Annie

When things were getting stressful, or she could feel a fight coming, Annie would make tea. Even when she was alive, her answer to all life's problems was a cup of tea. Though when Annie thinks about how much tea she's made since she's been dead, she thinks it just about outnumbers the amount of cups when she was alive.

She'd never really given death much thought, it always seemed like a much too morbid subject to bring up with Owen, so she never paid it much attention. Shrugging it off as something to think abut closer to the time. Death didn't seem to wait for her though. Death was impatient and demanding, and Annie never even had the chance to consider the question of 'and then what?'.

No where in her wildest dreams did she expect to be a ghost, she didn't even really believe ghosts existed. The again, she didn't expect to be killed by who she thought was the love of her life, or to be living with a werewolf and a vampire. But there she was, and she was happy with it. Because for the first time, it what felt like her entire life, these two people she'd found a family with, loved her despite all her little faults. No one had ever loved her like that before. Not even Owen.

So she makes the tea for her boys, and chats with Nina and looks after Eve. Because even after they've gone, even after they've left her, they're still her boys, her family. And no one had a chance of replacing them.

...

Tom and Hal tried. It was a strange relationship, maybe she tried to make it too much like it was before, maybe it was just never going to work. That's not to say she didn't love them, because she did. They helped her see the world again, to keep Eve safe, to find a purpose when everyone else seemed to have left her.

Maybe they weren't her boys. They didn't have the same friendships, the same traits. And sometimes she could have killed them for what they did, but they were there and Annie did love them. You don't chose your family, you don't chose who sneaks into your dead heart, they just do. Hal was nothing like Mitchell, he was older and stronger in ways Mitchell wasn't, but weaker. He needed saving, even if he wouldn't admit it, he did. Annie hoped he'd let someone save him. Tom was someone she cared for, someone she wanted to protect, even when he didn't needed it.

But they weren't her boys, and they never would be. And that was okay. Because after five years of Mitchell and George, and losing the both and gaining two more, Annie realised how much she needed them. How much she loved them. She had Tom and Hal to thank for that.

...

There was always an hidden tension between her and George at first. It was like he was scared she'd blow up in his face or so she told herself.

Before she'd died if someone had told her werewolves were real, Annie would have laughed at them. How absurd! Yet there she was, in her little pink house, trying to figure out the best way to scare the crap out of someone with a werewolf. It's funny how things turn out. How the people you least expect turn out to be one of the most important people in your life.

Even if they hadn't quite gotten along at first, they got to know each other and that grew to love. Because that's what you do with family isn't it, you love them despite all their faults. And that friendship was something Annie grew to rely on, when things were going wrong, George was always near. Even when he wasn't.

But that was them, that was their little life. Annie making the tea, George getting angry when there was none left for him to make a cup himself. She got angry when he left, and angry when he came back. She hated him for what she thought he was going to do, but loved him for all the he did.

When George was around, when Mitchell was around, with them both there with her, Annie didn't feel quite so dead. The loneliness she'd felt that first year wasn't around. And that was something Hal and Tom could never seem to make happen.

They just weren't her boys.

They weren't her family like they were. But she carried on, she had to carry on. She was all Eve had left in the world, and Annie would be damned twice over if she'd leave that baby. She'd promised George after all.

...

Once upon a time she'd wanted a family, she'd wanted what the normal people had. Instead she found that in the end all she wanted was him. John Mitchell.

The vampire, the killer, the man she should have been afraid of in his finale days. But yet she wasn't, because all she could think of was that man she'd met five years ago. The one who'd sat on the floor of her room with her, in front of her old chair and leaned in to kiss on her cheek and caught her lips instead.

Even when he changed, when his became hard and he became distant, she still remembered him as that man. She still believed he was in there somewhere, just waiting. Annie had to believe that. The other explanation was too hard to bare thought.

Mitchell was the one with the answers, the one who knew the world and the evil in it. He was always the first to defend her, the first to protect her. And when she thinks about it, maybe she had loved him from the start. Maybe they were both stupid and blind to thoughts and feelings. Maybe if they'd have been smarter the things he would do wouldn't have happened. There were a lot of maybes.

But that was them, that was their relationship. Annie didn't want to know the details of what he'd done, and Mitchell was happy to oblige. They shouldn't have worked, not really anyway. A ghost and a vampire? But perhaps it was a logical thing, when both of them were dead, they did have an eternity to spend together.

And she would have, and he knew it. They could have had forever, just the two of them. Watching over friends they made and family they found. It could have been a happy ever after, something they both deserved.

But things don't always go as planned, and not all fairy tales have a happy ending. Neither of them got their eternity, but the time they did get. Those short few months of being together, of being happy? They were the best times in her life, the first time she truly felt loved. And she was. Oh she was.

A/N: hm I'm not too happy with this, but I don't think I'll ever be able to put what I want to put into words, so this is the best that could happen.

Thank you to those who have revwied, you're all love, have a cookie! There will be one more short chapter and I think I'll stop. (Unless anyone thinks I should do Tom, Hal and Alex)