Disclaimer: Nope, don't own Being Human.
Author's Note: I'd wanted to write something for this show, and now I have. No idea where it came from, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.
UNTIL WE HAVE FACES
At first he barely sees them. They're vague shadows flickering behind his eyes as he sleeps. He assumes that one's his sergeant, and that one's his cousin.
It's more or less the taste that makes his stomach react, and the voices that scream that wake him with a start; and that's when reality hits him in the face.
It's the voices that get him to get out of bed, run to the bathroom and scrub and scratch at his face until crimson red is replaced with a different kind; and when Mitchell looks up to the mirror... that's when reality always pushes its ungodly weight onto him. It's been years since he's seen himself. He doesn't remember what he even looks like anymore.
"It gets easier," Herrick says one day nonchalantly, offering him a smoke.
It never does. He counts the days, and he never gets any closer to 'easier'.
He wonders about his parents, and if they'd given up on him back in Ireland. He wonders what story has been made up about him to justify his death. The war, probably.
He used to be methodical. Poison, and all that. After that he just submits to who he has become.
Sometimes the kills get more pathetic, surely Herrick knows that he won't infect a fucking little girl. He's not a timid murderer, he's grown into the fucking lifestyle.
He feels a tug, then, somewhere in him; the girl's spared but the bum on the street isn't.
What is that shift, he finds himself asking.
Josie is a brief reprieve from the life that he's come to loathe, over fifty years on. He loves her, he really does. The bloodlust quietens like a far off memory – at least, until he sleeps again, and he hears those screams. Then it comes back, pulses through his veins, and he wakes. She soothes him. He still can't get back to sleep.
Soon, they change and shift in his dreams. They take forms now, more refined, mostly dull. He can sometimes see colours. Herrick's come by a few times, hoping to change things, but Mitchell's unrelenting, unwilling to back to the dark to rot and watch humanity pass them by. He sees the good in it in Josie, and he'd like to try and mimic it.
There are days where he fights with himself not to split open one of his own veins and feed.
Then there are days where he has to remember that he loves Josie and that she's not a bloody feast.
And maybe once or twice, he's holding Josie against the wall, the fridge, whatever, eyes black as the night and she's trying so hard to hide her fear; but he can smell it. He can fucking smell it and it's almost as alluring as the blood that pumps through her system. He can hear each beat; it drives him insane and he doesn't even know.
The night after, he hears Josie's voice in his dreams, her screams, his hissing, and he swears he can taste the metallic splash on his mouth. She's wearing her red dress, the one that has black flowers stitched all over it as she convulses in his arms, and when did his dreams – nightmares – become so vivid?
He leaves then, and if his heart wasn't already as damaged as it is, he knows it would've broken. He's sure hers will when she sees the note in the morning.
He won't make her another name on a bloody list.
Some people have drugs as a crutch, or alcohol. Instead he turns back to what he's always known.
And Herrick is always there, cleaning up, helping him get through it and by God Mitchell is alive, he's fucking alive and he wonders how he could've done this to himself, kept himself so caged and away from his natural – or forced, rather – instincts.
There is a raging storm in him that, if he could remember how it felt to be human again, would've terrified him.
He remembers Josie, and sometimes he can quell it. He can avoid every kill, instead only doing it sometimes, maybe only to just survive, until that feeling pulls him under and he is helpless under the blood's control again.
Mitchell feels like a fucking puppet, a slave to the bloodlust.
One time he turns to drinking instead, hoping to abstain from blood that way. Passing out unconscious everyday doesn't work. It subdues the thirst, but it appears more in his nightmares. He dreams of massacred cities, and gore in every street and all over his hands and face and clothes.
Things are appearing where a blank canvas would otherwise be. Maybe a nose. Maybe an eyebrow. Or something else that his brain conjures but they're always pieces, never whole. And when he wakes, when he wakes, he's a fucking shitstorm, hell on earth and everywhere else, one that makes Herrick grin like the... the... the what?
He fucking feeds.
On one such occasion he meets Carl.
"We can survive without blood, you know," he says quietly, watching Mitchell's eyes.
Somewhere amongst the blood that dribbles from his chin, he all but roars piss off, and he doesn't see him again for... he doesn't know. He has no track of anything.
Herrick is suspicious. There are times where he pushes bodies towards him, "Feed."
And he'll turn away, most of the time. Hide back wherever the hell he lives nowadays, hear the bombs from the war that fucked his life, hear the sneers from the man who bit him, the screams, Josie plead for him to remember, and his own screams about how much he... he hates this now.
Sometimes he'll crack, because the screams are becoming too much, and he will do anything to drown it out. Or maybe he cracks because the bloodlust is making things appear in his room that don't exist, like werewolves that are supposedly after revenge for the dog fights the vampires have instigated, or his skin literally itches.
Herrick is sort of distant. Carl is not.
"I've been alive for so long, and yet I've never seen someone so unwilling to feed," he snits, and it is taunting, deliberate.
Because apparently, this stranger can survive without blood, where Mitchell has failed so many fucking times. He's a disgrace to humanity. To who he had been.
The next morning, there are reports that a family of five had been found dead in their home, drained dry. Not long after, there is something about Princess Diana, and he couldn't care less.
Herrick knocks one day, or is it two weeks after that family? He doesn't know. But when he enters, all policeman and glory with a knowing, almost regal sneer on his face, Mitchell is on the floor, knife on the ground, drinking from himself. His wrist could be stained.
"I can't do this anymore. I can't be what you made me," Mitchell announces, pausing to drink again, to lick, feed, and it's never enough to satisfy.
"Because what you are doing is impossible, Mitchell," Herrick snits with a slight shake of his head.
No one misses the two prostitutes on the corner that evening, or forever after.
Surely not all of his humanity was lost when his mortal life had been snatched from him.
Carl comes by next and finds him in the same sorry state. Mitchell thinks that his mental state is worsening, becoming crippled by his... difficulties, borderline refusal to feed beyond survival. He wants to feel human again, to feel that humanity that he'd only ever felt from Josie in his undead state.
Being immortal isn't as amazing as others once made it out to be.
Carl offers to let Mitchell stay with him for a while. What Mitchell does in his own time is his business, but he is intrigued by the way Carl can live without blood.
If Mitchell cracks, Carl turns a blind eye as the blood is cleaned off the floor and as the body is disposed of.
If Mitchell's on the floor of the bathroom drinking from himself desperately, Carl gives him a towel and tries to quell the hiccups that erupt from his throat, the bouts of paranoia and the I can't do this and the we're monsters and the God hates us. Maybe once or twice, Carl lends him his arm and fights the darkness with an ease and grace that Mitchell soon looks up to.
He wants to stop.
It has got to stop.
But he doesn't feel he's... able. Ever.
His nightmares get worse. He sees himself in Herrick's place, infecting his own army unit, his childhood crushes, his parents, almost the whole world. Almost the whole damn world, and he knows he's capable of doing that just so the itch stops.
And then... then he sees.
Then he sees eyes as blue as the sky, hair the colour of strawberries. Children. The sadness and the despair as they look up at him, and the tears, the screams and the bloody way that the bloodlust still shines through into his newly awakened state. It never changes – well, he will make it change.
When they finally have faces... that's when Mitchell begs, begs.
"Carl, please. I want to go clean."
He'd like to think that Josie would be proud of him.