(no subject)
Fandom Being Human
Pairing Annie/Mitchell
Rating PG-15
Word Count 2190
Summary Mitchell goes to purgatory to get Annie, only The Men aren't willing to let he leave. They do have an alternative though.
Notes Written for dark_fest some time ago
“See we’d love to let you have Annie back, Mitchell, we really would. But the thing is all the forms have been filled in, filed away, signed in triplicate and all that. There’s just nothing I can do.” Lia pauses then flashes him a little smile, it isn’t especially friendly. “Well there’s something I can do. Tell me, Mitchell, how much do you want her back? Your little ghost friend.”
“More than anything. Just tell me what I have to do. I’ll open every door, I’ll meet all of my victims. Anything just…just let me have her back.”
“Okay so, like I say we can’t let you have her back. But we can let you see her. She doesn’t have to stay here all alone if you know what I’m saying.”
Mitchell doesn’t quite get it. He’s tired and emotionally drained and all he wants is to see Annie again, because he’s pretty certain that’ll make everything a hell (pardon the pun) of a lot better. “Whatever it takes. Whatever little hoops you want me to dance through.”
She leans forward looking entirely too pleased with herself, enjoying his suffering as much as he enjoyed hers on the train. “What if I said you could stay here, keep her company?”
“Here? As in…purgatory!? Is that…is that even allowed?” This really wasn’t what he had in mind and George’s words ring in his ears. Just come back. He should have known it wouldn’t be that simple. The men with sticks and ropes have never exactly been the biggest fans of vampires, after all. Too much paperwork, or something. So why would they do him any favours?
“You’re dead, aren’t you?”
“Well more…undead strictly speaking but…” he trails off. This was not part of the plan. Okay so he didn’t have a plan but if he did this would not have be part of it.
“You can go back and wait for the werewolf if you like?” Lia offers cheerily. “You can leave Annie to it. She doesn’t even have to know you were here, unless you want me to tell her. I’m sure she’d be touched you tried at least. She calls your name a lot, you know? She calls for you to come and save her. It’s sweet, sort of.”
“My friends…back home.” He doesn’t look at her now, just stares at the plastic of the train table. Why does it have to be so difficult? Why does she have to tell him so much?
“You’ll end up here eventually. You all will. I‘m going to have to hurry you for an answer though. Things to do, people to see.”
“I’ll stay.” He sighs it into the tabletop, finally forcing himself to look at Lia again. Oh and she’s loving this. He can see it in her eyes. She’s positively delighted. “I’ll stay here. With Annie. I’ll keep her company.” George has Nina at least. He’ll be fine. She’ll look after him. They’ll have a nice little life in Wales without him there complicating things. They only have to with complicated deal with one night a month. Annie on the other hand has no one. Dear sweet brave Annie. It’s better this way. For all of them.
“I’ve got someone to see you!” Lia says happily, as she opens the door to the room Annie’s being kept in.
Annie looks up, eyes watery, hair lank. She doesn’t speak.
“I think it’ll make you smile,” she continues, standing in the doorway, leaving Mitchell standing behind her, trying to get a look inside.
“They’re coming to get me,” Annie says, looking across at her. “Did someone come to say goodbye? Did they come to gloat?”
“Annie,” Mitchell doesn’t exactly say her name, it more escapes from his throat and before he can say anything else she’s standing and beaming, because it’s him. Her Mitchell. Her Mitchell’s back and here and suddenly purgatory feels a lot better.
Finally Lia moves, because it seems pretty likely that it’s that or get shoved out of the way by both a ghost and a vampire. They cling to each other like they might just float away otherwise. It’s touching, almost. Completely and utterly inevitable but still, it’s almost nice to watch. Not that he deserves it. But then what does she know? She’s only seen Mitchell at his worse, perhaps he’s different when he’s not killing people. Perhaps he’s nice as well as good looking. It’s hard not to be biased against someone that’s torn your throat out though.
“I’ll um…leave you to it then, shall I?” Lia says clearing her throat, trying to get their attention, not that it matters much. “You’ll be staying in here. Annie, there’s been a change of plan. You won’t be going to Hell. Mitchell here’s done a deal with us. He’ll be staying with you. That’s nice, isn’t it?”
It takes a few moments for the words to filter through into Annie’s mind, too wrapped up in Mitchell. The feel of him solid against her, the happiness at finally seeing him again, though how long she’s here is anyone’s guess. “I’m not going to Hell?”
“No Annie. You’ll be staying here for a while. Things have changed. There’ll be another meeting to decide what happens next, but you’ve gone to the back of the queue. Anyway as I said I’ll leave you to it. I’m sure there’s plenty for you two to catch up on. Perhaps I’ll see you around.”
There’s more freedom now. This isn’t Heaven or Hell. This isn’t the waiting room with the tickets and the chairs. This is something different. This is rooms and doors (Doors?) and corridors and nobody but them. It’s quiet. Too quiet really. There isn’t even the sound of their heart beats or breathing because they’re dead and so they fill the heavy stifling silence with inane chatter about nothing.
“I’m going to open one of the doors,” Annie says one day (night?), her head in Mitchell’s lap. “Will you come with me?”
“Do you think that’s a good idea? I mean you know how what’s behind them, do you? I will. Of course I will but…are you sure?”
“It’s the important moments in your life. The good and the bad. It can’t be anything that terrible. The worse thing I’ve done according to the Men is snatch Kemp through the Door. It’ll be fine.” Slowly she sits up and kisses him. “It’ll give us something to do at least.”
“You’re saying spending eternity with me isn’t interesting enough? I’m offended.”
As it turns out there are few moments of note in Annie’s short life. In her death though, that’s a different matter. Only both these things are beside the point though because the first time she opens a door they find themselves in a hospital room.
“Isn’t that…that boy. The one you brought back? Bernie, that’s it! Mitchell why are we here?”
“I think we should leave,” he says, but the door slams shut. Of course it does. How could it not? “Annie, promise me you won’t judge me for this, okay? I did what I thought was best.”
He slips his arm around her waist as some echo of himself enters the room. He should close his eyes really. Tell Annie to do the same, but he isn’t sure she would.
“Can he see us?” Annie whispers, as if she’s convinced the other Mitchell will be able to hear her.
“I doubt it. This isn’t time travel. It’s our worse moments. Like watching a video or something,”
“Or like some seriously messed up version of A Christmas Carole.”
The corridor stretches onwards forward, doors on either side go forward. They thought once that there was an ending. They ran towards the end of the corridor, towards a slightly different kind of light, a glow, gripping each other’s hands. It’s not that they were looking for a way out, just something different, a different kind of door.
“I thought there were supposed to be good and bad thing behind these doors,” Annie says. Both of them are sitting in the corridor, backs against the blank white wall, exactly the same as the rest of it.
“How many doors have we opened?”
“I don’t know. 30, 40? A hundred?”
“I think we’re working at odds more like one in a thousand,” Mitchell says and turns to look down at her, at her head on his shoulder. Quite why she’s still here, still curled up against him, still holding his hand and going through doors with him is totally beyond him. True she doesn’t have a lot of choice, it’s just them now, forever. Eternity in this corridor with nothing to do but relive all the terrible, terrible things he’s done. She should be screaming and shouting. She should be cowering as far away from possible. She shouldn’t have her head on his shoulder like nothing’s even happened. Like she hasn’t seen the blood and the bodies and what he’s capable of.
“You’ve done good things.”
“Name two. Let’s line them up against the blood I’ve spilled, against the atrocities I’ve committed. See if we can’t even it out.”
She doesn’t move. She doesn’t even tell him he’s being stupid, because perhaps he’s on to something, but that isn’t him now. That’s the past. He isn’t a monster. He’s Mitchell. Her hero.
“You saved me,” she says. “You’ve saved me more times than I can even count. You came here, you came to purgatory to get me. You were ready to face the men with the sticks and ropes. And you knew about them, but still came.” Annie pauses to shuffle in front of her, legs curling back under her, cardigan over her knees as she reaches for his hands, clutching them in her own. “But more than that. You stayed. You didn’t have to. You could’ve gone back. I won’t even have known you were here.”
“I couldn’t,” Mitchell replies, and it’s the most honest thing he’s ever said. “I saw you, Annie, the way you were in this place. “I saw the desperation, the fear.” He squeezes her hands, unfolds his legs and wraps them around her. “I couldn’t just leave you, Annie. Go on living in an old B and B with George and Nina, getting in the way. Pretending I didn’t miss you every single day.”
“They’ll be okay, won’t they? George and Nina?” Probably not the part she should be focusing on, but it’s slightly easier.
“They’ll be fine. I was dragging them down. They‘ve got each other. They know what they‘re doing. Now if it was just George…” The idea doesn’t bear thinking about, so he doesn’t. “And that’s only one,” he points out, a hint of a smile on his lips.
“You saved George too. You took on Herrick. You helped me deal with Owen.”
“That was more George and you know it.”
“You were there when it counted. You’re always there when it really counts. Like now.”
Quite suddenly she’s leaping up, dragging him up with her. “Come on, I want to find a good one!”
She’s so optimistic, so determined and so confident that one day they’ll open a door on something that Mitchell can’t help but smile.
“It’ll be one of yours if we do,” he says.
“We never open one of my doors.”
It’s tempting fate obviously because the neither of them recognise the scene they walk into now.
“I don’t remember this,” Mitchell says as he steps inside with Annie. They’re a dead body laying on the bed so of course it’s his. The room seems oddly modern though, which means should remember, there haven’t been that many slip ups.
Annie steps closer, peers at the body, its face twisted away and hidden in the shadows. “Owen.” There’s no emotion, no anger, no heartbreak, nothing like that. It’s just a name.
Mitchell steps closer, reaches for her head even though it doesn’t really seem like she needs his support. “There’s a note.”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t want to know what he had to say for himself? Don’t want to know if he apologised for what he did?”
“It doesn’t matter. We won. In the end we won.”
Turning his gaze away from her now dead fiancé he’s a little surprised by the look on her face. He’s never seen her look so cruel. Perhaps he’s tainted her, or perhaps Owen did that. Either way he can’t really blame her.
“Well I want to know,” he says after a moment, reaching for it without letting go of her.
“Well?”
“’The Men can have me now’” Mitchell reads. “You told him then? That’s what finally did it?”
“I wanted payback. I wanted revenge. I wanted his fear. It was the only thing I had.”
“I’m proud of you.” And he is. He really, truly is. She stood up for herself. She didn’t let him win. She’s stronger than Owen would ever know.
“I think we found a good one,” she says looking up at her, eyes flaming violet.
“I think we did,” he agrees. And he leans in to kiss her.
Pairing Annie/Mitchell
Rating PG-15
Word Count 2190
Summary Mitchell goes to purgatory to get Annie, only The Men aren't willing to let he leave. They do have an alternative though.
Notes Written for dark_fest some time ago
“See we’d love to let you have Annie back, Mitchell, we really would. But the thing is all the forms have been filled in, filed away, signed in triplicate and all that. There’s just nothing I can do.” Lia pauses then flashes him a little smile, it isn’t especially friendly. “Well there’s something I can do. Tell me, Mitchell, how much do you want her back? Your little ghost friend.”
“More than anything. Just tell me what I have to do. I’ll open every door, I’ll meet all of my victims. Anything just…just let me have her back.”
“Okay so, like I say we can’t let you have her back. But we can let you see her. She doesn’t have to stay here all alone if you know what I’m saying.”
Mitchell doesn’t quite get it. He’s tired and emotionally drained and all he wants is to see Annie again, because he’s pretty certain that’ll make everything a hell (pardon the pun) of a lot better. “Whatever it takes. Whatever little hoops you want me to dance through.”
She leans forward looking entirely too pleased with herself, enjoying his suffering as much as he enjoyed hers on the train. “What if I said you could stay here, keep her company?”
“Here? As in…purgatory!? Is that…is that even allowed?” This really wasn’t what he had in mind and George’s words ring in his ears. Just come back. He should have known it wouldn’t be that simple. The men with sticks and ropes have never exactly been the biggest fans of vampires, after all. Too much paperwork, or something. So why would they do him any favours?
“You’re dead, aren’t you?”
“Well more…undead strictly speaking but…” he trails off. This was not part of the plan. Okay so he didn’t have a plan but if he did this would not have be part of it.
“You can go back and wait for the werewolf if you like?” Lia offers cheerily. “You can leave Annie to it. She doesn’t even have to know you were here, unless you want me to tell her. I’m sure she’d be touched you tried at least. She calls your name a lot, you know? She calls for you to come and save her. It’s sweet, sort of.”
“My friends…back home.” He doesn’t look at her now, just stares at the plastic of the train table. Why does it have to be so difficult? Why does she have to tell him so much?
“You’ll end up here eventually. You all will. I‘m going to have to hurry you for an answer though. Things to do, people to see.”
“I’ll stay.” He sighs it into the tabletop, finally forcing himself to look at Lia again. Oh and she’s loving this. He can see it in her eyes. She’s positively delighted. “I’ll stay here. With Annie. I’ll keep her company.” George has Nina at least. He’ll be fine. She’ll look after him. They’ll have a nice little life in Wales without him there complicating things. They only have to with complicated deal with one night a month. Annie on the other hand has no one. Dear sweet brave Annie. It’s better this way. For all of them.
“I’ve got someone to see you!” Lia says happily, as she opens the door to the room Annie’s being kept in.
Annie looks up, eyes watery, hair lank. She doesn’t speak.
“I think it’ll make you smile,” she continues, standing in the doorway, leaving Mitchell standing behind her, trying to get a look inside.
“They’re coming to get me,” Annie says, looking across at her. “Did someone come to say goodbye? Did they come to gloat?”
“Annie,” Mitchell doesn’t exactly say her name, it more escapes from his throat and before he can say anything else she’s standing and beaming, because it’s him. Her Mitchell. Her Mitchell’s back and here and suddenly purgatory feels a lot better.
Finally Lia moves, because it seems pretty likely that it’s that or get shoved out of the way by both a ghost and a vampire. They cling to each other like they might just float away otherwise. It’s touching, almost. Completely and utterly inevitable but still, it’s almost nice to watch. Not that he deserves it. But then what does she know? She’s only seen Mitchell at his worse, perhaps he’s different when he’s not killing people. Perhaps he’s nice as well as good looking. It’s hard not to be biased against someone that’s torn your throat out though.
“I’ll um…leave you to it then, shall I?” Lia says clearing her throat, trying to get their attention, not that it matters much. “You’ll be staying in here. Annie, there’s been a change of plan. You won’t be going to Hell. Mitchell here’s done a deal with us. He’ll be staying with you. That’s nice, isn’t it?”
It takes a few moments for the words to filter through into Annie’s mind, too wrapped up in Mitchell. The feel of him solid against her, the happiness at finally seeing him again, though how long she’s here is anyone’s guess. “I’m not going to Hell?”
“No Annie. You’ll be staying here for a while. Things have changed. There’ll be another meeting to decide what happens next, but you’ve gone to the back of the queue. Anyway as I said I’ll leave you to it. I’m sure there’s plenty for you two to catch up on. Perhaps I’ll see you around.”
There’s more freedom now. This isn’t Heaven or Hell. This isn’t the waiting room with the tickets and the chairs. This is something different. This is rooms and doors (Doors?) and corridors and nobody but them. It’s quiet. Too quiet really. There isn’t even the sound of their heart beats or breathing because they’re dead and so they fill the heavy stifling silence with inane chatter about nothing.
“I’m going to open one of the doors,” Annie says one day (night?), her head in Mitchell’s lap. “Will you come with me?”
“Do you think that’s a good idea? I mean you know how what’s behind them, do you? I will. Of course I will but…are you sure?”
“It’s the important moments in your life. The good and the bad. It can’t be anything that terrible. The worse thing I’ve done according to the Men is snatch Kemp through the Door. It’ll be fine.” Slowly she sits up and kisses him. “It’ll give us something to do at least.”
“You’re saying spending eternity with me isn’t interesting enough? I’m offended.”
As it turns out there are few moments of note in Annie’s short life. In her death though, that’s a different matter. Only both these things are beside the point though because the first time she opens a door they find themselves in a hospital room.
“Isn’t that…that boy. The one you brought back? Bernie, that’s it! Mitchell why are we here?”
“I think we should leave,” he says, but the door slams shut. Of course it does. How could it not? “Annie, promise me you won’t judge me for this, okay? I did what I thought was best.”
He slips his arm around her waist as some echo of himself enters the room. He should close his eyes really. Tell Annie to do the same, but he isn’t sure she would.
“Can he see us?” Annie whispers, as if she’s convinced the other Mitchell will be able to hear her.
“I doubt it. This isn’t time travel. It’s our worse moments. Like watching a video or something,”
“Or like some seriously messed up version of A Christmas Carole.”
The corridor stretches onwards forward, doors on either side go forward. They thought once that there was an ending. They ran towards the end of the corridor, towards a slightly different kind of light, a glow, gripping each other’s hands. It’s not that they were looking for a way out, just something different, a different kind of door.
“I thought there were supposed to be good and bad thing behind these doors,” Annie says. Both of them are sitting in the corridor, backs against the blank white wall, exactly the same as the rest of it.
“How many doors have we opened?”
“I don’t know. 30, 40? A hundred?”
“I think we’re working at odds more like one in a thousand,” Mitchell says and turns to look down at her, at her head on his shoulder. Quite why she’s still here, still curled up against him, still holding his hand and going through doors with him is totally beyond him. True she doesn’t have a lot of choice, it’s just them now, forever. Eternity in this corridor with nothing to do but relive all the terrible, terrible things he’s done. She should be screaming and shouting. She should be cowering as far away from possible. She shouldn’t have her head on his shoulder like nothing’s even happened. Like she hasn’t seen the blood and the bodies and what he’s capable of.
“You’ve done good things.”
“Name two. Let’s line them up against the blood I’ve spilled, against the atrocities I’ve committed. See if we can’t even it out.”
She doesn’t move. She doesn’t even tell him he’s being stupid, because perhaps he’s on to something, but that isn’t him now. That’s the past. He isn’t a monster. He’s Mitchell. Her hero.
“You saved me,” she says. “You’ve saved me more times than I can even count. You came here, you came to purgatory to get me. You were ready to face the men with the sticks and ropes. And you knew about them, but still came.” Annie pauses to shuffle in front of her, legs curling back under her, cardigan over her knees as she reaches for his hands, clutching them in her own. “But more than that. You stayed. You didn’t have to. You could’ve gone back. I won’t even have known you were here.”
“I couldn’t,” Mitchell replies, and it’s the most honest thing he’s ever said. “I saw you, Annie, the way you were in this place. “I saw the desperation, the fear.” He squeezes her hands, unfolds his legs and wraps them around her. “I couldn’t just leave you, Annie. Go on living in an old B and B with George and Nina, getting in the way. Pretending I didn’t miss you every single day.”
“They’ll be okay, won’t they? George and Nina?” Probably not the part she should be focusing on, but it’s slightly easier.
“They’ll be fine. I was dragging them down. They‘ve got each other. They know what they‘re doing. Now if it was just George…” The idea doesn’t bear thinking about, so he doesn’t. “And that’s only one,” he points out, a hint of a smile on his lips.
“You saved George too. You took on Herrick. You helped me deal with Owen.”
“That was more George and you know it.”
“You were there when it counted. You’re always there when it really counts. Like now.”
Quite suddenly she’s leaping up, dragging him up with her. “Come on, I want to find a good one!”
She’s so optimistic, so determined and so confident that one day they’ll open a door on something that Mitchell can’t help but smile.
“It’ll be one of yours if we do,” he says.
“We never open one of my doors.”
It’s tempting fate obviously because the neither of them recognise the scene they walk into now.
“I don’t remember this,” Mitchell says as he steps inside with Annie. They’re a dead body laying on the bed so of course it’s his. The room seems oddly modern though, which means should remember, there haven’t been that many slip ups.
Annie steps closer, peers at the body, its face twisted away and hidden in the shadows. “Owen.” There’s no emotion, no anger, no heartbreak, nothing like that. It’s just a name.
Mitchell steps closer, reaches for her head even though it doesn’t really seem like she needs his support. “There’s a note.”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t want to know what he had to say for himself? Don’t want to know if he apologised for what he did?”
“It doesn’t matter. We won. In the end we won.”
Turning his gaze away from her now dead fiancé he’s a little surprised by the look on her face. He’s never seen her look so cruel. Perhaps he’s tainted her, or perhaps Owen did that. Either way he can’t really blame her.
“Well I want to know,” he says after a moment, reaching for it without letting go of her.
“Well?”
“’The Men can have me now’” Mitchell reads. “You told him then? That’s what finally did it?”
“I wanted payback. I wanted revenge. I wanted his fear. It was the only thing I had.”
“I’m proud of you.” And he is. He really, truly is. She stood up for herself. She didn’t let him win. She’s stronger than Owen would ever know.
“I think we found a good one,” she says looking up at her, eyes flaming violet.
“I think we did,” he agrees. And he leans in to kiss her.