Fic: Behind Closed Doors; Being Human; Mitchell/Annie; 1/1
Hello! So I'm not dead, just writing about characters that are.
Title: Behind Closed Doors
Author: shootingstars88
Characters/Pairing: Annie/Mitchell
Rating: G
Disclaimer: All characters/settings etc property of the BBC
Spoilers: S3 eps so far
Summary: Mitchell and Annie discuss purgatory, amongst other things.
A/N - I haven't written anything for a while, and nothing for these two since s1, but this pairing tempted into writing something. I'm not really sure about this one, but it's finished and there's so little fic for these two lately that I thought I'd share. I'm not trying to let Mitchell off the hook for his past here, just trying to suggest that he doesn't have to live in it. Also for anyone who is wondering, the suggestion of Annie sort of sensing Mitchell comes from two things - Mitchell feeling Annie go at the end of S2 and Annie feeling and hearing the victims at the funeral parlour at the end of s1. Unbetaed so apologies for any mistakes.
~
Downstairs, Annie cleans and tidies and tries not to think about the corridor of doors.
Upstairs, Mitchell dreams of it. He closes his eyes and there is nothing but doors.
Behind one of them, somewhere in this corridor of his history, he knows there must be something good.
He’s sure he can find it, possessed by the idea that there’s at least one good door somewhere. He has to find it, not to cancel out the others, not to even the score, just to know that there is one. At least one. Just to prove there is something more than death waiting for him here.
But there are doors and doors as far as he can see and even further than that, an impossibly long corridor that stretches endlessly away in both directions.
At random, he opens a door, looks inside and slams it shut. Another. Another. Another.
He turns and runs flat out until he feels like he might be sick, then he stops in a new stretch of corridor that looks like all the rest and tries the doors here instead.
It’s all that matters, finding one good door. He opens a hundred bad ones looking for it.
He searches for hours or maybe days or maybe neither, long enough to wonder if time even exists here.
But he does find one, in the end.
He can almost hear laughter behind it and there is something that might be a hint of Josie’s perfume on the wind. Relief washes over him and the creeping panic starts to recede.
When he tries to turn the handle, his shaking hands slip. Undeterred, he pushes his shoulder against the door instead and it breaks open.
He stumbles forward into the room and his eyes find her immediately.
It is Josie, as beautiful as the day he met her.
She is sitting in a darkened train, young and beautiful and dead, the side of her neck drenched in shockingly red blood.
He stumbles backward, cries out that this never happened but he’s sitting up in bed, shouting at shadows.
It takes less than a second for him to understand. Letting out a huff of breath, he slumps back against his pillows, breathing hard until the horror of the dream begins to leave him.
When reality settles in, he’s actually a little disappointed in his subconscious. As nightmares go, the doors were getting a bit predictable. Josie was cruel though. His mind is vicious like that.
He leans back against his pillow, watching the shadowed outlines of his new room take shape in the gloom as his breathing returns to normal. He recognises the darkest blur of the wardrobe and the line of a bookcase but everything else is shadow even to his sharp eyes. He turns to the lamp beside his bed and flicks it on, flooding the room with a pale glow.
As it turns out, the shadow at the foot of his bed is Annie.
He lets out a quiet yelp of surprise, scrambling backwards on instinct.
“Annie! What the hell?”
“Sorry, sorry!” she says quickly, holding up her hands in a placating gesture. “I was aiming for my room, y’know-” she makes a little whooshing gesture with her arms to explain what she means. “I suppose my steering was a little bit off.”
“A bit.”
“Sorry.”
She looks worried, concern creasing into a frown between her eyebrows. He wonders if she saw him as he woke up. “How long have you been there?” His voice sounds a little harsher than he intended, sharpened by embarrassment at the idea.
“Just a couple of seconds,” she assures him quickly. “This was meant to be my room but ... “ she trails off, frowning at the recollection. “I don’t know what happened. I was just trying to figure out where I was when you turned the light on. Mitchell, I’m really sorry. I’ll go.”
Her tone melts his anger in an instant, but she’s already turned to go. She takes a step away from him and he’s surprised how much that one little movement scares him. ”No wait, don’t go,” he says quickly, hearing a plea in his voice that is mildly desperate. “I’m sorry, I was just surprised that’s all. Stay.”
She nods, accepting his apology, but there is still a shadow of concern on her face.
“Are you sure you’re ok Mitchell?” she asks. “You look a bit like you’ve-”
“-seen a ghost?” he jumps in, trying to inject a little humour to steer this conversation into lighter territory.
“You looked like you’d had a nightmare just now,” she says, acknowledging his joke with just a fleeting smile.
“I’m fine,” he says quickly. Too quickly.
“Are you sure?” she asks, unconvinced. Her eyes keep flicking to his face and he’s sure she can see the drying tears on his cheeks.
“Annie, it’s nothing,” he says but there is a waiver in his voice he can’t hide.
She sits down on the the empty side of his bed, twisting to face him where he sits up against the headboard. He wishes she’d look away because her gaze feels like it’s looking right into him and there are things there she shouldn’t have to see.
“You can tell me you know. I think...” she hesitates and just for a moment she looks impossibly sad. “I think if I could sleep I’d only ever have nightmares.”
Something in his chest tightens at her words. His heart hasn’t beat in a lifetime but he can feel something stirring in there all the same, the ghost of his human heart. He doesn’t reply, just throws the covers aside and pats the space beside him.
Annie smiles at his gesture but it doesn’t reach her eyes. She toes off her boots, a recently acquired skill, and slips her feet under the covers. Mitchell lifts his arm and she settles against him without a word, pillowing her head against his chest.
It’s the strangest sensation. Annie’s skin is cool but everywhere she’s touching him feels warmer than he has in years. He lowers his arm around her, hugging her in tighter and dips his head to press a kiss into her curls.
“Was it about purgatory?” she asks quietly.
He opens his mouth to deny it, to brush her question aside but then he remembers that she’s been there too. She has her own corridor, her own doors. So he tells her the truth.
“Yeah it was.”
She’s tense beside him, he can feel it, and he realises in a rush of horror that she feels guilty that he had to go there.
“I’m-”
“Don’t,” he interrupts her before she can say. “Don’t apologise.”
“But it’s my fault-”
“Annie,” he stretches the syllables of her name into a complaint. “I knew what I was doing. I just wanted you back.”
“I know what that place is like Mitchell,” she says and her voice is suddenly heavy with tears. “I hate that you went there.”
“It was my choice,” he tells her firmly. “I went looking for you. Anything else I found was of my own making.”
She hesitates and then asks, “What happened to you Mitchell? What did you see there?” Her hand, which has been absently tracing patterns across his t-shirt, stills as she waits for his answer.
“Myself,” he answers simply, as honestly as he can bear to. “Just myself, that’s all.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she says softly, “and I don’t think it was all of you, y’know.”
“What do you mean?”
She twists in his arms, pulling away to sit up so she can look at him properly. She looks so sad that he takes her hand in his without thinking, trying to chase some of the darkness from her face. His touch seems to ground her somehow, pulling her back from whatever memory she was lost in. She takes a deep breath and explains, phrasing her words carefully.
“I don’t know what you saw there Mitchell, but I saw ... nothing. All the rooms behind all my doors were empty. All I did was wait.” The hand in his trembles slightly and her voice shakes, but she doesn’t falter. “They said this was my life, that I’d filled my corridor with nothing. That I’d looked in on other people’s lives and wasted my own.”
It’s unbearable, to hear her talk like this. “Annie-” he tries to interrupt.
She ignores him and wipes impatiently at the fresh tears on her cheeks.
“I started to believe them as well,” she continues, “I started to forget the good things. But now I’m out of there it’s like it’s all come back. I had a family. I made people happy. I did good things. I had dreams. But none of that was there because ... because that place was designed to be cruel. They wanted to trap me and scare me and that’s all. They used pieces of me Mitchell. The bad pieces.”
She looks carefully at him and the conviction in her eyes is clear. “It was not the whole of my life. Not the whole of me. Maybe it was the same for you.”
He lets out a long breath, considering the idea. Annie sits patiently beside him while he is lost in thought, his mind in that corridor again.
All the rooms behind all the doors were of his own making, he knows this. Lia had shown him the worst of himself but maybe she didn’t show him everything. Maybe Annie was right and that corridor wasn’t really all of him at all, just pieces.
He runs a hand through his tousled hair, lost. He knows what he is. He accepts what he’s done. He is a murderer and a liar and a coward but, he remembers, he once had started to see that he did not have to be only those things.
Annie certainly seems to think he is more than the sum of his parts. He looks at her, good and kind and falling in love with him, of all people. Just then he knows that he is capable of good. Someone so human couldn’t love a monster.
Impulsively he leans forward and kisses her. She smiles into his kiss, her hand reaching up to cup his cheek.
“I think you’re right,” he says when they break apart, resting his forehead against hers.
She smiles. “I usually am.”
The little joke, so out of place in this serious conversation, breaks the tension wonderfully. Mitchell pulls back from her and laughs, freer than he has in a long time. Annie joins him, her whole face lighting up to see him smile.
When they are quiet again, Annie settles back down beside him, burrowing into his arms. She puts her hand on his chest, over his silent heart and taps a beat for him.
He closes his eyes again until the edges of his thoughts begin to blur with sleep. “You don’t have to stay all night y’know.” he says, thinking of the sleeplessness of Annie’s existence.
She shushes him, pressing a featherlight kiss to his chest. “Don’t be silly. Beside, this isn’t just for you y’know.”
He wonders when was the last time she was held like this and pulls her a little closer to him. “Well you’re always welcome,” he says warmly. “Although maybe knock next time,” he adds, unable to help a little joke.
Annie huffs but her tone is amused. “I wasn’t like stalking you or anything. Actually it’s weird. I really was trying to be in my room but just as I disappeared ... it was almost like I could ... hear you, all the way downstairs. You just sort of popped into my head and then I was here.”
“Maybe I was talking in my sleep,” he suggests, hearing an edge of tiredness softening his voice.
“I was downstairs Mitchell. You’d have had to be shouting,” she counters.
“Right, yeah,” he agrees, hardly listening.
She tilts her head thoughtfully, considering. “It wasn’t like hearing you actually,” she says slowly. “It was more like ... I don’t know ... like a feeling. A pull. Just for a second.”
Suddenly he is wide awake. He remembers, with the crystal clear accuracy of immortality, a moment when he’d felt something like that too. A little piece of her in him, pulling. A possibility takes shape in the back of his mind, a connection beyond what they can put a name to. It’s absurd of course, but they’re off the map here after all. Warmth blazes in his chest at the thought and he wonders at how he can have lived so long and still find things he doesn’t understand.
She shrugs. “Weird.”
“Yeah, weird,” he agrees after a moment.
“Maybe I just gravitated towards the mess,” Annie jokes, happy to brush aside the strange circumstance. “Your room is a tip.”
Mitchell groans. “Uh I’ve been a bit busy?”
“It’s not your mess actually, for a change. The house is a mess. It’s filthy. I can’t believe you moved in when it’s like this.” The exasperation in her tone is so endearingly familiar that he smiles. “Actually I can believe it of you, maybe even of George, but I thought Nina might have put her foot down.” He can tells she’s been dying to say this for a while. “The kitchen was atrocious.”
“Wait a minute - was atrocious? Annie have you been cleaning the house on the sly?” he asks, laughing quietly. The banter is easy still, despite the changes, and he’s grateful.
“Of course I have! I mean it’s bad enough you moved to a foreign country -”
“Annie it’s Wales, it’s hardly foreign. We didn’t need passports.”
“Just as well.”
He laughs and she laughs and then just like that it’s quiet again. Their breathing levels out, falls into sync and Mitchell feels Annie smiling against his chest.
She is happy, and it’s because of him.
The last thing he thinks about before falling asleep is doors. He thinks of a corridor of all the good and all the bad and decides that if it exists, there will be a door with this room behind it. This is a good one. He’s found it.
~
:)
Title: Behind Closed Doors
Author: shootingstars88
Characters/Pairing: Annie/Mitchell
Rating: G
Disclaimer: All characters/settings etc property of the BBC
Spoilers: S3 eps so far
Summary: Mitchell and Annie discuss purgatory, amongst other things.
A/N - I haven't written anything for a while, and nothing for these two since s1, but this pairing tempted into writing something. I'm not really sure about this one, but it's finished and there's so little fic for these two lately that I thought I'd share. I'm not trying to let Mitchell off the hook for his past here, just trying to suggest that he doesn't have to live in it. Also for anyone who is wondering, the suggestion of Annie sort of sensing Mitchell comes from two things - Mitchell feeling Annie go at the end of S2 and Annie feeling and hearing the victims at the funeral parlour at the end of s1. Unbetaed so apologies for any mistakes.
~
Downstairs, Annie cleans and tidies and tries not to think about the corridor of doors.
Upstairs, Mitchell dreams of it. He closes his eyes and there is nothing but doors.
Behind one of them, somewhere in this corridor of his history, he knows there must be something good.
He’s sure he can find it, possessed by the idea that there’s at least one good door somewhere. He has to find it, not to cancel out the others, not to even the score, just to know that there is one. At least one. Just to prove there is something more than death waiting for him here.
But there are doors and doors as far as he can see and even further than that, an impossibly long corridor that stretches endlessly away in both directions.
At random, he opens a door, looks inside and slams it shut. Another. Another. Another.
He turns and runs flat out until he feels like he might be sick, then he stops in a new stretch of corridor that looks like all the rest and tries the doors here instead.
It’s all that matters, finding one good door. He opens a hundred bad ones looking for it.
He searches for hours or maybe days or maybe neither, long enough to wonder if time even exists here.
But he does find one, in the end.
He can almost hear laughter behind it and there is something that might be a hint of Josie’s perfume on the wind. Relief washes over him and the creeping panic starts to recede.
When he tries to turn the handle, his shaking hands slip. Undeterred, he pushes his shoulder against the door instead and it breaks open.
He stumbles forward into the room and his eyes find her immediately.
It is Josie, as beautiful as the day he met her.
She is sitting in a darkened train, young and beautiful and dead, the side of her neck drenched in shockingly red blood.
He stumbles backward, cries out that this never happened but he’s sitting up in bed, shouting at shadows.
It takes less than a second for him to understand. Letting out a huff of breath, he slumps back against his pillows, breathing hard until the horror of the dream begins to leave him.
When reality settles in, he’s actually a little disappointed in his subconscious. As nightmares go, the doors were getting a bit predictable. Josie was cruel though. His mind is vicious like that.
He leans back against his pillow, watching the shadowed outlines of his new room take shape in the gloom as his breathing returns to normal. He recognises the darkest blur of the wardrobe and the line of a bookcase but everything else is shadow even to his sharp eyes. He turns to the lamp beside his bed and flicks it on, flooding the room with a pale glow.
As it turns out, the shadow at the foot of his bed is Annie.
He lets out a quiet yelp of surprise, scrambling backwards on instinct.
“Annie! What the hell?”
“Sorry, sorry!” she says quickly, holding up her hands in a placating gesture. “I was aiming for my room, y’know-” she makes a little whooshing gesture with her arms to explain what she means. “I suppose my steering was a little bit off.”
“A bit.”
“Sorry.”
She looks worried, concern creasing into a frown between her eyebrows. He wonders if she saw him as he woke up. “How long have you been there?” His voice sounds a little harsher than he intended, sharpened by embarrassment at the idea.
“Just a couple of seconds,” she assures him quickly. “This was meant to be my room but ... “ she trails off, frowning at the recollection. “I don’t know what happened. I was just trying to figure out where I was when you turned the light on. Mitchell, I’m really sorry. I’ll go.”
Her tone melts his anger in an instant, but she’s already turned to go. She takes a step away from him and he’s surprised how much that one little movement scares him. ”No wait, don’t go,” he says quickly, hearing a plea in his voice that is mildly desperate. “I’m sorry, I was just surprised that’s all. Stay.”
She nods, accepting his apology, but there is still a shadow of concern on her face.
“Are you sure you’re ok Mitchell?” she asks. “You look a bit like you’ve-”
“-seen a ghost?” he jumps in, trying to inject a little humour to steer this conversation into lighter territory.
“You looked like you’d had a nightmare just now,” she says, acknowledging his joke with just a fleeting smile.
“I’m fine,” he says quickly. Too quickly.
“Are you sure?” she asks, unconvinced. Her eyes keep flicking to his face and he’s sure she can see the drying tears on his cheeks.
“Annie, it’s nothing,” he says but there is a waiver in his voice he can’t hide.
She sits down on the the empty side of his bed, twisting to face him where he sits up against the headboard. He wishes she’d look away because her gaze feels like it’s looking right into him and there are things there she shouldn’t have to see.
“You can tell me you know. I think...” she hesitates and just for a moment she looks impossibly sad. “I think if I could sleep I’d only ever have nightmares.”
Something in his chest tightens at her words. His heart hasn’t beat in a lifetime but he can feel something stirring in there all the same, the ghost of his human heart. He doesn’t reply, just throws the covers aside and pats the space beside him.
Annie smiles at his gesture but it doesn’t reach her eyes. She toes off her boots, a recently acquired skill, and slips her feet under the covers. Mitchell lifts his arm and she settles against him without a word, pillowing her head against his chest.
It’s the strangest sensation. Annie’s skin is cool but everywhere she’s touching him feels warmer than he has in years. He lowers his arm around her, hugging her in tighter and dips his head to press a kiss into her curls.
“Was it about purgatory?” she asks quietly.
He opens his mouth to deny it, to brush her question aside but then he remembers that she’s been there too. She has her own corridor, her own doors. So he tells her the truth.
“Yeah it was.”
She’s tense beside him, he can feel it, and he realises in a rush of horror that she feels guilty that he had to go there.
“I’m-”
“Don’t,” he interrupts her before she can say. “Don’t apologise.”
“But it’s my fault-”
“Annie,” he stretches the syllables of her name into a complaint. “I knew what I was doing. I just wanted you back.”
“I know what that place is like Mitchell,” she says and her voice is suddenly heavy with tears. “I hate that you went there.”
“It was my choice,” he tells her firmly. “I went looking for you. Anything else I found was of my own making.”
She hesitates and then asks, “What happened to you Mitchell? What did you see there?” Her hand, which has been absently tracing patterns across his t-shirt, stills as she waits for his answer.
“Myself,” he answers simply, as honestly as he can bear to. “Just myself, that’s all.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she says softly, “and I don’t think it was all of you, y’know.”
“What do you mean?”
She twists in his arms, pulling away to sit up so she can look at him properly. She looks so sad that he takes her hand in his without thinking, trying to chase some of the darkness from her face. His touch seems to ground her somehow, pulling her back from whatever memory she was lost in. She takes a deep breath and explains, phrasing her words carefully.
“I don’t know what you saw there Mitchell, but I saw ... nothing. All the rooms behind all my doors were empty. All I did was wait.” The hand in his trembles slightly and her voice shakes, but she doesn’t falter. “They said this was my life, that I’d filled my corridor with nothing. That I’d looked in on other people’s lives and wasted my own.”
It’s unbearable, to hear her talk like this. “Annie-” he tries to interrupt.
She ignores him and wipes impatiently at the fresh tears on her cheeks.
“I started to believe them as well,” she continues, “I started to forget the good things. But now I’m out of there it’s like it’s all come back. I had a family. I made people happy. I did good things. I had dreams. But none of that was there because ... because that place was designed to be cruel. They wanted to trap me and scare me and that’s all. They used pieces of me Mitchell. The bad pieces.”
She looks carefully at him and the conviction in her eyes is clear. “It was not the whole of my life. Not the whole of me. Maybe it was the same for you.”
He lets out a long breath, considering the idea. Annie sits patiently beside him while he is lost in thought, his mind in that corridor again.
All the rooms behind all the doors were of his own making, he knows this. Lia had shown him the worst of himself but maybe she didn’t show him everything. Maybe Annie was right and that corridor wasn’t really all of him at all, just pieces.
He runs a hand through his tousled hair, lost. He knows what he is. He accepts what he’s done. He is a murderer and a liar and a coward but, he remembers, he once had started to see that he did not have to be only those things.
Annie certainly seems to think he is more than the sum of his parts. He looks at her, good and kind and falling in love with him, of all people. Just then he knows that he is capable of good. Someone so human couldn’t love a monster.
Impulsively he leans forward and kisses her. She smiles into his kiss, her hand reaching up to cup his cheek.
“I think you’re right,” he says when they break apart, resting his forehead against hers.
She smiles. “I usually am.”
The little joke, so out of place in this serious conversation, breaks the tension wonderfully. Mitchell pulls back from her and laughs, freer than he has in a long time. Annie joins him, her whole face lighting up to see him smile.
When they are quiet again, Annie settles back down beside him, burrowing into his arms. She puts her hand on his chest, over his silent heart and taps a beat for him.
He closes his eyes again until the edges of his thoughts begin to blur with sleep. “You don’t have to stay all night y’know.” he says, thinking of the sleeplessness of Annie’s existence.
She shushes him, pressing a featherlight kiss to his chest. “Don’t be silly. Beside, this isn’t just for you y’know.”
He wonders when was the last time she was held like this and pulls her a little closer to him. “Well you’re always welcome,” he says warmly. “Although maybe knock next time,” he adds, unable to help a little joke.
Annie huffs but her tone is amused. “I wasn’t like stalking you or anything. Actually it’s weird. I really was trying to be in my room but just as I disappeared ... it was almost like I could ... hear you, all the way downstairs. You just sort of popped into my head and then I was here.”
“Maybe I was talking in my sleep,” he suggests, hearing an edge of tiredness softening his voice.
“I was downstairs Mitchell. You’d have had to be shouting,” she counters.
“Right, yeah,” he agrees, hardly listening.
She tilts her head thoughtfully, considering. “It wasn’t like hearing you actually,” she says slowly. “It was more like ... I don’t know ... like a feeling. A pull. Just for a second.”
Suddenly he is wide awake. He remembers, with the crystal clear accuracy of immortality, a moment when he’d felt something like that too. A little piece of her in him, pulling. A possibility takes shape in the back of his mind, a connection beyond what they can put a name to. It’s absurd of course, but they’re off the map here after all. Warmth blazes in his chest at the thought and he wonders at how he can have lived so long and still find things he doesn’t understand.
She shrugs. “Weird.”
“Yeah, weird,” he agrees after a moment.
“Maybe I just gravitated towards the mess,” Annie jokes, happy to brush aside the strange circumstance. “Your room is a tip.”
Mitchell groans. “Uh I’ve been a bit busy?”
“It’s not your mess actually, for a change. The house is a mess. It’s filthy. I can’t believe you moved in when it’s like this.” The exasperation in her tone is so endearingly familiar that he smiles. “Actually I can believe it of you, maybe even of George, but I thought Nina might have put her foot down.” He can tells she’s been dying to say this for a while. “The kitchen was atrocious.”
“Wait a minute - was atrocious? Annie have you been cleaning the house on the sly?” he asks, laughing quietly. The banter is easy still, despite the changes, and he’s grateful.
“Of course I have! I mean it’s bad enough you moved to a foreign country -”
“Annie it’s Wales, it’s hardly foreign. We didn’t need passports.”
“Just as well.”
He laughs and she laughs and then just like that it’s quiet again. Their breathing levels out, falls into sync and Mitchell feels Annie smiling against his chest.
She is happy, and it’s because of him.
The last thing he thinks about before falling asleep is doors. He thinks of a corridor of all the good and all the bad and decides that if it exists, there will be a door with this room behind it. This is a good one. He’s found it.
~
:)