"He Closes Early On Thursdays", Being Human, Gen
Title: He Closes Early On Thursdays
Fandom: Being Human
Characters: George, Annie, Mitchell
Challenge/Prompt: paliphrase, “Never”
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2520
Genre: Gen
Summary: This is the part where he runs, you know.
Author’s Notes: Fifteen things that didn’t happen in the season finale. I have no idea where this idea came from, but come it did, and I was running a temperature at the time of writing, so... just read and enjoy. Contains various permutations of major character deaths.
I love you so much
I’m gonna let you kill me.
- Florence & the Machine
fifteen.
This is the part where he runs, you know.
Strap of his bag cutting into his shoulder, he waits for Annie. Scans the crowds at the station, worrying his lower lip between his teeth, still pointed, still too sharp. He hasn’t showered and his skin still stinks of fur. His trainers squeak on the floor and he tries not to think of Mitchell. Tries not to wonder if there is anything left to think about. He has made this choice - or someone made it, anyway.
Annie isn’t coming, and he should go back for her. Mitchell would have gone back for her. His feet feel rooted to the floor. This is the part where he is supposed to return to the house and speak reason. But if he goes back to the house he won’t ever be able to leave, and someone should come out of this. That was the point, after all.
He leans against the train window and feels dirty. Houses of ordinary fucking humans and fucking inhumans skim past his eyes, pretty liars, and this will not be enough. This won’t ever be enough.
The ticket inspector’s eyes gloss black.
four.
Annie closes her eyes against the light, against the flickering flames biting the night sky.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” she mutters between her teeth.
And then she is.
twelve.
He shouldn’t be nervous, Mitchell thinks. There is no sense in being nervous about something that is inevitable. In any case, he has been doing this too long. It would’ve been easier to have been claimed by Ypres or the Somme, to become a number in stone and spoken of while never being remembered. He liked the twenties, of course. He liked the eighties. He even quite likes it now. But knowing what he knows now, he would rather he had died there in the war. Died, and not ever come back. Not opened his eyes again.
He takes a breath he does not need; takes two. The air feels thick, cold. It has been a long day, so long.
Mitchell turns, and watches Herrick step through the door, out onto the roof.
eleven.
George hides his eyes when Annie opens the door - her door - because childish destructive curiosity is appealing but common sense wins out and there was something in Annie’s eyes. Besides, George has seen enough of the things that darkness and death have to offer, and he has no desire to see any more. He hears her breath hitch, hears Mitchell choke, and then the door - Annie’s door - closes with a quiet, anticlimactic click. He lowers his hand, and the room is the same as it ever was.
The house seems bigger, colder, emptier. Malevolent, yes, that’s the word. Malevolent.
“She’s gone,” he manages, thick with tears and desperation.
“She is,” Mitchell agrees, and his voice breaks on the second word, a sob bursting between his teeth.
It’s a relief when there is a knock at the front door.
two.
Herrick is faster and George’s blood stripes across the locked door.
Nina screams. It must be a lot - your lover a werewolf and dead all in the space of three minutes - Annie supposes. Mitchell is keening, a low soft note of guilt and grief, and she runs into the room, door and walls mist to her. It is too dark in here, air stained deep blue.
“Going to stop me, little girl?” Herrick asks. His teeth and chin are dripping; in the dark the blood is barely crimson. His eyes are starless nights.
“Annie!” Mitchell yells, the single word a study in agony.
The werewolf stops quivering on the floor and goes very, very still. Annie takes her eyes from Herrick’s freshly-stained shirt collar and watches the change in reverse. It’s almost peaceful without the screaming, the howls. Only then it isn’t a wolf, it’s George, and Annie takes a step back because oh God, his head -
“Out of my way,” Herrick snaps.
Annie grits her teeth. “The man I loved killed me,” she tells him, “you can’t do worse than that.”
Herrick studies her for a long moment in the gloom. “No,” he concedes, “but then, I don’t have to.”
George’s blood inexorably spreads across the concrete floor.
ten.
Annie is silent in the passenger seat. Her eyes on the road, arms folded. She has run out of tears and recriminations but the sentiment is so thick in the air he can smell it, can hear its discordant note strung between them.
Run, little werewolf, the white noise on the radio whispers. Run, little werewolf, run. And keep running. Keep on running.
He whimpers, knuckles white on the steering wheel.
six.
The ward is quiet, splashed with sunlight. This isn’t actually the first time Mitchell has been staked, though he’s careful not to bring it up, and in any case the clumsiness of Herrick’s attack leaves a sour taste in his mouth. It’s usually much tidier than this when you’re killing another vampire. Dignified. That sort of thing. He can’t work out if this was more about a warning than a real intent to kill, or if Herrick’s really just a dick.
Josie looks softly sad, picking his hand up from the cover and pressing a kiss to his knuckles. “I hate seeing you like this,” she says. “I hate it. I always wanted to see you as infallible, invincible. You know?”
“Well, I’d like that too.” He attempts a grin, because something is wrong here. His senses are scrambled and the closing hole in his chest itches, but something is wrong. He shifts awkwardly, making space for Josie on the bed. She curls into his side as she did when she was younger and they were attempting to be happy, or something like it anyway.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles. “I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t understand,” he replies.
Josie twists her head to look at him, and her eyes are black. Shining and black. “Herrick came to me and he wasn’t asking any longer,” she tells him. “I think I’m supposed to be a message.”
Oh, Mitchell thinks almost dispassionately, so this is what it feels like when your heart breaks.
thirteen.
George sits in the transport cafe in the middle of nowhere and pretends to read the menu. It’s raining outside and he is not thinking of Annie walking through the door to oblivion, or of Mitchell falling to pieces around a stake in their hallway. He is not.
A smiling waitress comes to take his order, her teeth just a little too long, and George wonders if she is one of them or if she just really needs a dentist. He sends her off with a request for coffee and a cooked breakfast that he doesn’t really want.
“And then what?” he mutters to himself. And gives himself a reply too: “This.”
Really, he wants to tell Mitchell, really, and then what is turning out to be kind of shit.
five.
The moon is still screaming down each bone on his spine when he awakes, though the sun has risen. His nails are full of mud and leaves, and his teeth taste like dirt. George pushes himself into a sitting position, every inch of him full of that bone-deep ache that follows the transformation, where his skin doesn’t fit and never will. Werewolves should have their own language, he thinks, an ability to describe this.
He finds his feet after a moment, twigs and leaves beneath his bare soles. There is a sharp possibility that Mitchell is dead, and he needs to get back to the house, find Annie, run. Oh Jesus, run.
Except that the trees rustle and people are stepping out from behind them, easily surrounding him. No, not people. Vampires.
“I take it the deal’s off, then,” he says, and admires the way his voice manages to stay steady.
nine.
Annie takes her time straightening cups on the sideboard, arranging them according to colour and size. They look pretty, she thinks, and it’s little touches like that that make this a home and not just a mausoleum for the lost and the bored and the exhausted.
Well, it’s none of those things now, anyway. It’s a failed experiment. Too many variables.
Every pan is in its right place, the fucking graters have been returned to their drawers to languish. She even cleaned out the fridge, binned everything that was up to its use-by date, took the rubbish outside. The kitchen has never looked so clean.
Annie surveys her work one more time and then sits down, back to the cupboard beneath the sink. The kitchen is starting to fill with smoke; the living room ceiling has already collapsed. She thinks the fire brigade has been called, but by the time they get here it will be too late. The flames are licking the kitchen doorframe, blackening the paint.
She closes her eyes, and waits.
three.
After the fifth full moon, Nina makes him breakfast in the morning. Tea, toast, bacon, eggs. It’s a nice gesture, but George already knows that it’s just to avoid looking him in the eye.
He hasn’t seen Annie in six days; she claimed she was bored with the domesticity, but he doesn’t believe her and he doesn’t think she expects him to. Maybe she’ll come back. Maybe she found a new door somewhere, walked through it. Maybe there are more ghosts here, maybe she’s found people like her to be with.
Nina sips a black coffee, thumb stroking the edge of the chipped blue mug. It’s an ok flat; one bedroom, but Annie doesn’t sleep and doesn’t spend much time here and they’re muddling through. Fresh start and all that, even if they’re looking over their shoulders every second of every day.
“You shouldn’t have chosen me,” George tells her, halfway through his meal, the sound of his knife scraping the plate too loud in his still sensitive ears.
Nina smiles, eyes on her mug. “Well,” she says, and her voice is still light, so light, “I know that now.”
seven.
Owen looks thoughtful when Annie steps back.
“Good to know,” he says. “Or was that supposed to break me?”
The world wavers beneath her feet.
one.
The blood pouring from Mitchell’s mouth is thick and too red as it spills over his chest and soaks into his shirt. George’s hands flutter over the stake in his chest - this never came up, he and Mitchell never had the by the way, this is what you do if I ever get staked conversation, why the fuck didn’t they have it? - and he looks helplessly at Annie, stuck between life and death, sobbing in desperation.
“You need to go,” he all but screams at her and she shakes her head, eyes on Mitchell quivering against the hall wall. There’s blood spilling across the tiles - Annie died here, now Mitchell is dying here too, and maybe there’s something poetic in that but George can’t see it.
Mitchell’s hand brushes his arm, grips, and he’s trying to speak. But he can’t force the words out and George brings his hands away from Mitchell’s chest, soaked crimson. And then, right in front of his eyes, the blood turns to dust in his palms.
“No,” he breathes, “no, please, please no.”
Mitchell tries to say something again but he’s cracking. Literally cracking, turning to fragments right in front of George, and Annie is screaming, screaming, screaming, and George has no idea what he’s doing because his best friend is there in front of him, disintegrating.
In moments, there’s nothing left at all.
eight.
The world is taken over by vampires and there is nowhere to hide. Nowhere at all. The most they can do is keep running, and George and Annie do; leaping from country to country and continent to continent. Annie sits and cries on full moons, while George transforms where he can; woods, locked sheds, basements. The house burned months ago and she felt herself trying to fade away, but George held her hand until she stopped. Until strength came back. She almost wishes that she’d gone then; at least now she wouldn’t have to see the shimmering rows of black eyes on the streets, hear the screams, walk the pavements the world over spattered with blood.
Herrick’s beautiful new world and the one saving grace is that Mitchell did not live to see it.
They’re killing half the street, and somehow becoming a fugitive did not ever figure in Annie’s plans for what she was going to do with her life. Of course, she has no life now, but whatever the hell this is, she never meant to ever be on the run. Even if she had ever given a thought of the course of her life without Owen, lying curled up under a bed with a werewolf would never have occurred to her.
“They’re never going to stop, are they?” she asks into George’s shoulder.
She feels him sigh. “No. No, they never will.”
fourteen.
Annie has made half the tea in the house, spreading it through the rooms, hot and steaming and such a waste. George says nothing because he knows it’s only Annie’s way of saying how glad she is that none of them are dead. Well, no more dead than they were yesterday, anyway.
“What happens now?” she asks as they sit at their small kitchen table, clasping warm mugs that none of them particularly want to drink. George wonders if Mitchell feels impotent now, anticlimactic, tired. George feels nothing at all and suspects he should be more worried about that than he is. No one is prepared for situations like this, these situations are not supposed to happen to anyone, who’s to say how you’re supposed to react?
Mitchell scrapes up a passable smile that looks halfway real. “Now?” he echoes. “Now, we live happily ever after.”
George thinks of Nina upstairs, doing her best to be accommodating in the shittiest of circumstances, thinks of the taste of vampire blood that still lingers on his teeth, thinks of Herrick’s warning shots.
“I don’t think we do,” he says aloud, and for a moment mourns the man he was two days ago. He is not that man now, analogies from the Bible or not.
Mitchell’s smile becomes more of a grimace, and Annie reaches for George’s hand. Her skin is snow to the touch, malleable and icy. She squeezes and he’s grateful; grateful in spite of it all.
“Would you it kill you to pretend for five minutes?” Mitchell asks on a laugh that doesn’t quite reach his eyes or anywhere that matters. He’s shaken, George knows; shaken and tired and still in pain and probably suffering more about Herrick than he will ever, ever let on. They’re a vampire and a werewolf and a ghost sharing a house that they will probably not get to keep in a situation as precarious as it is possible to be and there isn’t even any milk left in the fridge.
“Yes,” George decides, “yes, I think it might, a little bit.”
Fandom: Being Human
Characters: George, Annie, Mitchell
Challenge/Prompt: paliphrase, “Never”
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2520
Genre: Gen
Summary: This is the part where he runs, you know.
Author’s Notes: Fifteen things that didn’t happen in the season finale. I have no idea where this idea came from, but come it did, and I was running a temperature at the time of writing, so... just read and enjoy. Contains various permutations of major character deaths.
I love you so much
I’m gonna let you kill me.
- Florence & the Machine
fifteen.
This is the part where he runs, you know.
Strap of his bag cutting into his shoulder, he waits for Annie. Scans the crowds at the station, worrying his lower lip between his teeth, still pointed, still too sharp. He hasn’t showered and his skin still stinks of fur. His trainers squeak on the floor and he tries not to think of Mitchell. Tries not to wonder if there is anything left to think about. He has made this choice - or someone made it, anyway.
Annie isn’t coming, and he should go back for her. Mitchell would have gone back for her. His feet feel rooted to the floor. This is the part where he is supposed to return to the house and speak reason. But if he goes back to the house he won’t ever be able to leave, and someone should come out of this. That was the point, after all.
He leans against the train window and feels dirty. Houses of ordinary fucking humans and fucking inhumans skim past his eyes, pretty liars, and this will not be enough. This won’t ever be enough.
The ticket inspector’s eyes gloss black.
four.
Annie closes her eyes against the light, against the flickering flames biting the night sky.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” she mutters between her teeth.
And then she is.
twelve.
He shouldn’t be nervous, Mitchell thinks. There is no sense in being nervous about something that is inevitable. In any case, he has been doing this too long. It would’ve been easier to have been claimed by Ypres or the Somme, to become a number in stone and spoken of while never being remembered. He liked the twenties, of course. He liked the eighties. He even quite likes it now. But knowing what he knows now, he would rather he had died there in the war. Died, and not ever come back. Not opened his eyes again.
He takes a breath he does not need; takes two. The air feels thick, cold. It has been a long day, so long.
Mitchell turns, and watches Herrick step through the door, out onto the roof.
eleven.
George hides his eyes when Annie opens the door - her door - because childish destructive curiosity is appealing but common sense wins out and there was something in Annie’s eyes. Besides, George has seen enough of the things that darkness and death have to offer, and he has no desire to see any more. He hears her breath hitch, hears Mitchell choke, and then the door - Annie’s door - closes with a quiet, anticlimactic click. He lowers his hand, and the room is the same as it ever was.
The house seems bigger, colder, emptier. Malevolent, yes, that’s the word. Malevolent.
“She’s gone,” he manages, thick with tears and desperation.
“She is,” Mitchell agrees, and his voice breaks on the second word, a sob bursting between his teeth.
It’s a relief when there is a knock at the front door.
two.
Herrick is faster and George’s blood stripes across the locked door.
Nina screams. It must be a lot - your lover a werewolf and dead all in the space of three minutes - Annie supposes. Mitchell is keening, a low soft note of guilt and grief, and she runs into the room, door and walls mist to her. It is too dark in here, air stained deep blue.
“Going to stop me, little girl?” Herrick asks. His teeth and chin are dripping; in the dark the blood is barely crimson. His eyes are starless nights.
“Annie!” Mitchell yells, the single word a study in agony.
The werewolf stops quivering on the floor and goes very, very still. Annie takes her eyes from Herrick’s freshly-stained shirt collar and watches the change in reverse. It’s almost peaceful without the screaming, the howls. Only then it isn’t a wolf, it’s George, and Annie takes a step back because oh God, his head -
“Out of my way,” Herrick snaps.
Annie grits her teeth. “The man I loved killed me,” she tells him, “you can’t do worse than that.”
Herrick studies her for a long moment in the gloom. “No,” he concedes, “but then, I don’t have to.”
George’s blood inexorably spreads across the concrete floor.
ten.
Annie is silent in the passenger seat. Her eyes on the road, arms folded. She has run out of tears and recriminations but the sentiment is so thick in the air he can smell it, can hear its discordant note strung between them.
Run, little werewolf, the white noise on the radio whispers. Run, little werewolf, run. And keep running. Keep on running.
He whimpers, knuckles white on the steering wheel.
six.
The ward is quiet, splashed with sunlight. This isn’t actually the first time Mitchell has been staked, though he’s careful not to bring it up, and in any case the clumsiness of Herrick’s attack leaves a sour taste in his mouth. It’s usually much tidier than this when you’re killing another vampire. Dignified. That sort of thing. He can’t work out if this was more about a warning than a real intent to kill, or if Herrick’s really just a dick.
Josie looks softly sad, picking his hand up from the cover and pressing a kiss to his knuckles. “I hate seeing you like this,” she says. “I hate it. I always wanted to see you as infallible, invincible. You know?”
“Well, I’d like that too.” He attempts a grin, because something is wrong here. His senses are scrambled and the closing hole in his chest itches, but something is wrong. He shifts awkwardly, making space for Josie on the bed. She curls into his side as she did when she was younger and they were attempting to be happy, or something like it anyway.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles. “I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t understand,” he replies.
Josie twists her head to look at him, and her eyes are black. Shining and black. “Herrick came to me and he wasn’t asking any longer,” she tells him. “I think I’m supposed to be a message.”
Oh, Mitchell thinks almost dispassionately, so this is what it feels like when your heart breaks.
thirteen.
George sits in the transport cafe in the middle of nowhere and pretends to read the menu. It’s raining outside and he is not thinking of Annie walking through the door to oblivion, or of Mitchell falling to pieces around a stake in their hallway. He is not.
A smiling waitress comes to take his order, her teeth just a little too long, and George wonders if she is one of them or if she just really needs a dentist. He sends her off with a request for coffee and a cooked breakfast that he doesn’t really want.
“And then what?” he mutters to himself. And gives himself a reply too: “This.”
Really, he wants to tell Mitchell, really, and then what is turning out to be kind of shit.
five.
The moon is still screaming down each bone on his spine when he awakes, though the sun has risen. His nails are full of mud and leaves, and his teeth taste like dirt. George pushes himself into a sitting position, every inch of him full of that bone-deep ache that follows the transformation, where his skin doesn’t fit and never will. Werewolves should have their own language, he thinks, an ability to describe this.
He finds his feet after a moment, twigs and leaves beneath his bare soles. There is a sharp possibility that Mitchell is dead, and he needs to get back to the house, find Annie, run. Oh Jesus, run.
Except that the trees rustle and people are stepping out from behind them, easily surrounding him. No, not people. Vampires.
“I take it the deal’s off, then,” he says, and admires the way his voice manages to stay steady.
nine.
Annie takes her time straightening cups on the sideboard, arranging them according to colour and size. They look pretty, she thinks, and it’s little touches like that that make this a home and not just a mausoleum for the lost and the bored and the exhausted.
Well, it’s none of those things now, anyway. It’s a failed experiment. Too many variables.
Every pan is in its right place, the fucking graters have been returned to their drawers to languish. She even cleaned out the fridge, binned everything that was up to its use-by date, took the rubbish outside. The kitchen has never looked so clean.
Annie surveys her work one more time and then sits down, back to the cupboard beneath the sink. The kitchen is starting to fill with smoke; the living room ceiling has already collapsed. She thinks the fire brigade has been called, but by the time they get here it will be too late. The flames are licking the kitchen doorframe, blackening the paint.
She closes her eyes, and waits.
three.
After the fifth full moon, Nina makes him breakfast in the morning. Tea, toast, bacon, eggs. It’s a nice gesture, but George already knows that it’s just to avoid looking him in the eye.
He hasn’t seen Annie in six days; she claimed she was bored with the domesticity, but he doesn’t believe her and he doesn’t think she expects him to. Maybe she’ll come back. Maybe she found a new door somewhere, walked through it. Maybe there are more ghosts here, maybe she’s found people like her to be with.
Nina sips a black coffee, thumb stroking the edge of the chipped blue mug. It’s an ok flat; one bedroom, but Annie doesn’t sleep and doesn’t spend much time here and they’re muddling through. Fresh start and all that, even if they’re looking over their shoulders every second of every day.
“You shouldn’t have chosen me,” George tells her, halfway through his meal, the sound of his knife scraping the plate too loud in his still sensitive ears.
Nina smiles, eyes on her mug. “Well,” she says, and her voice is still light, so light, “I know that now.”
seven.
Owen looks thoughtful when Annie steps back.
“Good to know,” he says. “Or was that supposed to break me?”
The world wavers beneath her feet.
one.
The blood pouring from Mitchell’s mouth is thick and too red as it spills over his chest and soaks into his shirt. George’s hands flutter over the stake in his chest - this never came up, he and Mitchell never had the by the way, this is what you do if I ever get staked conversation, why the fuck didn’t they have it? - and he looks helplessly at Annie, stuck between life and death, sobbing in desperation.
“You need to go,” he all but screams at her and she shakes her head, eyes on Mitchell quivering against the hall wall. There’s blood spilling across the tiles - Annie died here, now Mitchell is dying here too, and maybe there’s something poetic in that but George can’t see it.
Mitchell’s hand brushes his arm, grips, and he’s trying to speak. But he can’t force the words out and George brings his hands away from Mitchell’s chest, soaked crimson. And then, right in front of his eyes, the blood turns to dust in his palms.
“No,” he breathes, “no, please, please no.”
Mitchell tries to say something again but he’s cracking. Literally cracking, turning to fragments right in front of George, and Annie is screaming, screaming, screaming, and George has no idea what he’s doing because his best friend is there in front of him, disintegrating.
In moments, there’s nothing left at all.
eight.
The world is taken over by vampires and there is nowhere to hide. Nowhere at all. The most they can do is keep running, and George and Annie do; leaping from country to country and continent to continent. Annie sits and cries on full moons, while George transforms where he can; woods, locked sheds, basements. The house burned months ago and she felt herself trying to fade away, but George held her hand until she stopped. Until strength came back. She almost wishes that she’d gone then; at least now she wouldn’t have to see the shimmering rows of black eyes on the streets, hear the screams, walk the pavements the world over spattered with blood.
Herrick’s beautiful new world and the one saving grace is that Mitchell did not live to see it.
They’re killing half the street, and somehow becoming a fugitive did not ever figure in Annie’s plans for what she was going to do with her life. Of course, she has no life now, but whatever the hell this is, she never meant to ever be on the run. Even if she had ever given a thought of the course of her life without Owen, lying curled up under a bed with a werewolf would never have occurred to her.
“They’re never going to stop, are they?” she asks into George’s shoulder.
She feels him sigh. “No. No, they never will.”
fourteen.
Annie has made half the tea in the house, spreading it through the rooms, hot and steaming and such a waste. George says nothing because he knows it’s only Annie’s way of saying how glad she is that none of them are dead. Well, no more dead than they were yesterday, anyway.
“What happens now?” she asks as they sit at their small kitchen table, clasping warm mugs that none of them particularly want to drink. George wonders if Mitchell feels impotent now, anticlimactic, tired. George feels nothing at all and suspects he should be more worried about that than he is. No one is prepared for situations like this, these situations are not supposed to happen to anyone, who’s to say how you’re supposed to react?
Mitchell scrapes up a passable smile that looks halfway real. “Now?” he echoes. “Now, we live happily ever after.”
George thinks of Nina upstairs, doing her best to be accommodating in the shittiest of circumstances, thinks of the taste of vampire blood that still lingers on his teeth, thinks of Herrick’s warning shots.
“I don’t think we do,” he says aloud, and for a moment mourns the man he was two days ago. He is not that man now, analogies from the Bible or not.
Mitchell’s smile becomes more of a grimace, and Annie reaches for George’s hand. Her skin is snow to the touch, malleable and icy. She squeezes and he’s grateful; grateful in spite of it all.
“Would you it kill you to pretend for five minutes?” Mitchell asks on a laugh that doesn’t quite reach his eyes or anywhere that matters. He’s shaken, George knows; shaken and tired and still in pain and probably suffering more about Herrick than he will ever, ever let on. They’re a vampire and a werewolf and a ghost sharing a house that they will probably not get to keep in a situation as precarious as it is possible to be and there isn’t even any milk left in the fridge.
“Yes,” George decides, “yes, I think it might, a little bit.”