At long last I come bearing an update. xD
HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY PLUTO <3 I really meant to get this ready in time to be posted for your big day but I am a slacker who forgets birthdays. OTL
{06}
With Hugo gone, Brian began to feel somewhat lost in the crowd. It didn’t help that several of the shifters remembered him, while he – who had spent his one night with them months before dwelling on leaving Hugo and making no effort to remember faces – fumbled for names. He tried to casually ask what Julia wanted with Hugo, only to be told that it was personal.
He escaped the crowd to return to the trucks for a drink and watched at a distance, taking his first opportunity to study a crowd with his new vampiric night-vision. It was disorienting; the colors blurred and some people were brighter than others for no distinguishable reason. Age, gender and distance didn’t seem to make a difference.
Someone broke from the groups and approached him. It was a short-haired man, probably in his early thirties. Despite a youthful figure, the lines between his eyes made him look worn, and there was a droop to the corners of his mouth.
“You’re the rebel who came to Forks last spring, right?” the man said, closing in. “The one Hugo left with?”
“Yeah, that’s me. Brian.”
“Tom.” He didn’t offer his hand, just looked around. “I was looking for Hugo. Is he at the infirmary?”
“I don’t know. I guess so. Julia came and got him. What’s going on?”
His hopes of someone providing a hint were dashed as Tom shifted his weight restlessly. “That’s probably for him to tell you. If he’s already gone I’ll catch up with him later. Sorry to bother you.”
Brian stopped him before he could escape. “Hey, how did you recognize me? I’m pretty sure I’ve never met you.”
“Louisa told us– me– about you. I’m her brother-in-law. Um. Was.”
“Oh, Hugo did mention…” Brian stopped. His pulse began to race. “What do you mean,
was? Is Louisa okay? Why are you out here?”
“Louisa’s okay. I mean, I hope…as far as I know.” He swallowed heavily. Brian saw him start to blink, and his voice began to crack. “Ali, her sister, my wife–”
“You don’t have to say it,” Brian said quietly, the water he’d just chugged sloshing queasily in his stomach as he watched Tom struggle to take a deep breath. After that he looked away, not wanting the man to feel like his grief was on display.
“You guys spooked Holden,” he said, even though Brian hadn’t asked for elaboration. “He’s using violence now. They almost got me, too.” He pulled down his collar, and Brian winced to see a long, still-healing wound. It barely missed Tom’s throat. “They were rushing. They got careless.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.” He bit the words off, not giving them a chance to waver. “The pack knows more. They’ll fill you in.”
“Where’s Louisa?”
“Married off to one of his flunkies.” Tom’s grief cracked for a second, revealing anger. “She should still be alive. She hasn’t ended up out here yet, anyway. Only the dead and dying ever get thrown over the wall. More dead than alive, lately.” He wiped his eyes roughly.
“People must be noticing all the disappearances–”
“Holden’s saying it’s vampires. That you and Hugo caused God to stop protecting us, and vampires are getting in. People are too scared to ask questions. They’re more in his control than before. You guys are here to get him out of power, right?”
“Yes. Us and anyone here who wants to help.”
“I’m going in with you.” He met Brian’s gaze with a stare that dared him to say no. Brian just nodded.
“Glad to have you on our team.” He set his cup of water down on the side of the truck. “Tom?”
“Huh?”
“I need to know. Who’s in the infirmary that they wanted Hugo to see?”
- - -
Ten minutes later he saw Hugo come striding through the crowd. To Brian’s vision, he was a harsh flare of color, painfully overwhelming the other people. His jaw was clenched and shaking.
“Hugo?”
Hugo ignored him, climbing the side of the truck to grab one of the boxes they’d taken from the Redwood hospital.
“Hugo.” Brian tried again.
“Which box did we put the antibiotics in? And the saline, I remember it being in the back–”
“Hugo!”
Finally, he turned around, his expression twisted. Brian put his arms around him wordlessly, and he felt his body wilt into him.
“The bastard hurt my mom,” Hugo whispered, his fists twisting up Brian’s shirt. “She always trusted him and he–”
I know, Brian wanted to say, but this wasn’t the time. Hugo didn’t need more death on his mind. Instead, he asked, “Do you know why?”
“Not yet. Fernando said after I help Tess treat her he’ll fill me in on what he knows.” He gulped down desperate breaths.
“Want me there?”
“No. Sorry. It’s just easier.”
“Don’t be sorry, just wanted to ask,” Brian said, running his knuckles down Hugo’s back.
“Thanks.” Hugo rested his face against Brian’s neck, and he felt his body regaining some strength, limbs straightening, breathing returning to something closer to normal. “I’ll come find you later,” he said. “Okay?”
Brian let him go. “Okay.”
With a brittle smile, Hugo grabbed the supplies he wanted and darted away with them.
- - -
‘Later’ came and went. After the adrenaline rush of the arrival wore off, almost everyone went back to sleep. Brian encouraged it; they would need all their energy for the following day’s plans, even though he found his own sleep restless and unforthcoming. It was late morning by the time he and the team from San Francisco met with the leaders in the reservation, among them Fernando and Julia, who were now co-leaders of the pack. They crowded into Fernando’s cabin, but even the cramped, stifling room couldn’t distract Brian from the fact that someone was missing.
“Where’s Hugo?” Andrea asked.
“I don’t know.” Brian cast a glance toward Fernando, who shrugged. “He can’t still be working, can he?”
“I don’t think so. They were finished when I stopped at the infirmary after my patrol. We talked a little and he just said he wanted some time alone. I told him when we’d be meeting and left. Wanted to give him some privacy.”
“Did you talk about what happened to his mom?”
The others from his team all looked at him in surprise. “What about his mom?” Isaac said.
“She got hurt somehow. Bad, I heard. Holden went after her.”
“What exactly happened?” Jou demanded at Fernando.
“I can’t…” His expression grew more severe. “I promised Hugo I wouldn’t go talking about it to you guys until he said it was okay. He didn’t want you to worry.”
“How are we supposed to know if we should be worried about him or not if he won’t let you talk?” Yeni complained.
“It could be important to the mission, if Holden was involved,” Andrea said.
“Just tell them. It’s not like it’s a big secret Holden’s turning violent,” said another of the reservation’s inhabitants, a man named Miles. He was human, not a shapeshifter, and was one of the people Holden had used to help build his wall before leaving them outside.
“Well, no, but this is personal for him,” Fernando said.
“All the more reason you should tell us so Hugo doesn’t have to,” Yeni said, and her teammates rumbled with agreement.
Brian didn’t add his voice to the mix. He slipped quietly out the door amid the fray.
At the infirmary, he tapped the door rather than knock, just like he’d tapped Hugo’s back door the day he’d been shot. After a moment of no answer, he cracked it open and said, “It’s me. Can I come in?”
A small voice answered him. “Yeah.”
Infection mixed with antiseptic made him grimace when he walked in. Dead bodies and decay were bad enough in his opinion, but endurable. Sickness was worse. Its smell meant someone was still alive and suffering. Hugo sat by the occupied bed with his hands clasped, and Brian remembered his own days of sitting by his father in the truck, watching him grow sicker.
He sneaked a glance at the woman in the bed. He’d only seen Hugo’s mother once, briefly, waiting for her to leave the yard. She’d been pale, like most of Forks’ residents, but otherwise seemed strong and healthy. Her face was almost unrecognizable, with hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes. Her hair, the same color as Hugo’s, hung lank and dull. He’d assumed she might have a cut like Tom’s, but her neck was untouched.
Silent, he sat down on the floor by Hugo’s chair. It wasn’t long before Hugo said, “I’m sorry about missing the meeting.”
“You haven’t missed it, it’s still going on.”
“Sorry for being late then.”
“Don’t be. Me and Fernando are the leaders, and we both know you’re busy–”
“I’m not busy.” Hugo hung his head. “She just needs someone to keep watch for complications. I could have asked any of Tess’s students for that. I just couldn’t go to the meeting. If I went in there now, I’m pretty sure I’d change my mind.”
“About the coup?”
“About the coup, about my limits, about everything!” he exploded, only to wince and dart his eyes toward the bed. Then he folded his arms over his face and mumbled between them: “You can’t put me in charge of a war council right now, Brian.”
Brian pulled his knees to his chest, where a spot of cold had begun to spread again. “This isn’t just about your mom, is it,” he said, staring at the bed.
“I wasn’t worried before. I didn’t think anything could make me hurt someone, but out there during the attack, at the end, it started to get easy." He tightened his grip on himself. "I started wanting to shoot, because I knew it would get rid of the threat.”
The cold got worse. Brian had seen the horror in Hugo’s face in the beginning. Those had been healthy vampires, who didn’t die easily. He had also seen the horror fade at the end and had known his friend would eventually have to confront the conflict of being able to shoot even when the enemy wore a human face. He’d intended to talk to him about it when they arrived and had a moment alone. Then Julia had appeared.
“You were protecting your friends from things you knew were monsters. It’s different,” he said, knowing there was very little difference at all. Once the fear of pulling the trigger at a human shape was gone, it became easier to do, no matter what was in front of it. He didn’t want Hugo to know that. He’d lie until the end of the world to hide that from him.
“I don’t want it to go that way. I
don’t. But if I saw Holden right now…”
He wished his voice wouldn’t shake, but it did. “I know.”
Slowly Hugo lowered his arms, fingers formerly clenched falling open. “I’m sorry. You’re the last person who should have to listen to me be like this.”
“No, Hugo.” He reached up to rest his hand on his leg. “I get it. Let me stay with you.”
The words awoke something. Hugo suddenly stood up, pushed the chair away and sank to the floor beside him, clutching his arm. It was a silent, bleeding thank you, and Brian was glad to hold onto his arm back. “Will we wake her up, being here?”
“No. She’s drugged for now.”
“You want to talk about it?”
Hugo nodded, but the words didn’t come for quite awhile. When they finally did, every one of them was sharp. “She wasn’t always this bad. When they first found her, she told Fernando and everyone what happened. I guess after we left, there was a small uprising. People got worried, finding out they’d been lied to about you being dead. They started asking questions and demanding answers that weren’t just about God’s will. Rumors went around that the police killed us for rebelling.”
“Gee, I wonder where those came from.”
He cracked a smile that faded just as quickly. “Holden managed to spin it, of course. Said the rumors were stupid, that he’d been tricked by unfaithfuls among his police force, and you had used me as a hostage, then kidnapped me. Mom knew it wasn’t true, because I left her a note that I’d gone willingly. She knew he was lying.”
“Must have been hard for her, realizing he could lie,” Brian said, remembering how Hugo had told him the church was what had saved his mother’s will to live.
“It was. It got worse when Holden claimed he sent out scouts who found us dead.”
“What?”
Hugo nodded. “It was after a month, I guess. When he realized people were still wary of him. You and I had become kind of legends, like how the rebels were legends. He knew some people admired the rebels for fighting, so he told us you had all fallen from arrogance. It worked then, why not tell everyone you and I were stupid kids struck down by God too? If we died pointlessly and alone, nobody would idolize us.”
“Your mom didn’t want to believe him, did she?”
“No.”
“That’s not easy, having one of your most loyal followers question you,” Brian said. “Makes people wonder why they’re asking questions and if they’ve got a good reason.”
“Exactly,” Hugo said.
“So he threw her over the wall?”
“Not right then. I guess he had Mitch verify his story and claim to have seen our bodies. Mom demanded proof. Mitch said she should believe him because he said so. She refused and walked out.”
“Wait…walked out?” Brian blinked. “Like out of the house?”
“Yes.”
“Fundamentalist wives don’t usually do that, do they?”
“No. They don’t usually call their husbands lying assholes, either.” It was inappropriate, but Brian grinned, and were the woman in the bed awake, he would be offering her a high-five right that moment.
“Where’d she go?”
“Louisa’s sister Ali let her stay with them,” he replied, and Brian’s heart jumped. Suddenly, the words he heard were coming from far away. “She took Elizabeth, Lilli and Matty with her. Adam stayed with his dad. She didn’t tell Fernando much about staying there, just that she needed time to think. She wasn’t really okay…doubting Holden and leaving Mitch were rough, it tore her up.” His voice grew unsteady. “I guess she stayed inside a lot. A few weeks ago, when it was just her there, Holden went to see her. He talked to her until she buckled. I’m sure he knew all the right things to say. He got her to agree to go to the church when there wasn’t a sermon on, to just go talk to God if she wouldn’t talk to him, and when she did, Holden’s guards jumped her.”
“What did they do?”
“Knocked her out. Cut her legs. They left her to bleed out.”
“Or be found by vampires,” Brian said quietly, wondering if Holden knew her body had vanished, if that had been why they went after Tom and Ali so ruthlessly.
A low growl punctuated the silence, and Brian felt him shaking. “The wolves found her before any vampires did, got her here…but the cuts were dirty, and an infection they couldn’t fight got in. I saw it…Tess is some kind of miracle worker to have fought it this long with the medicine they have.”
“Will she be okay?”
“I don’t know. Redwood’s hospital had better supplies. Stronger stuff, stored better. So…I hope.” His voice cracked. “She woke up once. I don’t think she knew it was me.”
Brian gripped his hand. “She knew.”
“I don’t know–”
“She did.”
Hugo swallowed hard and leaned into him. “I– I didn’t think Holden would ever have a reason to hurt her, you know? I was so stupid. I know what he was ready to do to us, I don’t know why I figured she’d be okay.”
“Because she was one of his best followers. Anyone would think she’d be safe.”
“If she wasn’t…I can’t imagine who would be.” When Brian didn’t answer, Hugo continued, “I asked Fernando how many other people they’ve found. He didn’t want to tell me. Do you know?”
After a second of hesitation, Brian nodded. “I don’t know how many, but I think Holden got more desperate with time. More have been dead instead of just injured, lately.” He forced optimism into his voice. “But there’s survivors, too, and they said they’re pretty sure Louisa’s okay. Plus they’re going to help us.”
“Did you recognize any of the survivors?” He hesitated beyond a second that time, and Hugo’s brows tilted further down. “You did, didn’t you?”
“Right now’s not really the best time.”
“Brian, it’s okay. You can tell me. I’ll find out, anyway.”
Brian wrapped both his hands around Hugo’s. “They killed Ali,” he said. “They tried to kill Tom, but he survived. He’s here.”
With a sudden choke, Hugo lowered his head. The room was quiet for a long time, the air split only by ragged breathing, and Brian didn’t have to wonder how much anger and pain and fear were hidden under the silence. He already knew.
He held onto Hugo’s hands as hard as he could.
- - -
Notes: Yaaay feelings. /o/
Short chapter this time. I ended up with one looooong chapter, and ended up deciding to chop it in half, because the whole tone of this chapter is sort of at odds with the next one, and they felt weird being in the same one. Better to let this be the quiet one before things heat back up again in the next. Which is ridiculously long.
Despite grief, depression and disillusionment with her only source of strength, Rachael Smith is done with taking bullshit okay.