bad moon rising

The work of weeks culminates tonight, and though Sabrina has spent most of those weeks crawling around buildings with chalk, making holes in the ground or in walls where she can stash some protective charms, and taking tiny catnaps of exhaustion, she regrets none of the work.

And the final touch, to be placed upon Leviathan tonight, has her buzzing in anticipation.

It's not all she's buzzing about.

Do not use the Purge as date night, warns some voice in her head that sounds like nearly every authority figure ever, and she's not! She really isn't.

But it's her birthday, and Jules is coming over, and they're going to wear costumes! Maybe they can rig up a projector and watch a movie, depending on how bad the Purge is outside. It's a whole night together, with plans to see if they can haul breakfast over to the bunker in the morning.

So if she's waiting, in costume, nose practically pressed up against the glass of the door, for Jules to get here, aware of the fading daylight and feeling a little excited, surely it doesn't make her a terrible person.

She hopes so, anyway.

With no neighbors on either side of Leviathan, well, existing in Darrow at current, Sabrina finds that she's not only in charge of the store-- nobody's going to care if she indulges her sense of drama. She can do whatever she'd like, and what she'd like is to make it clear that someone still looks out for this shop and can provide assistance.

Assistance of a witchy nature, that is.

A lovely, only mildly ominous cauldron set over a little fire pit has been sitting in the backroom for far too long without attention, and by the time she gets it wheeled out, a fire lit and water boiling, morning has become afternoon. Sabrina's grateful for the breeze that kicks up as she settles on the front steps, sorting dried and fresh herbs into little piles.

Honestly, she really only misses some of her co-workers; her time at Petros has left her with a distaste for most of the locals. Even being aware of how not mortal the thought process doesn't stop her from not really considering them to be fully real. It's the kind of thought she keeps to herself, and it leads down a lot of other paths not worth traveling at this date.

No, the better alternative is to weigh out lavender sprigs while humming and singing. "I admit that in the past I've been a nasty; they weren't kidding when they called me, well, a witch..."

Once a month, Sabrina sleeps at Leviathan, for her turn on the weekly overnight shift. It usually falls on a weekend, but she's leveraged her assigned shift last Friday night for tonight, a Tuesday. She expects no trouble; winter break has already started, and the solstice has passed. Nothing in the store seems particularly likely to escape; nothing has tasted human flesh so far as she knows.

When she bundles herself onto the air mattress in the back, after setting out all of those little projects that require someone to be here overnight-- some of them, she suspects, needing a magical presence nearby to develop-- Sabrina really, truly thinks that the worst of her problems is that she has to be awake at 5:30 for a morning shipment of particularly fragile teeth.

She falls asleep quickly, with Salem a warm and comforting weight against the small of her back.

Her phone alarm goes off at 5:30 as planned, but even as Sabrina rubs her eyes and reaches for it, something feels off. Why is it so far away? Is Salem feeling particularly large and lumpy beside her?

The next few observations come quick-quick-quick. Her phone is too big, and it doesn't recognize her face. The hoodie she's stolen from Charlie and the pajama bottoms she's stolen from Rosie are also too big, and she ends up in a tangled mess on the floor, panting and unsure.

Moments later, when she's keyed in her passcode and is using the camera to look at herself, it comes together. "Fuck," she says, and winces at the small, piping voice that comes out. "What am I, five?"

Sabrina holds it together as long as she can.

She holds it together until she can't.

It's a Wednesday night and she's taking care of the dishwasher before she heads upstairs to study. Studying gets more pointless by the night, but maintaining her grades seems like a benchmark in normal and will ensure that she moves through the year with as little trouble as possible.

Salem sits on the counter, the rest of the household not really caring if he does so, so long as they clean it. Where he'd once roamed the city in wide loops, he's now in her orbit most of the time.

She picks up a glass, not registering how wet it is until she turns and it flies from her hand, shattering on the ground. Sabrina looks at the pieces of glass, her hand shaking.

A sob rips free in a voice she hardly recognizes as her own, and she sinks to the ground. The tears tear through her, painful and wracking, loud until she can hear herself echoing through the house. She can't stop, she can't stop.

Salem finds his way into her lap, and she clings to her familiar, trying to muffle her sobs in his dark fur.

When Sabrina finally leaves the apartment building, after she's able to keep from pressing herself to the closed door of Nick's apartment and weeping, after the promise to meet up with Charlie and Rosie as soon as she can, it's morning. Not long after dawn, and thankfully it's not too hot or too busy yet. Salem insists on being carried, and she thinks it must be so the little purring mechanism of his feline body can be pressed to her own broken heart.

Maybe that's a selfish way to put it, when she has Charlie, when she has Rosie, but there's so many things she's lost, in losing Nick.

Her eyes are heavy and she knows they're rimmed in red, another reason she's glad the streets are fairly empty. She cries into Salem's fur, very quietly, on the sparsely populated train, and spares a moment to stare at her phone. Just as she's about to attempt a text to Marcus, about coming home early this morning, about what's happened, a message pops up from Dan, simply informing her that he's made sure Marcus will be waiting for her. Benefits, somewhat, of living with a psychic.

She almost sits down on the path up to the house, remembering how she'd found Nick here that day, only nudged forward by an insistent familiar. Sabrina finally gets herself through the door, shockingly exhausted, and when she calls out for Marcus, it's with a sob in her throat.

Practice wraps up, for both the team and the cheerleaders, and after permitting the attentions-- for about five minutes-- of the very girls who had been involved in her admittedly impetuous audition, Sabrina heads toward the stands where a lone black cat sits.

"I can't believe you're so into this game," she tells Salem. "Is it a goblin thing? Is that why it makes sense to you?"

Mrrrrr.

"Yes, yes, I did this all for you," she says, barely hiding her giggle. "But come on, you're not here just to see the stunning athletic prowess of the Petros High Pterodactyls. We've got someone to introduce ourselves to."

Salem rises and stretches, and then bounds off of his spot, trotting over to where one Caleb Micheals is preparing to leave. Slinging her bag over her shoulder, Sabrina goes to catch up, trusting that Salem's proven method of sitting in one's path and meowing will give her the time.

The thing is, this is the third time in less than a year that her parentage has come into play, in some awful way. She can't take credit for the Darkness, but Lucifer was her own mess, and she can't be certain how her influence has impacted Marcus.

Even if she's not causing it, she thinks she probably makes it worse. If it weren't for her promise to Charlie, and that awful night in the Necropolis, she thinks she might do something stupid. She might already be doing something stupid, knowing that she's hiding out here at Sam's warehouse, instead of going home with anyone, but she feels a little like anyone handling her is bound to be hurt at this point.

Luckily or not, however, it doesn't seem like Sam's tiny punk girlfriend particularly worries about these things. Sabrina admits to having been distracted for a full fifteen minutes from the possession situation by questions and the desire to probably make poor Sam insane with said questions on handling Satanic influences on relationships.

She does not fight it when her phone is taken by said tiny woman, and remains brooding on the floor, unaware of the call made to Rosie, or the directive to come pick her up.

Sabrina parts ways with her familiar not far from Rosie's apartment building, both of them in the understanding that the next conversation is for the two girls alone. The evening is muggier than she'd like, and she's not entirely certain whether they ought to go for a walk, or whether they should stay here. Or-- she's just not sure how to proceed here.

It had been so much easier when talking to Nick, somehow.

After a moment or two of hesitating in front of the door, staring at the button that will ring the appropriate buzzer, hands firmly in the pocket of her sundress, Sabrina blows out a huff of air. She's being ridiculous. It was a success, after all, and she can't doubt Rosie's friendship, their closeness.

She hits the button decisively, waiting for the door to release.

It's going to be alright.

running in the shadows
damn your love, damn your lies

i. Charlie
ii. Rosie

listen to the wind blow (watch the sun rise)

i. Charlie & Kavinsky
ii. Marcus
iii. Sam


[Collection post for Sabrina's threads during Lucifer's possession of Nick.]

Sabrina supposes there's a comfort in knowing that at least fashion seems fairly consistent from Dark Lord to Dark Lord. In the end, Lucifer had preferred all that gold in what Aunt Zelda had declared a gauche representation of being the Morning Star.

But she remembers the black lace she'd worn on the night of her almost-baptism, and that's similar to this new dress.

There's certainly drama in this one, at least.

She's doing her best to look imperiously bored as she plays with some bizarre little puzzles that would mean putting a cube together, having chased the latest round of goblin servant-guards away. That doesn't mean, however, that her ears aren't trained for a certain discovered secret passage, and movement within.