AN: Happy Holidays, Being Human style! This will probably be two chapters.
"No. Mitchell, absolutely not. I will not have that - that bloody thing inside this house."
John Mitchell stood outside the little pink house in Bristol, bewildered and freezing. Inside, where he would much rather be, was Annie, barring his entrance. From the closeness of her voice, Mitchell judged the irate ghost to be squatting in the vicinity of the letter slot.
Frowning, Mitchell shifted a cardboard box approximately the size of a small coffin from knee to knee as he balanced awkwardly on the stoop. The box was the cause of his trouble. Annie had slammed the door in his face the moment she saw it, leaving Mitchell engulfed in the opening breaths of a howling snow squall.
The storm was just getting its legs under it, churning up and down alleys and sending funnels of snowdevils swirling down the white-dusted streets. Snowflakes caught in Mitchell's dark hair and lashes and settled across his cheeks, where they formed feathery tessellations of ice. Being dead, his skin hadn't the warmth to melt them. "Annie, this is ridiculous! I only did what you asked. C'mon, open the door, it's freezing!" called Mitchell, carefully restraining the ticking time bomb in his voice as he addressed the mail slot.
It had been a black day of interminable torture. But such was the life of a hospital porter during a Bristol winter. Black ice and unexpected snow had made for a busy Accident and Emergency department; stress had been high and tempers short. A string of gory accidents, all seeming to involve substantial amounts of blood, had wound from one end of Mitchell's shift to the other. All day he emptied pail after pail of rose-tinged water. By the time he ran his badge to punch his time out, his self-control was all but shredded. Mitchell slouched into the snowy streets, miserable and tetchy.
His walk home, brisk even at the best of times, was today cruelly biting. The only good thing that could be said for the cold was that it had reduced the number of morsels scurrying along with their tempting chorus of warm-blooded siren songs. The sight of his own door as he rounded the corner of Windsor Terrace brought a burst of relief.
The wind howled a sudden violent gust, sending Mitchell sprinting for his familiar portal to safety and comfort. As his key turned in the lock, all he wanted was to sink into the warmth of his own bed and bask in gloomy black solitude. Instead, he found Annie on the bottom stair, eagerly awaiting his arrival. She wore a giddy look that announced quite clearly that she was over the moon about something. Beaming, oblivious to the strain on his face and the testiness behind his slumped shoulders, Annie pounced with characteristic enthusiasm.
"You're back!"
"I come back every day, Annie, there's no need to set out banners and balloons over it," grumped Mitchell, flinging his bag behind the coat rack and tearing his scarf from around his face. His nose burned with cold and, despite overcast skies, he was sure he'd gone snow blind.
Annie tripped across the foyer, light as only a ghost could do. "Well, can't I be glad to see you anyway?" She stood behind Mitchell and helped him with his coat, in case he hadn't got the procedure down pat at some point over the last hundred years or so.
Mitchell rolled his shoulders under her gentle hands and let out a long, cathartic sigh as his nerves began to unclench. He gave Annie a slack smile. "Sorry. It's been a shite day."
Annie's smile faltered for the briefest of moments, then returned full-force. Alarm bells rang somewhere in the lower compartments of Mitchell's brain. No idiot he, the vampire backed purposefully toward the stairs. "I'll see you later, yeah?"
"Well, but Mitchell," Annie began, looking at her feet and picking the hem of her sleeve like a bashful school girl awaiting a kiss from a clueless suitor. "I was really hoping you could pop back out to pick something up for me."
Mitchell eyed the stairwell. "What is it?" he asked, fully aware that he was making a grievous mistake.
Annie gave him full-throttle doe-eyes. "I wanted to put the Christmas tree up today. Would you get one? Please? We can decorate, and watch specials on the telly, and I'll make pigs in a blanket if you'll pick up some bacon from Tesco, and -"
"Oh Annie, can't it wait?" Mitchell broke in shortly. "I can't go back out today. It'll be the death of me. Anyway, it's not even Thanksgiving."
"It's just that it's the first snow -"
"And a right mess of the roads it's making, too."
"- and it's tradition to put up the tree during the first snow!"
"I've never heard any such thing. And I'm sure I'd have heard of it by now if it were an actual, real thing."
"It doesn't have to be a real thing to be tradition. Anyway, it's my thing. I thought you knew that," countered Annie, a note of hurt in her voice. How calculated that hurt might be Mitchell could not say. He sighed wearily, acknowledging his defeat as it loomed on the horizon. He supposed he did recall one aenemic flurry the day Annie decided to erect their tree last year, although she had never made it clear that the two events were connected. Even after a hundred years, it was still a mystery why women expected a man to divine such things without being told, as if simply caring for them should have rendered him a bloody psychic by now, and made his true nature as a slightly self-absorbed vampire a moot point.
Mitchell threw out one last plea. "Are you sure it can't wait, Annie?" He eyed his dripping scarf with genuine trepidation.
"Please please please? We could have it done before George gets home, we can surprise him!"
"George is Jewish."
"He still liked the tree last year."
"I'm dropping your fecking tree in the hall the moment I get back, and don't bother me with what happens to it after that. I plan on being asleep."
Though disappointed by Mitchell's refusal to decorate, Annie let it pass in light of her greater victory. "You'll get it then? Thank you, thank you!" She kissed Mitchell's wintery cheeks and sealed his fate with an excited handclap. There was no turning back on his word now. "Mm, you even smell like Christmas."
"I smell like disinfectant and sick," Mitchell growled. "Why did you even let me take my coat off?" He eased back into frigid leather with a disgusted shrug. Winding his damp scarf around his throat with a final glowering look of supreme resentment, Mitchell cast himself out the door and back into the swirling snow.
"Get a nice one from one of the lots!" Annie called. "A Douglas fir. No no, a spruce. Yes, get a blue spruce! Or possibly a larch, unless that's not an evergreen, I'm not actually sure..."
The ghost watched fondly as Mitchell flapped an irritated hand over his shoulder before becoming lost to the dense thicket of flakes.
None of the Christmas tree lots were open. Their fenced in yards weren't even stocked with trees; it was too early in the season. Mitchell had expected as much, and wasted only an hour needlessly fighting crowds and elbowing aside other belligerent shoppers. After determining he had put enough effort into the search for a live tree, he opted for plan B, the Tesco Superstore, where, in a strategic ploy to bleed shoppers dry from the very earliest opportunity, the entryway had already been plastered with a dizzying array of synthetic holiday paraphernalia.
He found what he was looking for immediately after entering the automated doors; artificial trees, boxed spruces and pines, plain and pre-lit. The pre-lit trees drew his attention with their glittering lights. They came in a rainbow assortment of colors; blues, reds, multi, and traditional white. Some blinked, some twinkled, some alternated patterns, and some even faded in and out in time to music. Mitchell chose a six-foot spruce, whose branches sported a light flocking of sprayed-on snow, as if cut fresh from a field in the middle of a snow storm. It had white lights. Mitchell felt certain that Annie would fancy something traditional over any of the tacky, newfangled dance-party trees.
Exhaustion beyond all rational belief engulfed him once on the street. The black, gnawing thing that sprang up as he wrestled mop-fulls of diluted blood had never fully settled. Yet, as much as that inner beast growled and raged, it lost power when weighed against the possibility of bringing a smile to Annie's sweet face. As Mitchell walked out of the store with the tree box settled snug under his arm, the world had seemed a shade brighter.
So to be turned away so callously, as though he hadn't bent over backwards for Annie, as if he hadn't tried his damndest to please her, was a wrenching slap in the face. "I thought you'd like it, Annie."
"Like it?" Annie snorted in derision, a harsh sound completely uncharacteristic for the usually gentle ghost. "Mitchell, it's terrible! It's not even alive! Take it back and bring home a nice, healthy, living one, like in the Christmas specials, like I asked you to!"
"I only thought that since George nearly killed the last one -"
Deafening silence from inside.
"Christ, fine, fine! Jesus, you want a live tree, I'll get you one!" Seething, Mitchell spun from the door and hurtled into the cutting wind. He did not take the pre-lit artificial spruce, boxed neatly in its cardboard coffin. Instead, he upended it behind a trash bin, where it landed in an accumulating snowbank. A sheet of snow cascaded from the top of the bin, covering the box and sealing it within a white tomb. "I'll do that for you, Annie, although I don't know why. Nothing I ever do will make you happy!" Then he tore into the night in a state stormier than the driving storm could ever hope to achieve.
Inside, Annie sank against the door and burst into tears.
AN: Reviews! I perform for treats. C'mon, Being Human fandom, let's show those supportive Hobbit readers what's what. (Just kidding to those who are both, haha)