AN~ I'm back! Sorry for the wait, everyone, but... NaNo comes first. And I WON THIS YEAR! 50,089 words in 28 days! Also sorry that this is a little short. I guess I'm losing steam for this.
ALSO, PEOPLE: IF YOU HAVE ANY 'But what about...?' QUESTIONS, ASK THEM NOW. I'M ABOUT TO FINISH THIS STORY. LIKE LESS THAN FIVE CHAPTERS LEFT FINISH. DO NOT WAIT.
QotU: You and a Disney princess (definition of Disney princess: NOT MULAN, and not from a Dreamworks movie. Pocahontas is a go, though, and so are the lesser-known ones, like Kida and Eilonwy) get to go on an adventure. Who do you choose, where do you go, what happens, and why her?
Previous QotD winner: jdr ride, who actually had questions.
Review Replies:
foxface: Thanks for all the compliments! I'm glad you liked it so much! :D Also thanks. It's rough, but I'm making it, mostly.
hannnnnaaaaaahhh: Good. I'm glad.
Ice mask: I'm glad you're so enthusiastic! :) But the 'update' stuff kind of irritates me a little. I get that you want more, but... I put a lot of work into these, and reviews like that make me feel like you don't appreciate that I'm not just slapping these together, and that I have other things to do with my time than write fanfiction. Although I'll give you that THIS was just a rude wait.
The next day, they decided what to do about all their problems: the crowd factor, the bathroom wait, and the 'what do we do now?' issue.
Jane had wanted to make a schedule for the bathroom, but Sabrina had pointed out that it meant they all got about ten minutes in the bathroom a day, which was not okay with her at all, so eventually Jane had submitted and let them use their own plan: Divide and conquer.
They would divide up into groups of ten or so, with Bella and whoever was too injured to fight staying back at the chicken house, along with at least two squads of ten healthy people, to find the now-homeless Scarlet Hand and beat them back, since they were likely to be desperate and searching for food. Every week, one squad would come back to the chicken house to get more supplies and get help for anyone who'd gotten injured, and one of the resting squads would go out in their place.
Mr. Clay and most of the others liked the idea. They ended up with eleven healthy groups of people, each one led by either Sabrina, Mr. Clay, Puck, Mustardseed, Will, Annie, Art, Ariel, Peaseblossom, Jane, or Wendy. Mr. Clay's group and Art's were the first to stay at the house. The others left.
Tom showed up with Sabrina's group several times during the next few weeks, and she assumed he went other places, too. He always had some interesting tidbit that would help them out. The Scarlet Hand seemed to know they were coming, a lot, though, and they didn't do as much damage as they might have, even when Tom told them where some Hand members were.
The kids made contact with the adults for the first time since they'd left, and there was a lot of shouting, but in the end, most parents allowed their kids to stay where they were, instead of dragging them back home.
Life was hard, but manageable.
After four weeks of wandering around in the winter woods, it was Sabrina's squad's turn to go come. She took her first hot shower in that long, slept inside, and let Bella patch up her minor injuries, relaxing for a few days.
Two weeks later, though, she was back out in the wilderness.
One day stuck out in her memory, separate from the blur of the rest of that January in her mind: Tom had come to visit again, and he pulled her off a little ways away from everyone else.
"Sabrina?" he said, taking a deep breath. "I have something to say to you."
"All right," Sabrina said, looking up at him, confused.
"I have a thing for you," Tom said. "A, like, I'm in love with you thing. Will you go out with me?"
Sabrina just blinked at Tom for several minutes. Eventually, she said, "That's really sweet, but... I kind of sort of have a boyfriend..."
It was Tom's turn to stare. Then he made a face and said, "Great. Now what am I supposed to do? I love you, and you just shot me down."
Sabrina shook her head and said, "You don't love me. It might be a crush, but you're not in love."
"How do you know?" Tom accused, squinting at her.
"You'd be a million times more upset if you were in love," Sabrina said, "Plus, love doesn't happen that fast. You don't know me well enough to be in love."
"So what do I do?" Tom asked. "Since you don't like me? I don't suppose you'd be willing to break up with whatshisface and go out with me?"
Sabrina shook her head with a small smile and said, "Nope. And what you do is up to you. You could get really mad at me and go tell the Hand everything we've been up to, all our plans and stuff. Or you could try to move on and stay friends with me."
"That one, I guess," Tom said with a shrug.
"Good," Sabrina said. "Just... please stop staring at me? It's kind of creepy."
"Sure," Tom said, and that was the end of that.
It went better than Sabrina would have expected it to, if she'd seen it coming, and she was pleased that he hadn't gone berserk on her. The next time she saw Puck, she gave him an extra-long hug, because she was grateful. For everything.
The next thing that happened was that Annie's squad was badly beaten because the Hand had somehow learned what they were up to, and been waiting to ambush them.
"I think we have a traitor," Mustardseed told Sabrina. Their squads had met up to discuss the issues, and they were sitting in front of a campfire in the woods at night.
"Probably," Sabrina agreed. "How do we catch them?"
Puck, who was also there, grinned slowly and said, "I have a plan."
Puck's plan entailed telling everyone about a false plan, and then having Mustardseed put some sort of tracer spell on them so they could see who told. It was a lot simpler than Sabrina would normally pin to him, but it worked, so she didn't comment as they went to confront the girl who'd set off their little alarm.
They found her with a small mirror, talking into it quickly in a low voice, a small redhead with a round nose.
It took five of them to take her out, and then Mustardseed's squad escorted her to the fort, where she'd be put in their jail.
"I don't even know her name," Sabrina commented to Puck, as they watched her being dragged off. She'd lost her fire since her capture, and was looking resigned to her fate.
"It's Lexington Edmond," Puck said, "She's from Faerie. A lot younger than I am, but we knew each other a bit."
"Oh," Sabrina said, "I wonder why she turned traitor?"
Puck shrugged. "They offered her something she wanted, I guess."
Sabrina snorted. "They offered us all something we wanted. And you don't see us over there."
"True enough," Puck agreed, "But maybe she wanted it bad enough."
"I guess we'll never know," Sabrina said with a sigh.
Puck shrugged. "I guess."
And that was the end of it.
They went off again. Sabrina lost track of how many battles she fought, how often she ended up with a minor injury, where she went, who she fought with or against, everything. It was a very long, cold winter. And she lost sight of the glory and what little fun she'd had in fighting very quickly. She was sick, tired, and ready for the war to be over.
The only good things were the times she got to spend with her friends. They laughed a lot, because they had to; had to remind themselves that they were still kids, and could still have fun and joke. She had a lot of fun watching Wendell and Bella be a couple again, and decided that she could even put up with her friend's teasing comments about double dates, and her less teasing ones about how Wendell was amazing, and she couldn't remember why she'd ever broken up with him in the first place (lie). She enjoyed watching Daphne and Art a lot less, but she realized that Art was sorry, and that Daphne was almost eleven now, and old enough to decide who to befriend without help from a concerned big sister. As long as they didn't get together for a couple more years, anyway. Art might only be thirteen physically, so the age gap wasn't as much of a problem as it used to be, but they should both be bigger before they became a 'thing.'
She'd noticed that a lot of her friends were coupled up, actually. Mustardseed and Renee, Wendell and Bella, Peter and Wendy in a really awkward way, Annie and Marcus, Peaseblossom and Cricket, Jane and some Lost Boy or other, Will and Yvonne, Jonas and Eve... only Kaytee out of Sabrina's close friends seemed to still be single, and she'd been flirting on and off with another of the lost boys, so Sabrina doubted that would last much longer. Even Red was writing letters to someone.
By far the oddest of the new-forming relationships among the squads of the Emerald Foot was that of Tom Thumb and Tinkerbell. Nobody had seen it coming, but once it happened, several people commented on how perfect it seemed. Tom still hadn't joined the Emerald Foot officially, but he was there more often than he was with anyone in the Hand. He said that it was because they at least had a house of sorts, while the Scarlet Hand had been reduced to living in the remains of the crushed and burnt downtown area, when they weren't scavenging for food, but Sabrina suspected that it had as much to do with his girlfriend as anything.
She mentioned the onslaught of couples to Puck, one day.
"Huh," he said, when she'd pointed it out. They were both off-duty, their squads back at the chicken house, and they were sitting on the roof together, talking. "You're right, I guess. There aren't many single people left."
"Maybe we should join them?" Sabrina suggested tentatively.
Puck blinked at her for a second, then burst out laughing. His laughter got stronger and louder, until he was rolling around on the roof, one hand on his stomach and the other over his eyes, kicking his feet at the idea.
It took him a long time to realize Sabrina wasn't laughing with him. But when he did, and got control of himself, he sat up and looked at her. "Were you serious?" he asked.
Sabrina shrugged. "Well, I just thought... but never mind, it's no big deal."
"No, wait," Puck said, peering at her. "You seriously want to tell people we're dating?"
"Well, yeah, kind of," Sabrina muttered, not looking at Puck. "I mean, we've been dating for half a year now, so we can lord that over their heads if they get all 'I knew it!' and stuff, and... well, I see everyone else holding hands in public and stuff, and... I love sneaking, you know I do. I'm good at it. But I'm tired of keeping this a secret, anymore."
Puck said nothing for a minute, and Sabrina shook her head, muttering, "Forget it. It was a stupid idea."
"No, no, it's not that," Puck said. "It took me by surprise, but... I'm just thinking, is all."
"All right...?" Sabrina said, waiting for more explanation impatiently (the way Sabrina waited for everything, of course).
"Let's." Puck said, grinning at her. "But let's not make an announcement or anything. Let's just act like it's totally normal."
Sabrina's grin grew slowly, and then she pecked him on the lips, saying, "Sounds like a plan."
They headed back to the inside of the house at that, holding hands, determined to not react to the surprise of any of the thirty-five-odd people that were stationed in the chicken house.
The reaction was just as funny as Puck had hoped, with everyone staring intently at Puck and Sabrina, some openly gaping, while Sabrina just said, "What? What are you all looking at?"
Bella was the only one in the room to not be dumbstruck, because, of course, she'd known already. She grinned slyly at Puck and Sabrina, and then went back to organizing a shelf of medicines.
"But- how? What- When-" was the general idea of what Sabrina heard.
Eventually, Puck couldn't hold it together anymore, and he gave of some muffled laughter, then he was exploding in laughter again. Sabrina rolled her eyes and let go of his hand so he could roll on the floor again.
"We've been dating for a while," Sabrina explained matter-of-fact-ly to the staring people, "And we're just messing with you. Sorry."
It wasn't that simple, of course. And it took everyone a long time to adjust to the new situation- even Puck and Sabrina, who often forgot that they could act like a couple in front of everyone else (not helped by the fact that they were together so rarely)- but eventually, Puck and Sabrina spent most of their time together that they weren't bickering holding hands, and everyone else didn't stare at them too much.
It was March, and everything was still deeply frozen, with no signs of a thaw coming any time soon, when the Sabrina saw her parents for the first time in months.
She hadn't realized how much she missed them until they were there, she'd been so busy, but she and Daphne, who were both at the chicken house then, spent a long time just hugging their parents before they could finally explain what they were doing there.
"Kids, nice as it is to see you, we wouldn't be here," Veronica said, "Except that we need your help."
"What is it?" Sabrina asked.
"We've gotten some intelligence," Henry started tensely, "and it sounds like the Scarlet Hand are desperate. Really desperate. So desperate that they're gathering to march on the Fort."
Sabrina and Daphne both stared at their parents and then started giving them a barrage of questions.
"Calm down," Veronica said, putting her hands forward and waving them a bit in the direction of her daughters. "We don't know many details, but they'll probably be there in about a week. So we're trying to prepare by pulling everyone back to the Fort, since we know they're coming. If you can get everyone you're working with there within a week? Because we'll need all the help we can get."
Sabrina and Daphne looked at each other and nodded, and then looked at their parents as Daphne said, "We'll be there."