Walk away

Like many of you, I'm not ok with what happened in part 3. It hurts. A lot.

And my only "healthy" mechanism to cope with the pain is to write so I decided to do it and this is what came out.
Hope you like.
By the way, I didn't finish watching the series because my heart couldn't stand it, so ignore everything that happened after episode 5.

He woke up with a startle.

He felt cold sweat against his skin and it was hard for him to breath. The way his heart was beating was almost painful. Pain. Could he someday escape the pain? He sometimes thought it impossible.

It was strange, his relationship with the pain, it was an enemy and a friend. The pain numbed him.

The pain didn't let him sleep. The pain hurt him and soothed him.

It was unhealthy, the way the pain helped him relieve the pain. But it was the only thing he had left.

Nick sat up, he put his hands on his knees, with his head bend down he took a deep breath trying to calm down, trying to bring his breath and heart to a normal pace. It had been just another nightmare he told himself. Just that, a nightmare and nothing else, but then… Why did it feel so real? Why could he still feel the pain… the humiliation… the hate?

His hand went to his head, messing up his hair, pulling it angrily. He was so angry. Angry with the world, with himself, even with… her.

He couldn't forget. Those thirty days in Hell actually seemed like three hundred years and he knew they would haunt him for the rest of his life, the terrors he had lived there were going to be always there for him, hidden in a corner, waiting for him to fall again.

And it made him think more often than not if it was still worth living. Did he want to spend hundreds of years with the same horror? It could be so easy to finish everything at once, stop the pain, stop the shame, stop the regret.

Every time he tried to find a reason to continue there it was harder and harder to find one, but he was unable to end his life. And he had tried.

But every time he was about to do it her image came to his mind.

Sabrina.

Sabrina with her platinum hair, red lips and dark eyes. Sabrina telling him that she loved him. That was a painful memory too.

And even when he no longer had her, even if he didn't have anyone else in the world who cared about him. He couldn't do it.

He couldn't stop the torture his life had become.

Now, he was alone.

And it hurt. But Nick knew they couldn't be together. Not after what he said to her, what he did to her. He couldn't stay with her because he was broken, rotten. He no longer was who he used to be but he didn't know who he was now either.

Was there anything left of the Nicholas Scratch she had known? The Nicholas Scratch he had been?

He doubted it.

A tear tried to fall from his eyes but he whipped away immediately almost angrily. It was not worth crying. It didn't take away the pain. Nothing did.

And he had tried everything.

It was one thing to say that you should learn to live with the pain and it was quite another to do it.

And although they had managed to eliminate all traces of the Dark Lord from his body, he still... felt him. He felt the darkness running through his veins, rolled up his organs, attempting to choke him.

And he couldn't forget. He couldn't forget the indignities the Dark Lord and Lilith inflicted to him. They were impressed on his mind with fire.

He could never forget.

Sometimes he thought it would have been better to stay in Hell. At least there he had a purpose. To protect her from the Dark Lord evil plans for her. But he couldn't do it well, she became what he had tried to prevent with his sacrifice, everything he did was pointless in the end.

She was now the Queen of Hell and the Dark Lord was free. And he was the one to blame for the last, he knew.

Now he was just a shell of the man he once was. Walking aimlessly through the halls of the Academy, wandering the woods without destination.

But what hurt the most was seeing her daily and being unable to approach to her, talk to her, touch her. He had to remind him that it was his decision to break up with her. He was the one who walked away, he did it because he knew he was going to hurt her.

But she also hurt him with her love.

They weren't fated to be together since the beginning but he had been stubborn and now he was paying the consequences.

But being away from her was hard and right now he didn't know if the remedy was better or worse than the disease.

Nick tilted his head back, his eyes fixed on the dark ceiling of his room. He had to do something.

He had to get out of there. He needed to get away from the Academy, from Greendale, from her. After all, nothing tied him there. He needed another place, another air.

He needed a place that didn't remind him of his nightmares.

Knowing that he was unable to continue sleeping, although it wasn't as if he had been able to sleep much lately, he went to his closet and dressed hastily. He took a bag and began to put his clothes in, he did it quickly, almost as if he was running away. But maybe, he thought, that was exactly what he was doing.

Fleeing from ghosts, memories, nightmares.

No, from those last ones he knew he could never escape. Every time he closed his eyes he saw everything clearly, he felt it on his skin, in his muscles, in his bones. Maybe he would never stop feeling it, living it.

Nick put the bag strap on his shoulder, he didn't look back and left the room to disappear in the darkness of the night.

He didn't leave a note. There was no one interested in reading it anyway.

Nick let the cold mountain air hit his face. He liked that cold air and the smell of the wet earth. He liked the cloudy skies and the unforeseen rain.

He looked at the mountains around him, all green grass and rocks. He liked the solitude, it gave him some peace, being alone practically in the middle of nowhere helped him to heal.

But it hadn't been easy, many times in the last months he had felt the need to simply drown all his sorrows in a glass of bourbon. But he had controlled himself, nothing good would come if he went down that route again and he knew it. So he gathered all his willpower and resisted. He had been sober and intended to continue that way. But the nightmares weren't leaving him and Nick suspected they never would. Some nights he still could hear the Dark Lord vicious voice telling him the atrocities he was going to do to Sabrina once he was free, telling him how he was going to break him from the inside.

Sometimes he thought he managed to accomplish the last.

He was broken. But at least in the past days the frequency of the nightmares had decreased. The first night he managed to sleep without one still seemed a dream to him, but there had been more nights like that. Being able to sleep had improved his situation a bit, he hadn't feel this rested in months.

Nick liked to take long walks under the rain. He felt how the water healed him a bit taking away part of the pain in his soul. During those long walks he thought a lot. He thought about everything that had happened to him and tried to make sense of it.

And he always came to the same conclusion. The reason had been her. Sabrina.

He still couldn't forget her. Her eyes, her hands, her voice saying I love you. Maybe he never would forget her. But he knew that if he stayed with her they would end up hurting each other. He wasn't the same man she had felt in love with. He still remembered with cruel clarity all the things he had accused her of and he hated himself because was sure that a part of those accusations had nothing to do with the influence of Lucifer and a lot with his own insecurities.

But he couldn't help but miss her, that was another kind of pain he had to get used to live with. There were too many things to learn.

The first one was to learn to forgive himself.

And accept that there were things he could never change. Horrors he could never erase from his memory. Scars in his soul that would never heal completely.

But he could try to soften the edges a little so they weren't so sharp and allowed him to move on.

The first weeks had been difficult, isolated from the world in a cabin he had rented in the middle of the mountains, he had spent most of those first days sitting on the ground in front of a fire he hardly cared to keep alive and looking at the squalid flames with an almost sickly fascination. He liked to see the way the wood was engulfed by the flames and turned to ashes, ashes the wind would then take away. If only he could part from his memories with the same easiness.

Even the few good moments he spent with her hurt him. Everything hurt, the good and the bad. The beautiful and the awful.

And yet, he still loved her, maybe he would never stop to. And now he felt so alone.

When he realized this, was the first time he allowed himself to cry.

There was something liberating in letting the tears fall. He cried for her and for him. For what happened and for what won't happen anymore. He cried for who he used to be. He cried because he had been through a lot and have a lot ahead too.

He cried for what seemed like hours until his eyes were unable to produce another tear.

Forgiving himself was harder. Understand that everything that had happened wasn't his fault, that he was the victim and not the victimizer as he had thought. But still he was scared, scared because he didn't know if what he had said to Sabrina had been only the influence of the Dark Lord inside him or part of him really thought that and the idea was just driving him crazy.

He had been harsh, bitter and accusing in his words. He had been merciless and yet she had not recriminated him. She had told him that she loved him, the words he had wanted to hear so many times and now there was nothing left of what they used to be. The times their path had crossed into the Academy both had acted almost as if they were two completely strangers. There was nothing left that could be saved from what they once were. That was another kind of pain he had to learn to live with too.

He had been the one who had broken up with her, he had been the one who asked for space. It had been him... because he knew that if he continued with her he would only harm her and himself too. And one of the few certainties he had at the time was that he didn't want to make Sabrina suffer, although that was what he had ended up doing in his attempt to protect her from himself.

But he also did it to protect himself.

He couldn't shake the idea from his head that everything he had done had been useless because in the end the devil had got away with it. And he was there, with a fractured mind, a tortured soul. The traces of possession were even physical, and it was hard to look at himself without noticing that little detail. He had been told that it would disappear with time but he no longer believed it, months had passed and he saw no changes, at least in that regard.

While he knew that there would always be scars that would remind him of his time in Hell at least the wounds had slowly begun to heal.

But sometimes it was so easy to go back.

The desire to return to the dark place where he had been stronger some days, wishing for something that could numb the pain and let him move on. But he couldn't go back to that. And not for someone else, he needed to do it for himself. He knew he would never be the same man he once was but at least he could try to be a part of what he was.

When the need was stronger, he went for a long walk in which his steps became a race through the meadows, the icy wind against his face helped him clear his mind. There was something in the pure air of Scotland that made him feel a little better. Not completely well, but better. Cleaner.

One day he felt a bit better than he usually did and decided to go down to town. He needed to buy groceries and maybe being around other people could help.

But being surrounded by people for the first time in so many months was strange and somewhat overwhelming. Of course people looked at him, he was the only foreigner in a town where everyone seemed to know everyone.

He was walking down the street when he saw it. It was a small and narrow building with a signboard that identified it as a book store. He hadn't read in months and realized he missed it. For years the books had been his only consolation, his only true friends. It didn't matter which theme they were about, he simply enjoyed reading any book that came to his hands.

And when he entered and smelled the scent of old paper so characteristic of the books he felt terribly nostalgic. Would he come back someday? Would he walk through the halls of the Academy and spend endless hours reading in the library again? At the moment he didn't think it was possible. Return was tempting but also dangerous. For his heart, for his mind.

He walked around, looking at the few shelves in the book store. He scanned the titles on the backs of the books. There, he would not find the kind of book he used to read, instead there were novels, he once had very the opportunity to read mortal literature, but that was in the past now. And he didn't want to remember. He took some books which titles seemed interesting and went to the cash register.

He was going to try to find comfort in books again.

Nick resumed his walk around the town. And that when the temptation came into view, there was a small bar across the street.

He felt the almost uncontrollable desire to enter and drown his feeling in alcohol. He began to sweat cold and had to clench his fists tightly trying to contain himself but without noticing he had already reached the front door and was ready to enter. A drink or two wouldn't hurt he thought for a second, he was about to open the door with a shaky hand when he stopped. Nick took a deep breath before walking away. The forgetfulness that alcohol would provide was something brief and illusion that always disappeared, a brief consolation.

Being able to resist the temptation when it had been presented in front of him felt like a small victory.

It had been about a year and a half since he left Greendale when he decided it was time to return. After all, that little town was the only true home he had ever known.

Time had helped him understand. And to forgive himself.

He had understood that he could be resilient, that he could overcome the trauma and move forward. Even when he knew he would never be able to forget it completely, what had happened to him was burned into his memory with fire. But at least now he could move on, he needed to do it. It was the only way to show the devil that he no longer had control over him. That was him, Nicholas Scratch, the owner of his own destiny.

It had been hard but he had learned to accepted that the pain would never go away. But he discovery others ways to cope, to face his own fears. He wrote down everything he went through, every single detail and once it was ready, Nick took the sheets and burned them one by one. Seeing them burning until they became ashes was liberating. He felt lighter after that.

He was able to control the pain now. He didn't let it control him anymore.

He gathered his few belongings. He looked around one last time before closing the door.

A part of him must admit he wanted to go back to see her again.

Even though he knew she probably have moved on, although he knew Sabrina and him were destined to fail, he needed to see her. He needed to know she was doing fine.

Because deep down he still loved her. He had never stopped doing it.

And he would never stop loving her.

He walked through the forest with heavy steps, afraid to approach and at the same time anxious to do so. Would everything be the same as the day he had left it behind? Surely not, he couldn't help wondering what things had changed. When the trees were shrinking, he saw the Academy, the building looked older, as if it had been more than a year and a half since he was there for last time.

He took a deep breath when he reached the edge of the forest, he remained there for what seemed like hours, unable to take the few steps that separated him from the building. He was about to turn, ready to leave again when the front door opened.

And then he saw her.

Sabrina stopped in the middle of the entrance stairs and looked at him. She couldn't help it, she felt her heartbeat racing and the need to run towards him was so strong but she stopped herself from doing so.

They were nothing to each other.

And even if it hurt her she must accept it.

They looked at each other in the distance that separated them. They could lie to themselves all they want but their feelings were still there. Nick clenched his fits fighting the need to walk towards her and touch her cheek. He had hurt her, he couldn't expect anything from her, he knew this and still… his heart wanted something his mind insisted was wrong.

He needed her, but they both had hurt the other, he had to give up on her and learn to live with the consequences.

They stayed in silent for what seemed like hours.

"Nick…" she finally said in a whisper.

"Sabrina" he replied back.

They continue in their positions, studying the other face.

"You're back" she said suddenly. Nick just nodded unable to find his voice to talk to her "Why?"

He shrugged because he didn't know exactly why he had come back. Sabrina readjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder, she felt uncomfortable, she had never felt that way around Nick before and she didn't like it. It was like she had to walk on eggshells.

"You should get inside. It's freezing" she said to him.

Nick nodded. He took a deep breath before he started walking in direction to the Academy, Sabrina resumed her walk in direction to the woods. He couldn't help looking back at her.

He watched her until she disappeared between the trees.

It was strange, to be in the same place as her again. To pass each other in the corridors with nothing more than a nod in form of greeting as if they were two strangers. He missed her but didn't feel able to walk in direction to her either. He was afraid.

Sometimes he wondered if his decision had been the right one.

Maybe he should have stayed away. He could tell she was uncomfortable with his presence and he felt miserable.

It was one afternoon, weeks after he arrived, when she decided to make the first move and she approached to him.

Nick was sitting at one of the library tables reading a book when he saw someone's shadow appear on the page he was reading, he looked up and saw her.

"Sabrina?" Her name sounded like a question. He was surprised to see her approach him when she normally shunned him.

"Nick" she replied as greeting "Can we talk?" she asked shyly.

He was startled and that could be seen in his face. Sabrina didn't wait for an answer and pushed the chair at his side aside and sat down.

"What do you want to talk about?" he asked.

"We can't go on like this"

"What do you mean?"

"This, what we are doing" she said "I can't stand it anymore"

He didn't answer her, he didn't tell her he couldn't stand it either. That being so close to her and being unable to touch her, to speak to her, to hold her hand was killing him slowly.

"I'm not asking you to..." Sabrina felt silent, unsure of her next words "I know it's hard but... could we at least try to be friends?" she said, this time was Nick who remained silent for a while "Tell me something, please"

Friends? Could he be her friend after everything that had happened between them?

"I don't think that's a good idea," he whispered.

She tried to hide her disappointment but he saw it in her face. Sabrina rose abruptly from the chair and left the library with hurried steps. He stayed there, sitting without knowing very well what to do. Should he leave her alone or should he go after her? He blinked, deep down he knew what he had to do.

He ran after her.

She was fast when she wanted to and he had a hard time following her, people looked at him confused but he didn't care, he went after her. When he reached her they were in the middle of the forest, far away from the eyes of everyone at the Academy.

"Sabrina, wait!" he shouted.

She ignored him and tried to move away from him but he held her arm to prevent her from moving forward. She looked at him with her eyes bright with fury and moved away from his touch as if his hand burned her.

"What?" she snapped "What do you want, Nick?"

"Let's talk"

"I thought you didn't want anything to do with me"

"Sabrina, I'm sorry" he said, Nick tried to look at her eyes but she kept her eyes down, fixed in the ground "Can you look at me… please?"

She didn't do it and he sighed exasperatedly.

"I regret what I said to you, I shouldn't"

"But you already said it" she replied "And it's okay, I shouldn't have even suggested it. We're done, I understand"

"Sabrina..."

"I know you don't want to hear it but it hurts, Nick" Sabrina finally looked up, there were tears in her eyes "I missed you. Heavens! I tried not to do it but it's impossible"

"Sabrina..." he said again.

"Please listen to me," she begged him "I'm happy you're back. I'm glad you're better, because you're better, right?" he nodded and she let out a sigh "Why did you come back, Nick?" she couldn't help asking, there was no recrimination in her words, just curiosity.

He couldn't tell her that he was back because he wanted to see her again. They didn't need to hurt themselves again. But that was exactly what they were doing.

"I love you" she said out of the blue and he was surprised "I know you don't want anything to do with me. And it hurts, but if..."

Nick couldn't resist it anymore. He shortened the distance between them and kissed her hard.

His kiss was desperate.

And she responded in the same way, her hands went to his head and her fingers buried into his hair, she tried to attract him even closer to her, she couldn't have enough, she wanted to feel him against her completely. Theirs wasn't a tender kiss. It was deep, intense and desperate.

It was a kiss that was almost painful. And at the same time it was a balm for their wounds.

Sabrina felt his thumb caressing one of her cheeks, whipping away the tears she wasn't aware of being shedding. They only separated when the need for air was imperative.

Nick rested his forehead against hers, the space between them filled with their agitated breaths.

"I'm sorry, Sabrina... I shouldn't have…"

She brought one of her fingers to his lips to silence him. His hot breath against her finger make her shiver.

"There is nothing for which you should apologize"

"But..."

Sabrina shook her head.

"I understand. I understand what happened, you needed your space, you needed... You needed time for yourself and that's fine" she pulled her finger away from his lips and brought her hands back to the back of his neck. She stroked his short hair "But you're here now. And I won't to let you go"

"I don't intend to go anywhere"

"Good"

She smiled at him and he, after what had seemed like an eternity, smiled again.