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The worst part wasn’t that the Turok-Han had left angry slashes across Sam’s abdomen or that it has nicked an intestine, leading to heavy bleeding and hours in surgery. The worst part was that all of this meant he would be on a liquid diet for weeks. He put down his cup of broth and longed for the hospital food on Dean’s untouched tray.
Once Dean had been thoroughly checked by a team of baffled doctors, they deemed him out of the woods and rolled him into Sam’s room. Castiel had healed the Winchesters of everything from fight wounds to death, and whenever he did, the magnitude of the power he tapped them with cleared away even old scars. But not this time. Maybe it was the words Buffy has chosen or where she put her hands. Maybe Cas struggled to even reach Dean, for though the bleeding and pressure on his brain had disappeared, he was still broken in other places. He’d been up all night in horrible pain, not falling asleep until right before breakfast arrived.
Before Sam could decide if it would be worth it to steal Dean’s cold eggs, Xander and Willow popped into the room. Tiptoeing past his brother’s bed, they greeted Sam with wide smiles.
“Sam my man! Nice to see you awake,” whispered Xander.
“Gotta be honest, I was thinking about taking a morning nap. I mean, I’ve been up for, like, two whole hours.”
“An unreasonable amount of time,” said Willow.
“At least I can sleep in my own bed tomorrow,” said Sam, smiling at the thought of ditching his thin gown for real pajamas.
“Tomorrow!” Xander’s eyes were wide with surprise. “It’s only been three days since they sewed your guts back in.”
Willow glared at him and shook her head in disgust.
After Buffy had tossed Sam around like a rag doll a couple months before, he’d healed rapidly. Half-the-time rapidly. His friends must have not noticed among the chaos of everything else happening at the time. But he didn’t want to point it out either; another mark of weirdness gained since they’d appeared in Sunnydale. “We’re free first thing tomorrow morning. Doctor said we’re both stable. All they can do for us now is make us cold and uncomfortable.”
“What doctors do best,” Xander said. “Bad news is you might have to stay until the evening. Giles is in South America rounding up more Potentials, and I have to meet some inspectors first thing in the morning. Unless you’re feeling up to a bus station hobble.”
“The Scoobies may be carless, but we could ask Jada to pick you up,” suggested Willow.
Too tired to hide his feelings, Sam’s face fell and he gazed blurry-eyed at his cold broth.
“Oh no. Oh no! That’s breakup face. Sam, I’m so sorry!” Willow said nervously waving her hands before starting to push Xander from the room. “Go get coffee!”
“Why do I have to leave?” Xander asked.
“Because I’m better with girl problems.”
“Touché.” And Xander left as told.
Willow rushed back to Sam, sat on the edge of his bed, held his hand in hers and with pleading eyes said, “Tell me everything.”
“Well, I don’t know that we’re even broken up, but there’s a definite break.”
Willow nodded sympathetically but said nothing.
He continued. “Short story, Dean and I killed a vampire in front of Jada and Dottie.”
“A very Sunnydale milestone. How’s she take it?”
“I think she knew before that,” he said before explaining the cloud he saw surrounding Jada whenever he mentioned the supernatural.
Willow chewed on her lip as she mulled over his story. “A spell that wears off with exposure? That’s super strange. I mean, what good does it do to hide this stuff, other than making people easier targets? But this sounds too advanced for the run-of-the-mill vampire, and the Mayor’s spell should have worn off by now.”
“I don’t know. Giles has been using some sort of memory thing on some of the Potentials’ families.”
Her sharp inhale told him Giles hadn’t disclosed that detail. “I…I don’t think Giles would have the juice. You said it’s the whole town?”
“I doubt it’s one unlucky bookstore.”
“So there’s someone or thing out there with crazy powers and it’s just…blocking memories? Not even making themselves cool and rich? By Sunnydale standards, that’s almost cuddly. Like a cute snake,” she said brightly.
Suddenly, a draft sent Sam into a sneezing fit, pulling at his stitches and setting his whole body on fire. “Oh God! Mystery goes on the back burner for now; we have more violent problems to deal with.”
Given the state she was in when he’d last seen her, Sam was surprised when Jada and Dottie arrived at the hospital the following morning to take them home. She didn’t speak to him at the hospital, and other than Dottie occasionally asking if she could drive, their trip was equally silent.
The Winchesters – cast and broken and stitched – painfully made their way up their apartment stairs as Jada and Dottie quietly argued by the car.
As soon as he set foot in his room, Sam could feel tension dripping off him and drug-induced sleep trying to pull him under. He felt like he’d already slept for a week, so he grabbed a book from his nightstand – Sphere by Michael Crichton – to stave it off. “Do you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.”
His mind preoccupied with Jada, Sam read the sentences four times. Was she angry? She was certainly hurt, and he needed to decide quickly how much truth would be a balm and how much would hurt her more.
Jada opened his bedroom door a crack. “I thought you’d be asleep by now.”
“I’ve got the whole rest of the day for that.”
“You should sleep,” Jada said.
“Wait! Please?” Sam didn’t want to keep these thoughts tumbling around his head. “Would you stay a while? Talk with me?”
Wearily, Jada dragged his desk chair to the bedside. “What really happened? Willow said you were in a car accident.”
“We were,” Sam said. “Dean’s freaking out because no one will tell him how bad the Impala is. Xander’s trying to get it from the junkyard for him.”
Jada raised her eyebrows in suspicion. “So like all of your other injuries, this isn’t vampire related?”
He’d pressed her because he was worried she’d be attacked again, but Jada wasn’t a fighter. She approached every situation with gentleness and a smile. That wouldn’t keep her safe. But she didn’t seem like the type to stomach gory details. “How much of this do you want to know about? Really?”
She looked at the ceiling and bit her lip to hold back the quivering. “At first I thought, ‘It’s just Sunnydale, right? I never saw a monster in San Francisco.’ But from what I could find they’re everywhere, like mice. When that – that thing grabbed me…I never want to feel that fear again.”
A tear rolled down her cheek. Sam tried to sit up, to reach out to her, but the gashes on his stomach raged, causing him to fall back into the bed with a groan. Abandoning her anger, Jada sat on the bed, his hand grasped in hers.
“The funny thing is, I feel safest with you,” she said in a hush. “But I don’t really know you, do I?”
Voices in the living room caught her attention. “I’m going to check on Auntie, but I’ll be back, okay?”
That was the best news Sam had heard all day.
Jada emerged from Sam’s bedroom to find Buffy in the kitchen, the counter full of beer and half-empty bottles of booze. She eyed the pile while smiling. “Buffy! I didn’t know you were here.”
“Sorry, I thought I should hide the alcohol while the guys are on painkillers,” Buffy said with a shrug.
“That’s probably a good idea. We can take it to my place.”
When Willow told Jada about the “accident,” she let slip that Buffy had been driving. Not only did Jada have difficulty imagining Dean letting anyone drive his car, but Buffy seemed bruise-free and unbroken. “You must have been buckled in. I’m glad someone walked away unharmed.”
“Wasn’t an accident,” said Dottie. “It was the vampires.” She held up the book she’d been flipping through and pointed with her gnarled finger to a bumpy-face, fanged block print.
The bit of a smile Jada had been able to muster gave way as she closed her eyes and sighed, “Of course.”
“Books say Heaven’s gonna send a savior. A girl. She’s gonna kill all the vampires,” Dottie continued.
Buffy perked up at Dottie’s comment. “What else do the books say about her?”
Jada realized with a sinking feeling that Buffy was probably just as involved in this vampire business as the Winchesters. But she needed facts, not indulgence and wild theories. She glanced at Buffy with mild annoyance and tried to redirect Dottie’s attention. “Auntie, would you like some music? How about I bring over some of your records?” With that plan, her smile was back in place as she took the booze away.
When Jada returned a few minutes later with some Louis Armstrong, Buffy was gone and Dottie was still engrossed in a book. She grabbed a blanket for her aunt (nap time was approaching), and sat beside her on the couch. “Learn anything interesting?”
Disappointed, Dottie pursed her lips. “No wonder the vampires are so bad. How can one person keep up with all of this? Books says she’s strong, but a body can only be one place at a time. Did you know there’s vampires in China. China!”
Jada did not know, but she nodded in agreement.
After a minute of watching Dottie read, she asked, “Auntie, how do you trust someone again after they’ve lied to you?”
Dottie closed her book and looked curiously at her.
“It’s silly, right? If someone lies to you, you shouldn’t trust them or like them or anything, right?”
“Depends, Sweets Girl. There’s lies, then there’s white lies. Sometimes people lie with good intentions, and sometimes they have to because someone won’t listen,” she said, slapping her niece’s knee.
Jada grinned and tossed her the blanket, “You want to nap here or at home?”
Dottie tucked the blanket in around her lap and reopened her book. “Not sleepy yet. Put on some music, and let’s see how long I last.”
In the time it took for Jada to set up the record player and grab a glass of water, her aunt’s eyelids were already fluttering.
Sam, also fighting the battle against sleep, was still reading in bed. Pale and clammy with dark circles under his eyes, he looked hollowed out; though, he offered her a twitch of a smile. “Water? Thanks.”
It had been over a week, a week in which she’d managed to find few of her aunt’s old friends, hunted for clues in the newspaper archives, and dug into some of the library’s creepier books. That taught her about monsters, but not about Sam.
Before moving to Sunnydale, Jada Green held a few things as true. Family was everything. A dash of nutmeg could improve most dishes. No outfit was complete without something pink. Smiling could fix anything.
Now the world was turned inside out. She knew vampires and demons were real. Smiling may fool people, but it wouldn’t heal what was broken inside. Sam Winchester scared her and made her feel safe all at once.
Nutmeg still improved most dishes.
Unsure what to do, she had called her friend, Tiffany. In the broadest of strokes, she had painted a picture of her new relationship.
“So let me get this straight – CAITLYN, PUT THE CAT DOWN! – sorry, your neighbor is extremely hot and super sweet. He dotes on you and your sick aunt with all sorts of time that Tyler McCrapface–”
“Tyler was cute, thank you,” Jada sighed.
“Not good enough for you, sweetie. Not. Good. Enough. Anyway, so he’s everything Tyler wasn’t, and you’re mad at him because he spends some evenings as an amateur boxer?”
Boxing was the only workable lie Jada could come up with. “You know I don’t like violence, Tiff.”
“But the arms, Jada! Tell me they are gloriously beefy.”
“Sam has excellent arms,” she said with a laugh. “But arms aside. I can’t believe he lied to me about it. I feel like there’s this wild side to my quiet librarian–”
“Sexy librarian.”
“My quiet sexy librarian. Do you…what do you think that means about his personality? Do you think he’s violent underneath all that?”
“Boxing’s just a sport, Jada. It is a little weird he didn’t bring it up before, but I think you’re making something out of nothing. Maybe ask him why he’s into it? And it’s not like everyone can be upfront about everything from the star– CAITLYN, WHAT DID I TELL YOU? I gotta go. Call you soon. Love. Bye!”
Jada closed Sam’s bedroom door behind her. “Buffy’s here, bruise free,” she said as strains of Louis Armstrong drifted in from the living room. “She’s in on this, isn’t she? She knows about the vampires? All of your friends do?”
He nodded.
She rubbed her arms to fight off a chill. “The library’s packed with monster material, but no one seems too bothered by this. Do a lot of people know?”
“I’m not sure,” Sam said softly. “Not many people can do anything about it, if they do.”
“So you’re not expecting me to go vampire hunting with you?”
“God no! Although I’d feel a hell of a lot better if you let me teach you some self defense.”
“Maybe when you’re a little less recently hospitalized. Speaking of, you should be sleeping.”
Face soft, eyes pleading, he said, “I’d rather be with you.”
She stretched out beside him on the bed – though on top of the covers – and held his hand. “Then tell me a story. Something real about yourself and all this…darkness out there.”
He remained quiet for so long, she wondered if he’d fallen asleep. Then, quietly, “Dad hunted monsters, so I’ve kinda been doing this my whole life.”
He wove a similar tale as before about life on the road, constantly moving from town to town, motels blending into each other, the hit-and-miss quality of diner food. But this story was darker. Grittier. This story involved salt across the threshold and shotguns behind the door. Weeks with no one to care for him but his barely-older brother. Learning how to best bandage and stitch.
Jada was shocked he’d lived this long.
They lay quietly for a while, listening to the music until the record ended. She rose to set the music back to the beginning, and when she returned, she snuggled next to Sam and confessed, “I-I want to apologize.”
Sam frowned. “For what?”
Jada sighed. She hadn’t been up front about most things, preferring to charm, trying to keep her pain tucked away so she didn’t have to deal with it, believing her very real, human hurt somehow made her less. And Sam Winchester told her it didn’t. He gave her room to exist. To feel.
Sam Winchester may have lied to her, but he wasn’t a liar. He couldn’t be.
She continued. “I realized I had a few truths I hadn’t told you. Things like, I was supposed to be married by now. Things like, I left him a few months before moving here.
“I think…I think after we got engaged, he started cheating on me.” Jada had expected the admission to hurt like a knife to the belly, but it only stung like salt in a wound. His long hours at work, terse phone calls, avoiding her, she’d chalked it up to him not being able to cope with her mourning her father, but Tyler had started to withdraw before. Then he married someone – his college ex – else nine months later.
“That guy’s a dick,” Sam said with the finality she needed.
Jada giggled, and it felt like her body was being cleansed of any feelings for her ex. “He was. He was boring, too. And a liar who treated me like I was a burden if I dared to ask for help, which I almost never did anyway.”
“Asshole.”
The declaration slipped out before she could bite it back. “And he was bad in bed!”
Sam snorted then groaned, pressing his hands to the places that hurt when he laughed. “Why did you date him?”
Jada shrugged. “He was tall. Good hair.”
“You have a type.”
“My type, I thought, was stable, calm, a good provider for the little family I wanted.” She took a deep breath and let that dream go. “Then my father died, and I broke off my engagement. When Auntie, whom I’ve always adored, called, I thought I could come here for a reboot. I knew Auntie wasn’t well, but I thought she could be reasoned with. I thought she still understood the basics of reality. I didn’t expect it to be a marathon of fantasy and twisted memories. I didn’t think I’d have to chase her down in a graveyard at night.
“I didn’t expect you.”
They lay together, skin pressed against each other warm and familiar, and listened to the warbling gravel of Louis Armstrong coming from the other room. “The bright blessed day, /
The dark sacred night. / And I think to myself, / What a wonderful world.”
The world was full of monsters – vampires, cheating fiancés – but there were knights too. Sam made her feel like a princess, and laying by his side, Jada knew she could slay dragons.