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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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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