Lot of plot thrown about in this chapter, and some other development, including possibly the first sign of trouble brewing for the Fitzgerald sisters...
I would also greatly appreciate any feedback on how the story is going so far, especially from anyone who has read Reunion. Thanks for reading!
Brigitte sat down at the dining room table, joining Ginger and Ghost who were already there, still in their sleepwear, leaning tiredly over their bowls of cereal. Apparently they were slumming it, today.
"Morning." Ghost yawned.
"Mm." Brigitte nodded, dropping the case she'd brought up on the table beside her. She saw Ginger's eyes flit over to it and frown slightly.
She wasn't unsympathetic. She'd head years of bad sleeping, never really feeling safe enough to relax, or let her ever-present fears slip away for a moment, and…last night, she had. Waking up with her sister's arms around her, spooned with her back to Ginger, had been more reassuring than she cared to admit.
"Feeling better?" Ginger asked around a mouthful of toast.
"Yeah." Brigitte nodded, helping herself to a few slices.
She chewed on one as she plucked out a syringe, cord and two vials of the monkshood extract from the case.
"Now?" Ginger asked, trying and failing to sound indifferent.
"Now." Brigitte mumbled, toast gripped between her teeth as she wrapped the cord around her upper arm and knotted it.
"Needles." Ghost cringed, looking uncomfortable. "Ick."
"One thing we can agree on." Ginger groaned.
"Would you give it a rest?" Brigitte scowled.
She tipped the vial onto the syringe, letting it fill slowly, then set the vial aside. Giving the needle a flick, she held it to her wrist and tried to ignore the uncomfortable looks from her sister and Ghost.
"What in heaven's name are you doing?"
Brigitte looked up sharply, the needle poised over her wrist, as Pamela stood in the doorway to the dining room, appalled.
"Shootin' up, what's it look like?" Ginger turned to their mother, beaming.
"I told you yesterday, we have to do this. It slows down the transformation." Brigitte explained, impatiently.
"I just thought-" Pamela sighed. "I'm a mother, when your girls are playing with needles at the dinner table, you tend to think certain things."
"I bet most moms don't have to worry about raising a brood of werewolves." Ghost sniggered.
Ginger glared, about to say something but Brigitte kicked her.
"Packs, dear." Pamela sat down at the head of the table. "Wolves come in packs."
"…er…right." Ghost replied, momentarily taken aback.
"Anyway, I'm sorry I thought you were…" Pamela looked at her, concerned. "…but after what you told me last night, I just worried that you were still doing-"
"I'm past it. I told you." Brigitte argued. "No more drugs. Just this."
Brigitte wasn't being totally honest, even with herself. She couldn't know what'd happen next week let alone in the next year. Maybe she'd be dead. Maybe she'd chuck it in and go feral. Maybe she and Ginger'd be caught by the cops and go out in a hail of bullets. Who knew?
"She won't even touch weed, Pam, and that barely counts as an illegal substance, right?" Ginger added, smiling helpfully as she finished off the last of her toast.
Brigitte kicked her again.
"Girls." Pamela said, sternly.
Brigitte shut them all out and tried to focus. She clenched her teeth and plunged the needle in, then squeezed the top. The monkshood flooded into her veins, cold and sharp.
"Fuck." She whispered, setting the syringe aside and undoing the cord, working her fingers and her wrist to get the circulation going.
"I wasn't sure if I really believed you, at first, even seeing you two. I mean, werewolves?" Pamela said, watching her intently. "But your stories…filled in a lot of gaps, in that last month before you both disappeared. For the first time since you left, things have started to make a kind of sense." She finished, sadly.
"Like my behaviour?" Ginger prompted.
"Well…no." Pamela admitted. "You were always quite…erratic, growing up. It was more to do with your sister, dear." She went on.
"What?" Brigitte asked, tuning back into the conversation.
"You were always Ginger's shadow, as children. Where she went, you were never far behind." Pamela smiled, sympathetically. "But in that last month, for the first time in your lives something seemed to have come between you, and you were starting to…stand on your own, Brigitte. A mother notices these things."
"That'll happen when one of you is mauled by a bloodthirsty monster, and turned into a selfish, sex-crazed, permanently angry, unholy terror." Ginger muttered. "You mean you didn't think there was anything strange about me at all?" She added, in disbelief.
"I thought you were just going through puberty, honey." Pamela shrugged. "It takes us all in different ways.
"Thanks a lot." Ginger muttered, moodily.
Brigitte was gathering up another vial and the syringe, when her arm jolted suddenly. Pain racked through her and she grimaced, the monkshood doing its work.
"Does it hurt?" Pamela asked, frowning worriedly. "Monkshood is a poison."
"Every time." Brigitte replied. "But it works. It's just that it's a treatment, rather than a cure. Your arm, Ginge."
Ginger reluctantly held out her hand.
"This can't be good for you." Pamela shook her head, disapprovingly. "You look so thin, Brigitte. Pale."
"I've been taking it for over three years." Brigitte shrugged, tying the cord around Ginger's arm.
"Ginger looks…healthier." Pamela managed, hesitating as she regarded her fanged, clawed, somewhat lupine-looking daughter.
"I haven't been taking it for over three years." Ginger said, looking at their mother.
They shared a meaningful look. Brigitte softened her grip on Ginger's wrist, rubbing her skin gently with her fingers.
They'd told Pamela everything, last night. Everything.
Everything.
Brigitte shot Ginger a guilty look.
Well, almost everything. She'd chosen not to spill the beans about the fact she and Ginger were taking too close for sisters to other, mom-breaking depths.
"I know." Pamela replied, expression fixed.
Brigitte's gut twisted. She tried to fathom what was going through her mother's head. What could you think, what could you feel? What was it like, trying to look at your daughters and seeing killers?
"Ginger." Brigitte tried to get her attention as she wound and knotted the cord just short of her elbow. "Hold still."
She knew what Ginger would say. She said it often enough. Brigitte wasn't a killer. Brigitte hadn't killed anybody. But it didn't matter.
For three years, she'd felt like a killer. A murderer. For three years, she'd accepted that the blood of the only person she'd ever really cared about was on her hands. It didn't just go away. How could it?
And then there'd been others. Trina, Sam, Alice, Tyler, Jeremy, more, all dead because of her, in one way or another, even if she hadn't specifically done it herself.
"You all there?" Ginger peered at her, tilting her head slightly.
"Yeah." Brigitte blinked, picking up the syringe. "Yeah. I'm here."
…
"Keep her away from me, that's all. I'm not in the fuckin' mood." Ginger growled.
Brigitte massaged her forehead, irritably, trying to imagine something calm, relaxing, peaceful. Like a mausoleum.
Ginger wasn't dealing with the monkshood well, she never did. She and Ghost had been snapping at each other all morning, and now they were arguing over the TV.
"Ginger Ann Fitzgerald." They heard Pamela from the kitchen. "This is still my house and you are still my daughter."
Ginger shot Brigitte a look of utter disbelief, before slumping back into the sofa, curling up in a massive sulk. Nobody could be as noisily quiet as Ginger when she was sulking. Brigitte eyed the TV vaguely, but it made her head hurt more.
Brigitte wasn't entirely sure what their next step was, beyond getting to the National Archives in Toronto proper, but in their current monkshood-poisoned state they weren't going to be doing anything useful, so Ginger had persuaded her to call it an "off day".
The trouble was, it had been so long since she'd taken a day to just…switch off, she found she wasn't sure what to do with herself. Her thoughts kept going back to the time before, the weeks after Ginger was first attacked, to Sam…
She had no idea if he even had any family. She had no idea, after all this time, who'd…taken care of things. The body. Buried him. She wondered if Pamela would know.
"I'm going for a walk." She said, gritting her teeth against the pain as her entire body protested at being made to move at all.
"Mm." Ginger grunted, lost in her own world of agony.
Brigitte left the living room, heading for the kitchen. How did you even start a conversation like this?
Pamela was washing dishes with her back to her when she came in and stopped, awkwardly, in the doorway. Pamela seemed to notice she was there because she turned suddenly. She dried off her hands, leaning against the sink.
"Something wrong, dear?" She asked, in that probing 'mom' way. As if somehow all those years hadn't passed, with all the shit that went with them. "I doubt you're to ask me about boys, again. In retrospect, I should have probably suspected something when you asked me that, three years ago, but…"
"You put it down to puberty again, right?" Brigitte smiled wryly.
"I made my share of errors, with you two." Pamela sighed. "I feel responsible for much of this."
"Not your fault. Told you." Brigitte rebuked her, patiently. "Being attacked by werewolves can't be that common a thing for parents to worry about."
"Perhaps not." Her mother glanced away. "What was it you wanted?"
Brigitte crossed her arms, chewing her lip. Her bones were alive with a dull, constant ache that made her want to scratch through her skin to relieve, made it hard to think. She considered backing out and writing the whole thing off, putting it down as another horrible, horrible instance of trying to interact with her own mother.
"Is it Sam?" She asked, suddenly, in a display of unexpected intuition Brigitte found shocking.
"Yeah." She replied, after a moment.
"Was he a friend of yours? I didn't remember seeing him in your class…" Pamela asked, frowning in thought.
"Sort of. A friend I mean. And he wasn't from school exactly. Worked there, kind of. Plants. Gardening." Brigitte explained, haltingly.
"An older boy? Brigitte, you were only fifteen-" Pamela started, disapprovingly.
"We weren't-" Brigitte argued, then stopped. "Look, I just wanted to know if…was he…taken care of, you know?"
A look of understanding crossed her mom's face and she nodded slightly.
"There was a small service. Official. I don't believe he had any family."
"How do you know?" Brigitte asked, before she could stop herself.
"I went." Her mom replied, looking around the kitchen evasively. "I wanted to…understand. Why you were both gone, what happened, who he was to you two. I hoped someone who knew him might know…anything."
"Oh." Brigitte nodded slowly.
She looked across at the woman, her mom. They'd never really been close, never connected. She had hardly even thought of her as a mother, growing up. Ginger had taken up so much of her focus, her affection. Ginger had been the centre of everything. She'd filled Brigitte up and left no room for anything else, including her own parents.
"I'm sorry." She added, not sure what she was really apologising for.
"You should rest while you're here, I suppose you two won't be staying long." Pamela carried on.
"We can't." Brigitte reached up for her necklace out of habit and started thumbing it, her other arm wrapped around her.
"You still wear that old thing?" Her mother smiled, teasingly. "I saw Ginger did too."
"I guess." Brigitte shrugged.
Ginger had first found the creepy old necklaces up in the attic, among boxes and stacks of old family things, and she'd insisted they take for their own, one each. Dark, spooky, weird, just like they were, she'd laughed. And they'd just kept them, for years, and that was all there was to it.
Brigitte had to admit that they'd taken on a new significance since she'd seen the Ginger and Brigitte in her dream wearing them too. Coincidence? A product of her imagination? Real? The fact Ginger had seen the necklaces in her dreams had given her some pause for thought. She'd almost forgotten that they'd originally found them in their own home. Maybe…
"Mom, I don't think we ever asked, I don't suppose you know where these came from?" Brigitte asked, holding up the skull pendant. "Ginger found them when she was digging around in the attic, years ago."
"Oh," Pamela blinked, surprised. ", well, they belonged to my mother, your grandmother, and her sister, dear. She gave them to me when I was little, but…I was never too fond of them, to be honest." She explained, guiltily.
Brigitte didn't remember much about her grandmother. She'd died when she was really young, leaving her barely any memories of the woman. She didn't remember her great-aunt at all.
"I hardly remember her, where did she get them? Were they always hers?" Brigitte asked, curious now.
The last thing she'd expected was to actually learn anything by going back to Bailey Downs. It was a slim chance, but at this point she was willing to grab any thread.
"Why does it matter?" Pamela asked, chuckling slightly, but she must have seen something in Brigitte's expression because she sighed, nodding to herself and appeared to give it some thought. "I think my mother told me once, that she had them passed down to her and her sister by her mother, she was named Brigitte too, by the way, she was your namesake…or was it her grandmother…did she have a sister?" Her mother rambled, half to herself.
"There a lot of women in our family?" Brigitte asked, sarcastically. "Named Brigitte?"
"You know, I'm sure we had an old...family tree or something, tucked away somewhere." Pamela tapped her chin, thoughtfully.
"Seriously?"
That thin thread was shaping into a lead, in Brigitte's mind. It was almost enough to make her forget the monkshood currently tearing up her insides.
"Yes, I think so. I'll have a look if you like?"
"No, I'll-" She turned to hurry down the hall when a hand latched onto her shoulder. Not hard, but firmly enough to stop her.
"Brigitte Fitzgerald, you may have been on your own and looked out for yourself for a long time, but I am still your mother and I watched you inject yourself with what should have been a lethal dose of poison." She paused. "Whatever happened to you has changed you, but you're my daughter, and even I can see you're in pain. I will find it."
"But-"
"But nothing. Go sit down, or go for a walk, if you can't do that." Pamela ordered.
"But-" Brigitte tried again, feeling the strangest sense of deja-vu, as Pamela pushed her out of the kitchen.
"No buts." Pamela breezed past and started up the hall. "Relax, doctor's orders." And with that she disappeared upstairs, leaving Brigitte lost and bewildered in the hall.
She hadn't been talked to like that for years. It was a jarring experience.
Brigitte took a few steps back and forth, at a loose end. She fumbled for her cigarettes for a minute, and decided against it.
She finally took a seat at the foot of the stairs, and fiddled with the pendant again, distractedly, as she thought.
What if they were literally the same pendants? Two hundred years or so old, passed down through their family all the way to here, where she and Ginger happened on them? Changing hands, passing down the Fitzgerald line. Brigitte knew Henry had taken her mother's family name, but she'd never thought anything of it before, she hadn't cared.
It was getting harder not to take Ginger's dreams seriously…literal even, maybe. Too many things were adding up.
And if they were real…didn't that mean the other Fitzgerald sisters were real? And if they were real…what had Ginger said? They were both infected and stranded in the wilderness, after the fort was destroyed?
But the Fitzgeralds were still around. She was here. Ginger was here. Her mother, Pamela was here. Her mother, and her mother's mother, going all the way back…
It was possible they'd had other relatives around at the time, and that the old Ginger and Brigitte had just died in the middle of nowhere, or gone mad, or turned feral, never to be seen again, but…
"Didn't get far then?"
Brigitte jumped, turning to see Ginger leaning on the banister, beside her.
"What?" She blurted, trying to catch up.
"Your walk." Ginger went on. "Sounded like you and Pam were talkin', mostly."
"We might not have to go to the archives." Brigitte said, getting up. "Want to go for that walk with me? There's a lot to explain."
"I'm not really feelin' up to a walk, to be-" Ginger started, holding her stomach with a grimace.
"Wasn't really a suggestion." Brigitte tossed Ginger her jacket, as she tugged on her own. "Come on."
…
They walked without any goal in mind, down still-familiar roads and lanes, past old haunts and hangouts, by their old school, closed and empty for the winter, past Sam's old greenhouse, boarded and abandoned, all the while, Brigitte tried to explain and make sense of what she'd learned talking to Pamela. Then they came to the playpark.
It was empty. Too cold out now, apparently, not that she or Ginger could feel it anymore.
Ginger jogged ahead, heading to the swings and falling into one of the seats. Brigitte dropped into one beside her.
"You think these might be the real deal, then?" Ginger asked, plucking out her own pendant.
"That or its one hell of a coincidence." Brigitte pushed back with her feet, slowly swinging back and forth. "But that wasn't really my point, Ginger. I mean, think about this."
"What?" Ginger asked.
"If these are the same pendants they had over two hundred years ago, if they are our…ancestors or something, then how are we here?" Brigitte pressed.
"How do you mean?" Her sister asked, frowning.
Brigitte shook her head, trying to get her to understand.
"The last and only time you had sex, you turned Jason McCardy into a fucking werewolf, Ginger." Brigitte explained. "You told me in your dream you saw Brigitte infect herself with Ginger's blood because she was dying from the cold."
"Oh." Ginger muttered, something like realisation crossing her face.
"And, from those notes of yours, they claimed their parents were dead or something. Maybe they lied, but if it didn't, and they were the only members of the Fitzgerald family left at the time…" Brigitte prompted.
"You think..."
"Maybe one of them, maybe even both of them, found some kind of…cure." Brigitte said, still pushing herself on the swing, as her mind worked, absent-mindedly. "Mo-…Pamela said her grandmother…or her great grandmother was called Brigitte, apparently my namesake, but what if she was named after another Brigitte in the family?"
"Fuck, B."
"It's a lot of 'ifs' and 'maybes'." Brigitte admitted. "But…it's not impossible. We might have a chance, Ginge." She turned to her sister, trying hard to quash the beginnings of hope she felt stirring in her gut.
Hoping for things had never turned out too well in the past.
They fell into a comfortable silence, for some time. Brigitte swaying back and forth still and Ginger fiddling with the pendant. They watched cars go by across the small green around the park, and the street lights slowly come on as the sky darkened and the sun went down, in the early afternoon.
The monkshood had passed, at least. The pain that came with it fading away, leaving her oddly numb. Ginger seemed to have settled, too. They'd already started looking a little more like themselves. Ginger's hair had started to return to its normal colour, and her fangs had shrunk away. Idly, she checked her own teeth and was relieved to find them normal too.
"Have you thought about what you'd wanna do after all this? If we find something, whatever we find? Cure or damnation or absolutely fuck all or whatever?" Ginger asked, suddenly.
Brigitte turned to her sister, slowly.
"I don't know." She shrugged. "There aren't many places we could go, with our faces stuck all over newspapers like they are."
"If we don't find anything, even if we do, maybe, it's not like we can just go back to how things were. We can't just find a place, get a job and hit the daily grind." Ginger kicked off on her own seat, mirroring Brigitte's motion.
"You sound like you've thought about this." Brigitte said, a touch surprised.
Ginger generally didn't think ahead more than five minutes, in her experience. She had always been pretty firmly rooted in 'the moment'.
"We could go away. Just us. Nobody else. Somewhere out there, away from everybody, where we can't hurt anybody and nobody can hurt us." Ginger said, seriously. "Make something for ourselves, fuck the rest of the world."
"You mean like…out in the wilderness? Like, a cabin out in the woods?" Brigitte asked, dubiously.
"Hey, I spent my three years livin' rough in the wild, staying away from towns and people. I picked up some pretty useful fuckin' skills. I learnt how to survive, in my own way, like you did." Ginger retorted. "I could teach you to hunt, trap, we could build ourselves something. We'd never have to worry about needing anyone else again. Just you and me."
"Together forever, huh?" Brigitte mused.
"If you'll still have me." Ginger replied, holding her gaze, her hand reaching out toward her.
Brigitte grasped her sister's hand, entwining their fingers.
"You really have thought about this." Brigitte murmured.
"I don't think I could lose you again, B." Ginger laughed, nervily. "It nearly pushed me over the edge, last time."
"Yeah," Brigitte nodded, understanding. ", I know what you mean."
It wasn't as if she'd fared much better without Ginger, all that time. Her thoughts turned instinctively back to the night she'd killed…thought she'd killed her sister. She felt the beginnings of the trembling, getting to her hands. And the ache in her skull.
Brigitte let go of her sister's hand, pulling out her cigarettes and lighting one up in an attempt to cover it up, hoping Ginger wouldn't notice. Ginger was looking at her with a light frown, but didn't say anything.
The only sound for a time, was the creaking of the swings in the evening breeze that picked up, as they sat side by side, unmoving.
"We should head back." Brigitte said, getting up. "Pamela might have found something by now."
"Yeah. I suppose." Ginger got up next to her. She seemed about to say something when she stopped, abruptly, and stared past her, toward the woods.
Brigitte was about to ask what was wrong, when she felt something, too. Like the hairs on the back of her neck all standing on end at once. She turned sharply in the other direction, toward the road.
"Did you…" She started.
"…feel something then?" Ginger finished.
"Like…something watching?" Brigitte said, as they both turned back to face each other.
Ginger looked uncharacteristically unnerved.
"Yeah, it's…weird." She nodded. "Do you think…?" Ginger trailed off, looking around the park, clearly on edge.
To Brigitte, it was looking a little too much like it had the night Ginger was attacked. Her instincts were saying 'go', and she had started to trust them, lately.
Brigitte frowned. The last time she'd felt like this Ghost had been watching them, taking photos in an attempt to blackmail her. She wasn't about to entirely write it off as 'nothing'.
"Let's just go." Brigitte took her hand, flicking her cigarette across the tarmac.
"Good idea." Ginger agreed, and they turned in the direction of home.