Feeling (A Being Human Ficlet)
Title: Feeling
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Mitchell-centric, Annie, Lauren
Author: Tiffany Dreamglitter
Summary: Mitchell has a secret hidden in boxes.
Word count: 382 (This one is short)
AN: Done on that i-pod shuffle prompt to the song Niki Fm by Hawthorne Heights
Disclaimer: If I made money from this, it would be a glorious day.
Mitchell is not a sentimentalist. He’s anything but. The cardigan that George gave him for his birthday? He threw it out as soon as one of the threads snagged. He was also working desperately hard to throw out Annie’s parsley grater. Nobody in the house really ate parsley. It was a completely useless tool, especially since Owen gave it to her.
Mitchell didn’t hold onto objects. Instead he had pictures. There were hundreds of them tucked away into boxes and bags hidden in the back of his closet. They were mostly photos of young women, some men, all smiling in eternal happiness. Mitchell liked them smiling. With the photos, he didn’t have to remember their agonized faces. He didn’t have to remember the anguish, the realization, or the horror. When they smiled, he didn’t see the blood.
Except he did. It stained his mind and poured over his bed sheets, melting through his eyes. He could never forget them. 100 years of misery. One century of regret sat in boxes smiling up at him. Maybe one day he would throw them away, but for now he was okay with the ghosts. As long as he could keep smiling, he could live with them. It wasn’t such a dark secret when there were so many others out there who were not in the box, so many people living, breathing, beating.
Except one. A new girl whose face was not in the box, but on his nightstand and outside his window. A girl who should have died but didn’t. A girl he couldn’t stop thinking of. He could hear her breathing, could feel her heart speed up in time with his, could feel her blood freeze under his fingertips.
When he sees her, he’s taken back o the days before the boxes. Back when he was needed; when he didn’t need.
He can’t turn her away because he remembers how it feels to know on one. Just to see a familiar face, to catch the tune; he knows how it gets harder and harder to find. So she stays, tucked away in a frame, hidden in a hotel shower, breathing but not quite.
“Help me,” she says. “You made me like this.”
And Mitchell can’t possibly imagine putting her in the box.