Being Human: While the Fields Are Burning [In Camera RP, OC]
Title: “While the Fields Are Burning”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: G
Timeline: mid-1960s
Summary: A routine investigation of a vampire attack leads a man in grey to wonder about the victim’s motivations.
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Original characters belong to shirogiku and yours truly. Quote from “A Season in Hell” by Arthur Rimbauld.
Dedication: for shirogiku. I'm kind of sorry for screwing up your character a little. ;)
A/N: Inspired by this song:
WHILE THE FIELDS ARE BURNING
“We are not police,” they tell her.
Oh, she can bet they aren’t. It’s not like she hasn’t seen coppers before and she’s pretty sure they don’t dress like they were getting ready for a funeral but their suits faded from black to grey.
“Yeah,” she snorts. “And you just want to talk.”
To be fair, it’s not very intimidating: they are sitting in a coffee shop and the bloke opposite her is kind of cute and maybe he’s a mod underneath all that pretentious swank.
“Right,” she says, sounding braver than she feels. “What do you want to know?”
“What do you care to tell us?”
She fiddles with a paper tissue and avoids looking at him. He’s, like, five years older than her and he probably should be getting some kind of a business degree in college or something, but he’s sitting here with her, and that’s, well, crazy.
“Do you even have the right to talk to me without my parents being present?” She looks up to see a small smile twist his lips. Her Dad is a lawyer. He’d wipe the floor with this bloke.
“We are not arresting you.”
She raises her hand. “Do you like my nails?” They are frosted coral; Mum has a matching lipstick that she doesn’t even wear. “I mean I bite them sometimes. It’s a childhood habit. I know it’s bad for you but I get nervous sometimes.” She wiggles her fingers and smiles.
“You have very nice nails,” he says, dutifully.
She sighs. “Don’t be boring.”
She’s wearing her pull on dress with a floral print and tons of mascara to avoid being mistaken for a hippie. She doesn’t understand the necessity of conformation to one tribe. She’s not plastic either regardless of what her sister says. She may be a bit of a rocker on a good day but don’t tell her Mum.
“So my school,” she tells the cute bloke in grey, “is a fascist state. So Orwellian. Would you say this is short?” She stands up and points at her skirt. It’s cut just above the knees. “You have to watch the hemline. If you kneel and your skirt doesn’t touch the ground, you’re finished. If you can’t fix it, it’s not decent and you’re sent home. And God forbid you wear trousers. What do you think about women wearing trousers?”
He looks like he’s pondering a math problem. He tells her he doesn’t think about it.
“Well, you should!” she points an accusatory finger at him. “It’s very important. What’s your name? You’ve told me but I forgot.”
“Pryce. Declan Pryce.”
Declan. Is that Irish? He doesn’t sound Irish. Dec-lann. She rolls the name in her mouth like a fruit drop. Yeah, she can talk to a bloke named Declan.
She goes on about the skirts and asks him if he likes her hair. She actually wants to dye it but Mum would have a heart attack. Mum is usually quite lenient about everything but that’s no reason to try her patience.
“I thought you’d interrupt me, you know,” she says, interrupting herself. He smiles politely. That’s also how she knows he’s not a copper.
The others are swarming in the background like little grey flies. They probably think they don’t stand out at all. Maybe they really don’t. She just knows they’re here.
“Why don’t you tell me about the fight?” Pryce says.
She licks her lips and wipes her mouth with a paper tissue. Too bad she’s not wearing any lipstick; she’d give him the imprint.
“Well, she started it.”
He nods. “Obviously.” And she can’t tell if it’s sarcasm or not.
The girl had nails like bloody claws. Who the hell doesn’t bother to clip their nails?
“And she spat at me. Like this.” She mimics a cat.
“Was that before or after you hit her?”
She squares her shoulders, feeling defensive.
“Yeah, I socked her. Right on the mouth. So what? It was self-defense.”
Pryce jots something down in his notebook. She tries to sneak a peek but he deviously covers it with his elbow like Jenna Hargreave does in class when she doesn’t want people copying from her. She sits back and huffs. Not like she’s really interested, mind you. So he’ll write that she’s crazy and aggressive and blabbers a lot; so what? He’s not a copper, he can’t use it against her.
“Do you like music?” she asks.
He doesn’t look up from his notebook but nods.
She says: “Music is like religion but better,” and that’s a very deep thought. Coming from her, it’s a bloody Bible quote.
“You said you didn’t know the girl that attacked you,” Pryce says, business-like. “But she goes to the same school, does she not?”
“Did you know every person in your school?”
“She is roughly the same age as you.”
She throws up her hands. “I said I didn’t know her, all right? She was new.”
She sips her tea and asks him if he has a stick of gum by any chance. She’s not surprised at all when he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and produces it. She pops it into her mouth and thinks that he’s nice but he’s kind of a disaster at this interrogation thing. Yet the way he looks at her sometimes makes her want to not be here.
“You said she bit you,” Pryce prods again. “Then you changed the statement.”
She fidgets restlessly. “It’s mental, isn’t it?”
“Not at all.” He speaks cautiously as if choosing proper words is suddenly a hardship. “A person might want to use whatever advantage they have if they want to win a fight.”
“See, that’s just it!” she exclaims and slams her palms flat against the table. A few heads turn. Pryce placates them with a small, apologetic smile. “There was no argument. It’s not like I insulted her or something. She just cornered me.” She turns down her scarf a little, exposing a bite on her neck. “Please don’t tell my Mum.”
She must sound like a pre-schooler because his expression warms up a little. It doesn’t last long.
“The altercation between you and Miss Kelly Grant took place on the school premises at 11:47 a.m. while the rest of the student body was in class.” He sounds almost reproachful. Is he going to get at her for cutting class now? “Was there anything suspicious about it?”
She blinks. “Besides her sinking fangs into my bloody neck, you mean?”
He flicks the tip of his pen against the notebook but seems to change his mind.
There’s that look again. Like he’s going to have her committed and treated with an electroshock. She feels lost, like she was supposed to have this “youth that was lovely, heroic, fabulous, something to write down on pages of gold” and she’s not getting any of it. Like she was supposed to make history and she doesn’t even know where to start.
“Miss Cutler,” Pryce says in a strangely confidential voice. She shudders when he says her name. “I think we both know what happened there. The problem is that Miss Grant… how should I put it? She has not been on our radar for many years. She was on what you might call a special diet. The very fact of her attacking someone, particularly in a public place with a large number of potential witnesses, is rather unlikely. So if there is anything you haven’t told me about your disagreement…”
Maggie blows a bubble and pops it loudly. Do these guys ever lose patience?
“I may have said something about her lipstick,” she admits. “It was white and made her look like a… you know. Like she’s dead.”
Pryce gives her an odd look. “So you basically provoked her?”
Now that is so unfair! You tell a girl her make-up looks ugly, you expect a nasty comment about your own appearance in return, not being slammed into the wall and her teeth clenching around your jugular!
“Miss Cutler,” Pryce says, “what happened to your father?”
She flashes him a sharp look. She doesn’t see what that has to do with anything.
“He stepped out,” she says. “For a little while.”
He repeats the question calmly.
“He stepped out,” Maggie says coldly. “For a little while.”
And now Mum acts like his name is a four-lettered word. Which is funny because it does have four letters.
That’s what happened.
“Shall I tell you what I think?” Pryce puts the pen aside and lays his hands on the table, weaving his fingers together. “I think you provoked Miss Grant on purpose. You may have had suspicions about her but you wanted to be sure. You chose a very specific moment when no one would be around. You said something she wouldn’t want to hear. Having been dry for almost seven years, Miss Grant was prone to losing her temper over things that referred to her unique condition. She attacked you, you fought back. That is actually quite admirable. However, I would strongly recommend you not to repeat this feat again.”
Maggie glares at him defiantly. “Has she filed a complaint? Kelly?”
Not that she needs to. She can just track Maggie down and rip her throat out with her teeth.
“Not to my knowledge.” Pryce closes the notebook and puts it away into his pocket. “I trust you understand that you cannot discuss this with anyone. The best you can do is forget it ever happened. You have your whole life ahead of you, Miss Cutler. Stop wasting it on chasing myths.”
* * *
Needless to say, Kelly Grant doesn’t show up at school again. Soon, it’s like she never existed at all.
The bite skins over eventually and Maggie stops annoying everyone by wearing a scarf indoors. The sight of grey suits in the crowd has almost stopped making her nervous.
She writes in a school assignment: “Sometimes I feel that I’m standing in the middle of a burning field and I have to get out, but I can’t. Not while the field is still burning. I have to stay and watch. Somehow, it’s very important.” The teacher thinks it’s a great metaphor. Maggie knows it’s rubbish, a rip-off of her favourite French poets. But she is a teenager; she is allowed to be unsatisfied.
* * *
Pryce snaps shut the folder that has “CUTLER, Margaret” written on the cover in block letters and downs his coffee.
“Broken homes are the worst,” he says.
“Do you think her behaviour has something to do with her father’s disappearance? Whose case was it, by the way?”
Pryce shrugs. He was around Maggie’s age then and hadn’t worked for the men in grey yet. He doesn’t have the clearance now either.
But he comes from a broken home too. And yeah, they’re the worst.
June 3, 2012
A/N 2: Maggie Cutler first appears in Merry-Go-Round by shirogiku.
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: G
Timeline: mid-1960s
Summary: A routine investigation of a vampire attack leads a man in grey to wonder about the victim’s motivations.
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. Original characters belong to shirogiku and yours truly. Quote from “A Season in Hell” by Arthur Rimbauld.
Dedication: for shirogiku. I'm kind of sorry for screwing up your character a little. ;)
A/N: Inspired by this song:
WHILE THE FIELDS ARE BURNING
“We are not police,” they tell her.
Oh, she can bet they aren’t. It’s not like she hasn’t seen coppers before and she’s pretty sure they don’t dress like they were getting ready for a funeral but their suits faded from black to grey.
“Yeah,” she snorts. “And you just want to talk.”
To be fair, it’s not very intimidating: they are sitting in a coffee shop and the bloke opposite her is kind of cute and maybe he’s a mod underneath all that pretentious swank.
“Right,” she says, sounding braver than she feels. “What do you want to know?”
“What do you care to tell us?”
She fiddles with a paper tissue and avoids looking at him. He’s, like, five years older than her and he probably should be getting some kind of a business degree in college or something, but he’s sitting here with her, and that’s, well, crazy.
“Do you even have the right to talk to me without my parents being present?” She looks up to see a small smile twist his lips. Her Dad is a lawyer. He’d wipe the floor with this bloke.
“We are not arresting you.”
She raises her hand. “Do you like my nails?” They are frosted coral; Mum has a matching lipstick that she doesn’t even wear. “I mean I bite them sometimes. It’s a childhood habit. I know it’s bad for you but I get nervous sometimes.” She wiggles her fingers and smiles.
“You have very nice nails,” he says, dutifully.
She sighs. “Don’t be boring.”
She’s wearing her pull on dress with a floral print and tons of mascara to avoid being mistaken for a hippie. She doesn’t understand the necessity of conformation to one tribe. She’s not plastic either regardless of what her sister says. She may be a bit of a rocker on a good day but don’t tell her Mum.
“So my school,” she tells the cute bloke in grey, “is a fascist state. So Orwellian. Would you say this is short?” She stands up and points at her skirt. It’s cut just above the knees. “You have to watch the hemline. If you kneel and your skirt doesn’t touch the ground, you’re finished. If you can’t fix it, it’s not decent and you’re sent home. And God forbid you wear trousers. What do you think about women wearing trousers?”
He looks like he’s pondering a math problem. He tells her he doesn’t think about it.
“Well, you should!” she points an accusatory finger at him. “It’s very important. What’s your name? You’ve told me but I forgot.”
“Pryce. Declan Pryce.”
Declan. Is that Irish? He doesn’t sound Irish. Dec-lann. She rolls the name in her mouth like a fruit drop. Yeah, she can talk to a bloke named Declan.
She goes on about the skirts and asks him if he likes her hair. She actually wants to dye it but Mum would have a heart attack. Mum is usually quite lenient about everything but that’s no reason to try her patience.
“I thought you’d interrupt me, you know,” she says, interrupting herself. He smiles politely. That’s also how she knows he’s not a copper.
The others are swarming in the background like little grey flies. They probably think they don’t stand out at all. Maybe they really don’t. She just knows they’re here.
“Why don’t you tell me about the fight?” Pryce says.
She licks her lips and wipes her mouth with a paper tissue. Too bad she’s not wearing any lipstick; she’d give him the imprint.
“Well, she started it.”
He nods. “Obviously.” And she can’t tell if it’s sarcasm or not.
The girl had nails like bloody claws. Who the hell doesn’t bother to clip their nails?
“And she spat at me. Like this.” She mimics a cat.
“Was that before or after you hit her?”
She squares her shoulders, feeling defensive.
“Yeah, I socked her. Right on the mouth. So what? It was self-defense.”
Pryce jots something down in his notebook. She tries to sneak a peek but he deviously covers it with his elbow like Jenna Hargreave does in class when she doesn’t want people copying from her. She sits back and huffs. Not like she’s really interested, mind you. So he’ll write that she’s crazy and aggressive and blabbers a lot; so what? He’s not a copper, he can’t use it against her.
“Do you like music?” she asks.
He doesn’t look up from his notebook but nods.
She says: “Music is like religion but better,” and that’s a very deep thought. Coming from her, it’s a bloody Bible quote.
“You said you didn’t know the girl that attacked you,” Pryce says, business-like. “But she goes to the same school, does she not?”
“Did you know every person in your school?”
“She is roughly the same age as you.”
She throws up her hands. “I said I didn’t know her, all right? She was new.”
She sips her tea and asks him if he has a stick of gum by any chance. She’s not surprised at all when he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and produces it. She pops it into her mouth and thinks that he’s nice but he’s kind of a disaster at this interrogation thing. Yet the way he looks at her sometimes makes her want to not be here.
“You said she bit you,” Pryce prods again. “Then you changed the statement.”
She fidgets restlessly. “It’s mental, isn’t it?”
“Not at all.” He speaks cautiously as if choosing proper words is suddenly a hardship. “A person might want to use whatever advantage they have if they want to win a fight.”
“See, that’s just it!” she exclaims and slams her palms flat against the table. A few heads turn. Pryce placates them with a small, apologetic smile. “There was no argument. It’s not like I insulted her or something. She just cornered me.” She turns down her scarf a little, exposing a bite on her neck. “Please don’t tell my Mum.”
She must sound like a pre-schooler because his expression warms up a little. It doesn’t last long.
“The altercation between you and Miss Kelly Grant took place on the school premises at 11:47 a.m. while the rest of the student body was in class.” He sounds almost reproachful. Is he going to get at her for cutting class now? “Was there anything suspicious about it?”
She blinks. “Besides her sinking fangs into my bloody neck, you mean?”
He flicks the tip of his pen against the notebook but seems to change his mind.
There’s that look again. Like he’s going to have her committed and treated with an electroshock. She feels lost, like she was supposed to have this “youth that was lovely, heroic, fabulous, something to write down on pages of gold” and she’s not getting any of it. Like she was supposed to make history and she doesn’t even know where to start.
“Miss Cutler,” Pryce says in a strangely confidential voice. She shudders when he says her name. “I think we both know what happened there. The problem is that Miss Grant… how should I put it? She has not been on our radar for many years. She was on what you might call a special diet. The very fact of her attacking someone, particularly in a public place with a large number of potential witnesses, is rather unlikely. So if there is anything you haven’t told me about your disagreement…”
Maggie blows a bubble and pops it loudly. Do these guys ever lose patience?
“I may have said something about her lipstick,” she admits. “It was white and made her look like a… you know. Like she’s dead.”
Pryce gives her an odd look. “So you basically provoked her?”
Now that is so unfair! You tell a girl her make-up looks ugly, you expect a nasty comment about your own appearance in return, not being slammed into the wall and her teeth clenching around your jugular!
“Miss Cutler,” Pryce says, “what happened to your father?”
She flashes him a sharp look. She doesn’t see what that has to do with anything.
“He stepped out,” she says. “For a little while.”
He repeats the question calmly.
“He stepped out,” Maggie says coldly. “For a little while.”
And now Mum acts like his name is a four-lettered word. Which is funny because it does have four letters.
That’s what happened.
“Shall I tell you what I think?” Pryce puts the pen aside and lays his hands on the table, weaving his fingers together. “I think you provoked Miss Grant on purpose. You may have had suspicions about her but you wanted to be sure. You chose a very specific moment when no one would be around. You said something she wouldn’t want to hear. Having been dry for almost seven years, Miss Grant was prone to losing her temper over things that referred to her unique condition. She attacked you, you fought back. That is actually quite admirable. However, I would strongly recommend you not to repeat this feat again.”
Maggie glares at him defiantly. “Has she filed a complaint? Kelly?”
Not that she needs to. She can just track Maggie down and rip her throat out with her teeth.
“Not to my knowledge.” Pryce closes the notebook and puts it away into his pocket. “I trust you understand that you cannot discuss this with anyone. The best you can do is forget it ever happened. You have your whole life ahead of you, Miss Cutler. Stop wasting it on chasing myths.”
* * *
Needless to say, Kelly Grant doesn’t show up at school again. Soon, it’s like she never existed at all.
The bite skins over eventually and Maggie stops annoying everyone by wearing a scarf indoors. The sight of grey suits in the crowd has almost stopped making her nervous.
She writes in a school assignment: “Sometimes I feel that I’m standing in the middle of a burning field and I have to get out, but I can’t. Not while the field is still burning. I have to stay and watch. Somehow, it’s very important.” The teacher thinks it’s a great metaphor. Maggie knows it’s rubbish, a rip-off of her favourite French poets. But she is a teenager; she is allowed to be unsatisfied.
* * *
Pryce snaps shut the folder that has “CUTLER, Margaret” written on the cover in block letters and downs his coffee.
“Broken homes are the worst,” he says.
“Do you think her behaviour has something to do with her father’s disappearance? Whose case was it, by the way?”
Pryce shrugs. He was around Maggie’s age then and hadn’t worked for the men in grey yet. He doesn’t have the clearance now either.
But he comes from a broken home too. And yeah, they’re the worst.
June 3, 2012
A/N 2: Maggie Cutler first appears in Merry-Go-Round by shirogiku.