's used to, but the activity of it, the core concept, that hasn't changed and it's what he's yearning for.

Some familiarity before it all ends. He's noticed that Graham seems somewhat off, somewhat strange, and he wonders if it has anything to do with Emma's arrival. "Are you okay?" he asks, above the wind.

Graham drew the edges of his coat tighter at the boundaries between glove and coat, collar and throat, in an only partially successful attempt to keep out the razor edge of the wind. Where the wind bit at every exposed inch of skin it could find, it was not the physical cold that held his attention then. The worlds beyond the doors stood outside whatever protection the Nexus afforded him, the feeling of cold sinking into the hollowed shell of his chest and outlining the shape of all he had lost. He had felt the sensation before and shied away from each door he did not stumble through to forget who he was for awhile, but where it otherwise would have been too reminiscent of the years he had served the Queen and brought him only pain, the numbness was something of a relief then.

"No," he said in reply, voice leveling out with the feeling of being something distant from himself. "I am not anywhere near it." As he looked at the other man he understood, as he had been unable to with eyes blinded by his own emotion, why Snow's prince might not have told him his fate. Why he and Ruby both had kept the approaching deadline of his death from him where he now saw that first meeting in the arboretum as painted thickly with it. "But this is better."

Charming swallows back the lump in his throat that reminds him that this is not the only secret he's concealed, but where death stands, he feels that his own secret is far more personal and he doesn't know how to ask for the help he needs from people he knows. He seems to only know how to tell strangers. "How did you find out?" he finally asks, because his curiosity makes him want to know, but also he's curious if there are answers to be had from somewhere within the Nexus.

Feeling more the part of the Huntsman than he had in years, but still as hollowed as Regina's Sheriff had been made to be, he could not but be aware of the stone weight of his stomach within him. As he was of the beat of his heart being only an echo within his ribcage.

He was glad (if only distantly) that the other man made no play of ignorance then, the truth might have been harder to swallow if he had. As he stood looking at David he wondered if they had had the time, would they have been friends rather than allies united by the connection of Snow. But the world seemed too drawn on a deadline then for him to think of things for long, the ticking clock seeming to hang over his head like a cloud. "Your daughter," he told him. "She was surprised to see me still alive, and said so."

In a way, Charming's hardly surprised that Emma hadn't avoided the point. In a way, he's envious that she'd been able to be so direct, but he hadn't wanted to bring reality down on Graham when it could be avoided a little longer. "Did she tell you how?" he wonders. "Maybe now that the truth is out there, it's time you were able to ask for the details."

The resignation had settled over him in place of the grief over his own death, leaving him to tip his head at the other man with the expression clear on his face that Emma's shaky description of how and the suspicions she had had that had never been substantiated had been nothing of a surprise to him. "David," he began, reproach underlying his tone. "We both know how."

As agonizing as it had been to be faced with the apparent inevitability of his death, the hopelessness as a future with Red died with Emma's words, it felt then as if there had ever only been one way his story would end. "I've seen how she kills - I suppose I should feel lucky she crushed my heart to dust as she always promised she would if I disobeyed her, rather than have died burning like my brother."

He hadn't known if Graham knew how, exactly. David hadn't been there. David had barely been out of his coma at the time and he had been so close to remembering everything before Regina had sent him the wrong way, to earn back all the wrong memories. He grimaces, trying to reconcile that Regina with the one who's at their side in Neverland, working alongside them to find Henry.

"She's done some terrible things," he agrees. "And even though she's trying to atone for them, it doesn't fix the past."

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."

He raises his brow, wondering if Graham is really going to make him counter with the terrible things Regina reigned on him and Snow, by virtue of Snow having supposedly ruined her life. He'd also been killed by her soldier's hands, but the curse had delayed that, sent them into a land without magic, one with pain. "No, I don't know everything she's done," he admits, because there's more to it than he could possibly imagine. "And I wouldn't want to imagine myself in your shoes. But trust me, Huntsman," he says, firmly. "I know some of the things she's done because from the moment I fell in love with Snow, she was determined to ruin our lives. She took our daughter from us, she took my child," he reminds him pointedly. "She's destroyed many lives and it wasn't your hand. It wasn't you."

The past week's frustration and anger, the weight of all that had gone unsaid and seemed to then be never said aloud, faded in the face of the cold within and without.

The Huntsman let it all out with a breath, reaching out a hand to pat the other man's shoulder with a shake of his head. "I'm not looking to pick a fight, I know better than most what she's put you and Snow through." He drew in a breath through his nose and let the cold settle in his lungs, "But where it was her orders, her will, it was my hand. My sword. My name people whispered with fear when I stepped into their villages and demanded her tribute." His lips quirked as he made a stab at a weak joke, "I'd say I have to live with that -- but I guess not."

"I like to think that we're all given new chances and that you shouldn't have to live with that over your head," Charming opines, bracing himself against the cold and the shocks of pain that come from the dreamshade wound that's about to end his second chance. "Maybe that guilt will never go away, but you shouldn't have to let it cloud your future."

"Besides, speaking as someone who didn't think he'd have much of one when the curse came down on us, you really should never let those days be clouded. Every one of them is amazing, that we're still here." For now, he thinks, in his case.

The pale shade of the prince's face did not wholly match their environment, and even had the bitter cold been entirely to blame for that shaky look to the man (as Graham looked closer at him), there was something pinched in his expression that struck the Huntsman as discordant.

As much as he would have liked to nod his head and accept David's opinion as part of his own philosophy, the news of his impending death seemed to have cut straight through any such planning for the future. Struggling with his guilt over what he had done, both of his own free will and under the Queen's command those thirty plus years, was as pointless in that lens as continuing to hope for a future with Red. The realization had ate at him like acid, but there in the cold and a world beyond the Nexus he felt no more than faint shades of his own emotions. It was soothing and allowed him to look closer at the other man without being distracted overly much by his own turmoil to see that something was wrong.

"Are you going to tell me why you brought me out here?" He asked, pitching his voice just loud enough to be heard over the wind. "We both know the answer to what is on my mind, what's on yours?"

He knows that he's put it off long enough. Some of the strangers who pass by the hotel know what's happening to him, but he's kept it from the people who know of their world and their magic, maybe out of a fear that if they know, it becomes real and he can't avoid it. "I didn't go into too many details, I don't think, but before I got here, I was in Neverland. I got trapped, but I eventually found a door back there, but it was only for long enough for one of the Lost Boys to strike me with an arrow."

He grimaces, resting his palm flush against the wound. "It was laced with dreamshade. It's lethal and I'm not entirely sure I have much time left."

The Huntsman knew of the worlds that lay beyond the Enchanted Forest, worlds that the Nexus did not touch but stood still outside of the world without magic as they had known Storybrooke. The details of that knowledge were vague, like broad paintstrokes without time taken to do more than highlight the fact that there were at least a dozen such worlds or realms. That some were with magic, some with magic unlike their own, and a few wholly without it. He still knew nothing of this Neverland beyond perhaps a passing mention of the name, a scrap overheard in waiting to report to the Queen of the latest outing she had sent him on but soon hushed up when he entered the room.

"Poison or potion?" He asked, attempting to understand the facts as the prince had laid them out and immediately thinking of what could be done or undone. "There is no poison without antidote, as there is no curse without a way to break it. There must be a way."

He had not done all he had already for the prince to die and Snow to not be allowed the happy ending she deserved.

"Poison," Charming confirms, a hooded look in his eyes that's easy to see, even with the Arctic winds blowing around them. "They dipped their arrows in it and it's slowly killing me." It's strange to be so honest about it after lying by omission for so long. "And if there is an antidote, it's going to be in Neverland. I had hope that I could find it, but I haven't been able to find a door back to Neverland and the rest," he says. "And barring Hook or Pan showing up here, the number of people I know who know about Neverland rest at none."

He manages a dark smile. "Being out here, in the cold? It helps. It dulls the pain."

Poison and magic were beyond the capabilities the Huntsman had ever harbored, and where Graham had known of only one of the two, the two halves of him together had no love for either. He preferred instead the straight forward nature of bladed weapons or of bows, of fighting with fists and teeth and nerve. The idea of insidious weaponry had never been to his taste and had become a subject he reared instinctively back from, though he pushed through his own distaste for those who used such things to focus on the problem at hand.

"The doctors here, have you seen any of them?" He understood there was at least one, and with the medical suite perhaps there was a way around a door-locked antidote.

"Several weeks back, when I was feeling very weak, I went and saw one," Charming replies, thinking back to the pain and how horrible it had been. He had been willing to do anything to make it go away, even give up on fighting in order to find some respite. "They couldn't treat the poison, but they could treat the pain. It's strange, though. Being here, in these places, it seems to slow it." It never stops, but it slows, and it's usually enough to keep him fighting to find a way home.

Right now, though, he's getting too worn to do even that. "What I really need is to find a door back to Neverland, find the source of it all."

"Weeks?" Graham echoed, the hollowness within him dulling but not wholly negating the guilt that speared through him at the suggestion that he had been so entirely wrapped up in his own difficulties he had missed something so integral. The time seemed to have coincided a little too neatly with Emma's arrival, or at least his awareness of it and the news that had followed.

At a loss for an immediate plan, or any plan at all he could think of that might deliver the other man back to a world he himself had never heard of before, he opened and then shut his mouth. A moment later he finally asked, "What can I do?"

Charming isn't willing to think of the long term in negative suggestions, but there's one that he can't forget about, because no matter how optimistic and positive he wants to be, this keeps coming back to him. "I need you to keep an eye on Emma and Snow, if she ever comes," he says, a pit beginning to grow in his stomach. "If I die, I need to make sure that my family is taken care of."

Through the whipping winds, in the ice and snow, it feels strange to be talking about a poison he earned in the jungle. "I want a cure, more than anything, and that requires getting back to Neverland."

As little as he wants as Graham to deny any chance of there not being a way around the poison, of Charming's fate not being then in flux and no longer so assured, the Huntsman had known too many unhappy endings to not be pragmatic on the matter. "If that comes to pass," he told him, unwilling still to allow what the spoke of to be a certainty not possibility. "I will watch over them to my dying breath. You have my word, David."

The irony of the oath he had made was not entirely lost on him. How little time he had until his dying breath was built to the specifications of the hotel, to his avoidance of doors that led back to their world. The laws the micro-world of the hotel had been built upon were a mystery to him, but all he knew then was that as long as he remained within its hold he might stay alive.

"I will look," he said, seeing no reason to draw the world in terms of dramaticism he did not then feel. "Tell me what I need look for."

He's not sure Graham should look, is the problem. He's not sure how the mechanics of life work here, but Graham is no longer alive back home and does that mean all the worlds they're a part of? If that's the case, then he doesn't know if he should bring that into question. "I don't know," he finally says, after weighing his options. "I don't like the idea of you losing your life by looking for something that might help me. After all, who knows if they're interconnected," he points out.

"Maybe someone else can help. Ruby, maybe." Seeing as he's yet to tell Emma about it.

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How the hell am I supposed to find a room with no door?

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