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sabrina

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Honestly, these days, Eddie thinks his Uncle Wayne might be a little proud of him.

He's been here awhile now, almost two months, and he's nearly finished with summer school, which will finally get him set with his high school diploma, and he's got a job. A proper one, too, not selling drugs out of a tin lunchbox, but working part time at a record store, with Steve Harrington, of all people. So yeah, he thinks his uncle would probably be sort of proud, even if they were both kind of garbage at ever talking about their feelings.

Wayne was a good man, though, and he'd been good to Eddie since he'd started taking care of him all those years ago. Most of the time, Eddie doesn't mind being a bit of a fuck up, but the times he does mind, it's only because of his uncle.

Maybe Darrow is good for him in that regard. Maybe the Upside Down had been, too. He had learned a lot about himself in those five days, he's learned a bit more in the past two months. It feels kind of good.

But Eddie isn't about to become a completely different person and he's still curious by nature, interested in things that people in Hawkins would have considered weird or even wrong and that's why he's standing outside a store called Leviathan, looking at it with wide, excited eyes.

When he opens the door, he sees a familiar head of white blonde hair and a grin lights up his features.

"Well, holy shit, if it isn't my fireball throwing saviour," he says cheerfully.

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Sabrina sits perched on the edge of the counter, legs crossed, working with a decently sized mortar and pestle. She glances up from the book with the directions for this particular mixture, and smiles with real warmth. "Hey, it's you! You're looking a lot better without a demon bat chewing on you."

Not that far away, Salem's curled up in one of those window-hammocks for carts, enjoying the summer sun while it lasts. Throwing a lazy yawn in Eddie's direction, the familiar settles back in to sleep.

"Come on in," Sabrina calls, waving him further into the shop. "I'm prepping a couple of mixtures for paste and poultice making, but nothing too gross." While the dried herbs currently getting ground to dust don't look like much more than bits of dead plant, it's a pleasant enough smell, a forest just starting to dry out for autumn. "How's it going?"

She is very, very hot.

Eddie thinks someone else might be scared of her, given the fireball throwing part, but he just thinks she's cool. Badass, powerful, so pretty, and very cool. Even without the magic, she seems like the sort of girl who would have made a lot of enemies in Hawkins, which just makes Eddie like her more.

"Paste and poultice making," he echoes, crossing to where she's sitting and leaning his forearms on the counter to watch. "I mean, I'm alive thanks to you. Bat-free. I've got some sick scars, but they very kindly didn't fuck up any of my tattoos, so that's not the worst thing."

Sabrina has the definite urge to tousle all that hair, brightening further as he seems to show real interest.

"Fire-balling of bats is on the house," she says. "Actually, I had fun with that part. Darrow isn't like a lot of places, and it sort of accepts that magic is real and happens. I have to do way less pretending than I ever did before, but... I'd usually try something less explosive. It was good to let loose. So thank you, Eddie, for the bats."

She crumbles lavender into the little bowl, letting the stems fall. The kind of person buying a poultice usually loves lavender.

"You seem pretty settled in, then."

Every night, he has trouble sleeping. He wakes up to the shriek of bats, hearing them coming straight out of his dreams and into his waking life. Once the dreams wake him up, he has a hard time getting back to sleep and he spends a lot of his nights walking around the block, just so he has something to do.

Is that settled? He doesn't think so, but he grins anyway, because he doesn't even want to think about all that.

"Yeah, not bad, I guess," he agrees. "There's a bunch of people here from Hawkins, so... got some people from home. Sort of." He leans in and smells what she's using. "That smells good."

"Lavender," she answers, the flakes of dull purple easily grinding to dust. "It doesn't do as many things as people think it does, but it smells good and it's calming. And as a rule, just about anything goes better for someone if they're calm. With a few exceptions."

Reaching into a nearby jar, Sabrina produces a dried sprig of it, holding it out for Eddie to tak.

"I'm glad you have some people. I have no idea if I'd have done nearly as well if I didn't get Salem so soon into my tim here, but I was also sixteen and had to stay at the Children's home for a while." Her nose crinkles in thought. "Hawkins. I know I've heard that one before. Is Steve one of yours, maybe? I remember helping him with some weird dog creatures once."

Reaching for the lavender, Eddie lets it glide under his nose, breathing it in. He's pretty calm right now, it's only in the middle of the night, waking up from those awful dreams that his heart pounds and his breath quickens and he feels too hot, like he's being held down by the bats all over again.

Maybe he should buy some, though. Maybe it'll help.

"Steve is... one of mine, yeah," Eddie answers with a huff of a laugh. "Never would've thought it, honestly. King Steve was pretty much a douchebag when we went to school together and I was not one of the popular kids. But things change. Steve changed."

"King Steve? King Steve?" Sabrina laughs, delighted at that, mostly because it seems like the kind of thing that would mortify any person who's no longer in high school. Or if they're not terrible, while they're in high school. "I don't know him well. I know his girlfriend better. I bet she didn't know she's a Queen."

She looks at Eddie speculatively. "I didn't have a great high school experience either. Back in Greendale I was trying to split time with the coven and here..." Her expression flickers. "High school is pretty hellish no matter where you are. I'm glad to be done with it."

It's a little surprising, how easy he is to talk to-- not that she's known for being particularly quiet.

"I've seen her, bet she'd kick someone's ass for calling her Queen anything," Eddie says, delighted. Steve's girlfriend is nothing like any of the girls he'd dated back in Hawkins, with her tattoos and piercings and all that jewelry.

In fact, she looks a little more like the girls people expected Eddie to date, when in fact, he's always kind of preferred someone a little more preppy.

"Amen to that," he says, saluting with the sprig of lavender. "I was on my third attempt at my senior year when I got here, but I just finished up with summer classes and it's official. Eddie Munson is a high school graduate."

"She would," Sabrina agrees, mischief crackling in her dark eyes. "Which is exactly why it'd be so fun."

She offers her own salute, with a sprig of betony, similarly purples as the lavender. "I only had to go through the once, but I ended up doing all my work and lessons at home. It wasn't a good idea for me to be there any longer." Maybe, she thinks, it might have worked-- but she'd made promises, after all, about not causing her usual brand of trouble.

"Well, congratulations, High School Graduate Eddie Munson. How are you celebrating? It's pretty easy to have parties here, with the lower drinking age and lots of cool people around."

"Yeah?" he asks. "Yeah, maybe I should throw a party. I know about... six whole people here, but maybe they'd bring some friends and their friends would bring some friends and bam, we got ourselves a rager."

Which isn't Eddie's style, honestly, and he shrugs a second later, grinning.

"Not my scene, really. The only reason I got invited to parties in Hawkins was because I had access to weed and other shit. And once they realized I was selling it, they just came to transact before the party and didn't bother with the invite."

"Well, I think people around here have better manners than that," Sabrina says. "But it does seem a little bit like any time there's a celebration around here, weird and somewhat dangerous things happen. Maybe I'll just buy you a drink or something. Less chance of killer bees, or ice bees, or fire bees, or bees that sting you and paralyze you..."

She crinkles her nose.

"Yeah, we want to stay below the bee to party ratio threshold as much as we can," and she's only partly teasing. "I know your world has something going on it, those things trying to eat you guys, but is that normal? Do you have magic there too?"

"So I'm getting the sense that weird bees are a theme," Eddie says, looking more amused than he probably should, given that she's just said killer bees and somehow that's not even the weirdest one.

Leaning his chin in one hand, the other hand still twirling the lavender back and forth, Eddie shakes his head.

"I mean, I guess it was more normal than I realized, but I didn't know about it until five days before I got here," he says. "Steve and Robin said it'd been happening for years. This weird mirror world of our own."

"Way more bees than you think there's going to be," Sabrina confirms. "I guess unless where you're from has a lot of bees, and you're already expecting a bee problem. Some of the worlds that funnel into this place get pretty strange."

She listens as she works with the mortar and pestle, soft sounds of stone meeting stone and rasping together. Hawkins goes into her mental tally of places that seem to be middle of the road, neither fully mundane or full on elves and mutants and superheroes. Greendale's closer to the second, of course, but maybe not by much.

"Yeah, I know a little about that from the other side," she says. "I lived two separate lives until I was sixteen. When I was in the mortal world, I was there fully, but I'd go home to the occult. The idea was you had your Dark Baptism then, and then it was all coven all the time."

"Dark Baptism," Eddie echoes. "Sounds very metal."

He's not sure what it actually means, how something like that is real, but then, murderous demon bats hadn't seemed real to him before the day he'd come here, so he thinks he can be a little more openminded.

"I'm very into DnD," he tells Sabrina. "Hardcore Dungeon Master, led a lot of really cool campaigns back home, we even had a club dedicated to it at my high school. Then Satanic Panic hit." He wiggles the lavender the emphasize the words. "Suddenly I was sacrificing teenagers to my demon overlord because I played a fantasy game."

An amused, wry smile takes over Sabrina's mouth.

"That's actually kind of funny. Not because clearly you were dealing with idiots and assholes, but because I'm technically Sabrina Morningstar, daughter of Lucifer Morningstar, Heir to the Throne of Hell. Maybe the flames that hit those bats wasn't from Morningstar-brand Hell, but I called on hellfire to save you." She huffs out a laugh. "I did always wonder about DnD, but the one time Aunt Zelda overheard me talking about it, she lectured me for twenty minutes on how I had something better."

Eying the powdery fruits of her labor, Sabrina starts the process of gently scooping the herbs into a jar. "If you do a game here, I want in. It'll be like... full circle."

Eddie kind of thinks he's being fucked with, because even having dealt with the Upside Down, someone actually being the child of the devil seems kind of nuts. His head tilts and he watches Sabrina as she scoops everything into a jar, then decides even if she is messing with him, that's pretty fair.

The world is weird, after all.

"Really?" he asks when she says she'd want to join the party. He grins and says, "Yeah, okay. That'd be cool. Your dad isn't like... here, is he?"

Only for a moment do Sabrina's features flicker enough to suggest that she's genuinely unnerved by the idea of Lucifer in Darrow (again).

"He's not here," she answers, firm and mostly untroubled. "He tried showing up, but we were able to take care of it. With a minimum of deaths. I'm not a great heir, so he might skip saying hi, but..." Her head shakes, just a bit. "Unfortunately, my reality does not have a cool or really badass Devil. He's a whiny show-off and more bitchy than evil. Which isn't to say he doesn't do all of the evil, just... I mean, who among us isn't disappointed in our biological roots sometimes?"

For all he's into mental and DnD, Eddie honestly hasn't given much thought to the devil and what he might be like, mostly because he's pretty sure the dude doesn't exist. At least, not in the context he was taught, growing up in a small American town.

Being an atheist was the one thing he really didn't advertise, because somehow that felt even more dangerous than all the rest.

At her words, he snorts and says, "Yeah, ain't that the truth. The only thing my dad ever taught me was how to hot wire a car on one of his few stints out of prison. Then he got wasted and drove his car into a tree with my equally wasted mom in the passenger seat, so." He shrugs. "That's a hell of a disappointment."

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