forthsofar | while the whole wide world is fast asleep

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nick

while the whole wide world is fast asleep

The combination of relief and exhaustion after her rescue meant that Rosie slept without dreams at first, safe within the warmth of the apartment and giving in to the driving need it seemed all of them had just to be close now that Nick and Sabrina's plan had worked and they were free. But--too soon--she moves from something deep and dreamless to a more fitful slumber. She dreams then, a nightmare that feels all too real and finds her a prisoner once more, surrounded by the glittering, leering eyes of the goblins. She tries to sing; knows somehow that she has to to save herself and Charlie and all the rest, but no notes come.

Pretty bird's been broken, laughs one of the goblins, its hand latching around her throat. Only one use for broken birds. All at once, they're in the hot, filthy kitchens, the goblins holding her down on the worktable as one of them raises a cleaver, honed to a razor's edge. Its voice was sweet but its flesh is sweeter, it taunts as she opens her mouth in a silent scream, as the blade starts its downward arc and the other creatures cheer.

Rosie wakes with a gasp, alone and trembling in the middle of Nick's bed. She sits there for a few minutes, trying to calm her racing heart and convince herself again of her safety. Hearing the faint sound of something from down the hall--a laugh track, maybe, or piece of music--she gets up and wanders towards it.

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Nick finds himself exhausted but utterly unable to sleep. He's curled at one end of the sofa swaddled in a blanket, dressed in sweaters and a raggy t-shirt, barefoot. When Rosie appears in the doorway, dressed in his clothes, he looks at her for a long moment, and then, before he's said anything, he lifts the edge of the blanket.

Rosie hadn't been sure which of them she'd find, just follows the sound out to the living room knowing that she'll be glad of whoever it is. More so, if it's all three of them. Her hair's a mess, the borrowed t-shirt and sweatpants a little loose and silly-looking on her slim frame, but it's difficult to care about any of it right now.

She looks back at Nick and the lifted corner of the blanket for a moment of her own, then takes the few remaining steps from the doorway to the couch. Maybe she should think about it more than she does; maybe she will later, once things feel a little more settled. More normal. For now, Rosie just sits, pulling her feet up beneath her and letting Nick rearrange the blanket over them both.

"Thank you."

"This show is terrible," he says, wrapping the blanket around her and then slipping his arm around her shoulders, pulling her in against him like he had down in the dark...only, this time, there's no bars to separate them, just her tucked in warm against his side. "So don't thank me yet."

She smiles, faint and fleeting but present, curling into Nick's side again without thought. The curve of his arm around her shoulders is solid and comforting, much as it had been in circumstances more dire than these; once again, its gentle weight eases what remains of her fear.

"What show is it?" Rosie asks, turning her head to look up at him. There's a commercial on now, some woman with too-white teeth holding up a gaudy bracelet like some kind of prize while a phone number flashed at the bottom of the screen. "What's even on at this time of night?"

Keeping her close like this feels instinctive now, like it's the easiest way to comfort both of them. She's warm and solid next to him, as close as she can get, and that's all either of them need right now. If it had even occurred to Nick to worry about a mortal boyfriend, it wouldn't have mattered. This was about mroe than sex anyway.

"Honestly?" he says, his words edged with laughter. "I have no idea. There's a family, and they all seem to hate each other, and a big chunk of it is set in a mortal high school?"

"Goodness," she says, laughing along with him as she relaxes further, slipping into the simple comfort of the moment. "That does sound awful."

There's no conscious comparison Rosie makes between this and anything she'd shared with David. Even if there had been, it would have seemed ridiculous almost immediately. One was, if not quite Rosie's idea of romance, something intimate and a little scandalous; furtive afternoons and wandering hands, half-watched movies or the sound of his car radio playing in the background. The other was just a need, a reaction to an event neither she nor Nick had been able to fully parse yet, one that had been full of misery and pain and fear. So she doesn't compare them, doesn't think about the occasional brush of Nick's fingers against her arm, doesn't wonder what (if anything at all) she ought to say to David about the last few days.

Not consciously, anyway.

"I'm glad someone else was awake," Rosie says instead, as the show starts again with some agonized conversation between two of the characters in a locker-filled hallway. "I mean, probably we all should be asleep, but..." She sighs. "I had an awful dream, just now, and I'm just glad not to be the only person up."

"Do you want to talk about it?" asks Nick, stroking his fingers against her arm, idly playing with the sleeve of her t-shirt. "Or do you want to talk about...anything else?" He shifts, curling his legs up, too, making sure that Rosie's properly cradled and safe.

"There isn't much to say about it," she admits with another faint smile. His shift in position causes Rosie to move as well, to rest slightly more against his chest than his side. More than maybe she should, if she'd been thinking about it.

"The goblins were there, the dungeon...horrible things. Everything I'd expect to have a nightmare about after the last few days."

She settles against his chest and he wraps his arms around her, letting her settle however she's comfortable. He sighs when she describes the dream she's had.

"Inevitable, I suppose," he says. "But I'm sorry, all the same."

"You're the last person who'd need to apologize, under the circumstances," she says, tilting her head to look up at him briefly. "You or Sabrina. But...thank you." The longer she stays here, the further and fainter away the dream seems, its horrors more easily dispelled than Rosie had anticipated in those first gasping moments of wakefulness. It's so little, but it's enough.

She stretches her legs out beneath the blanket as she leans against him, one ankle bumping against his with the motion. "But yes, let's talk about something else." She chews her lip a little, thinking. "Even though you didn't see much of how it usually is before, well, all of this...what do you think of Darrow?"

"It's a little like Greendale," he says. "Brighter colours, but yeah. There's something about mortals that's a little bit magical sometimes, even if you don't see it." He smiles. "And with Sabrina here too? Yeah, I can see myself being happy here."

"I don't see it, you're right," Rosie says, curious about his reasoning but unable to keep herself from laughing a little at the idea. "What on earth could be magical to you about us?" There wasn't anything of the sort about her, she knows, even considering her strange tumble into Anterwold. That had simply been an accident the first time; only slightly more intentional, the second.

Again, there's the rush of love and trust in his voice when he says Sabrina's name, just as she'd heard it the first day they met. "Good," she says, softly. "You know this already, better than I ever could, but I think Sabrina's even happier here now that you've come." Loyalty--and hope, and friendship--prompts her to speak again after a moment. "I want to think she was happy before, too. With Charlie, and the friends she's made here, and especially once she left the Children's Home. Even if none of it's quite the same as having someone here from home."

It might be a little too much, Rosie realizes only once it's been said, a thoughtless presumption not unlike so many of the things she's blurted out at people before. All of it had felt true, though, as she was saying it. She falls quiet, blushing faintly at her tactlessness but stubbornly unwilling in this moment to apologize for it.

"All kinds of things. I remember going to this...dance with Sabrina, back in Greendale...And I'd just never seen anything like it. We didn't ever anything like it, back at the Academy." He shifts, his arm still curled around her, idly playing with the ends of her dark curls, only half even looking at the tv anymore. "I hope she was happy without me, too," he says. "I'm glad we're figuring it out."

"Really? I never thought of dances as being particularly magical." That the first thing he thinks to mention is something so simple, so almost normal, though, both surprises and endears him to her all the more. "Or not school dances, at least," she adds after a moment, thinking of the whirl of the Festivity and the strange enchantment of all that had happened that evening.

The light touch of his fingers in her hair sends a faint tingle down her spine; a little strange, but not unpleasant. Still leaning against his chest, she tips her head down slightly, almost unthinkingly, exposing the nape of her neck a little more. Not away from his touch, by any means.

"I'm glad you are too," she says. "They're both...I never had friends like the two of them, back home."

"There was just something about it," he says, with a little smile. He takes the tilt of her head as an invitation, and he doesn't take his hand away, still playing with the end of her hair. "Sabrina was wearing this red dress, and it was...Yeah. It was definitely something." He thinks about that for a moment. "No, neither did I. Not really. Not until I met Sabrina."

"Something about the dress, or something about the dance?" she teases before she can think about it, just as she might have done--and had, before--to any of her other friends over similar conversations. "Both, I'm sure."

He keeps up the touch to her hair, and she sighs a little, a quiet exhalation of breath as involuntary as the dip of her head had been.

"Brainy girls don't really have friends, back home. At least that's what I'd always been told." If his admission surprises her, she tries not to let it show. He's exactly the sort of person--charming, brave, thoughtful, among other things--that would have been swarmed with attention back in Oxford. It's hard to believe it hadn't been the case in Greendale, even with what little she knows about the town--and even less than that, where the Academy is concerned.

"Thank goodness it's different here, for both of us."

"Definitely both," says Nick, remembering both the way that Sabrina had looked coming down those stairs and the way that he'd felt when he lifted her off her feet to swing her in a slow circle. "It's definitely different. Back at the Academy, I felt like...I knew a lot of people, but there weren't a tonne of people that I could really talk to? That I could really trust. You never knew what the Sisters were up to, and most of the other Warlocks were Blackwoods boys, and..."

"And from what I've heard of that Father Blackwood, you certainly couldn't trust any of them," Rosie says, wrinkling her nose a little. "It all sounds awfully lonely."

The show he'd been watching, whatever it was, had finished without their noticing, caught up as they'd been in their conversation. Rosie looks over at the television, catching only a glimpse of whatever's airing now--something more dated in black and white, a courtroom scene with a grim-jawed lawyer and his client. It's hardly worth more than that brief glance, and she looks away again, settling a bit further into the way they've curled themselves on the couch.

Talking to Rosie is a thing that feels like it's come very naturally, the way it always has with Sabrina, and Nick doesn't hesitate. He stays wrapped around her, his arms on either side of her, keeping her cradled and warm and safe.

"I don't know," he says. "I didn't notice, most of the time. I think I stared to feel it more after I met Sabrina."

She nods, turning a little and getting more comfortable within the circle of his arms and the slightly awkward tangle their legs have become beneath the pile of blankets. That they're here like this, entwined like this, talking about someone who's one of Rosie's dearest friends--and something much more to Nick besides--only occurs to her distantly, a thought as far away as the sound of the television.

"I suppose that's what it takes," she says, quiet and thoughtful. "Something disrupting what you thought your life was, to make you see how it might be different."

"Something like that," says Nick, still playing with her hair as she settles against him, as they get comfortable in a tangle on the sofa under the blankets. Warm and close and safe. "She had this boyfriend when I met her. Harry. Harvey. I...Yeah. Didn't really take to him."

"What was..." She yawns then, the warmth and comfort dispelling what remains of her earlier fear. She hadn't wanted to sleep again, afraid that it'd simply plunge her back into her nightmare or bring on another more terrifying than the last. Now, here, safe and held, Rosie thinks she might be able to sleep for ages once she closes her eyes again.

"Sorry," she murmurs, looking up to smile lazily at him. "What was so bad about Harvey? Just that he was a mortal, or...?"

Nick grins when she yawns like that, twisting her dark hair around his fingers.

"Nothing, I suppose. He was just..." He shrugs. "In my way, I guess."

"That's a bit of a mercenary way of looking at it," she says, though it comes out far less chiding now than it might have before. "Even if it did work out in the end, clearly."

She closes her eyes at the twist of his fingers in her hair, the slight pull there but light enough not to be painful.

"Mercenary? Do you think so?" he says. "I was always alright with sharing. It just took Sabrina a while to come around to the idea."

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