Title: Hanging Fire
Fandom: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (see author's note)
Category: Canon-typical gen.
Rating: Teen
Length: ~1435 words

Author's Note: So in an act of sheer quixotic self-centeredness, really, I'm using my bingo card as inspiration for backstory/mood piece snippets from a fairly large and plotty AU I'm working on. About all you need to know at this point -- very nearly all I exactly know at this point! -- is that it involves a parallel timeline where Sabrina's parents never met and are (therefore?) still alive.

I wasn't expecting this one to come out with quite as much of a Cold War espionage vibe as it did. That's really the only content advisory I can come up with. Some story-specific notes follow.

Prompts: "Throw" challenge, "The Other Side" square on my bingo card.



Ten Years Earlier

-- absurd, clearly. Coaxing the long black Oldsmobile inch by inch into a curbside space on Hudson Street between the toyshop -- its window heaped with decaying tinsel and sunbleached plastic trucks -- and the Hill Town All-Nite Laundromat: absurd, truly, laughable, if Zelda were thinking at all correctly. On comparable occasions, she remembers, she has, and this entire grand design of Edward's has been nothing more nor less --

Curled politely on the passenger seat, Vinegar Tom whuffs: "if the thing's bound to be miserable, why draw it out?"

"Hush." The key jams in the ignition when she tries to draw it out; again, a third time, not relenting until after she's taken one hitching breath and allowed her hands to stretch and clasp together. Closed, open, an inexcusable thin white rind of wear at the tip of one Fire and Ice index finger, she could -- she could be anywhere, if she so pleased. She could be walking in the woods. She could be on the porch at home, drinking mulled cider laced with Calvados, tilting back in her deckchair to take the watery rays of October sun while she waited to hear the door creak open behind her.

Vinegar Tom whines and casts his eyes up; no need for him to make his point by speaking, only by thumping his tail against the seatback to pop open the latches of each front door. 

Zelda drums her fingers across the steering wheel, hands splayed end to end. She steps out of the car. She feeds three quarters into a rust-chipped parking meter and adjusts her stole on her shoulders. So close to the center of town, the bricks underfoot are clean and tolerably even, but her shoes snag in the mortar with every second or third step, all the same. If Hilda had deigned to invite herself along, she might say oh, my kingdom for some proper concrete, she might say sod the colored postcards, what else is the twentieth century for, and Zelda might exhale sharply and widen her eyes in confirmation; more likely, Hilda would trip along at her side babbling without saying a blasted thing, and Zelda would know at the very least that she, herself, wasn't babbling twice as loudly in her own thoughts.

She rounds the corner of Hudson and Second Street, her familiar at her heels, just as the wind changes: an east wind, lifting her hair, ruffling her stole and the trim on her coat-cuffs as she waits unpatiently at the crosswalk. A woman with an uncommonly placid dog trotting by her side, pinned in place on a curb by the wind and the traffic lights on her way to a stroll in the park; that woman could be simply anyone. Zelda could be -- catlike she could laze in the hideous club chair in Edward's study, warming her feet at the fire, languidly pretending to debate his latest overconfident reconstruction of On the Sending Out of the Soul. She could be anywhere at all, anywhere safe and welcoming, rather than pacing through the town square in her pride and her unsuitable shoes, towards the rag of yellowing grass at its center.

Murchison Park, since the streets were laid with asphalt, is a sorry scrap of a thing in any case: a wisp of lawn and stunted ash trees, barely wider than the town roads that contain its downhill course along four blocks of Greendale. Rising at the far end, the questionable redbrick Gothic of the public library, dragged down at its hem by its blockish modern extension; scattered over the grass, a handful of teenagers, self-consciously lounging with their jackets unbuttoned as though to demand the last traces of warmth the sun can provide; and on a bench at the foot of a thoroughly unsuitable statue of Paul Revere, Lemuel Kinkle in a navy-blue watch cap tugged down over the tips of his ears, flanked by two solemn, wary mortal children -- boys -- twelve and perhaps seven, she'd make them, in worn brown barn coats each the image of their grandfather's.

Vinegar Tom's nails tick on the pavement at her side.

The man doesn't condescend to acknowledge her until she's reached spitting distance; then he drags his eyes from her ankles to her hairline, slowly and matchlessly uninterested, as though she were -- rather, even, than a woman -- something thorny and cumbersome that had fallen inconveniently across his front walk.

"They got leash laws in this town now, y'know, lady," he says.

"I'm certain they have."

The younger boy leans forward, his Dickensian eyes flickering back and forth between the dog at her feet and the foxes draped around her neck. Kinkle stops just shy of spitting through his teeth: "don't mess with her, Harvey," he says, not turning. "She'll pull your teeth out soon as look at you and string 'em on a necklace. She's got one like that at home already. I seen her wearing it."

"Not," the older boy says, nothing like quietly enough. 

With an incongruous stage-magic tidiness, the man produces a grubby baseball from his jacket pocket; it sits like an apple in his open palm. "Okay, smart-aleck," he says -- not unfondly, Zelda thinks, hopes, imagines. "Why don't you two run down that way so you can try and teach your brother to tell his can from a changeup. Don't get out of my sight, though, hear me?

"Short one already gets his ass kicked in flag football," he adds, with the boys presumably out of earshot. "But he's got an okay eye if he'd quit trying to hide from the ball. Sit down. You ever have kids?"

"Never," she says, clipped. Some perverse remaining ego -- beyond laughable, to think he'd honor the achievement, even were she a mortal, even were he to understand it -- prompts her to add, "I've delivered a fair number of them."

"Yeah? You use that hoodoo to keep your fancy dress clean?" He emits a sound somewhere between a cough and a cackle, and fishes a worse-for-wear pack of Lucky Strikes from another pocket. "More importantly, you got a light?"

Purely as an arrogant gesture she snaps the flame into life between two empty fingers, makes a production of finding her own cigarette case and holder. It gives her a silk-thin excuse, at any rate, to force her hands into slow deliberate movement; Vinegar Tom sighs and settles his weight against her leg as though she hadn't tried for an excuse at all.

"Haven't seen you in a while, anyway," Kinkle says, still gazing pointedly away from her. "Your brother out sick today, is he? Or is he getting some idea this is shitwork he can offload on anyone else with their nose high enough in the air, 'cause I can tell you he ain't making friends that way."

A few yards away, his older grandson dodges around a long-haired laughing girl on roller skates. Zelda could be running a hot bath with jasmine oil, she could be collating sheet-music for tomorrow's practice, she could be lying on the cool forest floor with the wind in her mouth and red leaves crackling into her hair -- draw up the thrumming unhuman life of the place through her palms flat in the soil -- 

"I wasn't aware you normally brought the children," she replies. "Are we blooding in the next generation, or did your son find himself indisposed again this morning? My sister could prepare him a remedy that does wonders."

"You people," Kinkle says, after a moment. "You all think you're the only ones that remember. I tell your brother once a month and I'm telling you now, sweetheart -- you wanted to live in this town like rats under the floorboards, that was fine with everyone, but us human beings haven't forgotten what it was like when you thought you owned the place."

For another moment, silent side by side, they could nearly be allies: family, even, long-estranged, sealed up each alone in calcified resentment, meeting to finalize some tawdry and exhausting bit of legal business. Nothing will come of nothing.

"Not your fault, maybe," he adds, in a tone of great and magnanimous concession. "If coexistence for a rat means spreading fleas and pissing in the sugar bowl, then that's just its nature. But I tell your brother once a month, he's a fool if he thinks I don't know that's what he's peddling, and now I'm telling you to pass on that I said it again. Now let's hear what we got to talk about this time."



Story Notes:

As far as I can tell, Harvey's grandfather doesn't have a canonical first name yet. As a former BSG fan dealing with this show of all shows, I was inappropriately delighted with the opportunity to hang yet another terrible Biblical name on Michael Hogan.

If you think something is a reference, you're probably right. Look, canon got away with literally stealing an entire character name from a Shirley Jackson novel, this is all pretty much my hometown.

As someone who's lived with chronic anxiety in smallish-town New England since 1999... ahaha oh my GOD Zelda is fun to write, put it that way. (Someone tell me I wasn't the only person who went from bewilderment that her familiar is a hound of all things to "... oh, okay, he's also her emotional support dog, got it.")

I am a charter member of the Edward Spellman Was One Shady Motherfucker Association, fight me, and if I weren't just trying to get this done I'd... probably know more about the details in this instance.