#<the floor I just mopped last night in my big cleaning-house before leaving town mission…

[northwestofinsanity]

Good morning, everybody…

Freakin’ egg, man!

[curls-cat]

the house creaks a lullaby

For @grimmtober day 2: haunted house. Also on AO3 and ff.net under the same name, as per usual. Not linking so people can, y’know, see it. Sabrina/Red established relationship.

When Baba Yaga leaves the chicken house to Red in her will, everyone is surprised. Surprised, first off, that the crone has disappeared (not died, Daphne assures them. Just gone off somewhere). And surprised, again, that she had a will at all, that she didn’t just take all her stuff with her. And surprised, lastly, that she’d leave the place to Red, of all people.

Even Red was surprised.

“I didn’t know you two even knew each other,” Sabrina says. She tries hard not to make it sound accusatory. Just because they’re A Thing doesn’t mean they need to tell each other everything.

“She’s been trying to help me deal with the Wolf,” Red says.

And that makes sense. It makes sense that Red wouldn’t tell Sabrina, too. They don’t talk about the Wolf a lot. Red doesn’t like it, any more than Sabrina likes talking about the way her parents lied to her for a decade. They both have people that have hurt them. They’re both learning how to live with those people. And it’s still hard, even though they’re adults now.

Sabrina doesn’t ask how that went. If Red wants her to know, she’ll tell her. If she doesn’t want her to know, Sabrina can live with the worry. What she does say is, “So are you going to move in?”

Red shrugs. “I might as well. It’s weird, now that Granny’s gone. The house doesn’t feel right.”

“Yeah,” Sabrina says. She gets it. When she comes home from college, she tries not to stay overnight. Red comes to her more often than not.

“Do you want to help me move in?” Red asks, and she sounds kind of hesitant. “I thought maybe…” She doesn’t finish the thought.

Sabrina thinks she knows where it’s going, though. They’ve been seeing each other for nearly five years, now. Red has a drawer of stuff in Sabrina’s dorm, and a toothbrush. Her hair product is in a little caddy. Sabrina’s roommate has Red’s phone number. If Red has her own place…

Well.

Sabrina and Red are, in a lot of ways, a package deal these days.

*

“I swear this place is haunted,” Sabrina says. She’s brandishing a mop like a club, having just jumped nearly a foot in the air when a bookshelf full of jars of slimy Somethings fell over.

They’ve been trying to clean out the chicken house for about a week now, and it’s as bad as Sabrina had anticipated. Baba Yaga lived in freaking filth. The bathroom is buried in so much grime Sabrina can barely see where the sink ends and the wall starts, and the food in the fridge probably predates refrigeration in general.

“I don’t think ghosts are real,” Red says, but she doesn’t sound as sure as she did a week ago.

“Oh, they definitely are,” Sabrina says. “I’ve been possessed. It sucked.”

“You’ve been what?” Red demands, whipping around to stare her girlfriend in the face. She slips and falls into the slimy things, and hisses. She’s cut herself on one of the broken jars.

Sabrina heads for the first aid kit. It’s not the first time they’ve needed it. “It wasn’t that big a deal,” she says as she rips open an alcohol swap and reaches for Red’s arm. “When we went to the city, back the first year I lived in town? When Puck needed healing.”

Red nods. “Daphne told me about it,” she says. They can talk about Puck without it being weird for either of them, now. It probably helps that he’s not around a lot.

“Well, Oberon got murdered while we were there, and we were following all these stupid leads to find out who killed him.” As Sabrina talks, she wipes off Red’s cut. She needs to use more than one. Red’s arm has some sort of green jelly on it. “One of ‘em was Scrooge, and he did some sort of spiritual conduit, and it turns out I’m sort of a natural medium or something. Ghosts can possess me easier than other people.”

“Great,” Red says, and she sounds grumpy. “One more thing to watch out for.” Red has made it her personal mission to protect Sabrina from all the things in the world that want to take advantage of her. It makes Sabrina’s heart melt every time she does it, even though she’s tried to point out that she can take care of herself. There’s only so many times you can hear ‘but you shouldn’t have to’ in response to that before it makes you want to cry, it turns out.

“I think we should be a little more concerned about you getting some weird disease from this gunk,” Sabrina says. “I’ve been possessed a grand total of once in twenty-one years. Which is probably less time than whatever this stuff is has been fermenting.”

“I’ll be fine,” Red says dismissively. She swipes up some of the gunk and gives it a sniff. “I think it’s calendula, actually.”

“What?”

“For bruising. An old cure. My mother used to use it.” Red’s voice only barely breaks on the word ‘mother.’

Sabrina squeezes Red’s forearm, a sign of solidarity. She covers the cut in gauze, then wraps it with tape a few times. “Come on,” she says at last. “Get out of this mess so I can clean it up.”

*

Cleaning out the house takes a long time. They can’t do it all themselves, either, because Sabrina can’t touch the magic items. They still sing to her, even all these years later, a dangerous call for a power she doesn’t even want, really, much as it draws her in. And Red is always afraid of what’s going to interact with the already dangerous concoction of Wolf-and-girl-and-witchcraft inside her. So anything that calls Sabrina’s name is picked up with a very long stick and thrown into a bag for Daphne to pick over. She’ll be ecstatic, when they finally hand it to her.

In the meantime, they clean, and things keep falling over. It’s kind of helpful, actually. Nothing falls over that they wanted to keep, and aside from the times they trip and fall into the mess, there are no injuries.

“I think it might be a helpful ghost,” Red says, when a pile of rotting newspapers just happens to topple out the window. She leans against her broom thoughtfully.

“Maybe it’s the house itself,” Sabrina suggests. It weirds her out, but she’s getting better about that sort of thing. Magic isn’t the problem, she keeps reminding herself. It’s people, and how they use it. Look at Red. Someone this kind can’t be wrong, just because she’s got something powerful inside her.

“Would make sense,” Red agrees. “It is alive, after all.”

They’re keeping the house in the front yard of the house that used to be Granny’s, for now. At the end of the night, they’ll walk it as close to the nearby dump as they can get it without being seen, to lug out the day’s trash.

“Whatever it is,” Sabrina says, looking around askance, “I hope it can’t actually, y’know, see us.”

“Why?” Red asks.

“Because,” Sabrina says, and she reaches out and grabs Red by the waist, reels her in. “I’d like to know I can have some time alone with you.”

“Hm,” Red says, turning a smile on Sabrina, leaning in for a kiss. “I think I’d like that.”

*

Nothing falls over, and when they emerge from the bedroom much later, both streaked with way more dust than when they started and clothes askew, the house seems no different.

“So we can get alone time,” Red says brightly, looking around . “That’s great.”

“Yeah,” Sabrina agrees.

“It’s especially great,” Red says, winding her fingers through Sabrina’s, “because I was wondering if you’d like to move in with me. Once you graduate.”

Sabrina knew this was coming. The question still melts her. She looks around the living room, the room they’ve been cleaning out together. The room they picked a paint color for together, too. The room whose floors Sabrina scrubbed and whose furniture Red has discussed picking up from goodwill. A place they’re rebuilding together. It already feels like it’s not just Red’s home, it’s theirs.

“Yeah,” she says, leaning in to give Red another kiss. “Yes. I’d love to live with you.”