Dark_Fest Entry, Being Human Fic: "I Tell You a Mystery"
Title: I Tell You a Mystery
Author: ms_smilla
Fandom: Being Human
Characters/Pairing: George, Mitchell/Annie
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Season 2 spoilers! dubcon, a hint of necrophilia, violence, sex, the end of the world.
Prompt: I combined two prompts, which were:
1) Being Human, Mitchell starts drinking blood again.
And
2) Being Human, Annie, future apocalypse scenario (cause of your choice). Everything is going to hell, and Annie can only spectate, unable to help or touch or reach the world.
Notes: Canon compliant until Kemp’s exorcism, and then...
~~
I Tell You a Mystery
~~
“...stay out of the cities. The cities won't be safe for much longer.” - Mitchell, 2x07.
~~
She hurts.
It’s been so long since she felt anything that it’s almost a pleasure. The grass is dewy and cold against her bare feet. Each step feels like the slice of a knife on her flesh. She’s wearing a black dress that her mother liked and her arms, no longer covered by the grey cardigan, prickle with goosebumps in the night air; each raised hair feels like a needle scratching her skin.
Blood trickles from her knuckles, each droplet falling from her fingertips like a trail of breadcrumbs. It’s scalding, each rivulet boiling against her bruised hands. There’s earth in her hair and under her nails and all she can smell is decay.
Annie walks away from her open grave and out of Arnos Vale Cemetery into the night.
~~
George’s face, when he opens the door, is expressionless, his eyes shadows in the yellow streetlights. Or, she muses, not quite expressionless; it is an expression Annie can’t read, at all. When she thinks about it, many months later, she wonders if it was George that answered the door that night, or if he’d already left her.
His eyes widen and he swallows as he looks at her, waiting on his doorstep. His mouth opens, once, twice, but no sound comes out. He reaches out to her, but his hand hovers an inch above her shoulder as if afraid.
“It’s me.” She says, but the words are as thick as pus in her mouth; her tongue itches and she can taste bile. She gags with the effort of speaking, doubling over at the waist, knowing that she will vomit a vital organ onto the pavement.
George’s fingers grab at her arms, pulling her inside, and she tries not to think about the squelch of her flesh between his palms and her bones.
~~
She has a shower with the lights off, watching the mud and the blood circling away into the drain. Her skin feels icy cold to the touch no matter how hot she sets the water. She closes her eyes as she coughs up something that tastes like rancid milk and has the slick, sticky consistency of oil. She doesn’t want to see the worst of what she suspects is her own rotten flesh.
She pulls the cord only when she is out on the bathmat, wrapped in a baby blue towel. She looks at herself in the mirror under the fluorescent light. She doesn’t scream.
There are things to be positive about, Annie tells herself. She still has all of her hair, eyelashes and eyebrows included, and there’s no need for any dieting; after some time underground she looks fashionably starved; stretch her out an inch or two and she could pass for a Parisian catwalk model. A yellow and grey catwalk model with skin the texture of paper.
She smiles with her blue lips and watches as her skin stretches over her skull.
~~
George has a mug of tea waiting for her in the lounge. He watches every move she makes as she walks from the stairs and sits opposite him.
“Don’t worry,” Annie tells him, “I don’t feel any urges to start eating brains.” she is stunned by how rough her voice is through disuse; it sounds as if someone else is speaking, using her as a shell.
George’s eyes widen and he giggles nervously. “Not the first thing that sprang to mind,” he states, “but thanks for clearing that up.”
She takes the mug between her hands, pressing it, watching how her skin flares red and raw where it meets the heat from the ceramic. George leans back, slumping against the cushions, rubbing his hands across his face, stretching out the bags underneath his eyes.
“What was the first thing then?” Annie asks him. George frowns at her. “The first thing you though of.” She clarifies.
“How.” George states, and he shakes his head as if in disbelief. “How did you come back?”
Annie takes a sip of the tea, and almost chokes on it, her body forgetting how to swallow. She coughs deep rattling coughs that shake her ribs and spine. George lurches across the room to help and she flaps her hands at him, trying to tell him that she’s okay. He sits next to her, his hands stroking her back, warm against her skin; it helps to ease her startled lungs.
“I can’t remember.” She gasps eventually.
George nods, his hand still and warm on her scapula. “What do you remember?” he asks.
The feel of the carpet under her clawing fingers; the monotonous chanting; the absolute cold of the open door; screaming for George in desperation.
“I remember being dragged through the door.” Annie tells him, and she is grateful that the croak of her voice hides the waver in it.
“And then?” George asks.
“I just wanted to come home. And then I was crawling out of my coffin.” Annie states, and George flinches. “It’s okay,” she soothes, she doesn’t want to upset him, “It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.”
George is still watching her closely, as if she might fall apart at any moment. “I don’t know how,” she tells him, “I don’t even know what I am. I don’t feel like a zombie.” She smiles at George, without teeth. A grin with teeth is a little disturbing to look at right now, she knows.
George chuckles, but it sounds forced. There are fine lines around his eyes, like cracks in glass. “You reek of formaldehyde.” He snorts, but his laughs are beginning to sound like gasps for air, almost like sobs.
“How long have I been gone?” she asks.
“Not long,” George soothes her, “it’s been two days since I left the facility.”
Annie watches him carefully. There is a dark smudge, like a fading bruise on his jaw and there are scabs on his knuckles. Annie reaches out and takes his hands in her own. “What happened?” she asks.
George sucks in a breath; Annie rubs her fingers across the back of his hands, gently encouraging him.
“Mitchell’s gone.” He tells her. “So’s-” he continues, his voice breaking with raw grief, “So has Nina.”
~~
They do as Mitchell told them; they get out of the city.
Not too far. To a village that’s barely scraped out of hamlet status: Rudry, to the north-west of Cardiff.
George is adamant they can’t go back.
“You didn’t see him,” he hisses at Annie, when she tries to convince him to wait for Mitchell to find them, “It wasn’t Mitchell anymore, Annie.”
Annie starts her own kitchen garden in the back yard, a few tomato plants in grow bags, some carrots and potatoes next to the fence. The welsh soil is cool and crumbly in her hands. She thinks about him, the smell of him as he tried to kiss her, like old pennies heated in the hand.
Kemp’s neck was broken by the time George got to them, he tells her. “He was covered in blood. I tried to pull him away, but-” he shrugs, gesturing to the fading bruise on his jaw. George’s eyes are pinched and dark, and he won’t look directly at Annie.
She improves daily; she has remembered how to chew, and she can eat small tubs of baby food. She’s filling out slowly, muscles bulking up, and her skin is losing some of its parchment-like quality. She’s still a frightening shade of yellow, like a week old bruise. Some days her legs hurt so much she has to crawl around the house.
“He said it was for everything, the vampires, the other werewolves. He’d decimated the facility by the time I figured out he was there.” George bites his lip so hard that it turns white. “He told me that he could feel you going through the door. That they’d taken you away from him.”
Because of her startling appearance, George has to do all of the shopping. Once a week he leaves her and goes into Cardiff. George won’t tell Annie what happened to Nina, but in his room there is a navy jumper, stiff with dried blood. Annie has a little wind-up radio. She listens to it when she is working in the garden. The Box Tunnel Twenty are mentioned daily.
One day, George brings home two live chickens. Eggs for protein, he tells Annie, he thinks they should be looking at becoming self sufficient.
~~
George listens almost hourly to the news. Little things make him pause. Mentions of families found locked in their houses, dead hands clutching at the locks, whole hostels found abandoned, the sudden closure of the BRI intensive care unit, followed by the paediatric ward.
Annie watches him during the news bulletins, watches how still he becomes, how the resigned expression makes his face look older.
On the twenty third of the month, Annie is lying on the sofa, wrapped in the duvet George brought down for her. She sweats boiling hot and icy cold with fever. She chokes her way through two slices of toast before throwing up. George holds her hair and strokes her back. Her skin itches; red raw and splotchy, it feels like cockroaches are trying to crawl out of her bones.
A reported signal failure in the Severn Tunnel has led to a train crash. They think all one thousand six hundred and eighty eight passengers are dead.
On the twenty sixth of the month, Annie can barely lift her head to drink the water George holds to her lips. Every muscle burns with pain. Her skin is covered in open sores that bleed. George holds her head back and pours penicillin down her throat.
The largest Tesco in Cardiff has been surrounded by armed police. Some kind of terrorist threat. Over three hundred people are trapped inside. Annie can see corpses covered in blood being dragged out by the paramedics. She hallucinates that demons are crawling across the ceiling, watching her with their black eyes, black feathers moulting from their arms and falling down onto her, tickling her skin. Apparently, no one makes it out of Tesco’s alive.
On the thirtieth of the month, Annie’s fever breaks, thanks to the antibiotics. She’s still too weak to move. The new TV, pilfered from an abandoned farm, George tells her, only shows hourly news updates. There’s a little message scrolling along the bottom of the screen, please stay calm, it reads, we have very little information at this time.
George is wrapping fresh bandages around the sores on her legs. His hands are cold and dry against her skin. “There,” he says, tucking the corner of the bandage neatly away, “all done.” Her reaches up, and smoothes her hair, tucking it behind her ears. Annie is shocked to see the hollows of his cheekbones, the shadows under his eyes. George looks like he is dying.
“What’s happening?” she gasps.
“They’re killing everyone in the cities.” George states, calmly. His eyes never leave Annie’s. “it’s like Mitchell said, the cities aren’t safe.”
The TV shows aerial shots of smoke-hazy city centres: Cardiff, Bristol, Liverpool, London. People are trying to get out. Both of the Severn Bridges are bumper to bumper with traffic; people are walking over cars, abandoning their vehicles, pedestrians streaming across the six lanes. The Brynglas tunnels are on fire, cars jumbled in a pile-up that disappears into the mouth of the tunnel which is glowing like a furnace, belching black smoke into the sky. There are ground-level shots of people running from the Underground stations in London. The Mersey tunnels are shut, red crosses blinking on and off above all the entrances. The riot police are waiting in a line with their shields, trying to stop people walking into the Channel tunnel. There is a train derailment at Manchester, but no emergency vehicles are attending. People walking past the cameras are covered in dust or blood or both; they occasionally have to step over bodies lying abandoned in the streets.
“George?” Annie asks, and she can hear the scream building in the back of her throat.
“It’s okay.” He tells her. “They’ll stay in the cities long enough for us to get a few things together, and then we’ll go,” George holds her hand in his, but he doesn’t meet her gaze, “we’ll go somewhere safe.”
~~
It is dark when she wakes up. She’s been dreaming about darkness, about being left alone in absolute nothingness. The TV hums quietly in the background, a list of churches, mosques, synagogues and temples scrolling across the screen.
George is looming above her, silhouetted in the flickering light. His eyes are voids in the dark.
Annie freezes, trying to stay as still as possible, listening for his breathing, trying to check if he’s still George.
“I saw her.” He says, eventually.
“Who?” Annie wheezes; her lungs can’t draw breath for fear.
“Nina.” George states. He staggers slightly, eventually folding up and sitting at her side, holding his knees to his chest. Annie relaxes, she can see his eyes now; she can see how blue his irises are. “She was waiting for me in the garden. She wants me to go with her.”
Annie feels a bone-deep click of understanding reverberate through her. He has been distant ever since she returned; for months she has watched George going through the motions of survival as if he was just killing time. Annie realises now that George must have known the world was going to hell ever since they saw Mitchell clawing at the kitchen table. And since the institution and Nina, Annie thinks, he’s just been waiting to die. He didn’t plan on Annie coming back as a walking corpse, he was just waiting in their pink house for Mitchell to come back and find him.
“Don’t!” Annie gasps. George turns sharply to look at her, his eyes full of tears. Annie feels sick with fear, she doesn’t want to be left, she can’t bear to be alone. She reaches out, cradling his face in her hands. “Don’t go with her. Don’t leave me.” She begs.
George presses her hands even tighter against his face, nodding, hot tears spilling from his eyes onto her thumbs.
~~
It is the fourth of August. George has packed a car with food and medicine. They are almost ready to leave. He has gone to a farm on the other side of Rudry to try and siphon some diesel from abandoned tractors. He has promised to be careful.
The TV hasn’t shown anything other than an eternally scrolling list of places of worship for the past few days. She watches it anyway. She is cold, and her legs are stiff today. She wears two sweaters and three pairs of socks and she struggles to straighten the duvet which is tangled around her ankles. Abruptly the TV screen fuzzes into static and then flares a brilliant white. All the other lamps in the room flicker brightly and then dim and the whole house jerks and shudders. Annie freezes, her breath coming quick and sharp in the sudden silence.
On the other side of the room, the glass patio door jiggles and she watches its lock unlock itself with a click. Squeaking, the glass slides across its floor runner and the rain blows a cluster of brown leaves from the garden inside. They are here, she thinks, they have come for me, oh God. Annie throws herself off the sofa, clawing across the carpet until she reaches the door. She pulls at it, trying to close it, rain making her hands slippery. A tug of war begins between herself and the door’s mass.
It is closing, slowly. She is crying, her face wet, her hands red, with every tug she feels as if her tendons are peeling like ribbons from her bones. No, she thinks, go away go away go away. With a final jolt, the door slams shut and she falls, exhausted, onto the floor. And then comes a crash from the outside; the sliding door’s glass shatters into a spider’s web lace, a million tiny shards in a fraction of a second. She screams, curling into a ball, her arms over her head.
Nothing else happens. Annie waits on the floor, waits for the shattered glass to fall, for the door to slide open again, but nothing happens. Eventually the sun sets, it goes dark.
George never comes home.
~~
Annie dreams she is walking.
It is such a vivid dream; the fields are green and gold, the sky is blue and the air is cold against her cheeks; there is a scent of smoke and she walks on roads free of traffic. She walks steadily, trying not to think, looking only at the mountains in the distance, the blue haze of the forests. Annie only stops to adjust the bandages on her legs, to wrap the scarf tighter around her ears and mouth. She’s wearing layers of George and Mitchell’s clothes to try and compensate for the lost fat that must have dissolved into the lining of her coffin.
She walks until her legs throb.
It is only when she reaches the M4 underpass that any other human activity becomes evident. There has been a car pile up and a fire; the skeletons of burnt-out cars have tumbled off the bridge onto the embankment below. The beautiful sunshine makes the charred corpses hanging out of the windows surreal. The motorway is full of abandoned cars. Pus-blistered bodies hang off bumpers and roofs, skin rotting and sloughing off in the sunshine. Annie is the closest thing to alive here. She feels sick, she feels like laughing, she could lie down here and no-one would know the difference between her and the dead.
She keeps walking.
The sun is high in the sky by the time she reaches the outskirts of Cardiff. She has taken off some jumpers and tied them around her hips; it is warm, a gorgeous summer’s day. The suburbs are empty; the houses are deserted, their dark bay windows glinting like teeth. The trees rustle in the breeze. There are few cars on the streets or in driveways, those that have been left have had their tyres slashed and their windows smashed. Some houses have had their front doors broken open, in one hallway there is a pool of dried blood that streaks down the garden pathway and out into the street.
Annie doesn’t feel afraid. She knows she should, but all she feels is exhaustion. She reaches Llanishen village and sits on the bench near the bus shelter, resting her legs. She stretches, listening to her joints crack; her arms are still stick-thin and her flesh is grey. She reaches down to unwrap the bandages on her legs, her knees are bulbous, the skin shrunken around them. Some of the sores on her skin are scabbing over, most are still red and oozing slightly.
In the Co-Op behind her, something falls to the floor with a clatter.
It is loud enough it wake her up.
~~
She wakes on a cold cement floor. This is not the lounge she fell asleep in, she thinks. The sea-sick daisy patterned carpet has disappeared, so has the artex ceiling. Above her, the polystyrene tiles are water-stained. There is an old, rusted bed to her left and when she rolls her head to the side she can see a locked door on her right. The windows are high and barred.
Annie smells them before she sees them; there is a pile of corpses in the middle of the room. Their decay is mouldering them into one another, a ribcage here with an arm piercing through it, an open scream of a skull looking into maggot-infested eyes. Their stench is overpowering; it cloys the air and makes Annie retch a thin trickle of bile. She heaves, each gasp of air making it worse until she is dizzy.
And there, in the pile, she thinks she can see George’s blue eyes.
No, she moans, crawling away to the door. No, she’s dizzy and her eyes are watering and it’s not him, he promised he’d be careful and the face the eyes are resting in is too mashed-up, to bloody to tell. It’s not him. No.
She’s slamming her palms against the door, moaning her denial. No, she thinks, no no no, I can’t stay here, let me out. She’s screaming and her voice doesn’t sound like hers anymore, she calls for George over and over.
~~
She wakes again.
A few of the shards of glass have fallen from the shattered door onto the carpet, leaving a tiny hole in the centre of the broken glass which lets in a thin trickle of rain water and the cold.
She lies there, feeling the chill seeping into her bones. Where her hips touch the daisy patterned carpet she feels a burning pain blazing all the way into her marrow. Her hands clutch, involuntarily, at the fabric underneath her fingertips. She can see the black of the sofa, fazing in and out of focus. Every shadow in the room is moving. She can’t get up and she retches involuntarily, all the breath pounded out of her body. She curls up, drawing herself close, hiding her face.
Icy hands clutch at her arms, forcing Annie to unfurl and turn over to lie on her back. The world turns a slow, nauseating roll. A pale face squints down at her. He looms above her, all blurry blacks and creams, and then shifts into focus. His hair is dark and curly; his eyebrows strong and dark, his eyes are wide with shock. “Annie.” He gasps and his hands are warm against her cold skin as he gathers her up into his arms.
She can feel his fingers threading into her hair, cradling her head. He still smells of hot pennies. “Mitchell.” She sighs, and there’s a buzzing around her, swallowing her words. Her eyes keep closing.
He’s calling, but she can’t keep her eyes open.
~~
“Annie.” He says. The sound of it hurts, so much, and she screams until she has no breath and he’s forcing her mouth open and breathing into her, stale air that tastes of the grave.
It’s not a kiss, but in the darkness she can feel his hands touching every part of her body, caressing her shoulders, her knees, her hips. She feels his cold lips on the pulse point in her neck more than once.
“Just sleep, Annie” He whispers into her ear.
She does, and dreams of George. He watches her; they are alone together, in the darkness, but he won’t say anything no matter how much she begs. She wakes, gasping, feeling the weight of eyes watching her. Mitchell’s sitting by her bed, his hand in hers. He looks tired and angry and overjoyed, and his eyes are clear.
“Are you real?” she whispers, feeling every ache in her body as if it is fresh.
“Yes.” He tells her, his voice low and rough. He shifts, getting out of the chair and moving so that he is sitting on the bed beside her, the weight of him on the mattress makes her body slide towards him. “I’m here,” he tells her, a small smile on his lips, his fingers tightening around hers, “I found you, Annie.”
“Yeah,” she sighs, moving to sit up, but the pain crackling across her spine stops her and she hisses. Mitchell moves closer, gathering her into his arms and supporting her as she tries again. He shifts her gently until she is resting against the soft pillows behind her. “Not feeling great.” She confesses. He laughs softly, tucking her hair behind her ears, his hand lingering against her cheek.
“You’re not looking great either,” he tells her. She groans, trying to turn away in a vain attempt to hide. He leans in closer, reaching out to trap her head in his hands and turn her back towards him. “I don’t care,” he tells her, “I brought you back to be with me. I don’t care that you can’t move; I want you weak. I like you helpless.” He smiles, a small morbid twist of the lips.
Annie feels cold. She can feel every muscle in her body tense and every hair on her body stand on end. This is not the Mitchell she knew. This is the Mitchell George tried to warn her about. This is the Mitchell who demanded that she kiss him, his body feverish and hot, pushing into her personal space.
He watches her, intensely, his hands brushing down from her cheeks across the soft line of her neck and onto her collarbone; she can feel the faint scratch of his fingernails against her skin. “It’s okay,” he tells her, “I won’t hurt you.” He doesn’t blink. “I thought about you every second you were away from me. I had to do something.”
“Something?” Annie asks. She can’t find the strength to raise her voice above a whisper.
“Yeah,” he frowns, his shoulders tensing, his hands tightening at her shoulders. “I waited hours in that graveyard and when nothing happened-” he sucks in a breath, looking up at her from underneath his dark eyebrows. “I felt you go.” He tells her.
“What have you done?” she begs, she cannot look away from him. “What am I?”
He flinches, eyes narrowing and nostrils flaring, leaning back from her. “You’re alive,” he tells her, “you’re here.”
~~
Annie heard the stories of the Haitian coffee girls from her grandmother, who heard it from her grandmother and so on. Owen used to snort at the stories, informing Annie that zombies didn’t exist, that the stories all stemmed from a corruption of the word nzambi, and how could a four year old be made to believe that their will belonged to someone else?
Annie believes in zombies now. Annie wonders if Mitchell is her bokor, if his will has become her will. When he tells her to stay, she does, when he tells her to sleep she does.
Next to her bed there is a chair. Annie wakes at nine every day and every day Mitchell sits in the chair, watching her wake. He spends the mornings with her and then vanishes in the afternoons. Annie eats whatever he has prepared for her and then lies there, dozing, as he reads to her, books that are so varied in subject matter that he must collect them from Cardiff library in the time he is gone. They move from Dickens to Mills and Boon to Emily McGuire.
Some days, at about ten, she pretends to doze, lying still and breathing slowly. She listens to the sounds of Mitchell; his leather coat creaks as he climbs out of the chair, his plaid shirt rustles as he leans over her, his hands runch against the bed clothes, his lips are hot against her skin. She can feel the shape of words he cannot say aloud being mouthed against her flesh.
They don’t talk about the things Annie saw before he found her. One night, there are screams outside her bedroom window; at first, in the confusion of waking, Annie thinks the foxes are calling to each other across the fields, but the sounds sharpen until her room echoes with the sounds of a woman begging ‘please’, over and over. Annie lies there, in the dark, every muscle aching, listening. She cannot move. The begging stops, trailing off into a moaning, low and drawn out, and Annie can’t tell if it’s the sound of sex or death. And when it finally stops, all that’s left is the sound of a man, laughing.
When Annie asks Mitchell if he heard anything last night, his hands tighten around the pages of the book he is reading to her. He glances up at her, his eyes black as night, and growls one word: “don’t”. Every hair on her body stands on end. She doesn’t ask about anything, other than their reading matter, again.
She dreams terrible dreams. She wanders through deserted streets screaming for George. Something is following her, something is coming for her and only George can help her, but she can’t find him.
One night, in her dream, she finally finds him. She wakes up sobbing, calling out for him. Her bedroom is dark and stuffy and she thinks she is alone until there is the scratch of a match being lit and Mitchell’s face flares yellow in the brief light.
“You know, you call out for him every night,” he tells her, lighting a cigarette; his tone is ice cold and his face is shadowed and frightening.
All she can taste is bile. Tonight, she watched as a rope was wrapped around George, each coil tighter and tighter. And then black, shiny feathers poured from the darkness, washing over him like waves, each one taller and stronger. They were drowning him in feathers. And she screamed at him to run, run, do something, save yourself, but he just stood there and watched her with blank eyes until he choked to death.
“I miss him,” she sobs, “he left me.” She is shivering, and no matter how tightly she hugs herself, she can’t stop shaking.
“He didn’t care,” Mitchell hisses, starting from the chair to loom above her, “not like-” he breaks off, his breath hitching, “not like I care about you.”
“He did!” She argues, swiping at her tears furiously. “He was there when you weren’t, Mitchell.”
“He didn’t save you!” Mitchell roars, “I did!”
“I don’t want to be saved!” she screams. Annie is furious now, “What have you done?” she shrieks, her hands clutching at her skin, pulling at it so that it lifts from her bones. “I didn’t want this! I don’t like this! I’m all alone and he’s dead! Everyone’s dead!”
Mitchell has gone as white as death; his eyes are holes in the dark of the room. “I came to save you,” he states, his voice hollow, his eyes never leaving hers, “I couldn’t. You were dragged away from me and I felt it. I felt you go.” He sucks in a breath; leaning into her, his exhaled breath on her cheek is scalding. “It was agony. Part of me was ripped away. And they needed to feel that pain. They deserve to die, Annie. They deserve to die for what they’d do to us - what they have done to us.”
He presses against her, his forehead resting on her collarbone, burning with heat. His hands are clutching at the bedclothes either side of her hips.
“I didn’t want that.” She whispers to him, “I want-” she trails off, sudden fear closing-up her throat. She shivers as gooseflesh prickles across her skin.
“You have to tell me,” Mitchell pleads into her shoulder, “You can save me, Annie; I’ll be better for you.”
I want you to read to me, she thinks, I want you to make it all go away, make me warm, I want you to bring everyone back, make me go to sleep, make me forget.
“I want to see George.” She sniffles.
He tenses against her, every muscle like steel. His sits up to look at her. He stares at her until the expression on his face is too much to bear and she closes her eyes. She feels the bed shift as he gets up and leaves.
~~
“The question is, do you want to?” George’s voice whispers from the darkest corner of his room.
Annie is instantly awake, bolt upright in bed. He comes out of the darkness too quickly; he is too pale, his eyes are like bruises and his fingertips are bleeding. He is the most terrible and glorious sight Annie can think of.
“Hello,” she sighs, smiling at him, “Have you come for me?” She feels giddy, like a weight has been lifted.
“Only if you want to,” George tells her, but his mouth lags behind the words, “And that’s the question: do you want to?”
He holds his hands out to her, an invitation, and Annie is tempted; she doesn’t know what’s behind the door, but it has to be better than the end of the world life she’s living.
But, caught in George’s fingers is a bedraggled black feather. It shines in the moonlight coming in through the curtains. Looking at it, Annie feels terror, the cold blast of it, the jarring of her bones.
George’s hands drop to his sides. He smiles at her, his teeth are bloody. “Good choice,” he tells her, his voice soft and warm, “it’s not so great, really.”
He is beginning to blur and fade around the edges. “You’re going back.” Annie says, feeling her heart wrench.
“It’s okay,” George says, and his voice is warm and comforting. He looks at her with his bruised eyes, and all Annie can see is acceptance, her chest feels like it’s being ripped open. “It’s really okay, I’ve got Nina.” He is almost gone. “It’s okay, Annie.” He tells her as he disappears.
Annie sits there, for a long time, looking at the place where he last stood, listening to the complete and perfect silence of the world.
~~
There is nothing but silence and the blur of grey shadow and darkness in her room. Everything is fading away. Annie marvels at her heart, continuing to beat. She hasn’t eaten or drunk for days.
And then he is above her, a white blur in the night. “Save me.” He tells her.
Each item of clothing her drags from her body exposes her to the cold, her skin numbing itself in the chill. She can’t move. She lies as still as a corpse, her bones jutting out, pressing into his thighs, his chest. Annie closes her eyes, feeling the serenity of the emptiness around them.
Mitchell presses his teeth against her throat and his mouth is hot and mean against her vulnerable skin. He pushes into her, pulling out again quickly, and with each thrust Annie can feel her skin shifting against her bones, lifting and sagging back limply.
She falls away, feeling the darkness creeping thickly into her mouth, her eyes, her nose. Her thighs roll apart, bones separating and resetting with each press of his hips against hers. His hands clutch at her arms, lifting the flesh from her bones and then sliding it back into place. She can feel him, hot and hard inside, his cock dragging against her, pulling her so that her body is turning inside-out against him. She tries to tense her muscles, stop her body sliding so wetly against him; She squeezes him from the inside, dragging him closer, trying not to be pulled apart. He moans, pressing into her, thrusting harder and faster.
Annie forces her eyes open. All she can see is blackness, and all she can hear is the nothingness around her and in her and through her. She is nothing, floating in nothing, hearing nothing.
And then Mitchell bites her, his sharp teeth burning, and she is everything, feeling everything, hearing everything. She can see mudslides, a power station all ablaze, a city centre clock flashing midnight and 142 degrees centigrade, bodies littered around the churches, their flesh dripping from their bones in decay. She is burning, sliced in two from her clit to her skull. She can feel him spilling into her, and she sobs as he moans, her body is open all the way down. The light is too bright and the heat too hot and the spasms won’t stop. She cannot breathe, even when he rolls off her; he has pressed his teeth directly into her nerve endings, and it hurts, her body is not meant to be without skin, open to every sensation.
She rolls over and presses her body against his, hiding her face, trying to block out the overload of colour and sound.
“Are you okay?” he asks, stroking her hair.
No, she thinks, I’m not. I don’t want to feel this world so sharply; I don’t want to see technicolour desolation and destruction.
Mitchell pulls her closer, arms like steel bands around her. He rubs at her bloody neck with his thumb, the callus blazing against her hypersensitive flesh. “It will be okay.” He whispers.
Annie closes her eyes. Outside, the birds are singing a repetitive, broken melody and the air is full of smoke.
~~
Fin.
Author: ms_smilla
Fandom: Being Human
Characters/Pairing: George, Mitchell/Annie
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Season 2 spoilers! dubcon, a hint of necrophilia, violence, sex, the end of the world.
Prompt: I combined two prompts, which were:
1) Being Human, Mitchell starts drinking blood again.
And
2) Being Human, Annie, future apocalypse scenario (cause of your choice). Everything is going to hell, and Annie can only spectate, unable to help or touch or reach the world.
Notes: Canon compliant until Kemp’s exorcism, and then...
~~
I Tell You a Mystery
~~
“...stay out of the cities. The cities won't be safe for much longer.” - Mitchell, 2x07.
~~
She hurts.
It’s been so long since she felt anything that it’s almost a pleasure. The grass is dewy and cold against her bare feet. Each step feels like the slice of a knife on her flesh. She’s wearing a black dress that her mother liked and her arms, no longer covered by the grey cardigan, prickle with goosebumps in the night air; each raised hair feels like a needle scratching her skin.
Blood trickles from her knuckles, each droplet falling from her fingertips like a trail of breadcrumbs. It’s scalding, each rivulet boiling against her bruised hands. There’s earth in her hair and under her nails and all she can smell is decay.
Annie walks away from her open grave and out of Arnos Vale Cemetery into the night.
~~
George’s face, when he opens the door, is expressionless, his eyes shadows in the yellow streetlights. Or, she muses, not quite expressionless; it is an expression Annie can’t read, at all. When she thinks about it, many months later, she wonders if it was George that answered the door that night, or if he’d already left her.
His eyes widen and he swallows as he looks at her, waiting on his doorstep. His mouth opens, once, twice, but no sound comes out. He reaches out to her, but his hand hovers an inch above her shoulder as if afraid.
“It’s me.” She says, but the words are as thick as pus in her mouth; her tongue itches and she can taste bile. She gags with the effort of speaking, doubling over at the waist, knowing that she will vomit a vital organ onto the pavement.
George’s fingers grab at her arms, pulling her inside, and she tries not to think about the squelch of her flesh between his palms and her bones.
~~
She has a shower with the lights off, watching the mud and the blood circling away into the drain. Her skin feels icy cold to the touch no matter how hot she sets the water. She closes her eyes as she coughs up something that tastes like rancid milk and has the slick, sticky consistency of oil. She doesn’t want to see the worst of what she suspects is her own rotten flesh.
She pulls the cord only when she is out on the bathmat, wrapped in a baby blue towel. She looks at herself in the mirror under the fluorescent light. She doesn’t scream.
There are things to be positive about, Annie tells herself. She still has all of her hair, eyelashes and eyebrows included, and there’s no need for any dieting; after some time underground she looks fashionably starved; stretch her out an inch or two and she could pass for a Parisian catwalk model. A yellow and grey catwalk model with skin the texture of paper.
She smiles with her blue lips and watches as her skin stretches over her skull.
~~
George has a mug of tea waiting for her in the lounge. He watches every move she makes as she walks from the stairs and sits opposite him.
“Don’t worry,” Annie tells him, “I don’t feel any urges to start eating brains.” she is stunned by how rough her voice is through disuse; it sounds as if someone else is speaking, using her as a shell.
George’s eyes widen and he giggles nervously. “Not the first thing that sprang to mind,” he states, “but thanks for clearing that up.”
She takes the mug between her hands, pressing it, watching how her skin flares red and raw where it meets the heat from the ceramic. George leans back, slumping against the cushions, rubbing his hands across his face, stretching out the bags underneath his eyes.
“What was the first thing then?” Annie asks him. George frowns at her. “The first thing you though of.” She clarifies.
“How.” George states, and he shakes his head as if in disbelief. “How did you come back?”
Annie takes a sip of the tea, and almost chokes on it, her body forgetting how to swallow. She coughs deep rattling coughs that shake her ribs and spine. George lurches across the room to help and she flaps her hands at him, trying to tell him that she’s okay. He sits next to her, his hands stroking her back, warm against her skin; it helps to ease her startled lungs.
“I can’t remember.” She gasps eventually.
George nods, his hand still and warm on her scapula. “What do you remember?” he asks.
The feel of the carpet under her clawing fingers; the monotonous chanting; the absolute cold of the open door; screaming for George in desperation.
“I remember being dragged through the door.” Annie tells him, and she is grateful that the croak of her voice hides the waver in it.
“And then?” George asks.
“I just wanted to come home. And then I was crawling out of my coffin.” Annie states, and George flinches. “It’s okay,” she soothes, she doesn’t want to upset him, “It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.”
George is still watching her closely, as if she might fall apart at any moment. “I don’t know how,” she tells him, “I don’t even know what I am. I don’t feel like a zombie.” She smiles at George, without teeth. A grin with teeth is a little disturbing to look at right now, she knows.
George chuckles, but it sounds forced. There are fine lines around his eyes, like cracks in glass. “You reek of formaldehyde.” He snorts, but his laughs are beginning to sound like gasps for air, almost like sobs.
“How long have I been gone?” she asks.
“Not long,” George soothes her, “it’s been two days since I left the facility.”
Annie watches him carefully. There is a dark smudge, like a fading bruise on his jaw and there are scabs on his knuckles. Annie reaches out and takes his hands in her own. “What happened?” she asks.
George sucks in a breath; Annie rubs her fingers across the back of his hands, gently encouraging him.
“Mitchell’s gone.” He tells her. “So’s-” he continues, his voice breaking with raw grief, “So has Nina.”
~~
They do as Mitchell told them; they get out of the city.
Not too far. To a village that’s barely scraped out of hamlet status: Rudry, to the north-west of Cardiff.
George is adamant they can’t go back.
“You didn’t see him,” he hisses at Annie, when she tries to convince him to wait for Mitchell to find them, “It wasn’t Mitchell anymore, Annie.”
Annie starts her own kitchen garden in the back yard, a few tomato plants in grow bags, some carrots and potatoes next to the fence. The welsh soil is cool and crumbly in her hands. She thinks about him, the smell of him as he tried to kiss her, like old pennies heated in the hand.
Kemp’s neck was broken by the time George got to them, he tells her. “He was covered in blood. I tried to pull him away, but-” he shrugs, gesturing to the fading bruise on his jaw. George’s eyes are pinched and dark, and he won’t look directly at Annie.
She improves daily; she has remembered how to chew, and she can eat small tubs of baby food. She’s filling out slowly, muscles bulking up, and her skin is losing some of its parchment-like quality. She’s still a frightening shade of yellow, like a week old bruise. Some days her legs hurt so much she has to crawl around the house.
“He said it was for everything, the vampires, the other werewolves. He’d decimated the facility by the time I figured out he was there.” George bites his lip so hard that it turns white. “He told me that he could feel you going through the door. That they’d taken you away from him.”
Because of her startling appearance, George has to do all of the shopping. Once a week he leaves her and goes into Cardiff. George won’t tell Annie what happened to Nina, but in his room there is a navy jumper, stiff with dried blood. Annie has a little wind-up radio. She listens to it when she is working in the garden. The Box Tunnel Twenty are mentioned daily.
One day, George brings home two live chickens. Eggs for protein, he tells Annie, he thinks they should be looking at becoming self sufficient.
~~
George listens almost hourly to the news. Little things make him pause. Mentions of families found locked in their houses, dead hands clutching at the locks, whole hostels found abandoned, the sudden closure of the BRI intensive care unit, followed by the paediatric ward.
Annie watches him during the news bulletins, watches how still he becomes, how the resigned expression makes his face look older.
On the twenty third of the month, Annie is lying on the sofa, wrapped in the duvet George brought down for her. She sweats boiling hot and icy cold with fever. She chokes her way through two slices of toast before throwing up. George holds her hair and strokes her back. Her skin itches; red raw and splotchy, it feels like cockroaches are trying to crawl out of her bones.
A reported signal failure in the Severn Tunnel has led to a train crash. They think all one thousand six hundred and eighty eight passengers are dead.
On the twenty sixth of the month, Annie can barely lift her head to drink the water George holds to her lips. Every muscle burns with pain. Her skin is covered in open sores that bleed. George holds her head back and pours penicillin down her throat.
The largest Tesco in Cardiff has been surrounded by armed police. Some kind of terrorist threat. Over three hundred people are trapped inside. Annie can see corpses covered in blood being dragged out by the paramedics. She hallucinates that demons are crawling across the ceiling, watching her with their black eyes, black feathers moulting from their arms and falling down onto her, tickling her skin. Apparently, no one makes it out of Tesco’s alive.
On the thirtieth of the month, Annie’s fever breaks, thanks to the antibiotics. She’s still too weak to move. The new TV, pilfered from an abandoned farm, George tells her, only shows hourly news updates. There’s a little message scrolling along the bottom of the screen, please stay calm, it reads, we have very little information at this time.
George is wrapping fresh bandages around the sores on her legs. His hands are cold and dry against her skin. “There,” he says, tucking the corner of the bandage neatly away, “all done.” Her reaches up, and smoothes her hair, tucking it behind her ears. Annie is shocked to see the hollows of his cheekbones, the shadows under his eyes. George looks like he is dying.
“What’s happening?” she gasps.
“They’re killing everyone in the cities.” George states, calmly. His eyes never leave Annie’s. “it’s like Mitchell said, the cities aren’t safe.”
The TV shows aerial shots of smoke-hazy city centres: Cardiff, Bristol, Liverpool, London. People are trying to get out. Both of the Severn Bridges are bumper to bumper with traffic; people are walking over cars, abandoning their vehicles, pedestrians streaming across the six lanes. The Brynglas tunnels are on fire, cars jumbled in a pile-up that disappears into the mouth of the tunnel which is glowing like a furnace, belching black smoke into the sky. There are ground-level shots of people running from the Underground stations in London. The Mersey tunnels are shut, red crosses blinking on and off above all the entrances. The riot police are waiting in a line with their shields, trying to stop people walking into the Channel tunnel. There is a train derailment at Manchester, but no emergency vehicles are attending. People walking past the cameras are covered in dust or blood or both; they occasionally have to step over bodies lying abandoned in the streets.
“George?” Annie asks, and she can hear the scream building in the back of her throat.
“It’s okay.” He tells her. “They’ll stay in the cities long enough for us to get a few things together, and then we’ll go,” George holds her hand in his, but he doesn’t meet her gaze, “we’ll go somewhere safe.”
~~
It is dark when she wakes up. She’s been dreaming about darkness, about being left alone in absolute nothingness. The TV hums quietly in the background, a list of churches, mosques, synagogues and temples scrolling across the screen.
George is looming above her, silhouetted in the flickering light. His eyes are voids in the dark.
Annie freezes, trying to stay as still as possible, listening for his breathing, trying to check if he’s still George.
“I saw her.” He says, eventually.
“Who?” Annie wheezes; her lungs can’t draw breath for fear.
“Nina.” George states. He staggers slightly, eventually folding up and sitting at her side, holding his knees to his chest. Annie relaxes, she can see his eyes now; she can see how blue his irises are. “She was waiting for me in the garden. She wants me to go with her.”
Annie feels a bone-deep click of understanding reverberate through her. He has been distant ever since she returned; for months she has watched George going through the motions of survival as if he was just killing time. Annie realises now that George must have known the world was going to hell ever since they saw Mitchell clawing at the kitchen table. And since the institution and Nina, Annie thinks, he’s just been waiting to die. He didn’t plan on Annie coming back as a walking corpse, he was just waiting in their pink house for Mitchell to come back and find him.
“Don’t!” Annie gasps. George turns sharply to look at her, his eyes full of tears. Annie feels sick with fear, she doesn’t want to be left, she can’t bear to be alone. She reaches out, cradling his face in her hands. “Don’t go with her. Don’t leave me.” She begs.
George presses her hands even tighter against his face, nodding, hot tears spilling from his eyes onto her thumbs.
~~
It is the fourth of August. George has packed a car with food and medicine. They are almost ready to leave. He has gone to a farm on the other side of Rudry to try and siphon some diesel from abandoned tractors. He has promised to be careful.
The TV hasn’t shown anything other than an eternally scrolling list of places of worship for the past few days. She watches it anyway. She is cold, and her legs are stiff today. She wears two sweaters and three pairs of socks and she struggles to straighten the duvet which is tangled around her ankles. Abruptly the TV screen fuzzes into static and then flares a brilliant white. All the other lamps in the room flicker brightly and then dim and the whole house jerks and shudders. Annie freezes, her breath coming quick and sharp in the sudden silence.
On the other side of the room, the glass patio door jiggles and she watches its lock unlock itself with a click. Squeaking, the glass slides across its floor runner and the rain blows a cluster of brown leaves from the garden inside. They are here, she thinks, they have come for me, oh God. Annie throws herself off the sofa, clawing across the carpet until she reaches the door. She pulls at it, trying to close it, rain making her hands slippery. A tug of war begins between herself and the door’s mass.
It is closing, slowly. She is crying, her face wet, her hands red, with every tug she feels as if her tendons are peeling like ribbons from her bones. No, she thinks, go away go away go away. With a final jolt, the door slams shut and she falls, exhausted, onto the floor. And then comes a crash from the outside; the sliding door’s glass shatters into a spider’s web lace, a million tiny shards in a fraction of a second. She screams, curling into a ball, her arms over her head.
Nothing else happens. Annie waits on the floor, waits for the shattered glass to fall, for the door to slide open again, but nothing happens. Eventually the sun sets, it goes dark.
George never comes home.
~~
Annie dreams she is walking.
It is such a vivid dream; the fields are green and gold, the sky is blue and the air is cold against her cheeks; there is a scent of smoke and she walks on roads free of traffic. She walks steadily, trying not to think, looking only at the mountains in the distance, the blue haze of the forests. Annie only stops to adjust the bandages on her legs, to wrap the scarf tighter around her ears and mouth. She’s wearing layers of George and Mitchell’s clothes to try and compensate for the lost fat that must have dissolved into the lining of her coffin.
She walks until her legs throb.
It is only when she reaches the M4 underpass that any other human activity becomes evident. There has been a car pile up and a fire; the skeletons of burnt-out cars have tumbled off the bridge onto the embankment below. The beautiful sunshine makes the charred corpses hanging out of the windows surreal. The motorway is full of abandoned cars. Pus-blistered bodies hang off bumpers and roofs, skin rotting and sloughing off in the sunshine. Annie is the closest thing to alive here. She feels sick, she feels like laughing, she could lie down here and no-one would know the difference between her and the dead.
She keeps walking.
The sun is high in the sky by the time she reaches the outskirts of Cardiff. She has taken off some jumpers and tied them around her hips; it is warm, a gorgeous summer’s day. The suburbs are empty; the houses are deserted, their dark bay windows glinting like teeth. The trees rustle in the breeze. There are few cars on the streets or in driveways, those that have been left have had their tyres slashed and their windows smashed. Some houses have had their front doors broken open, in one hallway there is a pool of dried blood that streaks down the garden pathway and out into the street.
Annie doesn’t feel afraid. She knows she should, but all she feels is exhaustion. She reaches Llanishen village and sits on the bench near the bus shelter, resting her legs. She stretches, listening to her joints crack; her arms are still stick-thin and her flesh is grey. She reaches down to unwrap the bandages on her legs, her knees are bulbous, the skin shrunken around them. Some of the sores on her skin are scabbing over, most are still red and oozing slightly.
In the Co-Op behind her, something falls to the floor with a clatter.
It is loud enough it wake her up.
~~
She wakes on a cold cement floor. This is not the lounge she fell asleep in, she thinks. The sea-sick daisy patterned carpet has disappeared, so has the artex ceiling. Above her, the polystyrene tiles are water-stained. There is an old, rusted bed to her left and when she rolls her head to the side she can see a locked door on her right. The windows are high and barred.
Annie smells them before she sees them; there is a pile of corpses in the middle of the room. Their decay is mouldering them into one another, a ribcage here with an arm piercing through it, an open scream of a skull looking into maggot-infested eyes. Their stench is overpowering; it cloys the air and makes Annie retch a thin trickle of bile. She heaves, each gasp of air making it worse until she is dizzy.
And there, in the pile, she thinks she can see George’s blue eyes.
No, she moans, crawling away to the door. No, she’s dizzy and her eyes are watering and it’s not him, he promised he’d be careful and the face the eyes are resting in is too mashed-up, to bloody to tell. It’s not him. No.
She’s slamming her palms against the door, moaning her denial. No, she thinks, no no no, I can’t stay here, let me out. She’s screaming and her voice doesn’t sound like hers anymore, she calls for George over and over.
~~
She wakes again.
A few of the shards of glass have fallen from the shattered door onto the carpet, leaving a tiny hole in the centre of the broken glass which lets in a thin trickle of rain water and the cold.
She lies there, feeling the chill seeping into her bones. Where her hips touch the daisy patterned carpet she feels a burning pain blazing all the way into her marrow. Her hands clutch, involuntarily, at the fabric underneath her fingertips. She can see the black of the sofa, fazing in and out of focus. Every shadow in the room is moving. She can’t get up and she retches involuntarily, all the breath pounded out of her body. She curls up, drawing herself close, hiding her face.
Icy hands clutch at her arms, forcing Annie to unfurl and turn over to lie on her back. The world turns a slow, nauseating roll. A pale face squints down at her. He looms above her, all blurry blacks and creams, and then shifts into focus. His hair is dark and curly; his eyebrows strong and dark, his eyes are wide with shock. “Annie.” He gasps and his hands are warm against her cold skin as he gathers her up into his arms.
She can feel his fingers threading into her hair, cradling her head. He still smells of hot pennies. “Mitchell.” She sighs, and there’s a buzzing around her, swallowing her words. Her eyes keep closing.
He’s calling, but she can’t keep her eyes open.
~~
“Annie.” He says. The sound of it hurts, so much, and she screams until she has no breath and he’s forcing her mouth open and breathing into her, stale air that tastes of the grave.
It’s not a kiss, but in the darkness she can feel his hands touching every part of her body, caressing her shoulders, her knees, her hips. She feels his cold lips on the pulse point in her neck more than once.
“Just sleep, Annie” He whispers into her ear.
She does, and dreams of George. He watches her; they are alone together, in the darkness, but he won’t say anything no matter how much she begs. She wakes, gasping, feeling the weight of eyes watching her. Mitchell’s sitting by her bed, his hand in hers. He looks tired and angry and overjoyed, and his eyes are clear.
“Are you real?” she whispers, feeling every ache in her body as if it is fresh.
“Yes.” He tells her, his voice low and rough. He shifts, getting out of the chair and moving so that he is sitting on the bed beside her, the weight of him on the mattress makes her body slide towards him. “I’m here,” he tells her, a small smile on his lips, his fingers tightening around hers, “I found you, Annie.”
“Yeah,” she sighs, moving to sit up, but the pain crackling across her spine stops her and she hisses. Mitchell moves closer, gathering her into his arms and supporting her as she tries again. He shifts her gently until she is resting against the soft pillows behind her. “Not feeling great.” She confesses. He laughs softly, tucking her hair behind her ears, his hand lingering against her cheek.
“You’re not looking great either,” he tells her. She groans, trying to turn away in a vain attempt to hide. He leans in closer, reaching out to trap her head in his hands and turn her back towards him. “I don’t care,” he tells her, “I brought you back to be with me. I don’t care that you can’t move; I want you weak. I like you helpless.” He smiles, a small morbid twist of the lips.
Annie feels cold. She can feel every muscle in her body tense and every hair on her body stand on end. This is not the Mitchell she knew. This is the Mitchell George tried to warn her about. This is the Mitchell who demanded that she kiss him, his body feverish and hot, pushing into her personal space.
He watches her, intensely, his hands brushing down from her cheeks across the soft line of her neck and onto her collarbone; she can feel the faint scratch of his fingernails against her skin. “It’s okay,” he tells her, “I won’t hurt you.” He doesn’t blink. “I thought about you every second you were away from me. I had to do something.”
“Something?” Annie asks. She can’t find the strength to raise her voice above a whisper.
“Yeah,” he frowns, his shoulders tensing, his hands tightening at her shoulders. “I waited hours in that graveyard and when nothing happened-” he sucks in a breath, looking up at her from underneath his dark eyebrows. “I felt you go.” He tells her.
“What have you done?” she begs, she cannot look away from him. “What am I?”
He flinches, eyes narrowing and nostrils flaring, leaning back from her. “You’re alive,” he tells her, “you’re here.”
~~
Annie heard the stories of the Haitian coffee girls from her grandmother, who heard it from her grandmother and so on. Owen used to snort at the stories, informing Annie that zombies didn’t exist, that the stories all stemmed from a corruption of the word nzambi, and how could a four year old be made to believe that their will belonged to someone else?
Annie believes in zombies now. Annie wonders if Mitchell is her bokor, if his will has become her will. When he tells her to stay, she does, when he tells her to sleep she does.
Next to her bed there is a chair. Annie wakes at nine every day and every day Mitchell sits in the chair, watching her wake. He spends the mornings with her and then vanishes in the afternoons. Annie eats whatever he has prepared for her and then lies there, dozing, as he reads to her, books that are so varied in subject matter that he must collect them from Cardiff library in the time he is gone. They move from Dickens to Mills and Boon to Emily McGuire.
Some days, at about ten, she pretends to doze, lying still and breathing slowly. She listens to the sounds of Mitchell; his leather coat creaks as he climbs out of the chair, his plaid shirt rustles as he leans over her, his hands runch against the bed clothes, his lips are hot against her skin. She can feel the shape of words he cannot say aloud being mouthed against her flesh.
They don’t talk about the things Annie saw before he found her. One night, there are screams outside her bedroom window; at first, in the confusion of waking, Annie thinks the foxes are calling to each other across the fields, but the sounds sharpen until her room echoes with the sounds of a woman begging ‘please’, over and over. Annie lies there, in the dark, every muscle aching, listening. She cannot move. The begging stops, trailing off into a moaning, low and drawn out, and Annie can’t tell if it’s the sound of sex or death. And when it finally stops, all that’s left is the sound of a man, laughing.
When Annie asks Mitchell if he heard anything last night, his hands tighten around the pages of the book he is reading to her. He glances up at her, his eyes black as night, and growls one word: “don’t”. Every hair on her body stands on end. She doesn’t ask about anything, other than their reading matter, again.
She dreams terrible dreams. She wanders through deserted streets screaming for George. Something is following her, something is coming for her and only George can help her, but she can’t find him.
One night, in her dream, she finally finds him. She wakes up sobbing, calling out for him. Her bedroom is dark and stuffy and she thinks she is alone until there is the scratch of a match being lit and Mitchell’s face flares yellow in the brief light.
“You know, you call out for him every night,” he tells her, lighting a cigarette; his tone is ice cold and his face is shadowed and frightening.
All she can taste is bile. Tonight, she watched as a rope was wrapped around George, each coil tighter and tighter. And then black, shiny feathers poured from the darkness, washing over him like waves, each one taller and stronger. They were drowning him in feathers. And she screamed at him to run, run, do something, save yourself, but he just stood there and watched her with blank eyes until he choked to death.
“I miss him,” she sobs, “he left me.” She is shivering, and no matter how tightly she hugs herself, she can’t stop shaking.
“He didn’t care,” Mitchell hisses, starting from the chair to loom above her, “not like-” he breaks off, his breath hitching, “not like I care about you.”
“He did!” She argues, swiping at her tears furiously. “He was there when you weren’t, Mitchell.”
“He didn’t save you!” Mitchell roars, “I did!”
“I don’t want to be saved!” she screams. Annie is furious now, “What have you done?” she shrieks, her hands clutching at her skin, pulling at it so that it lifts from her bones. “I didn’t want this! I don’t like this! I’m all alone and he’s dead! Everyone’s dead!”
Mitchell has gone as white as death; his eyes are holes in the dark of the room. “I came to save you,” he states, his voice hollow, his eyes never leaving hers, “I couldn’t. You were dragged away from me and I felt it. I felt you go.” He sucks in a breath; leaning into her, his exhaled breath on her cheek is scalding. “It was agony. Part of me was ripped away. And they needed to feel that pain. They deserve to die, Annie. They deserve to die for what they’d do to us - what they have done to us.”
He presses against her, his forehead resting on her collarbone, burning with heat. His hands are clutching at the bedclothes either side of her hips.
“I didn’t want that.” She whispers to him, “I want-” she trails off, sudden fear closing-up her throat. She shivers as gooseflesh prickles across her skin.
“You have to tell me,” Mitchell pleads into her shoulder, “You can save me, Annie; I’ll be better for you.”
I want you to read to me, she thinks, I want you to make it all go away, make me warm, I want you to bring everyone back, make me go to sleep, make me forget.
“I want to see George.” She sniffles.
He tenses against her, every muscle like steel. His sits up to look at her. He stares at her until the expression on his face is too much to bear and she closes her eyes. She feels the bed shift as he gets up and leaves.
~~
“The question is, do you want to?” George’s voice whispers from the darkest corner of his room.
Annie is instantly awake, bolt upright in bed. He comes out of the darkness too quickly; he is too pale, his eyes are like bruises and his fingertips are bleeding. He is the most terrible and glorious sight Annie can think of.
“Hello,” she sighs, smiling at him, “Have you come for me?” She feels giddy, like a weight has been lifted.
“Only if you want to,” George tells her, but his mouth lags behind the words, “And that’s the question: do you want to?”
He holds his hands out to her, an invitation, and Annie is tempted; she doesn’t know what’s behind the door, but it has to be better than the end of the world life she’s living.
But, caught in George’s fingers is a bedraggled black feather. It shines in the moonlight coming in through the curtains. Looking at it, Annie feels terror, the cold blast of it, the jarring of her bones.
George’s hands drop to his sides. He smiles at her, his teeth are bloody. “Good choice,” he tells her, his voice soft and warm, “it’s not so great, really.”
He is beginning to blur and fade around the edges. “You’re going back.” Annie says, feeling her heart wrench.
“It’s okay,” George says, and his voice is warm and comforting. He looks at her with his bruised eyes, and all Annie can see is acceptance, her chest feels like it’s being ripped open. “It’s really okay, I’ve got Nina.” He is almost gone. “It’s okay, Annie.” He tells her as he disappears.
Annie sits there, for a long time, looking at the place where he last stood, listening to the complete and perfect silence of the world.
~~
There is nothing but silence and the blur of grey shadow and darkness in her room. Everything is fading away. Annie marvels at her heart, continuing to beat. She hasn’t eaten or drunk for days.
And then he is above her, a white blur in the night. “Save me.” He tells her.
Each item of clothing her drags from her body exposes her to the cold, her skin numbing itself in the chill. She can’t move. She lies as still as a corpse, her bones jutting out, pressing into his thighs, his chest. Annie closes her eyes, feeling the serenity of the emptiness around them.
Mitchell presses his teeth against her throat and his mouth is hot and mean against her vulnerable skin. He pushes into her, pulling out again quickly, and with each thrust Annie can feel her skin shifting against her bones, lifting and sagging back limply.
She falls away, feeling the darkness creeping thickly into her mouth, her eyes, her nose. Her thighs roll apart, bones separating and resetting with each press of his hips against hers. His hands clutch at her arms, lifting the flesh from her bones and then sliding it back into place. She can feel him, hot and hard inside, his cock dragging against her, pulling her so that her body is turning inside-out against him. She tries to tense her muscles, stop her body sliding so wetly against him; She squeezes him from the inside, dragging him closer, trying not to be pulled apart. He moans, pressing into her, thrusting harder and faster.
Annie forces her eyes open. All she can see is blackness, and all she can hear is the nothingness around her and in her and through her. She is nothing, floating in nothing, hearing nothing.
And then Mitchell bites her, his sharp teeth burning, and she is everything, feeling everything, hearing everything. She can see mudslides, a power station all ablaze, a city centre clock flashing midnight and 142 degrees centigrade, bodies littered around the churches, their flesh dripping from their bones in decay. She is burning, sliced in two from her clit to her skull. She can feel him spilling into her, and she sobs as he moans, her body is open all the way down. The light is too bright and the heat too hot and the spasms won’t stop. She cannot breathe, even when he rolls off her; he has pressed his teeth directly into her nerve endings, and it hurts, her body is not meant to be without skin, open to every sensation.
She rolls over and presses her body against his, hiding her face, trying to block out the overload of colour and sound.
“Are you okay?” he asks, stroking her hair.
No, she thinks, I’m not. I don’t want to feel this world so sharply; I don’t want to see technicolour desolation and destruction.
Mitchell pulls her closer, arms like steel bands around her. He rubs at her bloody neck with his thumb, the callus blazing against her hypersensitive flesh. “It will be okay.” He whispers.
Annie closes her eyes. Outside, the birds are singing a repetitive, broken melody and the air is full of smoke.
~~
Fin.