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There are things Sam saw she can't forget.
The blood is still in the streets long after they were gone. Her apartment is no longer hers. People were still crying over their dead sons. The nightmares that continue to come for her every night.
Death and destruction, the constant reminders that her life was different now. Stranger.
Still, to the rest of the world, is as if nothing ever happened. She might as well be an alien (someone else might see the irony in this and laugh. She just becomes more bitter about it) to them.
She thinks about Moses sometimes. When she is about to sleep, or when she just woke up from dreaming of those things (“He would understand” it's what a tiny voice tells her as she opens her eyes). She finds herself looking for his presence in an empty room. She sometimes is filled with an inexplicable urge to know what has happened to him. She never does look for him, of course, and she almost hates herself for the desiring it in the first place.
Sam waits.
She is not quite sure what she is waiting for; at times it feels like life is just a huge distraction to something else.
She breaks up with her boyfriend once he returns. She can't explain why. Sam feels that if she could, she would get rid of all her possessions and all the people in her life, so she would be ready when it came for her.
She learns to fight. When the year ends, she knows more about hurting people than she ever knew about healing them. She forbids herself to think about what that means. She banishes any thoughts about it to that same place where dreams of Moses were. The dark corners of her mind.
Sam continues to wait.
Moses finds her, one night. He is eighteen now, and there is a tired quality to him that seemed to come from his very soul. The last three years were a lifetime ago for him.
“Hey.” he says.
“Hello”she replies.
He doesn't ask to come in, and she doesn't protest when he simply enters and makes himself comfortable in the couch. He was never meant to be anywhere else, the tiny voice in her head tells her.
They share stories about nightmares and the unbearable fear that something was watching over them in the darkness, with glowing fangs. They share a couple of drinks.
“I feel like I've been waiting for something” She confesses. “Something is going to come and this time there will be no heroes.”
“There have never been heroes” he says.
“There was you.”
Her hand touches his, almost accidentally.
“I have been waiting for something too.” he says, and there is no accident in the way he moves toward Sam.
He kisses her.
She doesn't stop it right away; for a second or two it seems that the world is no longer filled with anticipation for something that would destroy her sooner or later (he does understand, the tiny voice in her head say), and the realizations suddenly strikes her that this is the first time she feels safe.
She stops him.
“This is wrong.” she whispers.
“A lot of things are wrong.” he replies; his eyes are the oldest eyes she had ever seen in her life.
He kisses her again. She does not pull away.