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On her twenty first birthday, Halloween night, a full moon floods the dark sky with brightness. Well, it's her birthday inasmuch as any day/hour/minute/second exists in the trans-dimensional liminal space the university occupies. She hasn't quite worked out the mechanics of time here, would rather bask in the glory of the moment than dissect the physics of it, but Ambrose had set her a watch to the millisecond of Greendale time, like a temporal doorway home. In her heart, and on her wrist, Sabrina is twenty-one years old and hovering on the precipice of something incalculable and yet inevitable - the gaping abyss of life, spread out for her fingertips.
It's all shockingly ordinary. Sabrina, alone, with her head out of her dorm room window to feel that blush of moonlight on her face, how it pulls delicately at the hum of divine light that buzzes in her blood. Everyone - her roommate, classmates and lecturers are curled in the courtyard already, stripped down and feeling the pulse of the night start to reach their limbs, the Samhain ball unfurling from within like a shared hallucination. It seems time lines up sometimes - that, or witch holidays are a statement of fact, and time simply flows between them at will.
She can see them now, see Agatha's body rolling with a freedom she hasn't seen since before the pagans, her arms twined with a dark haired girl they'd scrapped over in first year - Sabrina yearning for that touch of the unknown and Agatha grasping at the familiar. She's the first to admit she liked the war more than the spoils but she still holds close the memory of the three of them curled in the dorm and drunk on dandelion wine easing up against the limits the others had set. Her chest had been spattered with bite marks for weeks.
Part of her, the part that is the very spirit of Samhain, the spark of life born on the festival of death is desperate to join them. Wants to writhe to the rhythm of crackling fire and songs of ancestors, to fall into someone's arms and succumb to the magick that marks her birthright.
But she's half mortal, after all, and that comes with its own intricate rituals. Sabrina grips the watch, the metal and glass somewhat warmed from her skin and clicks her heels just for the heaven of it, and before she can blink Sabrina is home.
She wonders if it should still feel like that, her girlhood bedroom at the Spellman mortuary, a place she only seems to stumble into in transition, these days. Filled with the clothes she was happy to leave behind and other markers of adolescence - the books on her English syllabus she hadn't wanted to burn, some sketches Harvey gave her and she tucked into frames but couldn't bear to look up at from her dorm room bed, the twelve slightly variant shades of red lipstick she bought aged sixteen before settling on a signature one - she feels almost out of place, an interloper on her own history. But then Salem hops onto the bed, chirping brightly and she sweeps him up into her arms, nestling her nose in his fur. The truest calamity of witch educational institutions is the familiar bans. He mewls in her arms, his claws pressing insistently into her bicep in protest of her squishing and she releases him with a pout.
"Am I not allowed to miss you?" She scritches behind his ear and he arches his velvet head into the touch. "Yeah, that's what I thought."
"I do believe he missed you too, cousin. Either that or he thinks it's funny to knock over bottles of embalming fluids and holler every time he thinks you might be having a nightmare." Ambrose stands in the doorway, arms outstretched. Like the room, he remains entirely unchanged, down to the sharp huff of a laugh he releases when she barrels into his chest. "Happy birthday, Sabrina."
She can't actually manage a response at first, just presses her ear into his chest and listens to the rumble of his heart, the little reverberation of her own like some biological make up for the decade plus of psuedo-siblinghood. But then she laughs at her own sentimentality, and he laughs because she does and not a single day has passed since she swanned off to study beyond the stars.
"Are the aunties here?" She asks, giving a final squeeze before releasing him.
"Can't you smell the thirty odd cakes aunt Hilda and Dr Cee have been baking since she caught wind of your return?" He touches the ends of her hair, the electric blue she let Agatha convince her of back over Eostre, the both of them pulled into the other's axis in the uncomfortable melancholy. The colour like a defiance of itself - if she's feeling blue, she wants the hot, sharp blue of a lightning bolt.
She wants to shrug off the scrutiny, her tongue already curling around a justification, but he just smiles.
"Is there lemon drizzle cake?" She throws her hair back over her shoulder and makes for the door.
"At least three of them," he assures her, and ushers her downstairs.
She really should have expected the spectacle - the living room is decked out in silver mylar balloons that all say 21 in a spooky, dripping green font, and there are presents heaped in little piles between the couches all wrapped in crisp brown paper with sigils for happiness painstakingly drawn on. There is more cake than Sabrina could dream of, each flickering with twenty one tiny candles. Emerging from between the cakes are her family, Aunt Hilda and Dr Cee grinning at her warmly from the left side of the room, Zelda and Marie curled up on the right. There's an intake of breath, and she's petrified for a moment that they're going to break out into Happy Birthday, but Zelda merely exhales a cloud of smoke before drawing Sabrina in for a hug.
"Welcome home, darling." She runs her hand through Sabrina's hair with only the faintest touch of disdain, which is almost a compliment and before she's been released Hilda has her wrapped tightly in her own arms, Sabrina pressed in between the both of them, utterly surrounded.
"Happy birthday, love." Hilda's cheek presses into her hair, her warmth flooding into Sabrina. "Ambrose said you wanted a mortal celebration, so we got cake and balloons, I hope it's enough."
"It's amazing," she tells her, meeting her squeezing touch with just as much fierceness. "Even though I'm not sure it's even possible to eat this much cake."
"I'm sure we'll manage," Dr Cee says from above them, somewhere, but Sabrina can't see much beyond Hilda's blue taffeta.
"I feel awful that I can't stay long." Sabrina pulls back, eyeing the efforts they've all gone to rather sheepishly. "But I promised the gang I'd see in adulthood with a drink."
"I did warn them," Ambrose tells her, Salem cradled in his arms. "But no one ever listens to the scholar, do they? Feel like bloody Cassandra sometimes."
"It's not like anyone's going to complain about birthday cake for breakfast," Hilda throws back lightly and Sabrina feels that warmth again, curling up tight in her chest.
She lets them fuss over her for an hour, piling gifts into her lap and cake onto her plate and tea into the china cup with her initials on that they'd never let her use as a child (and for good reason, because it has a hairline fracture on the lip by the time she's drained it.) It's lovely, if a bit claustrophobic after the relative freedom of campus life, the parental gaze tracking her movements just shifting in her seat. The bobbing balloons almost mock her, the barest brush of adulthood virtually inconsequential in a room full of people with ages in the triple digits. But it's hers, and she feels her age, feels older than she has any right to, so she only feels a little guilty slipping away when Zelda whirls on Dr Cee for a scratch on her favourite plate.
The woods, maybe more than her bedroom, feel like home. There isn't time, now, to really bask in it, but she listens to the gentle patter of tree branches in the autumn breeze, leaves falling around her like their own little birthday gift.
It's nice to just walk for a while. The college has a nasty problem with missing doorways, corridors dropping away with trans-dimensional interference, so teleportation is a girl's best bet. Walking has its own kind of novelty, especially in Greendale. She feels like she's tracing her own footsteps, breezing past the highschool, the cinema, Dr Cee's shop, all of them tugging on her sternum. By the time she gets to the lone bar in town, a dank little sports bar with a single pool table and a vintage Raven's scarf curled in the window, she feels almost giddy. It's silly, really. She's drank wine with her own blood stirred in, and shared strong, heavy meade with the coven during festivals. Still, there's a novelty to stepping inside the musty room, the bud light sign catching on her hair, her friends curled together in a booth waiting for her.
They'd made a pact - when the first of them turned twenty one, they'd all drop what they were doing and come to King Pin's, to savour the first legal drink like it belonged to them all.
Harvey is sketching on a beermat, his hair bleached, and shaved at the back, a dusky blue crop top stretched over his torso. Roz is talking animatedly at the boys, her hair natural but perfectly shaped, dozens of buttons and pins glinting from her maroon corduroy jacket. Theo is at ease, legs kicked up on the opposite side of the booth, broader shouldered than she remembers, a light dusting of stubble along his jaw. It's the first time the Fright Club have fully reconvened since the end of summer senior year, and that's not terribly long, but looking at them, the ease with which they tesselate, Sabrina feels fully unwound for the first time since she left.
"Of all the sports bars in all the world," she says, sliding in beside Roz, her smile so wide it makes her cheeks ache. She loses herself a little in the pile-on, all bodies and warmth and undiluted affection.
"Well," she says, when they've let go, their knees still pressed flush against hers in the tiny booth. "I for one am frankly offended none of you are in costume."
"Aren't we getting a little old for that kinda thing?" Theo asks, laughing.
"Never," she assures him, flattening the cocktail menu out on the table. "What are we drinking, gang?"
"Harvey vetoed wine," Roz tells her, as the boy in question makes a face.
"It tastes like vinegar, and people who say they like it are liars." He taps the menu with a black painted fingernail. "I wanted to try the spitfire cocktail, but Theo said it sounded as bitter as I am about his first tattoo not being designed by me."
Theo pokes his tongue out at Harvey. "I wanted shots."
" Veto ," Harvey and Roz say in unison.
"So a gin and tonic, then?" She asks, but not really asking at all. She knew what she'd be drinking the first time Nick slid one across the bar to her at Dorian's, the faint botanical notes like a grown-up echo of Hilda's herbal remedies.
It's happy hour - though the crowd doesn't seem to know it - so four drinks won't shake out to too much. She fingers her license as she sidles up to the bar, relishing in the mundane thrill; she can - and has - conjured up forgeries as undetectable as the real thing, but there is something about the ritual, the milestone that makes her feel a kind of mortal pride. She slaps it down audibly on the bar expecting to find Billy's brother, heir to the fine establishment since she was a child, to loom over her, but finds a man she doesn't recognise. He's distinctly… indistinct. She can't get a lock on the shape of his face, the colour of his eyes, it's as if every time she blinks she forgets what she's been looking at.
He peers down at the license and smiles. "Happy birthday, gorgeous. What are you drinking?"
There's something about that smile, the way it doesn't quite fit on this indefinite face. "Nick?"
He smiles at her again, dropping the glamour and shifting into the face she better recognises.
"What are you doing here?"
He's started preparing the drinks without her telling him what she wants, and that's presumptuous, or maybe charming, or something belonging to the blurry middle ground. "I hear this is a big birthday in the mortal realm. I couldn't in good conscience not stop by."
He pushes the drinks, four gin and tonics made methodically by hand, lime wedges and a twist of mint to garnish floating amongst the ice, across the bar, and she stops his hand before he can withdraw. "Come sit with us."
"Spellman, I don't want to intrude -"
"Scratch," she says, matching his intonation, with maybe a touch more force. "I want you there."
He picks up two glasses and steps around the bar, crooking an elbow for her to take, and she can't quite shake the pleased smile from her mouth.
The gang receive him warmly, enough of a shared history that he can slip right in, and Sabrina settles in the booth, unfurling.
She succumbs to the throes of conversation, Roz and Nick happily debating the validities of the Book of Thoth, and Harvey revealing the sketch he's been quietly working on - it's her, like it so often is, but different, something ancient in the big eyes, something unbearably new about the delicate tips of her hair - and Sabrina taps out a quiet happy birthday to herself against her glass with a fingernail, her smile tucked into her palm.