Disclaimer: I don't own Being Human or any of the characters from it, but they certainly own my heart (I know, cheese).
So, here we are. Being Human has finished. I suppose it's not the end of the world. Or is it? ;-)
I can only apologise for not having updated this for a few weeks, but this has been a hard chapter to write, and I've been distracted writing for someone else, a most talented gentleman named spondoolix whose fanfics you should all read if you haven't already! But not right now obviously, read this one first :P
Thank you so much for all the follows, favourites and reviews, and for the moral support. I will hopefully be updating more regularly now that I'm not feeling quite so down in the dumps after this past week. Real life is almost certainly going to get a bit tough over the next few weeks, so you might get a slightly more jolly chapter because I don't know about you, but I'm going to need it.
But anyway, I'm rambling now. Enjoy and thanks for being patient! x
Spoilers: Series 4 and Series 5
Step Seven: Remove Our Shortcomings
Hal shut the bedroom door behind him and took a deep breath. The sudden calm was a far cry from the disastrous past few hours. Exhausted, he leant back against the door to collect himself, his eyes falling on his bedside table almost by accident. Almost, but not quite. His mind hadn't been far from the flask since Rook had passed it to him only the day before.
Before he knew what he was doing, he had opened the drawer and taken the flask from it, sliding the cover from the bottom of the vessel to expose the glass and the fluid within.
He stared at the blood as it sloshed around the flask, almost mesmerised by it. He flicked his wrist, idly tipping it upside down, watching the red fluid run tantalizingly down the glass. Quite what had been going through Rook's mind when he gave him this gift was something Hal didn't think he'd ever understand. The man wanted him to take charge of the vampires, clearly having no idea of the true implications, but didn't he know who he was? He seemed equal parts informed and calamitously mistaken. Hal was indeed a human sympathiser, and in its simplest form, the plan was a good one. If, of course, you failed to take into account that drinking blood, however it was obtained, would turn him from sympathiser to devourer faster than Rook could comprehend.
How things could change in just a few short days. It had been less than a week since his release from the chair and already he had betrayed his friend's trust. The look on Tom's face when he had come through the front door had hurt far more than the punch that followed.
Things had started so well. Getting himself and the house back to a neat and tidy order had been the perfect first step. It had distracted him from his apprehension at being free, and brought him back to the routine of day-to-day life. Slipping on his marigolds had been just like coming home. He had pretended not to see Alex and Tom's amused stares as he tidied, dusted and disinfected practically everything in sight. Alex teased him about his masculinity being challenged, whilst Tom just watched him, happy to have his friend back again but still wary of trusting him on his own.
Two days later the house had been spotless, and Hal's confidence had grown. Which was fortunate, because as his friends eventually informed him, a stint of job seeking was on the cards. When Alex mentioned that she had seen a hotel on the seafront advertising for staff, his blood had run cold.
"The cafe was bad enough, but a hotel?"
"Don't be such a snob. Anyway, I think you'd make a great chamber maid. They'd have the cleanest rooms in Wales." The ghost smirked at him.
"Alex, this is not funny. And I didn't mean that, I meant that there will be guests, human guests, does that not strike you as pushing it a bit?"
"You managed in the cafe mate. We had people in there all the time and you never attacked them." Tom offered hopefully.
"Yes, but I hadn't had blood for fifty-seven years then. I'm... different now. My boundaries have changed."
"We need the money Hal. There's not many jobs you can just walk into that don't involve working with people. You're just going to have to deal with it." Alex shrugged dismissively.
"Deal with it." He repeated incredulously. "Deal with it! Are you really that naive?"
"You of all people don't get to call me naive after what I've seen in the past month!"
"Me of all... why do you keep saying that?" he scowled at her.
"We have fed you, watered you, fucking cleaned you, and been there for the you while you had the mother of all mental breakdowns," she snapped at him, standing up and banging her hands on the table top to lean over him in what he could only describe as an attempt at being dominant, "so I think it's high time you made an effort to at least try to overcome this, instead of whacking on your marigolds and being a dick to us at the first sign of a challenge. We're going to that hotel, and you're going to apply for a job, or... or else... or else I'm going to rip your shitting cleaning rota into tiny little bits and scatter them all over your room!" she finished finally, crossing her arms and glaring.
He stared at her in silence, stunned and just a little bit scared by her outburst. Tom rubbed a hand over his head and tried very hard not to look at either of them.
"Fine. If it makes you happy, I'll try." he muttered in concession.
"Good." She nodded, sitting back down with a smile. Hal shook his head in disbelief. He didn't think he would get used to her instantaneous mood swings. Not that he was really one to comment on those.
The trip to the hotel had been a great success, in terms of his blood lust at least. If it hadn't been for that and the fact that he and Tom had got the jobs they had applied for, he would have called it an unmitigated disaster.
Firstly, it wasn't so much a hotel and a complete and utter monstrosity and an eyesore. The decor was appalling, the cleanliness woeful and the guests, the tourist version of the living dead. The thought of working there day in day out was depressing at best, but he had promised Alex he would try, and she had been right, they did need the money.
If that hadn't been bad enough, there had been Rook. The odious, arrogant little man had tested Hal's patience and resolve further than he considered safe, but he had resisted temptation and declined Rook's offer. It had given him a renewed sense of hope, for all of five minutes.
Then Alex had blown her top at him. At least he had finally found out what she meant by "you of all people", though the discovery wasn't much of a silver lining. Evidently she hadn't got over his involvement in her death quite as much as he had thought.
"You should have a fucking sign round your neck and a bell! You should be living in a cave!"
He didn't argue back because he couldn't. He had nothing to say because she was right.
Her words still stinging, he had stormed out of the hotel to walk home, needing the time on his own to calm down and get his head together again. Peace, solitude and calm were what he required, but what he got couldn't have been further from it.
Ian.
What had he been thinking? Doing the right thing was one thing, keeping him alive, saving him even. But the more Hal thought about it, the more he accepted that what he had done was completely the opposite. Manifesting infront of him had been an accident, chasing him a well-meaning mistake, but recruiting him? That had been imbecilic misjudgement on a grand scale. He could barely control his own blood lust, let alone that of a new recruit.
He had tried to be kind to Ian, and had succeeded he thought. This will not be a repeat of Cutler he had thought to himself, taking the time to explain what the man was now and what that meant in terms of his physiology and mentality. No one had told him there was hope of assimilation when he had been recruited, and he certainly hadn't indulged any of his recruits with that idea in the past. Maybe that was what had been missing. Get to them early, make them see that this affliction didn't need to be a death sentence to their former human lives. He had been proven spectacularly wrong.
A man had died because he couldn't keep his selfish version of mercy to himself. Two men, if you counted Ian as dead too.
Hal had been fully prepared to take his own life, in his mind at least. Of course, sitting in his room now in the quiet and the dark, he could be honest with himself. If he was really going to do it, wouldn't he have just got on with it? Knowing that Tom and Alex were standing right behind him, had it all been a bluff? Had he known, subconsciously, that they would intervene? Was that why he had wasted time explaining why he and Ian didn't deserve to live in this world any more? Hal really didn't know, but a niggling voice in the darkest, primal recesses of his brain kept repeating one word.
Survival.
He hadn't trusted himself for a very long time, and that was the reason why. There was a part of him that would do anything to survive, however morally reprehensible that was.
Rook had stepped in to save the day in the end, a God send as far as tidying up the evidence and sorting out the witnesses was concerned. But Hal had a feeling Rook wasn't the sort of man to forget a favour when one was owed, and he had already turned him down once. The threat of further involvement would hang over him, he was sure.
And now here he was, flask of blood in his hands a dangerous temptation to take away the stress and the guilt and the depression of inevitable failure.
His saving grace was Alex, tangentially. Still entranced by just the sight of the blood, he made his way absent-mindedly to the sofa on the other side of the room to sit down. As he did, something sharp dug into him, shaking him from his thoughts. He frowned and set the flask down on the arm of the chair to fish out the offending item from the back pocket of his jeans.
It was a crumpled piece of note paper. The same piece of paper that Alex had entrusted to him only a few days before when she and Tom had released him from the chair downstairs. He stared at it for a few minutes, then looked back to the flask, horrified at what he had been considering doing. He snatched it from the arm of the sofa and strode over to the table, thrusting the cover back on and flinging it back inside the drawer.
He sat back down and unfolded the paper, running his finger down the list until he reached Step Seven.
"Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. Shortcomings, defects of character, wrongs. What about idiocy, narcissism and dishonesty?" Hal muttered to himself, voice thick with self-pity.
The Step might not be wholly useful, but it was spookily relevant after what Ian had said to him.
"You took everything you hated and put it in one place. You need someone like me to be the bad man, so you don't have to."
Hal had been shocked by the level of logic and thought that Ian had obviously put into this theory, having only known his maker for one day, but he couldn't agree with it. Not completely anyway.
Ian was right up to a point. Hal did need somewhere to put everything he hated most about himself. But Ian wasn't the outlet. He really had recruited him to save his life, even though that act of mercy had been more for his own benefit than for Ian's. The real outlet was the other version of himself. The monster he was most afraid of.
It was for this reason that Ian's parting shot had terrified him so much.
"This is where you'll end up."
Hal couldn't dwell on that thought. Ian was wrong. He would finish the Twelve Steps, distract himself with his quest for a human life, put his all into being there for Tom and Alex the way that they had been there for him. He would not roll over and let the monster back in, no matter how hard things got. And he would not drink the blood in that flask.
His behaviour in the last few days had been far from what he had hoped to achieve upon his release, but that was the past now. He had shown his true colours as an addict, lying to Tom and Alex repeatedly while he tried hopelessly to put things right on his own. He should have asked them for help. He wouldn't be making that mistake again. It was time to step up and be the man he wanted to be.
