A Pink Corner House, Bristol, Tuesday Evening
"First we have to leave the house because it's only a matter of time before they come again. The hospital is different. Stick to crowded, public areas and you'll be fine."
Annie paced around the kitchen like someone gone mad, tapping off the points as she spoke. At the dinner table, Mitchell and George were less energetic. In fact, Mitchell observed, George looked somewhat sedate. At least that was a good sign; at least someone was accepting of what he had to do here.
It didn't chase the sense of death from the air.
He sunk his head in his hands. "Annie," he whispered.
"But attack is the best form of defence, so I think that's what we should do," she said, hotly. "We can't just sit and wait--"
Mitchell rubbed at his face with the palms of his hands. First Kate, now Annie. Everyone was in so much fucking denial around here. At the rate he was going, he wouldn't even get a proper goodbye. "Annie. I'm meeting Herrick," he said. "I'm ending this."
"It's precisely because of that attitude that you do not have a say in this," Annie snarled at him, and God, was she a far cry from the scared slip of a girl she had been. It kept occuring to him, lately, that she was. "Isn't that right, George?" she added, shooting the werewolf a pointed look.
When he didn't answer, she lost some of her fire. "...Talk to me, fella."
George breathed out shallowly. "Mitchell's made his decision. I think we should respect that," he told the table. There was a sense of wavering in his voice, but most of it was rockhard, certain. Sad. "I have to think about my future. I have to think about Nina now."
Thank God at least George had a sense of priorities.
"No!" Annie shouted. "You can't just leave him like that." Like he wasn't even in the room.
"I won't live forever, I don't have time like you two do," George said, softly. He pulled his gaze away from the tabletop and looked Annie in the eye, his eyes a little watery. Oh, George...
But the ghost slammed her hands down on the table. "He doesn't have time," she snapped. "Last week, you made me rescue Mitchell from Herrick."
"That was different," George started--
"You said if I didn't do this--"
"He didn't know why he was there--"
"I had truely died--"
"The thing with Bernie, it's his choice--"
"You ran in, didn't think now--"
"I am scared!"
George's shout bounced off the walls and seemed to echo, deafening, forever in Mitchell's ears, in everyone's ears, and he just wanted them all to shut up, to let him have one more moment of something before it all took him again, dragged him down.
Annie didn't stop or pause or gasp for breath. "We're all scared!" she snapped back. Her anger smelled a lot like desperation.
The answer she got started as barely a whisper. "I am sorry, Annie, but there is nothing here for you now but this," George said, softly. "I am the only one in this room that..." He bit on his lip, and choked back a few words. "... I have a chance."
He turned and looked at Mitchell, his face red. "I'm so sorry," he mumbled.
Of course he was; but he didn't need to be. "It's fine," Mitchell said. It was all he wanted to say. It was all they should hear, all of them, just... just live. "It's what I want you to do," he said. Please. "Both of you."
"Well is it--" George's face was red and blotchy and he was sniffling, sobbing a little between the words, and christ, Mitchell just wished-- he just wished. "Is it all set?"
"There's a rooftop, at the hospital," he said, nodding slowly. "No-one goes up there. It's safe."
A squeak. "Let me do it." What-- "Tell Herrick," George explained. "I'm sure if I can just talk to him--"
Oh, fucking christ. "No, George," he said. "No." No. He'd just get hurt.
"They won't touch me," George told him. "If they do, they'll know the deal is off. Please. Please, let me at least try, please--"
Funny. Mitchell had memories of others begging him like that, for entirely different reasons. But this was George. And George... ridiculous, clever George with his inane flights of fancy, his central Georgeness, cared. Mitchell took a deep breath, and realised that George's logic did make sense. "Sure," he said at last.
"Good," George said, and exhaled, pressure leaving him. "Good. Good, I'll-- I'll tell him tomorrow, then. I'll talk to him." He glanced up past Mitchell's shoulder, probably at Annie, who hadn't said a word in a while. "Annie?" he asked, but he got no answer.
So George took his coat off the chair and left silently, probably upstairs to straighten himself, Mitchell didn't know, didn't care. He just kept thinking about everything, and honestly he'd been thinking for days, weeks, something. It was just all so jagged, so... something.
The sound of cups shattering snapped him out of his revery. At least two dozen of them slamming into the ground, and then he heard Annie's knees hit the ground, and sobbing, and christ, no, come on, he was doing this for her too.
"Annie. Please. Stop."
His own internal pressure cooker snapped under the force of it all, George's eyes on him after-- after Josie last week, Kate at the Perk, George's tears and Annie's anger and all of it, fuck. They didn't get it. "It's not like I was a drunk and there are whole periods I can't remember," he snapped. "I can tell you all their names, what they were wearing." Sundress, skirt, that one lad with the blue jumper-- "I remember who cried, who fought back." Hundreds of them, begging for their lives every single fucking time.
"Others have tried to quit before me, but they didn't last long. I just thought the need for blood got too much."
He didn't need to breathe, but he felt the urge to, like glass shards poking around his insides.
"But it was this."
The same thing he'd been trying to run away from. The same thing he kept coming back 'round to. No matter what he did, what mistakes he made, what classes he taught, what things he made better. He sank to the floor in front of her, looked at her tearstained face, this person, this dead person he loved so fucking much she'd become a part of him, like George, like the house, like everything. "Because when the craving subsides, it all comes back, everything you did. It's just you, in that room, with that person." All the time. All the time, all the deaths, the bodies, the girls, the boys, all of them, smeared with blood and tainted around the edges. He slipped his hand into her hair, feeling the cool skin underneath his, her eyes focused on his. "--And it's so much easier to go back and drink again, lose yourself again so you don't have to face it."
He ran his thumb down her cheek, not-breathing in her not-breath. "Believe me, George is no more of a coward than I am," he whispered.
She sobbed softly.
The tension didn't go anywhere.
His heart felt like it was about to burst out of his chest forever, and he didn't fucking even know what the fucking fuck to do with it, didn't know anything, really, beyond that he had to do this, for them, for her and him and everyone, and he just wanted to scream with it but he couldn't.
[[ nfb, nfi, ooc-okay, taken from Being Human 1x06. ]]