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Jenny sighed almost serenely, pushing back a strand of graying ginger hair behind one ear. it had been some time since she'd managed to pull that stunt, and yet, she'd executed it with flawless timing. And now, Caroline, sweet Caroline, was losing her s**t.

Sometimes it was hard to believe they'd ever lived past the seventies, let alone gotten this far.

"Caaarroooline!" Jenny called, sing-song, her grating voice echoing out too-loud over the screeching sound of machines. "Where areeee you, sister mine!"

Jenny did not, in fact, abide. Instead, she wrapped gnarled fingers around a nearby barstool and dragged it over, safely outside the Caroline Destruction Circle, beaming a toothing smile.

"Don't tell me you've missed me that much, Carrie," Jenny said, taking a seat on the stool backwards, wrapping her arms around the back of it, swinging her feet a little.

"What have you been up to all these years, huh? Still hunting after ghosts? Married to that, what's his name? Herbert?"

And then there was, admittedly, an undignified yelp, swallowed up in the laugh that tapered down into breathless wheezing, And Genevieve Sette O'Leary's brain ticked into overdrive, parsing fragments of sentences into meanings of a whole. Fury was a symptom and, unknowingly to them both, fear was the cause.

Jenny, just Jenny, not Red Jenny, not Lucky Seven, not Genevieve Sette, just Jenny, laid a hand on Caroline's wild nest of red hair, and tucked it under a bony chin.

"The fruit of your loins turned out rotten, huh? Mine too. You're right. I didn't do s**t. It's why I sort of left it in Wade's hands. Didn't really-- much think of yours."

It was strange, really. For all Jenny had known, Caroline was supposed to be dead and buried, wasted away in a house with white paint and regal interiors, heavy drapes pulled closed and a recalcitrant daughter that had, according to rumor, taken scissors to a boy's chest when her own daughter had thrown fits at shadows in shopping malls and screamed at every attempt at comfort.

And yet here, in this casino with human on the menu and a collar around every neck, clad in green and fake ivy, her own hair greying from age and undying humans littered all around them, their own childish nightmares born anew and raised out of the dark and made real--

Perhaps the dead walking and screaming and crying and clinging, as little sisters were wont to do, was not so strange as the rest of it.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Caroline. I wish I could take it all back. I just-- left, and once I left, it was hard to come back."

"I know," Jenny said, a calm and quiet reminder, because she did. She remembered the budding rivalry, had heard it in phone calls while in the alps, read it in letters while in New Mexico, listened to it over crackling pay phones in New Brunswick.

"They were difficult. Yours became a monster and mine ran wild. She ran off to join the circus, you know. After you died. That's not a metaphor. The <******** circus, Carrie. Wade told me after she died, a few years back."

All the while, Jenny carded bony, calloused fingers through tangled, limp hair, a stronger red than her own coppery brass run through with strings of grey, her own face quietly wet. "We weren't cut out, for that. Why did we listen, when they told us it was best? That it was the good and right way to be?"

A half whispered question to ghosts long dead, looming shadows still haunting.

Jenny lifted her sister, so they could stand in the wreckage of her rage. At her own side there was the steel line of a crowbar and at her blood's there was the cruel line of a whip, and while they'd never made it to an island a long, long way away, once upon a time obscured by fog, they were hunters in their own way.

"They tried to break our teeth and trim our claws, to run off the thorns of our stems. But nature grows back in the ruins of society's downfall, and we are strong and we were right."

A grin twisted Jenny's lips, and this was something that they shared, more than ragdolls or books or boys.

"Everything was out to get us."