Fic: Something Only the Dead Know
Title: Something Only the Dead Know
Author: djarum99
Fandom: Being Human
Characters/Pairing: Mitchell/Annie, George, Nina
Rating: R
Warnings: no warnings apply
Prompt: Written for the beinghuman_thon prompt request “Annie/Mitchell - Annie tells Mitchell that, even with all his ‘baggage,’ she wishes she'd met him before Owen” for sabaceanbabe
Summary: Some sins are harder to forgive than others, and sometimes salvation bleeds. This is Mitchell and Annie finding a way to live with their choices, post episode eight.
Notes: The BBC owns the vampire, the ghost, and the werewolf; I make no profit. Spoilery through season two. This is a bit dark, and I hope I didn’t stray too far from the prompt. The story reads as a standalone, but it follows God’s Blueprint, in which Mitchell found a way to rescue Annie from what lies behind Death’s doors.
This is where the wild things are, and we have got your scent now, we can find you at the edge of the earth...
A ghost cannot sleep, but Annie remembers dreaming. Remembers flying, pearl-polished toes skimming the earth, swimming in the wind’s blue song, taking tea with talking birds. Angel’s tales, her Gran used to call them - but a ghost cannot dream. Sometimes Annie wonders if she’s been wrenched from Death’s cold hands only to awaken in some sly nightmare. Like those awful Elm Street films, when children escape from Freddy’s talons to the safety of suburban bedrooms, and then end up sliced and diced by their bed-in-a-bag duvets.
So much has changed since Mitchell brought her back. George has filled in the blank spaces that she wasn’t there to see. Most of them. She thinks Mitchell might share the rest with her soon, knows he needs to set some dark thing free - sometimes, when she looks into his eyes, she can hear Kemp’s endless screaming.
Someday Mitchell will tell her. His secret can’t be worse.
Mitchell had kissed her as he carried her inside, all in a swirling rush, stars wheeling overhead, shreds of the Keeper’s fury still clinging to her soul. Kissed her for the second time, and his mouth had been hard, desperate - Annie had tasted him. Not truly Mitchell, she’d known that, but her imagining what he would be, smoke and heat and whiskey, with something half-familiar underneath. He’d put her down just past the threshold, cradled her face, and she could feel him, the press of bone and calloused fingers, the stolen memory of warmth.
“Annie...I found you, not just a tingle, you’re warm, I can...I’m going to do it again.”
Mitchell had, more gently then but not waiting for permission, and not before she’d seen his joy and the fear that lurked beneath. From somewhere behind them, in the uneasy shadows, she had heard a woman’s voice, liquid keening, a sound of sorrow so deep it had flooded her heart. Like drowning. Mitchell’s kiss had been a lifeline, her first aching breath on the surface of a dismal sea.
George and Nina had appeared then, trailing faded lavender sheets; George had tripped on his, lost modesty to disbelief, and wrapped her in a bare skin hug with Nina joining in. Mitchell hadn’t let her go, and they’d ended in a swaying huddle, the four of them in a dingy hallway with the night wind sweeping through.
A hallway in Wales. The pink corner house is gone, left behind in the dust of chaos, and Annie’s afraid of losing its essence to these dull, slow-motion days. George is stoic, and Nina is brittle, wearing a veneer like porcelain armor that will crack with the Next Bad Thing. Annie can see what’s underneath, thinks that the Next Bad Thing might want to run, far away and very fast - Nina has embraced her Wolf. Being four instead of three has tipped their balance, turned a page, but Annie welcomes that change. George’s absolution is worth the price of stumbling conversation and damp flimsies on the bath rail. Besides...there’s safety in numbers.
They’re waiting for what comes next.
Annie will let Mitchell confess, let him unveil the knife-edged truth of what he’d done to save her. His secret can’t be worse than her own. She’s willing to cart black sin to Babylon for the sake of those she loves, and Mitchell has saved her...from Them. Annie isn’t certain that the way of it will matter, or what that might mean about the person she’s become. She’s no longer the girl who chained herself to love’s diamond ring deception.
Annie can name the monsters now.
Owen wore entitlement like a tarnished pawn shop medal, and Mitchell has decades of blood on his hands, but he never denies his victims, or his choice. Maybe that’s the difference, the thing she can forgive. Maybe it’s just that Mitchell is one of her own, someone who leaves unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink, someone who snores, just a little, when she’s wandering midnight’s vacant spaces and waiting for the sun.
Their limestone cottage squats between weary ancient hills, isolated, shabby, miles from a city that Annie doesn’t know. She’s certain the rooms reek of mildew, though she’d lost her sense of smell to the tiles beneath Owen’s staircase - she’s lost so many of the living’s touchstones, and hasn’t had time to mourn them all. Besides...some of them have come back. Back through the Door, clinging tight to her awareness as she clung tight to Mitchell, blinded by moonlight, icy tears, after so many nights in the Dark. She can feel now, if she chooses, the prickly wool of George’s sweaters, the kettle’s steam against her face. Rain, the chill of morning, Mitchell’s fingers in her hair.
The house has only two cramped bedrooms - Nina and George share one, and she’s taken to haunting Mitchell’s. Not a proper haunting, of course; just crawling under bedclothes she suspects aren’t particularly clean, and wiling away the quiet hours watching him as he sleeps. Sprawled in lost childhood’s abandon, he looks like the boy he must have been. So very long ago, over a century and counting; Annie thinks he was born in Dungarven, but can’t remember when he’d told her - he seldom talks about his past. Not the part when he was human.
Tonight, she’s grown tired of waiting.
He woke with her first touch, the tentative brush of her lips at his shoulder. She kisses him, the third time, makes it deep and sweet, marks a path to his throat’s smooth hollow. No pulse beats there, but she can feel him, the burn of life’s fire beneath his skin, fierce and bright, an aching lie.
“What are we doing, Annie?” It isn’t really a question - his hands are already beneath her shirt and he’s hard against her thigh.
“The next thing. What we need to do. I won’t just let it all happen, not anymore. I won’t let myself stay frozen.”
“The next thing, then. And...you’re naked. How did that happen?” There’s wonder in his voice, laughter, and it hurts - it’s been months since she’s heard him laugh.
“I just - shut up, Mitchell.”
He doesn’t, moans when she straddles his hips, hisses a curse when she takes him in, whispers as they move together, “so beautiful...so warm...,” tries to push her beneath him but she struggles, refuses. Annie is flying, spiraling upward, winging between his body and her own - she knows the moment he begins to fall, before his eyes go dark, before he breathes her name. Mitchell finishes her with his mouth, his tongue, and Annie tastes her own surrender.
We’ve driven off the edge of the map but we’re still travelling. No one told me death sometimes cheats.
Annie’s learned a thing or two about cheating, and charting her own painful course. She tells Mitchell what she’d done to save them, about Kemp, about what happens to a living man who enters a Door unbidden. She tells him about the screaming.
“They crawl, Mitchell, and they devour - he won’t die, and they won’t stop feeding.”
He pulls her against his chest, draws up the blanket to cover them both.
“He would have killed Nina. Tried to kill us all.”
“I know. I’d do it again, Mitchell. That’s the thing, the worst of it - I’m not sorry.”
“Neither am I. Not about Kemp. You’re not a monster, Annie, you’re not...like me.”
His story is worse, and the same. Mitchell's voice catches on his victim's name, but he tells her, tells her all of it, how he'd chosen, how she'd smiled, how she clung to her life's misery with denial's palsied hope. How he had stolen even that.
“You killed an innocent woman to find me. And...I can't even say the words. Can't pretend I'm sorry. Maybe we’re both monsters.”
“I can’t hurt you, Annie.”
“Because I’m a ghost? We can hurt each other, Mitchell. Don’t you ever doubt it.”
"But we're not monsters here, Annie. Not for each other. Never that."
Their bedroom window captures starlight, limning the panes with silver. Tomorrow night the moon will wax full. The cottage has a cellar, and two wolves to share it; Annie isn’t sure anymore if that’s a blessing, or a curse. Maybe love is the only truth, maybe the trick is knowing when it’s real, when to let go and when to hold tight, when to ride for that third star, straight on into the morning.
“I wish I’d met you before - you, George, Nina. Before Owen, before I died, before he stole my life. I wish I’d known what I know now, when I was still alive.”
He sighs against the back of her neck, cups her breast.
“Then it might have been me - your thief. Doesn’t bear thinking of.”
That’s Mitchell, always hard-rock honest when he can be, but Annie can see the cracks, the fault lines of self-deception. She thinks he’ll need her help with that in the dark-winged days to come, knows they’ll need to make cruel choices in order to survive. Sometimes honesty is overrated, and monsters have always walked the night.
The ones who dwell inside this house are waiting for what comes next.
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Author: djarum99
Fandom: Being Human
Characters/Pairing: Mitchell/Annie, George, Nina
Rating: R
Warnings: no warnings apply
Prompt: Written for the beinghuman_thon prompt request “Annie/Mitchell - Annie tells Mitchell that, even with all his ‘baggage,’ she wishes she'd met him before Owen” for sabaceanbabe
Summary: Some sins are harder to forgive than others, and sometimes salvation bleeds. This is Mitchell and Annie finding a way to live with their choices, post episode eight.
Notes: The BBC owns the vampire, the ghost, and the werewolf; I make no profit. Spoilery through season two. This is a bit dark, and I hope I didn’t stray too far from the prompt. The story reads as a standalone, but it follows God’s Blueprint, in which Mitchell found a way to rescue Annie from what lies behind Death’s doors.
This is where the wild things are, and we have got your scent now, we can find you at the edge of the earth...
A ghost cannot sleep, but Annie remembers dreaming. Remembers flying, pearl-polished toes skimming the earth, swimming in the wind’s blue song, taking tea with talking birds. Angel’s tales, her Gran used to call them - but a ghost cannot dream. Sometimes Annie wonders if she’s been wrenched from Death’s cold hands only to awaken in some sly nightmare. Like those awful Elm Street films, when children escape from Freddy’s talons to the safety of suburban bedrooms, and then end up sliced and diced by their bed-in-a-bag duvets.
So much has changed since Mitchell brought her back. George has filled in the blank spaces that she wasn’t there to see. Most of them. She thinks Mitchell might share the rest with her soon, knows he needs to set some dark thing free - sometimes, when she looks into his eyes, she can hear Kemp’s endless screaming.
Someday Mitchell will tell her. His secret can’t be worse.
Mitchell had kissed her as he carried her inside, all in a swirling rush, stars wheeling overhead, shreds of the Keeper’s fury still clinging to her soul. Kissed her for the second time, and his mouth had been hard, desperate - Annie had tasted him. Not truly Mitchell, she’d known that, but her imagining what he would be, smoke and heat and whiskey, with something half-familiar underneath. He’d put her down just past the threshold, cradled her face, and she could feel him, the press of bone and calloused fingers, the stolen memory of warmth.
“Annie...I found you, not just a tingle, you’re warm, I can...I’m going to do it again.”
Mitchell had, more gently then but not waiting for permission, and not before she’d seen his joy and the fear that lurked beneath. From somewhere behind them, in the uneasy shadows, she had heard a woman’s voice, liquid keening, a sound of sorrow so deep it had flooded her heart. Like drowning. Mitchell’s kiss had been a lifeline, her first aching breath on the surface of a dismal sea.
George and Nina had appeared then, trailing faded lavender sheets; George had tripped on his, lost modesty to disbelief, and wrapped her in a bare skin hug with Nina joining in. Mitchell hadn’t let her go, and they’d ended in a swaying huddle, the four of them in a dingy hallway with the night wind sweeping through.
A hallway in Wales. The pink corner house is gone, left behind in the dust of chaos, and Annie’s afraid of losing its essence to these dull, slow-motion days. George is stoic, and Nina is brittle, wearing a veneer like porcelain armor that will crack with the Next Bad Thing. Annie can see what’s underneath, thinks that the Next Bad Thing might want to run, far away and very fast - Nina has embraced her Wolf. Being four instead of three has tipped their balance, turned a page, but Annie welcomes that change. George’s absolution is worth the price of stumbling conversation and damp flimsies on the bath rail. Besides...there’s safety in numbers.
They’re waiting for what comes next.
Annie will let Mitchell confess, let him unveil the knife-edged truth of what he’d done to save her. His secret can’t be worse than her own. She’s willing to cart black sin to Babylon for the sake of those she loves, and Mitchell has saved her...from Them. Annie isn’t certain that the way of it will matter, or what that might mean about the person she’s become. She’s no longer the girl who chained herself to love’s diamond ring deception.
Annie can name the monsters now.
Owen wore entitlement like a tarnished pawn shop medal, and Mitchell has decades of blood on his hands, but he never denies his victims, or his choice. Maybe that’s the difference, the thing she can forgive. Maybe it’s just that Mitchell is one of her own, someone who leaves unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink, someone who snores, just a little, when she’s wandering midnight’s vacant spaces and waiting for the sun.
Their limestone cottage squats between weary ancient hills, isolated, shabby, miles from a city that Annie doesn’t know. She’s certain the rooms reek of mildew, though she’d lost her sense of smell to the tiles beneath Owen’s staircase - she’s lost so many of the living’s touchstones, and hasn’t had time to mourn them all. Besides...some of them have come back. Back through the Door, clinging tight to her awareness as she clung tight to Mitchell, blinded by moonlight, icy tears, after so many nights in the Dark. She can feel now, if she chooses, the prickly wool of George’s sweaters, the kettle’s steam against her face. Rain, the chill of morning, Mitchell’s fingers in her hair.
The house has only two cramped bedrooms - Nina and George share one, and she’s taken to haunting Mitchell’s. Not a proper haunting, of course; just crawling under bedclothes she suspects aren’t particularly clean, and wiling away the quiet hours watching him as he sleeps. Sprawled in lost childhood’s abandon, he looks like the boy he must have been. So very long ago, over a century and counting; Annie thinks he was born in Dungarven, but can’t remember when he’d told her - he seldom talks about his past. Not the part when he was human.
Tonight, she’s grown tired of waiting.
He woke with her first touch, the tentative brush of her lips at his shoulder. She kisses him, the third time, makes it deep and sweet, marks a path to his throat’s smooth hollow. No pulse beats there, but she can feel him, the burn of life’s fire beneath his skin, fierce and bright, an aching lie.
“What are we doing, Annie?” It isn’t really a question - his hands are already beneath her shirt and he’s hard against her thigh.
“The next thing. What we need to do. I won’t just let it all happen, not anymore. I won’t let myself stay frozen.”
“The next thing, then. And...you’re naked. How did that happen?” There’s wonder in his voice, laughter, and it hurts - it’s been months since she’s heard him laugh.
“I just - shut up, Mitchell.”
He doesn’t, moans when she straddles his hips, hisses a curse when she takes him in, whispers as they move together, “so beautiful...so warm...,” tries to push her beneath him but she struggles, refuses. Annie is flying, spiraling upward, winging between his body and her own - she knows the moment he begins to fall, before his eyes go dark, before he breathes her name. Mitchell finishes her with his mouth, his tongue, and Annie tastes her own surrender.
We’ve driven off the edge of the map but we’re still travelling. No one told me death sometimes cheats.
Annie’s learned a thing or two about cheating, and charting her own painful course. She tells Mitchell what she’d done to save them, about Kemp, about what happens to a living man who enters a Door unbidden. She tells him about the screaming.
“They crawl, Mitchell, and they devour - he won’t die, and they won’t stop feeding.”
He pulls her against his chest, draws up the blanket to cover them both.
“He would have killed Nina. Tried to kill us all.”
“I know. I’d do it again, Mitchell. That’s the thing, the worst of it - I’m not sorry.”
“Neither am I. Not about Kemp. You’re not a monster, Annie, you’re not...like me.”
His story is worse, and the same. Mitchell's voice catches on his victim's name, but he tells her, tells her all of it, how he'd chosen, how she'd smiled, how she clung to her life's misery with denial's palsied hope. How he had stolen even that.
“You killed an innocent woman to find me. And...I can't even say the words. Can't pretend I'm sorry. Maybe we’re both monsters.”
“I can’t hurt you, Annie.”
“Because I’m a ghost? We can hurt each other, Mitchell. Don’t you ever doubt it.”
"But we're not monsters here, Annie. Not for each other. Never that."
Their bedroom window captures starlight, limning the panes with silver. Tomorrow night the moon will wax full. The cottage has a cellar, and two wolves to share it; Annie isn’t sure anymore if that’s a blessing, or a curse. Maybe love is the only truth, maybe the trick is knowing when it’s real, when to let go and when to hold tight, when to ride for that third star, straight on into the morning.
“I wish I’d met you before - you, George, Nina. Before Owen, before I died, before he stole my life. I wish I’d known what I know now, when I was still alive.”
He sighs against the back of her neck, cups her breast.
“Then it might have been me - your thief. Doesn’t bear thinking of.”
That’s Mitchell, always hard-rock honest when he can be, but Annie can see the cracks, the fault lines of self-deception. She thinks he’ll need her help with that in the dark-winged days to come, knows they’ll need to make cruel choices in order to survive. Sometimes honesty is overrated, and monsters have always walked the night.
The ones who dwell inside this house are waiting for what comes next.
Create your own visitor map!