Chapter Text
Jade was sitting on the porch steps, arms resting on his knees, leaning slightly forward. Boyd sat still at his side. Barely an hour had passed since they left the office and headed towards Colony House. Upon arriving, Boyd had gone inside to speak to Kenny and make sure everything was running smoothly during Donna's absence, and had later come back out and sat beside him. The settlement group would arrive at any second, and Jade wanted to be there when Tabitha arrived, feeling the sudden, almost physical urge to see her after everything he had recently found out.
After a few minutes, the group emerged from the woods, following the path towards the old house. And that was when he spotted her. Tabitha. When he saw her, something shifted in his face. Not relief exactly, it was too complicated for that word, too tangled up with something he could not name. When she got closer, his eyes locked with hers and a familiar sensation spread across his chest. In a swift motion Boyd stood up, and that was when Jade noticed the state the group was in. Ethan and Tabitha were up front; closely behind them followed Donna, Ellis, and a girl whose name Jade couldn't recall, who was holding a cloth pressed against one side of her face. The group stopped, dropping their backpacks to the ground, the looks on their faces making it plain that something had gone badly wrong. Boyd sprinted towards them and Jade followed down the steps without thinking, crossing the space between them in a few long strides before stopping short, just in front of Tabitha and Ethan.
His gaze moved from her to the boy and back, checking for visible injuries. "Are you okay?" he asked, his breath coming in short pulls from the run.
"Yes. Are you?" she answered, a protective hand resting gently on Ethan's shoulder.
"Yes, those mushrooms weren't poisonous after all," he said, attempting something like a joke. Her expression didn't move. The same serious look that was present on Ethan's face when the boy glanced up at him. Boyd's voice, raised and urgent, pulled their attention away.
"What? What do you mean the dolls came to life?" He was speaking to Donna, who instantly raised her own voice in response. "Boyd! Now is not the moment." She turned to Ellis and the redheaded girl. "Ellis, could you please take Patty to the clinic? Kristi needs to look at that." Ellis nodded and started walking towards the clinic, the girl, Patty, trailing behind him.
Ethan tugged at Tabitha's sleeve to get her attention. "Mom, can I go with them? I want to see Julie."
She considered it for a moment, turning her head towards Ellis, who gave her a reassuring look. "Okay, but be careful. I'll come by soon."
Ethan ran to catch up with the other two, and they continued down the path. Donna made her way inside the house with Boyd close behind her, leaving Jade and Tabitha alone outside.
He let her speak first.
"We need to talk." The phrase slipped from her lips the same way he himself had said it a few days ago.
"We definitely do." He looked from side to side, a wary expression on his face. "But not here."
———
She let him lead her to the bar without asking any questions. There, she sat at the edge of a table facing the wall that Jade had covered in layers of notes. He stood with his back to her, staring at it for a moment, lost somewhere inside his own head. When he turned around to face her, she was biting her lip anxiously, not quite meeting his eyes, a habit he had memorised without ever intending to.
"Well," Jade said softly. "You first."
She swallowed and took a slow breath before speaking. And then she told him about the dolls. How they had dragged them up from the lake, the way Donna had called them scarecrows and thrown them back and believed, for one brief hopeful hour, that the problem might be solved. She told him about the singing. How she had recognised it. How it had unlocked something inside her, and the memories had come flooding through all at once.
"I was a child," she said. "In the settlement. Not me, but her, the version of me that was here before." She looked down at her hands in her lap. "She had those dolls. They were just dolls, child-sized, ordinary. She played with them. And that man...he took them away because they gave him nightmares. He threw them in the lake." She swallowed. "And when he died, whatever he dreamed about those dolls, it became real. The nightmares crawled out of the water in the shape of the thing he had feared most." She looked up at Jade. "The talisman did nothing.Nothing at all. Those things...they were different."
Jade was very still. She could sense him processing everything, trying to piece together what it meant.
"You knew how to hurt them," he said. It wasn't an accusation. It was something closer to wonder.
"I remembered. At the last possible second, I remembered." She pressed her hand flat against her sternum. "It wasn't like thinking, Jade. It was like something reaching up through me. Using my hands. Like the memory was so strong it moved my body before my brain could catch up." She shook her head, trying to shake the sensation loose.
Jade nodded slowly, then turned his head towards the piece of cardboard hanging at the top of the wall. He stared at the uppermost section of the timeline: '1800? — settlement' and beside it a note in his handwriting: 'Red stones. Tabitha saw them in her nightmares.' When he turned back to her, his expression was a careful mixture of fear and concern. A sudden, instinctive urge to reach for her rose in his chest. He even moved, just slightly, before he caught himself and stopped.
She noticed the change in his face. "And what about you?"
He told her about the mushrooms. He described following his younger self through the forest. The violin. The blood on the skull.
When he got to the part about the townspeople, he stopped. He looked at her for a long moment, and she could see him deciding not whether to tell her, she knew him well enough by now to know he would never withhold something like this from her, not anymore, not after everything, but how. He looked down, trying to find the right words.
But there was no gentle way to tell someone that across centuries, they were killed by the people they were living with.
"They were me," he said finally. "The soldier, the man under the rock, the one with the skull...they were versions of me, past lives, and all of them—" He stopped. Pressed his mouth into a line. Started again. "Every time, the townspeople killed them. Blamed us. For the creatures, for the suffering...they decided we were the cause." He paused. "It happened again and again. Like a pattern."
The room was very quiet.
"And then—" His voice cracked, and he looked away from her for a moment, steadying himself. "He told me that what they do to you, what they've done to every version of you is..." He stopped. His jaw moved. "Is worse than death."
The words landed in the room and did not leave.
Tabitha sat with them. She felt her chest tighten, not only with fear but with something older. Something resigned. 'Of course', some part of her thought. 'Of course it is.' As if some deep, bone-level memory was quietly nodding along. 'This is how it always goes.'
"Tabitha." Jade's voice was different now, "Look at me."
She looked at him.
"I am not going to let that happen," he said.
The simplicity of it almost undid her. She had expected something else, a plan, maybe, or another theory with strings that didn't quite connect. Not that. Not those eight words, flat and final as a closed door, as a body placed deliberately in front of something.
"You can't promise that," she said. Her voice was steadier than she felt.
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because I needed to say it." He leaned forward. "And because I mean it. Whatever has to happen, Tabitha, whatever I have to do." He paused, as if measuring exactly how far he was willing to go. "I am not going to let this town take you the way it took the others. I am not going to stand there and watch it."
She looked at him for a long moment, studying his features. The lines around his eyes, his mouth, the way he held himself when he was trying hard not to let anyone see how frightened he was. She had gotten very good at reading him.
"You were scared," she said softly. "When you came out of the vision."
He didn't deny it. "Yes."
"For me."
"Predominantly," he said, and the single word carried everything he wasn't saying alongside it.
She smiled softly. Jade stared at her, the warm light from the window catching the brown of her eyes. His breath snagged in his throat for a moment. They held each other's gaze for what felt like much longer than it was, before she looked away, down at her hands, which were turning her wedding ring slowly between her fingers. Guilt settled back into his chest like something returning to a familiar seat.
After a moment she spoke. "I think you should stay with us tonight." Jade raised his eyebrows. Tabitha pressed on before he could respond. "I don't want you to be here alone."
Jade exhaled with a quiet chuckle. "I don't think a mob of hippies from Colony House is going to show up with torches." She rolled her eyes, fighting to keep her expression neutral, but he caught the small smile pulling at the corner of her mouth, the same one she'd had the first time she came to the bar, after he found her in the woods.
"I'll be there," he said softly.
She smiled once more, brief and real. "I'm going to check on Ethan and Julie." She started for the door, then paused in the frame and turned back to him. "Be careful."
Jade looked at her. "You too."
She pulled the door shut behind her, and he stood there for a moment and simply breathed.
It wasn't something new, he had understood that much, even before the vision. The centuries of shared memory were difficult enough to hold, but he had already fallen for her long before any of that, before he ever played the song under the bottle tree. It was in the way he had naturally softened around her and no one else. In how he felt with her every time they worked together. In the familiar weight in his chest when he found out she had gone through the bottle tree, and the way the world had seemed to quietly brighten when Boyd told him she was back in town. He loved her. That wasn't new. The fear for her safety wasn't new either, but after what he had seen in the vision, the thought of being away from her had become something closer to unbearable. That was part of why he had agreed to spend the night.
He hadn't meant to intrude. Hadn't meant to fill the void Jim had left. Because Jim was the man she loved, the man she had built a life and a family with, and even if, in some spiritual, impossible sense, Jade had come first, that didn't matter. Not in the way that counted. She needed space. She needed time to grieve. He was going to give her that.
But he was also going to make sure she was safe.