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Sabrina Spellman moved in with her cousin Ambrose a bit over a year ago, when she got fed up with halls and finally admitted that living with another witch would make life easier. Whilst sneaking off at night and returning at 3 or 4 am was par for the course for first-year university students, coming back covered in earth and/or blood was less expected, and harder to hide than a more traditional entanglement. There was also the issue of Salem to contend with; halls didn’t allow cats, even as service animals, and disguising him as a plushy toy whenever her floormates burst through the door without knocking was getting exhausting.
Plus, Ambrose asked nicely, and she loved her cousin too much to say no. The warlock had a penchant for getting lost in his research for weeks at a time, and apparently having someone else around the house kept him both sane and fed. The issue being, of course, that magical flatmates don’t grow on trees. He’d tried attending a couple of local coven meetings, but even in Cardiff, magical capital of Britain, witches were secretive, and fairly entrenched in their family or historic homes. He tried flatting with a Kelpie for a little bit out of sheer desperation, but Cedric turned out to be an absolute nightmare, and the whole house was in danger of becoming permanently damp from his algae-covered presence.
Not long after, Sabrina walked into her room at 5 am, towelling her hair dry yet again, only to find Ambrose sitting on her bed, begging for a new flatmate. Despite his weak home invasion excuse — “I’m too busy to figure out how that mortal vocal projection works, cous, but this is urgent,” — she didn’t take much convincing.
Sabrina took more convincing to stay in the house when Ambrose realised just how busy she was studying both mortal university and magic full-time, and called an intervention with both their aunts. It took Aunt Zelda almost two hours to bully her into practicing both part-time instead. “You’re barely thirty, Sabrina! You have almost two hundred years to study mortal literature. Why in Goddess’s name are you risking your health for a poet who, frankly, wasn’t even that good in bed?” Afterwards, Aunt Hilda nodded sympathetically at her panicked “I have assignments due” spiel, tactfully knocked her out with a murmured spell, and left her to sleep off the stress hangover for a week and a half. She left Salem curled up on Sabrina’s chest, purring like a freight train.
It might just have been that she was too sleep-fogged to protest this infantilising treatment for three days after she woke, but by the time Sabrina was awake enough to be angry, she was also aware enough of the weight lifted that she couldn’t be. She was almost grateful for Hilda turning up at all her professors’ offices with wringing hands, explaining the terrible pneumonia Sabrina had contracted and liberally applying forged doctors’ notes to soothe the wounds. She was definitely grateful for Ambrose attending all her lectures for the time she was out. He wrote impressively detailed notes, scribbling corrections in the margins to the lecturer’s information about Shakespeare’s love life. (Apparently Ambrose’s grand-uncle had dated him, and he kept quite explicit diaries.)
If she was honest, Sabrina would have admitted that she was working so hard because it kept her from thinking. She and Harvey had only divorced a year ago, and grief still crept into every waking moment. But Ambrose conveniently didn’t ask for honesty, and after she talked to Aunt Hilda she had to admit that replacing grief with grief-tinged stress wasn’t really an improvement. So instead she pulled back, and slowly, infuriatingly, gave herself time to heal.
By the time thirty-five year old Sabrina reached her fourth year at university, she had settled into a comfortable pattern. Take one paper per semester; study magic three afternoons a week under Ambrose’s tutelage; cook dinners as payment for said tutelage; sneak off to shake collection buckets once or twice a week (under the guise of Tinder dates so Ambrose didn’t alert the Aunts for another intervention); delicately fend off actual date requests from mortals during charity work, whilst simultaneously collecting enough invitations to social events that she wouldn’t appear mysterious; feed Salem; sleep; repeat. It was a good life, if a bit lonely, but after the ten-year-long lesson in failed romance she knew better than to get too close to mortals. She’d tried meeting other witches, but the local covens were a bit too traditional for her taste, not to mention cliquey. And besides, she told herself; witches don’t fall in love often. One love ought to be good enough for a lifetime. As for real friends, she had her family and Dr. Cee.
So Sabrina the Witch drifted comfortably; bored, but content to trade excitement for safety. Besides, Ambrose’s experiments upstairs were explosive enough to keep their home life eventful.