Being Human Fan Site - Recently Updated Pages

Choosing a Tribe

djarum99 — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:54:05 CDT

God's Blueprint

by djarum99

being human season:	post season two
rating: (Refer to main page)	M
pairings: (if needed)	Mitchell/Josie, Mitchell/Annie
characters in episode:	Mitchell, Herrick, Josie, George and Nina mentioned
disclaimer: (if needed)	The BBC owns the vampire, the ghost and the wolf - I make no profit

http://djarum99.livejournal.com/55331.html#cutid1

Being Human Episode 5 Quotes

QuietVampire — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:49:09 CDT

episode four quotes

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season 2 quotes

	being human episode five quotes
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what did they say?	when?
"I need something to defend myself. So far I've got a wisk and my phone recharger." -George
"What the f--k is that?" -Seth "I'm a ghost, actually." -Annie "Get out--can you, like, move things about, and, you know, walk from one room to another?" -Seth "Yeah, I'm pretty sure everyone can do that." -George
"We're not good or bad. We're what just comes next" - Herrick	When Mitchell confronts Herrick after discovering the human blood slaves.

episode four quotes

being human quotes home

season 2 quotes

Being Human Pilot

AndrewLazenby — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:57:48 CST

being human episode guide home

episode one

being human the pilot episode

episode essentials
	air date
	writer(s):
	director(s):
	guest stars:

the pilot synopsis

	talk about: the pilot episode
	back to: episode guide

DID YOU WATCH THE PILOT??
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inside the flat

mitchell's blood habit

relapses this episode:
victims:
vampire encounters:

george's wolf-outs

transformations this episode:
location:
victims:
aftermath/damage:

annie (in)sightings

sightings this episode:
annie's issues:
ghostly revelations:
insights into her death:

inside being human the pilot

comparing the series

topic	pilot	season one
Mitchell	played by Guy Flanagan	played by Aidan Turner

revelations

unanswered questions

new characters

pilot episode shockers

being human the pilot soundtrack

song title	artist	scene	listen

being human pilot episode photo gallery

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being human episode guide home

episode one

Being Human Music

jewerly — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 02:51:47 CST

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being human music

LOVE THE MUSIC ON BEING HUMAN? Click EasyEdit to help create the ultimate music guide.
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pilot episode music

artist	song	listen	scene
Amy Winehouse	Rehab		Opening titles

episode one music

artist	song	listen	scene
The Prodigy	Smack My B**** Up
The Artic Monkeys	When The Sun Goes Down
Supergrass	St Petersburg
Dirty Pretty Things	Wondering
Maximo Park	Books From Boxes
Pigeon Detectives	Take Her Back
The Eels	Friendly Ghost
Johnny Cash	Hurt

episode two music

artist	song	listen	scene
The Coral	Something Inside of Me
The Coral	Shadows Fall
Muse	Showbiz
Supergrass	St Petersburg
Roachford	Cuddly Toy
The Futureheads	The Hounds of Love
The Coral	Secret Love

episode three music

artist	song	listen	scene
Soft Cell	Tainted Love		The flatmates decide to go clubbing to cheer up Annie. This song is playing as they enter the club.
The Fall	High Tension Line
The Smiths	Girlfriend in a Coma
The Specials	Ghost Town
Marc and The Mambas	In My Room
Fun Boy Three	The Tunnel Of Love
Born Ruffians	Little Garcon
Joy Division	Love Will Tear Us Apart
Soft Cell	Torch
Echo and The Bunnymen	A Promise
The Teardrop Explodes	Reward

episode four music

artist	song	listen	scene
Alabama Three	Don't Call The Doctor
Alabama Three	Sad Eyed Lady of The Lowlife
Aqua	Barbie Girl

episode five music

artist	song	listen	scene
Aaliyah	More Than a Woman
Franz Ferdinand	Take Me Out
Ivor Novello	Love is My Reason
Kings of Leon	Use Somebody
Michael Crawford	Spirit of The Living God
Scissor Sisters	Comfortably Numb
The Bombay Bicycle Club	Open House

episode six music

artist	song	listen	scene
Duffy	Mercy
Bloc Party	Where is Home
Elvis Costello	Baby Plays Around
Johnny Cash	The Man Comes Around
Michael Crawford	The Holy City

Lenora Crichlow

bloodthirstygirl — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:59:55 CST

aidan | lenora | russell | back to being human home

lenora crichlow on being human | annie



	meeting lenora

ADD TO THE LENORA CRICHLOW PROFILE!!
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lenora crichlow stats
	name:	Lenora Crichlow
	date of birth:	4 January 1985
	lenora crichlow's home town:	London
	resides in:
	lenora crichlow's education:	Young Blood Theatre Company
	family:	Amanda Crichlow (Sister)
	charities / causes:
	hobbies:
	motto:

lenora crichlow's bio

	see also: annie
	talk about: lenora crichlow
	*back to: being human* cast**

career highlights

	non-acting careers:
	cast name's movies:	Wilderness
	tv:	The Bill, Sugar Rush, Dr Who, Kiss of Death, Being Human, Collision, Material Girl
	stage:
	big break:	Sugar Rush
	best known for:	"Annie" in Being Human, "Ali Redcliffe" in Material Girl
	cast name's awards:
	upcoming projects:	Audio Release of Dr Who: The Architects of History, Character of "Rachel"

lenora crichlow trivia

lenora crichlow links
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm/1564072/

lenora crichlow photo gallery

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Being Human Links

tina2shy — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:12:28 CST

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being human links

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official being human sites

being human fansites

being human actor fansites

aidan turner

lenora crichlow

russell tovey

being human live journal communities

being human fans (For fans of the BBC3 show Being Human to discus the characters, plot etc.)
--

being human forums

watch being human online

other

Being Human Episode 1 Quotes

tina2shy — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:00:05 CST

being human pilot quotes

being human quotes home

episode two quotes

	being human quotes episode one
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what did they say?	when?
George: A pigeon. I killed it. With a shoe.	His explanation for the strange noises Owen hears while he's visiting.

being human pilot quotes

being human quotes home

episode two quotes

Annie

giguise — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:45:08 CST

mitchell | annie | george | back to being human home

annie on being human | lenora crichlow

annie's stats
	name:	Anna Claire Sawyer
	age:	22
	home town:	Bristol
	occupation:
	personality type:
	signature style:
	quirks:	Making cups of tea
	endearing trait(s):
	annoying trait(s):
	how did she die?	Falling down the stairs.

annie's backstory

Help fill in the backstory of the lovely ghost Annie!

Annie was engaged to Owen. However Owen was controlling and abusive towards her. One evening after an argument Owen deliberatly pushed Annie down the stairs and kills her. He then claims it was an accident. This means Annie is unable to pass on to the otherside and remains in the house as a ghost. Owen decides to rent out the house but Annie terrorises the new tenants so much that they've left within a couple of days. The next people to come and live in the house are George and Mitchell who are a were-wolf and vampire respectively. They can see Annie and soon make friends.



	annie's prequel

DO YOU KNOW THIS GHOST?
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	see also: lenora crichlow
	talk about: annie
	*back to: being human* characters**

Annie's connections

name:	Owen
relationship:	Ex-fiance
occupation:

name:
relationship:
occupation:

name:
relationship:
occupation:

name:
relationship:
occupation:

Annie sightings

episode	seen by	location of sighting	interaction

annie's best quotes

see also: being human quotes

annie's defining moments

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/beinghuman/2009/05/annies_pivotal_moments_the_res.html (Warning; contains spoilers for series 1)
--
--

annie trivia

annie photo gallery

click here to add your pictures of annie to the slideshow

Being Human Supporting Cast & Characters

xMitchellxLucyx — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:10:59 CST

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being human supporting cast & characters

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character name: Herrick	species: vampire
occupation: leader of the vampires	age: unknown
played by: Jason Watkins	appears in episode(s): 1-6

character & plot connections: He turned Mitchell during the war. He is planning a vampire uprising.

character name: Tully	species: werewolf
occupation: drifter	age:
played by: Dean Lennox Kelly	appears in episode(s): 1, 2

character & plot connections: He is the werewolf that turned George. He tries to weasel his way into the flat and drive a wedge between George and his mates.

character name: Seth	species: vampire
occupation: Herrick's lieutenant	age:
played by: Dylan Brown	appears in episode(s): 1-6

character & plot connections:

character name: Lauren	species: vampire
occupation:	age:
played by: Annabel Scholey	appears in episode(s): 1-5

character & plot connections: She was a hospital co-worker who was turned by Mitchell and begins to enjoy being a vampire.

character name: Owen	species: Human
occupation:	age:
played by: Gregg Chillin	appears in episode(s): 1-6

character & plot connections: The living fiance of Annie who ended up killing her in a fit of rage. He is also the landlord of the house.

character name: Lucy Jaggat	species: Human
occupation: Medical Doctor, Professer	age: Early 30's
played by: Lyndsey Marshall	appears in episode(s):

character & plot connections: Lucy meets Mitchell at the hospital and later becomes his new love interest, later in the series we find out she is Professer Jaggat, who works with Kemp in studying Vampires, Werewolves and Ghosts

character name:	species:
occupation:	age:
played by:	appears in episode(s):

character & plot connections:

character name:	species:
occupation:	age:
played by:	appears in episode(s):

character & plot connections:

character name:	species:
occupation:	age:
played by:	appears in episode(s):

character & plot connections:

Being Human Season 2 Speculations

Fangsfreak — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:13:10 CST

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being human season two speculations

SEASON ONE IS OVER... IT'S TIME TO START SPECULATING!!
What do you think will happen? What do you want to happen? Click EasyEdit to add your theories!
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Speculated by:	fangsfreak
What do you think Season 2 will bring?	Romance,More mystery & Jaw dropping story Lines!
Character Bombshells?	Annies mum dies,and when she finds out annie wants to cross over
Plot twists?	Ninas a fully werewolf and is far stronger then george,she knew all a long!,nina is angry at George and wants to kill him,becuase of somthing he did to her in the past!.
Potential Relationships?	Annie and Mitchell <3
Jaw Droppers?	Annie realise she half human half ghost + plus she gets more powers,Michella falls in love with annie and they end up going out,but when they have sex annie fully changes into a human and ends up getting bitten by mitchelle!
What SHOULD happen?	Annie becomes half vampire half ghost after what happend with michelle but they end up happy togerther!,George ends up having a battle/fight with nina in werewolf form,but stops half way becuase they realise they have such strong feelings for each other ! x

Speculated by:	The Cloud 77
What do you think Season 2 will bring?	A good exciting story that picks up where season one left off.
Character Bombshells?	That Jaggart fellow perhaps
Plot twists?	Something involving Nina maybe?
Potential Relationships?	Mitchell+Annie
Jaw Droppers?
What SHOULD happen?	None of the Trio die.....I will be soo upset if one dies

Speculated by:	Tommo72
What do you think Season 2 will bring?	A broader view of the Being Human supernatural world. Possibly some "supposed" good guys like a Van Helsing type guy, Anne Rice Talamasca group, Supernatural style hunters. Which I'm totally okay with.
Character Bombshells?	Nina will either accept being a werewolf or top herself - she's pretty scarred already (literally and figuratively), this might be too much. The real 'love' of Anniw's life will emerge, the man that Owen accused her of wearing the thong for.
Plot twists?	Nina isn't a werewolf, something about what George did - unclear. Owen crosses over to the dark side - wolf or vampire. Tully reappears and is being hunted by a bigger badder wolf.
Potential Relationships?	Mitchell and Annie, but as a fleeting thing as both will be have major ructions in their lovelifes - Annie's past along with another ghostly flirtation. Mitchell will fall for an supernatural investigator who only wants him to turn her into a vampire. Well that's how I would write it.
Jaw Droppers?	One of the season 1 characters who died comes back as a ghost. Maybe Nina if she does top herself. Other supernaturals appear - witches maybe - potential lover relationship for Mitchell or George.
What SHOULD happen?	Above all else, the humour needs to be maintained. If new players come in, another vampire uprising occurs, lives end or are altered forever, the humour and the idea of being human is central to the show. Otherwise the only other thing that should happen is that this show needs to keep being made. It's awesome.

Owen has given away their whereabouts - last scene of Season 1

Speculated by:
What do you think Season 2 will bring?	Some big human baddies - searching out Mitchell and George - for use andmanipulateto their own ends. Own has unwittingly given themtheirwhereabouts in the last scene
Character Bombshells?	Nina becomes a far stronger and more accepting werewolf that George... which he finds hard to cope with.
Plot twists?	Nina's scarring did not come from boiled water/mental ex-boyfriend.. she is a witch.Somethingwith Owen's current girlfriend and big new baddies.
Potential Relationships?	Annie and another spirit.
Jaw Droppers?	Mitchell turns to the dark side - fully.
What SHOULD happen?	Keep the comedy element, the saying the wrong thing, the air of dry wit and sarcasm, it what makes the programme so fresh and new - for allcharactersor it will go totally wrong. Don't make it 'too' supernatural, so the idea of making the people they battle against as human, when that is they very thing they want to be is a good one - as it defeats the concept of their aim - it will put George in a marvellous moralquandaryas well!

Speculated by:	LilSis360
What do you think Season 2 will bring?	I think we will find out more about the pasts of Annie, George, Mitchell, and Nina. I also think there will be more battle with the vampire uprise, they are going to be mad that George killed their leader. I'm interested to see who this professor is and why they are looking for George and Mitchell, that should be a good development.
Character Bombshells?	I think Bernie (the boy that Mitchell turned) will come back. I'm not sure if he will become a good vampire or bad but I'm hoping good.
Plot twists?	I think Owen will become a supernatural, probably a vampire turned by the people who are looking for George and Mitchell. There might be some twist with Nina, I'd like to know how she got her scars. And if she does become a werewolf, she might be a bad one or decide she doesn't want to stay with George afterall. I also think there might be a twist involving Owen's orange girlfriend, Janey.
Potential Relationships?	Maybe something between Mitchell and Annie, I always thought there was a little chemistry when they accidentally kissed in the second episode.
Jaw Droppers?	Herrick comes back from being killed by George
What SHOULD happen?	I think Annie should harness more of her poltergeist powers, I also heard that she might have a new wardrobe in the 2nd season, I hope that's true. I think Mitchell should take over the vampires or kill them, I think George and Nina should stay together and both be werewolves, and hopefully something really bad happens to Owen because he is such a terrible person and I hate how he treated Annie.

Speculated by:	PhoenixFawkes
What do you think Season 2 will bring?	Owen, having given away their location, joins forces with the Professor to further "hurt" Annie. Nina, being clawed by George during his transformation to fight Harrick, becomes a slight hormone case both hating and loving George (IE: the first time they had sex). George dates, and finds himself in the middle of an investigation when his dates are murdered at every full moon. He wakes from his transformation with the dead body beside him. Wracked with guilt, he believes it's him killing these girls. Mitchell, ever the melancholy one, decides to convert another. This time he does it right and they fall madly in love...much to Annie's dismay. Annie becomes more copporeal and is able to have a relationship with the living...as well as relations with the living. In a drunken stupor, Mitchell confesses his love for Annie and knows that they are unable to be together. Thinking he is dreaming, he and Annie consumate this love.
Character Bombshells?	Bernie returns after having "accidentally" killied his mother.
Plot twists?	Annie becomes "spectrally" pregnant. It's really Nina killing George's dates in a jealous rage.
Potential Relationships?	Annie's unrequited love of Mitchell; George and Nina (on-again-off-again); Mitchell and an unnamed new recruit
Jaw Droppers?	Annie's spectral pregnancy; Bernie turns traitor to Mitchell
What SHOULD happen?	Annie's pregnancy was a "gift" from God to allow her to experience things that she missed having been murdered so young, making her more "human." Mitchell and the new vampire are able to bring a cohesion to the vamipres, thus quelling the uprising for another season, though a threat lurks unseen within the ranks: Bernie. George and Nina reconcile and are less violent when transformed together, having their humanity more apparent...Nina still hiding her part in the murders. (( Author's note: I may come back and change these as ideas come up. ))

Speculated by:	PrettySiren
What do you think Season 2 will bring?	Since the first series was a bit vampire laced, I think we'll delve into different aspects of the universe. I see more interactions with humans on the trio's part. Basically, just a general deepening of the entire mythos.
Character Bombshells?	Bernie returns. Ever since he left, I just had a feeling his story wasn't quite over. Oh, and he returns evil. Evil little kid vampires may sound cliche, but Lauren already showed us that the lust for blood is just far too tempting.
Plot twists?	Owen becomes a functional lunatic -- for lack of better description once more. It's not so much a twist, as likely. But he's working with someone to bring down Annie and the trio as a whole. In fact, he might even be the evil mastermind of series 2. It'd definitely be a roadblock in Annie's character development for sure, and create interesting drama.
Potential Relationships?	Mitchell and Annie, of course. The chemistry's always there and every touch is a just a little bit lingering. Plus, there's also that shared immortality, which tends to unite television characters. cough cough Heroes cough cough
Jaw Droppers?	Another twist in Annie's death. A new power or something. There's definitely more to her story that needs to be explored.
What SHOULD happen?	Mitchell and Annie. I think they need each other. I think it'd be interesting to shake up the already established dynamic of the trio -- especially since George has Nina now, who's obviously a werewolf herself. So, the balance of power shifts, in that respect, if Nina begins to play a larger role, which I think she should. I see Nina furthering George's story a lot; and that begs the question: where does that leave Mitchell and Annie? It's inevitable -- they're destined.

Q: What do you think Season 2 will bring?
A: We will discover more Supernatural beings such as Zombies? Ogres? Trolls? Hey and I am serious how about a Frankenstein like Monster from Liverpool ??

Q: Character Bombshells?
A: Owen becomes a Vampire and seeks to destroy our favorite trio

Q: Plot twists?
A: The Reverend is a werewolf like George !!!!!!

Q: Potential Relationships?
A: Mitchell and Annie; Nina and George

Q: Jaw Droppers?
A: The one who turned Nina is the one who turned George

Q: What SHOULD happen?
A: Van Helsing a creepy dude maybe even a nazi spells trouble for Martin !

George

Lionesskeeper — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:48:05 CST

mitchell | annie | george | back to being human home

george on being human | russell tovey

george's stats
	name:	George Sands
	age:	28
	home town:	Bristol
	occupation:	Hospital Porter
	personality type:	Loveable Dork
	signature style:	Lumberjack Chique/Geek Chique
	quirks:	Squeaking
	endearing trait(s):	His Loyalty to his friends/girlfriend. His big heart
	annoying trait(s):	He can be a little selfish, especially when dealing with Annie
	how were they turned?	Scratched by another werewolf in Scotland called Tully

george's backstory



	george's prequel

DO YOU KNOW THIS WEREWOLF??
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	see also: russell tovey
	talk about: george
	*back to: being human* characters**

george's connections

name:	Nina
relationship:	Girlfriend
occupation:	Nurse

name:	Mitchell
relationship:	Best Friend/Housemate
occupation:	Hospital Porter

name:	Tully
relationship:	Tully was the one who infected him
occupation:	Drifter/Bum

name:	Annie
relationship:	Friend/Housemate
occupation:	Ghost

george's wolf-outs

episode	location of transformation	witnesses	victims?	aftermath/damage
One	The Woods	None	The woodland creatures	George realises he is a werewolf-abandons his life
One	The House	Annie	The Furniture	House is smashed up
Two	The Woods	None	Woodland critters	Found by Tully

george's best quotes

--Humanity is about love and sacrifice, this doesn't rob me of my humanity. It proves it
--We're like the World's Gayest Ninjas
--'Has everybody suddenly taken Stupid Pills'

see also: being human quotes

george's defining moments

-- Standing up to Herrick at the end of Episode 6
--
--

george trivia

george photo gallery

click here to add your pictures of george to the slideshow

Being Human Icons

acridineorange — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:47:50 CST

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being human icons

ADD YOUR BEING HUMAN ICONS TO THE GALLERY! Click EasyEdit to add your avatars
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mitchell / aidan turner avatars

[link to icon maker]

george / russel tovey avatars

[link to icon maker]

link to icon maker

[link to icon maker]

annie / lenora crichlow avatars

[link to icon maker]

Being Human Fan Fiction

acridineorange — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:16:41 CST

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	being human fan fiction

how to add being human fan fiction

	Step 1: Stay on this page and click Add page on the left below the navigation.
	Step 2: Go to the Use Template cell and use the drop down arrow to select Fan Fiction.
	Step 3: Give your Fan Fiction page a name in the first Cell.
	Step 4: Click "Add Page."
	Step 5: Come back to this page and link to your Being Human Fan Fiction below!

being human fan fiction ratings

Please remember to add a rating as there are people of all ages that come to this site.
K	Intended for general audience 5 years and older. Content should be free of any coarse language, violence, and adult themes.
K+	Suitable for more mature children, 9 years and older, with minor action violence without serious injury. May contain mild coarse language. Should not contain any adult themes.
T	Suitable for teens, 13 years and older, with some violence, minor coarse language, and minor suggestive adult themes.
M	Not suitable for children or teens below the age of 16 with possible strong but non-explicit adult themes, references to violence, and strong coarse language.
NC-17	Content is appropriate only for an adult audience.

being human fan fiction writers

add a link to your being human fan fiction

Title:	MBP's Fan Fiction
Author:	monsterbyproxy
Rating:	T
Pairing: (if applicable)	not applicable
Summary:	http://www.beinghumantv.com/page/MBP%27s+Fan+Fiction

Title:	Who is Jenny?
Author:	acridineorange
Rating:	K+
Pairing: (if applicable)
Summary:	Who is Jenny? Where did she come from?
	http://www.beinghumantv.com/page/Who+is+Jenny%3F

Title:
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Summary:

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Title:
Author:
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Author:
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Summary:

Who is Jenny?

acridineorange — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:13:05 CST

Who is Jenny?

by Ashley Rae D.

being human season:	some time after season 1
rating: (Refer to main page)	k+
pairings: (if needed)	George,Mitchell,Annie, and a character i made up called Jenny
characters in episode:	George,Mitchell,Annie
disclaimer: (if needed)	"Who is Jenny? Where did she come from?" (Not beta'd at all, and actually my first fan fic ever. I haven't written anything in a while, but critique is most welcome :) Hope you all enjoy it!)

Title: Who' is Jenny?
Written by Ashley Rae Demauro
Original character's (c) Being Human and creators

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary for George, but the ordinary. Here he was in his basic routine, laying in the forest stark naked after gallivanting in the moonlight. He was becoming more accepting of his condition as time went on. This was his life, anyway you slice it, and nothing to do about it but to live or die. He was finding he had a purpose besides maintaining the two halves of himself. Mitchell and Annie needed him now more then ever. Especially since Herrick's remains now lie in pieces on that dungeon floor. Who knows what higher ranks were planning their revenge on the three, or when it would happen. Though George did a good job of not harming anyone during his nightly escapades. Except for the one who deserved it.

He pulled himself up slowly from the heap of dirt and rock he was lying in. A bit disoriented as usual, blinking at the sunlight through the trees. As if he had been in a pitch black room, which he had been in a way. With no memory, as he was used to. But despite having this condition for over two years, his body never became a "pro" at conditioning to the change. So he never expected himself to jump up right as rain the morning after.

His legs felt like they had been given a good stretch, which they had. Feeling like he had been working out without even being aware of it. Every time he wakes up, he couldn't deny how wonderful he felt. The serotonin in his body worked over time while his body returned to its human state. Leaving him feeling relieved of bodily tension, which helps him recover each time. Catching his footing, George shuffled himself about, looking for his bagged personal kit full of the next day usuals. Getting his barrings to a proper point, he was able to easily locate his possessions in the hole of a tree stump near by. After cleaning up a bit with the wipes, he fitted himself with a fresh pair of jeans and shirt he had previously preserved. Though not sampling the bananas he had packed as he felt quite full. Probably due to the wolf dining on some of the indigenous wildlife.

As he gathered his belongings, he started his way back to the house. He made it about half a mile or so before being abruptly stopped in his tracks from a distinct sound. It sounded human, and it was whimpering in a terrified manner. He closed his eyes with a sigh, anticipating what it could be, he only knew it was something unpleasant. As trouble followed him like some horrible life long sickness, besides the one he already had.

George cautiously turned himself around towards the sound. Making light yet quickening steps in its direction. And there, a girl wept against a tree. Hunched like a fetal statue, yet shivering with no sign of slowing her breath. She was nude, covered in blood and tears. Her dark, shoulder length hair, draping over her eyes. George silently gasped as he tried his best not to drop his bag and scare the poor girl more then she already was. His eyes wide in an obvious shock of the image before him. The girl was holding herself tightly, as tight as she could muster against her own flesh. She turned her head up to him, with a meek and horrified expression. Sobbing herself drenched as her eyes drowned in her feelings of confusion and fear. George, moved his lips as if to say something, but he had no idea what. With a withering panicked voice that matched her torn appearance, she spoke.. "What...happened to me?....Where am i?". George snapped himself out of his frozen state and hurried to wrap her in a hoodie that he thankfully packed along with his other items. She gasped in mix of relief and instinctual surprise as the hoodie relieved her skin of the frigid air.

Without murmuring any spoken words, he carried her in a panic towards the house and out of the Forest. Panting, not thinking about what to do once he got there, but just to GET there. He arrived, just about busting open the door with his foot. Not caring if the neighbors saw him running with a bloody shaking naked person in his arms, the three had enough attention to really give a crap anymore. They had enough problems besides gibbering gossip to care for.

Mitchell was enjoying his coffee as he was in the middle of some off conversation with Annie. Not a split second after George bursted into the house, they both ran to his side in a frantic delusion to the situation at hand. George rushed to place the girl softly on the couch. Both Mitchell and Annie caught in the same shocked state that George was in before. "Get a blanket or something!"..exclaimed George as he was trying to organize his thoughts. Annie was quick on the task as she usually is for most things. Being able to transfer herself with ease through out the house, or any other place for that matter.

Mitchell ran his eyes across the girl as his mind spun in question about what had happened. Annie arrived on the spot with the blanket, and they quickly covered her up. She had passed out in Georges arms on the way there. Her limp body, tired and drained, lay there with calm breaths.

Mitchell erupted with question "Where did she come from??..Who is she?..". "I don't..I don't know!" George shook his head in a rapid frustration. " I..I woke up from the change, and THERE she was!" nervously stuttered George. Annie cocked her head with her saddened expression she had used often. Examining the girl with her mind and emotions, feeling bad for her situation. Being the more composed one at the moment. "She's just a girl, she doesn't look more then 17 years old" Annie noted in her observation. The three looked at her and then at each other, trying to figure out some plan on what to do next.

They all flocked to the kitchen, yet keeping a wide eye on the girl. In a low voice they tried to make sense of it all, even though it was impossible to do so. "What was she doing naked and alone in the forest?" insisted Mitchell in question. " How the hell would i know.." retorted George. Mitchell took an easing breath, trying to piece himself back together in a calm manner." Well, what do we do with her?.." Mitchell asked, " I don't know!" George said, raising his voice a bit in further frustration. "shhhhh" expressed Annie, " Well, whatever happened to her, it's best we stay calm....we don't want to frighten her even more.." she said in a voice of sudden reason. All three of them sat at the kitchen table, of course George being the last to come down from his mental breakdown.

"Do you think she was attacked?" Mitchell questioned. "She might have been" answered Annie. George sat there with his hands braced against the side of his head as his eyes focusing downward in a strain. "By who or what?" again Mitchell questioned. Annie shook her head without an answer. George stayed silent as they spoke to one another. Then suddenly, without blinking, George's face strained into an even more shocked expression. They both looked at him in with a full attention, knowing already that he knew something. "What is it?" said Mitchell, almost relieved to know that George might have an answer to all this madness. George stared straight in front of him with no other focus then what kept his mind. "I know what she is..." George said in a regrettable tone. They both turned and sighed, they knew what he was talking about. "Well why didn't you say anything??" Annie sharply asked. "I was in a sudden panic, i didn't THINK about it okay??" exclaimed George. "I was just worried about getting her and myself here in one piece!" George turned his head to them as his tension rose again. Mitchell wound his head around as he laid back in his seat, holding his forehead as he took in the dreadful information. "We have enough to deal with...with just your problem..." He replied". George turned to him with a clearly insulted expression. "No offense..." Mitchell said in respect.

"Well what are we supposed to tell her when she wakes up??" Annie sharply asked looking to the both of them." I don't know!" George shrieked in that quirky high pitched squeal that they were so accustomed to. "I cant very well go up to her and say....Oh hello deary, you got attacked by a werewolf and now you are one, good morning" George snidely commented in a bouncy sarcastic tone. Annie added "Well we have to tell her something, this is kind of a big issue we have on our hands" she swayed her vision between the two men. Both Annie and Mitchell, stared at George as if he had some responsibility to keep to. George looked to the both of them in annoyed question with his mouth wide with disapproval. "Why do i have to be the one to try and explain everything?? ...Why can't you both jump in for once!" he exclaimed with jittery annoyance.

"Well you sort of have...experience with this George, you could explain things a bit better" Mitchell tried to reason. George sighed, whirling his head around, counting the problems he already had in his head without this one. They suddenly turned there heads to see the girl sitting up on the couch, delirious as she grasped onto the blanket with one hand to cover her bare form. She rubbed her hand against her head, squinting as she moved her palm over her eyes. "Where am i?...Who are you people?" she murmured in a drudging tone. They all stared at her as if they had no answer. Annie walked to her and sat by her side on the couch, with the calm and caring vibe she was so notable for. "You are safe now" Annie tried reassuring her. "I'm Annie, this is Mitchell and that's George, you are at our house" she explains. Annie kindly looks at the girl's exhausted face, "I'll go make you some tea alright?" she says as she heads back to the kitchen.

Mitchell went to her and looked her in the eyes "Do you remember what happened?" he asked in a soft voice. "Of course she doesn't!" George blurted waving his hand to the two. Mitchell looking to him like he should know better then to spew out such a thing. George sighed and turned around, rubbing his chin then scratching his neck in agitation. The girl shook her head "No i don't remember"...squinting some more as she tried to clear out the blanks in her mind. "What's your name?" asked Mitchell. "Jenny" she uttered. Annie came striding in with a steaming cup of tea, handing it to her with gentle hands "Here you go..", Jenny nodded in thanks and took a sip of the tea. The warmth of it was relieving, as well as being around others in a warm house. Though she was naked, and didn't know who they were.

Mitchell turned to her again, speaking softly as he had " Well, do you remember anything before last night?..you were found alone in the woods like this..". Jenny's expression lit up with even more confusion "In the woods?". Mitchell nodded. Jenny stuttered as she blinked several times, trying to piece her memory together "I was out on a hike with my parents, we were going to make a night of it and camp there.." she turned to Mitchell and Annie quickly "Have you seen them?". Annie and Mitchell shook there heads letting her know they hadn't. Meanwhile, George was pacing around behind them in disarray.

Annie motioned her to follow her "Here, lets get you cleaned up". As Jenny got up to follow her, holding onto the blanket tightly, George had noticed her left leg. It had a large bite shaped scar on it. Further proving what had happened, and what she was. Jenny and Annie both headed upstairs to the bathroom. Mitchell then turned to George, trying to figure out a plan of action. George sighed "Ok....I'll talk to her.." lightly flailing one of his hands around in an agitated gesture as he spoke. Then turning towards the kitchen.

Probably an hour or so had passed and Annie came down the stairs. Mitchell looked to her "So...how is she?" he asked. "Still a bit shaken up, but calming down some.." Mitchell nodded as he held his cup of coffee, looking down in thought. Jenny had washed in the shower and Annie had shown her to some spare clothes she had lying around. Jenny was sitting on the bed in the extra room, looking through the window with a blank stare. She crossed her arms and started rubbing them for comfort as she eased down on the bed. Her head nestled into the pillow as she laid with a saddened and still confused expression. Then fell asleep.

The next day, Annie and George were in the kitchen as George was eating breakfest. And of course, Annie was making tea. They both notice Jenny slowly making her way into the room. She looked at them silently, seeming out of place and feeling awkward. "Would you like some breakfast?" Annie cheerfully asked. "No thank you...not quite hungry.." Jenny said in an almost morose tone as she sat down. She began rubbing one of her shoulders again, from the stress of the whole ordeal. Annie looked at George, clearing her throat to him with an insisting glare. George paused in the middle of eating his cereal to glare back at her. He knew what she wanted him to do. "I'll be right back.." and headed up stairs to leave them to discussion. It was awkwardly silent for a few moments. Jenny secretly eyed George, thinking him to be sort of odd and reclusive in his manner towards her.

Braving the courage to try and tell her what had happened, he finally breaks his silence. He faces her "Jenny..." he says in a straight and serious manner. "yes?" she replies. "I know what happened to you last night..." saying in a way as if he's pushing the words out of his mouth. Jenny's eyes widen to this news "You do??" and George nods nervously with a yes. Jenny bounces her eyes around, fearful of what he had to say and wondering why he hadn't said anything yesterday. George sets his hands out infront of him in gesture and pauses. Knowing how insane it was going to sound, and how to explain it to her.

He faces her, yet looks off to the side as he finally continues. "You were attacked by a werewolf..." then he pauses again as he motions to make eye contact. Jenny, just sitting there, listening. "at some point in the past, you were bitten by one...and...and" Jenny's expression morphed as she rose one eyebrow to his words. Hearing indeed, how insane he was sounding. "so now you are one...and that's what you became last night because it was a full moon, and i know this because..i...i am one too" he bounces his head a bit and folds his hands together. With a smirk, trying to cover that what he had just told her sounded incredibly crazy. Jenny stays in her solid state of disbelief with the one eyebrow still raised, "I see.." as she turns her head. George looks down, knowing right off the bat that she doesn't believe him and thinks him mad.

Jenny turns back to him "well um..now that i know you've gone mental..i think I'll show myself out" giving a showy fake smile. She then proceeds to get up and motions towards the door. "No no wait!" George stands up and reaches out to her. She stops and turns to him, wondering what other nonsense he possibly had to say. "I know..how this sounds ok.if i were you id be thinking the same exact thing...but i need you to listen to me...alright" Jenny's face twists with some disgust and she abruptly moves away from him. "..and i need you to listen to ME...get some help!" she yells as she barrels out the door. George sighs deeply, holding his face in his hands.

Annie walks down the stairs to catch the end of the disorganized scene. "So...how did it go?" she asks, looking around and noticing the girl was not there. "exactly...how i thought it would go" George proclaims to her as if it was a failed idea to begin with.

As Jenny stomps across the street, not even knowing where she would go or where her parents were, Mitchell was walking back. He noticed her leaving and quickly approaches her "Hey..where are you going?.." he places his hand on her shoulder in concern. She whips her finger to the house and points "Your FRIEND...or...or WHOEVER he is..is insane...he's going on about werewolves and..." Mitchell tries to calm her down "hey..its ok, it's alright..he is a bit odd, but he isn't insane" he gently smirks at her. She glares at him, yet again in disbelief that he too believes this incredible story. " listen... i don't have TIME for this! i need to find my parents" she clearly states as she storms off. "Wait!" Mitchell calls out, but she ignores him and keeps walking.

Mitchell walks into the door with a displeased expression. "What did you do??" he asks with disappointment in his voice. George pauses like he was just harshly insulted, "I did what you told me to do!" he flails his hand out. " I told her what happened, and what she was..i talked to her, just like you both told me to!"

Mitchell exclaims "Well you could have been a little more respectful about it!". "George rolls his head back "What did you expect me to do! i knew it wouldn't work, she thinks I've gone off my rocket!". Annie steps in between them "It doesn't matter, she has no where to go, and she doesn't know the danger she..or anyone else around her is in...We have to go after her.." she states. George sighs harshly and spins around in a tangent. "She's right, we need to go find her" Mitchell says as he heads out the door. George tries to reason with him as he watches him pass "But she's just going to run away again!". He starts mumbling in anger as he goes to follow Mitchell.

Jenny heads back to the forest, trying to back track as best as she could remember, which wasn't much at all. She jogs around while huffing, feeling like she is running through an endless maze with no clues or answers. After running around for quite some time, calling for her parents, she spins herself in frustration. She covers her face and sits on a rock as her eyes begin to tear up. Trailing not far behind, Mitchell, George and Annie call out for her. "Jenny..wait!" Mitchell cries out as jenny comes into sight. "Stay away from me!" she yells to them in a threatening yet frightened tone, as she turns to run. She gasps as her breath tries to catch up with her feet. Running as fast as she can, anywhere away from them.

She turns her head to see them as they run towards her, still calling out to her. But she continues running no matter. Suddenly, her leg catches on a branch and she takes flight roughly onto the ground. She grunts in a bit of pain from the landing, only to suddenly widen her eyes as she desperately crawls backwards in pure horror. A trail of blood can be seen, leading up to the mangled torn corpses of her parents. Both side by side, some limbs scattered across the other. Jenny lets out an impressive and earth shattering scream. The three finally catch up to her and find her horrible discovery. They jolt back and stand in place, horrified as well. Annie's face wells up almost to tears as she quickly turns her head away from the scene. Mitchell approaches, as Jenny desperately grabs at him, crying uncontrollably in his arms. George just stands there, staring and astounded, shaking his head as he knows what had happened.

They are gathered back at the house. Jenny still in tears and silent in shock, staring off at the floor as the image replays again and again in her head. Annie sits besides her, trying not to cry herself so to be strong for the girl. All the words she can muster "I'm sorry", but in such a kind way that it could have sounded like much more. Jenny looks to her, eyes still swollen and wet with sadness, she sniffles "i...i don't understand...what happened to them?....what happened to me?...none of this makes any sense!" she turns away, trying to merge words out inbetween tears. Mitchell stays quiet, sighing and feeling beyond sorry for the poor girl, and wondering about her fate. George leans against the wall, staying silent in his thoughts. Bringing a bit of anger in himself, because he understands the menace of the other half and what it is capable of.

"You can stay here with us..we will sort this all out..i promise.." Annie says as she looks to the other two, begging with her eyes for some type of input from them. George suddenly comes back from his thoughts, she approaches Annie and Jenny on the couch. "I know...this is hard for you to accept, it was for me.." before he can speak another word, she lashes out" Don't you start with that nonsense again! my parents were killed!! how dare you!!.." while Mitchell and Annie try to motion for her to calm down. Mitchell turns to her, and cups her face gently in his hands, making direct eye contact.

"Jenny, i know you're scared, i know you just lost your parents. But its all true, every bit of it...the creatures you were taught weren't real, they are. And we are them." Jennys weak crying body almost goes limp in his arms, tired of crying and exerting energy from her enraged sadness. She still believes them to be insane, but feels like hope is lost and doesn't even care anymore. She just sobs, staring at Mitchell. Out of no where, his eyes turn pitch black. She screams and jumps back on the couch. Frantic as her heart pounds, "What are you?!!" she screams. Mitchell's eyes fade back to normal, and he looks down, not wanting to have done that to her..but knew she needed some proof. Annie holds onto Jenny to try and compose and calm her down.

Jenny looks up at Annie, thinking she might be the sanest and normal of the three. Her eyes pleading for an explanation. Mitchell looks to Jenny, eyes forward again, "I'm a vampire..George is a werewolf, and Annie is a ghost". For something sounding so ridiculous, Mitchell couldn't have said it any more serious then he did. Jenny stares, her face still frozen in tears and horror. She quickly jumps her sight back to Annie "is this true??". Annie nods, in a saddened and understanding way "yes.." she says. Jenny stops silent in her tears. She stares forward trying to take it all in, inbetween skepticism and thinking she's going insane, to accepting it might all be real.

The next morning we find the three in the kitchen, quiet again in deep thought. George paces, not knowing what to do, or what to think. Mitchell turns to him with a straight face. "You have to help her manage it..." George stops dead in his tracks to Mitchell's statement. "Are you kidding me?? I can BARELY..manage it myself!" pointing jaggedly at his chest. "There's no other way..." Annie adds. "Oh, so now I'M responsible for her, is that it??" Annie looks to George, glaring as if he is acting a bit selfish. "Well what do you SUGGEST we do?" Annie says with a sharp tongue. "I...I...dont know..i don't know what to do.." George states, again in a tangent. Mitchell looks forward "She can stay here for now, until we decide what we can do for her..." Annie nods to him. George doesn't say a single word, still lost in his own racing thoughts about what was happening.

Later that day, Jenny quietly approaches George while he is alone in the kitchen. George shoots his glance to her, not expecting her to have approached him. "So...how do i control it?" she asks quietly, and as if she was forcing herself to do so. George quietly replies back "You cant..." ..he looks away "You can only contain it". She looks off to the side "Well...how do i contain it?" she asks. George looks back to her and gently smiles, "I'll show you.." and nods. Jenny weakly smiles back and nods in return.

Dichotomy

monsterbyproxy — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:34:01 CDT

“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.

MBP's Fan Fiction

monsterbyproxy — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:41:46 CDT

MBP's Fanfic and Art

STORIES AVAILABLE:

1 - "Annie's Gift" - Mitchell surprises Annie with a present. September 2009.

2 - "Intelligibilia - George, Mitchell and Annie reminisce about the things they lost after they lost their human selves. September 2009.

3 - "Mended Pieces" - The threesome are brought together after tragedy almost tears them apart.

4 - "Aqqa" - George and Mitchell have a row.

5 - "The Morning After the Night Before" - Mitchell and Annie clean up George's mess.

6 - "Dichotomy" - Mitchell and George discuss humanity.

The Morning After the Night Before

monsterbyproxy — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:22:16 CDT

“Oh, the poor man must be exhausted…”

Annie Sawyer cupped her hands beneath her chin and stared across the room at George Sands, who lay half-curled up on the floor amidst a massive amount of debris and damaged furniture. His pale, naked body lay motionless on the wood floor except for the slow rise and fall of his chest, and he rested on his left side with his right leg slightly scissored forward in an unconscious position of modesty, hiding his genitals from view. George’s head rested on one stretched-out arm, with his right hand drawn close to his face, and if he’d drawn his hand just a tad closer to his face, he could’ve easily regressed to sucking his thumb for comfort after the previous evening‘s traumatic events.

John Mitchell, who’d been staring around the demolished downstairs living space in shock, blinked and looked at Annie with the same stunned expression. He surveyed the area again with open-mouthed wonder--this time, not at the damage done, but at his flatmate‘s reaction to it all.

Our things have been torn to shreds… her things have been torn to shreds, and she couldn’t care less, Mitchell observed. She’s a good person, our Annie…

He quickly got his emotions under control as Annie turned to him, and her dark questioning eyes asked what had to be done. Mitchell gave her a tight-lipped smile.

“I’ll get him upstairs,” Mitchell whispered.

Annie nodded. “And I’ll… get started down here,” she replied in a soft voice. She took a step to her right, paused, then redirected herself to weave through the mangled remains of the furniture. “If I can get to the kitchen,” she muttered.

Mitchell picked his way across the main room carefully. He had two issues on his mind: one, he didn’t want to fall and break a leg in the mess before him, and two, he didn’t want to wake George from sleep. The man hadn’t slept well for about a week and a half (“I can‘t get my brain to turn off,” George had complained. “It‘s like the smallest issues are of major importance all of a sudden”), and the previous evening’s transformation certainly hadn’t helped his already-exhausted body. Another concern rested with just how much of the wolf lingered; Mitchell knew he could fend off any attack from the mortal George, but out of general concern for his friend, he didn’t want the wolf’s keen hearing to disturb George’s much-needed slumber.

With a grace born from a hundred years of earthbound life, Mitchell made his way around George and rolled him onto his back. He then slipped his hands underneath George’s prone body, one arm under the man’s knees and the other arm around his shoulders, then hoisted George up with a grunt as he stood. He breathed a sigh of relief as his concerns about George’s hearing appeared unfounded; the form in his arms barely stirred. His mouth slacked open as his head rolled back over Mitchell’s coat sleeve. His slack, unrestrained penis flopped to the left as Mitchell gave a quick hoist of the body, in order to better reposition George in his arms.

With care, Mitchell maneuvered his way towards the stairs, turned slightly, and moved George sideways up the narrow staircase, his own steps sideways and executed with caution so as not to risk dropping George. The young man’s eyes remained closed the entire time, oblivious to the carry-journey that he found himself on.

Mitchell, however, endured the trip with a tightness in his chest. He had the strength, of course--he tapped into that extraordinary vampire strength that had allowed his kind to live for thousands of years, so that made the physical part of his task easy--but the odd, delicate moment pulled at his heartstrings.

How long had it been, he wondered, since George had been carried like a baby, bare-bummed and unconscious to the world, completely trusting those around him to take care of him? How long, in fact, had it been since Mitchell himself could say the same thing? Not from infancy, surely. As for experiencing such a deep level of trust, that element about humanity had almost been stripped from their grasp with the first bites and scrapes to their bodies. Sure, they’d come to trust one another and they’d come to trust Annie. But so few other opportunities made it possible for them to let go, to give themselves to another person so completely…

Mitchell pivoted and guided his burden through the doorway of George’s bedroom (the gnome room, his mind echoed), then hesitated because the bed, in typical anal-retentive George fashion, had been well-made. After a moment of indecision, he cautiously lowered George’s feet to the floor, let the man’s upper torso lean against his, then reached out and quickly snatched the coverlet and top sheet back.

“C’mon, George,” he whispered, more to himself than to his sleeping friend. “Time for bed.”

Lifting George’s legs again, Mitchell tucked them in between the sheets and shifted George from his arms to the bed, this time resting him on his right side as he tucked him in. Mitchell gave one last swat to lay the sheet over his naked body, then stood there for a few minutes, staring at that peaceful, worry-free expression with new amazement. He’d never watched George sleep before, but Mitchell caught a glimpse of something that he so rarely saw: the real George, free from anxiety and fear… and from that deep-rooted yet always denied level of anger he carried around. Just as he lay stripped of his clothes, so, too, did George lay stripped of his burden. Wolf time had ended, and he had a long stretch of days before it came again. Caught up in sleep, he didn’t have his genius brain gnawing at him, reminding him of all he knew and all he’d given up after the dreaded transformation.

For that space of time, Mitchell could see George as a regular person--one who loved animals (Lord knows that no living creature would tolerate their presence now, sensing the wrongness of what they had become), someone who cared for himself and others, and who had been an important, contributing member of human society…

Reduced to nothing more a konked-out, snoring form in a cheap bed, above some trashed flat in Bristol.

Mitchell left the bedroom and eased the door shut behind him; the metal lock barely clicked as he turned it into place. He walked back downstairs, then paused as he entered the main room.

Annie had worked diligently to clean things up and, in true ghost form, had done a wonderful job in a very short amount of time. The abilities that she’d once used to stack furniture and frighten away tenants in “her” house had been put to use again, so now the majority of the broken heavy items rested in a corner while she undertook the more normal, mortal task of sweeping. She smiled at Mitchell as he nodded to her, gave her a smile of his own, and began cleaning.

“Is he all right?” she asked.

Mitchell nodded. “George is having a wonderful sleep.” He glanced around at the disaster area. “I truly envy him that right now.”

“It’s not like he did all this on purpose,” Annie reminded Mitchell gently. “And you did encourage him to transform in the house, you know.”

He nodded sagely. “Yes, I know. Which makes this as much my fault as his, I suppose. I thought perhaps in a confined space, there would be less… action from the creature.”

Annie smirked. “You thought locking a four-hundred pound wild animal in your house comes without consequences, eh?”

He put his hands on his hips and puffed out a breath. “I really had no idea how violent and scary the whole experience would be. Or how loud.”

“I suspect there‘ll be some explaining to do to the neighbors,” she remarked.

Mitchell shook his head. “No. I’ve got friends in the police force. If they didn‘t show up after all that ruckus last night, then they‘re not going to…” He winced as he looked at the black leather sofa that he adored so much, now up righted thanks to Annie but missing its seating. “Oh, no! The cushions,” he muttered. Annie gave Mitchell a sympathetic glance and continued sweeping.

“And to think,” she muttered, “that I’d just done the Hoovering in here, too.”

Aqqa

monsterbyproxy — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:43:11 CDT

“Vampires kill,” John Mitchell said with a frown, “but at least we have a conscience about it. And we do it by design, never by accident.”

“Oh, really? What of Lauren, then?”

George Sands stood up from the sofa and took several steps until he put himself quite close to Mitchell, who twitched his nose and half-turned away.

“Lauren’s death came about from your passion,” George argued. “You didn’t plan to kill her. It just happened--which means that makes it an accident, doesn‘t it?”

Both Mitchell and George broke off their conversation for a moment, each one retreating to a different area of the living room and pacing about as they tried to get control of their emotions.

George linked his hands around the back of his head and squeezed his elbows together, narrowing his field of vision as he stared at the floor and moved in a slow circle. Mitchell kept half-turned away from George as he walked back and forth in a straight line, his gaze alternating between the colorful panels that blotted out the windows of their flat and the wallpaper opposite.

Over the past few minutes, their voices had begun to grow louder, and the conversation more intense, as neither man backed down from the topic at hand and gave ground to the other‘s views. Up until that point, their lives together had been a typical Thursday night, with the three of them--George, Mitchell and Annie--staked out in front of the television, They’d drifted casually from one subject to another, integrating the evening news into their chat.

Following the story of a woman killed by her ex-boyfriend in Essex, Annie brought up Gilbert‘s name. Gilbert, a departed spirit that Mitchell had introduced to her one night at a local club, had passed in 1985; he’d told her when they’d met that he didn’t eat meat (a bit of a ridiculous statement, really, as a ghost couldn’t eat or drink anything). Annie nodded at the TV screen, which showed a man being taken into custody by the Essex Police.

“’Death for no reason is murder,’ Gilbert told me.” Annie plucked at the sleeve of her shirt. “It‘s horrific, dying at the hands of someone who says he loves you. Like what Owen did to me. I mean, how does one kill, anyway?” she asked, as she turned her curious gaze towards Mitchell and George.

From that point, the calm together-time evening had disintegrated into a who‘s-worse conversation when it came to killing people, vampires versus werewolves…

Mitchell wiped at his mouth as he tried to replay the conversation in his head and to backtrack to where it had all gone wrong, but his emotions choked off all logical thought. Finally, he glanced over at Annie, who sat curled up and forlorn-looking on the floor, uncomfortable over the argument going on between her flat mates and clearly upset of her small, innocent contribution to the turn of events.

For her sake, at least, Mitchell told himself, don’t go flying off the handle at George.

“We are all animals, in a way,” Mitchell began again, desperate to try and defuse the situation. The two men stopped their pacing and faced one another again. “Humans, vampires, werewolves,” Mitchell continued. “We’ve all got some animalistic drives in us that make us do things we wouldn’t normally do. Perhaps,” he conceded, “I misspoke when I said that my kind bring death by design. I’m just saying that I do have more control over it than you do. The blood lust that we live with is quite overpowering at times and, yes, that causes unwarranted casualties.”

George, still keyed up, fixed him with a glare. “More control? You call what you did to Lauren having ‘more control’, eh? Bollocks! And you said that I… that werewolves… kill mindlessly? I’ve never killed mindlessly. As a matter of fact, I’ve killed a person only once, and that was Herrick.” His look changed to one of derision. “We both know that you can’t boast such a record.”

“So what of the deer,” he challenged George as his temper flared up again, “and the squirrels and the rabbits and the stoats? They don’t count because they’re lesser creatures? That was still killing. And that was you, that was the wolf, acting instinctively.” He took a step forward. “And without… a… conscience.”

“And without a memory of it,” George countered. “It was not something that I knew happened. The wolf was hungry, the wolf killed--”

“YOU killed, George!” Mitchell’s tenuous self-control snapped. He waved his arms in the air in frustration. “My God, d’you think I don’t know anything about your condition? That I don’t know that, even after the transformation, it’s still you in there? You claim to have memory blackouts, but we both know that’s not the case--”

“It IS!“ he screeched, his face red and his eyes wide as he grasped the meaning behind Mitchell‘s words. “I have no memory whatsoever when it happens!”

“No.” Mitchell’s voice grew quiet and his face set like stone. “You’ve said that time and again, but I know better.”

George’s mouth trembled. “It’s a lie…”

“At best,” Mitchell continued in a monotone, “from time to time, it is all a blank to you. I know that. Sometimes you have no recollection of what takes place in your werewolf state. But other times? Hell, you’ve said it yourself, that it’s all like a dream. There’s the agonizing pain of transformation, then your consciousness go blank… and then you come back to yourself, don’t you? Just a little bit at a time…” He cocked his head and took another step forward. “Just as the wolf creeps in on you during your human state, so do you awaken within the wolf, to feel its power, to let it take you on its wild journey. And you revel in it--”

“Stop it!”

George backed away and dropped back down into his seat, one hand on his stomach as he grew pale. His body gave a violent, involuntary shake and he leaned his head back against the sofa. “I-- I don’t like to think about things like that. Nothing is within my control when I transform.”

“Because you don’t want it in your control any more than you want to remember what‘s happened.” Mitchell hovered over him. “But you’re wrong, you know. The beast is within your power. Why do you think you’ve gone so long without killing a human being? Because you, George, have kept the animal from doing such harm. There’s enough of you in there--”

“And what of you?” George retorted. “Mister Vampire, the elegant creature of the night.” With some effort, he cast aside his nausea and stood up again, putting himself face-to-face with Mitchell. “Where’s your control at? You go on the wagon, you go off the wagon. You find victims and invite them on dates… and then it’s Russian Roulette at that point, innit? Will they live or will they die?” He sneered at Mitchell. “At least with the wolf, I know where I stand. You’re your own worst enemy--fully aware of everything that you‘re doing as you‘re doing it, and yet letting it go on even when you know what the outcome will be.”

Mitchell trembled under the truth of George’s words.

“Even if you weren‘t a vampire,” George finished, “you‘d be a *****, shagging everything in sight just to satisfy another desire, walking around, smelling of it--”

“SMELL?!?”

With a sudden screech, Mitchell aimed both hands at George’s chest and shoved George away from him. George stumbled back, gasping as the sudden, unexpected and incredibly powerful blow pushed the air out of his lungs. He dropped to one knee as he fought to get his wind back.

“What do you know of smell?” Mitchell raged. “You smell! The wolf smells! You stink to me, George. From the first night we met, your scent has struck me as being downright putrid. You have no idea the amount of nausea that just being in the same room with you brings me.” He bent over George and grabbed him by the back of the neck. “But I’ve kept that under control, haven’t I? Not a word of complaint. And here, you had no idea how much the mere scent of your cursed blood offends me!”

With a swift upward movement of his arm, George swiped at Mitchell and drove him back with a sound smack. Mitchell swore and curled one hand around his lower jaw.

“And what of your blood, then?” George retaliated. “You think I can’t smell you and what you carry? The darkness, the death? My blood may be cursed, but at least it’s alive. Yours has centuries of memory in it, everything that those before you have experienced… pestilence, plague… vampires before you have drank it in and passed it down, and now you…” A quick, angry laugh escaped him. “You’re the most disgusting thing of all. You’re a walking memory of death. No. Worse. You’re the continuation of unnatural death.”

“No, he‘s not,” Annie said in a hollow voice. “But I am.”

The solemn words snapped the tension in the room, and both George and Mitchell turned to look at Annie.

She glanced up at them with a sad expression. “I am unnatural,” she said in a near-whisper, “moreso than even you and Mitchell. At least you two can still feel things. You’ve got blood--however changed it may be--coursing through your veins. You can smell. Eat. Drink. Interact.” She plucked at her shirt again. “You can even do something as simple as change clothes. I can’t. I’ve lost my connection to this world forever. There is nothing more unnatural in this world than being in it but not being a part of it.”

With a hard swallow, Mitchell went to her and knelt down. “But you are a part of it, love,” he said softly. He reached out and stroked her hair. “You were so in life, and you still are.” George slowly brought his right hand up to rub at his left shoulder, the injured shoulder with its never-fading scars. His face, flushed and fierce just moments ago, went pale and concerned as he looked down at her. “Oh, Annie,” he breathed, “don’t say such things. You’re a part of our lives, at the very least.”

“You feel things,” Mitchell added. “Not like you used to, but in different ways. New ways.”

Annie, close to tears, nodded. “But where did we go, Mitchell?” she asked, her voice breaking. “The people we were. Where did we go?”

Mitchell pulled her close, unable to answer. He knew what she meant, and it pained him to think of a response. Sure, in appearance and mannerisms, the three of them hadn’t changed all that much from the way they’d been before… but they had, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And for once, Mitchell felt glad that he couldn’t see himself in a mirror. He didn’t want to look into his own eyes, to see his true age that he knew would be reflected back at him, and to see the dark soul of the creature that he’d become over the decades.

Behind him, George removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes, then turned and headed towards the stairs.

“We’ve had a… long day,” he said slowly. “Best to… put it… behind us.”

“Aye,” Mitchell heard himself respond. Annie, one hand up to her face to hide her tears, nodded in agreement. George paused at the foot of the stairs, put one hand on the banister, and glanced back at his flat mates. For a few moments, his long-forgotten Jewish heritage crept back into his consciousness. He knew that Judaism did not consider anger to be a “bad” trait, only a dangerous one. But misdirected or misused anger, like rage, became a self-serving emotion--it had a destructive, animalistic nature…

The word “nature” in his mind triggered another, fresher memory. “Man is evil, by nature man is a beast…”

George shivered. Those words had been spoken by Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis. The 90-year-old Jewish man had died just the other day, and George had read that sentence in the newspaper. Now, as he looked at Mitchell and Annie, seated on the floor and still holding onto one another, Edelman’s words came back to him.

“We need to be better than man,” George muttered to himself as he turned and slowly marched up the stairs.

Mended Pieces

monsterbyproxy — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:38:37 CDT

"Being Human" Season:	End of Season 2 (granted, we've only ended Season One...)
Rating:	T
Pairings:	(none)
Characters In Episodes:	Mitchell, George, Annie
Disclaimer:	This is a work of fiction, not for sale or profit, all rights belong to BBC.

　

“Burned out.”

George Sands said the words with a slow shake of his head, his voice dull and low as he stared out across the city landscape below.

Beside him, John Mitchell half-turned in his direction and looked at George, unable to say anything to either comfort or question him as his own silent pain crippled him.

Finally Mitchell turned to follow his friend’s gaze, drew in a long breath, and sighed out a single word.

“Annie.”

George said nothing in return. The two men stood there together, on the roof of the hospital, with the distant, fiery glow of their former residence brightening the night with a warm orange light.

Emergency vehicles of every nature surrounded the area, and their lights set up a colorful yet repetitious perimeter around the site. Mitchell swallowed, albeit with some effort. He knew that it would only be a matter of time before they lost the flat. It always been that way for him, with reality and the way of things ending whatever moment of happiness or contentment he seemed to find. Months earlier, it had seemed like their neighbors would drive them out of their home. Then he feared that his fellow vampires would be the undoing of the threesome’s peaceful lives together. Now the threat had swung back to that of man… to one man in particular… to the Professor.

George let out a strange sound and hugged the small, flat box in his hands closer to his chest. “Oh, Annie,” he managed to whisper. Mitchell put an arm over George’s shoulder and pulled him close, then wrapped both arms around him and hugged him tight as George’s paper-thin level of self-control crumbled, and he began weeping.

Mitchell eased George down to a sitting position on the roof, and they sat there together for some time until George’s tears subsided. Although he let go with one arm, Mitchell kept his other arm over George. He stared down at the roof for a while, then closed his eyes.

“I wish I could cry for her,” Mitchell murmured. "But I can't. I don't know why."

George sniffed and wiped at his tear-stained face. He didn’t have his glasses--they’d been lost somewhere, either during the struggle to get away from the Professor’s assistants (henchmen, Mitchell’s mind corrected) or as they’d escaped the fiercely-burning flat. George couldn’t make out the world around him very well at the moment; he could forego his glasses about a week before his transformation, as all his senses heightened and the glasses became unnecessary, but without them during his normal phase, he had difficulty in distinguishing the finer details of things beyond the reach of his hand.

“You fancied her.” George turned his tear-stained face towards his friend. “Loved her a bit. Didn’t you?”

“Didn’t you?” Mitchell countered gently.

George gave a quick nod of his head, then wiped at his face again and took several deep breaths.

“You did very well back there, you know,” Mitchell reassured him.

“If this had happened in another couple of weeks,” George replied in a shaky voice, “I would’ve done considerably more.”

“The important thing was that you didn’t panic.” Mitchell gave him another quick squeeze. “You acted instinctively. You used enough of the wolf to get us out of the window. If you hadn’t have done that, we’d have died for sure.”

George gave him a surprised glance. “I’d have died. You’d have been burned for some time--”

“And in extreme agony for some time…”

“But you’d have lived."

Mitchell slowly pulled back his arm and brought his legs up, then put his elbows on his bent knees and locked his hands together.

“Living. This isn’t living. This is existing.” He closed his eyes. “I wish that stake had gone through my heart, you know. Then I could’ve been like Lauren--drifting up into the sky. A puff of smoke, a bit of dust. Cut loose from this… this endless hunger. This cruel creature that I am.”

“We wouldn’t have you any other way,” George whispered with a slight smile.

Mitchell cracked open his eyes.

“You’re fine as you are," George continued. "Just as I’m fine as I am. There are worse things in this world than this. Worse… creatures… that we could be.”

George’s gaze went out in front of them again, towards the amber glow in the darkness.

“I guess there are,” Mitchell agreed.

George relaxed his arms and eased the small box in his hands onto his lap. For some time, his fingers stroked the torn paper of the outer covering, then he sniffed again and looked back at Mitchell. “So what do we do now?”

Mitchell shrugged and forced himself to his feet.

“I don’t know,” he grumbled. “Start again, I guess. Start yet again. A new town, a new flat, new jobs. Damn it!” Mitchell’s anger boiled to the surface. “My entire world is about starting over, pulling the pieces together after something else has shattered them. Moving every ten years or so, to keep people from seeing that I don’t age. Moving sooner than that when I’m found out. And I’m sick of it, I tell you!” He flailed his arms. “And now, look at this! They’ve taken our Annie! They’ve destroyed her. They burned down her home, the one place that kept her grounded to this plane of existence. And she hasn’t passed into death, either. Because Annie gave up death for us, and look what we gave her. Something worse than death. She’s discorporate now. It‘s the worst thing that can happen to a ghost. Before, she was gaining substance and growing in confidence, and now…”

Mitchell’s shoulders hunched and he walked away, his face averted from George’s concerned gaze.

“Mitchell,” he reminded her gently, “she knew what she was doing when she turned her back to death. She made a choice to stay here and help us fight Herrick.”

“We forced her to,” Mitchell said over his shoulder. “Maybe not physically, but surely we manipulated her. She had a kind heart, and we bound her here unnecessarily. With friendship, and… with… love…”

George sighed, then nodded to himself. He stood up and walked over to Mitchell, and put a hand on his back.

“I think you should have this, then,” he said softly. “You need it more than I do.”

Mitchell kept his head down but half-turned to look at the box which George held out to him.

“What is it?”

“A reminder,” George replied. “Something so that we don’t ever forget Annie.”

With trembling fingers, Mitchell opened the lid of the thin box and tucked the lid underneath it. There, laying on top of George’s blue silk handkerchief--a good one that he’d bought for a special occasion at the hospital--sat a broken tile.

Mitchell recognized it right off. The cracked tile in his hands had been the very tile where Annie’s head had smashed after her fall down the stairs--the tile that had killed her, essentially. Owen never replaced the broken ceramic, and it hadn’t been until Annie remembered that he’d caused her death before they all understood why… because Owen didn’t care. Not about her, or the accident, or his part in it. He didn’t care about anything, not even enough to replace a simple broken floor tile.

Mitchell gently touched the smooth, sharp edges of the broken white ceramic, then eased the lid back on top and held it to his own chest, just as George had done.

“I pulled it out the floor yesterday,” George said. He bit his bottom lip and shook his head. “I don’t know why. I thought maybe we could take it to the cemetery some day. Bury it. Maybe bury some of the pain that her death caused her. At the very least, it seemed cruel to just leave it.”

“It was,” Mitchell agreed. “Only we didn’t see it like that, did we? We must’ve stepped over this hundreds of times, without a thought as to what it must’ve meant to Annie, looking at the spot that claimed her life day after day.”

They hadn’t been there to witness Annie’s death, but Mitchell, having been through war and heard the crunch of men’s skulls beneath the butts of rifles, could certainly envision it. He could sense the brutal physical force that would’ve been required to split the tile, and her delicate skull, in one blow. He felt fresh tears come to his eyes as he imagined Annie lying there, arms by her head, a blank look on her face as her life’s blood drained out on the floor around her and her spirit separated from her body. Poor Annie, who had no control over her death as a human being or as a ghost…

“Look at what they did to my house!”

George and Mitchell screamed in unison and swung around to stare at Annie, who stood with her arms crossed and her fierce, dark gaze on the distant fire.

“You… you…” George tried to speak, but only ended up gasping.

“You’re not dead!” Mitchell exclaimed.

Annie gave him an odd glance. “Of course I’m dead. What’s up with you two?”

“No, I mean--” He pointed at her. “You’re here!”

She shrugged. “So?”

George broke out in a wide grin. “So?!??” he remarked with a squeak of his voice and a slight laugh. “We thought you were gone. A wisp of air, nothing more! What else could we think?”

A strange look came over Annie’s face. “Poof,” she said softly.

“Yea.” Mitchell looked at the box, and smiled wider, then turned and gave George an enthusiastic hug, one that nearly knocked him off his feet.

“You did it, George! You saved her!”

“Wha--?”

Mitchell took a step back, then laughed and waved the box by George’s face and the pieces of tile inside clinked together. “What do you think I mean?”

“So…” George took the box and glanced between it, him and Annie. “All this time, it was just was the tile. Where she died specifically, but not the house itself.”

“Apparently!”

Annie cocked her head to one side. “You mean… I’m… not connected to it any more?”

George stepped up as Mitchell set her down and gave her a quick hug, then tucked the box into his overcoat.

“You’re free! You can stay with us,” he explained. “Now you’re not tethered to Bristol, and you can go anywhere with us, anywhere in the whole world!”

Unable to contain himself any longer, Mitchell swept forward and pulled her into his arms, and he looped his hands around her waist and swung her in several circles.

“Oh, my Annie,” he said in a breathless voice.

Annie and Mitchell stared at one another for a moment, and it didn’t surprise George one bit when their lips finally met. He watched them for quite some time, one hand resting on the thick package in the pocket of his overcoat, and his smile never faltered.

"Intelligibilia"

monsterbyproxy — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:23:12 CDT

"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.”