Being Human: The Day We Said Goodbye [Hal/Pearl]
Title: “The Day We Said Goodbye”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: R
Timeline: post-Episode 4x01, “Eve of the War”; AU - canon divergence
Summary: My name is Pearl and I’ll love you the best way I know how… Hal and Pearl and all the time they’ve got in the aftermath of Leo’s death. [Hal/Pearl]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. The line in the summary is from "Siren Song" by Bat For Lashes. Quotes from “The Stranger” by Albert Camus; “Tender Is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
A/N: It sprung from that song, at least the general mood and the basic idea. Don’t ask why, I don’t even ship it. XD
THE DAY WE SAID GOODBYE
The day Leo dies, Pearl presses a cold kiss to Hal’s cheek, not comforting but reminding. He is not alone, he’s got her. It terrifies him because he is her anchor in Leo’s absence - and suddenly he’s gone from being someone’s responsibility to taking care of someone.
He turns his head, lips accidentally brushing hers. It’s a cliché, but maybe she wants one.
--
There is little they can talk about outside of Leo. It’s all right with Hal. He doesn’t know how to talk to her for all that they have lived together for fifty-five years. He prefers her silent, sat on the sofa with her Marie Claire, ankles crossed like a proper lady, a blue-and-red nostalgic picture from the days of yore.
--
They have got plenty of time. It’s all they’ve got. All the time in the world.
They stay put for as long as they can but in this electronic day and age when everything is catalogued and processed, they are faceless and nameless and unaccounted for.
--
She doesn’t say a word when he kills for the first time. He is shaking, blood frothing on his lips, but she simply looks at him and goes back to perusing her fashion magazine. He wants to scream at her that she is not upholding her end of the deal, she is not being his new Leo, but the truth is - she doesn’t have to be. She is a broken dead girl and he has always been too selfish not to be focused solely on his bloodlust. They can’t help each other.
He reaches for her, makes her drop the magazine and pulls her into his arms. He buries his bloodied face at the crook of her neck, instinctively looking for the familiar throbbing of a pulse and not finding it. He imagines what she must have smelled like when she was alive. A strong fragrance that carried on in her wake, with something else underneath. Flour sticking to her fingers. Cinnamon. Fresh bakery. Raindrops on flower petals.
Not being able to catch any of that on her now drives him into a frenzy.
--
Pearl is not entirely indifferent. She lets him bite her when she notices that he can’t take his eyes off a group of children in a sandbox. He shouldn’t even be here; obviously the whole getting fresh air thing is not working.
Pearl holds out her hand and he sinks his teeth into her wrist. There is no blood obviously, but the act itself is comforting. It feels like draining snake venom.
His head begins to hurt.
--
Hal nicks one of those fancy new electronic reading devices from a girl in the park because he misses reading too much. It takes him a while to figure out how to use the bloody thing. The library features a small classical selection but is mostly filled with things like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. The latter has Hal laughing madly for quite some time. It sounds like something right up Mr Snow’s alley.
--
They squat in someone’s empty house, waiting for the rightful owners to return any minute. They’ve got nowhere to go and Hal cannot imagine spending another night in some grimy warehouse. Carpets. Radio Four. Central heating. Yes, please.
He can’t sleep. He keeps tossing and turning, and the glistening sheen of sweat on his skin stings, and he yells at Pearl when she places her cold hand on his forehead. She gives him the look again and teleports away. This is not how things are supposed to be. She always had quite the temper, always exploded so easily.
He insults her tea the next time. Calls it an insipid slush, says that mud on the beach tastes better. He hides her magazines and turns the radio up when he catches Barbara Ann playing on some retro station. Pearl hates that song. He wants her to be vocal about it. About anything really. Anything goes.
He kills again. The woman is beautiful, in her early thirties perhaps, with finely moulded facial features, slanted eyes and an elegant, pointed chin. He cannot bring himself to do anything else to her aside from draining her dry, though he wants to.
Wants to drag himself kicking and screaming into his old lifestyle. Wants to take a dive and not think about how disappointed Leo would be. Leo always knew this would be the logical aftermath of their parting. Pearl’s company cannot change that.
He comes home covered in blood and she doesn’t even notice.
--
She’s got nice legs. He catches himself looking occasionally, wondering if Leo tried anything during that Beatles concert. No, it wouldn’t have even occurred to him. Leo could be surprisingly slow when it came to women.
He tells her everything that he would have done to her if she had been alive. Every gory detail. She’s heard worse, always from him. Good thing I’m not alive then, she says.
He slams her against the wall, presses hard against her. She feels cold and soft and not altogether there.
Talk to me, he demands. She remains silent. I will kill again, he says. She looks bored.
--
She sits by his bedside at night as he suffers from withdrawal once again, thrashing in the grip of hungry fever. He must go out. He cannot stand these alien walls. Nothing here reminds him of Leo, which is both painful and encouraging.
He struggles to sit up, scans the room for his clothes. She whispers: Don’t go.
She takes a book from the shelf and starts reading aloud:
Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.
Paperback, one hundred and twenty-three pages. She doesn’t get tired, her throat doesn’t get sore or parched. He lies back on the sweat-soaked sheets and listens.
The sky is of the faint morning blue when she reads:
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.
She drops the very last line, perhaps out of some misguided impression that it is depressing. Hal takes the book out of her hands. It feels light.
Words glare at him from the page. A jumble of letters and punctuation marks comprising a sentence.
After a few false starts, he manages to spit out:
For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Pearl looks at him calmly and reaches for another book. Her voice is steady and flat. Hal cannot look away from the red smudge of her mouth as her lips move.
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.
--
He locks himself up and paces around the room like a caged tiger. Pearl keeps vigil just in case he attempts to do something extreme, like knock his own teeth out or pin himself to a wall with sharp wooden objects.
He sinks into an armchair, pulls her on top of himself and bites her neck, meeting no resistance. It’s safe, he tells himself. He bites her and he bites his own lips until they are bloody and torn, redder than hers.
She kisses him on the mouth and probably thinks she is betraying Leo’s memory, but the fact of the matter is that they both have betrayed Leo time and again. Their inaction, their inertness, allowances she keeps making for Hal, the fact that Hal is still alive. What is all that if not betrayal?
Her lips glide down his neck, across his chest and abdomen, cold pinpricks of sensation making his body tingle. She slips off of him. He can feel her fingers and her mouth on him, bucks his hips involuntarily and looks down the length of his body at Pearl positioned between his legs. It is quite a lewd sight. He never imagined she could do that, never pictured her doing that.
He likes taking girls apart. Loves to toy with them, exploring them like each one of them is new to him, inflicting pain and pleasure by turns. He enjoys watching that first blood that oozes out of a cut as though it has been waiting for a chance to break out from under the skin.
He cannot have anything like that with her. All he’s got is her lips and her tongue coaxing him to half-forgotten pleasure. His fingers curl around the armrests so hard that the knuckles whiten. Maybe it’s all in his head; maybe she is in head; maybe he is hallucinating as a result of the withdrawal.
Heat pooling in the pit of his stomach tells him otherwise.
--
They don’t talk about it. He doesn’t ask why she did it or how she even knew what to do. It strikes him that he knows very little about her, while she, in turn, knows quite a lot about him.
She certainly knows that he regrets not being able to do the things he told her about.
She probably doesn’t know how grateful he is for not being able to do those things.
--
“Shepherd’s pie,” she informs him when she starts cooking again. He nods. “One of these days these people are going to come home,” she says. “Or the police will come. Someone is bound to notice. What are we going to do then?”
She has already said more to him than she did in the past few weeks. Too bad he doesn’t have any answers to her questions.
--
When he finally gets her to talk about Leo, they end up screaming at each other. Hal tells her she has ignored all of Leo’s work and let his rehab be derailed by grief; Pearl counters that five hundred is a little too old to be acting like a spoiled, self-absorbed child.
He tells her he is going to kill again. He is scared of it, but not as much as he used to be. He is growing accustomed to the idea, to the taste of blood in his mouth.
She slaps him across the face. Hard enough and fast enough to make him accidentally bite his lip and draw blood. Get accustomed to that, she says coldly.
He scoops her up in his arms. After a moment of tension, she hugs him back.
They are just two selfish people grieving.
--
She begins to smile more often. Not always at him. She smiles at the kids who can’t see her or at the telly that they very seldom switch on. Sometimes she kisses Hal out of the blue, a quick peck on the cheek or a proper snog, and they never discuss it.
She says: “I think I know what my unfinished business was. I think it was to tell Leo how I felt about him.”
“Why didn’t you?” he asks distractedly.
She looks at him like he’s an idiot. He understands that it’s a very naïve question for a five-hundred-year-old.
--
She grows irritable. She doesn’t like going shopping and she grumbles about the quality of every product. He can see her walking down the street, pushing the bag in front of her or just carrying it in her hand, a floating bag in an invisible hand. He yells at her for not teleporting. He doesn’t care if she is seen, but he knows what happens when a ghost loses an interest in their abilities.
If you leave me, he says, and she says: What? You’ll kill again? That’s blackmail.
They fight every day like a goddamn dysfunctional married couple. She proclaims that she is tired of his attitude, that unless he makes a change, unless they move into a flat that is legally theirs, unless Hal at least tries to get a grip (You think I’m not trying? he shouts. This is me holding by the skin on my teeth!), they are both as good as dead already. Oblivion might be a better alternative in the long run.
He calls her a number of names that he later regrets saying.
--
He looks emaciated. He wouldn’t know, but she tells him he does. She trims his hair, helps him to shave off the stubble and adjusts his tie. He’s got a job interview to attend.
They like him. He is very polite.
He secretly wants to kill them all.
--
Their new flat is very small, but it’s theirs. Hal is paying for it. No more warehouses, empty cafes and homes belonging to absent people.
He finds the exact centre of the flat and sets his dominoes up there. They spiral over the floor, distracting him from the holes in the threadbare carpet.
He goes to work every day. It’s just another routine, albeit more difficult to maintain because there are humans involved and he is so damn hungry all the time.
Pearl cooks him breakfast and walks him to work. She is there when he returns, dinner ready. She doesn’t call him self-absorbed anymore.
She still reads to him at night. Jude the Obscure and Crime and Punishment and Oliver Twist; sometimes even those silly books from the electronic device. He criticizes the writing but he secretly likes them. He criticizes her reading but he secretly likes it too.
It’s almost like they are both alive.
--
On a warm April evening, Hal hangs a new rota on his wall. He has edited Leo’s regulations in order to incorporate work, but other than that his routines are still the same: exercises, origami, needlework, dominoes. Sometimes he nearly succeeds making himself believe Leo is about to walk in and check up on him.
Pearl drops something in the living-room. Hal winces; it takes little these days to ruin his concentration.
He moves the bed a few inches to have it parallel to the window. There. A perfect straight line. He hates this room a little less now.
“Hal!” Pearl calls out. “Come here. Now.”
He can smell dinner and he can smell that it’s undercooked, but the notes of urgency in her tone of voice compel him to comply. He finds her standing in front of the television, a shattered plate at her feet. On screen, a man is thrashing in agony as if something invisible has latched itself onto him and is… eating…
“What is it?” Hal whispers, even though he thinks he knows the answer.
“It’s the prime-minister,” Pearl answers, her voice flat with shock.
Hal waits for a peal of thunder, a bolt of lightning, a gust of wind - anything to showcase the agonizing change the world is going through.
There is nothing.
He watches on, his eyes black and his chest tight, as the world where it will be pointless to fight one’s nature is born.
January 8-9, 2013
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: R
Timeline: post-Episode 4x01, “Eve of the War”; AU - canon divergence
Summary: My name is Pearl and I’ll love you the best way I know how… Hal and Pearl and all the time they’ve got in the aftermath of Leo’s death. [Hal/Pearl]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. The line in the summary is from "Siren Song" by Bat For Lashes. Quotes from “The Stranger” by Albert Camus; “Tender Is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
A/N: It sprung from that song, at least the general mood and the basic idea. Don’t ask why, I don’t even ship it. XD
THE DAY WE SAID GOODBYE
The day Leo dies, Pearl presses a cold kiss to Hal’s cheek, not comforting but reminding. He is not alone, he’s got her. It terrifies him because he is her anchor in Leo’s absence - and suddenly he’s gone from being someone’s responsibility to taking care of someone.
He turns his head, lips accidentally brushing hers. It’s a cliché, but maybe she wants one.
--
There is little they can talk about outside of Leo. It’s all right with Hal. He doesn’t know how to talk to her for all that they have lived together for fifty-five years. He prefers her silent, sat on the sofa with her Marie Claire, ankles crossed like a proper lady, a blue-and-red nostalgic picture from the days of yore.
--
They have got plenty of time. It’s all they’ve got. All the time in the world.
They stay put for as long as they can but in this electronic day and age when everything is catalogued and processed, they are faceless and nameless and unaccounted for.
--
She doesn’t say a word when he kills for the first time. He is shaking, blood frothing on his lips, but she simply looks at him and goes back to perusing her fashion magazine. He wants to scream at her that she is not upholding her end of the deal, she is not being his new Leo, but the truth is - she doesn’t have to be. She is a broken dead girl and he has always been too selfish not to be focused solely on his bloodlust. They can’t help each other.
He reaches for her, makes her drop the magazine and pulls her into his arms. He buries his bloodied face at the crook of her neck, instinctively looking for the familiar throbbing of a pulse and not finding it. He imagines what she must have smelled like when she was alive. A strong fragrance that carried on in her wake, with something else underneath. Flour sticking to her fingers. Cinnamon. Fresh bakery. Raindrops on flower petals.
Not being able to catch any of that on her now drives him into a frenzy.
--
Pearl is not entirely indifferent. She lets him bite her when she notices that he can’t take his eyes off a group of children in a sandbox. He shouldn’t even be here; obviously the whole getting fresh air thing is not working.
Pearl holds out her hand and he sinks his teeth into her wrist. There is no blood obviously, but the act itself is comforting. It feels like draining snake venom.
His head begins to hurt.
--
Hal nicks one of those fancy new electronic reading devices from a girl in the park because he misses reading too much. It takes him a while to figure out how to use the bloody thing. The library features a small classical selection but is mostly filled with things like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. The latter has Hal laughing madly for quite some time. It sounds like something right up Mr Snow’s alley.
--
They squat in someone’s empty house, waiting for the rightful owners to return any minute. They’ve got nowhere to go and Hal cannot imagine spending another night in some grimy warehouse. Carpets. Radio Four. Central heating. Yes, please.
He can’t sleep. He keeps tossing and turning, and the glistening sheen of sweat on his skin stings, and he yells at Pearl when she places her cold hand on his forehead. She gives him the look again and teleports away. This is not how things are supposed to be. She always had quite the temper, always exploded so easily.
He insults her tea the next time. Calls it an insipid slush, says that mud on the beach tastes better. He hides her magazines and turns the radio up when he catches Barbara Ann playing on some retro station. Pearl hates that song. He wants her to be vocal about it. About anything really. Anything goes.
He kills again. The woman is beautiful, in her early thirties perhaps, with finely moulded facial features, slanted eyes and an elegant, pointed chin. He cannot bring himself to do anything else to her aside from draining her dry, though he wants to.
Wants to drag himself kicking and screaming into his old lifestyle. Wants to take a dive and not think about how disappointed Leo would be. Leo always knew this would be the logical aftermath of their parting. Pearl’s company cannot change that.
He comes home covered in blood and she doesn’t even notice.
--
She’s got nice legs. He catches himself looking occasionally, wondering if Leo tried anything during that Beatles concert. No, it wouldn’t have even occurred to him. Leo could be surprisingly slow when it came to women.
He tells her everything that he would have done to her if she had been alive. Every gory detail. She’s heard worse, always from him. Good thing I’m not alive then, she says.
He slams her against the wall, presses hard against her. She feels cold and soft and not altogether there.
Talk to me, he demands. She remains silent. I will kill again, he says. She looks bored.
--
She sits by his bedside at night as he suffers from withdrawal once again, thrashing in the grip of hungry fever. He must go out. He cannot stand these alien walls. Nothing here reminds him of Leo, which is both painful and encouraging.
He struggles to sit up, scans the room for his clothes. She whispers: Don’t go.
She takes a book from the shelf and starts reading aloud:
Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.
Paperback, one hundred and twenty-three pages. She doesn’t get tired, her throat doesn’t get sore or parched. He lies back on the sweat-soaked sheets and listens.
The sky is of the faint morning blue when she reads:
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.
She drops the very last line, perhaps out of some misguided impression that it is depressing. Hal takes the book out of her hands. It feels light.
Words glare at him from the page. A jumble of letters and punctuation marks comprising a sentence.
After a few false starts, he manages to spit out:
For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Pearl looks at him calmly and reaches for another book. Her voice is steady and flat. Hal cannot look away from the red smudge of her mouth as her lips move.
On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.
--
He locks himself up and paces around the room like a caged tiger. Pearl keeps vigil just in case he attempts to do something extreme, like knock his own teeth out or pin himself to a wall with sharp wooden objects.
He sinks into an armchair, pulls her on top of himself and bites her neck, meeting no resistance. It’s safe, he tells himself. He bites her and he bites his own lips until they are bloody and torn, redder than hers.
She kisses him on the mouth and probably thinks she is betraying Leo’s memory, but the fact of the matter is that they both have betrayed Leo time and again. Their inaction, their inertness, allowances she keeps making for Hal, the fact that Hal is still alive. What is all that if not betrayal?
Her lips glide down his neck, across his chest and abdomen, cold pinpricks of sensation making his body tingle. She slips off of him. He can feel her fingers and her mouth on him, bucks his hips involuntarily and looks down the length of his body at Pearl positioned between his legs. It is quite a lewd sight. He never imagined she could do that, never pictured her doing that.
He likes taking girls apart. Loves to toy with them, exploring them like each one of them is new to him, inflicting pain and pleasure by turns. He enjoys watching that first blood that oozes out of a cut as though it has been waiting for a chance to break out from under the skin.
He cannot have anything like that with her. All he’s got is her lips and her tongue coaxing him to half-forgotten pleasure. His fingers curl around the armrests so hard that the knuckles whiten. Maybe it’s all in his head; maybe she is in head; maybe he is hallucinating as a result of the withdrawal.
Heat pooling in the pit of his stomach tells him otherwise.
--
They don’t talk about it. He doesn’t ask why she did it or how she even knew what to do. It strikes him that he knows very little about her, while she, in turn, knows quite a lot about him.
She certainly knows that he regrets not being able to do the things he told her about.
She probably doesn’t know how grateful he is for not being able to do those things.
--
“Shepherd’s pie,” she informs him when she starts cooking again. He nods. “One of these days these people are going to come home,” she says. “Or the police will come. Someone is bound to notice. What are we going to do then?”
She has already said more to him than she did in the past few weeks. Too bad he doesn’t have any answers to her questions.
--
When he finally gets her to talk about Leo, they end up screaming at each other. Hal tells her she has ignored all of Leo’s work and let his rehab be derailed by grief; Pearl counters that five hundred is a little too old to be acting like a spoiled, self-absorbed child.
He tells her he is going to kill again. He is scared of it, but not as much as he used to be. He is growing accustomed to the idea, to the taste of blood in his mouth.
She slaps him across the face. Hard enough and fast enough to make him accidentally bite his lip and draw blood. Get accustomed to that, she says coldly.
He scoops her up in his arms. After a moment of tension, she hugs him back.
They are just two selfish people grieving.
--
She begins to smile more often. Not always at him. She smiles at the kids who can’t see her or at the telly that they very seldom switch on. Sometimes she kisses Hal out of the blue, a quick peck on the cheek or a proper snog, and they never discuss it.
She says: “I think I know what my unfinished business was. I think it was to tell Leo how I felt about him.”
“Why didn’t you?” he asks distractedly.
She looks at him like he’s an idiot. He understands that it’s a very naïve question for a five-hundred-year-old.
--
She grows irritable. She doesn’t like going shopping and she grumbles about the quality of every product. He can see her walking down the street, pushing the bag in front of her or just carrying it in her hand, a floating bag in an invisible hand. He yells at her for not teleporting. He doesn’t care if she is seen, but he knows what happens when a ghost loses an interest in their abilities.
If you leave me, he says, and she says: What? You’ll kill again? That’s blackmail.
They fight every day like a goddamn dysfunctional married couple. She proclaims that she is tired of his attitude, that unless he makes a change, unless they move into a flat that is legally theirs, unless Hal at least tries to get a grip (You think I’m not trying? he shouts. This is me holding by the skin on my teeth!), they are both as good as dead already. Oblivion might be a better alternative in the long run.
He calls her a number of names that he later regrets saying.
--
He looks emaciated. He wouldn’t know, but she tells him he does. She trims his hair, helps him to shave off the stubble and adjusts his tie. He’s got a job interview to attend.
They like him. He is very polite.
He secretly wants to kill them all.
--
Their new flat is very small, but it’s theirs. Hal is paying for it. No more warehouses, empty cafes and homes belonging to absent people.
He finds the exact centre of the flat and sets his dominoes up there. They spiral over the floor, distracting him from the holes in the threadbare carpet.
He goes to work every day. It’s just another routine, albeit more difficult to maintain because there are humans involved and he is so damn hungry all the time.
Pearl cooks him breakfast and walks him to work. She is there when he returns, dinner ready. She doesn’t call him self-absorbed anymore.
She still reads to him at night. Jude the Obscure and Crime and Punishment and Oliver Twist; sometimes even those silly books from the electronic device. He criticizes the writing but he secretly likes them. He criticizes her reading but he secretly likes it too.
It’s almost like they are both alive.
--
On a warm April evening, Hal hangs a new rota on his wall. He has edited Leo’s regulations in order to incorporate work, but other than that his routines are still the same: exercises, origami, needlework, dominoes. Sometimes he nearly succeeds making himself believe Leo is about to walk in and check up on him.
Pearl drops something in the living-room. Hal winces; it takes little these days to ruin his concentration.
He moves the bed a few inches to have it parallel to the window. There. A perfect straight line. He hates this room a little less now.
“Hal!” Pearl calls out. “Come here. Now.”
He can smell dinner and he can smell that it’s undercooked, but the notes of urgency in her tone of voice compel him to comply. He finds her standing in front of the television, a shattered plate at her feet. On screen, a man is thrashing in agony as if something invisible has latched itself onto him and is… eating…
“What is it?” Hal whispers, even though he thinks he knows the answer.
“It’s the prime-minister,” Pearl answers, her voice flat with shock.
Hal waits for a peal of thunder, a bolt of lightning, a gust of wind - anything to showcase the agonizing change the world is going through.
There is nothing.
He watches on, his eyes black and his chest tight, as the world where it will be pointless to fight one’s nature is born.
January 8-9, 2013