teenagerenegade | (no subject)

Rosie miraculously doesn't have to work tonight, and she couldn't be happier. As much as she loves her job--most nights, anyway, that one instance a week ago notwithstanding--it's left her with less time for things like this, opportunities for the four of them just to spend a night together without any other obligations. She says goodbye to Neil, winking at Caleb when she just happens to pass him in the lobby on her way out, and it takes only the length of a bus ride before she's across town and on her way up to Nick's.

The front door's unlocked when she gets there, and she pushes it open, grinning over at Charlie when she sees him putting things away in the kitchen. "What can I help with?"

Sabrina arrives about fifteen minutes later, Salem in tow.

As much as her mind has been occupied by certain gloomy things, this seems like a surefire way to push it back, at least for a while. She stretches, relieving some of the tension in her from stocking bookshelves, as her familiar trots around the apartment.

"What's the movie of the night?" She glances around. "Nick said he'd be here when I got off my shift, did he go back out?"

"We're at his place, so I hope not?" says Charlie looking up from where he's making drinks. He'd left Rosie in charge of the popcorn. "He's probably just gone out to grab something, right?"

He glances over his shoulder at Sabrina, automatically offering his cheek for a kiss.

Rosie ignores the stab of regret she feels seeing Sabrina walk through the door, knowing how low she'd been the last few days. Tonight will be better, for all of them.

"Maybe he's getting dessert?" she says, giving the pan a shake as the popcorn starts to pop. "From that place downtown we all keep meaning to try, with the little cakes and everything." It feels more like the kind of spontaneous thing he'd do on a night when it's just her, or just Sabrina, but the fact it's all of them doesn't make it an impossible idea either. She sighs when Sabrina asks about the movie.

"We haven't chosen," she admits, and scrunches up her nose, playfully resigned to her fate. "Why don't you look for something?"

Salem strangely, balefully, makes noise from down the hallway.

For a moment, Sabrina's too distracted for it, pressing a kiss to Charlie's cheek and breathing in the warm scent of him, and as she moves along to collapse on the couch, she finds Rosie's hand, giving it a squeeze. "You gave in awful easy," she remarks.

Salem makes a sound that's a lot more pained, this time, and Sabrina doesn't make it to the couch, instead heading for the hallway.

Charlie frowns, watching Sabrina go out into the hallway and he leaves what he's doing, shooting Rosie a dubious look.

"Brina?" he asks, following her out. "What's wrong? Is it Salem?"

She answers Charlie's look with one of her own, watching him follow Sabrina down the hallway. She doesn't have any kind of anything, no magic or precognition or anything very special at all, but all of a sudden the apartment doesn't feel as cosy as it had even a minute ago.

The popcorn might burn if she leaves it too long, but this is more important. She turns off the burner--with the lid on, there may be enough conserved heat to pop a bit more of it anyway--and leaves the kitchen, following them both to where Salem's wailing in a key she hadn't ever heard before. It settles another hard, sickening stone in the pit of her stomach.

"Sabrina, what is it?"

What they'll find is witch and familiar, standing outside Nick's bedroom door, Salem somehow looking less like a cat than usual, and Sabrina with the color drained out of her face. "You're just being paranoid," she tells him, shaking hands patting herself down for her phone.

"Can one of you call Nick?"

Charlie's hand immediately goes to the pocket of his jeans, grabbing his phone and starting to call up Nick's number.

"....What does he think's wrong?" he says, holding his phone up to his ear. He frowns and lowers the phone, ending the call and trying again. "That's...Rosie, can you try?"

The look on Charlie's face just then scares her more than the fact of Salem's crying or the tremor in Sabrina's hands. "I...it's in my bag, I'll just..."

Rosie backs away, turning towards the living room and trying not to run. Her purse is hanging on a hook by the door; she opens it, taking out her phone just as it buzzes, and for a moment she has the tiniest shred of hope. All it is is a notification from one of the games she'd put on there, something silly and useless she lost interest in quickly but hadn't yet thought to delete. It's not Nick, and the force of her wishing that it was makes it hard for her to breathe. She waits until she's back with the others before she makes the call.

And makes it again. And again. "I'm not...there's just a recording," she says. She can feel her heart pounding in her chest. "Not his voicemail, just...a recording."

Salem is up on hind legs, kneading at Sabrina's knees, while she goes whiter and whiter. She doesn't trust herself to pick him up, and in a voice she knows will be peculiar and tight, she manages, "Salem doesn't think he's here."

Anymore, she can't bring herself to say, and she's suddenly moving, back to the kitchen where she picks up a knife and a nearby black marker. With this kind of horror building inside, she'd have thought her hands wouldn't be steady enough, and yet the moment she begins scrawling out the shapes and sigils on the countertop, it comes out as perfectly as she could imagine.

She slips the knife over her thumb and smears it along the circle, whispering the words to the locating spell. The circle flashes, a light pulsing along the loop, searching, and then simply winks out.

Charlie follows her, standing next to Rosie, so close that their shoulders are almost touching, watching what Sabrina does. When the light flares and then fizzles, dies, a little shiver of dread goes straight through him.

"...Do I want to know what that means?"

"Sabrina, that's a permanent marker," she admonishes, focusing on the practical, the fussy and mortal and boring, anything to quiet the sickening creep of her own distress. It doesn't work as well as she might hope. "What's Nick going to think, finding his counter all..."

Sabrina's not listening, finishing the sigil and slicing her thumb; Rosie's hand finds Charlie's as the magic takes effect. The light blinks out at a speed even she can tell is too quick.

"I don't think we do," she says, her voice sounding just as uncertain as his, her eyes going to Sabrina's and not wanting to find a confirmation there.

She can't find a way to answer, and Salem's winding his way through Rosie's legs, trying to get picked up by hear instead.

"It's a locator spell," she says. Her voice seems far away when she says, "It didn't connect."

And Sabrina knows, but that doesn't stop her from scoring her ring finger, tracing the circle again. Watching the light pulse like a telephone ringing, watching it blink out again.

She can't feel her fingertips, and switches the knife to the bleeding hand, examining the fingers freed up by the swap.

"Hey," says Charlie, stepping away from Rosie while still keeping hold of her hand to curl his fingers around the wrist of Sabrina's hand. Everything comes together in his head and it's suddenly hard to breath under the weight of it, so he keeps hold of both of the girls. "No, Brina. Okay? You have to...stop."

She can't make herself let go of Charlie's hand long enough to deal with Salem, choosing instead to let him keep pressing himself against her legs. There's not much comfort in that, for either of them--and less, when Sabrina's next try fails just as quickly as the first--but it's all she has to give.

"It has to connect," she says, insists, her voice tremulous and feeble. "You're doing it wrong, or...it has to connect." Charlie pulls away, his hand still tight in hers as he grabs Sabrina's wrist, and that's the last piece before it feels like everything crumbles.

"No," she echoes, but she's not saying it to either of them, her legs suddenly feeling like they're not going to hold her up a minute longer. She's going to scream, or vomit, or start crying until she runs out of tears, if she ever does. She'll throw a plate, five plates, everything that's in the cupboard by her head and not stop until Nick walks through the front door again. "No, no, no, no..."

"I'm sorry," Sabrina says, in a tiny voice, standing there with blood on her hands, on the countertop in front of her, her magic failing and everything falling apart.

Only Charlie's touch keeps her from trying it again, has her setting the knife down. For a moment, it's also the only thing that keeps her from believing she's standing before the closed Gates of Hell, knowing that Nick is gone, out of her reach.

She looks over at Rosie, and feels in a way before that she's brought so much hurt to her, that the world with Greendale had only had the power to hurt Rosie and ruin things because Sabrina is always a carrier of sorrow.

Does Rosie even want her comfort? All of Sabrina's feelings are behind the Gates now, as if she's heard them close. She moves forward, bringing Charlie with her as she attempts to pull Rosie close. "I'm sorry, Rosie, I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry," says Charlie softly, even as he pushes down the memory of the various ways his mom had hurt herself when his dad first went to prison. This isn't the same -- it's not the same at all. He goes easily into the embrace, gathering Rosie to them with his free hand so that they can stand together, breathing together, in the middle of Nick's kitchen.

"He's...really gone?"

Charlie goes easily, but Rosie struggles at first when he tries to pull her in, when Sabrina reaches for her and draws her close. Resisting this isn't going to bring Nick back, or let him walk through the door or for one of their phones to miraculously ring and have it be him on the other side of the line, and she knows it. But she also knows if she gives in to this, she loses the last thing keeping her anywhere near together.

She's already lost enough.

But they pull her in anyway, and she stops fighting, and when Charlie asks the question they all already know the answer to, a sob tears its way out of her throat. She holds on to both of them, as tightly as they're clinging to her, there in the middle of a kitchen that used to be Nick's.

"He's gone," Sabrina answers, because someone has to say it. It has to be said. She's certain she feels the tears on her cold face, but she feels as if some part of her, maybe her astral self, still stands in front of the mess she'd made of the locator spell.

She presses in closer and closer, hoping the warmth of the other two, that they smell like themselves, that it will all anchor her to the moment.

Charlie does his best to stay in contact with both of the girls, his girls, aware of what they've both lost here. He's good at managing loss, has gotten good over the years, but that doesn't mean it's easy. He squeezes his eyes shut against the sudden sting of tears.

"I'm...Shit. I'm really, really sorry."

Rosie holds them both and cries, something horrible and racking that's already leaving her exhausted. She barely hears Sabrina confirm it, what they all already knew and what Salem had tried to tell them, but she does and her already-broken heart somehow manages to break even further.

"We didn't even have a year together, not properly," she says, each word aching with pain. "I thought we'd at least have that. I wanted that."

"I'm sorry," Sabrina whispers, again and again. She's saying it to all of them, to Rosie's blinding grief, and Charlie who will be trying to keep them afloat, and Nick who must have returned to Hell, having chosen it so she wouldn't. She's saying sorry to all the universe, if it'll listen, sorry for everything she's been and done, that's led to this.

When she realizes she can't stop saying it, she presses her face into Charlie's shoulder, feeling her hand start to throb.

Charlie just holds onto them both for a long moment and then he pulls back, just enough that he can look into their faces. "I need to take care of your hand, okay, Brina? You guys should...sit down. Let me take care of you."

Rosie looks at Charlie, trying so hard to be steady and brave and whole for them both, when everything else has fallen to pieces. She loves him more now--her best and closest friend, the one she'd trust with nearly everything--than she thinks she ever has before. "Okay," she says, the word raw and miserable in her throat. "Please."

The couch isn't far, but it feels like an age, and even when they sit it's full of all kinds of memories: movie nights, like tonight was supposed to be; their one bright Christmas all together; any number of slow, heated evenings where she and Nick got exactly as carried away as they ever wanted to be. And most of all, most overwhelming of all, the night she'd spent in his arms right after their escape from Kagura. He'd made her feel safe then, and content, and looking back Rosie had known that was the beginning of everything.

She'd had her something good, and now she'd lost it, and it's never going to return.

As Charlie goes to the bathroom to get bandages, Rosie puts a careful arm around Sabrina, holding her tight. "I'm sorry," she murmurs. "I'm sorry for both of us."

"My hand," says Sabrina, and it's clear that it takes her a moment to understand, looking down and seeing the blood. It ought to be there, she thinks, blood on her hands so now that Nick is gone, she never forgets where he is.

Charlie wants to take care of it, and she's not about to deny him anything he wants now. "Okay," she agrees, and then turns to Rosie as she echoes back the sorry. She's too stiff at first, but within a few heartbeats she's letting herself lean into Rosie.

She doesn't know what to say, just reaches up with the clean hand to cup Rosie's face.

Coming back from the bathroom, Charlies stands and watches the two of them together on the sofa, locked together in grief. He shares it, obviously -- him and Nick were close -- but it's nothing to what the girls are going to be feeling, and he knows that. So Charlie does what he's learned to do, and shoves down everything that he's been feeling, so that he can be strong for someone else.

He sits down on the edge of the coffee table and holds out his hand for Sabrina's.

"C'mon, Brina - let me see."A

Rosie looks over at him as he sits down on the coffee table, untwisting herself a little from the way she and Sabrina have been clinging to each other. She doesn't move the other girl, doesn't make her give her injured hand to Charlie, but her fingers gently trace the line of her wrist in a kind of encouragement.

"Go on," she murmurs. "Let him clean up a bit, okay?"

"Of course," Sabrina answers, because even if she's feeling numb and detached, the one thing she can still do is listen to Charlie. Rosie's touch helps, and she pulls the other girl with her as she moves.

She remembers feeling this way when she'd remembered with the book, remembers that she'd felt it when she want to seal herself away.

When she gives her hand over, she can see the faint line from that night, and her promise. it's not helpful to cleaning her fingers, maybe, but she steps close enough to lean into him.

Gently and methodically, Charlie cleans each of the cuts and carefully tapes a bandage over each one. When he's done, he leans in and presses a kiss to her cheek.

"There," he says. "You probably could have done that with magic but...thank you for letting me help."

Watching the two of them--Charlie, steady and loving as he cleans and bandages; Sabrina, wrung out and numb--there's a moment where Rosie feels almost superfluous. It's fleeting, but no less painful in its brevity. As it is, it's not worth dwelling on tonight. She takes a shaky breath, leaning against Sabrina again once Charlie's finished.

Sabrina finds herself with the clear and chilling thought that some sort of new balance will have to be found, and it seems exhausting. She's suddenly so tired, and she wishes she could just bypass all the pain that's coming, sleep instead.

She's just a few steps away from where the yawning pit of what it means that Nick is gone sits, and it's only a matter of time before she tumbles in. Burying her face in Charlie's neck, she pulls Rosie closer too, wants to have them both pressed as close as possible.