forthsofar | there's no controlling the unrolling of your fate, my friend

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nick

there's no controlling the unrolling of your fate, my friend

Just like last year, the return of Movies in the Park was one of the main topics of chatter that day at school: groups of people making plans or shouting lines back and forth at one another in the hallway; gossip about who was going with whom (or who might say they were going and forgo the movie for other, more private entertainments); a few intensely enthusiastic people from the AV club discussing going in costume as one character or another. Strange though it was, as Darrow traditions went it seemed, at least, fairly innocuous. Especially after the summer that’s just passed, things like that seemed more and more of a rarity the longer she stayed in the city.

For a moment, Rosie considers attending herself, but when she hears that Charlie and Sabrina had already made plans to go--and that the movie scheduled for tonight was one of the blood-soaked horror films Sabrina loved so much--it’s all too easy for her to drop the idea entirely. Her offer to spend the evening at Nick’s is met with a lack of resistance, especially from Sabrina, that she might have thought suspicious under any other circumstance. Relieved as she is at having avoided a night of watching wholesale cinematic slaughter, though, she barely pauses to question it.

Hardly notices, too, the slight spark in Sabrina’s eye and the quiet look of planning both her best friends exchange as they turn away at the end of the lunch period.

When she gets to Chelsea that night, it’s just in time to say a quick hello in the lobby to Sabrina and Charlie on their way out. They’d done things like this on numerous occasions over the last two weeks, briefly checking in or updating one another on how Nick was feeling; this time, at least, it’s for a slightly lighter and easier reason. Rosie waves them happily out the front door of the building, then takes the familiar elevator ride up to the top floor and lets herself in to Nick’s apartment.

“Shift change,” she calls out to him, laughing a little. “Let me just put my bag down, and then I’ll be…” She trails off, noticing the neat pile of things on the coffee table: takeout menus, DVD cases with cover art that looks nearly as lurid and gory as that of the movie playing in the park, even a set of disposable cups and plates and a folded picnic blanket. And, prominently displayed, a note in Sabrina’s familiar handwriting exhorting them both to Have fun tonight!

“Oh, good grief.”

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"Those suit you," says Nick, taking his glasses and sliding them onto his own nose. Back home he'd always been vain about wearing contacts or using spells to avoid wearing them around people, but he doesn't feel like he has to hide that way around Rosie and Sabrina and Charlie.

He leans forward, wincing a little, hand pressed against the dressing under his shirt as he reaches for his beer.

"We can start it," he says. "Let's not pretend that we're going to watch every second of it."

"I'm fairly certain they don't, Nick," she says, light and teasing and a little contrary, even as she smiles at the compliment--such as it was. "But thank you."

When he leans forward and winces, Rosie makes a small, involuntary hum of concern; she nearly moves to get his beer from the table for him, but he manages on his own before she can. Instead, she picks up the DVD case and opens it, taking out the disc inside. It still seemed altogether ridiculous that an entire movie could fit on something so small. "I'm certainly not going to watch every second," she says, getting up from the couch again to put the movie in. "Not once the killer or the ghost or whatever it is in this one shows up, anyway."

She presses the play button on the DVD player, then sits back down on the couch--perhaps a little closer to Nick this time than she had before.

She sits down and he automatically shifts to give her room to settle beside him, his arm draped along the back of the sofa. It's felt natural to want to be close to her for months now...even if he has only just figured out what the implications of that might be.

It's easy to take his slight shift in posture for the invitation it feels like it is. The invitation it's always seemed to be, at least for the last few months. Since just after Kagura, really.

Rosie thinks about bad dreams and late night television, borrowed clothes and the touch of fingers in her hair; once again, there's that gentle flutter of something in her stomach. Despite that, she settles a bit more, her head resting gently against his shoulder.

Onscreen, the characters pile camping gear and coolers of food into a truck, talking and laughing and making plans for their weekend in the woods.

He wraps his arm around her, enjoying the neat, natural way she fits against his side.

"So," he says. "Sabrina and I have been...we talked."

Unlike Sabrina's friend from home, the girl she can't help but think of as the other Rosalind, Rosie doesn't have the ability to see the future, to divine things before they happen or intuit someone's innermost thoughts. But when he says what he does, in the way that he does, she doesn't need any sort of mystical power at all to hear the weight behind it.

"You talk all the time," she says, but even as the words leave her mouth she knows it's a flippant sort of deflection, a shield for the way her heart's started to race just slightly. She takes a sip of her beer. "What, um. What...what about?"

"About..." And then he finds that, in that moment, he doesn't have the words to express it to her. His stomach flips in the way it had when he'd first been feeling things out with Sabrina. There's just something about mortal girls, even if it's only half of who they are.

In the end, he just turns his head and brushes a kiss against her jaw.

He starts to speak, then goes silent, and then his lips land so gently--almost hesitantly--along her jaw and it's better than anything she thinks he might have had to say. She gasps once, a soft, surprised inhale of breath.

"Nick, are you...really?" She turns to look at him, his face still so close to hers. "We can--you can...this is okay?"

"I mean...I'd like to?" He says, quietly. "We'd need to...talk about it, obviously. But I'd like to. And Sabrina's okay with it because...well. Because it's you."

Rosie can feel herself starting to blush, the slight, creeping warmth heating her face; this time, at least, the cause is something more wonderful than it is embarrassing. "We'll need to talk about it," she echoes, her dark eyes searching his own. "Of course we will. We should. But I also...I'd like to, too. Very much."

There's something pleasant and wonderful about the way he says because it's you; something special, too, in the sense of permission granted. They're all connected to one another already, wrapped in each others' lives in a way she'd never known before, and this is just...something new.

She tilts her head up, waiting just a moment before she presses her lips gently to his.

It's a sweet kiss, soft and barely there, and Nick drags in a breath through his nose before he leans in, pressing it just a little bit deeper.

That he deepens the kiss, even slightly, feels like its own kind of permission too. She makes a soft sound against his mouth, something almost instinctual and without thought.

It would be so, so easy to get carried away, to let it go too far too fast, but Nick is intensely aware of both the dressing under his shirt and his desire to this properly. He breaks the kiss, leaning his forehead against Rosie's for a moment, then pressing another kiss to the tip of her nose.

"Yeah," he says. "We definitely need to talk about this."

Her heart is racing, her cheeks flushed pink, and when Nick kisses the tip of her nose, she lets out a faint and happy little laugh. "Then we'll talk," she says. There's no regret there--or if there is, it's brief and minimal and easy enough to set aside for the moment.

A scream comes from the television--the first victim meeting her unnecessarily graphic doom while floating on an inner tube in the lake--and Rosie turns away just enough to grab the remote. "Without this in the background," she says, hitting the stop button, then settling back against Nick's side.

Even that now feels a little new and somehow different.

She settles against him, the TV silenced, and Nick wraps his arm around her, keeping her tucked in close. It's a familiar movement, even at the same time as it feels like something completely new.

"So you've been thinking about this too?"

"I have," she says, a crooked and slightly sheepish smile crossing her face at the admission. "I wasn't sure what to say about it, or do, but I knew there was something there. At least for me, and...I didn't want to come between you and Sabrina. I knew that, too."

It's that last part that had kept her quiet, once everything had come together in her head. She loved them all--Nick, Sabrina, Charlie--and the last thing she ever wanted was to upset their careful equilibrium.

"If I'm being honest, which I ought to be," Rosie continues, "I think it first started, just slightly, when you came to find me at Kagura."

A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth and he reaches up to brush a curl of her dark hair back from her forehead.

"That soon, huh?"

"You snuck into a castle full of monsters in search of me, Nick," she says, her slightly pointed tone shifting into one that's a little softer with the touch of his fingers in her hair. "That has an effect on a girl."

Rosie grins, tilting her head up and just looking at him for another moment or two.

"It was just something...I wasn't sure what it was, then. Whether it was just the circumstance, or the fact that we all became so close after that, all four of us. But it got stronger, the more time we spent together. More important."

"I think I realised when we came home," he says. "When you fell asleep with your head on me. When we were all safe."

There’s something that tightens in her chest, hearing that; remembering that evening. Fraught and terrifying as it had been to get there, for all of them, it had been worth it for those moments in the small hours of the night.

What’s your something good? he’d asked. Rosie thinks she has her answer now.

“That was...that makes sense,” she says, nuzzling against his chest briefly, letting herself be held. “It felt like something changed for all of us that night. We all got closer.”

"Like magic," he says, his breath catching when she nuzzles against him like that. "Apparently, Sabrina and Charlie figured it out a while ago."

"Like magic,” she echoes. The idea of it pleases her—almost as much as the way hearing that hitch in his breath does, if differently so. There’ll be time for that later, she knows, or hopes, or plans for.

The news about Charlie and Sabrina hardly comes as a surprise, but Rosie still finds herself blushing again, her face flushing hot. “Oh, goodness,” she murmurs.

"I guess it must have been obvious to everyone but us," he says, brushing his fingers against her reddened cheek. "Doesn't matter how, does it?"

"No," she says, leaning into the touch of his fingers, chasing the contact just slightly. "It doesn't."

There's a knock at the door, and even though she'd been the one to put in the order in the first place, Rosie still looks back in surprise. "I'll get that, and then..." She looks up at Nick, still a little disbelieving at the turn their evening had taken. Even if it had surprised no one else, it wasn't at all what she'd expected when she'd talked to Sabrina and Charlie at lunch. "And then I suppose there's more to talk about, isn't there?"

"Yeah," says Nick, taking a sip of his beer as Rosie climbs up off the sofa. "I suppose we'd better figure out how this is going to work."

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