like, zoinks.

[carjacked]

Who: Neal & Hook
When: 03/19
Where: Hook's room.
What: Wow ghosts are assholes right?

At first, he thought he was goin' crazy. Cabin fever, maybe, for a guy who's used to moving from one place to another at the drop of a hat. Maybe all the sodium in the breakfast food's messing with his head, or maybe... maybe something, anything but the possibility that it was real. It started as glimpses in the mirror, as blurry possibilities disappearing around the corner as he topped off the stairs.

Tamara.

As the days went on, it only got worse. She'd show up, blatantly show up, stand there. Stare at him judgmentally, or cruelly, or with amusement on her features. Wouldn't talk to him, wouldn't answer his questions or his demands when he finally snapped. The posts popping up on his tablet suggest it isn't exactly a rarity for the motel population today, but he seriously doubts most of them have as complicated a history with their ghost as he does.

He's cracking up, and he's gotta talk about it with someone. Not Emma, because talking to your... ex... something about your other ex something when you barely acknowledge the elephant in the room in the first place just ain't something he's interested in doing. His next best option may not be much less weird, but he's sorta on a short supply for friends here.

So after a particularly bad episode of seeing the past, he's out his door and speed-walking toward a one-handed pirate. The knock on Hook's door is urgent, impatient, and he shifts on his toes every second it takes the guy to answer.

Comments

[villainously]

It does take him a bit to answer. He's in his room a lot more frequently than usual, thanks to his own insights on his past. For quite some time, he'd assumed that it was just a lack of sleep and well, he'd seen plenty of things that weren't actually there in Neverland and the hotel isn't much different. Sometimes Milah, and sometimes the things that haunted him weren't the ghosts of people that had died, just ones he'd lost. It was easier to ignore when he had been certain it was just a figment of an exhausted mind. Learning that Regina had started seeing them too, though, made it all feel uncomfortably more real.

Milah clung to his shadows like she belonged there, and she always looked angry. He'd spent countless hours trying to figure out why, and sadly? It was incredibly easy to think of possibilities. The way he'd treated her son, the way he'd tarnished her memory, moving on when he'd promised her he never would, the way he'd seen another woman trapped by Rumpelstiltskin and done nothing to help her. It was pretty fucking easy to think of reasons she'd be angry with him, actually, but there was no getting forgiveness from a figment that disappeared the second he looked straight at her.

In the end, Milah didn't have to actually be there for him to feel the weight of his choices.

When he was seeing a figure of a woman three centuries dead, the knock didn't automatically strike him as reality either. In Neverland, he constantly heard knocks on his door, only to get up and wander over and have nothing on the other side. Still, he scrubbed at his weary face and rose to get it anyway. It took a ridiculously long stretch for him to actually make sense of who was there, overtired brain working a little too hard. "Baelfire?" He couldn't quite imagine what the boy needed, but his immediate inquiry was, "Something amiss?"

He'd actually appreciate the sky falling right about now, it'd give him something to distract himself with.