And Then There Was Fic
Title: Five Times Dean Winchester Met Brigitte Fitzgerald (and One Time He Didn't)
Author: missbaxter (fox_in_the_library on Dreamwidth)
Characters: Dean Winchester, Brigitte Fitzgerald
Rating: Call it R, for Dean's occasional lapses into swearing and political incorrectness
Summary: Supernatural/Ginger Snaps crossover. Takes place both pre and post Ginger Snaps II (could be read as slightly AU), and pre-series Supernatural.
Disclaimer: I wish I could claim credit for coming up with such awesome characters and stories. Sadly, I cannot. I do not own, and am making no profit off of, either Dean Winchester or Brigitte Fitzgerald.
1. He's in an alley in Detroit, wiping blood off his face when he hears a rustling, scuffling sound coming from where the dead end closes down into darkness. He kicks the redcap's body out of the way, hopes to Christ it's not a pack of them, and slinks down the alley. When he lunges forward, swinging the butt of the shotgun out and down, the scream he hears is definitely not a redcap's.
And then it's “Oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap”, because he flicks his flashlight on and realizes that he's clocked a girl, huddled up against the wall in some sort of cardboard nest, and man, that is so not on because Dean Winchester only hits girls when they're possessed.
2. Another beat-up roadside motel, this time in Vermont, where he's hunting a ghoul. It's snowing like hell and so cold the room key sticks to his fingers as he tries to jam it into the lock. He shoves his way in, slams the door back against the blast, turns round and whoa, there's a half-naked girl on the bed.
The words come out of his mouth on reflex, “Now this is what I call customer service.”
She looks up, the needle in her right hand resting on her bare thigh, the track marks on arms and legs visible. “Really?” she says. “Take one step closer, and this is what I call assault.”
She smiles, and it's a mirror of Dean's own vicious grin.
There's a nasty little pause in which no one is innocent.
“You know what,” says Dean, “I think I've got the wrong room.”
He grabs his duffel bag and stomps back out into the New England winter to go yell at the night clerk.
3. The third time, he's in Mercy General Hospital in Portland, Oregon, with a second-degree burn from a ghost he let get too close, and he looks over at the girl sitting on the outskirts of the tv room, and is sure he's seen her somewhere before. She's half buried beneath a puke yellow sweatshirt and a shoulder-length tangle of black hair, but her pointed face and sour mouth are definitely familiar. He saunters across the room (as much as a man in hospital scrubs can saunter) and turns on the Winchester charm.
She ignores him, but he can tell she's not actually watching the tv, and when she wrenches herself up from the couch and out of the room, he follows.
“C'mon,” he says, trotting along beside her as they pass the nurse's station. “If we were on the outside, I'd buy you a beer and ask you what a nice girl like you was doing in a place like that.”
She keeps walking, facing forward. “But as it is, you're going to offer to buy me really bad coffee from the cafeteria, and then ask me which terminal disease I have?”
“Something like that. I mean, if I guess wrong, I'll have to buy you a donut as well.” He smiles at her. She doesn't smile back. “No offense, but I don't really have time for this.”
“Sweetheart, it's a hospital. You've got nothing but time.Unless you really, really wanted to go to that communal arts and crafts session on at three. Somehow I can't see you there, but hey, maybe you really love pipe cleaners and googly eyes, I don't know.”
“No.” she says, “You don't know. And right now, what I really really want? Is to be somewhere where you, preferably, are not.”
He stands by the nurse's station and watches her hunched, fragile shoulders glower their way down the corridor. It's only when he passes by an open door, late the next afternoon, and sees her sitting on a bed, that he knows where he knows her from.
“Hey.” he says to her that evening, coming into her room with a cardboard tray. “I brought you that coffee.”
She looks up from where she's been trimming her fingernails onto the bed cover, and Dean thinks that's actually kind of gross, but sits down next to her anyways.
“Figured I'd better make up for busting in on you that one time.”
“What?”
“You don't remember? You, me, a crappy motel outside of Bennington?”
“I guess you're just not all that memorable. Sorry.”
He's bizarrely hurt by this. “Whatever.”
He proffers the coffee anyways, and waves a paper bag at her. “Boston cream or honey cruller?”
The look on her face says why are you still here, but after a moment she gingerly pokes about in the bag and chooses the cruller.
He bites into the other donut, and says, through a mouthful of cheap cream and cheaper icing, “So what are you in for? You coming off smack?”
“No.”
But he remembers the needle and the bruises. “You were taking something.”
She takes a mouse-sized bite of donut.
“Don't tell me I just wasted a donut on someone who's going to go barf it back up again as soon as I leave the room.”
“Don't tell me someone set you on fire by accident.”
He can't help it, he does laugh at that one, because hey, he can appreciate a smart insult when he hears it.
“I'm Larry Talbot,” he says. “What's your name?”
“Brigitte Fitzgerald.”
“So, Brigitte, what brings you to this fine medical establishment?”
She almost smiles. “Well, Larry, the doctors say that I have severe malnutrition coupled with severe mental issues.”
“Yeah? What would you say?”
“Lycanthropy.” She shoots him a quick look. “But then, anyone named Lawrence Talbot should know all about that.”
He looks at the fingernail clippings, lying sharp and dark on the pale green hospital sheet, and at the way her jaw looks slightly too big for her face, like she's got too many teeth in there, and begins to have a bad feeling about this one. He tries half-heartedly to get some more information out of her, but truth be told, it's a relief when the nurse comes in for the ward check and clears him out. He's a hunter, he should be following this up, should be checking calenders to see when the next full moon is, should be scoping out the ground, but you know what, silver bullets and a sawed-off shotgun are gonna be a bitch to smuggle past security, and once, just for once, maybe this can be someone else's problem.
He checks himself out first thing in the morning, and tries not to think about Brigitte Fitzgerald at all, ever. And when he looks at the Portland Tribune online the morning after the full moon, there's nothing that looks suspicious and he tells himself that she was just a nutjob after all. But he doesn't really believe it.
4. It's a sick, humid day in Ohio, and he's standing in the aisle of a Kwik Craft in a strip mall outside of Cincinnati, trying to decide how much copper wire to buy, when she comes round the corner with two fistfuls of dried flowers. It's the last place he'd expect to see her and the last thing he'd expect to see her with. Maybe all of those happy craft sessions at the hospital paid off after all. Or maybe not, because she freezes in mid-step when she sees him.
“What are you doing here?” they say in unison. With anyone else it would break the tension. It doesn't, and Dean decides that the best defense, as always, is offense, and holds up the spool of copper wire.
“I'm building a bomb. What are you doing?”
She holds up the purple weedy-looking things. “Flower arranging.”
He doesn't believe her for a second, but he moves aside to let her get past to the cashier. Then he shoves the wire back onto the shelf and follows her out of the store. She's walking across the parking lot heading for the solitary bus shelter when he catches up to her. She huffs out a sigh and an eyeroll when he doesn't go away, and it's just like high school. Anyone else would say 'except for the bit where he's hanging out with a werewolf', but for Dean, this is actually just like high school, werewolves included.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he says.
She looks tired and drab standing next to the bus stop, so when he pulls out of the parking lot, he rolls up beside her.
“Hey, Brigitte? Want a ride?”
She gives him the address of a really crummy motel downtown, and he watches her as they shuffle through noon-hour traffic.
“So.” he says as they idle at a red light. “What are you running from?”
“What makes you think that I'm running from anything?”
“It's pretty obvious. Lousy motels, shooting weird botanical shit...”He doesn't say 'lycanthropy', but it's there, unspoken between them as he pulls into the heat-hazed parking lot of the motel.
“You don't want help, that's fine, but I gotta tell you, Brigitte, being a werewolf sucks. You can't hold down a job, you turn into a ravenous beast once a month, and finally, well, you get shot by someone like me.”
He expects her to bolt out of the car, but she sits there instead, still buckled into her seatbelt, looking like she's about fourteen.
“It's not once a month.” she says finally.
“Huh?”
“It's not once a month. It's every month, every day, every hour, and it's getting faster. And when you turn, you don't turn back.”
And there went everything he thought he knew about werewolves, but he tries to keep processing the information, because she's still speaking.
“It's a virus. The monkshood suppresses it, slows it down, but it won't stop it.”
“Well, no, only thing that'll stop it's a silver bullet.” he says.
“Thank you for that supportive insight.” But despite the caustic tone, she's twisting her fingers around in her lap.
“Who'd you lose?”
“What?”
“The werewolf. When it bit you, who else did it get?”
She looks at him, quickly turns to look out the window.
“My sister.”
“That sucks.”
“You have no idea.”
“I've got a brother,” he says finally. “He's out in California. I don't talk to him so much these days.”
“But you think about him.”
“All the time.”
“So, is this what you do?” she says after a space.
“What?”
“Hunt werewolves?”
“Among other things.”
“Are you hunting me?”
“Not yet.”
They sit in the car for a while longer without speaking, and when she finally unbuckles her seatbelt and opens her door, he reaches over and catches her bony arm.
“Brigitte. Wait.”
He writes his phone number down neatly on the back of a fake ID badge that's too scuffed to be used anymore, and hands it to her.
“Call me,” he says, “Any time. If you want.”
“Thanks.” she says.
But she never does.
5. It's October, and Dean's hanging around the U.P. for a bit, taking a quick break from hunting to make cash through all of the usual slightly nefarious routes (and, yes, he knows the word 'nefarious', thank you very much.). He leaves the bar one night after midnight, and thinks he might go for a drive down to the lake, just because. There's a faint breeze, and water plashing, and the sharp smell of autumn leaves and a crescent moon glimmering down, and he lies on the Impala's warm hood and looks up, and for a minute, just a minute, he feels like any other guy in the state. And then something comes out of the woods at him, and he can't even get one fucking night off from this job, can he? He rolls off the car, hits the ground, has the gun drawn when the beast slides to a halt on the other side of the Impala. He knows it's a beast because he can see its legs from where he crouches, see a shaggy belly, hear the growl rumbling from deep within its chest as it stalks him around the car, around and around like some sort of fucking children's game. Screw that. He stands up and levels the handgun and when it turns towards him with a roar, thinks concretely that, shit, he really needed the shotgun for this one. Whoops. And when it comes barrelling over the hood at him, he does the only thing he can think of. He flings himself into his car, and twists the ignition and slams on the horn and the lights and hopes to Christ that the really big fucking mutant demon wolf from the darkest pits of Hell won't come through the windshield before he can get his ass out of there and gain some distance to arm up properly with. (Moral of the story number 723: never keep the entire arsenal in the trunk because at times like this it's a little inconvenient.)
It's circling the car, saliva stringing from a squat snout, narrow eyes peering at him through the headlight's glare (he wonders if it maybe hunts predominantly through scent.). Body like a giant bulldog's, with a heavy chest and forequarters balanced out by thick haunches, standing at least four feet at the shoulder, weight probably 180 on a good day. The steam from its breath glows gold in the headlights. Then it leaps from a standstill, and he hears the crunch of dented metal as it lands, and he has to stop himself from firing then and there because he doesn't care what kind of fugly monster The Littlest Hobo there is, nothing, nothing, fucks with his car like that. But there's only the windshield between them, and Dean slowly, very slowly (because you don't want to move quickly in front of a predator), raises the handgun and draws down on the beast's eye, yellow and cold where it watches him from less than a foot away. Slobber drips onto the windshield, its breath fogs the glass, and goddammit, he's about to shoot just because he can't stand the suspense when suddenly it's gone. Bounded off the hood and into the woods as if it had never been there.
This is probably abnormal, but hell if he's gonna stick around to figure out why, and he swings the Impala round as fast as he can and floors it on out of there, back to somewhere less hairy.
6. The sixth time, they're in the morgue in Jamestown, New York. He's a forensic anthropology grad student named Jack Williamson, and she's lying on a metal table, missing half her face. But he recognizes her all the same.
“What happened to her?” he asks.
The coroner is a soft-spoken man with gentle hands. “No one seems to be sure. Some sort of hunting accident, it sounds like.”
Dean watches him tuck the sheet in, shoring up the ruins.
“Yeah.” says Dean. “Hunting'll do that.”