and our hearts are lit with darkness falling down, down, down

[chasinghumanity]

Fuck all of it. That had been Mitchell's motto for the last two weeks and still the song remained the same. That was a long time to be pissed off at the entirety of the human race, but Mitchell had lived a great deal longer than most. He knew how to keep a fire burning low and long

Comments

[raw_youth]

Dodge noticed a hell of a lot now that he was off the junk. He noticed the way Jack clung to that hat like a security blanket. He noticed the way Lily kept herself guarded. He noticed the way Mitchell had been conspicuously absent. He'd kind of gotten used to this whole sponsor shit and if he was honest with himself...he liked it.

Off heroin didn't mean clean and sober. He still smoked and he still drank. Walking into the Hub he spotted Mitchell and it took two miliseconds to notice that the man looked like he'd crawl into that bottle and swim around if he could.

Dodge took the stool next to him and folded his hands on the bar.

"That wagon you fell off of is half the way to Winnipeg, man," he said quietly. There was no judgment in it, just an observation. He didn't think Mitchell would give him shit for fucking up so he had no right to do it to the other man.

[chasinghumanity]

A good man -- the man John Mitchell had been -- would have felt guilty. At the least, chagrined to be caught in such a state. He was supposed to be leading by example and Dodge needed that. He needed someone to show him it was okay, that change was rough but possible.

But that man John Mitchell had died a long time ago. What was left was Mitchell, a creature who laughed at hope. All humans ended up in the grave at the end of it. What did it matter if they lived clean or not?

"I didn't fall off. I jumped. Fuck Winnipeg," he replied, leaning precariously over the bar counter to fetch Dodge a shot glass of his own. "Come on. You're joinin' me."

[raw_youth]

Getting a drink was the fuckin' reason he'd come in so he didn't say no. He simply took the glass and poured himself a shot...then poured Mitchell's glass almost to the rim.

"Fuck Winnipeg," he agreed, then lifted his glass and tipped it back. There wasn't so much a burn as pain and the lingering taste of bile and depression.

"Jesus fuck, Mitchell," he gasped. "What did you do to deserve this shit? Drink something good at least."

[chasinghumanity]

"Hey. Hey, hey, hey, hey." The words came soft and quick and accompanied by three fingertips pressed lightly to Dodge's lips. Mitchell took a second, positioned just like this, to drink his shot. He had long since stopped really tasting it.

Setting aside the glass, he looked at Dodge properly but did not move his hand. "You piss off the owner, you're a dead man," he warned. His fingers finally dropped away and he shook his head. "S'fine. S'fine. I don't want to be fancy drunk anyway."

[likesthestooges]

Mitchell didn't look good. Aidan felt miserable, he assumed he even looked it at times, but nothing like that. Vampires, real vampires, didn't brood often. After you had killed your first thousand people or so and bathed in their blood, it took quite a bit to make you wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Aidan doubted that Mitchell just had a case of the Mondays on a Friday night.

He moved up next to him, himself just sipping beer. Tonight wasn't the night to let his mind get hazy and to let in everything that was creeping along the shadows of his thoughts. It was more than enough that Mitchell might be going down that route.

"Rough few days?" he asked.

[chasinghumanity]

Mitchell grunted inarticulately in Aidan's general direction, too focused on pouring himself another shot. The lip of the bottle clinked against the lip of the glass and the liquid made it into its new home, mostly. Good enough. Not like he was paying for this stuff anyway.

Bottle set aside, Mitchell grabbed for the glass, but hesitated before bringing it to his lips. Aidan. Aidan, Aidan, Aidan, with the roommates and the story like his, but American and from another universe. Or something. The last thing Mitchell wanted was to talk to himself tonight, so a few things needed to be established.

"'Fore comin' here," he said, drunkenness making his accent more pronounced, "what was your last kill?"

Bold question for a bar maybe, but his ability to give a shit had long since left him.

[likesthestooges]

The question was a bit of a surprise to him, just because it violated the seemingly unspoken rule that they wouldn't ask too personal of questions for fear of finding out just how similar they really were. The way he poured the latest glass and spoke let Aidan know that Mitchell was more than a bit tipsy, so maybe more questions like that were on their way.

"Bishop," Aidan said after a moment's hesitation. "He was my sire. Just a few hours before I showed up here, I killed him."

[chasinghumanity]

Mitchell blinked. And blinked again. His brows furrowed and his mouth twisted up, lips pursing to form a word that never got spoken. He left it and stared at Aidan with head cocked.

George had killed Herrick. Mitchell had intended to, but George had cut him off and Mitchell had, like the coward he was, ultimately ducked out of the dingy basement cell and let his best friend do his dirty work.

Great. So, Aidan wasn't exactly Mitchell. He was better than Mitchell.

"Fuckin' hell," he muttered. He grabbed tequila and took a swig straight from the bottle. The pinched look of pain on his face could have been from the taste or the fact that he felt as though he had been metaphorically kicked in the gut. "You're too pretty, you know that?" he said, fighting back against.. well, nothing. "This whole.. cheekbones thing. It's disturbing."

[frakkup]

Sometimes Kara wonders if she likes the Hub so much because she knows fewer people there. For reasons that probably all add up to Neil, most of the islanders she's close to frequent the Winchester, and sometimes. Sometimes it's just too hard to be next to all those bottles where the people that matter can see.

The Hub is easier. It's not anonymous - for all the island's mysteries, it's a cramped space, too small for any new face to go unnamed longer than a week. Kara's not safe here, but it'll do.

She heads up to the bar tonight, some pointless daring in her belly, the same reckless urge that precedes all her best and worst decisions, and takes a stool. It's not long before the sheer misery radiating from her bar mate has her turning her head.

"You," she observes, gesturing for the bartender, "are in a bad way."

[chasinghumanity]

"I," he responded, staring at his now empty glass, "am a bad man."

Even that felt disingenuous. Man. Human being. He was now though, wasn't he? And bad at it. Bad at being human. Bad at feeling what he should feel. Bad at doing what he should do. Bad at keeping relationships together and being good and all that bullshit humans told themselves. No, he was honest, and that made him a very bad man.

Mitchell lifted his head, gaze tearing away to refocus, after a few telling blinks, on the woman. Blonde hair, that mouth, that voice. Oh buggering fuck. Because he needed someone from his AA group watching him drown in his misery.

But, hey, no judgment, right? Wasn't that the point of the anonymous bit? It must have been.

"Join me?" he offered.

[frakkup]

There's a moment when Kara thinks, jesus frak, you are a bad man, but it doesn't take her long to find her way to the truth. She's a shitty human, and she wants what he's offering. The only uncertainty left is whether she takes it.

"I - " she says, sounding sure for all of one syllable. "Maybe." It's always maybe. To think otherwise would be to buy into the shit she's selling, and Kara's rarely ever that foolish. "The frak happened to you?"

[chasinghumanity]

He took a moment to consider "maybe," turning it over in his head as his fingers clung to the neck of his tequila bottle. Mitchell thought about it and then poured another shot, letting the silence fill in around him and make a point. Fuck only knew what that was. Silence sounded good though. Glass full, he carefully pushed it along the polished wood of the bar until it sat right beside her. He pulled the bottle closer to him, as though he might lean on it for support or hug it.

"The inevitable," he said finally. And almost immediately scowled, brows furrowing as though the words tasted bitter in his mouth. He always hated it when vampires took up talking like twats.

"I got dumped because I'm an ass and a liar," he said.

[wearestars]

Depending on the day, Lionel finds the sheer number of freakishly attractive men on the island to be either bliss or patently unfair. Nearly two months he's been here, and make no mistake, he doesn't think he's bottom of the barrel or anything, but this isn't exactly like hooking up with randoms at the park. The hotness standard it so beyond him in this place.

Case in point: Gloriously attractive British hipster artfully hunched over a bottomless glass of tequila. The guy is clearly miserable, yet still somehow gorgeous, with a mop of dark hair that Lionel is itching to brush back from his eyes.

Brown eyes. Seriously, so unfair.

Two stools down, chin propped on his upturned palm, Lionel slides an idle finger around the rim of his glass and watches.

"Have another," he says, tips his index finger into his cocktail, and then sucks the liquid from his fingertip with a bored air.

[chasinghumanity]

You don't get to be 116 years old without seeing quite a few of him at various bars. It wasn't the hair or the style. It wasn't that he was very obviously gay. It was that he was very obviously young and bored and didn't know what kind of trouble he could get himself into.

Mitchell could eat him for lunch. Or a late evening snack. And the fact that he could but he can't is a hell of a slap to the face.

Even so, he muddled through, pouring himself another shot, as ordered. He had fuck all else to do and a home he spent half his time avoiding. What was a little game of cat and mouse even if it went nowhere?

"Are you trying to get me drunk?" he asked, turning his gaze with a lifted brow on the young man.

[wearestars]

"Pretty sure you don't need any help with that," Lionel replies with a sardonic twist of his lips and a pointed glance to the half-empty tequila bottle the guy's been all but worshiping. "I don't think the phrase 'drown your sorrows' was intended to be literal."

[chasinghumanity]

"Shows what you know," Mitchell said with a seemingly easy, wry smile as he set the bottle down. "I have a lot of experience in this area and I can assure you: there's nothing like a blinding hangover headache the next morning to shove all thoughts out of your head, sorrowful or otherwise."

He picked up his shot glass with a remarkably steady hand and half turned in his seat towards the young man. Boy. He was a boy. "So what are we drinking to?" he asked, pointedly glancing at his cocktail. Mitchell wasn't the only one here with a reason, though his might have been far heavier than the other's.

[dichotomos]

There's an expression, I'm sure you've heard it, that people apparently use when something nice happens to them. Someone up there must like me. Meaning God, I guess, or angels or fuck knows, because I don't know any of these people.

Nobody up there likes me. I think it's probably fair to say that they probably fucking hate me.

After a year and a half on the island, I'd finally given into Ishiah's prodding and consented to a job. By job, I mean a position in which I served alcohol and my charming personality to people several hours a week for free. It was like doing community service for drunks.

And what do I get on my very first shift? Sookie's boyfriend, working his way to absolutely blotto.

"I really shouldn't give a shit, but I'm going to cut you off soon," I announced, both hands braced against the top of the bar. "Unlike condoms, the tequila doesn't refill itself."

[chasinghumanity]

Mitchell, as a general rule of thumb, tried not to pay attention to things that annoyed him. And -- and this is a true statement -- ever since the Enchantment Under the Sea dance more than a year ago, Caliban has annoyed him. He kept his tongue in check but not through any real special effort of his own. Caliban seemed to excel at avoiding people and the old saying was true: out of sight, (mostly) out of mind.

But the last, the complete, utter, absolute last person Mitchell wanted to see at that moment was him.

His lip curled up in something like a sneer. Maybe it was a snarl. That portion of his face had started to go pleasantly numb a short while ago. He wrapped his fingers around the bottle of tequila and pulled it an inch towards him, protectively.

"Got your feet under the table then?" he challenged.

[dichotomos]

"Are you fucking serious?" I asked, sliding a thoroughly unimpressed look from the bottle to Mitchell's face. It would have been so easy to grab the tequila and knock his hipster ass off the stool, but I bit the impulse back. Not because I gave a shit about customer service, but because the last thing I wanted was Sookie Stackhouse wagging her sassy Southern finger in my face because I gave her boyfriend a concussion.

Of course, the other option was getting blamed for the asshole's alcohol poisoning, because oh yes, the finger would be pointed at me. I had been in the general vicinity.

"Give me that," I bit out as I darted a hand out and snatched the bottle away. There was so little left in it by that point, I probably should have just let him keep it. "What the fuck is your damage, man?"

[chasinghumanity]

There were a lot of things in vampire mythology that Mitchell thought ridiculous and did not mourn the loss of. Being unable to walk in sunlight would have been a bitch. Being unable to eat garlic would have ruined him. Being unable to eat period would have been a tragedy. Usually he had wished that they could have had some of that super speed, super strength. A vampire well fed could easily overpower a human being, but it wasn't the same as having special powers.

Right now though Mitchell would have settled for standard hand-eye coordination, not lagging reflexes that saw his bottle stolen from him. "You're taking my liquor," he snapped back defensively. "What the hell do you think is my damage, mate?"