chosehumanity (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chosehumanity) wrote2010-11-07 03:17 pm
chosehumanity) wrote2010-11-07 03:17 pm
Bristol, Sunday, And The Many Weeks Before It
On Sunday morning, November 7th, George turns to Annie and says, "Have you seen Mitchell? I've barely seen him, have you?"
And Annie looks up, and frowns, and says, "Not since that night, when... well, since the accident."
They stare at each other, worried.
---
Several weeks ago, in September, or maybe October, Mitchell's at a funeral parlor.
"The door opens, and it's the hotel manager!" says Herrick, who's regaling them all with tall tales from their past. "I'm having a cigarette, and Mitchell's face is like, covered with blood, and there's this dead girl lying on the bed -- which reminds me, she's coming by later -- and so the manager is standing there, staring at this scene, and there's this kind of silence. And Mitchell says..."
He laughs.
"Tomb service!"
They welcome him back with slaps on the back and long bursts of laughter. Herrick holds a speech, and Mitchell smiles his way through it. There's two dozen vampires in this room and he knows all of them. They're all dedicated to the same thing he is: a better future for them all.
But there's one who keeps near the door like a shadow, her face set in a perpetual frown.
"Maybe you can explain something," says Lauren, ever so casual, except it's clear that she's not. "A funeral parlour? This has been bothering me. Aren't we skirting a little close to a cliché here?"
For a moment, something passes over Herrick's face that Mitchell can't quantify. It worries him, but he doesn't know how to place it. Herrick just starts talking, about their lives being a joining of life and death, about how this is a place where two worlds overlap. He sounds big, charismatic, as he always does. We feel at home here, he says.
Lauren just snorts. "Plus there's plenty of room for storage," she says, and vanishes.
Mitchell doesn't know what the fuck it means. He gets pulled into a wave of congratulations, and forgets about it.
---
George and Annie spend their time at home alone. Annie wants to haunt Owen. They practice together, to make it realistic.
Unfortunately, George's main input into the whole thing comes down to Patrick Swayze movies.
"I want to make him cry and beg and scream," Annie says, when they're done. "It's not just about justice. It's more jagged than that. Is that wrong of me?"
"It's human, " says George. "Not everything about being human is nice."
---
Mitchell's been loitering around the hospital for a while now. At first, he told George it was to spend a little more time with him. Then, to give himself somethin to do now that Fandom classes, being a respectable teacher didn't take up most of his time. Nowadays, he doesn't have an excuse, really. He told George he'd picked up his old cleaner job just for a day a week, because the movie theatre didn't pay a whole lot.
Really, though, he's here for this.
"Ready to spread a little joy?" Herrick asks, and takes the folder from Mitchell's hands.
Mitchell shrugs. "Duncan Johnson. 41 years old. AIDS-related Cytomegalovirus. He's got about five weeks, tops."
Herrick makes an understanding noise. "What does he do?"
"He's an engineer."
"Ah," says Herrick. "I always wanted to be an architect." He talks about buildings and building, about crafting something out of nothing, about his holy mission. About No One Gets Left Behind, and Mitchell nods and watches him from the other end of the lift.
When it arrives on the right floor, he makes Herrick promise not to frighten their latest. "He's angry and scared, and he doesn't want to die," he explains.
Now it's Herrick who shrugs. "Who does?"
And that's every day from then on, and October comes and goes, with Mitchell slipping back into Fandom when he can just to get away from it all, growing more distant by the second.
---
Then it all starts to loop over itself, and crashes, temporarily, into a wall called Fandom-and-Kate. Mitchell doesn't stick around to open up the movie theatre the next day. He goes back, looking for something to get his mind off his own anger.
On Sunday, an hour after George and Annie's conversation in his kitchen (not that he knows about it), he finds her sitting at a table in the middle of the hospital cafetaria, looking tiny.
---
[[// "Black coffee," Mitchell rattled off as he came up on her. "No sugar, just a splash of cold water from the tap." He remembered that very well, much like the features of her face, even as they were now dragging down with age. She still looked beautiful. "Hello, Josie."
She startled. "My God," she breathed. "Is it really you?" Her eyes didn't leave him for even a second as he sat down, and her fingers clung ever so slightly to the cup. That was the only sign that betrayed her, though. Josie had always been stoic, even in the face of the worst of horrors. "You haven't changed."
Mitchell smiled at her. "Neither have you," he said, sincerely.
She just laughed and shook her head. "Liar," she said. "What are you doing here?"
He couldn't be angry at her the way he was angry at Kate, the way he was angry at most people he knew. Josie had always been the best that any species had to offer, loving and fearless and just kind enough to heal, just cruel enough to find the right wounds.
The edges of his mouth curved on up. "I live here. I work here," he said. "You?"
"Oh, we moved here when my husband retired," Josie shared, lightly. She brought her cup of coffee up to her mouth. So she got married. That was good. That was...
"You're married."
Now she smiled again, and said, "Oh, he died. Five years ago."
He glanced down at her cup. "Oh. I'm sorry."
"What about you?"
"No," Mitchell said, and pointedly didn't think about Fandom, about Chloe, Kate and Jack, about Sergeant Angua and Max and all the other people he'd neglected over the past month or so. "Just me. As ever."
Josie's smile turned rueful. "All alone."
He shook his head. "No, I have a house I share with some friends. They're not vampires," he added, before she could voice the question clear in her eyes. "They're something else." His eyes darted back to the table, thinking, thinking back to earlier history. Better history. "We came here to Bristol, one weekend, do you remember?" he asked. "The Clifton Hotel."
Josie laughed, then snorted. "'Mr and Mrs McCartney'," she said.
"Hey, it was the sixties!" Mitchell protested, laughing with a human being for the first time in what felt like years. "Beatlemania. It was the first thing I could think of."
It earned him a grin, at least. "I stole my mother's wedding ring," Josie reflected.
"We only left the hotel for more cigarettes and chocolate," Mitchell added, and then he felt someone poke him in the shoulder. He looked up. It was George, looking a little alarmed, a little worried. Then again, that's what George usually looked like.
"Sorry, we need to talk."
Mitchell took a breath, then exhaled. "Okay, George," he said. "Sure. Uh, this is Josie. George," he added, turning his eyes back to her, "Is one of the people I talked about. George, Josie and I dated for a while." A pause. "In the sixties."
He could see the questions and the warnings and the fears broadcasting from George's face the moment the words had left his mouth. "It's fine," Mitchell said, quickly. "She knows about us. It's cool."
"Right," George replied, eyes darting from Mitchell to Josie and back again. "Right, er, I'll just be-- we'll talk later."
He left as quickly as he'd come in, leaving Mitchell feeling just a touch bewildered. He wasn't going to let it ruin this, though, and so he turned back to Josie.
"That was mean," Josie said, shooting him a chastisising look - ah, that was like old times, too.
"What?" he asked, "Why?"
"You just outed him!" she pointed out, aghast. "Mitchell!" Or as aghast as she ever got - the dignity she had held as a youth had only grown greater over time. He felt an old, familiar warmth in his breast.
"So why are you here?" he asked. "Are you sick?"
"Lung cancer," she said.
He didn't want to swallow, so he didn't, but he felt the impulse none the less. Lung cancer. That was... "Can they...?" he asked.
"No," she said, and stirred in her coffee, watching little clouds form. "No," she repeated, and looked up. She didn't look like someone who feared death; Mitchell felt like someone who did, thinking back to other faces, other people lost, other people soon to lose. He hoped she couldn't see it in his face.
If she did, she was kind enough not to mention it.
"Look at you," Josie said, instead. "Frozen like a photograph."
"Yeah," he said. //]]
(( Everyone loves a good vampire story these days: pretty girls saving brooding ancient men from their base desires. They don't know what it's really like; they don't see how pretty girls get older and ancient men don't, they don't understand that eventually a girl turns into a woman and leaves for something more practical. They don't know how easy it is to fall again, to drop all those lessons learned and return to your old ways, once the catalyst is gone.
Eventually, he'll wind up right back here, again and again, opposite some woman, or maybe some man, who was once a girl or a boy who'd say 'I won't ever give up on you', who'll fight for your soul.
But they either give up, sit across you saying 'you look like a photograph', or they let you stop their inevitable descent into becoming a man, or becoming a woman, and then, then you've got Lauren, and isn't that a fucking tragedy. ))
---
Sunday evening, Mitchell asks Herrick to recruit Josie. They're eating noodles together in the funeral home, waiting for Mr. Duncan Johnson to reanimate. She was a dance teacher, he tells Herrick. Herrick says that that doesn't make her a primary target for their current recruiting spree -- but hell, in their idyllic future, where no one will be left behind, where everyone will live forever-- people would need to know how to dance, right?
---
[[// "You shouldn't do that," said Lauren, after Herrick had left the room. Her face reminded Mitchell too much of Kate's right now, the way it was on Friday. It's a disturbing comparison. "Let them take someone you care about."
"Why not?" he asked, snorting.
"They might become cruel. It changes you, this life."
"It didn't change me," he said.
"It did," she replied. "It just took longer." //]]
---
Owen laughed in Annie's face when she tried to haunt him. Taunted her. Yelled at her. Sent her scrambling on back into her house, terrified.
Mitchell doesn't listen when she tries to tell him, later.
They ask him if he's killing again. They ask him if he's back with the others.
"Most of humanity still points at planes," he snaps, in lieu of a real answer. "Like they're Howard from the fucking Halifax. We're lucky not to be like them."
---
What the fuck does Kate know, anyway.
[[ nfb, nfi, but ooc-okay! taken from Being Human 1x05, and a lot of playing catch-up. ]]
And Annie looks up, and frowns, and says, "Not since that night, when... well, since the accident."
They stare at each other, worried.
---
Several weeks ago, in September, or maybe October, Mitchell's at a funeral parlor.
"The door opens, and it's the hotel manager!" says Herrick, who's regaling them all with tall tales from their past. "I'm having a cigarette, and Mitchell's face is like, covered with blood, and there's this dead girl lying on the bed -- which reminds me, she's coming by later -- and so the manager is standing there, staring at this scene, and there's this kind of silence. And Mitchell says..."
He laughs.
"Tomb service!"
They welcome him back with slaps on the back and long bursts of laughter. Herrick holds a speech, and Mitchell smiles his way through it. There's two dozen vampires in this room and he knows all of them. They're all dedicated to the same thing he is: a better future for them all.
But there's one who keeps near the door like a shadow, her face set in a perpetual frown.
"Maybe you can explain something," says Lauren, ever so casual, except it's clear that she's not. "A funeral parlour? This has been bothering me. Aren't we skirting a little close to a cliché here?"
For a moment, something passes over Herrick's face that Mitchell can't quantify. It worries him, but he doesn't know how to place it. Herrick just starts talking, about their lives being a joining of life and death, about how this is a place where two worlds overlap. He sounds big, charismatic, as he always does. We feel at home here, he says.
Lauren just snorts. "Plus there's plenty of room for storage," she says, and vanishes.
Mitchell doesn't know what the fuck it means. He gets pulled into a wave of congratulations, and forgets about it.
---
George and Annie spend their time at home alone. Annie wants to haunt Owen. They practice together, to make it realistic.
Unfortunately, George's main input into the whole thing comes down to Patrick Swayze movies.
"I want to make him cry and beg and scream," Annie says, when they're done. "It's not just about justice. It's more jagged than that. Is that wrong of me?"
"It's human, " says George. "Not everything about being human is nice."
---
Mitchell's been loitering around the hospital for a while now. At first, he told George it was to spend a little more time with him. Then, to give himself somethin to do now that Fandom classes, being a respectable teacher didn't take up most of his time. Nowadays, he doesn't have an excuse, really. He told George he'd picked up his old cleaner job just for a day a week, because the movie theatre didn't pay a whole lot.
Really, though, he's here for this.
"Ready to spread a little joy?" Herrick asks, and takes the folder from Mitchell's hands.
Mitchell shrugs. "Duncan Johnson. 41 years old. AIDS-related Cytomegalovirus. He's got about five weeks, tops."
Herrick makes an understanding noise. "What does he do?"
"He's an engineer."
"Ah," says Herrick. "I always wanted to be an architect." He talks about buildings and building, about crafting something out of nothing, about his holy mission. About No One Gets Left Behind, and Mitchell nods and watches him from the other end of the lift.
When it arrives on the right floor, he makes Herrick promise not to frighten their latest. "He's angry and scared, and he doesn't want to die," he explains.
Now it's Herrick who shrugs. "Who does?"
And that's every day from then on, and October comes and goes, with Mitchell slipping back into Fandom when he can just to get away from it all, growing more distant by the second.
---
Then it all starts to loop over itself, and crashes, temporarily, into a wall called Fandom-and-Kate. Mitchell doesn't stick around to open up the movie theatre the next day. He goes back, looking for something to get his mind off his own anger.
On Sunday, an hour after George and Annie's conversation in his kitchen (not that he knows about it), he finds her sitting at a table in the middle of the hospital cafetaria, looking tiny.
---
[[// "Black coffee," Mitchell rattled off as he came up on her. "No sugar, just a splash of cold water from the tap." He remembered that very well, much like the features of her face, even as they were now dragging down with age. She still looked beautiful. "Hello, Josie."
She startled. "My God," she breathed. "Is it really you?" Her eyes didn't leave him for even a second as he sat down, and her fingers clung ever so slightly to the cup. That was the only sign that betrayed her, though. Josie had always been stoic, even in the face of the worst of horrors. "You haven't changed."
Mitchell smiled at her. "Neither have you," he said, sincerely.
She just laughed and shook her head. "Liar," she said. "What are you doing here?"
He couldn't be angry at her the way he was angry at Kate, the way he was angry at most people he knew. Josie had always been the best that any species had to offer, loving and fearless and just kind enough to heal, just cruel enough to find the right wounds.
The edges of his mouth curved on up. "I live here. I work here," he said. "You?"
"Oh, we moved here when my husband retired," Josie shared, lightly. She brought her cup of coffee up to her mouth. So she got married. That was good. That was...
"You're married."
Now she smiled again, and said, "Oh, he died. Five years ago."
He glanced down at her cup. "Oh. I'm sorry."
"What about you?"
"No," Mitchell said, and pointedly didn't think about Fandom, about Chloe, Kate and Jack, about Sergeant Angua and Max and all the other people he'd neglected over the past month or so. "Just me. As ever."
Josie's smile turned rueful. "All alone."
He shook his head. "No, I have a house I share with some friends. They're not vampires," he added, before she could voice the question clear in her eyes. "They're something else." His eyes darted back to the table, thinking, thinking back to earlier history. Better history. "We came here to Bristol, one weekend, do you remember?" he asked. "The Clifton Hotel."
Josie laughed, then snorted. "'Mr and Mrs McCartney'," she said.
"Hey, it was the sixties!" Mitchell protested, laughing with a human being for the first time in what felt like years. "Beatlemania. It was the first thing I could think of."
It earned him a grin, at least. "I stole my mother's wedding ring," Josie reflected.
"We only left the hotel for more cigarettes and chocolate," Mitchell added, and then he felt someone poke him in the shoulder. He looked up. It was George, looking a little alarmed, a little worried. Then again, that's what George usually looked like.
"Sorry, we need to talk."
Mitchell took a breath, then exhaled. "Okay, George," he said. "Sure. Uh, this is Josie. George," he added, turning his eyes back to her, "Is one of the people I talked about. George, Josie and I dated for a while." A pause. "In the sixties."
He could see the questions and the warnings and the fears broadcasting from George's face the moment the words had left his mouth. "It's fine," Mitchell said, quickly. "She knows about us. It's cool."
"Right," George replied, eyes darting from Mitchell to Josie and back again. "Right, er, I'll just be-- we'll talk later."
He left as quickly as he'd come in, leaving Mitchell feeling just a touch bewildered. He wasn't going to let it ruin this, though, and so he turned back to Josie.
"That was mean," Josie said, shooting him a chastisising look - ah, that was like old times, too.
"What?" he asked, "Why?"
"You just outed him!" she pointed out, aghast. "Mitchell!" Or as aghast as she ever got - the dignity she had held as a youth had only grown greater over time. He felt an old, familiar warmth in his breast.
"So why are you here?" he asked. "Are you sick?"
"Lung cancer," she said.
He didn't want to swallow, so he didn't, but he felt the impulse none the less. Lung cancer. That was... "Can they...?" he asked.
"No," she said, and stirred in her coffee, watching little clouds form. "No," she repeated, and looked up. She didn't look like someone who feared death; Mitchell felt like someone who did, thinking back to other faces, other people lost, other people soon to lose. He hoped she couldn't see it in his face.
If she did, she was kind enough not to mention it.
"Look at you," Josie said, instead. "Frozen like a photograph."
"Yeah," he said. //]]
(( Everyone loves a good vampire story these days: pretty girls saving brooding ancient men from their base desires. They don't know what it's really like; they don't see how pretty girls get older and ancient men don't, they don't understand that eventually a girl turns into a woman and leaves for something more practical. They don't know how easy it is to fall again, to drop all those lessons learned and return to your old ways, once the catalyst is gone.
Eventually, he'll wind up right back here, again and again, opposite some woman, or maybe some man, who was once a girl or a boy who'd say 'I won't ever give up on you', who'll fight for your soul.
But they either give up, sit across you saying 'you look like a photograph', or they let you stop their inevitable descent into becoming a man, or becoming a woman, and then, then you've got Lauren, and isn't that a fucking tragedy. ))
---
Sunday evening, Mitchell asks Herrick to recruit Josie. They're eating noodles together in the funeral home, waiting for Mr. Duncan Johnson to reanimate. She was a dance teacher, he tells Herrick. Herrick says that that doesn't make her a primary target for their current recruiting spree -- but hell, in their idyllic future, where no one will be left behind, where everyone will live forever-- people would need to know how to dance, right?
---
[[// "You shouldn't do that," said Lauren, after Herrick had left the room. Her face reminded Mitchell too much of Kate's right now, the way it was on Friday. It's a disturbing comparison. "Let them take someone you care about."
"Why not?" he asked, snorting.
"They might become cruel. It changes you, this life."
"It didn't change me," he said.
"It did," she replied. "It just took longer." //]]
---
Owen laughed in Annie's face when she tried to haunt him. Taunted her. Yelled at her. Sent her scrambling on back into her house, terrified.
Mitchell doesn't listen when she tries to tell him, later.
They ask him if he's killing again. They ask him if he's back with the others.
"Most of humanity still points at planes," he snaps, in lieu of a real answer. "Like they're Howard from the fucking Halifax. We're lucky not to be like them."
---
What the fuck does Kate know, anyway.
[[ nfb, nfi, but ooc-okay! taken from Being Human 1x05, and a lot of playing catch-up. ]]
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