A Pink Corner House, Bristol, Thursday Morning

[chosehumanity]

Mitchell was cooking.

In the context of language in general, that wasn't a particularly strange sentence; in the context of this particular household, it was a bizarre aberration that would certainly lead to the apocalypse. George usually cooked, and if he didn't, then Annie did the job for him - Mitchell's dependability near a stove was questionable at best.

But Annie had spent the night guarding over the others. Kate had been granted Annie's room, and Jack the sofa-- Nina was sleeping off her own intense mental exhaustion in George's bedroom, and if you asked Mitchell, he'd say he wasn't expecting her to get up any time soon.

So, breakfast for three it was. Three malformed, droopy eggs stared back up at Mitchell, and the beans in the other pan were starting to burn just a little bit (the toast, on the other hand, was fine, but then it was impossible even for Mitchell to ruin toast), but at least he was trying.

Annie had insisted on making the coffee, though, and Mitchell wasn't going to argue. He'd have to go pick up George in another hour - the werewolf always slept late after a full moon.

[[ for those still in Bristol. ]]

Comments

[chosehumanity]

"Don't make me run you back off to your country," Mitchell threatened, slipping one - thankfully not entirely botched - egg onto her plate. "Or I'm dragging you off for curry later."

After he picked up George.

[vanillajello]

"As long as you're not cooking it, I'm good," she replied, eyeing the egg. "This one looks edible, though."

Such a compliment.

[chosehumanity]

"Beans," he said, pointing one gloved hand punishingly at ... the table. "Eat. It'll do your stomach some good."

[vanillajello]

"Ugh, now you're just sounding like Bod." Which... really brought to mind that oh God, Bod was going to hate this. Kate sat down again, and sounded a little more subdued, though she tried to make it into a sarcastic drawl. "Fine, I'll eat your stupid beans."

[chosehumanity]

"Good."

Mitchell managed to finagle the frying pan off the stove, and grabbed his own plate, dumping an egg and some beans and a piece of toast on it. He sat down opposite her, poking at his beans. "How're you? Really."

[vanillajello]

Kate shrugged a shoulder before reaching for the beans. "I don't know," she said. "Coping? And officially done with all cellars and basements."

[chosehumanity]

"Well, you're in luck," he said, subduedly. "We don't have any of those in this house."

[vanillajello]

"I'm thrilled." Only not really. She poked at the food on her plate a bit. "I don't know what I'm gonna say to Bod."

Somehow that was coming up to the forefront of her current problems. Mostly because it was the easiest to grasp, since everything else was just too massive.

[chosehumanity]

There was a short pause. Mitchell tore a piece off his toast. "What do you want to say to Bod?"

[vanillajello]

"Nothing."

It wasn't nice, but at least it was an honest answer.

[chosehumanity]

If there was anyone in the world who understood that, it was the guy sitting opposite her, and Mitchell simply nodded. "Then tell him you came over in some misguided, desperate attempt to talk me into Thanksgiving."

[vanillajello]

"Well, I would," Kate drawled, "but I kinda already let too much slip when I was telling him I was coming here again."

She'd been tired, and upset, and a little stupid. She shrugged. "So now I'm gonna be stuck reassuring him I'm fine and everything went okay."

[chosehumanity]

Mitchell swallowed the bit of toast he'd torn off earlier. "So what did you tell him?"

[vanillajello]

"That a friend was gonna do something stupid and dangerous," she replied evenly. "And that I was gonna yell and cry and stay safe."

And, okay, she may have accidentally dropped a hint about vampires.

[chosehumanity]

"It wasn't stupid."

Mitchell just needed to establish that, all right?

"Then tell him you yelled and cried and stayed safe, and got a good curry out of it."

[vanillajello]

Kate was going to skip getting into a debate, as much as she maybe wanted to. She could occasionally do that.

"That's the plan," she said instead. "He's still gonna give himself an ulcer by worrying but, as he's taken a liking to saying, I can't stop him, so..."

[chosehumanity]

"It's just concern," Mitchell said, with a light shrug of his shoulders. "Can't blame him for it, but there are some things that're just best not to talk about."

Like, say, what Mitchell had gotten up to between 1917 and 1969, a topic that George avoided like the plague for his own sanity.

After a pause, he added, "You can tell him about me, if you ever do want to. I'm not saying you should, just... don't let me keep you. I've met him. He seems all right."

[vanillajello]

"He's more than all right," Kate replied, with some stray softness to her tone as she cast her eyes down again. "And he'd get this stuff. Better than I do, probably. He'd be okay with you. I know that."

She shrugged again. "But I doubt I'll tell him. That just leads to having to go into everything else, and he already knows about all my other trauma."

[chosehumanity]

"Is it really that horrible, sharing it all?"

God help them, but with Mitchell's turn back towards Humanity In General, his usually-disastrous sense of idealism had seeped back in. To affairs that didn't have anything to do with world-conquering.

"It might make things easier, you don't know."

[vanillajello]

"I doubt that." She wasn't sure she doubted that, actually. But she was a stubborn one. "Sharing it all's not really something that tends to work for me."

[chosehumanity]

"I'm just saying, it might help to talk about some of this with someone who's, well, human," Mitchell said, shrugging slightly. "If you can't find that at Fandom-- I mean, Jack's a good lad, but he's not exactly living on your end of the world any more."

A beat.

"Though I do think you should talk to him, at the very least."

[vanillajello]

"Hmh." Well, the last time something bad happened, she and Jack had shared unhealthy looking drinks instead of actually talking. Which was largely down to her, of course. "You're making it sound like I need a therapist."

[chosehumanity]

"I don't believe in therapists," Mitchell said, decidedly. He sounded a bit like a stuffy old man in his fifties for that one beat, then shook it off. "But talking never hurt anyone." Except for-- "Well. Within reason."

[vanillajello]

Kate rolled her eyes. "You know, if you'd said you do think I need one, I would've flung my beans at you." Always one for mature threats. She shook her head. "Shoshana tried that. It didn't go so well."

[chosehumanity]

"...Shoshana?" He'd been out of the loop for too long.