71 Serendipity, Friday Afternoonish

[chosehumanity]

Mitchell was planning on heading back up to Bristol sometime ... soon. If he was entirely truthful, he wasn't looking forward to his trips quite as much as he used to. The tension in the house had been racking up lately, and Ivan's warnings still rang heavily in his mind.

So: procrastination. Namely by hanging in front of the telly with a bag of crisps (occasionally using the machine in question for target practice if someone really annoying was on). He had a Portalocity subscription, after all. He could miss a portal if he wanted to.

Yep.

Ah, Friday afternoons.

[[ for his partner in DAMMIT. ]]

Comments

[vanillajello]

Kate wasn't feeling much better today than she had yesterday evening when she'd fallen into bed utterly exhausted after cleaning up the room and taking a long, too-hot shower. She'd tried doing the last of her online coursework, but by the afternoon she was going crazy and really just needed to get out of the dorms.

Seeing as any public place was an ex-boyfriend danger zone, there was really only one place for her to go, and it wasn't long before she was ringing the doorbell at 71 Serendipity.

If her eyes looked a little red, well... The island was full of places with memories, and even avoiding the places didn't stop the memories from surfacing.

[chosehumanity]

It took Mitchell a minute or two to detach himself from the sofa. Then again, he wasn't actually expecting any upset girls at his doorstep; maybe a salesperson of some kind. Or more vampires. It was usually more vampires, wasn't it?

He opened up the door warily because of it, and found himself...

...face to face with a red-eyed girl. "Kate?" he said. "What's going on?"

[vanillajello]

"Everything's shit," Kate replied bluntly, dryly. "Can I come in?"

[chosehumanity]

He started. "Yeah, sure," he said, wariness replaced by worry, and stepped aside enough to let her through.

[vanillajello]

She brushed past him, hands in the pockets of her jacket, and took an idle look a around. "Haven't ever been in here before."

[chosehumanity]

"It's just a house," Mitchell said. He shut the door behind her, and shrugged his shoulders. "Used to share it with a hologram, and George used to bustle 'round back when he was still going to school here, but it's nothing special."

He gave her back a troubled look.

[vanillajello]

Kate glanced at him over hers houlder, one eyebrow raised. "A hologram?" She would've been curious about that even if she hadn't been feeling a little evasive.

[chosehumanity]

"Rimmer," Mitchell supplied. "Right bloody wanker, too. What's happened, Kate?"

[vanillajello]

So much for evasiveness, hmh? She looked ahead again, shrugging a shoulder. "I got fucking dumped." Or maybe it had been mutual. She couldn't honestly even tell.

[chosehumanity]

Mitchell winced in sympathy. "You want to grab some snacks and hang out on the sofa?" he asked. "You can tell me if I need to go rough someone up."

[vanillajello]

"Snacks and sofa sound good," Kate said a little more softly, already starting to shrug her jacket off. "Not really sure about that other thing yet."

[chosehumanity]

"We'll get to it," Mitchell assured her. "Grab a seat." He slipped into the kitchen to get a few more bags of crisps and maybe some left-over cake from the back of the fridge.

[vanillajello]

And Kate moved to conquer her fair share of the sofa. That was atalent that never seemed to leave her, taking up more space than a girl size ought to be able to.

Absently, she rubbed one of her eyes. They were already red so it didn't matter.

[chosehumanity]

Mitchell padded back into the room, assortment of crisp bags and half a cake made of... some kind of fruit, whatever George had been into at the time of making, and set it down on the end table.

Then he collapsed on the sofa, taking up less space in comparison. He could use his general thinness to his advantage, if need be. He picked up the remote and turned the channel to something appropriately braindead, some reality show, and dimmed the sound. "Hey."

[vanillajello]

"I was watching that," Kate complained jokingly (if a little weakly) when he turned the volume down. Then she glanced over at him. "Hey yourself."

[chosehumanity]

A hundred and twenty years, and he had absolutely no idea how to talk to teenage girls about their break-ups. Mitchell thought of Annie and plowed on. "So what happened?"

[vanillajello]

In Mitchell's defence, there were teenage girls that were probably a lot more easy to talk to.

Kate shruggged a shoulder again. "We had a massive fight."

[chosehumanity]

"Usually the start of the dumping process," he replied. "What about?" Because really he could punch Bod. Arguably. ...Okay, he'd rather avoid the punching.

[vanillajello]

"Things I've been doing that he didn't like," she said, and oh look, there was that evasive streak again. She fiddled with the hem of her shirt. "It was... pretty horrific."

[chosehumanity]

Yeah, Mitchell had picked up enough from her last time they were in Bristol to know what she was talking about, and he couldn't really blame Bod.

But he wasn't here to look after Bod right now; he had to lend his big brother services to Kate. "C'mere," he said, after a brief pause, extending his arm for a half-hug.

[vanillajello]

Kate hesitated briefly, then leaned in. It wasn't like she hadn't already blown her cover if she'd been wanting to play unaffected and totally okay.

"Everything sucks ass," she muttered.

[chosehumanity]

"Life's got a habit of it," Mitchell agreed, "But it'll start looking up again. It's just right now that sucks massive amounts of arse."

[vanillajello]

"It's just so fucking unfair," Kate said, making a face he coudn't see. "I mean, we just had our six month anniversary and everything."

[chosehumanity]

"Bad timing," Mitchell agreed. He was fairly certain his job at this point wasn't to say anything particularly complex just yet. She could talk.

[vanillajello]

And oh, could she ever talk, once she got going.

"Right? And now he thinks I'm-- that I'm a total skank, or something." A pause. "Well, he says he thinks I'm a liar and a cheater, but what he really thinks is that I'm a slut. I don't know, I guess I should be happy to be rid of someone who'll turn his back on me that easily."