Chapter Text
She hadn’t recognized him, even though he was sitting in her section.
Later, when Jenny remembers that night, she remembers noticing him, the sheer massive size of him hunched down in a baseball cap and a bulky blue canvas jacket, with bruises and a sad look on his face.
He’d sat in the back, facing the entrance of the diner and only ordered coffee, black. He’d called her ma’am . She remembers thinking he must be one of the homeless guys that come into the diner when it gets cold out, that it’s pretty chilly for October, and he’s probably ex military, because a lot of those guys are and they're the ones that call her ma’am .
She remembers pouring him his coffee, and she remembers him looking shifty.
“Can I get you anything else? You hungry?”
He’d looked at her with a flicker of surprise, distracted from glancing obsessively at the door, like he was worried about going back out there or something. Later, she realizes he'd been worried that what was out there was going to be coming in.
“No, thank you, ma’am.”
And she remembers pouring him soup on the house, which means soup she paid for, into a paper cup and putting it in front of him, the coffee pot held in the other hand. He’d looked familiar then, tugging at a memory, but the cap was distracting and the bruises were a little…
“On the house, sir,” she’d said, pushing the soup towards him. “It’s cold out there.”
And Jenny doesn’t remember much of what happened next, just guns, big guns, the biggest guns she’d seen in her whole life – or at least, up until that point of her life – and thinking that the sound of gunfire was so much louder than she’d been led to believe by television.
She remembers one of the bullets shattering the coffee pot in her hand, glass flying everywhere, coffee exploding all over the table. She remembers the dull pain of something on her hands, and then the other, brighter, louder pain that tore through her stomach. She remembers him practically tackling her to the floor, and then she remembers laying on her back, breathing heavily, and thinking how quiet the world had gone, wondering if she’s gone deaf from all the bullets and the guns firing.
She knows she hasn’t when she hears a big boot shuffling through the broken glass pieces beside her. A large body, massive and hulking, baseball cap gone now, looms, then crouches beside her. She recognizes him then.
“Here,” he says, voice rough, breathing heavy, wrapping something in his hands. A torn piece of cloth she thinks. He takes her hand, which hurts and stings and smells like burnt coffee, and puts it over the cloth on her stomach where it hurts most. “Keep pressure there until the ambulance gets here.”
“It’s okay,” she says softly, not really thinking, just understanding somehow that this is the man who’s going to kill her. She looks up at him, into that serious brow and the intense eyes, looking sad and tired and a little afraid. “It’s okay,” she says again, lifting her hand from where he’d placed it and wrapping her fingers around his massive forearm. He looks at it, then back at Jenny, eyebrows lifted in surprise. “I don’t mind, it’s okay. I’m ready. It’s okay.”
Beyond that, she doesn’t remember much at all.