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Residuum [noun] singular:
that which is left behind after all else has burned away.
PART I: Inception
He is the fifth.
It's always the same: the creased brow, the darting glance as they try to read between the lines. It's never what she says; the reaction is always to what it says about her - that she's lying to protect herself, that she's lying to soften the rejection, that she's lying because she's insane and up till that moment, masterful at hiding it.
She gives them some time to let it sink in, of course. She concedes aloud that it's a lot to process. She even laughs at herself in that self-deprecating way that had made them lose their hearts to her in the first place.
"Sounds crazy, doesn't it?" Her voice is merry, and her question borders on rhetorical, but it's her invitation to engage, draw near, not panic.
"Immortal, huh?" They ask. "So you can't die?"
Or
"You'll stay twenty-two forever, then?"
Or
"But you're still getting older . . . right?"
All the different tones, angles, priorities. So many iterations; mortals attempting to define infinity housed in flesh and bone. And because they're so busy analyzing it, analyzing themselves - how they could've been so stupid not to have realized she was completely mental - they miss the way the light goes out in her eyes.
There goes another, she thinks. So close. I really thought this might be the one.
Her first had been at sixteen: a boy from school, her first dance, her first kiss.
(Well. . . not really her first. He'd been her true first at the tender age of eleven, in exactly all those ways, but he didn't count, she'd told herself. Not when she'd dreamed all of those eleven years what it should've been like and he hadn't even come close.)
Numero Uno had lasted four months. She'd thought to tell him sooner rather than later, so there'd be nothing hidden between them.
She'd learned very quickly the value in keeping secrets.
After that, she'd waited a year, a year and a half, two, three - time was just numbers, anyway - until they were begging her to move in, to wear the ring, to spend the rest of her life with them.
The rest of her life!
(If they only knew.)
Still, each subsequent one adds to her repertoire of Things To Say, and by the time Mark comes along, her words are practiced, soothing; therapeutic even.
"I'm going to live for a very, very long time," she's the picture of efficiency as she delivers her speech, "and I'll look exactly like I do right now, although I can choose to age with you, if we want."
She watches his face - by now, she can recognize the expressions as they cycle through disbelief, shock, anger, uncertainty, insatiable curiosity. Even the questions are predictable - after all, back when it'd first happened, she herself had asked every one of them. And she obligingly supplies the answers, propitiation for the burden she'd laid on him, remembering her own wide-eyed amazement at being handed eternity on a platter before she'd even brushed the fringes of adolescence.
"How did it happen? Were you born that way?" He is the first to ask this; she is pleasantly surprised and, for an instant, flounders.
"Someone did . . . a . . . a spell, and we - I - became immortal."
He catches the slip, grabs it like a drowning man who sees the shadow of a line thrown at him. "We? You're not the only one? How many are there like you?"
So I can become immortal, too?
No, she fights him in her mind as she senses his unspoken hope, you don't know nearly enough people to make it okay to live forever. Because you will outlive every single one, and you'll be left behind, over and over again. Can you grasp that? Can you bear it? Being always left behind?
She dusts him. Tomorrow it won't matter that she was his soulmate, that he was ready to forsake all others and pledge that dizzying fact before the entire world. The last three years will be as if they never were. They will unblinkingly pass each other in coffee shops, stand shoulder-to-shoulder as strangers on the train, and never guess that they'd fallen asleep beside each other in another lifetime.
She dusts him. While he sits on the park bench, still trying to wrap his mind around immortality and this brand new layer of forever. Before he can tell anyone else. While she can still save him.
She dusts him while her heart breaks. Because she will remember every single kiss that he never will.
Tomorrow she will dust his family, too - the ones who've met her, who know how much she loves him back.
She shouldn't be sad, not after doing it four times, and surviving each one. But she is, and she does.
Night has fallen in the park, long past the hour when it's safe for a woman to be out alone, even one as quick with her fists as she. There are gangs that stalk these parts, who'd happily prey on those unwitting enough to wander into their territory, and they'll show as little mercy to those drunk on sorrow as the easy drinks that promise escape from it. But she's never been afraid, especially not tonight, when her anger is a weapon that stretches dangerously thin the line between immortal and invincible. What are a few lawless men when she feels she could annihilate the world . . . if she could only turn the maelstrom outward, away from her own wretched conscience.
The air flutters with the barest of whispers and someone stands beside her on the bridge. She knows without turning her head who it is.
"You look like hell," he says by way of greeting.
"Thanks."
A familiar silence settles between them.
"Lost another one today," she says heavily.
"Ah."
She grinds her lip between her teeth and stares out at the city lights hanging upside down in the river, slowly blurring through unwilling tears. When they'd been younger, this would've been when the mocking began - flippant allusions to her poor judge of character, her abysmal inability to hold on to even losers. She bites harder, harder, counting the seconds until she hears I Told You So.
It doesn't come. Instead, his hand cups her cheek to turn her face to his. There is no triumph in his eyes.
And just like that, the storm ebbs, and she collapses against him.
"I heard," he murmurs, "so I came."
Daphne, she guesses.
"Again." She exhales almost resentfully and pulls away.
"Who else would? You shut everyone out."
They're silent, watching the river flow beneath them, the dead leaves swirling in eddies, the man in the kayak floating lazily by. She's struck by how it's a metaphor of their lives: water under the bridge.
"How many does this make?" When he speaks again, she can't discern his tone, but the words are loaded enough.
"I'm not keeping count," she lies, then rationalizes, "they're people, not numbers."
"Aren't you tired?" He persists.
"We're not having this conversation again."
"You didn't answer my question."
She turns on him in reawakened fury.
"It doesn't matter whether I'm tired or not. I know what you're getting at. I know you think I'm wasting my time, that it's a lost cause, that it's the fifth one and I'm still dusting them, still failing. Maybe it'll take one hundred guys before I find one I won't have to dust. I'm not giving up - if he's out there, I'll find him. But I can't if you're always picking me up each time it fails, like a security blanket nobody asked for."
"That's all I am, huh? A shoulder to cry on?" His voice teeters on the brittle edge of anger. "What about that future? What about Paris?"
Her eyes narrow; she'd been right all along, about his motives, and especially about his judgement of her. "If you've come to say 'I told you so', you can just -"
"I'm not here to gloat," he quietly interrupts. "Not after this long. And you know that, so don't pretend that you don't."
She pounds her fist on the wooden railing, but the confrontation has stolen the last of her energy, and she wilts against the peeling lumber.
"Paris . . . was special," she concedes, and he can hear the frustration in her voice. "Paris was when we first thought . . . when we actually believed. . . Paris was . . ."
"Paris was right," he finishes, stepping closer, daring to curve his body around hers. "You knew it, I knew it."
She doesn't disagree, and he lets himself hope. But a second goes by, and then a minute, and he realizes that not disagreeing is not the same as assent.
A noise distracts them then and they straighten, instinctively checking their surroundings for a reason to shift into the fighters they are. A gang would be almost welcome - heaven knows he wants nothing more than to hit someone right then. But it's only a jogger whose eyes widen at the sight of him: the face of luminous beauty, the lines of a body at once strong and graceful, the diaphonous wings moving lazily in the moonlight.
Sabrina frowns as the interloper scrambles to flee. Run, why don't you? After all, it's what strangeness makes you do.
"Well," her companion's voice draws her back to the matter at hand, "it sounds like you want a clean slate. I know an exit sign when I see it. Good luck finding your unconditional soulmate."
He whirls, puts distance between them, his footsteps feather-light on the wooden beams.
"Puck," she calls after him, and he stops, turning just his head, into the breeze that has suddenly picked up around them.
"I can't marry my first crush. It doesn't happen. First crushes are never endgame."
"Keep telling yourself that," Puck grinds out, and feels as if part of him will forever be stuck there on that bridge, long after even the scent of her perfume is lost on the wind.
"I'll see you around, then?"
"No, you won't," he promises flatly, and vanishes upward in a funnel of fallen leaves and dust.
When she meets Bradley, it isn't love at first sight. The good ones seldom are - this she knows from experience. He isn't a wonder on the sports field like Mark, doesn't have Steven's ambition to open restaurants in all the major cities of the world, and will probably never stand in front of a judge for a speeding ticket, let alone the strings of successful lawsuits against environmentally-irresponsible multi-million-dollar companies that Joshua has under his belt. Bradley is a teacher at the local high school, beloved by many, refreshingly open-minded about the world, funny, and stable as a rock. His is humble work - at best the launching pad for future scientists and journalists, and if there are any accolades to his name, they will be prizes-by-proxy: Nobel, Pulitzer, Michelin, won by the students who are destined to exceed him. He is utterly normal, will live out his life in glorious ignominy, and Sabrina will bask in every unoutstanding minute of it.
Normal is good, she relishes the thought as she holds him up against all the others she's left in her wake. I've been settling for men who rose too high and fell too far. But no longer; this is what I want. I choose this -
not Fate,
not premonition,
not time;
I.
Thus, once more, she puts herself back in the game. And when Bradley holds her and kisses her under a summer sky, her heart quickens and she lets herself believe - again - that he is for keeps.
He proposes before she can tell him.
She freezes with her specters roiling within her in all the shades of fear; so much fear.
He misconcludes: she hesitates because it's only been seven months and society might frown on a courtship that seemed like a blink.
"I know we haven't known each other that long," he rationalizes, and Sabrina, finally galvanized into action, puts her hand on his lips before he can lead himself further astray.
"I have something to tell you first," she blurts out, as dread settles like a cancer in her gut.
Bradley laughs nervously. "It doesn't matter what you've done . . ." his voice drops, ". . . or how many people you've done it with. That's the past. I love you, and our future is all I care about."
She doesn't even blush. It's shocking how guys seem to think the same way, that there's only one thing a girl could be ashamed of, might want to exorcise from her soul before her wedding day; if they'd only guessed that there were far darker secrets to hide. Not that any of them had, of course - to have even imagined the premise of it was ludicrous, let alone the possibility that it could be standing right in front of them, looking like any other girl in any other lifetime.
But perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that, caught by surprise, one often has nothing but honesty to offer. Irreconcilable differences, they'd told her, one after the other, blusteringly ineloquent as they'd made their ungracious exits. Slightly more worthy of pity were the ones who'd stayed in spite of what she'd told them, even as they'd clung desperately to their sentiments while her words blew their narrow, reductionistic minds apart.
I am immortal.
She'd dusted them all anyway, without exception: the turncoats, the patriots, and the ones too paralyzed by shock to pick a side.
Clean slates, indeed.
And now Bradley is waiting for her to continue, so she takes a breath. In a minute, it'll be over, she counsels herself, he'll know, and I'll see which team he swings for, and if it'd been worth it to have traded spectacular for normal, not that it matters.
But it does matter. This one in particular, matters. Of all the men who'd wandered unsuspectingly into her life, this one is her favorite, precisely because he's unpretentiously, guilelessly, effortlessly normal. So with her heart in her mouth and choking on her words, she explains who she is, how she is cursed, and how, as staunchly as he vows to be with her forever, she can only ever leave him behind.
Bradley listens without so much as a twitch.
When she's finished, he doesn't fire off the questions. Instead, he reasons quite seriously, "So . . . we'll have fifty, sixty years together and then I'll die and you'll go on and love someone else, but during those fifty, sixty years, I get to give you everything I am and everything I have to make you the happiest woman on earth?"
"What?" She hadn't expected this.
"How many proposals have you received, Sabrina? In your immortal lifespan?"
She frowns, still stunned. This line of thought is completely new territory; she'd always counted years, not lives. Never lives.
"A few," she hedges.
"And how many times have you been married?"
"None," she admits.
"So who changed their mind - they or you?"
Her lips disappear in a thin, hard line, the barest of fissures in a face otherwise locked over its secrets.
"It was even on both sides."
He looks disappointed, as if he'd expected her to declare all his predecessors cowards and herself the abandoned martyr. Sabrina sees his look and offers, "The ones that didn't run screaming had no idea what they were saying yes to. So I did them a favor and helped them find their way out."
Bradley's gaze is intense. "I'm not screaming. Or running. Are you going to show me out, too?"
Sabrina's eyes fill with tears, but she isn't mourning this time, because sometimes hope burns too brightly for the soul to hold in.
There still remained, however, the practicalities and logistics of immortality. And to that end, even the best sentiment in the world must eventually be called to into reckoning, as happens one winter evening while the snow is bright on the ground and the ornaments barely hanging on to a faded spruce that had lost all holiday cheer along with its presents. Bradley, his face shining, makes his announcement amidst the cacophony of ticks and drips from the space heater valiantly battling the frigid January air.
"No." Sabrina's eyes almost swallow her face with fright.
"Why not?" Bradley leans over her grandmother's table, weaving his forearms over the leather-bound tome over which he'd been poring in the past hour.
"It's not a free-for-all. You don't know what you just said, Brad."
"Of course I do. I've been thinking about this for weeks."
"This is not a good thing."
"Not doing this is not a good thing."
Sabrina continues staring, aware that her mouth is agape, that she'd been too easily taken in by Bradley's suggestion to visit her grandmother's home, immerse himself in the sights and sounds of the place where it all began, read the journals, see the book that had given her eternal life.
She attacks from a different direction. "What will your family say when they realize you're not aging?"
"I'll tell them."
"Oh, really? Auntie Ruby, too?"
Bradley hesitates. "Probably not her."
"Uncle Arvid?"
A sigh. "Or him. . . or Josh and Troy."
A heavier sigh. "Or anyone."
Bradley bows his head over the parchment pages, hands untucking themselves from the cradle of his arms, reaching for his temples.
"Family," Sabrina commiserates, but her voice betrays her relief. "The ties that bind."
"Like shackles," he chuckles, and lifts his eyes to hers. "But we'll take it as it comes."
Before she knows what he's doing, he's picked up the pen, flipped over a blank page, and written Once upon a time, there was a man named -
"Stop!" She lunges across the table and grabs his hand.
He turns to her, questioning, almost obstinate.
"No! You can't, Brad. You mustn't! This is wrong."
"How is it wrong?"
"We . . . we can't turn people into Everafters just to solve problems." She hears the hypocrisy in her voice even as she remembers how her own name had found its way into that book.
"Well, I suppose it's progress that you've admitted we do have a problem. Even if I don't see any other solution for it."
"I'll age. I'll age for you."
The words explode out, urgent and passionate. She'd meant them as a promise to him, but in the ensuing silence, they echo back at her like a thunderclap, and it's a different voice, wild and merry, in which she hears green and gold, the wind in her hair, tentative kisses, strong arms. She feels as if she's been struck full across the face while the universe gloats.
Bradley, utterly unaware, furiously disagrees.
"What? No. For as long as we both shall live. The vows - we can make them literally mean forever. And I want us to be forever."
"And our children?" Sabrina shakes herself free, forces herself to engage, reminds herself that she'd chosen this. "If we have any?"
"They'll live forever, too."
"Will they? It's not hereditary, you know."
Comprehension abruptly dawns, and he frowns.
"We'll have to write them in the book, too." Sabrina is relentless. She has to be, to get through this. "Without their choice, or with. As long as we can't bear to watch them grow older than us, to die while we're still young enough to bury them."
"Don't be morbid," Bradley chides, but his tone is now uncertain.
"For as long as we both shall live," she parrots him. "A mortal lifespan, Brad. I'll meet you, not the other way around."
Time is just numbers anyway.
"Are you sure?" His voice is a pained whisper.
If we're counting lives, then you are my seventh, and if that isn't a lucky number, I don't know what is.
"Yes," she says desperately.
But she is not.
And she's quaking at the knees as she stands before the minister, Bradley beaming at her side. In the pews behind them, a depraved pantomime plays out among their guests: one half the masked players and the other the oblivious spectators, channeling misguided approval through benign expressions of joy. There is not an ounce of truth in this room, she realizes, and she is about to pledge her troth to either the deceivers or the deceived.
Which, though, is Bradley? And which is she?
All at once, she breaks out in cold sweat. She cannot be here. She must not be here. This is wrong. She feels faint, but she forces herself to keep standing, to continue smiling.
So that no one will guess that inside, she's begging: Please, let this stop. I can't do this. I can't -
The stained glass window shatters with a crash -
- and the sound of wings flapping, a hurricane that rains down rainbow shards, prism sprinkles upon a doomed celebration.
Her heart's in her throat. She doesn't dare look up. She's so relieved, and so mortified that she feels sick. Someone had heard her pray. Someone agrees with her that this was a mistake, that Bradley was a mistake, as were all the others who came before him.
But everyone is gasping now, whimpering and indulging in histrionics as they gaze upward. If she is the only one who doesn't, everyone would know.
So she does.
He is floating down to her, and he's a beautiful sight, though not only because he is immortal and crafted like a sculpture.
He is here. He knew. He came, as he always has. And he has eyes for only her, and a smile that she fights with all her might not to mirror, because she has no business to be glad to see him, today of all days.
Then he speaks and, against her will, her lips curve.
"Hello, Stinky."
A/N: This is another story that's been sitting on my computer for who knows how long. I think everyone in this fandom has either written or wanted to write about what happened between the epilogues. My other story Twenty-Nine was one (flippant) take on that. But I was also desperate to write a somewhat serious version, and specifically explore the idea of Sabrina's quest for Normal that'd led her to pick Bradley and stay with him all the way to the altar. What would make a person do that? After all, Sabrina doesn't always make perfect choices but she isn't cruel or selfish. So maybe Bradley wasn't Sabrina's only attempt at Being Normal; maybe she'd had to filter through others before arriving at the (mistaken) epiphany that Normal was better than Magical, and therefore for keeps.
Then there was Puck, staying away for 5 years for no reason other than he fell off the face of the earth. I wasn't sure about that, either. There must have been actual history, possibly painful, and definitely messy.
And finally, how does Sabrina lose Bradley, whom she surely did love in some misdirected way, and eventually end up with Puck, thus fulfilling a somewhat demented prophecy, while still being okay with her control issues? So many loose ends, and so many possible explanations. This story is just one of them. I hope you like it.