“They’re so afraid of change!” John Mitchell muttered with quiet amazement.

Mitchell half-turned towards George Sands, his gaze settling on the pale features and sharp blue eyes of his flatmate seated on the nearby sofa. Mitchell had been staring out the window for quite some time--perhaps twenty minutes had elapsed since he‘d pulled a chair from the kitchen into the main room, then seated himself by the window to watch the street--and he’d felt George staring at him for quite a while. Not in an obtrusive way, but in that curious yet restrained English gentleman way of his.

“That’s what you want to know, isn‘t it?” Mitchell asked. “What I’m thinking?”

George weaved his head back and forth a few times. “It… it was a… a concern, yes,” he admitted in the halting speech that his voice slipped into at moments of uncertainty. “I, ah, I just didn’t want to bother you…”

“No bother,” Mitchell reassured him in a relaxed tone. He lifted his chin from where it rested on his wrist and uncrossed his arms, then turned to look at George. “It just keeps going ‘round and ‘round in my head, you know? Humanity. Their quirks, their traits. Perhaps we’ve lost a lot of our humanity in our transformations, but we’ve got enough left to understand, don’t we?”

“I guess we do.” George put down the magazine in his hands and crossed his legs. “What brought these thoughts on?”

Mitchell gestured to his right. “The market.”

His friend nodded. Mitchell and George, each with their separate eating habits, agreed when they moved in together that each man would buy his own food so as not to drain the resources of the other. When Annie stepped into the picture, they each agreed to split the cost of her shopping needs--teas, coffees, hot chocolates… and now cappuccinos, thanks to George’s gift of a cappuccino machine for Annie’s birthday. They did their shopping separately, and Mitchell had gone just that morning to the local food store.

“I was in the snack aisle,” Mitchell continued, “and I saw this guy standing there for quite some time. He was scanning the biscuits pretty close, with this desperate look on his face. Turned out that he was upset because some Italian company had gone bankrupt and stopped making his favorite kind of… well, he said they were a kind of rolled wafer cookie of some sort. I pointed out that there were plenty of those kinds there, of course, but he refused to touch them. The ones on the shelves were filled with cream or chocolate, and his favorite brand was a hollow version. Just the cookie portion, you know?”

George nodded with somewhat of a blank look, clearly not familiar with that type of snack, but he made the gesture to indicate that he understood the gist of the story.

Mitchell let out a weak laugh. “I mean, the poor guy was nearly in tears. Over biscuits!” He shook his head. “It’s baffling, really. A piece of food, something that is such a tiny part of someone’s life, and yet it’s enough to make his entire world tremble like that…”

“Hence the ‘afraid of change’ remark?” George asked.

Mitchell nodded and scratched at his neck. “It just struck me as odd. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of things come and go in my time. Almost a century’s worth of alterations to the world around me. And you‘d think with so much time on this planet that such a fear over change would be my fear. Not that of the average man.”

“The dichotomy of humanity,” George inserted with a smile. “They have so little time on this planet, and so they strive daily to introduce something new and fresh into their lives. Yet the moment that things are altered, it throws them into chaos. Then they fall into a longing for the good old days.”

“’The good old days‘?” He cocked an eyebrow at George. “Been watching American television again?”

“It’s a rather nice phrase,” he replied in a defensive tone and with a slight frown. “People like to look back on a simpler time, when life was easy and things were set--”

“Things are never set!” Mitchell spat. He stood up and began to pace. “And life has never been easy. People are still dying and losing limbs from disease and pestilence and accidents. All of man’s little attempts to survive, to have a longer and better run than the generation before them, only creates more grief and trouble. Nothing in existence is ever static,” he finished.

Mitchell scratched at his neck again, at the area which once bore the scars where he’d been bitten and changed into a vampire. The puncture wounds had healed long ago, something which baffled George in that his undead friend, who had no discernible heartbeat and never aged, would still have such healing properties in his body.

George, in turn, shrugged his shoulders in order to feel the rub of his own scars against the coarse material of his shirt. The four slash marks across his skin, though they’d closed, would never fully heal. He would bear the mark of the beast on his body, and in his blood, for the rest of his life. Out of morbid curiosity, he’d done the maths once and figured that if he lived as long as his granddad, then he had at least another 600 transformations to go before he died. The realization that he would have to endure such horror so many more times before death found him had not been a cheerful one.

To an extent, each of their injuries had pulled them into different directions. Everything about George now represented change--a painful, powerful change on a monthly basis, altering his body and consciousness from that of man into werewolf, destroying his old life and every belief he‘d been raised with in the process. By comparison, Mitchell’s wounds had stopped the tick of the clock.

A wave of sympathy washed over George. Mitchell, frozen in time, his body forever that of a twenty-eight-year old man, had become static in many ways… and yet didn’t seem to realize it. His looks hadn’t become the only thing about him that never altered; time and again, George would glance over at his friend and see quick flutters of disgust or disbelief over some modern turn of phrase, action or invention that went against the grain of his past. On more than one occasion, they’d passed by some flirty young woman in revealing clothing and Mitchell would mutter, “The gall!” Mitchell might as well have continued the sentence with, “In my day, a young woman would’ve never…”

George had seen many cases of Mitchell’s prejudice against modern times, of course, but by the same token, Mitchell would all but jump at the chance to experience something new. He loved to challenge himself with learning new things like dance steps or cooking recipes, but even in adding such skills to his repertoire, there would be limits. For example, Mitchell expressed a certain level of intolerance for what he considered useless technology, like videogames; several months of pleading for the two of them to invest in a game console had gotten George nowhere. And whereas he would learn to dance in some new fashion, he often despised the majority of music that accompanied such steps.

Mitchell stopped his restless pacing and gestured upstairs.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he finally said. He glanced at a nearby table, where he’d left his mobile phone. “Get my phone if it rings?”

“Right.”

“Right.” Mitchell turned and made his way up the stairs.

George tilted his head back and listened to Mitchell’s slow, heavy footfalls overhead. A sad, tentative smile touched the corners of his lips, and he leaned back into the sofa and sighed.

“The dichotomy,” George muttered.