“I half feel like grabbing her by the shoulders and giving her a shake, while the other half of me just wants to crumble in and apologize like some kind of -” Of what? There was nothing wrong with apologizing. “- I really want to do right by her, man. I just hope that she gets that it’s not gonna be easy. Because when you throw something bad and unexpected into someone’s face, you can’t possibly expect for them to take it all in and say that everything is perfectly okay. It’s not. And I want her to understand that. I don‘t want for Ruby to look back at what happened there and think ‘oh, Sam got mad at me because of that, so it must have been pretty bad.’ I want her to look back at it and realize that innocent people died because of what she did that night. I worry that she doesn’t sometimes. I worry that as warm as she can be on the inside, that there’s some part of her that doesn’t fully understand the things that she’s supposed to. I know that goes hand in hand with her learning and coming from a completely different place than you and I do, but damn it all. It is hard.”
He was beginning to rant now and Sam understood that. So he looked down, took a deep breath, and smiled a bit more warmly than the former had been. “I kind of sound like I’m in over my head here, huh?” He laughed, taking up the fresh drink that had been shoved in front of him. Slopping a little onto the bar as he lifted it, Sam took a gulp of it and grinned. “I am in over my head. In fact, if this apocalypse stuff doesn’t drive me crazy? I’m betting that all this stuff with Ruby will. And I’m oddly okay with that. Because like you said before about Faith…she is worth it. All the bullshit, all the frustrations, all of the unpleasant surprises and inevitable confrontations that are going to come along because of what these two women have done in their pasts…when you look at who they are and you feel what you do for them, there’s nothing in the world that can change that. Nothing that can make you just up and give up on the one that you love. Kinda funny coming from a Hunter like me, but there it is.” Sam lifted his glass and raised it to Pike in a sort of salute. “To redemption. And to our sanities.” God knew that they’d need all the help that they could get.