awickedtime | End of Days

Enough is enough.

He's been in a black temper for days, since his conversation with the priest. He wakes up on a Sunday, the day dedicated to the worship of the false god, detirmined to have his way. Either Sabrina will reign at his side willingly, or he'll force her to, one way or another.

The bar is easy enough to find. It's underground, down a narrow set of stairs and then it's burnished wood and copper and soft light. It reminds him a lot of Gray's place in Greendale and, as such, seems like a perfect place to set up his throne.

The bartender puts up a small fight. There's a bullet wound that stings for a second before he heals it, leaving behind the faintest of silver scars on Nick Scratch's skin. He takes the man apart a piece at a time, buries his hands in viscera until his nails are grimed with blood. The man tastes sweet in all his pain and terror.

He stops hiding. He broadcasts his presence far and wide.
Let his daughter come.

It's time that they spoke face to face, with everything out in the open. It's time that this came to an end.

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He drifts, in and out, the pain in his side keeping him close to the surface. Every breath is edged with the coppery tang of blood and he doesn't know if it's his own or someone else's anymore.

He doesn't want to die and he knows it. He knows that better than anything.

He doesn't want to die.

They'd stayed out of the way but ready, her and Charlie both, but when the moment comes it still almost takes Rosie by surprise. She sees Nick--no, Lucifer, no, Nick--crumple and fall just before the lights flicker, and then there's a stench in the air and she and Charlie are running, not away but towards, both of them going to their knees on a floor sticky with something Rosie forces herself to believe is nothing more than spilled drinks.

"Nick, don't you dare go anywhere," she murmurs as she opens her bookbag, packed with as many clean dishtowels as she could find in her apartment. The first one she presses to the wound soaks through immediately, and Rosie lets out a small, desperate sob before she can stop herself.

He hears her voice and leans towards it. He...things are confusing, a little, where Rosie is concerned but, right then, it's like she's a spark of light int he darkness. Right then, she's the only thing in the world that he's got the energy to pull towards.

"Rosie," he murmurs, adn then his breath comes in a sharp, harsh gasp when she presses against the wound in his side."

Even if she hadn't seen everything that's just happened, that he calls her Rosie and not Rosalind is all the confirmation she needs of Nick's return. She allows herself one brief moment of joy, smiling even as her eyes fill with tears, then sniffs hard and reaches for another clean cloth.

"I'm sorry, I know it hurts," she says, wincing along with him as she applies a steady, firm pressure to the wound. His blood is hot and slick beneath her palms, between her fingers, and Rosie's stomach lurches unpleasantly--but she doesn't dare let go. "We've got to...I have to try to slow the bleeding, before--" She looks up at Charlie, her face already gone pale and frightened. "We're here, we're...it'll be alright."

Charlie drops down onto his knees beside Nick and Rosie, shaking off the sick sense of fear that had taken hold of him when he'd watched Nick go down that hard. He leans in, his fingers overlapping with Rosie's to help her push down on the wound, trying to staunch the bleeding.

"If you go anywhere, she'll never forgive either of us, man," he says, shooting Rosie a look across Nick's sprawled form. "So hold on, okay?"

Charlie's hands join hers, and it helps--with the bleeding, with keeping her steady and focused on the task before them, with shutting out the noise of the fighting far too close by. She answers his look with one of her own, grateful and uncertain all at once.

"He's right," she says, looking back down at Nick. The expression on his face is terrible, agonized beneath the smears of blood and gore whose source she dares not think about, and Rosie bites back yet another sob. "You'll be doing us all a favor, staying right here. With us, for good." There's more to it for her, of course, deeper reasons than just avoiding Sabrina's ire; reasons it likely doesn't take magic or mind reading or anything more than just a look at her to figure out. She doesn't let herself think about those. Not right now.

Nick's eyelashes flutter and he opens his eyes. His lips move, and he stumbles his way through an incantation that he'd learned when he was young, still in the habit of skinning his knees and his palms. It doesn't stop the bleeding but it does slow it some, a sluggish seep, rather than a gush.

"It hurts," he mumbles.

"Just couldn't let us do this the mortal way, could you?" she says under her breath, seeing his lips start to move. There's no heat to it, just a soft, fond near-exasperation. That he'd done it at all feels like another point of proof that he was--again--who he was supposed to be. And it helps, more than it seems anything she or Charlie had managed to do. When she switches out the sodden cloth for another fresh one, the flow of the blood from his side looks slower and more clotted; as disgusting as it is, Rosie takes it all as a sign of hope.

"I know," she says, louder, when he slurs out those two words both edged in pain. "I'm sorry, I know it hurts, Nick, but it's...I think it's getting better." A lock of her hair falls in her face, and she unthinkingly reaches up to smooth it back, leaving a dark streak of blood along her forehead and another slicked through her hair. The feeling of it makes her shudder and her stomach flip again.

Charlie knows Rosie well enough to know that the exasperation in her tone is the same impulse as the relief that floods through him when Rosie switches the cloth and he sees that Nick's rate of bleeding has changed.

"You can cope with this," he says, quietly, his fingers still interlaced with Rosie's where they're pressed against Nick's wound. "All of the shit that Sabrina says you two survived back home? This is nothing."

"Goodness, yes," she says, looking at Charlie as he keeps encouraging Nick. "All of that was so much more than...than this. Didn't she say you fought a squid at one point? If you can do that, you can absolutely get through this."

Her back's to them, but she can hear Sabrina and Marcus shouting, fighting, trying to protect them all; her heart seizes for a moment in fear and hope and concern all at once.

"For...her father's..." His thoughts swim a little. Pain spikes through the sound and he squirms, breathless. "It's...it feels like it's...b-burning."

"I'm sorry," she says once more, the words sounding far too small and ineffectual for the situation they're in. She chances a look back at the fighting, over her shoulder; what she sees makes her eyes go wide in fright and she looks away, shaken. "That must be the...what Sabrina had to use, I think it was holy. To work properly, I think it needed to be."

Rosie lifts the cloth, just for a moment, checking his wound for some sign--of improvement or deterioration, she's not sure. It looks just as bad as it had before, and she presses the cloth to his side again.

He drags in a harsh breath through his nose, squirming away from the pain of it, the press of Rosie and Charlie's hands against his side.

"That..that'd do it," he says, his vision swimming, black spots dancing.

"Shh, stay still if you can, please," she says, pleading and soft and desperate. For all that the lance had inflicted its own pain, she's hurting him too in her attempts to help--pushing against his side, keeping her hands locked tight with Charlie's--and she swallows down another sob, hating herself for adding to his discomfort. If this doesn't work, if Sabrina turns her into something small and easily squashed for losing Nick and failing her, Rosie thinks she'll almost welcome it.

"Dan's still...he stayed with the truck, right?" she asks, blinking back tears as she looks over at Charlie. "I don't know if we move him, or...or wait, or...I don't know."

End of Days

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