Summary: George left that message for Mitchell when he called home from the Facility, but those thoughts had been accumulating for a while. At one of their low points, George muses on his friendship with Mitchell. (spoilers for Series 2, episode 8, "All God's Children")
Disclaimer: It all belongs to Toby Whithouse, to whom we are grateful.
A/N: You could choose to see this as a companion piece to my ficlet "Reality Bites" (Mitchell POV). That would make sense.
SO HERE THEY were again: at the bottom. Scrambling up for a glimpse of light. As always.
What was it this time? He would go to this facility, with Nina, for Nina. Annie would come, so that she didn't have to be in her home with Mitchell when he was… like this. And Mitchell would… go on, he supposed. Somehow. Alone, perhaps.
It had apparently come to that.
George was exhausted; he had finally admitted it, allowed himself to feel it. Being a werewolf was tiring in it's own right, yes, but it was nothing compared to being Mitchell's friend—the sheer volition and effort it took, every time, to bring Mitchell back from the edge. (Mitchell! Mitchell, who always seemed to think he was the one taking care of them.)
Yes, Mitchell might be a hundred years old, and he might be above almost everyone on the food chain, but he could be so naïve.
Mitchell had thought "recruiting" would go just fine. Fine and dandy, thank you very much! Let's turn absolutely everyone into vampires—no problems there! Thank goodness Josie had seen through it and come to George.
And therein lay a related emotional landmine, which seemed to come with Mitchell's supernatural territory (or maybe just his personality): Mitchell was always hoping that this or that lover would "save" him. What a stinking pile of… well, you get the point. Didn't Mitchell realize that he had to save himself? How had he survived this long without realizing that?
With a little help from his friends. That's how.
The fact was, Mitchell had never survived on his own. It had taken some thinking about, but George had eventually realized this. Mitchell had always had a friend or a lover along to pull him through. Herrick, Josie, Carl, George and Annie, Lucy…. Had Mitchell never noticed this about himself? Was it just a case of denial? If it was, it was rather a gamble—he risked the lives of all these friends. Was Mitchell really that careless? Or self-serving? Had he been that selfish the whole time? He'd masked it well.
Worst of all—and Mitchell had pulled the wool over everyone's eyes on this one (including his own)—he thought he could go without blood. No, no, it was worse than that: he thought he could go without blood and not have occasional lash-outs and tumbles off the wagon. The utter foolishness of this had begun to dawn on George, who now felt he had been living with Mitchell in a strange bubble of hopefulness since they'd met.
And now it was happening again, quel surprise: Mitchell was falling off the rails. George could see the inevitable train wreck coming from fifty miles away. Not to be a downer or anything.
He refused to be angry. Anger comes from a place of powerlessness, he reminded himself. And George refused to be disempowered. He would help his friend, somehow.
But he couldn't help thinking the same things he'd thought when he'd found out about Lauren, and Mitchell going back to Herrick, and his participation in vampiric activities in general, and the vampiric "system" that was "in place" to "take care" of "accidents". Good grief.
I don't know how we're going to do this. Honestly, what were we thinking? Pipe dream, this whole thing.
What would become of Mitchell this time?
It could no longer be George's problem. He had Nina to think about. And Annie. And he had told Mitchell as much, hadn't he?
Well, he would now.
Maybe the way to help Mitchell was to let him go?
No, it wasn't. George was helping himself this time, and his friends. He would do what was in his power to help his friends. That, he had already decided. That, he had always known.
The tragic part was that Mitchell—if this shameless vampire was still Mitchell in any real way—could no longer be counted as his friend.
Maybe the way to help Mitchell was to let him go. He had to learn to help himself. He had to.
George had to put aside the very real worry that, while learning to help himself, Mitchell would leave a trail of blood behind him. George no longer had the energy to take on those worries. He had worries of his own.
So, so many worries of his own.
Like whether he'd survive the month. Oy vey, indeed.