"Being Human" Season:	After Episode 6, between Season One and Season Two
Rating:	T
Pairings:	(none)
Characters In Episode:	Mitchell, George, Annie
Disclaimer:	This is a work of fan fiction, not for sale or profit, all rights belong to BBC.

“You couldn’t have thought of a better last name than ‘Sands‘?”

John Mitchell looked up from the paperwork sprawled out in front of him on the kitchen table and gave his friend George an amused smile.

“Smith, perhaps?” Mitchell prodded with a bob of his head. “Or did you have a bad experience with a Jones that we don’t know about?”

George, for his part, simply turned the page of the newspaper in his hands and continued reading. He’d put on his “I’m ignoring you” face several minutes earlier, as Mitchell began organizing the paperwork needed for himself and George to renew their passports. Under normal circumstances, such a thing would’ve been impossible.; George’s non de guerre and Mitchell’s extreme age would’ve never passed through the system without raising suspicions. But one of the benefits of being a vampire involved living long enough to know how to beat the system. So as he’d set up shop in the kitchen and started writing, Mitchell had cracked wise about “how much less trouble this would all be if you hadn’t gone underground”--to which George snapped open the newspaper and began to rather bluntly ignore him.

Their resident ghost, Annie Sawyer, kept herself busy at the opposite end of kitchen, rolling out the crust for the latest pie creation that she had in mind. Before she remembered about how her fiancée Owen killed her, she’d been obsessively involved in brewing coffee and making tea. After she’d orchestrated his crack-up and felt free from Owen’s clutches, her homemaking skills began to steer themselves towards more complicated tasks. There’d been a brief soup phase, then she’d settled on cakes and biscuits.

The drawback? The two men had put on a bit of weight indulging in Annie’s pastries. But, on the bright side, the three of them had a cupboard full of clean ceramic mugs again. And with the new, expanded menu, Mitchell and George had become quite popular at the hospital; they brought in at least two different food items every day in an effort to keep the items from overflowing in the flat.

“There’s just something comforting about a nice, warm oven,” Annie told her flat mates when she’d started her latest baking frenzy. “Even if I can’t actually feel the heat. But on the bright side?” She held up her hands and grinned. “No pain, no burns, no oven mitts necessary!”

At the mention of George’s last name, Annie paused and turned to look at the two men seated behind her.

“What do you mean? Are you saying that’s not his real name?” she asked.

Mitchell cocked his head at George. “How many Jewish people named ‘Sands’ do you know?”

Annie blinked. “Well…”

“I’ll have you know,” George interrupted as he set the newspaper aside, “that there are no set Jewish parameters, despite all the popular stereotypes in existence. Jews are scattered throughout the world, after all. There are African Jews, Chinese Jews… we’re all different colors and nationalities. Therefore, someone with a rather generic name of Sands isn’t exactly scrutinized nearly as much as you might think.” He paused and crossed his arms. “Except perhaps by vampires... who can‘t mind their own business.”

“So what‘s the story, then?” Annie asked. “With Sands?”

George sighed. “After I left… everyone… my friends, my family… I found myself by the ocean. Spent days just sitting there, thinking. For a little while, it even felt as if I’d become part of the landscape. And then the next time that I had to write my name, that’s what I wrote. George Sands.”

“Although if not for meeting me shortly after,” Mitchell chimed in, “he couldn’t have gone very far on that name. I was the one that had to set him up with a license, credit history--”

“Yes,” George interrupted. He fixed Mitchell with a droll expression. “I’m forever in debt to you for forging documents. One of your many gifts.” He glanced over at Annie. “Actually, he is quite good at it,” George admitted. “You wouldn’t know that I’m not toting around my original birth certificate. He even faked the seal. Rather genius work.”

Mitchell gave a slight bow of his head. “Thank you. Coming from a genius, that’s much appreciated.”

George let out a frustrated huff and picked up the paper again.

“Genius,” he grumbled. “And a lot of good it’s done me. Working at hospital, stocking supply rooms and such. Years of study and work going to rot.”

Annie walked over and gave George a quick squeeze. “Oh, come now. It’s a relief to be free, and you know it. Besides, if you didn’t want a break from all that academic work, you’d be involved in some project or other. Not just hanging out here with us all the time, watching the telly.”

George gave her a pat on the arm. “Annie, it’s not that I don’t want to do anything. It’s that I can’t. I can’t get involved in anything that I worked at before.”

George’s gaze passed over to Mitchell, who nodded slowly.

“It was my suggestion,” Mitchell said in response to Annie‘s questioning look. “I have to do the same thing, myself. Throw off all the old shackles. Avoid going back to places where I was known. Keep away from things I’ve done before. The world is developing at a frightening pace, and it’s getting harder and harder to hide. Everywhere, there’s something keeping track of you and what you‘ve done.” He pointed at George. “Were George to return to working at a university or private school, the teaching community would trace him back to his original life--how could they not, with his skill set? If he got into research studies, it would only be a matter of time before someone recognized the quality of his work and linked it to ‘another George’ that did the same thing.”

George hummed in agreement. “There are only so many multilingual professors in the world. But the dead giveaway would be my ability to speak Croatian.” He let out a quick laugh. “A native Englishman speaking Croatian is a big red flag. Whereas everything else--the Italian, Spanish, French, German… those are simpler Latin-based languages, readily available to anyone interested in learning them. But something Serbo-Croatian in nature? That is not something you randomly choose to learn, or can necessarily find the right education for.”

“So how did you pick it up?” Annie asked.

“My mother. She was from Bosnia.”

George’s answer came out smoothly, but something about his words made the other two withdraw from further questions. Annie wandered back over to her pie crust, Mitchell focused on filling out the passport paperwork, and George casually resumed reading--or pretending to read--his newspaper.

All of them had lost something after they shifted from a normal human life to the realm of the supernatural. On occasion, they would sit down and argue (in a pointed yet half-hearted way) who had the worse situation to deal with, but all of them had reached a silent agreement a long time earlier about the greatest casualty in their lives: their families. On that point, the three of them knew that they stood on even ground.

Mitchell’s parents had long since died, and now--four generations into the family line--he meant nothing to the Mitchell clan. No photographs remained that might‘ve tipped off his relatives about his unusual longevity; he’d foreseen trouble on that account, and knew that he needed to take some steps to protect his new identity as a vampire, so Mitchell burgled the family home some twenty years after his transformation. He took away and destroyed every image of himself that he could find, except for one: an image of himself dressed in his Army uniform, which had been taken shortly before he’d left for the battlefield. His wealthy parents had splurged and gotten a color photograph of their son made--a rare but not unheard-of technological advance at the time. Now, the fragile image rested beneath a loose floorboard in the flat, hidden from view but existing as a quiet memento of a face that he could no longer see. Well, except for a caricature that George insisted he have done at a recent street carnival, but the exaggeration! The artist had taken considerable liberties. Mitchell’s cartoon chest hair burst like a tangled forest from his open shirt and, really, his eyebrows could not possibly be that bushy…

Annie endured one of the more difficult separations, as she’d had to witness her family’s anguish as they attended her wake at the flat. She, too, decided to keep herself apart from her family--not that they knew of her presence so soon after her death--because the pain of separating from her physical life didn’t compare to the myriad of losses that took place in her social and personal life. Annie’s ideal life with Owen turned out to be a lie, but with George and Mitchell by her side, she’d faced that reality pretty well. Now that more and more people could see her, it opened up the possibility of reconnecting with them, but she knew that even if she did, it would never restore what she’d lost with them. They could not hug her, kiss her or otherwise physically interact with her, and even if they did feel something of her presence, she couldn’t feel them. So she saw no point in torturing them by revealing herself.

George rustled his newspaper and turned to another page, then gave a casual glance over the edge of the paper to Mitchell, then to Annie.

In true English fashion, as he fought to uphold the gentleman image that he admired, George had restrained himself from complaining about his lost world. For one thing, it no longer existed for him, and no amount of whining or pining for it would bring it all back.

Another reason for his reticence rested with the abilities of his mind. Mitchell and Annie knew that George had brains, but didn‘t know the scope and depth of his intellect… and what the horrible werewolf encounter in Scotland cost him in terms of his old life. Everything he’d spent his youth learning and all the energy he’d put forth in maintaining a respectable place in the community had been for naught. Though, to his credit, George learned long ago not to be snobbish or elitist with his intelligence in terms of relating to people. He knew that he couldn’t “play dumb” and be an entirely different person, but he had learned how to suppress and conveniently “forget” much of the education that used to consume his life, and just live in the moment.

Even if it meant walking away from everyone who, for all their love and compassion after the mauling, couldn’t understand what he had become.

“They tried to have me committed, you know,” George mumbled.

Mitchell paused, the tip of his pen pressed firmly against the document in front of him. “What? Who did?”

“My family.” George set the newspaper aside again, got up, and fetched a clean mug from the cupboard. “I tried to explain to them what I’d been told in Scotland. About the wolf. About changing. What the locals had told me, basically. I mean, I could feel the change inside me, so I knew that it was true. But… nobody would listen. They all said I was still recovering and not yet in my right mind.” He gave his head a sharp shake and stepped over to the stove to fetch the kettle. “I don’t know. Maybe because it took me so long to heal. The claws had cut me down to the bone, after all. It was weeks of agony, and I ended up with some sort of infection the night of my change. I could feel it bubbling up. So I had to leave hospital and go to the nearest patch of woods that I could find. Luckily, there was water on all sides, so I stayed put and did no harm that night.”

He poured water into the mug, then set the cup on the counter and made his tea.

“But after I got home…” George swallowed. “Well, everyone thought I’d gone mad. Simple as that. I went upstairs, cleaned up a bit, and just as I was going down to talk to them again, I heard the ambulance coming down the street. So I scrambled out the window and ran. Left everything behind. Which is just as well, because otherwise I might’ve slipped up and been discovered, and subsequently committed.”

Annie gave him a concerned glance. “Can that still happen?”

“No. For all anyone knows, I was just out of my head with fever when I claimed to be a werewolf.” He paused. “You know, that’s the odd thing. People don’t want ‘truth’ in their lives, no matter what they say. They merely want information that will fulfill their curiosity, but which allows them to continue on just as before.”

“None of us ever had a proper goodbye, you know,” Mitchell remarked suddenly. “Clean breaks, all of us.”

“For their sake,” George pointed out. “Who knows what kind of a threat we’d have been in those early years?”

“Aye.”

His tea-making task completed, George resumed his seat at the table and cupped the mug with both hands. He stared down into the murky depths for a moment, then gave Mitchell a frustrated glance.

“So is this going to take all day? I remember the last time you thought you could put in some paperwork on my behallf. We ended up having to re-file four times just to get me a licence.”

Mitchell snorted. “Look, you’re the one that’s interested in going on holiday. Do you want to go to France or not?”

“I do.”

“Good. Then shut it.”

“All right, all right.” George put his hands up. “I’ll leave it to you, Professor Forgery.”

Mitchell smoothed his hair back and adjusted his clothing as he sat up straighter in his seat. “Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

Annie snickered, and both Mitchell and George broke out into wide grins.

“You’re all mad. The lot o’ you.”

George cocked an eyebrow. “Get a load of that. She says we’re mad, yet she thinks two people is a massive group.”

“George has got you there, Annie,” Mitchell told her.

“Oh…” Annie gave a frustrated yet amused pout at him. “Just…shut it.”