I hate him.
Sabrina had once thought otherwise, back when she had been a girl of twelve and heady on puppy love, so inherently in need of someone permanent and kind to make up for years of neglect. A girl who needed someone who could show her how to be a child again, even if the way he did often made her blood pressure rise with her indebted heart. A naive girl who began to count the days since she had seen him last.
Thirteen years, seven months, and four days.
She scowled at her image in the mirror, wishing she could be rid of that horrid reflexive habit. Those calendars were long gone, and the memories were eradicated from her consciousness. But it was only a frantic suffrage to bury what she did not want anymore.
"Today is not his day," she hissed savagely, nearly impaling her scalp with a bobby pin because of the force she used to tuck away a stray bit of hair.
This was no day-no day was, in fact-to think about him.
But he always haunted her when she was most lonely, no matter how desperately she breathed her mantra and curse against him.
I hate him.
Sabrina stared at her reflection and smiled. Her innocent, pure white dress was made of lace so delicate and intricate that she could hardly believe that the threads could stay together (so much as her fragile state of mind when she let herself drown in thoughts of him). Sabrina had thought that she'd rid herself of him, but she was slowly realizing that glowering resignation might be all she had left.
She turned when she heard a bell ring from the hall, reminding her that she didn't have all day to shred her mind. She turned back to the mirror.
She was a beautiful bride. So beautiful.
(Although he would never see what a marvel she had become.)
Beautiful.
Gall burned in her throat like fire and bad night on the town. She glared at her own eyes and growled-throaty, animalistic.
She wanted to throw her brush at the mirror and watch it shatter, but it was a dramatic action that she would not allow herself.
Instead, she traced every feature of the woman who was pieced together over and over again.
.-.-.-.
He left with her Uncle Jake after the war, off to experience the modern world like his caged soul had never been able to do before. She was happy for him, if not slightly forlorn. She knew the day that he left it would be a long time before she saw him again.
(Although she couldn't have ever prepared herself for just how long that it would turn out to be.)
Her life went on, normal as she had always wanted it to be. Boring school days, flawed skin, and blissful days off spent with perfectly human friends.
(She coerced herself into thinking that she loved it.)
Her conventional life went on until it was interrupted abruptly by a frantic call from Uncle Jake.
"I can't find him anywhere-I think he went to fight the monster that we've been hunting all on his own. I found his sword outside of the beast's den. I-I think..."
He was dead.
Gone.
Sabrina didn't believe it for one second-not when she had watched him return with a slain dragon, stabbed with a wooden play sword and a giddy laugh. Not when she knew how stubbornly Everafters clung to life. He was made of sterner stuff, she reminded them all.
He would come back.
For me, he promised to return.
He. Did. Not.
She had barely turned thirteen at the time. Too young for such a tragedy. It rent her mind-for if someone like him was fallible to death, what was she? Impulsive, fool-hardy? Fatuous and inane?
Those were the traits of the boy she loved and the boy who died.
The next few weeks were the hardest that she remembered-harder than abusive foster families and destructive Mirrors. She cried for him and wished furiously that she had been honest with him when she had had the chance. She felt terrible.
But Sabrina Grimm was made of sterner stuff, she reminded herself.
It took a long time for her to heal, along with hard work.
(Although she never truly dealt with it all-letting it fester deep inside-sealing her fate.)
However, all of that overcoming would soon unwind.
She had just found herself getting over the fact of his death when, eight years since she'd seen him in the flesh-eight years, two months, seventeen days-she received a letter in the mail.
From him.
After reading the juvenile, short message she would've been sure that it was a cruel trick if it wasn't for the picture attached to it.
So, apparently you guys think I'm dead?
-P
The photo was taken by him, judging from the angle, displaying him next to a building that could have been located anywhere. He was so much older than he had been when he was twelve-but she knew with every fiber of her being that it was him, twenty and handsome as sin.
She then covered her mouth to stifle a cry of elation and fear and fell apart again.
She missed his jokes and assurance more than she could admit. She missed what it was like to stand next to him on a battlefield. She missed what it was like to dream about his older counterpart from their dystopian future.
She picked herself up in a flurry of excitement and ran into her apartment and made countless tearful calls to her family.
Granny, he's alive.
Daphne, you won't believe me but he's contacted me.
Mom, dad, he's not dead.
Sabrina awaited more contact from him, fully expecting him-so hopelessly hoping that he would show up at her window and whisk her away into her forsaken childhood with a smirk or a grin-it hardly mattered so long as it was him.
But he did not come.
For years-she waited.
The only other contact she had with him-well, not him,-was when she nearly was killed by a goblin. She was chased through a city maze before being run off of a building, one much too tall to survive...except for the wings that caught her. Not his wings, but pixies. Hundreds of twinkling lights that deposited her on the ground. She was more than sure that they were his servants, but they didn't seem keen to listen to her plea to show her the way to him. They left, ignoring her appeal.
He did not want to be found.
Nevertheless, she tried everything she could to find him; she sent out countless contacts that she'd acquired over the years but he had dropped off the face of the earth once more, content to be an enigma of reality. Her grandmother passed away quietly, her last words a plea for her fourth and most wily grandchild.
Not only had he broken her splintered heart, but her Granny's feeble one as well.
All of that time that he must have had-surely he could've shown his face once, if only for the woman who had been the greatest catalyst in his life?
But no. All any of them received was that aforementioned flimsy letter.
She had gotten one silly letter.
It was bad enough that the acclaimed villain had left her by the wayside but her grandmother was the last straw.
Ten years eleven months and two days into her count, her resolve withered and she burned the letter as a form of purging her soul from him.
(Yet her hand shook when she lit the match and had to force herself from dousing the flames when she saw his face crumble away.)
She had had to do it, because it just wasn't FAIR. He had always controlled their relationship, the stagemaster who also wrote the lines for all of the actors.
Now she painted her dark pledge in her mind:
I hate him.
She'd come to the conclusion that she should have from the very beginning: he did not care enough to come back. He had decided to fly in the wind with no tethers or braces.
He was free.
But she was not.
Sabrina vowed with all vehemence that she would no longer be stalled with him, with their past, and assured herself that it had been far too long to wait for anyone-even if they were supposedly her 'true love'. What a lie true love was, hadn't she been enamored with other boys during her school days? Hadn't she even whispered to her friends at the time that she was in love with a couple of them?
True love was a concept, an illusion. Hardly tangible. Made of fairy tales and pixie dust. Hopes and dreams.
(Except all of those things were real-)
But she hardly cared, because it seemed obvious to her by now that he did not care about true love. Those many years were more than enough condemning evidence for his crimes. It did not matter to him that her feelings had all caught up to her, her heart screaming for something it knew on a seperate level of emotion. He did not care that she had to squash her feelings until they became a vengeful cry of outrage.
(But how could she forget him when she had once built here immortal life around him?)
So she finally let herself go, unbidden by him and took dating seriously-because if she could finally find a mate then Daphne would have no grounds to look at her skeptically when she promised that she was over him.
The problem was, every man that she looked at romantically would just become comparison, which in itself was ridiculous because she hadn't even known or seen the perpetrator of her grief since she was twelve.
She began to make up excuses why each did not work.
Too excitable.
Too rude.
Too subtle.
But, in the end, the real problem was that none of them wanted all of her. Heaven forbid that they hear all of the gory details. She could always remember the exact moments their faces fell. They didn't want to know that there was a terrorist-esque group of radical Everafters following her, seeking revenge. They didn't want to hear that she was immortal and would outlive them one hundred times. She tried to make her relationships work with honesty, but every one of them left after a dose of forgetful dust.
"That's why I found an Everafter, Sabrina. You would do well to do that to," Daphne had told her once. Perhaps it was the way one of her eyebrows quirked in suggestion or that she looked so hopeful, but Sabrina couldn't keep her anger from bubbling over.
"I hate him!" she'd snarled, much to the surprise of her well-meaning sibling. It was the first time she'd said it out loud and it felt so good that she said it again and again until Daphne was pouring tears trying to convince her that it wasn't true. It was liberating and horrible. Sabrina stopped her tirade, not because she didn't mean her words but because she couldn't stand seeing her dear sister so distressed.
"You don't mean it," whispered Daphne, but Sabrina stayed silent.
Poor optimistic Daphne who'd chosen a road of milk and honey, she would never know the full extent of her strife.
She took a deep breath after Daphne left and resumed her search for a man that she could love.
(One so distinctly removed from her once dearly beloved that all that could possibly be recognizable to her heart would be that he was male.)
She found one.
His name was Bradley.
He was kind and thoughtful. He never missed an important date. His hair was neat and dark. He was serious with a gentle sense of humor. He was completely dependable.
But she did not tell him even a fraction of the experiences and people that had shaped her. They seemed to work well together that way, she convinced herself that the love in his eyes was reflected in her heart; for she did truly care for him, more than she'd let anyone else in a long time.
I have trust issues, she'd let him know early in their courtship. Brad had simply smiled and promised that he was reliable.
And Bradley upheld that claim.
But despite not meaning to compare them-Bradley, all of the other suspects that wanted to hold her heart-there was just the fact that they weren't her first flame.
They did not make fun of her, call her pretty under a sky of fabricated stars, obnoxiously eat her food in front of her, or stand in between her and a vicious Jabberwocky.
However, she refused let that deter her from Bradley. She would not cast him off like so many others.
She wanted so badly to love him.
So when Bradley proposed to her she said 'yes' as quickly as she could before she could let her thoughts rush in. When she began to sob, everyone assumed it was because she was so overcome with happiness.
They were wrong. But they didn't need to know that.
.-.-.-.
She smiled against her will when he came in to crash her union, but now the bride was the executioner and without a word to anyone she walked out of her own wedding, not acknowledging anyone-not her supposed groom, her parents, her sister...especially not him. She would not allow him the satisfaction. But, of course, he followed her-an act so much like when they were young that Sabrina got a strange sense of vertigo as she forged on, not entirely sure where she planned to go.
Away. Outside. Anywhere where he wasn't.
Then there he was, drifting down to meet her gravity bound legs on the Earth, cocky as ever, the sight of him surfacing within her such a rage that nearly couldn't breathe or think or hate or wish for anything.
A vehement snarl poised on her lips, ready to lash every last sin out of his hide.
She had once had it all planned out, how she was going to destroy this boy that she had kissed out of an enchanted-apple induced sleep, how she was going to make the boy who turned her hair into a mess of crusty glue suffer, how she was going to make the boy that saved her more times than she could count wish that he had never left her.
He lighted down in front of her, hardly noticing her stormy expression in lieu of simply seeing her.
(How long had he longed for her in a deep pit within his soul?)
Meanwhile, visions of slapping him senseless danced in Sabrina's head, making her sick with the motion (even as he dreamed of embracing every inch of her). She was ready to give her speech, so carefully and meticulously prepared:
"You were dead for eight years. Eight. I counted nearly every second. I had nightmares where you bled out in front of me while I watched. I would cry so long in those first couple of nights that I had to miss school. Everyone thought that you were never coming back. What kind of monster lets his friends and family believe that for so long? And then never come back until they think their supposed claim has been challenged?"
I hate him.
But as she stared at him, silent for far too long, she could not find her boy. It was there in his cheek bones, but his hair was longer and his eyes were too intense for a perpetual eleven-year-old.
All of her previous thoughts fled from her. Suddenly all of her violent rage and resentment melted out of her. She stumbled unsteadily, nearly falling over, although she refused to collapse into his arms.
They stared at one another for a long time, her tongue heavy, his soul anchored.
"Oh, you i-d-i-o-t," she barely managed to articulate, trying to draw out the word as long as possible as if that way it could finally penetrate his thick skull.
His grin fell when he saw tears begin to run unhindered beneath her azure eyes, drowning her voice and tangling in her mascara painted blonde eyelashes. He did not know what to say to the woman who was nearly a stranger.
Finally, she spoke. Not in the clear, confident, enraged growl that she had so long dreamed about-no.
Her voice was the broken whisper of a naive girl of twelve (who loved him more than the world but couldn't bare to admit it to herself even as the thought raced through her head like lightning over and over-I love you. I love you so much. I love you), so choked that the fairy had to hold his breath to hear her.
"Puck, y-you...you missed everything."
.-.-.-.
AN: This is the ultimate extreme of Puck's independent behavior-to just 'poof' disappear off of the face of the earth. Poor Sabrina, victim to fate (in this fic at least) a bit dramatic, but that's just part of setting up the atmosphere of this story.
This was a fic born of a title-vehement, one of my personal favorite words. This was meant to be much lighter-I've never thought of this scenario before, but here we are with this mess of sadness. Your thoughts, as always, are appreciated.
Have an amazing day, my friends!
-Pinklily8