It had been a few days since Sabrina had woken up and the world had been upended again. At this point she was pretty used to that happening, but there was something different about this one, the adjustment a little bit harder than the other times her world had shifted. It wasn’t just the physical changes either--though her platinum blonde hair changing back to the golden blonde that she’d been born was different enough--but having experienced five years outside of Vallo in one night was a bit overwhelming.
Every other time had been a few weeks here and there updating her on what had happened back home. They had always been tumultuous, providing enough annoying events she hadn’t been able to do anything about while in Vallo and offering up abilities that she’d struggled being able to figure out how to handle--or shoving places she didn’t really want back into her life.
This one wasn’t even weeks or months though. It had been years and Sabrina felt them all as if she’d truly lived them, each gain and loss stitched into her skin and bones, wrapped tightly and entwining with the memories she had in Vallo as well.
She died, lived out nearly a year in her own personal heaven-like realm with Nick, been resurrected along with him, and that was only the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the adventures and struggles she’d gotten up to in the four years after that had shifted her into the person she was now, one who remembered Vallo with a vague fondness at points and then also recalled it as if everything had happened yesterday.
Which it had happened yesterday.
It had also happened five years ago…six years ago?
Time was a construct that she was seriously beginning to hate trying to figure out.
Sabrina slipped into the usual booth at the Grease Bucket, greeting the waitress and ordering her and Dan the drinks created for the two of them as she waited for him to show up.
Dan wasn’t entirely certain what was going on, but he was eager to sort of suss it out - Vallo being Vallo again, obviously, but on a whole other level. Which was saying quite a bit because it tended to flip things upside down pretty often - and reveal new interpersonal funhouse mazes that twisted like confetti caught in a windstorm. Gods only knew what was happening now, but he and Sabrina had weathered plenty of those windstorms in The Grease Bucket and they would do so again.
He wouldn’t keep her waiting for too long - he arrived at the designated time, headed to the designated booth, and slid across from her like he’d done so many times before. When he did some mental calculations and checked her over though, she looked different. Very different. Pale blue eyes actually widened for a second, and he internally panicked, but he wasn’t going to automatically jump to how this could be bad. No. It didn’t have to be.
Besides, how could it possibly get any worse? Maybe he shouldn’t ask that question or put it out there into the universe.
“So - “ he started, squinting. “I’ll just - give you the floor? If you want to talk about what happened?” Presumably milkshakes were on the way. He may need some fries as well.
Sabrina scrunched her nose as she took in the question and looked him over. Her mind was an internal battle, trying to meld the fact that it was like she was seeing him for the first time in five years and also as though she’d only talked to him a few days back. She wasn’t sure how she didn’t have a headache from that amount of processing, but she also wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth there either.
“So.” Sabrina paused as their milkshakes were delivered and put in an order for fries as well. “I had another update.” In itself that was improbable. She’d died. Permanently. Or at least it had seemed that way at the time. Now she was well aware that there was no death for her, only transformation or however that line went. “It took some time and a lot of effort on everyone’s part back home, but they resurrected Nick and I.”
Which was good or she’d have been spending however long it took to bring him back as well. Thankfully they had skipped that sort of melodrama. “We’ve been working with different covens around the world for the last four years? Five years?” What was time?
Sabrina frowned at her own words. “Like I remember doing those things. I feel it in my bones, the magic I’ve gained is etched into me.” She touched her hair, another sure sign that things had shifted. “Somehow I’m five years older…but I didn’t leave Vallo either? It’s like this war in my head right now that is trying to meld it all together. I remember having Claire over for a sleepover…but also last week I was in Paris, chasing down some really annoying witch hunters.”
Um. What?
Dan thought he could make sense of a lot of things - he was an intelligent person, even if prior to Vallo he didn’t have a ton of formal schooling. But he also had the burden (privilege?) of seeing the world in a whole different way - the Shining, telepathy, was like peering into the depths of a rock pool and seeing fish as random thoughts just darting around, every which way. You got used to it after awhile, and he even learned how to take control of it - but it was different.
Sort of helped him be able to keep an open mind about most of life’s curveballs. This one, however? It wasn’t one that he saw coming. “That’s...so much,” he observed, voice gravelly with thought, a door on rusty hinges. “But I’m relieved. For you, for Nick - I wanted nothing more than for you to get another chance together.”
Plus, he remembered talking to Zelda when she was here. She’d been despondent that her efforts to bring back Sabrina hadn’t yielded results yet but it seemed like she’d succeeded after all. Dan was happy to hear it. “Five years older though...” he whistled, poking his straw into his cherry-chocolate shake. “That’s a trade-off, for sure.”
He said it carefully, as a way to gauge how she felt about it.
“I…” Sabrina paused, leaning back against the booth as she thought about that. “It’s weird.” That was the simplest way to describe it. “I remember feeling this unfathomable grief that had wrapped its way inside of me and wasn’t shaking loose but then I also remember not feeling that way? He was with me back home. We weren’t apart in the Sweet Hereafter. I never had to grieve the loss of Nick like I was doing here.” She wasn’t sure anyone knew just how low she’d gotten over the last month, how much she’d had to curl into herself in order to not do the unimaginable things she’d wanted to do.
Sabrina might have been getting out again, making an effort to talk to people on the network and in person, hanging out with Dan and Claire and Roz and others, but she’d felt pretty hollow after doing so. It had been like all of her energy had been put into trying to be somewhat normal that by the time she got back to her apartment she’d just crash. Which had never been how she’d acted before.
“I woke up in our apartment with the animals and aside from Salem they weren’t sure what was going on but they could tell something had changed.” She didn’t feel overwhelmed by her own sorrow anymore. It still lingered there under the surface some but it wasn’t biting down inside of her and holding fast. She knew he was alive, that everyone she cared about was alive and thriving back home.
“I’m not sure if I should feel guilty or not that I feel as free as I do right now?” A weight had been lifted from her that she’d been struggling to shoulder.
Sabrina shrugged before taking a sip of her milkshake. “I have no idea if any of that makes sense?”
“It does,” Dan assured. He felt as if, throughout the whole time they’d known each other, he’d seen some of the highest points of Sabrina’s life - but also some of the lowest too. The high points he reveled in with her, celebrated with her. But those low points? It wore as heavy as a blanket on the shoulders, one dragged with you everywhere - stones on the chest, something inescapable. And while grief tended to resemble a storm (sometimes it was a light mist all around you, not gone but still there - and other times it was fierce) she hadn’t been at the point where she could really weather it well.
There hadn’t been anything he could do about that. No magic would fix it. No words would. Nothing made it more bearable except for support (he could offer that, at least) and time. If there had been a way for her to obtain that time in a way that didn’t exactly line up with how time usually passed? He would accept it. “I love you,” he said. “I hate that you were hurting. I wanted to take it away - but I knew I couldn’t. From my end, I’m not going to consider the ‘should’ parts of the scenario. You can feel how you want to feel about things. I’m happy that you have this, though.” That there was more life in her expression. It wasn’t just a hollowness, an emptiness that echoed like the silence that would ring in your ears whenever you were alone, grieving, and happened to close your eyes.
“I love you too. And I know you did.” A lot of people had wanted to do that. She was lucky that she didn’t have to live with that grief any longer though she knew Roz and Ambrose did to different degrees. She’d still been dead for them both for nearly an entire year and nothing would change that, even if it had been in the past. “I think I’ll just be feeling this out for awhile to come.”
Memory updates were one thing, but nothing had been to this degree for her before.
“And I need to figure out what I want to do here now.” Sabrina wasn’t sure about staying in the apartment Nick and her had been renting any longer. It was too small for all of the animals and with Maze popping up in it all the time with her hellhound-in-training, it really wasn’t ideal. She wanted the things inside of the place, all of the photos, Ripley’s mementos, but it was probably time to move on from it.
“I’m supposed to be working for Thurvishar for the DOA part time and going to school.” Was that still what she wanted? Sabrina really wasn’t sure yet.
The fries were dropped off, a whole piping hot basket - Dan took a couple, when they were hot and fresh. It’d be a nice snack before he went back to work - because there was always work to be done at the clinic, and Vallo’s weirdness didn’t really stop for anyone.
“Feeling this out is valid,” he smiled a bit, dunking those fries in some ketchup he squeezed out on a smaller plate. “You’ll have support from me and Allison, like you always do. And by feeling it out I guess that also means seeing how your wants have changed? Your priorities?”
It was possible Sabrina could decide she wanted to go in an entirely new direction - before, she’d been on a path to study acting. Dan saved the ticket stubs from every show she’d been in, all of them he’d come to watch, and her shadowbox was a keepsake that they were constantly adding to. But if she wanted to become a sheep shearer or something, well - he’d support that as well.
She had all sorts of new opportunities. New chances. Other paths to go down and other obstacles to overcome. There was no telling.
Sabrina nodded. She’d known Dan and Allison would have her back no matter what she decided to do but it was still nice to hear it from him. He’d become a rock for her, someone who’d helped instill some boundaries in her that her aunts had never successfully been able to help cultivate. She was forever going to be grateful for that. Probably not the vegetables though.
“Here isn’t home so I know I don’t have to do the same things I was doing there.” Which was kind of a relief. Witch politics were downright annoying but there was no escaping them in her world when she was so intrinsically tied to them there. Here she could live out some dreams she hadn’t gotten a chance to do.
“But yeah, I think this is definitely one of those situations where I just wait and see, ruminate or whatever.” There was no need to make any big decisions right away. Better to process everything first. Though, thankfully this wasn’t like the last few times she’d been updated. This was a lot, but it was mostly good. No devastating circumstances.
“I feel like I’m supposed to ask what you’ve gotten up to…but also I know it was literally yesterday for you.” That was going to take some getting used to.
Dan laughed, dunking that long silver spoon into his milkshake glass - the shakes here were always so damn good. Really thick, but not too thick - you could enjoy it with a spoon or use your straw, and you didn’t have to give yourself a brain aneurysm trying to slurp it up. “Not as much as you, sadly,” he teased, a little sliver of light-heartedness to his tone. It was true - his life definitely wasn’t as much of a roller coaster as Sabrina’s had been as of late. In Vallo, he tended to lead sort of a simple existence anyway - he worked, he went to nursing school, he had a family. And given that she’d crammed five years into a couple of days, he really didn’t have any stories that would compare to how potentially exciting that was.
“Just the usual though. Always waiting for the other ‘what will it be this week?’ shoe to drop,” he said. “Existing here is pretty crazy but after almost two years I’ve sort of learned to roll with a lot of things.” Others, not so much - but for the most part, he sort of found his niche with his work at the clinic and running the group support meetings. “And when I do reach that two-year mark, I hope we’ll celebrate together.”
“We better be celebrating together.” Her own anniversary was only a couple of weeks away, near the end of January. She grinned as she scooped up some fries, adding a bit more salt to the bunch. “Unless you’re going to try and serve me vegetables in cake again. Then I might need to decline.” She wouldn’t really, but it was hard not to tease about that.
Sabrina raised her milkshake glass. “To new beginnings?”
Because that was what this felt like for her. Not exactly a fresh start, but the slate had been brushed a bit, allowing for a new adventure in Vallo. A new path to try out and decide upon. That was exciting in itself, even better to have Dan and others that she loved on this crazy journey with her.
It was really great to see Sabrina smile, and to hear her teasing about vegetables - that actually felt normal for Dan. Like things hadn’t been completely on fire since Nick disappeared - that they were going to be okay. Oh, sure, he knew they would be okay eventually - it just felt like that point was eons away.
The fact that he could see it now, here in this moment, made him feel infinitely better - so yeah, he’d take it. Maybe there was ‘reason’ to feel guilty. Maybe it was cheating, somehow, on some cosmic scale. But he’d still take it.
“To new beginnings,” he echoed, gently clinking his glass against hers. “And - to no vegetables in cake.”