"Brigitte Snaps Back"
Chapter Thirteen
"The Self-Mutilation Diary"
Morning comes and goes, and the afternoon is when Brigitte stirs from sleep by the sudden impact of hunger clawing at her stomach. She feels sore from her head down to her toes, as if her entire body is encased in a cast from within... but especially pronounced in a particular spot between her legs. She finds herself drooling on a stray clump of her own hair, her body in a strange position, limbs bent and tangled up in those of the warm body sleeping soundly next to her. She looks and sees Sam's work bench, the one in his room. She doesn't recall for the fraction of an instant, and then where the night went comes back to her in a blinding flash of condensed recollection.
She manages to discreetly pull her limbs to a starting configuration. She then gets off the bed and looks around for her clothes.
The realization that whatever she had, meaning the clothes that were on her back are in the living room, and the rest are resting in a duffel bag in the back of his van.
She huffs in frustration, and reaches to scratch on the bandages on her arm. They come unraveled, having held together by stray strands and little else by that point. Brigitte looks at her arm. The cuts are still there, three parallel lines, like the marks that were on Ginger, and they're swollen, but they've already scabbed to the point where Brigitte knows they're ready to start flaking.
Brigitte goes for her bag, lying on the floor next to Sam's bedside and pulls up her diary and pen. She opens the grid.
A blank in her head for a moment. What day is it? Is it still day?
God, how long have they..?
Brigitte shakes her head. Problem for later. Prioritize.
(the Curse, Sam & me, food, sex, life)
NOVEMBER 9, 3:13 PM – INCISION, says the page. Brigitte crawls on her knees towards the bed. Luckily for her, Sam's wrist watch is still on him, with a few strands of her hair caught in the crown. She feels a blush decorating her face when she remembers the moment she felt the strands got plucked from her scalp.
NOVEMBER 10, 2:54 PM – HEALED TO SCABS
"Shit." She murmurs.
Immediately, she wonders if she cut deep enough. It's the knives, she knows, the reason why they didn't use Pam's in the first place. They cut too easily, so you don't try to cut as deep as you usually do. The reason why Ginger chose them for the marks in her palm... at first.
Brigitte stands up. Sam is sleeping contentedly. For a moment, a brief moment if brief moments were eternities, she considers grabbing her bag, her clothes, his van and getting out. Just driving out of Bailey Downs, out of the well-lit black hole that is all she knows of home or anything else.
The moment passes and she's still there.
Brigitte crawls back into bed. She lies there, staring at him, trying to figure out what makes him tick.
(you only ever did right by me)
Sam wakes up then. His eyes open slowly, and as they adjust to the light, he catches her staring.
"What time is it..?" he mumbles.
"Around three."
"In the morning?"
"Afternoon. We... were up all night."
"Come to think of it," Sam rubs his eyes, "Yeah, I do remember something like that."
"We have a problem."
Sam blinks a couple of times to clear the last of the crust from his eyes.
"I was wondering when you'd say that." He says.
NOVEMBER 10, 4:00 PM – RE-INCISION
"Here's how it works," Brigitte says as she sits down on the bed, an X-Acto knife and two syringes in hand. She crosses her legs. "We cut. We bleed some. We shoot up."
"Exactly how much some do we bleed?"
"We'll wing it."
"I feel safer already."
"Safety's overrated. We check every two hours."
"I don't think we can always redress the cuts every two hours." Sam says, "Make it four."
"Four. But we check. And in the meantime, we have to come up with a better alternative. Something that'll work."
"If anything works. I mean, we're stuck in nowhere-land with this one."
(not if you're stuck with me)
NOVEMBER 13, 2:30 PM – HEALED. SOME SCARRING.
NOVEMBER 13, 2:40 PM – INCISION
The Bailey Downs public library has an extensive section on botany, which Brigitte appreciates. Her card is still valid, and even though the resident librarian whose shift she coincides with gives her a look every time she comes in, there are perks to being the local spook story. The Countess Carmilla of Suburbia.
Brigitte ignores the strange looks that follow her, the sneering of concerned soccer moms and the occasional hiss from a Trina sucking up to someone she'll use for something that'll require more than just looks.
She gets to her section, picks out all the books she can find on aconites, and proceeds to raid the mythology section. The library is somewhat lacking there, but she finds a few good ones on werewolves. She dumps them on a random desk and heads towards the medical section.
Most of those, she's already read cover to cover. But there is a particular section she's never paid much attention to before: medical history. She grabs whatever she can find that looks even remotely medieval, and returns to her pile of books.
She sits down and sighs.
She hopes that salvation is in between the lines somewhere.
NOVEMBER 16, 3:14 PM – HEALED. LESS SCARRING.
NOVEMBER 16, 3:30 PM – INCISION.
Sam is used to a lot of things by now: the occasional come-on from a bored housewife or the son of a family with a lucratively large garden trying as obviously as possible to score some weed from him. Occupational hazard, they come with the territory. Also coming with the territory is the seasonal nature of his work: he can keep pretty much anything alive in the greenhouse, but out in Bailey Downs, there's progressively less he can do. He instead relies mainly on his weed this time of year, that and whatever minimum-wage bullshit the municipality will give him. There's a variety of plants at the greenhouse that he intends to sell, in particular three bonsai trees, the third of which is a miniature he's painstakingly carved into shape from an unsuspecting birch. It's a con job, but he's done it before. He's used to the back-and-forth of the tough sell.
He's not used to seeing missing posters with Jason McCardy's face on them all over the suburb, and to the dull ache inside of him when he thinks he knows exactly where the poor bastard is: six feet under.
He's not used to watching Brigitte cut him with hands delicate enough that it's almost as if she wants to caress his skin, not split it with a blade.
He'll never get used to seeing her on the verge of tears, finding it in herself to pull back and lock it all up inside.
NOVEMBER 19, 4:45 PM – HEALED. LESS SCARRING.
NOVEMBER 19, 5:02 PM – INCISION.
The woman standing at the counter of the pharmacy sizes them up. The guy, she knows as the gardener. She's bought weed from him once, too, but she knows he doesn't remember. The girl, she knows as the daughter of that killer, Pamela Fitzgerald. They're both standing there, looking at her expectantly, waiting for her to check out the small mountain of syringes they intend to walk out of there with.
They both have dark circles under their eyes. The girl's hair is a messy curtain obscuring most of her face. They're pale, even for this time of year, and she sees that one of his eyes is badly bloodshot.
"What are you going to do with all these?" she asks.
"We're gonna go back to my place, put on some goth music, and shoot up heroin from each and every one of them." Sam snaps.
Brigitte kicks him in the shin. He doesn't flinch.
"At least," Sam adds with an annoyed sigh, ", according to you. I need them for the plants. I've bought them here before."
She's not convinced. But she sees no reason to interfere with their imminent demise – they seem to be doing a fine job of it already.
NOVEMBER 22, 9:20 AM – HEALED. MINIMAL SCARRING.
They stare at the page.
"Now what?" Sam asks.
"We increase the dose." Brigitte replies.
NOVEMBER 22, 10:00 AM – INCISION. DOSEx2
They put the syringes on the bedside and remove the belts from their arms. Nothing happens at first, just the overall dizziness brought on by routine anxiety. They look at each other, expecting a reaction, looking for signs of something going wrong.
Sam finds Brigitte's hand. He's about to squeeze it when Brigitte makes a choking sound and reaches for him. He doesn't get it, and a second later, white-hot pain erupts from the needle's entry point and starts spreading throughout his veins.
Brigitte screams. She opens her mouth and sinks her teeth into Sam's shoulder, canines piercing through the fabric. It's Sam's turn to scream, but before he can, he sees her raise her fist and present it to him. He can't see straight, his field of vision is narrowing and so he takes the offer.
They sit there, biting into each other, shaking, trying to see through the pain only to see that there's nothing to see but the poison running through veins. The other poison, the lesser poison, burns brightly at the point of blindness.
NOVEMBER 25, 1:00 PM – HEALED. SCARRED BADLY.
Sam has an idea. He starts looking up and calling craft stores. It's a shot in the dark, a long shot at that, but at this point, he'll take anything.
NOVEMBER 25, 1:15 PM – INCISION. DOSEx2
The boredom proves too much for the teens of Bailey Downs, so they cope by organizing a little lynch mob that comes knocking on Sam's door, or rather, throwing pebbles at windows and screaming goading taunts at Sam's door.
The first sounds reach them just as they're cutting. Before Sam can say anything, Brigitte licks his wounds, smearing his blood onto her face. Then, without a word, she rushes out of the room, right to where she knows the machete is, and from there, she walks right out the front door. She stands in front of the horde, blood running down her arm, belt dangling from her wrist, scars lining her flesh and most importantly, machete in hand. Sam emerges a few seconds later with the shears that still carry the blood of Jason McCardy.
"You don't want to be here." Brigitte says.
They don't dare. They stand around awkwardly for a short while, and then decide that they do not want to throw their lives away, 'cause the survivor Fitz is crazy, everyone knows that – serves that drug dealing cherry hound right for fucking with Trina. They deserve each other.
Brigitte turns away and goes back inside, her mind furiously working the problem, because she heard their hearts beating in the silence of their awkward hesitation.
NOVEMBER 28, 1:00 PM – HEALED. SCARRED.
NOVEMBER 28, 1:15 PM – INCISION. DOSEx2
They start to stay away from meat altogether. Sam goes down to Sushi Mike's, a small Chinese place a little ways down Leland Street, and strikes a deal with them. Their take-out egg noodles come with a plethora of vegetables, so he pays them a lump sum to have them deliver exactly these, and nothing else, three times a day. No questions asked. For a place that's pretty much a tomb during the week, they welcome the sudden income.
The greenhouse quickly fills up with the cardboard boxes of noodles, every ounce of the insides cleaned out by increasingly ravenous tongues searching for something a little more juicy.
After the second day, Brigitte can't even taste it anymore. She eats it, it keeps her body fed, and that's enough.
NOVEMBER 30, 10:45 AM – HEALED. NO SCARRING.
"Shit." Brigitte huffs with frustation.
"We can't up the dose again. It's bad enough as it is."
"No. But we can try something else."
"Such as?"
"Take off your clothes."
NOVEMBER 30, 11:30 AM – BLOODLETTING. DOSEx2.
Sam fills up the tub. Once it's done, he adds bath salts. He strips. Brigitte walks into the bathroom already naked.
"So how is this going to work?"
"We're going to cut." Brigitte says, hands clasped in front of her, "We're going to sit down, and we're going to bleed."
"But why the tub?"
"Easier to clean up."
Sam doesn't say anything.
The porcelain is worn, and it's a bit more rugged than Brigitte would've liked, lacking the smooth, factory-made perfection of the one she's used to, the one in the home that's gone now. Sam gets in first and then, a somewhat nervous Brigitte slips in, her back turned to him. She brings the X-Acto knife around, the second one they're dulling, lifts her arm and starts cutting.
Sam stares at her shoulders, twitching slightly with every incision.
DECEMBER 2, 9:00 AM – HEALED. MINIMAL SCARRING.
DECEMBER 2, 10:00 AM – BLOODLETTING. DOSEx2.
It's the pitch-black of the greenhouse, as if the night has found a way to get in and smother every corner of the place. The bed they share lets them know they're not alone in the dark.
"We used to play this game." Brigitte says, "The hanging game. We were learning to tie nooses, but until we could tie proper ones, we were practicing with regular knots. Kid stuff. We'd stand on top of chairs, deliver a last speech, and then we'd slip the noose on and jump with pride. Go out with our heads held high."
Sam's breathing is steady. Brigitte likes to think he's asleep.
"And one day, mom caught us. I had just tied the perfect noose. I still do that sometimes, tie slipknots. They're not as good as that one."
Hesitation. Sam breathes.
"Ginger loved it. All of it. She thought it was funny that I was proud of my noose, enough to tell Pam she was being a bitch about it. I don't know if I did."
It's safe to cry when nobody can see it.
(go a shade orange so that nobody'll see your dark circles and know you've been doing god-knows-what with god-knows-who)
"Sam... what's the point of life? I thought you'd know, y'know? I thought you could tell me... but you're dying, just like me."
A sob, barely contained.
Sam stares at the ceiling.
DECEMBER 3, 4:00 PM – HEALED. NO SCARRING.
DECEMBER 3, 5:00 PM – BLOODLETTING. DOSEx2.
"...as Bailey Downs in 1915, three years after Ontario reached its final borders. The settlement was initially conceived as a continuation of the trading route it used to be, however, the prevalent legends and hearsay regarding Fort Bailey's fate resulted in a shortage of labor. The decision to turn Bailey Downs into a settlement was made unilaterally by the construction company, Wallace & Sons Co."
Brigitte pushes the book aside. She refused to believe that lycanthropes had set fire to Fort Bailey way back when.
DECEMBER 4, 3:30 PM – HEALED.
Brigitte just wants to scream.
(and now I am you)