Entry tags:

ginger

Ginger [Narrative]
Nightmares are the opposite of fun.
Sunday, July 14, 2013; Apt #308
R (language, dark themes, references to the attack from vamp!Peter)/In progress

She had a rough time of it since it was all over...

In the weeks following Jerry's demise and his fledglings return to their previous, human states, Ginger had gone through a lot of emotions. So many, in fact, that she was drowning in them for awhile. But a few days ago, she decided that she was done with that. She was done with running, she was done with avoiding, and she was just...done. And she'd told Peter as much. He doubted that it would work because things just don't work that way, issues don't go away just because you want them to—she had pointed out that it worked just fine when she decided the same thing over him dating Andrew when she'd first arrived. She hadn't reacted well at first, no, she lashed out and let her bitch flag fly, but after awhile, she gave up. After awhile, she couldn't fight any more. After awhile, she moved on.

Peter was her rock, here, in this place with all it's unpredictable crazy. So, when Jerry showed up and he started falling apart? Ginger had been quiet. She was scared. Scared for herself, for her friends, but more than anything she was scared for Peter. Because that fucking leech had it out for him, and he had been that way for almost all of Peter's life. And for what? For kicks. The sick fuck. She hated him. Hated him with a passion. But, as strong as that emotion was, that hate was not enough to drive her to do anything to change the situation once the asshole had stopped playing his bullshit little games and let his true identity be known.

The only part Ginger played in stopping Jerry was finding that stupid stake. Which was important and she wasn't downplaying that. And she had legitimate reason to be as terrified as she was. She'd been killed by him. Or was it the fledgling that used to be Charley's friend? She wasn't sure. Everything happened so fast and she was too busy being dead to make identification of her killer back home. It didn't matter, really, whether it was him or his minion. She died at his hand or his urge and she had reason to fear the leech the way she did.

It didn't make her feel any better, though. She still hated that she'd stayed hidden. She didn't help Peter. She didn't talk to any sense into him. She just...hid away in her apartment and hoped everyone else would take care of it soon. And then Peter went to him. Led himself right into a trap. And everything exploded after that.

She had a rough time of it since it was all over. Dreams. No, they weren't dreams, were they? They were too horrific to be dreams. Nightmares plagued her more than anything. That day she was headed to Purgatory to interview a new potential manager. She had thought herself safe in the daylight hours, but oh how wrong she had been. He stuck to the shadows and managed to jerk her to a shaded and dark alley and she was at his mercy. Mercy that, if she looked at the fact that she was at least left alive, he had given her. But then that thing that had been wearing Peter's face had hardly been a gentle creature. He'd still left his mark in her mind. And there was some part of her that would probably never truly be over the events that transpired that day. The words he'd uttered. The terrible, horrid words. Words she still vaguely wondered the validity of, even after hearing from Peter himself that they were false. It was hard to shake your former lover and current best friend telling you, you were better off dead.

Ginger had fallen into a routine as of late. She was mostly over her fear of the night. There would be a piece of it that always lingered there, she was certain of that, but considering he'd nabbed her in the daytime and the vast amount of daywalking vamps there were in Lawrence that could rip her apart in the blink of an eye if they so chose, it didn't seem like it mattered which time of day she was out, so she didn't see the point in wasting the energy of being afraid of any specific time of day. She did her work at Purgatory every day, made orders for new shipments of alcohol and other supplies as needed. Some days she spent time with her friends, like a movie night with Amy or coffee with Tahiri. But mostly, she was still staying to herself. She just had not found that social butterfly part of herself again yet. Ginger didn't like it, feeling this way, being so resigned and pulled into herself, but she just didn't have the social bug in her lately.

She had been doing a lot of cooking. Mostly, she just made some things she could freeze and save for later. Today, she'd shifted to deserts and made a big batch of sopapillas, far too many for her to eat on her own, so she delivered them to the complex kitchen. She hadn't done anything like that in awhile and at least people could enjoy them.

Since then, she'd come back up to her apartment and done mostly nothing of any real importance. She did the few dishes that were in the sink and cleaned up around the apartment, mostly just trying to stay busy and keep her mind off of other things. She watched a movie, tried to read for a little while, but when she realized she had gone over the same paragraph three times, she gave up and put the book away, deciding she was too distracted for it right now. She sighed and pressed her palms to her eyes, taking in a deep, steadying breath that she let out slowly before dropping her hands from her face and pushing herself up to head into the bathroom to run a very hot bath. What was more relaxing than that, right?

By the time she had gotten out from soaking her worries and troubles away, Ginger was too tired for anything else, opting for bed, despite the still relatively early hour. A good, long night's sleep was probably what she needed more than anything at this point.

However, that had been a fool's hope, because her sleep was anything but good or solid and nothing less than restless. First came the scene of her death, played out so perfectly that she wouldn't have known it not to be real, had she not jerked awake when, in the dream, she dropped to the floor, lying there dead. That one, however, was a bit of a recurring dream she'd had for some time now and was, somehow, easier to push away.

The next one was not so easy to ignore.

Peter, no, not Peter, the leech that wore his face, grabbing her and jerking her away from the safety of the sunny sidewalk and shoving her roughly into the alley.

The way he moved, the way he spoke, it was nothing like Peter, not the real Peter, not her Peter. But he sounded just like him and he wore his face and that was too hard to ignore.

The way he mocked her feelings for him, how he had stroked her cheek, staining her skin with the blood he'd taken from her.

It was all so real. Too real. Too real to be real and she jerked awake again, like someone who was having the sensation of a falling dream. She lay there, still as a statue, staring up at dark nothingness on the ceiling of her bedroom for a few minutes, mentally trying to collect herself. But she couldn't take the dark. She reached over and flicked on the lamp next to the bed and sat up, leaning her back against the pile of pillows behind her, knees drawing up slightly towards her chest. She let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding and stared at the wall in front of her, as if it held any answers for her. She didn't know how to make all of this go away, but she still hoped her decision from the other day held out. It wouldn't be immediate. Her acceptance of Andrew, and of Peter dating Andrew hadn't been instant either, even after she'd made that decision. It would just take time. That's all. Not enough time had passed just yet.

Ginger turned the t.v. on with the remote next to her bed and scanned idly through the channels, trying to find something mindless, settling on some rerun of American Dad that she had seen a few weeks ago. Tomorrow, she decided, she would talk to Jacen again. But for now, she would just distract herself for awhile.