"Brigitte Snaps Back"
Chapter One
"Incurable"
Brigitte listens in until she hears his breathing, still in short inhalations, keeping time with her pounding heart. She feels something crawling up her spine, giving her goosebumps at the tips of her fingers... something bundled up. High-energy, explosive. In her chest.
Something like madness.
(go one shade orange and nobody will be able to see your dark circles)
Brigitte keeps repeating that to herself as she steps away from the imaginary sanctuary of her room and towards the sound. Every step brings her closer, and with every passing moment, his breathing acquires more of a hum, as if he's getting closer to having a voice.
As her eyes adjust to the dark, she sees a shape, sprawled across the pool of blood, his. She can still taste it.
(it feels so good, Brigitte)
Brigitte shrugs it off.
The shade pulsates, expanding, contracting. Brigitte cautiously steps forward and crouches, feeling the hem of her coat soak up the liquid (don't think about the blood, don't think about how sweet it tastes) on the floor.
"Sam..?"
A hesitant hand, trembling, reaches out, grasps at the dark to find him, to find his body. She finds something slick and wet and shaking with every breath.
How is this..?
Brigitte considers the question, but it's a foregone conclusion at this point. The infection is saving him, blessing him (and her, you think of him that way, you think of him) with the first sign of the Curse, the healing. He's slowly healing up, but this means...
(it's like an infection, it works from the inside out, it's like a virus)
There's only one cure, Brigitte knows, and it's back in the room.
Brigitte goes back and finds the syringe on the ground – another piece lying where it fell. She takes it and observes the thick, purple liquid that will save them.
She has to cure him. She has to cure him, because he is the only one who knows how to make the cure in the first place.
(cure him and you cure yourself)
Brigitte steps over Ginger's (the wolf's, she's the wolf now, the lycanthrope, that's not Ginger on the ground, not anymore) corpse and then stops, a step into the hallway. No. Wait. She can't cure him.
The state he's in – it'll kill him.
Then, she decides, she has to cure herself. Brigitte feels around her neck with her free hand. She knows where the cartoid artery is, she's memorized every available point that can be used for exsanguination.
She raises the needle, but stops again. Wait. No, no, not it either.
It worked on Jason, yeah, but he's easily twice her size and she's about to use more or less the same amount. What if it knocks her out? Paralyzes her? She can't afford to not be able to move – she has to get them both out of that basement.
That tingling, itching sensation returns then, moving to her shoulders. Her fingers contort, trying to grasp at the phantom itch, her mind spirals inward in attempt to dislodge stray pieces of thoughts and merge them into a coherent whole.
Madness. Brigitte looks at the hallway, at the needle, feels the presence of the lycanthrope's carcass, is aware of what time it is, when Henry will be back, that Pamela did fuck knows what at the party, that she has no way of explaining any of this to anyone or fuck, even getting herself out and...
Brigitte clenches her teeth and beats her panic into submission: no. No. No. No. There is a way. There is a fucking way through this, out of this. There is a way. There is a way.
(improvise. Work it out, wriggle through the cracks)
There is a limit, Brigitte feels, of how much anyone can navigate rapidly-shifting situations. Dancing on the razor's edge tires anyone out, and she is no different.
She looks at what used to be her plan. It was that Sam would cure Ginger, they would cook some more monkshood and cure her, and if he was bitten, cure him. Nobody would know anything about anything.
Now, Brigitte reconsiders: Sam is out there being a far cry from a bare-minimum functional human being, Ginger is fucking dead and they're all stuck in the basement of her own home with nowhere to go, and no means to go nowhere with, no plan, and no practical application of their cure, and a fucking carcass of a creature modern science would break its back to explain and... and... and...
Full stop. Nothing before, nothing after. This is the point where everything stops, everything just stops for a moment. The world stops turning so Brigitte can wrap her head around what she can do, what she must do and what she can't not do.
Brigitte decides to break it down to requirements. She needs Sam semi-functional, or just enough to drive, because they need to get back to the greenhouse. She also needs to make sure nobody finds Gin (no it isn't) the lycanthrope. The best bet seems to be to bury it somewhere, and for that, they need the van, and for that, she needs Sam.
Brigitte tries to navigate around that particular requirement, but something inside of her confirms time and again that Sam is non-negotiable.
(I'll bet he is!)
Some parts of her like to think of his presence as a foregone conclusion.
Brigitte sits next to Sam, waiting for his breathing to slow down to normal, even breaths and counting up from twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen...
She watches him, this time without restraint. She's tired, in that moment, of hiding behind her hair, or behind the leverage of their common problem, and just wants to sit and stare at him.
Sam MacDonald. Botanist extraordinaire, main drug dealer of Bailey High who believes in lycanthropes. Who blasts Glassjaw when parking next to teachers. Who doesn't shirk from her, who doesn't belittle her, who doesn't act like a stuck up asshole around her, who doesn't... a slight flush colors her cheeks and thank fuck for all the blood coloring them already, who doesn't hound her.
(I do not think of you that way)
Don't you sometimes wish that you would, she wants to ask, but he can barely breathe to answer her. So Brigitte puts her hand on his waist and feels him tremble underneath her palm. Her fingers move in small circles, caressing him, as if trying to comfort him.
Poor Sam. Broken because he was there for her.
(you cannot try this alone)
(don't you sometimes wish that I could..?)