what if? // sebastian sallow

In the Shadow of Sacrifice

The next morning, I feel myself abruptly being shaken awake. I blink open my eyes slowly to see Sebatian towering over me, his normally soft, comforting brown eyes darkened with a deep concern. I sit straight up immediately when I see his expression. "What's wrong, Seb?"

"It's Ominis...something terrible has happened to him. You have to come help!" Sebastian urges, a slight tremor in his voice.

Wordlessly, I slide out of bed, slipping on a robe, and follow him down to the common room.

There is already a crowd of students gathered in the common room huddled around someone in the middle. Sebastian takes my hand and pulls me through the crowd, straight to the center of it, where I see Ominis laid out on the carpeted floor.

Ominis doesn't look like himself. He has gone deathly pale. His normally misty, warm eyes have become completely cold and glossy. His hair hangs limply around his face, and the hollows in his cheekbones are jarringly deep. He is still breathing, but barely. His labored breaths echo loudly in the hushed silence of the room.

"What happened?" I ask Sebastian, kneeling down next to Ominis. I take one of Ominis's hands in mine and his stiffened fingers feel shockingly cold to the touch.

Sebastian whispers, his voice just low enough so the throng of students circling us cannot hear him. "He cast the dark magic upon himself to save Anne."

My heart stops, and I imagine for a second that I did not hear him correctly. I barely have time to register his words before a group of professors push their way through the crowd of students to transfer Ominis to a stretcher and take him down to the infirmary.

Even amidst the chaos, the puzzle pieces all start to click together in my mind. Ominis's jarring breakup with Poppy. His cold words to me in the Undercroft last night. His eerily detached demeanor.

He'd been emotionally preparing himself to take the curse, and preparing us to lose him.

***

Sebastian and I sit in the infirmary late into the night with Ominis. Though Ominis's vitals have stabilized after some intervention from a healer, he is still unresponsive and we haven't been able to speak to him. The healers seeing him have been perplexed by his condition - none of them have dealt with curses as dark as this one.

The room is dark, most of the patients in the ward asleep. The only sounds pervading the room are the soft ticking of a clock and Sebastian's anxious breathing next to me. The heavy silence between us feels almost tense.

Finally, Sebastian speaks. "Do you know why I was upset with you yesterday?" he asks.

"No...why?" I ask, turning my attention to him. Sebastian's face is only partially lit by soft moonlight streaming through the windows, his expression unreadable. I ache to have his warmth back. His coldness towards me feels so uncomfortable, too reminiscent of his ghosting after fifth year.

"I heard you telling Ominis about the curse in the Undercroft the night before. You'd told me you were going to bed early, so when I couldn't sleep, I went by the Undercroft to practice some spells. As I entered, I heard you talking, so I stopped to listen. I heard most of what you said - it really hurt my feelings that you felt like you couldn't trust me to talk to me about it. I would've thought I'd be the first person you'd tell. Especially considering that this is my sister's life on the line," he says, a note of indignation creeping into his tone.

That explains the storminess in his eyes yesterday, the iciness of his kiss.

"Oh Merlin, it's not that I didn't trust you. I really care about you, Seb, and I was just afraid of losing you. I didn't want you to do anything rash. I know your emotions run high when it comes to Anne. I just wanted time to think before rushing to tell you about it," I admit.

Sebastian shifts in his seat, and I see tears in his eyes reflecting the moonlight. My heart clenches in my chest, and I reach my hand out towards him. He hesitates for a heartbreaking second before slowly wrapping his fingers around mine.

"It's okay - none of it matters anymore. What we need to do is figure out how to help Ominis now," he says.

"When did you know he cast it onto himself?" I ask.

"Yesterday, I had actually gone and retrieved the jar of magic from the Undercroft and put it in my dormitory. I didn't know what I was going to do with it yet, but I was terrified of it being around you - I care about you too much," Sebastian admits, to my surprise, his eyes filled with guilt.

"The more I thought about it, and the more I was around the magic, the desire to cast it on myself kept growing stronger in my mind," he continues. "I wanted to give Anne the life that she deserved. And ever since I killed Uncle Solomon, I don't feel very deserving of my own life anyways. I didn't want to hurt anyone else ever again. Early this morning, something compelled me to open the jar and I started to draw out the magic with my wand, preparing to cast it on myself. Somehow, Ominis sensed what I was doing and instantly woke up. He started yelling at me and intervened, and before I could even process what was happening, he cast it on himself instead. He said he had suspected I would try to do this, and he'd already planned to curse himself instead," Sebastian says, his voice cracking at the end.

I hold out my arms and he crumples into them, his tears burning hot on my skin. Over his shoulder, I look at listless Ominis laying on the bed, the gears churning in my mind. Ominis is the truest friend one could ever hope to have.

There's only one way left to fix this mess.

We take a seat at a bench next to Ominis's bed. Sebastian lays down with his head in my lap, and I absentmindedly run my fingers through his hair, desperate to give him some form of comfort.

Eventually I hear his breathing grow soft and even. For a moment, I let my eyes trail over his familiar freckled face, the softness of his expression while he's sleeping. His slightly rumpled clothes and tousled hair. His innocence, his good intentions, marred in his waking hours by dark choices he's made over time.

Seeing him asleep wipes away all of those choices and takes me back to when we were just kids in fifth year, before the complicated tangle of emotions got the best of us.

I would do anything to see his real smile again, the one I haven't seen in years, the one that hasn't been dimmed by the weight of the secrets he carries.

I stand up quietly, careful not to wake Sebastian while laying his head down gently on the bench, and walk over to Ominis's bed. I pull out my wand from my robe and touch it to his heart.

In the hushed silence of the ward, the clock ticking ominously, I channel my energy again, focusing in on the dark curse like I do with ancient magic. I feel a bittersweet pang of relief when my focus finally picks up on Rookwood's voice, just like last time I'd done this with Anne.

"Children should be seen and not heard."

Even in the darkness, I can start to make out the familiar dark swirls of magic around Ominis, and begin to tug at them with my wand.

I strain in silence this time, using my energy to pull every last strand of the dark magic from Ominis's chest. The dark tendrils hover maliciously around the edge of my wand, waiting for release.

This time, instead of putting it into a jar, I touch the wand to my own chest, releasing the curse onto myself. Once it's inside me, no one can attempt to extract it again, since no one else can channel ancient magic.

Everyone I know will finally be safe.

Just as I gasp and my vision starts to flicker, I see Ominis sit up in his bed, the color suddenly returning to his cheeks.

"Jazz!" I hear Sebastian cry behind me, and his voice is the last thing ringing in my ears before the world goes completely dark.