#slayeol

this took forever becaues i am the worst apologies and shame

“You’re a terrible cook,” Puck says casually, much the way he would say “the prisoners need new sheets” or “I’m sleeping in today.”

“Screw you too,” Sabrina answers.

They’re seated at the kitchen table in their part of the fortress, which is currently a tent pitched on the outside of Granny Relda’s cabin.

“No, I don’t mean it like that,” Puck says. Still easy, still smiling at her.

She loves this, this easy banter, these insults without sting, the comfortable way they can exist around each other these days. She wouldn’t give it up for anything.

And can anyone blame her? This is most of what she’s got: an air mattress on hard dirt, canvas walls on three sides and rough logs on the fourth, a pop-up kitchenette that only works because Daphne has piled so many spells on it it makes Sabrina dizzy to come near it.

Which is probably part of the reason she’s such a bad cook. Not that she’ll say that. It sounds too much like making excuses, but the pull of magic hasn’t gotten easier despite fifteen years around the stuff. It still sings in her bones when it comes close, twisting itself around her, cajoling her to use it like so much would be fixed if she would just twist—

But she’s avoided it, for the most part. There was that one moment, after Uncle Jake died—

Which she doesn’t think about.

Because she’s here in her “house” with her husband, and they woke up to the warm glow of sunshine through their tent walls, and the sound of people training outside, and he loves her even if he hates her cooking. And Uncle Jake and the decade and a half of furious war and her parents asleep still across the rough wall? The seventeen-year-old boy who should have been her brother? All of that is pennies against the brilliance that is standing back to back with Puck and knowing, down to the core of herself, that he’ll keep her as safe as she’ll keep him.

“How about I take it over,” Puck offers. “The cooking, I mean.”

Sabrina shrugs, easy, and takes a bite of her rubbery omelette. He’s not wrong. It’s not good. “Knock yourself out.”

“Oh thank god,” Puck says.

Sabrina considers being offended at the sheer relief in his voice.

“You know,” Sabrina says, keeping her voice mild, “it’s not like I had much of a chance to learn.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Grimm,” Puck says breezily. “But it takes skill to screw up with Marshmallow’s stove.”

Sabrina takes another bite of her omelette. She looks at her plate, making a face, then pushes it away. “Don’t let her hear you call her that.”

“I refuse to stop,” Puck says. He stands, and heads for the stove. He starts bustling around it, moving with purpose.

And she knows that part of that refusal is for her sake. Puck keeps trying to get Daphne to remember what she was like before because that girl? Sabrina gave up so much to let Daphne stay happy, and then—

Well. Sabrina could only protect Daphne so far, it seems.

Maybe someday Puck will get her to smile again.

Maybe.

Sabrina doesn’t think so.

She’s being maudlin again, and she’s trying to stop that. Trying to make the best of things. Doing pretty well at it, usually. She should go swing her sword at something. That usually helps her feel better, lets her switch from sadness to anger again. And she depends on anger a lot less than she used to, but it’s still useful. Anger is movement, anger is changing things. Sadness is useless.

She collects the remains of the atrocity she tried to call breakfast, and dumps them in the garbage bag, another of Daphne’s bespelled necessities. On the way back to the table, she kisses Puck on the cheek.

He leans into it without looking away from the onions he’s dicing. They’re rougher than Sabrina’s onions, which she cut into neat little squares, but they probably won’t be burnt by the time they make it to the table, so it doesn’t matter.

“I’m going to sharpen my swords,” she says. “Call me when breakfast is ready?”

Puck hums in affirmation. 

He’s beautiful, concentrating on something, in the diffuse yellow light of their tent, tall and almost clean, and she does love him, so much. Would do anything to keep him safe. Would burn down the world, would fall back into that desperate music of magic if it meant Puck would stay in the world, safe and hers and smiling despite everything.

OKAY SO THIS IS NOT EXACTLY A BOOK 5 FUTURE AU IM SORRY. YOUR OTHER PROMPT THAT I HAVE HAD SITTING IN MY INBOX FOR JUST AS LONG THOUGH? THAT WILL BE AN ACTUAL BOOK FIVE AU

It could have gone like this:

Sabrina becomes a lawyer on the urging of her mother and Robin Hood, and she likes it, mostly. She’d rather be doing something a little more active, but she does like it, and it pays well. It’s stable. She likes stability. Routine.

Puck disappears for five years and comes back right when Sabrina has moved on from him enough to get married.

Somehow, they get married and have two children, neither of whom resembles their father much at all. Sabrina convinces Puck to lie to them about what they are (think about what a trick it’ll be to play on them!). Daphne has twins, over fifteen years after Sabrina does. Their lives go on.

This, of course, is ridiculous. Sabrina does not become a lawyer because, while she loves research, she also loves action, and she has grown to accept all sides of her heritage and personality. She is militant. Puck runs off, but they find him again, because there is nowhere between here and Wonderland that Puck could go where Sabrina and Daphne could not find him. He wanted to be found.

It takes a long, long time for Sabrina and Puck to have kids. It is difficult. Biology does not lend itself to reproduction between them. Magic is involved. Their oldest resembles Sabrina more than Puck. Alison Relda Grimm is full of passionate likes and dislikes, and she is almost too much for life. Emma Briar, while just as much as her sister, is more playful, and she and her father collude on almost everything, though Emma shares her mother’s fondness for Book Learning in a way that Alison, who is diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia at age ten, cannot really join (oh, Puck says. His own trouble with books begins to make sense).

The Scarlet Hand is gone, destroyed, but this is not the end of their troubles. Everafters are rife within the world, and they are resentful of the way they have been shunted aside. Sabrina and Puck are never really allowed to settle, and are never given the luxury of repeating Henry and Veronica’s mistake in lying to their children.

They have day jobs, yes, but they also travel on weekends and vacations. They fight monsters. They have adventures. They come home. Rinse. Repeat.

Life goes on. Daphne and Red adopt twin girls, because when Daphne is given the choice between in-vitro fertilization and adoption, she wants to rescue two girls from her own experiences. Red, too, wants to give someone else who needs it a family instead of starting from scratch. When Basil, at twenty-eight, tells his family that he does not believe he will ever fall in love because he cannot remember feeling like that about anyone, Sabrina believes him.

Sabrina and Puck are in love. They disgust their children with it. More than passion and romance, though, which they occasionally have time for, they are partners. They have fought by each other’s sides so much that it is no longer like two people fighting, but like one person, fighting in two bodies. It is a dance, and it is their dance.

Ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, Sabrina would not have told you she wanted this. She would have told you the fantasy: a normal desk job, full of paperwork; a boring, ordinary husband; Puck in her life but not her other half; two girls who would have been much like carbon copies of herself and her sister.

Still.

This is better. This, with Puck, with the knowledge that yes, she will fight, but she will do it with someone she can trust implicitly, is good. This is waking up in the morning to blue skin and rolling over to punch the man who gave it to her, so he wakes up knowing he succeeded. This is calling Daphne to help her get back to normal while Puck laughs at her and whines about his handiwork, calls her abusive for punching him. This is waffles for breakfast and two girls bickering because one glued the other’s fingers together. This is day jobs with knives strapped to her thighs just in case. This is getting a call on her second cell phone because there’s a giant rampaging in Oklahoma and can you help please? This is being carried into battle by a Puck who is still wearing scrubs. This is the fear in battle only for Puck, because she knows he will protect her, so she doesn’t have to worry about herself. This is going home to tend their wounds.This is ordering takeout because they are both too sore to get off the couch. This is being very glad to stop aging before they hit forty.

This?

All this?

okay, we stop here