(Untitled)

[provenhumanity]

It seemed like it had been so long since George was in a good mood that he'd almost forgotten what it felt like. For over a month now, it seemed as though there had always been a cloud over him, weighing him down with guilt. Of course none of it was his fault; no one could really be blamed for the way the island brought people and took them away,

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[justsookie]

There were times when a new interest would suddenly pop up and overtake Mitchell's life for a time. Sookie was starting to see that. He was capable of acting on a whim, of working up excitement within himself for something that Sookie herself would feel swept up by the sentiment. Try a new food, take a new trail (...admittedly, the second was rarer than the first). But lately, Mitchell's newest obsession didn't quite seem to fall in line with the others, fingers smudged with ink from newspapers he'd grabbed from the bookshelf to peruse on his own time. And the new activity had not only contrasted with the others, but it was longer-lasting at that, weeks' worth of papers strewn around wherever he went.

Eventually, it'd gotten to the point where a girl just had to try to get to the bottom of it all.

Leaning over the opposite side of the table, Sookie lowered herself to try to get a look at his eyes, a thick copy of the Bristol Evening Post tucked under her arm. "So," she greeted, softly interrupting his look of concentration. "Wouldn'

[chasinghumanity]

There might have been, for the briefest second, a flash of terror in Mitchell's eyes as Sookie sat down, akin to a rabbit caught in a snare. But that faded with a blink and a casual lift of his shoulders into a dismissive shrug.

"Puzzle books have the answer in the back," he replied as he lifted up his coffee cup for a sip. "Do you really trust me not to cheat?" The cup paused at Mitchell's lips. "You know what I mean."

[justsookie]

"Could hand the answer key over to me," Sookie suggested with a soft grin, brushing some hair out of her line of sight, tucking blonde strands behind her ear. "You don't trust yourself, then you find people to help you keep from temptation. Feels like a line that I've been feedin' Jason all our lives." Idly, she smoothed out her own paper. She hadn't been consciously looking for an issue from his hometown (if anything, she would've preferred to find something from Bon Temps), but sometimes the bookshelf acted in very deliberate ways. George had learned of his own father's death through the shelf's offerings, even. So Sookie wondered if it meant something.

Or if she was just overthinking way too much.

"And if we're not talking about puzzles, well. You spend a year on an island with women that look like models walkin' at every turn, and you haven't even tried to let me go? I think that inspires confidence," she joked, leaning over to snag one of his fries.

[chasinghumanity]

He wanted to be distracted by her hair, how it would fall and brush her cheek, her neck, how her skin had a glow to it all the time, whether it be from sunlight or exertion. But her words shamed him a touch. Mitchell had always believed that he needed someone to change for. That was how he was to keep on the straight and narrow. He had put all that on Josie's shoulders and then on Lucy's, and only one of them had proven strong enough to handle it, if only for a little while. A part of him kept to George and Annie because they kept him good, too

[justsookie]

With Mitchell's gaze dropping down to the table for a few seconds, Sookie's suspicions began to surface again, the blonde tilting her head down to try and make eye contact as well as she could, fingers skirting across the table and only stopping when he looked up again with a disarming smile. (Only even that wasn't quite right, wasn't quite there, and didn't match the tension that she saw lingering in his eyes.) Her own grin paled in comparison, nervous as she finally breached the rest of the distance and tried to lace her fingers with Mitchell's, as though holding his hand would let her into his thoughts, the way it had so many people before she arrived on Tabula Rasa.

She couldn't quite place her finger on the unease that had her stomach roiling. All she knew was that it left her nauseated, cheeks feeling cold.

"Mitchell, you know there isn't a day that goes by without me thankin' my lucky stars that we found each other, but... you remember, right? That conversation that we had while watching Casablanca." Her smile widened for a

[chasinghumanity]

There were a lot of things discussed during that single viewing of Casablanca, a whole heap of Mitchell's dark deeds and troubled thoughts tossed out into the open and picked over lightly. Why couldn't that be enough? It would have been enough for any normal man. More than enough. But no, Mitchell had to live more than a century, fuck up more than any mortal, human man had a right to. He felt like his closet full of skeletons would never empty. And every time he tried to clear some out, it hurt. It burned through him and raised that old fear, the terror that he was going to be left alone again. And here he had no vampires to welcome him back in, to pat him on the back for the same things others shunned him for

[justsookie]

Just with his admission, Sookie could feel words threatening to tumble through her lips, and an ache settling in her heart, one that only months ago would have driven her temper to a boiling point- feelings too raw, too worn, from all of the lies that had swirled around her back home. With absence, her heart had grown fonder, but there was the 20/20 vision in retrospect as well, seeing all of the problems that Bill and her had encountered, defined too clearly to her eyes. And she knew that if there was anything that could drive a wedge between the two of them, it was the secrets that she, for some reason or another, couldn't bear. Sometimes, she wondered if she simply cared too much, if certain things could and should have been left unsaid, only with her telepathy, Sookie had never developed the ability to know when that was the case. To grit her teeth and push through it at all

[chasinghumanity]

He could see it, the subtle hints that she wasn't pleased with his answer. Or, rather, how long it had taken to give this answer. He stared at her face every day, knew her moods and, in some things, how she thought. Mitchell knew she wouldn't like this. But he was pleased by how relatively little she was displeased. She could have snapped. She could have pulled away. Instead she offered him sympathy with a hint of stiffness.

Mitchell was pleased his lie worked so well, and hated himself for being pleased.

But what else was new?

"I know," he said, hanging his head. "I know. But it's too much to tell a stranger and the last thing I want to do is talk your ear off about the woman before you. It just feels so much.. so much like letting the island win when I let things like this get to me." That, at least, was completely and utterly true. Applied to a lie, a partial lie really, but still true.

[justsookie]

Pressing her lips firmly together, Sookie continued to stare across the distance, her lips quirking now and again as she tried to listen to it all. It was always hard to try and stamp out the immediate impulse, the one that took her to take action, to worm her way down to whatever it was on his mind and just talk about it until both of them had worked all the kinks out, together. Maybe it was because that was how she'd always worked problems out with Jason (and whenever she tried to let him alone, things only got exponentially worse, and impossibly tangled).

"It's not really like the island's winning, is it? I mean, what happened... that was back in Bristol. If anythin', the island's made it better by giving you distance, I guess. Look, I know how tempting it can be to just toss that all aside, but if this is what's been making you act all weird lately, it's been goin' on for over a month now." Sighing, Sookie reached out, helping to settle Mitchell's curls with a fretful look in her eye. "Also, I'm pretty sure that after Lorena, I

[chasinghumanity]

"Yeah, distance and then pointed reminders," Mitchell replied bitterly. Whisk him away, literally covered in blood, still wet and warm and damp on his clothes. Let him sweep it all under the rug, with his friends none the wiser. And then remind him, a year and a half on, with a snide little remark, a knowing wink from a chance-found newspaper. The fucking arrogance of it. It was like being taunted by Herrick.

"It wasn't just that," he said. "It was all of it. That and Rapture and Nina showing up and Nina moving out. It's all... changin' and shiftin'. But things are settlin' again. I'm.. feelin' more like I can handle this." Mitchell gave Sookie a hopeful look, all big dark eyes and a barely there smile. "I just needed time, that's all. And be thankful Lucy isn't here. She'd do worse than try to kill you. She'd try to convert you." It was a frail little joke, but that too went along with the frail hope.

[justsookie]

Her hand shook for a second, teeth briefly biting down on her lower lip as she tried to discern whether or not there was anything else buried just beneath the surface. With Mitchell, she always had to go digging. And maybe the same had been true with Bill, but in his case, the vampires had brought it all to the surface anyway, forced the pair of them to confront it all and come out all the stronger. Right in that moment, a year's time felt like hardly anything at all. For some reason, fear snuck in, lodging itself in her chest.

"I guess I can understand that," she shrugged lightly, a hopeless little smile on her face. "Lord only knows life turned into one huge mess for me as soon as vampires came out of the coffin, and I..." Her nose wrinkled, before she decided to move on past the thought of children. No doubt Mitchell was the type who'd lose sleep over even a mention.

"Anyway. You sure that's all? I know, I know I'm kind of a worrywart. Just seems like with all of that, you'd expect George to react worse. But he's..." Sookie

[chasinghumanity]

Mitchell rolled his eyes, though mostly with fondness, at the mention of George. "Well, George has got something to distract him," he said, only sending the briefest of glances backward to his friend. Mitchell did not need to look to know. He lived with it, after all.

"Meanwhile, Nina and I have never been... that great," he admitted. A slight frown appeared with his words, one of genuine confusion. Mitchell had never claimed to be best friends with Nina, though he had volunteered to be there for her. "Not that that's a real worry," he added quickly, glancing up lest Sookie got the wrong idea and thought she had to play peacemaker between the two of them. "Just not as... cheer-inducing as for George."

[justsookie]

"Well, I sure hope she's not quite that cheer-inducing for you," Sookie joked lightly, although her brow knit with concern, shoulders pulling back with a sudden thought. "Although actually, now that you mention it... when I first met her, and she found out that the two of us were dating, she seemed really surprised. Tried to take it back, obviously, and cover up for whatever she was worried about, but she definitely seemed nervous."

She closed her eyes, palm running against her forehead as she tried to think of any reason Mitchell would have given anyone to be nervous. Was it simply that he'd been a vampire?

"Why don't the two of you get along? Is there something I should know that happened in Bristol, or something I should know about her?"

[chasinghumanity]

Now Mitchell rolled his eyes without that sense of fondness, a low sigh heavy with annoyance and frustration slipping from him. He could only imagine what sort of crime Nina had pinned on him back home. (He didn't think, not for a second, perhaps strangely, that she had cause to suspect him of any real crime. Nina couldn't keep a secret like that from him for that long.)

He fiddled with his coffee mug, turning it idly on the table. "She... doesn't like me much." That was obvious and Mitchell's hurried shrug seemed to acknowledge that. "I think.. she sort of blamed me, a little bit, for her... erm, condition. And thought I was a bad influence. My friends were bad influences. And then she went off with that mad priest Lucy was friends with. They tried to cure her, of all things, and who knows what kind of crap about me and vampires generally they filled with head with

[justsookie]

"Seems... like kind of a shaky way to leave things," Sookie replied carefully, even though she felt like shaking herself for pointing it out. God only knew that she'd looked a whole lot of issues in the eye and steadfastly ignored them, back in the day. It was the only way that she'd known to keep herself from going completely mad from hefting the weight of everyone's burdens, one way or another. Not all problems could be solved. And certainly, not all problems could be solved on a limited amount of patience and energy. "But I guess having a mutual friend must go a long way, for sure

[chasinghumanity]

Mitchell shrugged his shoulders dismissively, leaned back in his chair and cradled his cup with his hands. Truth be told, he didn't like how things were with Nina. He had always like her, even sometimes when she was being a bitch, but only after his own anger had cooled. Maybe that would fix itself, now that they were normal humans, but Mitchell did not want to kick that wasps' nest and see what came out.

"I'm not actually piling any of Nina's stuff on myself," he pointed out. "Those are her problems and I'm perfectly happy to let her deal with it. All I'm trying to sort through are my own memories, which I can't change and which fade away when I don't trouble myself with them."