suggested audio for this fic: 'this town' by niall horan, 'i don't want to miss a thing' by aerosmith.

It is just past ten on an April night when Sabrina vows to never attend another school dance, ever.

No matter which way she turns, something is pressed up uncomfortably close to her—flushed skin from other students, or the scratches from yards and yards of thick tulle brushing along her calves. Bass rumbles in the ground, vibrating up her spine and making her teeth chatter in spite of the sweat. The food is mediocre, and that's a rather generous opinion, when the only items to be judged are off-brand marshmallows and half a plastic box of stale shortbread.

Sabrina's doing some lame excuse for a two step, shuffling halfheartedly to a Tiesto remix of a Billboard Top 100 song, when someone has the nerve to put their hand on her bare shoulder. She's about to forcibly remove the hand before she realizes it's Bella, who spins Sabrina around so the two are face to face, disco lights patterning their skin with abstract geometrics in neon red.

Her mouth opens, and the only logical thing that should happen next is for words to come out of it, but it's a school dance, meaning that all forms of logic have been happily dropkicked out the nearest window. So instead of hearing words like any normal person would, Sabrina watches as Bella mouths frantically and points at her, making faces of confusion and excitement all at the same time.

"I can't hear you!" Sabrina shouts, putting her face closer to Bella's.

"Why would I want stew?" she shouts back, and Sabrina curses inwardly. Talking in a place like this is just like talking to Granny while she drives. Poor communication and a muffler broken beyond repair have led to incidents like the Donut Disaster of '10, and Sabrina is determined to not repeat the event here, with Bella.

Bella's fingers close around Sabrina's wrist, and she finds herself being dragged to the outskirts of the dance floor, where the air isn't as humid and rank from the hundreds of sweaty bodies. "There," she says, "now we can talk. You look so bored. What's up?" Her earnest eyes peer into Sabrina's, hoping to divine an answer from them.

Sabrina's knee-jerk response kicks in before her brain can properly gather the thoughts required for a somewhat intelligent sounding reply: "Nothing."

'Nothing', of course, implies that there is really a significant amount of things that are on her mind. These things range from the impending calculus test in three days to Faerie's current political climate, but somehow, Bella picks a topic Sabrina has been steadfastly avoiding for the past few weeks.

"You're thinking about him," she says. Her tone is somewhere between 'statement' and 'accusation'.

The 'him' in question is somewhere in the crowd on the dance floor, hip to hip with some gorgeous brunette Everafter who works as a hair model on the side—Natalie, if Sabrina recalls correctly, which she's pretty sure she does.

"Does he even know?" Sabrina asks bitterly.

"Know what?"

"Who she is."

Bella perches one hand on her jutted out hip and uses the other to shield her eyes from the glare of neon as she looks into the crowd. "He was fine with you," she says. "Bradley never knew you were one of us. He broke up with you because he's an ass, not because you're an Everafter."

Sabrina bites her lip and tries to swallow the words Bella feeds to her. In her own eyes, she's still a human—she ages, and she doesn't have any nonhuman body parts or anything of the sort that would give her away to anyone. And anyway, Bella doesn't have that problem. Sabrina can't recall a single one of Bella's relationships where she wasn't the one to do the dumping.

"Come on," Bella coaxes. "He isn't worth thinking about tonight, or any night."

"Right." Sabrina's voice sounds faint and detached even to herself, the sound faraway in the buzz of shouting and Top 40's club remixes. "I'm going to go sit down for a minute."

"I'll come with you," Bella says quickly, hiking up the hem of her gown so she doesn't trip. Voluminous puffs of pastel pink satin bounce about her ankles as she walks with Sabrina.

"So, how long has it been?" she asks Sabrina.

The question, vague as it is, sends a burst of emotion shooting through her. She'd rather not think about how long it's been (the answer, truthfully, is 'too long', but something tells her that Bella's looking for a more specific time frame).

The thing is, every time she thinks he's going to come back and stay for good, settle down somewhere in a Manhattan nook not too far away from their childhood home, he takes off back into the skies in a burst of forest green and candy pink. He'll run and run away until the sidewalk ends, and where he can't run anymore, he'll spread his wings and disappear behind the sun for another year, and come back to visit only when he feels like it. And the worst part is, he will leave her, but she's still going to have her arms stretched out to the stars, waiting for him to come back and promise he's going to stay here—right where he should be—forever.

"Seven months," Sabrina says at last, ticking off seven fingers on her hands. "I haven't seen him since last September." She lets her hands fall back into the soft blue material of her dress, not knowing what to do with them.

"He's scared of committing," Bella says candidly, ignoring how Sabrina chokes on her own saliva immediately after hearing the words.

"We're not in a relationship," Sabrina snaps.

Bella lifts an eyebrow, then sighs, lazily twisting one blonde curl around her index finger. "You seem pretty desperate to make sure he's okay."

Sabrina snorts. "If he's not, then Faerie will somehow spin the whole thing to make it look like I was responsible for the little freak." There's some rumor going around that being a Grimm makes you the (unofficial) presiding guardian of the oldest in the royal line of succession, and of course, fate would decree that the most common victim of this rumor would be Sabrina. Not Granny, who really has been looking out for him over the past years, or Veronica, whom Puck saw as a surrogate for Titania, but Sabrina, who couldn't get along with him for longer than five minutes on any given day.

"You seem worried that he can't take care of himself," Bella says. "I mean, he's got your uncle with him, right?"

"Puck has the maturity and mental capabilities of a six year old," Sabrina grumbles. "He outweighs anything Uncle Jake has."

Bella gives a dramatic sigh and drops her face into the palms of her upturned hands. "Sabrina, I've known you guys since the sixth grade. You're really worried about him, and you shouldn't be. It's prom night!"

"I know, I know." She folds her arms on the table and puts her head down, one cheek ungracefully smashed into her forearm. The flowers from her corsage—a spray of baby's breath surrounding a single white carnation, to offset the blue of her dress—are still sweet and fragrant, courtesy of Daphne. "What about you, though? Where's Toby?"

"He's…jamming out," Bella answers, craning her neck to see into the crowd. The boy in question is standing on a light-up platform, vigorously proving to the crowd that his hips don't lie.

"You should go join him," Sabrina suggests. She's completely sincere, but Bella shakes her head. "Really. I'll be there in a second. I just need to rest my feet."

"You sure?" As reluctant as Bella is to leave, there's just a hint of eagerness glowing in her eyes that Sabrina can't bear to look at, so she nods.

"Go ahead." Bella gives her one last look, a mixture between concern and pity, before hitching up the skirt of her gown again to go back to the dance floor. Sincere though her offer may be, Sabrina still can't help but feel the sharp gnaw of jealousy teething away at her heart. Toby had made the decision to go clean a while ago and stop being such a serial dater, and he had been dating Bella without a hitch since the second half of freshman year.

Puck, on the other hand…

He's always going to be a jackass of the highest regard, and by nature, a jackass of the highest regard isn't going to come stop by her senior prom, holding a dozen roses wrapped in paper, and ask her to dance as the DJ plays some cheesy slow song from the 80's. He isn't going to throw open the gym doors, theatrical smoke billowing around his suit, and stop the entire prom to ask where she is. The spotlights aren't going to magically focus on her beaming face, and she isn't going to walk forward, entranced, and take her place by his side while he grins and presses a quick but very public kiss to her forehead.

And yet, the typical objection her mind offers up is notably absent.

This is pathetic, Sabrina thinks. She's never been the type to be mopey over things, least of all boys, of all the dumb things in the world to worry about. And especially least of all, Bradley, and by extension, Puck. She briefly considers telling Bella that she's not feeling well, stealing a handful of marshmallows and shortbread, and just pulling up a bad romcom with Daphne and Red at home, but the idea refuses to take hold. The guilt of ditching Bella is too much for her, not to mention the thought of how she'll get chewed out the next day for abandoning her best friend.

Her stomach growls loudly, reminding her of the fact that she hasn't eaten anything since the handful of Goldfish in the early afternoon. She could go grab some fries at the burger joint a few blocks down, or she could take whatever remains of the school-provided snacks. The first option poses less of a risk of getting sick from germy hands, but the second option will protect her from Bella's wrath, so Sabrina begrudgingly gets out of her chair, plucking a rose from the centerpiece and laying it in front of her seat in hopes that people will get the hint that it's occupied (it's a slim chance, but whatever).

The line of people waiting for canned lemonade and the last reserves of the marshmallows is inordinately long, but she gets in it anyways, hoping the food will soothe her bad mood enough to actually loosen up and have fun. When she sits back down, she discovers that the marshmallows are more stale than they look, and that the quality of Minute Maid lemonade has frankly gone down the drain over the years.

She sags into her chair, propping her feet on the bar beneath the table and choosing to ignore her bad posture in favor of crossing her arms and balancing the plate of food on her knees. It wobbles precariously, threatening to spill its contents all over the blue crepe of Sabrina's dress.

She is chewing moodily on a marshmallow, forcing it down her throat, when someone loudly proclaims, "I knew you were a huge party pooper, but this is a new low, even for you."

This time, the plate really does fall off of her knees.

Standing in front of her, wearing a crisp white shirt and an infuriating smirk, is Puck. One finger is looped casually through the inner tag of his tux, his hand poised at the top of his shoulder. The blond curls that are usually messy and unkempt have been neatly combed and slicked back with a surprisingly moderate amount of gel. And, most miraculously of all, the boy actually doesn't smell like the insides of last week's garbage bag, but warm and clean, like department store cologne. The only thing that remains the same are his eyes, still bright green and twinkling with a humor that only he seems to understand.

"What's up, buttercup?" he teases, in a voice that's deepened by at least six notes since the last time Sabrina saw him.

"My blood pressure," she fires back, recovering from the initial shock. "What are you doing here?"

Puck has the audacity to look shocked, pouting and scrunching his eyebrows up to meet in the middle. "Last time I checked, prom allowed fairies to attend, too."

"I guess you haven't checked lately," Sabrina says, forcing her voice to stop shaking. The only thing that's keeping her from wiping her sweaty palms on her dress is the vision of Daphne yelling at her for ruining the silk fabric.

Puck laughs, and it's all Sabrina can do to not smile at the nostalgic sound. "You haven't changed a bit!" he says. "You act like you're a billion years old when you're only eighteen." Sabrina avoids his eyes when he runs his hand through his hair, the curls springing up slightly from their neat style.

"You've changed," she observes.

"Yeah," he says earnestly. "I learned how to count past ten! Please, don't feel inferior."

"You don't have to worry about that a bit," she grumbles back.

"What's with this?" he says, changing the subject and gesturing to Sabrina's outfit with his free hand. "Didn't think you were the dress type."

"Didn't think you were the showering type either," Sabrina says, "but I'm not complaining." Puck throws his hands up in surrender, wondering what kind of reunion one should expect from one's longtime childhood archrival, as well as where his perception could have been skewed enough to believe that the words 'sappy' and 'heartwarming' might be applied to the aforementioned reunion.

"Cranky," he mumbles under his breath, and Sabrina kicks him in the ankle. "If you go home like this, with no food or anything, your old man's going to beat the stuffing out of me. So come on." He grabs her wrist and pulls, and she is suddenly twelve years old all over again, running for her life with a boy made of magic and not wanting to stop.
"Wait!" she yelps, trying simultaneously to stop running and not to scuff the shoes she borrowed from Daphne (it's harder than she thinks). "Bella's going to give me all kinds of hell if I bail on her."

"Don't worry about it," Puck said. "I talked to her. The blonde one, right?"

"Puck, we're blonde."

He scratches his head. "Oh, yeah. Whatever."

"What did you tell her?"

"She knows who I am," he explains. "It's only natural, when you're as famous as I am. She told me to be nice and all that." Sabrina has a hunch that it would be useless to tell him that Bella only knew who he was because she had complained to her on the phone for every day of the sixth grade. "Come on. You're dad's going to kill me if I give him back Georgie the lake monster instead of his daughter." He grabs her by the hand again, and she stumbles out the double doors of the gym and into the night.

"Where are we going?" Sabrina asks. "And how?" The questions race out of her mouth breathlessly, and she's still very much confused about why Bella would let Puck come and whisk her away like this. "Bella drove me here, and if you think I'm going to let you drive me anywhere, pal, well—"

Puck grins, and the moon lights up his teeth like little stars. "You ever heard of shutting up, Grimm?"

[...]

Ten minutes later, Sabrina makes a mental play-by-play of what exactly just happened:

She was on the ground (the wonderful, solid ground).

She was no longer on the ground (the wonderful, solid ground).

Several encounters with the Grim Reaper, an old friend Sabrina would rather not meet for coffee often, occurred in rapid succession.

After too long of a time for her liking, they touched down in a parking lot with a cacophonous grinding of dress shoes against asphalt and pebbles.

She is unsure exactly of all the details, but generally would not like to go through an experience like that anytime soon, or ever again in her eternal life.

"That was the worst experience of my entire life," Sabrina says, smoothing down her windswept hair. "We almost died, like, five times."

"Exactly!" Puck crows. "I don't see why you're using the word 'worst' here, unless you confused it with 'best'."

The Blue Plate Special is exactly the same, its neon waitress on the roof still offering up a platter loaded with burgers and fries. Puck retracts his wings and cracks his back with a loud and contented sigh of relief, followed by a groan. "You should try going on a diet." He braces one hand on his hip while the other twists his torso around, forcing several more vertebrae to settle into place with a loud pop.

Sabrina's jaw drops. "You're the one who—who picked me up and flew me here!" she snaps, trying to tamp down the very recent memory of his arms beneath her knees, picking her up bridal style. "And you ripped the back of your shirt!"

"Jake's shirt," he corrects, a little sheepishly.

"That's even worse!"

"He let me borrow it!" he says defensively.

(Jake will testify that this is not exactly what happened. Puck had asked to borrow the shirt, received 'no' as an answer, and taken it anyway.)

At that point, Sabrina shivers, and Puck eyes her with concern. "Let's go," he says, opening the door and letting the mouthwatering scents of fried chicken and mashed potatoes mingle in the air. Sabrina is about to curse him out (loudly) for not holding it open for her, but he remembers at the last second and throws out his foot, catching it just in time.

"Thanks," she mumbles.

"Don't tell anyone I did that for you."

"I won't."

The waitress, handing them tall menus covered in a sheet of plastic, seats them at a square table by the glass partition running down the middle of the diner. "Anything to drink for you kiddos?" she asks, twirling a short pencil without an eraser around her fingers.

"Chocolate malted, extra large," Puck says promptly.

The waitress jots his order down, either not noticing the strangeness of his request at this hour or not caring at all. "And for you, honey?"

"Um," she says, her eyes still perusing the menu. "You still have egg creams, right?"

"'Course we do," the waitress says, scribbling down the order. She flips her pad of paper over. "I'll be right out with those, okay?" Sabrina nods.

There's a moment of uncomfortable silence between them, punctuated only by other late night diners' forks scraping on their plates and the drumbeats coming from a personal jukebox playing staticky sixties rock in the center of their table.

"Why are you back?" Sabrina finally asks.

Puck scowls, averting his gaze to the ketchup caddy and drawing out a packet of Equal to turn around in his fingers. He rips the paper open and empties the sweetener in his mouth before definitely not answering her question. "Jake's back too."

"Yeah," Sabrina says. "You wouldn't have flown back here by yourself."

"Here ya are," the waitress says cheerfully, spinning once on her rollerblades before setting down the drinks. They're in glasses like the kind in old black and white movie reels, and for some reason, this brings a smile to Sabrina's face. "You ready to order or do you wanna take a couple minutes?"

"A few minutes please," Sabrina says. Puck nods.

The waitress winks at them. "Whenever you're ready, okay?"

When Sabrina looks back, Puck is playing with another packet of artificial sugar—a small yellow one with navy blue cursive. A pale golden halo from the hanging light fixtures frames his figure, softening the sharp line of his jaw and the points where his elbows are propped up on the table.

"What are you getting?" Puck asks, scanning the menu.

Sabrina is sure he's faking it, since his illiteracy means he routinely struggles to get through The Cat in the Hat, but she still asks, with a healthy dose of suspicion, "Why do you want to know?"

"So I can pick which things to order and which ones to steal from your plate," he says, as if this is supposed to be a perfectly sensible and obvious statement. "Duh."

Sabrina almost wants to laugh. The Puck she knows would never even dream of touching her food, lest he be plagued by the lethal and deadly disease commonly known to man as 'cooties'.

On the other hand, this is the same Puck who kissed her, all those years ago…

It had felt nice kissing Bradley—he was soft and gentle and he had the decency to exfoliate before kissing her for the first time under Central Park's streetlamps. He had sent her home with butterflies in her stomach and a kiss on the forehead while she leaned over the porch railing, fingers wandering affectionately through his tangled hair. It was a comical contrast to Puck's rendition: sloppy, too much pressure, and surrounded by flea-ridden chimpanzees. In some pretty objective terms, the kiss was awful, and—

"Grimm, stop staring at my lips," Puck tells her.

"I think you hit your head on your way here," she says sourly, in a botched attempt to lie her way out of her embarrassment.

"I think you hit your head on your way out of the womb."

"Pot, I'd like you to meet my good friend, Kettle," Sabrina says. "Maybe you know each other."

"You mean the ones Beauty and the Beast used to own?"

Sabrina shudders. As if they were actual representations of the adage, the Pot and Kettle—Soot and Cinder, respectively—were always at each other's throats, or rather, spouts. Before she can answer, though, the waitress from earlier rollerblades back to the table, beaming.

"Decided on something yet?" she asks.

"I'll have a medium cheeseburger," Sabrina recites from memory, "um, cheese fries with a side of brown gravy, and a slice of blueberry cobbler."

"Good choices," the waitress says. The pencil makes one more line across the page before she picks it up with a flourish and turns to Puck. "And you, sweetheart?"

"Chicken strips," Puck says while pointing to the corresponding item on the menu, "stack of pancakes with extra maple syrup—hold the strawberries, unless they're the really syrupy kind—chili cheese fries, hamburger with extra pickles, no lettuce, some hash browns, a Neapolitan milkshake, and, uh, how about the caramel pudding?"

If the waitress is fazed by the sheer size of the order, she doesn't show it, merely smiles and collects the menus from them with a bright "That all for ya?" before rollerblading away and leaving them alone once more.

"You can't possibly have money for all that," Sabrina says.

"Nope," he agrees, "but Jake does."

"You're going to leave a two hundred dollar tab in his name?" she asks incredulously. Puck shrugs.

"He owes me his life from when I talked those hobgoblins in Virginia out of stewing him alive," he says. "A couple bucks is nothing."

"Couple hundred," Sabrina mutters.

Puck frowns and holds up his hands, wiggling each digit and looking puzzled. Sabrina sighs.

"Two," she says, holding up the correct number of fingers. "And you never answered my question. Are you actually going to stay, or are you just going to have your fun and leave again?"

Evidently, they're both surprised by the venom in Sabrina's voice—Puck looks up from his sugar packets and Sabrina suddenly clamps her mouth shut, lips pressed firmly together. She isn't aware of the pain in her tone; she has always dismissed the long nights spent counting the stars and the sore aches in her chest as a mere fluke, not knowing they would culminate into the rage and hurt that they are now.

Puck forms a fist with one hand, slowly curling each finger into his palm: pinky first, then all the others, his thumb closing over the rest in finality. He leaves a little space, just enough for Sabrina to fit her hand in his, she guesses.

Puck tilts his head a tiny fraction, letting the light dance across his cheek, and Sabrina stifles a gasp.

There, by the inner corners where his eyes meet the bridge of his nose, are a pair of symmetrical wrinkles, tiny sideways Vs that Sabrina hadn't noticed a second ago. The lines extend to match the curve of his eye, ending just where the fleshiest part of his nose begins.

"You aged," she murmurs softly, an unspoken 'why?' lingering between them. He nods.

"Mustardseed sent me a letter a few months ago," he says. "There's a law saying the oldest male heir, me, has to take over the throne when he comes of age. Until then, the queen regent, my mom, can rule in my place."

They were both seventeen the last time she saw him, over half a year ago, both just beginning to peer into the deep chasm of adulthood. "You don't have to age. You could have just stopped when you felt like it."

"It's your fault, you know," Puck says lazily. He puts his arms around the back of his head and pushes his chair backwards with one foot, his eyes closed and lips pursed. "Living in the forest before I met you and the marshmallow was the life."

Sabrina is trying not to burst a blood vessel, especially since she's in public, but frankly, she thinks she might lose this fight. "Sorry to be so inconvenient," she growls.

"You really are," he agrees. "The voice cracks, the puberty, the responsibility—it's all sucked." He sighs dramatically, rubbing his eyelids with two fingers. "And the knowledge that one day, I'm going to have to get married to you? That's sucked the most."

"We're not getting married," Sabrina says emphatically. She glares so intensely at the ketchup bottle, she half expects it to cower in fear before her. "How many times do I have to tell you?"

"It seems that fate has decreed it," Puck practically shouts, drowning out Sabrina's reminder.

"You're being stubborn." Sabrina focuses her glare from the ketchup bottle to Puck now, eyes narrow and demanding an explanation. He understandably shrinks away from her gaze, choosing to scowl at the off-white linoleum of the divider instead of looking at her directly. "You didn't have to grow up."

"I tried not to, believe me," Puck says. "It's like my body had a mind of its own."

"Knowing you, I'm surprised your body had a mind at all."

"Well, I do, and it's a beautiful mind, for your information."

There's a moment of silence as Sabrina mentally puts together all the information she's processed in the past hour. It's incredibly confusing, taking it all in one part at a time, but she's hoping that the bigger picture will reveal something more to her.

So far, Puck forcefully abducting her from the school dance and ordering enough food to feed an elephant just doesn't seem to have much correlation.

"But why tell me?" Sabrina asks, both hands pointing angrily at a point just beneath her Adam's apple. "Why drag me out of prom to tell me, and not like, I don't know, Mustardseed?" Spit flies from her lips with the force of her shouting, but she's too angry to recover her composure, swallow her pride, apologize. And besides, it's Puck—he's been in worse things than a little bit of saliva.

"You're mad because I dragged you out of prom?" Puck scoffs, one eyebrow quirked higher up than the other.

"Yes!"

Lie.

She tries again. "No!"
Lie.

"Then what, Sabrina?" Puck's hands are open, palms facing the ceiling, and the green of his eyes pierces her to the shaking core.

The words are coming out too quickly; her tongue trips over every syllable wanting to make itself heard, and ends up sputtering incoherently as a result. The telltale wetness in the corners of her eyes brings a wave of nausea over her. She wouldn't cry, not in front of Puck, of all the embarrassing people. "Why not your mom and Mustardseed? Or Uncle Jake? Or even my parents? Why did you have to tell me?"

Sabrina doesn't want to know this. She's taken seven months to pick up the glass and hold the pieces together, and now they're scattered all over the floor again, like a fine, razor sharp dust that spreads to where she can't jump over it. An old word she once learned from Pinocchio resurfaces in her mind—zugzwang, in which any possible moves will result in serious or fatal disadvantage.

Another bout of nausea rolls through her body, and she clasps the edge of the table with one hand to steady herself. "Why me?"

Puck sighs deeply and takes a sip of his chocolate malted. He wipes away the brown mustache with one hand, which does absolutely nothing, unless his goal is to transfer the liquid to a different surface. "Remind me," he says, "what's your birthday again? January, right?"

"The 2nd," she confirms.

"I was eleven years and eight months old until September 2nd, according to Mustardseed."

"So?"

The boy groans, yanking at his curls in overdramatic despair. "Don't make me spell this out for you."

"I don't think you could, if I asked. What was so important about September 2nd?"

"That was the day I started aging. And," he says, taking a pause to draw in a deep breath, "the day that I pushed you into a pool."

She remembers vividly: the heap of trash that doubled as a throne for the boy, the thin wooden plank (partially reclaimed by black mold), the music notes that came with the glowing lights. Another memory rises in conjunction to this one; the same two people, but in a different time, a different place. Here, she is watching Puck speak, only he is older and leaner and wiser, and a thick stripe of gold encircles the fourth finger on his left hand—the hand lovingly clasped on his future wife's shoulder.

"The day we met," Sabrina whispers. "That's when…?"

He nods gravely, as if the subject at hand were the news of some horrible new affliction he's fallen victim to. "I aged four months and officially turned twelve on January 2nd. Ever since, I've been aging at exactly the same rate you have. I turned eighteen on the same day you did, Grimm, a few months ago. That's why you needed to know first." He laughs. "After all, you brought it upon yourself."

As if by divine intervention, the waitress rolls into view, balancing four platters overflowing with greasy, gloriously American diner food. With one hand, she deftly opens up a folding stand and balances the platters on top of it. She places Sabrina's burger, fries, and cobbler in front of her, then puts her hands on her hips and squints in concentration at Puck.

"We're not going to be needing this thing for a while," she jokes, patting the folding stand, "so you kiddos can just keep it and enjoy yourselves, okay? Let me know if you need anything, anything at all." Sabrina nods. Her mouth begins watering at the scent of warm, just-melted cheese, but her hunger subsides, anger quick to become a top priority once again.

"Cheers," Puck says gleefully, digging in before the waitress even turns to go back to her station. Within seconds, his hands and face are coated in bits of chili cheese fries. That much, Sabrina thinks, hasn't changed.

The relative silence (or rather, the absence of speaking) gives Sabrina time to digest the information Puck has suddenly dropped on her as well as her cheeseburger. "So, you and I have the same birthday now?"

"More or less," Puck says. He hits the bottom of the ketchup bottle for all it's worth ($2.99, according to the back barcode), adding totally illogical amounts of ketchup to his pile of hash browns. "And now I'm back to torment you forever. Isn't that great?" Puck gestures wildly with his fork, threatening to elbow his basket of chicken strips and send it tumbling to the ground.

"Real great," Sabrina mumbles numbly. She dips two fries glued together with melted cheese into the gravy, chewing slowly.

It's common for confessions to take place on prom night; in fact, Sabrina had always used to dream about it happening, when she was a kid. The scene had taken place to the tune of an old, waltz type song, layered over with honey-smooth vocals and faint guitar, and she had always imagined herself leaning her head against her date's shoulder, not quite whispering the three words into his ear while he did the same.

Evidently though, written in the fine print footnote of 'Dream Confessions on Prom Night', there's a text that says some confessions may come in obtuse, frustrating ways, complete with the potentiality of a political upheaval that she's somehow caused, all spoken by a boy who has accidentally and yet completely fallen in love with her.

An awful squelch sound breaks her concentration, and she looks up in horror to find that Puck has transformed his tongue into that of a frog's and is currently using it to lick the remnants of chili cheese on his cheeks and hands. He looks at Sabrina. "I'm not sharing."

"I'm not asking," she says. She takes a bite of cheeseburger, opting to fill her mouth with food rather than words, since the latter seem to be failing her at the moment. It's not like she can just open with a casual laugh and a haha, so it was love at first sight for you? That definitely falls under the category of 'inappropriate sentence starters when talking to your archrival, who has just implicitly declared his love for you while covered with diner food grease'. In fact, she's not sure how to respond at all. Too many conflicting emotions vie for attention in her head: happiness, because Puck is home again; anger, because he's never stuck around; fear, because he's constantly bailed on her in the past. So really, the only option she's left with is 'how's the weather?'

She doesn't ask him this, though. Instead, she picks the worst possible thing to say in that moment: "So it all started on September 2nd, then?"

He nods, now starting to work at the chicken strips, double dipping into the miniature ramekin of honey mustard. "Yep. And as much as I've tried to change it, it seems that we're going to be stuck with each other—zits, B.O., foot fungus, and all—till the end of time."

"So you basically took me here to tell me about the apocalypse," Sabrina says, hoping her trademark New Yorkian sarcasm will come to save her.

Fortunately, she thinks it works, because Puck laughs out loud. "Yep."

By now, she's worked through more than half of her cheeseburger and most of her fries, saving the square of cobbler for last. The food, as expected, is delicious, but her eyes are bigger than her stomach, at present. Puck is having no trouble at all; he scarfs down plate after plate of junk food, his entire confession of love not seeming to have an impact on his superhuman appetite.

"I have some questions for you now, Grimm," he says through a mouthful of chicken, this time dipped in ketchup liberally spiked with hot sauce. "Why are you so cranky tonight? I know I get on your nerves—it's my job—but you're acting like my mom before her morning glass of merlot."

Sabrina winces a little, not ready (and not able) to tell him the truth. Because if she tells him the truth, she'll have to tell him about everything, from his last departure all the way up until Bradley, and she doesn't trust her tear ducts to hold everything back when they're supposed to. That's not to say she doesn't trust Puck; she does, with her life. But she cannot bring herself to match his actions, to hold her beating heart out in her hands and offer it to him without hesitation.

She mumbles an answer into the straw of her egg cream, large bubbles rising and subsequently bursting on its chocolatey surface. Puck makes an undeniable 'I-can't-hear-you-so-I'm-going-to-make-a-ridiculously-affected-gesture-to-indicate-it' movement, one hand cupped around his ear.

Sabrina sighs. "You're always gone."

"Not true," he counters. "I'm here in the flesh right now. The beautiful, glorious flesh, I might add." He mimes a kissy face, complete with exaggerated noises.

"I mean—" she glares at him, "—why don't you ever stay for long? Not even a week. Sometimes just a few days. It's like...like you don't even care." No sooner than the words leave her mouth does she wish she could catch them and reel them back in.

"And you care about me?" Even though Sabrina isn't looking, she knows there's an uneven smirk beginning to make its way across his face. And sure enough, he's grinning right at her, a portion of his teeth shining white on his lip.

She slams one hand down on the table hard, making the fries, the chicken strips, and Puck jump from the impact.

"You're so stupid," she cries. "Of course we care!"

"Whoa, whoa," Puck says, "I didn't ask about a 'we'. I asked about you."

Her heart roars like thunder behind her ribs. She wants to say 'I do'—she does, always will—but the letters fall over on her tongue, stuck somewhere between the dimensions of her mouth and the outside world.

"So, you do care," Puck says, interpreting her silence as a 'yes' (he's not wrong). Sabrina throws her crumpled ball of napkin across the table at his face, trying to keep the red blush off of her cheeks. "I'm getting a cavity, Grimm, I really am."

"It's the caramel pudding and poor dental hygiene," Sabrina speculates.

Puck shrugs and makes a 'maybe so' face. "So...are you gonna kiss me, like the last time you told me you cared about me?" He leans over the table, pushing his chair back with an obnoxious squealing sound, and puckers up his lips.

Sabrina gawks at him. "You kissed me!"

"Sure, but we all know you secretly loved it."

"I punched you in the stomach right after it happened."

"Love hurts," Puck says sagely.

"Can you just shut up and eat your dinner?" Sabrina says. Thankfully, he agrees, and returns to stuffing his face.

Sabrina runs her hand (cold from gripping her egg cream) along her cheeks, hoping the chill of the glass's condensation will be enough to dispel her blushing. The uncomfortable silence once again dominates their tiny bubble of atmosphere, save for Puck's unmannerly eating habits and the faint tunes of the tabletop music.

The jukebox sandwiched between the divider and the ketchup caddy sings a mournful melody about the pains of young love. Sabrina finds herself annoyed that a stupid piece of prehistoric technology has managed to pick out a personal tracklist of songs that comment on her life's current events.

The thing about Puck and herself is that they have never been ones for emotion. The banter is standard; it's an essential part of their relationship, the mutual teasing and wisecracking. But—and blame it on being a teenager—they seem to be physically incapable of a proper heart-to-heart, one of them always derailing the conversation to make fun of the other. As such, their relationship is constantly in a state of limbo, neither regressing nor progressing. It's all a mess.

And she's in what anyone with eyes and common sense would consider a mess: 1 AM in her prom dress at a diner, three feet across from a boy whom she may have always been a little bit in love with.

Said boy clears his throat, and Sabrina looks up. To her surprise, he's wiping his napkin across his face.

"For the record," he says, a little softer than he usually speaks, "I did care."

A burning curiosity compels Sabrina to ask, "Really?"

"You were on my mind every day that I was gone. I mean, a lot of the time, it was thinking about what type of glue I could use to stick a basketball to your head, but sometimes, it wasn't."

Sabrina waits for him to finish with something snarky, like 'I thought you'd look even stupider if I glued three cans' worth of tennis balls instead', but it never comes. He only looks at her with slightly raised eyebrows and a hint of a smile on his lips.

"Take your time," he says, effectively ruining the moment. "It's not every day the King of Faerie pays a human a compliment like that."

Sabrina rolls her eyes, not bothering to remind him she's an Everafter. She thinks she'd have learned to expect the unexpected by now, but perhaps catching her off guard is simply part of Puck's magic. It's his specialty, after all. He knows where her buttons are, and manages to push all of them multiple times in one try.

Puck drains the last of his malted with a loud slurp. "Um," he begins awkwardly, "would it be too much to ask that we pretend none of this—" he waves his hand, "—ever happened?"

Sabrina laughs. "That's the understatement of the year. You're going to be a king." And you just admitted you've been in love with me for six years, and now I need to tell you too but the words just won't come out of my mouth the right way.

"Please," he scoffs. "I was already a king, but you never wanted to admit it. It's official now, with all the papers and stamps and signatures that old people give you."

"Some prom night," Sabrina mumbles, ignoring him. "And there's no reentry." She smoothes down the sky blue crepe of her dress, watching the folds waver back and forth past her knees. Puck lifts his eyebrows.

"Didn't think you cared so much," he says quietly, twiddling his thumbs. His eyes are fixated on a point in his lap beneath the table, but they move to meet Sabrina's when he stands up, offering her his hand somewhat reluctantly. "Come on."

She eyes him warily and tries to predict all the possible hypotheticals: he could take advantage of the fact that she's wearing high heels and pull her to (literally) throw her off balance, he could be hiding a hamburger bun slathered in ketchup to throw in her face, or…

His fingers suddenly wrap around her wrist, and she finds herself standing, the chair kicked backwards into the table behind them. Even with the added height of her shoes, their features don't quite align; his smirking mouth is still several inches above hers.

"You're bellyaching so much about prom, so here." He picks up the jukebox and presses a few buttons, and upbeat 2000s pop starts playing. The same hand that he had pulled her up with is now extended towards her, its owner on the verge of laughter. "Takes two to tango."

"This is Britney Spears."

"Yeah, so let's rock and roll!"

He pirouettes sloppily while holding her hand high above his head, his hip bumping hard into the table mid-turn, the pain disguised with a conspicuous groan of pain. Sabrina finally gives in, allows herself one small turn, just so her back barely touches his chest. Even with the knowledge that fairies typically run at a much higher temperature than humans do, she's slightly surprised by the sheer amount of body heat he seems to radiate when their bodies finally make contact.

"I didn't know you were such a fan," Sabrina teases, while Britney sings about how much her loneliness is killing her. Her shoe clicks as she takes a step backward to allemande with Puck.

He turns a deep shade of pink. "Jake played it a couple times on the road."

"You mean the entire 'The Essential Britney Spears' album?"

"Yeah, that one. 'Toxin' was good."

"Toxic," Sabrina finds herself correcting him. She frowns. She didn't know so much of Uncle Jake had rubbed off on her.

Puck snaps and finger guns with both hands. "That's the one."

She stares at him.

He stares back.

She lets a tiny part of her perfect façade crack, and his splits wide open.

"We're so weird," Puck proclaims, beside himself with laughter. Sabrina allows herself a smile. He's right, and she knows from years of trying to evade this fact that he will not stop being right; at least, not in this regard.

The tune suddenly changes to an entirely different tune, a softer A major pop ballad underscored with guitar. It's still fairly recent, given that she's heard it a couple times on the radio.

Puck's right hand latches onto Sabrina's shoulder, his left gently pulling her by the waist towards him, and her breaths come quick and shallow. She almost wants to ask him what's going on, because surely Puck can't be so sweet and uncharacteristically romantic, and he has to be getting ready to pull a fast one on her, but the look in his eyes says 'trust me, I know what I'm doing'. His mouth twitches upward, and suddenly, like the whole ocean hits her at once—

—her heart remembers; remembers the smile she fell in love with at eleven and the one that broke her in pieces when he left at thirteen; the same one that makes her want to stand on tiptoes right now and press her smile to his, and hold him there so she'll go with him if he chooses to fly away again. And she wonders how she could have forgotten the angles of the lips she so wished she could kiss, the lines that compose his features, but is not ungrateful that she has rediscovered them in full.

(After all, the heart oftentimes remembers what the eyes do not.)

And Puck remembers too, because he moves his hand down the curve of her waist where his fingers fit to her skin perfectly, following the exact movements he went through so many years ago, all the way down to the blush-stained laugh that falls from his lips. After years of wishing and waiting, their torsos finally meet in the middle, only fabric separating their skin.

"Everything's going to be different now," she breathes. "You're finally staying for good, and you're going to run a kingdom."

He smirks and gives a little laugh, the sound sending a thrill through the center of her body. "How does that make you feel?"

"Terrified." Puck momentarily takes his hands off of Sabrina's waist to clasp his hands over his heart in mock offense.

"I'll make sure to fit 'pranking the ugliest Grimm in the family' into my schedule," he promises. She pokes him in the chest.

"Shirking your duties just to play practical jokes?" she asks. "Not very majestic of you." The jukebox crackles quietly as it changes tracks.

He shrugs, crooked grin just inches away from her face. "For anyone else? No. For you? It's worth it every time." Sabrina laughs. The words, straight out of like, The Notebook or something like that, belong in between kisses during thunderstorms, sunset picnics by the beach, and, oddly enough, here in this tiny diner where time moves in strange and inexplicable ways. And right now, it moves warm and slow, encasing their life in amber while the rest of the world spins on. Frankly, she's grateful for that.

"I've never been to high school," Puck says conversationally. "Is this what prom is usually like?"

Sabrina looks around her and laughs. For starters, most high school kids don't live forever, or fall in love with mythical creatures. "No," she answers, "not really. You usually slow dance to waltzes, not rock n' roll." She nods towards the jukebox, now playing Aerosmith.

"We're not normal people," he points out, and she agrees.

She's been avoiding the thought of him for months and months, so when he finally manifests in her life (out of a dream, practically), well, she unravels. Not in the a falling apart sort of way, but a finally-untied-this-stupid-triple-knotted-shoelace kind of way.

Sabrina's always been proud of having her own agency in life, but sometimes, it just feels better to fall into someone else's arms and stay there, if only for a few moments.

"You're doing it again." There's a singsong lilt to his voice; he's definitely making fun of her.

"Doing what?"

"Come on," he teases, "you know what you're doing." She wrinkles her face up at him, unsure of whether to use her hand or her mouth to wipe the stupid grin off of his lips.

"No," she says coyly, "I really don't."

He leans forward, brushes one of her long curls back so he can whisper in her ear. "Grimm," he says, and she is hyperaware of the pressure of his hand on her hip, "if you wanted a kiss, you could just ask; I have people begging on hands and knees for them all the time."

Sabrina bites back a laugh. She prides herself on her ability to read people and how she can always, always tell when she's getting played. So she knows, intuitively, that Puck is bluffing. But in spite of this, she stands on her tiptoes so she can whisper back, a grin on her face—

"—I'll keep that in mind."

fin.

whoo whoo whoo first sg longfic! as exhausting as this was to write and, in faatima's case, beta and edit, this was by far the funnest project i've worked on all month, and i'm so happy to finally present it to everyone after weeks of hard work. i hope you loved reading it as much as i loved writing it!

please leave a review and/or favorite if you enjoyed! feedback is like a diamond: i treasure it :')