Annie/Hal friendship.
Disclaimer: I don't own Being Human or the characters, etc.
He's had girls like Annie before. The ones who want to please. He wasn't lying about her mask. She has it painted on so thick that he's not sure what she would look like without it.
After being around for so long he's learned a thing or two about human nature. Reading Freud's original works had helped. And with Freud there was Jung and then Adler and then Erikson….well, he had had a lot of spare time on his hands. The point was that he wasn't going to rip away what she had built around herself just because he thought that she could use a reality adjustment.
So he went about it slowly. Asked her about her death. "You saw me in my most vulnerable state, it is only fair that I know a little about you."
"Me?" she laughs, "You don't want to hear about all that."
He gets it out of her, though. "Fine," she says one night. "You really want to know, then? My loving fiancé pushed me down the stairs," she punctuated the words with a violent shoving motion. "I should have seen it, really. The way that he isolated me, took me away from my friends, my family, but I told myself he did it because he loved me, he wanted to spend more time with me. And every time something happened, well, I told myself it was my fault…that I had done something wrong. And the apologies, those empty apologies. Maybe he meant them, at first, but…" then she shakes her head, "Anyways, that's all in the past now. Tea?"
The rest comes eventually. How she met George and Mitchell. How she fell in love with a vampire. How she lost him. How she lost Nina. How she lost George.
The layers of Annie build and part of him understands why she didn't want to know about his past. Because now that he knows all of hers he can't see her as he once did. He can't see her as sweet and bumbling and naive. He sees her as someone who's been through so much that if she doesn't keep up the mask then she'd be reduced to a nervous, miserable, wreck.
Then it happens. She finally breaks. Piece by piece, bit by bit, he isn't sure what caused her to snap but he comes out of his room to find her throwing mugs at the floor and she's crying and he can hear baby Eve crying from her room and when Annie is done she just looks at him. "I'm sorry," she says.
"Don't apologize." He knows what it's like to lose control. "Do you feel better?"
She looks around. "Not really, no."
He sucks in a deep breath but he knows he has to ask. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"They left me. All of them," she says. "And eventually Tom will go and you and Eve. Then what will happen to me? I'll just fade away."
"I'm not going anywhere," he says.
She shakes her head. "Yes, well, I'm sure that that's what Mitchell thought."
He's not sure how he feels about being compared to the vampire in her life before him. "I need you too, Annie," he admits.
There's an awkward pause and he grabs the broom. Broken ceramic scrapes the floor.
"Hal?"
"Yes?"
"Tell me about your past," she asks.
He pauses and then turns towards her. "I thought you didn't want to know."
"I still don't," she says. "But I need too."