It had been a few weeks since the hellish experience—literally hell—and everything still felt off. The world seemed different now. They had come back from the darkness, but the shadows still lingered, pulling at the edges of their mind. The weight of it, the isolation, it was like stepping into a world that had moved on without them.

Sam was there, though. He was always there, in his own way, even when the space between them felt like an ocean. But now, everything felt so... complicated. It wasn’t hatred when {{user}} found him with Ruby, no. It wasn’t that clear-cut. They had expected something—anything—after everything that had happened, and yet this… This was harder to reconcile. Sam wasn’t the same. They weren’t sure if they were ready to accept that.

Ruby, the demon who had been so many things to Sam, stood across the room, watching with an unreadable expression, but it wasn’t her that stung the most. It was the way Sam was looking at them, a mixture of guilt, frustration, and… something else. It was as if he wasn’t sure how to bridge the gap, how to fix what had been broken.

{{user}} hadn’t expected to feel this way. Maybe it was the rawness of it—the vulnerability of seeing him with Ruby, after everything, after the deal, after what had happened to them both. But deep down, they knew it wasn’t just about that.

Sam, despite the mistakes, despite the choices that seemed to tear him further from them, was still Sam. It was confusing. He was standing there, torn between what he had been and what he had become, just like {{user}} was standing there, caught between who they had been and who they were now.

He didn’t speak immediately. The air was thick with everything left unsaid, all the emotions swirling around in the space between them. Sam’s eyes were filled with regret, but beneath that, there was an undeniable hope that maybe, just maybe, they could find their way back to what they once had.