signed_sabrina | (no subject)

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Sabrina finds the book on the kitchen table.

She knows even before she's moving to open it that it's somehow from the place she only sometimes thinks of home, and she's moving toward it with the same sick feeling of compulsion that had led her to another book in the woods.

But this is not the Book of the Beast. She can see it's a book of prophecy, and with a shaking hand, she reaches for it. It feels familiar under her hands; she opens to the page marked with what looks like a page torn from a sketch book.

Before she can identify the actual content of the drawing, she knows Harvey's made it, knows his hand; when she looks a bit longer, she realizes this is her own face, but not, somehow wrong and evil and everything she's tried to pretend she's not. Trembling violently, she moves the drawing away and finds that the page beneath has an underlined passage.

She leans down to read it, and then she's falling, and she's closing her eyes with Salem's panicked yowls fading away.

Her eyes open and she's curled up on the floor, the afternoon light turned to dim twilight tones, her face wet and sticky with tears. She wants to claw at her own skin, she pushes her hands through her hair to get rid of a crown that isn't there, she screams and hits her fists against the floor.

Even Salem is gone, but as sure as she knows anything, she knows he's gone for help and she's going to have to move quickly to make sure that doesn't happen. There's no help for her here.

Her legs are unsteady, but they carry her as she grabs her bag and takes off out the door.

At the edge of town, there's a place she's always eyed with the suspicion of one who knows she'll visit, but not when. She goes to the Necropolis now, picking out a particularly large and suitably Satanic looking mausoleum.

Chalk and candles and a knife-- she has these things in her bag all the time, and she works with them now. She draws the circle, the sigils, the sacred geometry that will form her makeshift prison. Her blood charges the lines, and the trio of candles serve as a timer. When they burn themselves out, she will no longer be able to alter this trap. It's foolish to think no one else could, but she's fairly certain it will take long enough that-- that--

She doesn't know.

She just can't let herself be out there, a loaded gun, the bringer of an apocalypse, traitor to everything and everyone she loves.

Drawing her knees to her chest and hugging them tight, she tucks her face out of sight, and lets the candles burn.

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[Marcus]

Marcus is on his way back from a shift at the Home when Salem finds him by darting into the street, though at a good enough distance to give Marcus plenty of time to brake. The truck comes to a stop and he leans across to open the passenger side door, half expecting the cat to run back off toward the house. He knows better, though, because Salem isn't only a cat. Salem's much more than just Sabrina's cuddly pet, even though he meows and purrs and most often behaves like a cat.

Because every now and then he behaves like something else entirely.

He jumps up into the cab of the truck and begins to pace on the seat, so Marcus closes the door and continues the rest of the drive home. Something is wrong. He doesn't need to look at Salem to feel it and he's not surprised when they arrive back at the house and Salem goes streaking for the front door, which Marcus unlocks.

"Sabrina?" he calls, even though he knows better.

Salem has, as a rule, the run of the city if he likes it, though there's an agreement with Sabrina that he's to avoid traffic and large dogs. Neither of them are entirely certain why he can no longer access his other form, but it's one of the discussions they had when he first found his partner is this strange place.

However, Sabrina has most certainly violated one of her agreements, and so Salem makes sure Marcus sees him, and he's dealing with traffic as he gets into the truck.

And Salem is right.

There's no sign of his girl, besides the book that had caused her to fall to the floor. He jumps up, prancing around it and yowling at Marcus.

Marcus catches sight of the book, but he ignores it for now, instead going through the house room by room, calling for Sabrina as he does. Even before he's done, he knows she isn't here, but he still has to check. He has to be sure before he begins to make any sort of phone calls.

Sam might be able to track her, he thinks. But maybe Salem will work just as well. He'll have to call Charlie and then he blanks on who else.

Returning to the kitchen, he finally looks at the book, glancing at the drawing and then at the passage that's been underlined. He reads it three times, picking up the book and carrying it with him while he absently looks for the Scrabble box. As he finishes the third read through, he scatters tiles on the kitchen table and looks to Salem.

"Where did she go?"

Salem waits by the book, chirping impatiently at Marcus-- only to jump down and follow him around as he reads, keeping up a patter of irritated, upset noises. There's another absolute yowl as the Scrabble game is brought out and realization of what has to happen sets in, and only a bit of it because Sabrina was right about the letters.

His tail lashes wildly as he sniffs and pokes at the letters, complaining more quietly now, a low growl.

s-l-e-e-p

This set is nudged away and set by an o-n.

The next set is t-o and f-i-n-d m-a-r-k-s.

An expectant look up at Marcus, and a meow.

t-h-r-e

r-a-n g-o-n

h-i-d-e

Marcus can practically feel the impatience pouring off the cat as he arranges letters and waits for Marcus to read them. It takes him longer than he would like, too, scanning the letters. He works out the first two things with relative ease, but the third gives him pause and he has to scan it more than once to realize what Salem means.

"She ran," he says. "And she's hiding somewhere."

Not with Charlie, not with something of this level. He thinks if she's run from the house, she's likely run from Charlie, too, and even as Marcus takes his phone out of his pocket to call Sabrina, he knows she's not going to answer. Still, he has to try, and he paces a little, waiting, even though his call is never picked up.

"Where might she go?" he asks and he's speaking to himself as much as he is Salem. "Where... not to see Charlie. Not back to the Home. The store? Do you think she went to Leviathan?"

Edited 2019-05-19 04:01 (UTC)

Most of the impatience is tempered with the understanding that this poor mortal is trying, and that said mortal is as worried as the familiar about Sabrina.

Salem sits besides the pieces, batting them around to get rid of the words, waiting for Marcus to return, and with some similar conclusions. His tail lashes and there's a dismissive meow.

After what is clearly nearly a minute of thinking, Salem hisses and turns back to the letters.

t-h-i-n-x e-v-i-l

e-v-i-l p-l=a=s

g-r-a-v-s

"The Necropolis?" he asks, trying to remember if Sabrina has ever mentioned it to him before. Marcus would never consider it an evil place, simply a place for the dead to rest, but their experiences are very different and he's already grabbing the keys to the truck once more and heading for the door. If that's what the cat says -- an idea he's still just wrapping his head around -- then he's going to take it for what it is. If anyone here knows Sabrina best, it's Salem.

"Come on, then," he says to Salem. "We'll call Charlie on the way."

Given what he's just read in the book, Marcus isn't sure Sabrina is going to want to see him first. He's too tangled up in the ideas of God and the devil, the end of the world and trying to prevent it. Charlie will be the right choice to go to her, see what she needs. Marcus will do what he can from afar and then be there. After. When she lets him know she needs him.

[Charlie]

He runs, the soles of his sneakers squeaking on the stone floor as he heads for the flickering light of the candles. He slams into a barrier he can't see, though, and ends up skidding onto his ass, looking a little dazed before he scrambles back onto his knees.

"Sabrina?" he says. "Baby?"

Sabrina hears him hit the boundary and she flinches hard, her hands opening and closing, a sob escaping her. "Charlie," she manages, but she doesn't get up, and she won't look up from where she's curling into a little ball of Morningstar. "Charlie, you have to leave, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry."

This is going to be the real test.

She can't let herself break the line.

"What are you..." He stands back, taking in the boundary, the blood smeared on the floor, on her hands, on her clothes. "Sabrina," he says, trying to make his voice firmer. "In what world do you think I'm going anywhere? I know...I saw the book, Sabrina. You have to talk to me."

"No," she says, her shoulders shaking. "No, this isn't-- the book only has part of it. It's so much worse. I'm so much worse than that. I'm not just the Herald of Hell. I don't just bring the Apocalypse." She's rocking herself, but she won't look up at him, not yet, not until she has a better feeling that she won't break her lines.

"My real father is Lucifer, Charlie. I touched the book and I dreamed, like I did the other time, and I can feel it. I'm the daughter of the devil. And I did it, I brought the Apocalypse like I was supposed to. I'm not chancing it again."

"Sabrina," he says, his voice smaller than before, on his knees in front of the barrier. "You can't honestly thing I care about that? Any of that. I love you. I will always love you."

"You should care," she says, and she finally makes herself look up. Her eyes are pink-rimmed and black in their absolute misery. "I know you don't care, but I'm dangerous, I'm evil, and it didn't matter, back there, how hard I tried to stop myself. I took steps toward it even when I was trying to do the opposite."

She reaches for the other thing she has to tell him.

"And I-- there's something-- someone else. I fell in love at home. I lived it all out. His name is Nick and I can still feel myself loving him, even while I love you. And I might as well have killed him. He's in Hell, with Lucifer inside of him, because of me."

She's crying openly, the tears raining down her cheeks.

That admission feels a bit like a punch to the gut, and, for a moment, Charlie can't catch his breath. He almost says that he'd been falling in love with someone back home, but then he realises that it's not the same, just because of how she says it. But it doesn't matter because it's just the two of them there. That other boy is something else completely.

"We need to talk about it, Sabrina," he says. "You need to take...whatever this is. You need to take it down, sweetheart."

Sabrina wishes she hadn't looked up, wishes she wasn't watching, because she can see him absorb the bit about Nick. She shakes her head, because she has to do something, she has to try even if she's doomed to fail.

"We can talk," she says, unable to keep the devastation from her voice. "But the candles will burn down and then it's set and I won't be able to take it apart. I don't know what I'm going to do, but if I can't leave, I can't hurt anyone."

She doesn't believe this is ironclad; she suspects Magnus could probably take it apart, or even Marcus's hunter friend. But it can buy her time, maybe. Or-- or-- maybe they can't take it apart. Maybe she stays here.

"I just want to be there for you," he says, quietly, head tipped back, studying the space between them. "I just...can't I touch you? Won't that feel better?" He doesn't care about Nick, doesn't care about anything. He just wants to keep the girl that he loves from feeling any more pai.

"Of course it would feel better, but I can't have it, I shouldn't have it. I've brought you too far down the Path of Night already, and he's right. My f-father. There's no choice."

If he touches her, if she feels anything besides this pain, she might forget what she is, after all.

She's holding herself in place so tightly that her muscles ache. "I only seem to be able to hurt people."

"You've never hurt me," he says, his voice a little sharper and he's as close to her as he can get with the barrier in the way. "I don't believe you ever would, Sabrina. I don't believe it for a second. You're the love of my life, okay? You're everything to me. And I'm not letting you do any of this on your own. You don't have to do it on your own. Because I'm right here. And I'm not going anywhere."

A tear rolls down his cheek. Charlie can't remember the last time he actually cried. But there it is.

"But I will," she says, only it's an actual sob this time. "I tried everything. I tried resisting Lucifer's will and it didn't work. I tried trapping him and I tried outsmarting him, and I tried giving up my powers and making myself mortal, I gave up my life and it ended with death and with Nick gone. And now I'm here and it could all happen again. It could be you, it could be you trapped in Hell."

She's uncurled herself, leaning closer. They're not more than ten feet apart, but the candles are burning lower, starting to flicker.

He knows what will happen when the counters flicker out and Charlie can't have that. He doesn't know what he can do, but that's never stopped him before. He stands up, shoving against the barrier with both hands as hard as he can, trying to push though it, trying to get to her. The pain starts small at first, but then it ends up with searing pain and the smell of singed flesh. Charlie staggers back, cradling his burned hands against his chest.

"Sabrina, please..."

Sabrina hasn't planned for this; her Charlie stays so collected, especially in the face of all the horrible things she's presented to him, and this-- this she isn't ready for, not at all.

"Stop," she begs, "STOP, don't do that!"

But it's hurting him and she made it, and she can feel it hurting him and smell it hurting him and she has. She's hurt him anyway, and even if she's only going to keep doing it, she thinks she'd rather risk the end of the world if she can keep him from this, from that way he says her name and pleads.

"Charlie," she chokes out. She doesn't even feel it when she takes the knife up and cuts herself to smear blood through the lines, breaking them. She staggers out and goes to him, weeping, reaching for him. "Charlie, no, I'm sorry, don't, I'm sorry."

The minute he can, he wraps his arms around her and pulls her close, the palms of his hands scorched and cracked, bleeding a little. He drops frantic kisses into her hair.

"You can't do that," he says, his face wet with tears. "You can't go where I can't get to you."

She clings, and she'll do what she can for his hands in a moment, but right now all she can do is really let loose with the sort of hysterical tears she'd been pouring into this ill-advised plan. "I'm so sorry, I just wanted to keep you safe," she sobs. "I love you, I love you so much. I would do anything to keep you safe."

One of the candles flickers out behind her.

"I won't leave you again."

"Whatever it is, whatever's going to happen, we're doing it together," he says, holding her as tightly as he can. "Promise me."

Sabrina nods, their cheeks wet and a bit sticky as they brush together. She tips her head back just a little, and pulls at one of his hands with her own bleeding hand. Making sure to hold his gaze, she gently presses their palms together. "Whatever happens, we'll face it together. Promitto."

There's a little pulse between their hands, and she kisses him with trembling lips.

Charlie feels it happen, feels things mend and, when their hands part, his palm is tender, but whole. He blinks at her, tears still clinging to his eyelashes, and then he holds out his other hand to her. Because he trusts her, completely and utterly.

Her own surprise is enough to break through some of the remaining sense of guilt and sorrow; she's not exactly one for healing magic, and it feels nothing like when she'd healed Ambrose.

Magic, yes, but the kind of magic she knows she'd been trying to find in the words of Edward Spellman.

She wraps that hand in her bloody fingers, and raises it to kiss the back. "Whatever comes, whenever it comes, you're with me. Because I love you, and you love me. Promitto."

Edited 2019-05-18 21:53 (UTC)

"I love you too," he says, and he's never meant anything so much in his life. When his hands are whole again, he wraps both arms around her tightly, pushing his fingers into her hair to crush her against him.

"We need go somewhere that's not here. I don't care who's place it is, but I don't want to be here anymore."

She just wants to be held by him, but leaving is probably the better choice, especially with her blood all over the place and the candles burning out.

"I took off without telling Salem, or Marcus. We should go back there. I'm sure you can stay over. I'm not letting go of you tonight."

"They're the ones who got me here," he says, stroking her hair. "But let's go to your place. I just want to be where you are, Sabrina. We've got...You need to talk to me about all this."

"I'm glad," she says, nearly standing on his feet in order to get close enough. "We should get out and let them know I'm okay. And I'll tell you everything. All of you."

She sighs and tugs away just enough so that she can walk. "Time to face the music?"

Charlie keeps his arm tight around her, keeping her close, but nods. "I'm here, sweetheart," he says. "For whatever you need."

Marcus barely sleeps that night. He's worried, of course he's worried, so he sends Neil a few text messages, far too late, then tries to force himself to get at least a bit of rest, but nothing comes easy. Charlie and Sabrina are in her room, with Salem keeping watch. Trass is in Marcus's room with him, but he senses something is wrong and spends most of the night restless, too, hopping up onto the bed and then padding over to the door and sniffing around the frame.

Eventually, as the sky has barely begun to lighten, Marcus gives up on trying to sleep.

With Trass padding along behind him, Marcus goes to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee, knowing he'll need the caffeine today. Sabrina might need it, too, and he can have it ready for her when she gets up. He won't wake her, won't disturb her, because he imagines she needs a great deal of rest after yesterday, but at least he can get things ready. And he can be here when she comes out of her room.

Sabrina appears just after dawn, her pale curls seeming even whiter after the night in the Necropolis, be it a trick of the light or no. She's been resting fitfully, and is in her pajamas with a hoodie that definitely seems as if it belongs to Charlie wrapped around her.

She pads into the kitchen in over-sized woolen socks, and sits down at the table.

For a minute, she's just quiet, and then she says, "I'm sorry I ran away. I was scared."

"I know, duck," Marcus answers as he pours them both a cup of coffee, setting them down on the table before he slides into the chair beside her. He's not angry with her, he hopes that's clear enough, hopes Charlie told her, too, that he had only been worried about her and wanted to make sure she was okay.

"Sugar?" he asks, nodding at her coffee. He takes his own black and he pulls his mug closer, holding it between his hands to warm them.

They have to talk. He's seen the book and she'd told him in the truck on the way home about the memories that had come up when she'd fainted, and there's so much there, he knows she needs to talk about it. He can't rush her through it, though, it has to come up in her own time.

They've been so much better to her than she deserves, she thinks, and so she's managing to hold herself together at the moment. "Sugar, please," she answers, her voice soft and very young. How does she even begin here? Spending the night with Charlie's warmth and reassurance all around her has centered her enough to believe that Marcus is hardly going to drop her back at the Home.

Still, she waits until Marcus has passed the sugar over and she's added it to taste, a fairly ridiculous amount that she knows means she'll have to eat or suffer a bit of a crash. Then again, this is already a pretty big crash.

"Lucky you," she says finally, without bitterness, just resignation. "You've managed to end up housing the daughter of Lucifer. I-- I can't even be entirely sure I'm half witch. I don't know if there's any of Edward Spellman in me. What does that make me, then? Is the Lucifer from my world technically a demon? Or still a fallen angel?"

It is a bit of an unsettling statement, he can't pretend it's not, not with the life he's led. Fighting back against demons is everything he's been doing since he was just a boy, just twelve years old, younger than Sabrina by far and he'd been taught nearly every single day that the very root of all that evil was Lucifer himself.

But Marcus has never seen evidence of the devil. He's seen demons, plenty of them, and he knows not a single one of those things could have ever fathered a child as bright and caring and brilliant as Sabrina.

"It makes you Sabrina Spellman," he answers. "Exactly who you've been already for sixteen years and exactly who you'll continue to be from here on. And I am lucky. I'm lucky you're here, I'm lucky Charlie was able to convince you to come back. I'm very lucky to be the one looking out for you and don't think for a second any of what you've learned will change my mind on that."

Sabrina looks up from where she's staring into her coffee with wide eyes, though they seem far less lost in their expression than when Charlie had brought her back to the truck. "You know, I never doubted that," she says. "I knew you'd stand by me, and I knew Charlie would, and it was the idea that I tried so hard to keep from becoming this monster, and I couldn't do it. I couldn't ask anyone to come down that road with me again."

She sniffles a little, looking down again. "Just my existence tore the coven apart, though all the times I pushed Blackwood didn't help. He wanted us dead, and when the Dark Lord commanded him to accept me as Queen, he chose--" Her voice breaks a little. "He chose to poison them before he ran away. He was responsible for them and he killed as many as he could. I didn't make him do it, but would have have? If I weren't part of the equation?"

"You are not responsible for someone else's actions, duck," Marcus says, reaching across the table to cover her hand with his. "You're just not. Everyone makes their own choices and his were... cruel. Horribly selfish and horribly cruel, but from what you've said, he was a jealous, angry and terribly misogynistic man. If he hadn't done that, he would have done something else, something just as awful."

Men like that don't learn. They don't change. They only hurt others for their own personal gain.

"You're not a monster," he says gently. "You never could be. We are not our parents, you and I. We are our own people. Whatever mark they think they get to leave on us is ours to do with what we will. None of what you learned changes that."

Her face crumples a little bit at that. "I don't know how that can be, though. I'm literally the daughter of the devil. Anyone that accepts that as evil-- that evil would be in me too, wouldn't it?" Her eyes are getting hot and blurry, but she battles through it.

"And it's not like I didn't do anything. I performed the miracles, the perversion of them, and I blew the horn, and I wore the crown and I danced his waltz. If my mortal friends hadn't figured out how to block the gates of Hell, I would have brought the Apocalypse."

She's trying not to let her hands shake, but that's a losing battle. "I'd do it again, too. If he was here and I could keep you alive, keep Charlie alive, by doing it, I would."

"Oh, my darling girl," Marcus says, getting up from his seat and coming to sit down beside Sabrina instead. He turns his chair toward her, facing her, and takes one of her trembling hands between his. He knows what she says she remembers and while Marcus doesn't at all doubt her recollection or the things she's seen, he's not quite so eager to lay all the blame at her feet. From the way she's described it, she had been manipulated over and over, trying so hard to do good and having it turned against her by people she trusted.

He doesn't know that he can change what she thinks of any of that, but there are stories he can tell her. Of evil.

"My parents, Sabrina, were as evil as two people could get. They beat me. Burned me with cigarettes. They hated each other and hated me for having been born. When I was seven, my father took up a hammer and he used it to beat my mother to death. Right in front of me. I knew I would be next, so I took his hunting rifle off the wall and I shot him. He died still trying to choke me to death. His hands 'round my neck. I saw it in his eyes, how angry he was, how much evil there was inside of him." He strokes the back of Sabrina's hand. "But I am not my father. I make my choices to be good as often as I can and so do you. Maybe he's your father and maybe he's evil, but evil isn't passed through blood. Evil is a choice."

He smiles a little, then reaches up to smooth back some of her hair. "I've seen the face of God, duck. I know goodness when I see it and there's so much good in you."

The tears are rolling down her cheeks freely as soon as he takes her hand, and even as she's trying to keep from actively sobbing, she's listening.

When she thinks of the true evil of the creature that is apparently her father, what she thinks of are those moments in which she'd seen his eyes, enjoying the torment he put her through, revealing Nick, happy to kill her family. She meets Marcus's eyes, and he smiles and is gentle with her.

He thinks she's good, and she wants to be, so much.

"I tried so hard," she finally stammers out, and throws her arms around his neck and lets herself cry, a different sort of tears than have been poured elsewhere. "I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, I tried so hard." She's apologizing, she knows, to ears that can't hear her, in another world, but the words and the weeping keep coming.

Marcus wraps his arms around her in turn, stroking her hair, her back, murmuring what he hopes are comforting words. He has a feeling the apologies are for someone else, people who aren't in Darrow, those from the memories she's just found herself carrying and while he knows he can't promise her they've forgiven her, he's got a rather strong feeling they have.

"S'alright, duck," he murmurs. "I've got you. You're alright."

She needs this release. Marcus isn't going stop her tears or tell her she has nothing to cry about. People need these moments, these times to fall apart, and if he can give her somewhere space in which to do so, then he's done his job.

Sabrina lets herself cry for a good long while, and while she feels a bit like a child, it's safe here. it might even feel okay to feel a bit like a child, when she's been pushed forward into big roles since the very moment of her sixteenth birthday.

She sniffles as the tears start to dry up, and whispers, "Thank you, Marcus. If I had to have a surprise dad, I really wish it could have been you instead."

Breathing evenly, only sniffing a bit here and there, she doesn't think she can be blamed for letting herself be comforted a little bit longer, pressing her face into his shoulder.

"Let's pretend I am, then, shall we?" he asks with a small smile, still stroking her back. Never in his life has Marcus expected he would be a parent and while he adores children and tends to get along with them wonderfully in nearly all cases, he'd never thought it would extend beyond that. Beyond his work. Beyond volunteering at the Home. Those things were easy for him.

Caring for Sabrina has hardly been a trial and he's been surprised by just how naturally it's come to him, too. Going beyond an adult friend available to help out where needed was never something he imagined he would do.

But they're here now. And he adores her entirely, knows he would do anything for her. There's no harm in it, he figures, if it gives them both the security they need.

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