Chapter Text
Sanja Novak was raised around five card poker. Her father, in between deployment stents with the military, would always have her accompany him on Friday nights. She was told that she was Alexander’s lucky charm, and he never lost a poker night with the boys when she was around. It was a very believable lie to a child her age, and the thought never occurred to her until years later that it was simply because he couldn’t anyone else to watch her. He was a great man, and during deployments she’d squeeze her eyes real tight and imagine his voice talking her through how to play the game. Check. Call. Raise. Fold. He almost never folded.
When Alexander wasn’t stateside, wasn’t driving his daughter around sunny California looking to work random jobs to pass the time between deployments, her father entrusted Sanja to his father, Ivo Novak. Ivo was much more serious about his poker playing, as were most of the New Yorkers Sanja had the pleasure of meeting while he was taking care of her. He wasn’t a man who gambled frivolously, but he wasn’t a man who liked to lose. On the nights that he would meet his neighbors in the Polish restaurant downstairs to play, Sanja would follow along dutifully, ready to pick up any lessons Ivo decided to teach. You must learn the art of folding, Sanja; your face cannot hold a lie.
Between the two men in her life, she had seen how to turn a losing hand into a winning hand with nothing more than a couple of words and a smile. At the age of eight, her father and his buddies had let her open a round or two during their poker nights. The first few times it was to humor her so she wouldn’t get bored; the rest of the times it was because the men felt like they needed to reclaim their honor from losing against a child. Her father thought it was hilarious.
All of that experience led her to be very adept at a young age to reading situations and pivoting accordingly. That was how, at the age of nine, she realized very quickly, that life dealt her a losing hand that smiles or tricks couldn’t change.
If her father was alive, he would chastise her. He hated the phrase, preferring to call hands tragically unfortunate rather than losing; he always said he didn’t want to give the cards any ideas of how the game is supposed to go. As she stared at the flag-covered coffin being lowered into the ground, Sanja however, saw exactly how the game had gone, and saw exactly what she lost.
Five card poker gave you five cards to start. Her five cards given to her at birth were herself, a mother, a father, a brother, and a house in California. Death took her mother and brother in a car accident first before she was old enough to draw new cards to replace the gaps in her life. Her father’s card was snatched next, and with him went California. A stray bullet overseas. She still swears she dreamed his death before her grandfather got the call the next day.
Four cards lost before she had time to hold on to them. The only card left, herself, was a mockery of a card to build a hand around.
A callused, human, hand squeezed hers, and she looked up through the tears to look at her grandfather. It was only then that she realized the sound of dirt moving had finished. Her father was officially gone, buried beneath the soil that also claimed her mother and brother years before. “It is done, maličḱy. We have said our final words, and now he can rest.” As stoic as the notion was, Sanja could tell by the waver in his normally firm voice that he didn’t want to leave his son’s side any more than she did.
“I want him back, Dedo.” She was missing his card, and she would lose without him…had lost everything she was born with, everything that made her her. “It’s not fair, I want him back.” She began to sob as her grandfather lowered himself to her level. Sanja flung himself at him, hiding her wetting cheeks in his neck as she shook apart.
“I know, Sanja. I know.” The pair stayed there for a while, hanging onto each other. Ivo rocked them back and forth, unable to force any words of comfort through the lump of grief in his throat.
Eventually, when the rage of anguish quit rattling through her thoughts, Sanja untucked her head from its hiding spot, and wiped her face roughly. In the quiet of the moment, she thought of the last game she had played with her father. “If you’re missing something to start, Sanja, just draw for a better card. If you don’t take action, nothing will change.” Sanja’s brown eyes met her grandfather’s teary blue. Her hands mindlessly wiped his cheeks until he sent her a shaky smile. Then, without saying anymore, the pair stood up and walked away, hand in hand.
Sanja squeezed the callused hand and she took a steadying breath before getting in the car. She didn’t have just one card left. It was silly that she had forgotten she’d been able to draw his card the instant he came into her life.
It may still be a losing hand, but at least it wasn’t a lonely hand.
The trip from California to New York was a long one. Packing away the house was a struggle for both granddaughter and grandfather. Every inch of the house had memories, but very little would be able to fit into the Novak’s place. It was a miracle that the Brooklyn apartment had enough space for the two of them with the little luggage Sanja took with her during deployments. Adding everything the family of two had inherited to the mix would be impossible. It took about two weeks of organizing and donating to get an acceptably small pile of keepsakes to take back to New York. Even then, Ivo elected to rent out a storage area to preserve some of the larger items Sanja may want later in life.
Sanja had been on enough planes between California and New York to be at ease with the process under normal circumstances. However, the act of physically leaving her family behind for good made her feel shaky, nauseous, and panicked. In the back of her mind, she had a voice trying to break through the foggy dread to tell her that she shouldn’t make a scene, that her grandfather had just lost his son and didn’t need to deal with her fits. The voice wasn’t entirely strong enough. They had missed a connecting flight after a particularly nasty round of panic (hyperventilation her grandfather later, told her as he helped her make sense of the episode). It led the airport security to separate the two for fear of kidnapping. The trip that should’ve taken about 7 hours with a layover stop, was now lasting fourteen hours with the pair flying into LaGuardia instead of JFK.
Her grandfather didn’t blame her at all, which made the guilty pit in her stomach open up further.
As she sank into a fitful sleep on the plane, her dreams made that stomach pit roll and twist further. There were flashes of green first, accompanied by grunts and screams. Then a clearer picture came all at once with buildings toppling down after a giant green figure barreled through them. If it weren’t for the rage spread along the green face, she might’ve called it the Jolly Green Giant. One resounding roar shook Sanja awake. She gasped and bolted upright. Ivo looked at her sadly, patting her hand in comfort. “It is just a dream, Sanja. It will be ok.” The little girl nodded absently, trying to breathe at an easier pace and calm her heart. It was just a crazy, nonsensical dream. No reason to be scared of something she made up in her head.
Ivo started talking in a low, calming tone about easy things. Like what they would get to eat tonight, and where they would shop tomorrow to restock the fridge. Sanja tried to pay attention, but she couldn’t stop watching the flight attendants walking between the cockpit and their designated sitting area. There was a word she remembered from books her father read to her. Pacing. It was a word, her father told her, that authors used to show when someone had so much nervous energy it leaked into how they moved. No, she tried to tell herself. You are nervous. Don’t force your nerves on other people.
Still the ladies would not stop moving. Sanja peered around her grandfather to look at the window and frowned a little. “Dedo, aren’t we supposed to land there?” Ivo turned away from her to look at the window, where the runway was tilting away.
“Well,” Ivo started slowly. “Sometimes we have to circle the landing strip and wait for other planes to land first.” His words weren’t very certain, and Sanja noticed his frown deepen the second time runway entered and exited their window view.
The third time it happened, an announcement chimed overhead. “Ladies and gentlemen, please be advised. We are waiting for air traffic control to approve our landing. We will be circling until we get the all clear.”
Sanja looked up to her grandfather. “Just like you said, right?” He nodded slowly, but didn’t relax. He took her small hand in his and squeezed before glancing down her way. “Should we be scared?”
“No, Sanja. We will be ok.” After about thirty minutes of circling, this was proven to be true. The airplane landed, a few of the passengers clapped (Sanja wrinkled her nose in confusion before looking at her grandfather who shook his head to indicate the applause was also strange and obnoxious to him), and the crowd deboarded without much preamble. When they were finally in the airport, a few things became clear when the security guards meet them at the plane’s exit.
- There was a danger that prevented them from landing
- The danger wasn’t at the airport but had potential to move their way
- The authorities were advising people to not travel into New York until the danger was resolved
Most of the discussion went over Sanja’s head. She just kept a hold of her grandfather’s hand to look around. She gazed out of the window to look at the city in front of her. It was a different view than she was used to considering the change in connecting flights they had. It was dark, but the lights of the city still glowed. A building she was staring at went from fully lit to fully black in a matter of seconds before flames began to flutter to light. She frowned, turning to ask her grandfather what could cause that before being distracted once again by a TV screen.
A big green monster was rampaging the streets. The big green monster. The TV was muted, but Sanja knew exactly how it sounded. She had heard it just an hour before in her dreams. That roar and that green face was unforgettable. “Dedo…” she whimpered, pointing to screen as he turned to her. Words left her as the monster picked up a car and threw it at the camera, effectively cutting the feed into static.
Ivo, a broken record, just took a deep breath, picked her up, hugged her close, and whispered in her ear. “We will be ok. We have each other. We will be ok.”
If Sanja had a direct line to the universe, she’d ask to stop being dealt cataclysmic events. First her family dying in stages, then her new home being demolished…her cards were already destroyed enough as it was, she didn’t need to be dealt monsters too.
A fearful five hours later, and the pair made their way from the airport to a mercifully spared Brooklyn. They had to travel far out of their way to avoid the rubble and destruction, but by the time they got home, Sanja was so exhausted she forgot to miss her father before going to sleep. She hoped for a dreamless sleep.