Bristol, Friday Evening into Saturday Afternoon
On Friday night, things went to shit.
On Friday night, Annie set fire to her pictures of Owen while George and Mitchell watched endless old monster films inside. They came out to see what was going on, at last; George freaked out about the flames, but Mitchell was quiet, watchful, thinking.
Annie was beautiful then, holding a picture of her hugging Owen, tipped with hearts she'd drawn themselves, then casting it into the flames. Speaking as it burned, a low, promising sound that made some of Mitchell's endless brood evaporate.
"Everything that Owen and I ever had, that old life, can go to ash. I was dead before I even met Owen. A whole life just wasted on trivia and routine. But not now. Now I have a purpose. A reason to be here. Owen has taken everything he's ever going to take from me, he's not taking you two, or this house. I've never felt more alive."
And if that had been all, the night would have been memorable. Would have been strengthening, a sign of their power against the dark masses pounding on their door.
But that had never been how Mitchell's life worked, after all.
---
The doorbell rang. It was Mitchell who made his way through the dark living room to open it.
It was Bernie.
"Mitchell!"
Oh, brilliant. Mitchell took a deep breath. "You can't be here, Bernie," he said, pointedly.
The boy looked earnest, then. "I want to say sorry," he said.
Running a hand through his hair, Mitchell stepped just outside of his door. "What for?" he asked. "None of this was your fault." If Bernie spent his childhood blaming himself for this...
"But it is," Bernie replied, frowning. "I knew it was the wrong DVD as soon as I put it on. I should have never kept watching."
Yeah, but it was still his fault for leaving the DVD around. Bernie was a twelve-year-old. Of course he'd been fascinated. "Look, you've gotta go home," he said, and reached forward to grip Bernie's shoulders. "But you've nothing, nothing to apologise for, all right?"
And he would have said more, too, but--
"Oi, Gary Glitter! You're just takin' the piss now!"
-- there was, what, two hundred pounds? Of angry middle-aged man in his face. Bernie pulled away from his hands, and called something out in protest, but Mitchell knew better: the guy had smelled blood.
Fine.
Over a week's worth of resentment and anger bubbled back up into his mind, especially when other shadows, people, seeped in from the sidelines.
"Be told," said the man. "We want you out."
Mitchell didn't even need to think before he shoved forward, and in the man's face. "You gonna make me?" he growled.
"Steady, Mitchell," George whispered, in warning, behind him. He didn't care. He was so fucking tired of this shit. Bernie joined in, shouting helplessly, he hasn't done anything wrong and it's not his fault and please.
"If I have to," Big Twat growled, tilting up his chin.
Mitchell mirrored it. "Don't even think about it," he snarled back.
"Steady!" George cried again, slipping out of the doorway behind him.
"Listen to your bum chum, mate."
He didn't even have to count, didn't even have to say anything, so predictable was George's answering "We're just roommates!", so pointless, and for once he really wished George would just shut up.
"You've got him all wrong!" Bernie shouted, desperately, and dashed forward, gripping the man's arm tight. "I came to see him!" But he was pushed away, snidely.
"This is for your benefit, son."
Oh, please. Fucking humans. "Is it?" Mitchell snapped. "Is it?" His ears were screaming, his mind was thudding with the sound of the gathering mob, shouting, calling for him to be knocked on his arse, punched in the face, hit him good--
Fleur's voice joined in the background, screaming, and for once Mitchell really wished he'd have stupid, fucking dull human senses, that he wouldn't be able to pick out each and every fucking yeer. George was hollering something at him from behind, but he didn't care.
Fucking humans. Fuck this shit. Fuck--
Fleur kept yelling. She didn't see the car coming.
Mitchell did. Mitchell heard it, screeching around the corner, lights on, and his head snapped over abruptly, the entire mob muted suddenly as he realised what was happening.
He ran for it.
But Bernie had also not seen the car coming, and Mitchell-- Mitchell wasn't fast enough, even his best, inhuman efforts bringing him no further than right up against it, feeling his flesh budge only a little, bruising in a way that would be clear again in the next five minutes.
He also heard Bernie's bones breaking.
He was there and on his knees in an instant, staring, the world turning white and jagged at the edges, everything moving too fast and entirely too slow. Like Becka, he thought, for a stupid instant. His fault.
No. Not his fault.
He realised then that Fleur was screaming at him again. Screaming for him to go, to get off, to go away, like he was going to do-- like what? He was going to do something to Bernie while his life was soaking away into the asphalt?
Mitchell jerked away like the boy was in fire. Not his fault. Not his fault.
He turned towards the crowd. Theirs. Their fault. Their fucking fault there was an amazing, innocent little boy dying in front of a fucking car, and they were just fucking standing there.
"Are you enjoying the show?!" he shouted, his vision tightening down to a single point. "Huh? That's real fucking community spirit! Real community spirit!"
George's hands closed on his shoulders-- someone's hands-- and he jerked back.
"I said LEAVE IT, Mitchell!" George yelled, using his full strength to keep him restrained. It didn't work: Mitchell pulled free, and turned around, grabbing him by the collar. "They're only--" George breathed.
"Human?!" Mitchell asked, feverishly, and shoved George so hard the man stumbled back several paces. "Then it's our mistake wanting to be LIKE THEM!"
He didn't know whether to laugh or cry or scream, and he could hear Fleur feverishly begging her son to open his eyes, and the world was too dark and too gone, and everything-- everything he had worked at over the past year was fucking pointless.
---
The last of Annie's photos burned to ash. She wandered through the crowds, quietly, undone by the scale of it.
"Doesn't look good, love," said an old woman.
"You can see me," said Annie, whisper-soft.
---
A mother sat in a bleak hospital room, watching her son's life fading with every blip of a monitor.
A vampire came to her, and sat with her. He let her flicker a mirror at him, and he listened to her shock; and when all of that sank into her, that shellshocked girl, he began to talk.
"Now, you can cling to your old way of seeing the world, or let me help. Us vampires, we're not born, we're made. Snatched from a human life at the moment of death. Bernie doesn't have much longer, not as you know him. I can give him a new life, if that's what you want... I died a hundred years ago. I was a young man, just sent off to war. But I've lived more since then than I ever thought was possible."
Fleur looked at him, her fingers entangled in Bernie's. She just looked, for a long hard minute.
"All right," she said at last. "Well, you tell me this, then. Honestly, if this is the choice that I'm left with--" Her voice cracked, a little. "If you were me, would you choose that life for your son?" Her eyes flickered over Mitchell's face. "Because I don't see much happiness in you, Mitchell. Would Bernie really thank me if I let him live on like you?"
Mitchell felt every bit of the past hundred and twenty odd years, then. Distantly, he wondered if he looked now the way Sebastien had done, if he had reflected all that expectation of age and wisdom then, sitting in that booth.
"That choice must be yours," he said. "But you have to make it now."
Fleur nodded.
---
On Saturday morning, they spoke again.
"I've told the neighbours that I got it wrong," she murmured. "I said that you'd tried to save him."
Which was nice. Very human. But human wasn't enough. He'd been stupid to think that it ever would have been.
"It doesn't matter any more," he said.
"If I die," she started, then bit on her lip. "...Should I do it too? Should I become one? To take care of him?"
"No," he said, "You need to stay as you are. You have to remind him. You have to keep him good."
Bernie had been good, after all.
He'd been good, and they'd killed him.
---
On Saturday afternoon, he left Bernie in the care of his mother, standing on a train station in central Bristol, waiting to be taken away.
He felt colder than he had in years.
"Thank you, Mitchell," said Bernie.
"Don't," he said.
When he got home, he found an envelope from Portalocity, telling him service had been resumed.
It didn't matter all that much.
---
On Saturday night, he walked into the funeral parlour, and looked Herrick in the face.
"I'm in."
[[ nfb, nfi, ooc-okay, and based on the final scenes of Being Human 1x04. Warning: Minor character death. ]]