Quicksilver in my Blood, Mirrors in my Bones

In the beginning, Sabrina was a twelve-year-old girl who, like many twelve-year-olds, lived with her grandmother. Unlike most twelve-year-olds who live with their grandmothers, she did so because her parents had been kidnapped. It started with that, sort of.

How it really started, though, was this: Sabrina's best friend tried to kill her. He almost did it. In a room full of mirrors made of pure power, a room of portals and folds in the fabric of space and time, Sabrina was stabbed with shards of glass and mercury and a shattered spell.

If you asked her about it, she'd tell you about a time another child got a shard of a magic mirror in his eye, a second shard in his heart, about how that mirror froze his heart and twisted everything he saw. She wouldn't tell you how she knew. She might tell you that they told her it would kill her unless she got it all out of her system.

So Sabrina Grimm was covered in mirror-cuts, and there was not enough glass on the ground to rebuild just one of the mirrors, even if you'd wanted to.

She saved the world, her best friend (the one who tried to kill her) died, and she didn't. And Sabrina Grimm spent the next three years trying to believe that she was human.

The first time she cut herself, after it was all supposed to be over, she was making a sandwich, and she remembers clearly that she needed a knife because the sandwich was going to be made of leftover chicken breast. If you asked (but you wouldn't ask, because then you'd have to know, and she's very good at keeping secrets), she might tell you that, might even tell you that she remembers the sandwich because her blood wasn't red. It was silver, and that was how Sabrina knew that it wasn't over, that what she thought was the end was really only the start of something else.

For the most part, these days, Sabrina has adjusted. She is very good about not getting cut in front of other people, and she has learned to mask the way her vision whites out every time someone asks her a question. She is not human anymore, but then again, none of her family is quite human these days.

This was meant to kill her, she knows. It was meant to run like poison through her veins and end with a girl who could never be a witch dead in her best friend's prison, but instead it's turned her into... something.

Something new.

Maybe she is dead. Maybe Sabrina Grimm died at the tender age of twelve and a half, trying to protect her sister. All the worst things in Sabrina's life happened because she was trying to protect her sister, it sometimes feels, but it has never occurred to her to stop.

Anyway, maybe she is dead and in her place is a girl made of silvered glass, only reflecting the person she's replaced. Maybe she's a monster. Maybe she's the thing that scares her most.

She tries not to think about it much.

Sabrina has gotten very good about Not Thinking About Things over the course of her short life.

She doesn't think about the adults who were supposed to take care of her and failed, either on accident or horribly, maliciously on purpose. She doesn't think about her mother deciding to lie to her father and the way it destroyed Sabrina. She doesn't think about how she has never been good enough for anybody.

So she goes about her days, and she tries not to bleed, and she goes to bed early. If she gets up still tired, she remembers her dreams, and they're always full of things she Should Not Know.

(They are full, too, of voices. Of the ghosts of the—people? No, not exactly—beings whose power poured into her when they were destroyed. She is full of ghosts, is Sabrina.)