RP Log: Sabrina Spellman & Callum Nova Who: Callum Nova and Sabrina Spellman What: Holiday shenanigans is interrupted by a talk about memory updates. Where: A cozy holiday ice rink When: mid-December Warnings: Spoilers for Atlas Paradox and bad ice-skating
Sabrina Spellman preferred cooler weather. Give her a chance to wear leggings and an oversized fuzzy sweater and she was in heaven. Greendale had almost always been in a state of Autumn with trees changing color, apple spice in the air, and pumpkins dotting most doorsteps. Cold weather was a different story entirely. Snow was pretty when viewed from a window, but needing to go out into it and maneuver around all that cold white was something she’d rather skip.
Ice skating she could do though. Cute outfit with deadly skates strapped to her feet? Who wouldn’t love that combination? Add in the private decked out igloo Callum had gotten the two of them and it was perfect.
She did a little spin on the ice as she stepped onto it, turning back to look at him. He’d been weird lately. Well, weirder than normal. Sabrina didn’t think it had anything to do with her growing feelings toward him, not when he continued to hang out with her, but something was up. And she was going to figure out what it was.
“I’m guessing there’s not a lot of ice skating in South Africa?” she asked, holding out a hand to him. Hopefully he was sober enough to get across the ice.
Callum had rented the little bubble igloo not out of a sense of holiday spirit, but because it offered two of his favorite things: people-watching and privacy. He’d not been graceful on his skates, having not skated all that much (Sabrina was right; his homeland wasn’t terribly interested in cold weather sports), but it’d been a shit week and Callum cared less about making a good impression than he usually did, and he rarely cared on a decent day. So what if he was clumsy when ice skating? So what if he’d started the festive holiday drinking around noon?
So what if he’d gotten a year’s worth of memories dumped into his head without fanfare a few days ago, rendering him off-balance, shattered, and irritated - deeply, deeply irritated - about having to deal with emotion that was actually his own?
The peppermint hot chocolate was spiked and that was a godsend, as far as he was concerned. When Sabrina had suggested they take advantage of Vallo’s various winter festivals, he’d pictured them dressed to the nines pissing off her friends for existing and looking good at some fancy something-or-other. Now, he was grateful that no one was paying much attention to them in their cozy little igloo as people skated past. Although watching the occasional one fall and feel embarrassment did cheer him up a little.
He took a sip of the hot cocoa, slouched as he was next to her. “Cape Town’s not unlike southern California in weather,” he agreed, “so I’ll be leaving the triple-axels to you.”
Dressing to the nines at some fancy getogether was still on the table (New Year’s Eve wasn’t that far away) but as much as Sabrina enjoyed dressing up, sometimes cozy and semi-private seemed better. Especially with how he’d been acting lately. She snagged some cheese off the charcuterie board as they watched the people skate by, mulling over the possibilities for his extra glumness.
She’d already scratched off not liking the holidays. He hadn’t grumped much when the lights and decorations had started going up in November. Crowds were always a possibility but that didn’t add up with when they were at his place or hers and it was only the two of them. Even without celebrating Christmas, this time of the year could be difficult for people who missed their families. So maybe that was it. She missed her aunts, even if she never wanted to lay eyes on them again because of their betrayal.
Sabrina had never been good at letting things go, but she was going to try.
She pulled her phone out of her bag, determined to take a photo of them. Even slouching Callum was photogenic. “To making memories,” her voice with entirely too much cheer as she raised the phone and then quickly dropped it.
Memories. Oh fuck her. “Did you die?”
Callum, sensing the predatory stalking of an actual serious conversation, grabbed her phone from where Sabrina had dropped it at her hip and snapped the selfie of the two of them before the app could close. Examining it, Callum decided he looked impeccable - smiling, charming, warm, fake - while Sabrina’s eyes continued to hold the horrified realization of what was likely to have been plaguing him, her mouth half-open in question. Charming.
“Oh, that one’s Christmas card material,” he said, pleased with it, and passed her phone back to her so she could keep or delete it. “And no. I didn’t die. I’m still very much alive at home, much to everyone’s general disappointment.” His voice drawled in its usual way, but his image wasn’t without cracks: he reached for his drink, downed it, and set the empty glass down a little too abruptly.
“You know,” he mused, “it’s almost fun. Having to speak any of this out loud, I mean. Back at home, everyone always just knew.” Parisa, mostly, but the others were as watchful as prey. Which, he supposed, they were.
“Back home everyone plotted to kill you, so maybe it's better that not everyone always just knows here,” Sabrina countered, as she looked down at the photograph. Keeping, but not posting it. She could use telepathy or her own brand of persuasion powers to dig a little deeper, but Sabrina wasn’t a fan of using either. Morals were a dastardly little thing that she couldn’t ever really shake.
Sabrina took note of the way he put down his glass, adding it up with the various other bits and pieces she’d picked up recently. He wasn’t alright, but was anyone after Vallo decided to dump memories in their head? She gestured to the door to their igloo and it closed, affording them even more privacy as Sabrina sat down on one of the comfy looking couches. And then willed in a bottle of spiced rum from Lux and some more glasses before picking at the cheese again.
“How long was your update?” she asked, pouring herself some rum before offering Callum the bottle. “I’ve done one week of time all the way to jamming five years of my life into my head at once. It’s Vallo’s fun little gift that keeps on giving. This is why I prefer when I get animals.” Less headache inducing. “Should have let me take you to a cat cafe.”
“A year,” he answered, because it was an easy response without emotional attachment to it, and accepted the bottle and poured his own glass. “I don’t even want to imagine five years. RIP hairline and good cholesterol,” he added as an afterthought, making a face. It wasn’t quite empathy for what Sabrina had been through, but it was as close as Callum got; he suddenly and fiercely hated Vallo for the power it wielded and used so sloppily. Petty magic, it felt like. Petty grievances.
He didn’t like being on the other side of petty.
He refocused on Sabrina. “How did you get through it?” Callum was curious, yes, but it was also a good deflection from details he was still parsing. He wasn’t unwilling to have this conversation with Sabrina, but mentally moving from grumpy private brooding to “okay so we’re doing this” was still in motion, and hey. She was the expert. He might as well learn.
Sabrina swirled the rum around in her glass, snorting at his question. Had she gotten through it? Some days it definitely didn’t feel that way, but she’d been a hopeless mess this time last year, barely moving out of her bed. The memories had helped push her forward if nothing else. “Well. I went from being dead to alive again, so that helped.”
She quickly downed her glass, making a face at the burn of the alcohol before pouring herself another. “I don’t recommend sacrificing yourself for the world. Especially if the world decides it still needs you”--yes, she did air quotes.
“I guess time does it.” Put enough space between her and the memories worked some. “But also don’t give yourself time to wallow in it. We can’t change anything about whatever’s happened at home while we’re here, which makes all of it even more pointless.” Sabrina shrugged. “Hanging out with you usually makes me forget all of it.”
Callum didn’t mean to snort, but he did. ‘Wallowing in it’ was sort of his raison d'être; he’d never been the sort of person to have much in the way of momentum. He was more of a jellyfish person, floating from one entertainment to another and never really landing anywhere of his own volition. It was a nasty personality defect, but one that guaranteed he wouldn’t be an ambitious megalomaniac wanting to take over the world or whatever. The laziness both cut and comforted.
“You don’t have to worry about my sacrificing myself for the world,” he said knowingly, “although if the world tried to kill me and resurrect me for its own aims I’d probably die again just to spite it. Obviously I’d prefer if you didn’t follow that path,” he added lightly, because while he wasn’t really the hero type, he was absolutely the vengeance type. He had no idea how Sabrina managed to be smile and think the general best of things after all the fuckery she’d been put through. God, she and Rhodes would probably be friends.
That nauseating thought aside, he took a drink of his rum and mulled. “Although--” he began, and thought how to phrase what came next. “I suppose my lack of untimely death is part of the problem. I didn’t die. Rhodes didn’t die - more’s the pity there - and now the Archives are lacking the requisite sacrifice. So it’s pulling from the living.”
He could see that clearly, here - perspective, he supposed. He doubted the magic would be able to follow him all the way out here, which was one point for Vallo. What a racket. “This is why libraries are a mistake,” he confided to her, as much to be a brat as to minimize whatever the fuck had happened back home.
Ah. Death was an absolute ass about getting what it thought it deserved. She’d seen that play out more than once. It was funny how true those damn Final Destination movies turned out to be. Death would keep coming until it got what it wanted or whatever it saw as a fair trade. At least in her world. Who knew what the rules were in Vallo.
“I wish I could tell you there’s something you could do with knowing all of this, but that’s the worst part. You get a chance for all this perspective on all the crap you’re dealing with at home and can’t do a thing about it.” It was cruel, a twist of a knife in a wound that wouldn’t kill but wasn’t allowed to heal either.
“The version of it here isn’t hurting you though, is it?” Sabrina narrowed her eyes, the igloo heating up a few degrees as she contemplated burning the building to the ground if it was giving him so much as a headache. Gansey would probably cry though. And Roz.
God. It really was incredibly tempting to lie to Sabrina and get the Library of Alexandria in this world burned down and torment all the weird nerds with its destruction. Callum had always hated the sort of intellectual who liked to bleat about the Library and talk about sniffing the spines of old books.
“The Library here isn’t connected with the one at home, no,” he admitted after a beat, wondering if his restraint would come back around to benefit him one of these days. Almost certainly not. “So it’s just memories. Memories that I didn’t live.” Callum didn’t put too much stock in them, one way or another, being a person who could put things in other people’s heads. It annoyed him greatly that it was happening to him now and he couldn’t just… go bitch at Parisa or what not. “I’ve never tried it but you could probably get someone to pluck them out if you really wanted,” she offered up. Sabrina doubted it would be something he’d really want to do. She knew how disconcerting it was to have others inside her head when she was used to being the one to go into theirs even if doing so wasn’t even something she liked doing much at all.
She leaned back against the sofa, pulling the furskin throw tighter around her. “I’m all ears if you want to bitch about anything specific,” she said, setting her glass down on the table. “I’m told that helps, but I mostly broke stuff in Hell when I got mine.” There was something incredibly satisfying about destroying ancient sculptures and tapestries while the demons could do nothing but stand around and sulk.
“We could always set fire to the library there.” It wasn’t like she hadn’t considered doing that a time or two in the past anyway.
“There isn’t much to report,” Callum said, and although it wasn’t true, truthfully there wasn’t much he considered worthy of gossiping about. “Reina’s got a god complex. I’ve been seeing what that’s all about. Why not.” His directionless year was a blur to him now, remembering the various little slights from Tristan, Parisa’s block of mental stone. “I don’t know that I’m at the ‘break things’ state; I’m far better at breaking people. But if that changes,” he finished off the rum. “I will let you know. Besides.”
He struck a dramatic pose. “How could I ever let such sad memories ruin this magical and festive time of year?”
Sabrina snorted and offered up some of the blanket to him. “I’m pretty sure that statistically this is one of the most depressing times of the year. Anyway,” she drawled. “Want to snuggle and you can laugh at everyone who keeps falling on the ice? We still haven’t even picked at the dessert tray.”
He’d actually talked and while maybe he hadn’t delved into all the sordid details, Sabrina was counting this conversation as a win. It wasn’t like everything was going to be sunshine and rainbows after getting a memory dump, but he seemed a little less gloom and doom to her and he’d said he’d let her know if he wanted to break things.
“Also I want a better picture than that monstrosity from earlier.”
“We’ll take one. I’m sure I’ll be just as pretty later on this evening,” Callum said with his usual drawl, sitting back alongside her to watch the various people skate by. He hoped someone would wipe out; that was always a mood-lifter.
Callum would continue to mentally pick at the new memories, and wonder what, if anything, they were supposed to mean for him. His aimlessness here in Vallo seemed more pointed now, given what little he had undertaken back home. Still. He wasn’t the sort to suddenly be ambitious or particularly self-reflective. He liked alcohol and opportunities to be adored. Luckily, at present he had both.
At least Sabrina didn’t expect him to put on a cheery face with all this, having gone through it herself. With a sigh, he raised his finger and ducked his head out of the igloo to find someone to refresh their drinks. Never let it be said he contributed nothing.
Sabrina took a few selfies while he bothered with getting them more drinks. The igloo was cute, her outfit was great, and she wasn’t letting the only picture of her in it be that ridiculous one from earlier. She put her phone away and settled back under the throw, dessert tray hovering in the air in front of her.
“What did you usually do for the holidays?” If the plan was for them to stick to this place until the evening then she was going to keep asking questions. It wasn’t in her nature to be silent for too long most days. Even if he’d been dealt a memory blow. “Greendale usually got decked out for Christmas but my family celebrated Yule. No Jesus, more drinking. Occasionally dealing with ghost children or demons trying to abduct teens.” Some days it really was a mystery how it took her friends so long to realize her family were witches.
“Though recently back home, I was trying to be as far away from my hometown as possible,” she shrugged. Anything to not be around her aunts. Sabrina gestured around at the igloo. “Vallo is always this amalgamation of like twenty things at once.”
Callum set two hot spiced wines onto the table; each was garnished with a fragrant smelling orange peel and a cinnamon stick. Callum, after all, was a basic bitch who loved him some fucking garnishes with abandon.
“Well, congratulations,” he said in his drawl, “you managed to get far from home.” Even if portions from home had managed to find her here. At her question, Callum gave his usual shrug to indicate his boredom with the topic, but he didn’t change it, giving his drink a stir with his cinnamon stick. “Parties. Charity dinners. Family gatherings. If an aunt wasn’t throwing Song dynasty bowls against the wall or crying in the bathroom it wasn’t even the holidays.” The Nova family was… fractured to say the least, but too rich to show the jagged edges. Never knew when you might get written out of the will, after all.
“My sister is tolerable,” he added, because she was the only family member he didn’t feel gross about admitting to halfway liking. “She’s nicer than me. Roz would like her. If she shows, I’ll introduce you.” The corner of his mouth quirked as he turned to look at Sabrina, smug in his teasing.
Sabrina nudged him with her foot, rolling her eyes as she took in the entirety of him. He was such an ass, but he also had a very nice one. Such a conundrum. Oh well. She wasn’t anazlying any of that right now. “I’m pretty sure half the time Roz thinks you’re the devil’s spawn even when she knows that I am,” she pointed out, picking up her drink and discarding the orange peel.
She kept the cinnamon stick, swirling it around before finally taking a drink.
But okay, he had a sister. Had he mentioned that before? Sabrina didn’t think so but she wasn’t exactly always sober when they talked either. “Is she older or younger than you? I don’t have any siblings. Not really.” She cringed, taking another drink. “Well. I had a brother, but his mother ate him when he was a couple weeks old and my “sister” was really just the version of me from the timeline I fucked around with before dying. So.” And Rory, but that was alternate reality stuff.
“My aunts didn’t really break any of our fancy bowls, but Aunt Hilda used to wind up buried in the Cain pit at least twice during Yule. Usually because Aunt Zee killed her one way or another.”
“Older, by a bit,” Callum replied, after a pause to give Sabrina a deeply ‘what-the-shit’ expression at her discussion of having a brother that got eaten and an alternate reality self. Although he supposed that having alternate reality personas was now on the game board for all of them, what with Vallo being Vallo and all. Callum had been an ‘oops’ baby, a topic that he wasn’t nearly drunk enough to discuss at the moment, but he did in fact actually like his sister enough to add: “She’s a sterling example of Nova ingenuity, I guess. But I don’t think anyone actually comes back from the dead where I’m from, if it took properly in the first place.” He paused. “And if they do, they’re probably gross.” He’d rather stay dead. Hard to sparkle when you were rotting.
He knocked back his cider - it was a little too hot to do so, but he’d made mistakes before. “Want to make fun of how wretched I am on skates?”
Sabrina was never sure if she was supposed to wish people showed up in Vallo or not. It felt selfish and technically that was bad, but also sometimes she didn’t give a shit about being so. Especially when she was at her lowest. But all thoughts about the morality of hoping were quickly pushed aside when he brought up skating.
She quirked a brow, lips pressed together as she carefully regarded him before asking, “You’re not going to puke on me if we go out there, are you?” Because her outfit was too cute to put up with that nonsense.
“Sabrina, if I feel like I’m going to puke, I solemnly promise to swallow it back,” Callum answered with the gravitas that his reply certainly didn’t deserve, and offered her an arm.
He could sense her lingering disquiet - only a touch of it; she was grateful that he’d talked. Callum wasn’t sure how he felt about the matter.Talking changed nothing, after all, but he supposed on some level he felt a little less… alone in it all. Ugh. Sentiment. Maybe he would puke after all.
“As long as it's not on me, I don’t care,” she told him, accepting his arm. Anyone else on or off the rink was fair game. They hadn’t drank that much anyway… though she had no clue how much he’d drank before they’d met up either. He didn’t seem to be wobbling though so it probably wouldn’t be that bad.
“But I am definitely taking a picture if you fall on your ass,” Sabrina added, her smile bright and voice light.
Callum did a sweeping, dramatic gesture to show just how much he didn’t care about his falling on his ass being commemorated in photographic form, and nearly slipped coming out of the igloo. Grasping at the doorway he prevented himself from wiping out and taking Sabrina with him, but it was a near thing.
“Fair,” he managed, tottering out to the ice.
Sabrina contemplated enchanting his skates, but considering it was the holiday season in Vallo she didn’t quite trust it to play fairly. The world would definitely try to pull some ridiculous Hallmark movie nonsense and she was not drunk enough to deal with that. Instead she held onto his arm and led them both forward.
“Just one foot and then the next basically,” she said, keeping her movements slow and steady. “The trick is to keep looking ahead no matter how much you want to look down at your feet. Otherwise you’ll run into someone or the wall. Usually it's the wall.”
Callum moaned in aggravation, and leaned on her without shame. “That sounds horrifically like a metaphor for life I’m supposed to learn from.”
Just keep going, keep your eyes on the prize, and don’t hit a wall. Christ. No wonder he was crap at skating (or athletics of any kind). Honestly, he was built for lounging around aesthetically and making drastic mistakes. With a sigh, he attempted to straighten his legs, using her for light balance. “All right. Well. Show me all the holiday magic, I guess.”
Sabrina snorted. “All of those supposed life lessons are shit anyway. Not everyone can win the gold, no matter how much they practice. You can do everything right and still lose or everything wrong and still come out on top.” Luck seemed to play more of a part in everything from what Sabrina had seen. Luck and privilege.
She adjusted her body to help keep them both upright and minimize the chance of him dragging her down if he did end up falling. “But alright, we’ll go around twice and then we can go top up on mulled wine.”
“You know, well-spotted. I am frequently motivated by rewards rather than shame,” Callum muttered as he got his shit together and made a goddamn effort not to embarrass himself (frankly, he didn’t mind embarrassing Sabrina; she knew what she was getting into when she encouraged him to ice skate at this point). And so leaning on her, he managed to put one skate in front of the other, the movement jerky but functional, and with a bit of focus, he built them up to a speed that wasn’t quite passing toddlers but was still respectable enough.
There. They were doing it. They were ice-skating. It’d never win gold, as Sabrina had aptly observed, but they were doing it and it was somewhere within the realm of ‘fun’. Callum passed by someone who was entirely too smug as they did little jumps and swivels and things; he shot them a pointed burst of anxiety that had them tripping on a skate and landing on their face, and tried and failed not to snicker to himself as he and Sabrina glided past the tangle of limbs together.
A wall approached. Callum briefly tried (and failed) to remember how to stop. A decision was made. He collided them both into the wall with a crunch.
Winded, he lay on the ice for a moment, glancing at Sabrina and not feeling any real pain coming off of her (they had landed on their coats, which helped blunt the fall).
“Wine now,” he managed, and knowing there was no way in hell he’d be able to get up on his feet on the ice, kind of sadly clung to the wall and began to pull himself toward the safety of their igloo. Ah well.
Sabrina glanced down at her phone. The photo she’d gotten of him sprawled out on the ice after the crash was perfect. That was definitely going up. She just needed to add some stickers to complete the look before posting.
“You’ve earned it,” Sabrina agreed, her smile only growing as she followed him toward their igloo. It might have ended with the two of them on the floor, but once he’d put some effort into trying to skate she was pretty sure he’d had a little fun. She’d had a blast, impressed that they had actually managed to get out on the rink and even give it a whirl instead of staying inside the igloo the whole time.
“I’ll meet you at the igloo,” she told him when they were near enough that she didn’t think he’d wipe out completely before getting into it. Sabrina skated away before he could reply, heading to the photographer who was capturing the event.
She returned as one of the attendants was bringing in more mulled wine, clutching a glossy 8x10 photo in her hands. They’d been going under one of the light displays and it had captured the moment Callum had begun snickering, as well as the guy who’d fallen. His horrified expression enhanced the photo. Plus she looked great in her outfit.
“This one is going on the wall,” she said, handing it over for Callum to look as she plopped down onto the couch.
Callum admired it with the expression that art critics generally considered a particularly challenging sculpture. “Heartwarming,” he concluded, his voice dry as dirt, and tucked it into a book in his backpack so it wouldn’t get bent. “The holiday season in a glimpse.”
Callum had never believed in Santa Claus. You had to give things to yourself, if you wanted them, after all. And making merry? Oh, he was good at that. He handed Sabrina her glass, and gave it a clink to toast. “To us,” he said, “and to whoever gets caught in our wake.”
Sabrina grinned, clinking her glass back against his before settling down underneath the fuzzy throw again. Today had gone far better than she’d thought it would. The drinks were decent and the provided snacks weren’t half bad either. The igloo had been a nice bonus, giving them a cozy atmosphere. Add in the fact that Callum had talked and opened up a little and they had managed to go skating? Well, Sabrina was on her own little Cloud Nine. Even if she was pretty sure her side was going to be bruised from their earlier fall.
Simple pleasures were all she needed. “Don’t think that photo gets you out of the selfie I still want to take later,” Sabrina drawled, holding out her glass to be topped up.
“Not a hardship. I love selfies,” Callum replied unironically, thinking of the selfie he’d taken with their terrified hostage back home. …simple pleasures indeed.