Among the Deepening Shades: Chapter Three

[jesterladyfic]

Chapter Three

Nina reflected that it was rather hard caring for someone who didn’t sleep when you needed to sleep yourself. She’d been attempting to stick close to Annie and help her through the readjustment period, but it was difficult.

Annie had been constantly flip flopping through extremes of emotion and whatever had happened to her on the other side had left her skittish, flinching at sounds and peripheral movements. She was still chipper and optimistic but, somehow, hearing about Mitchell, or perhaps a combination of her ordeal and Mitchell, had left a hardness to Annie that Nina had never seen before. A hardness and a tendency to explode. George had finally given up complaining about buying new bulbs for the house. Well, almost - it was George, after all.

A month had passed and Annie still wasn’t speaking to Mitchell except through curt monosyllabic sentences when it was absolutely necessary. Mitchell was doing the only thing he’d ever done that Nina approved of and was staying away from Annie.

In the meantime George was moping because his friends were at odds and Nina could see that George still hadn’t come to his own terms about Mitchell. Certainly Nina hadn’t. It was like the household was in some kind of holding pattern, waiting for a spark to either make it come to life again or burn it down. Personally Nina rather suspected the latter would happen. But she was a pessimist, always had been.

Nina found herself forced into the position of being the only sane person in a house of lunatics and wondering how she’d ever wound up connected with any of them. She was tired of being the person who made sure everyone else was okay.

Annie’s arrival had seemed to set Mitchell back to where he’d been right after they left the facility. He’d obviously been pinning everything he had on getting her home and now that she was home, the only thing he had left was the fact that everyone he loved wasn’t sure they wanted to be around him and the knowledge of what he’d done.

George was wandering around the house when he wasn’t working, prone to long lie-ins in the morning, and not cooking, which meant Nina had to do it all since Annie certainly wasn’t in the mood to help. Every time Nina had tried to talk to him, George made some kind of excuse and so Nina gave up after awhile, wondering again if she’d made the right choice in staying with him.

Nina tried to be mature. She tried to support George, corral Annie, and watch Mitchell, but the burden of it all was suddenly too much the day she was forced to conclude she needed to take a pregnancy test.

She’d suspected for a few days, since just after her second transformation in Barry, but had put off the idea as impossible. She didn’t get pregnant; she always took every precaution against it short of actual abstinence. The very idea of having a baby was…inconceivable to her. No pun intended.

But it was true. She took the test and as soon as she saw the plus sign she was instantly sick, heaving over the toilet, praying to a God she’d never believed in that the results were wrong. But they weren’t, not for that test or the next or the next. She was pregnant.

Just saying the word was impossible, let alone telling George. It took Nina a few minutes to figure out when it had happened and that brought a whole new level of terror into the equation. Yet for once the horror of the wolf was secondary to the horror of the whole situation. Nina knew she wouldn’t be able to deal with this, even if everything in her life was perfect; there was no way she could let it happen because it was her worst fear and brought to life everything she’d been running from her whole life.

Just looking at herself in the mirror made her feel sick again. She didn’t understand how she was pregnant, how having sex as the wolf had affected her birth control, how she could possibly be showing signs this soon? But in the end, no matter how it had happened…she was carrying a child inside her. Maybe a monster, maybe not, but either way it was a child. And that meant she was a mother.

She retched again.

Morality and situational reasons aside, Nina just could not let this happen. That meant she couldn’t tell George. He would freak out if he knew, of course, but Nina knew him well enough to know the end result would be a proud and pleased father-to-be and she couldn’t handle having to take that away from him.

She tossed the latest stick and put on some makeup. She’d have to make a plan, but for now, she needed to figure out what Annie was doing. Annie was doing a lot better, but Nina still tried to check on her a few times a day. The…condition Nina was in would be forgotten, it wasn’t even a problem anymore. She had to work, she had to cheer up George, and keep Annie comfortable. After that, well, anything after that was something Nina would put off for another day because if she tried to deal with it all now she would explode.

***

Annie sat at the bar counter idly flipping through the paper. She was trying to get caught up on recent events, but no matter how hard she tried not to, she just kept grabbing onto anything that mentioned the Box Tunnel Twenty. She could hardly be blamed for that considering what she knew about it.

She was trying not to think about it, but she couldn’t help it. She was sickened in her very soul. How anyone could do such a thing, she just couldn’t imagine it. The blood, the stench, the horror, it was all too foreign to her. Perhaps the most uncomfortable part of it was that every time she tried to picture what they must have felt before Mitchell ripped their lives from them, all she could hear was the sound of Kemp’s voice as she dragged him into hell.

But best not to think about that. Best not to think about anything connected to Purgatory. The sounds and the visuals and the memories made her shudder and generally something exploded. She didn’t know if ghosts got PTSD or anything like that, but if they did, then she had it. Everything made her nervous and she had stayed inside the house, mostly inside her room. This was the first time she’d been downstairs in weeks. Definitely the first time she’d let herself be around a radio or a television, too afraid she’d be sucked back into that nothing world of horror.

Thank God for Nina and her constant care. Annie was glad to have a best friend back, but Nina was the only one she really did have back. George was quite clearly unhappy about the rift in the household and Mitchell was staying far away from Annie, which, in her angrier moments, made her happy, but was still so very different from what their lives had been like before. Mitchell had been a support and a comfort, a source of knowledge and strength that she hadn’t realized she’d depended on so deeply.

Now that it was gone, she missed its presence and was angry with him for destroying everything.

The telly flickered and static filled the screen. Annie practically flung herself backward from the counter and was about to yell for help when she heard the voice.

“Hey, Annie.” Annie jumped. “Hi ya,” said Lia, waving, her figure coming into view out of the static, sitting on a bed.

“Lia?” Annie breathed in fright. “What…what are you doing?”

“Can’t a girl call to catch up?” Lia asked innocently. She wreathed her hands on her knee and leaned forward. “What’s new?”

“Um…not much,” said Annie automatically, busy trying to still her frantic fear. “How are you?”

“Still dead,” Lia said, laughing. “But then you knew that. How’s Mitchell? Anything going on yet?”

That instantly put Annie’s guard up.

“Why do you care?” she asked.

“Oh, haven’t you worked it out yet?” Lia said, frowning slightly. “I mean, surely Mitchell told you about me? Or you saw my picture?”

That cinched it and Annie felt nauseated. Or as nauseated as a ghost could feel.

“You…you’re one of…you were on the train,” Annie said.

It wasn’t that hard to work out.

“Bingo,” Lia said, cocking her fingers at the screen. “H-12.”

“But why would you encourage me to…” Annie trailed off, unable to even finish the sentence.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Lia said, “I’ve got no love for Mitchell. There’s some rage there, definitely. But you…oh, Annie, how could anyone not love you? I may be new here, but I’m a quick study, and I see what everyone’s always saying about you.”

“What do they say about me?” asked Annie. “And what does this have to do with Mitchell?”

“Slow down, you’ll hurt yourself,” said Lia. “All good things, I promise. Well, not about Mitchell. They can’t wait for you to come home, though.”

“Then why did they let me leave?” demanded Annie.

She was starting to feel very confused and more than a little bit angry. The lights in the kitchen began to flicker but she barely noticed.

“Maybe I should start at the beginning,” said Lia.

“Maybe you’d better.”

“You’re a very unique individual,” Lia began, leaning back on her hands. “Now…plenty of people have turned down their door. If Mitchell told you different, he was lying. But there was always a reason. Take your friend Sykes for instance.”

“How did you…?”

Lia laid a finger to the side of her nose and winked.

“Quick study. Anyway…people are quite understandably afraid of what’s behind the door. Even if they’ve resolved their unfinished business sometimes there’s guilt or fear and they hold back from crossing over. We’re patient with them, we’ve got time. After all, we want everyone to feel ready. Sometimes strong measures have to be taken; Sykes is quite stubborn, after all. But those are very rare instances.”

“I still don’t understand what this has to do with me,” Annie said. “Why did they keep coming after me and why did they let me go?”

“You are different because, Annie, you’re the only one who’s ever turned down the door for love.”

“But I’m not in-”

“Oh, come off it,” said Lia. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. Whether you’re in love with him or not, you do love him. You turned down your door for him.”

“He was dying!” Annie said.

“Yeah, but what could you do about it? George told you to go. You turned down death. What’s more, you kept turning down death. It wasn’t just a split second decision based on a frantic situation, you wanted to stay because you loved them more than you loved the idea of passing over.”

“Well, so what?”

“That’s not the way things are done,” Lia said brightly. “You caused a bit of a tizzy, I’m afraid. Drastic measures had to be taken.”

“You had me,” Annie said. “You had me, so why bother letting me go?”

“Maybe you didn’t read the forms you filled out very carefully,” said Lia, “but you weren’t exactly processed properly. You were dragged through and not even at our behest. It was forced, not by you, not by us, and that cocks everything up a bit.”

“So…you released me so you could drag me back?”

“Well, new developments and all that. See…there’s Mitchell to deal with. He gave us an excuse really, to send you back, but now there’s the whole prophecy thing that has to unfold. Paperwork, I tell you.”

“What prophecy?” Annie asked sharply.

Lia grinned, showing her teeth.

“What? He didn’t tell you? Well, well, well.”

“What prophecy?” Annie asked again.

“No can do, I’m afraid,” Lia said. “That’s not for me to give away. Confidentiality in death and all that. But still…here’s a bit of a tip for you. Don’t let him keep secrets. Make him invite you in.”

Annie had been listening with rising horror and Lia’s hard words, spoken so lightly, were enough to make Annie reach her limits.

“Stop that,” Annie said. “I’ve had it with all of you. You never make any sense.” Doors banged open and closed around her but Annie wasn’t paying attention anymore. “What I feel about Mitchell is my own business. If I want to stay on this side of the door, that’s my own business. I don’t know you and I don’t appreciate you acting like we’re best mates. Just stay away from me and from him. I’m so sorry for what he did to you, so sorry, but I don’t like your bloody interference.”

The light bulbs in the kitchen burst. Then the light bulbs in the bar.

“There’s my Annie,” Lia said, smiling broadly, and the telly went dark.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs and Mitchell, George, and Nina ran into the room.

“What’s going on?” George asked. “Are we under attack? Oh, I just changed those,” he bemoaned when he saw the shards of the light bulbs on the counter.

“You!” Annie said, jabbing a finger into Mitchell’s chest. He stepped back under her onslaught. “Prophecy. Spill now.”

George and Nina turned to look at him and Mitchell blanched.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “What prophecy?”

“It’s nothing, but you don’t know anything about it?” Nina queried sarcastically.

“I- it’s nothing,” said Mitchell.

“If you don’t tell me everything right now,” Annie said, “I will drag your ass back to hell and leave you there to rot.”

“Can she do that?” George whispered, to no one in particular.

Mitchell swallowed and held up his hands in surrender.

Annie found it difficult to look at him. He was just the same as he had always been; his yellow shirt so similar to the one he used to wear back in Bristol. His hair was longer now and she almost wished she could nag him about getting it cut the way she used to. His gloves were getting old and she remembered how she was going to have George get him a new pair. Each memory was painful now that she’d cut him off.

Annie swallowed and spoke more calmly.

“I saw Lia just now.” Mitchell flinched. “Yes, Mitchell, one of your victims. She was the one who let me go.”

“Or was told to let you go,” said Mitchell.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Annie. “She assumed you had told me all about a little prophecy that was given to you while you were there. Please elaborate.”

Mitchell ruffled his hair with one hand.

“It’s just mind games,” he said. “What she said doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me,” said Annie.

“It’s no one’s business,” he protested.

“When you boarded that train you made everything you do everyone’s business,” Annie said icily.

“She told me I’m going to die,” said Mitchell loudly and quickly.

The three of them looked at him for a moment, his words dying into a blank void of silence.

“Oh,” said Annie, not quite sure how that fit into everything she’d been thinking before.

“Someone is going to kill me,” said Mitchell wearily, evidently giving in to the need for full disclosure. “A-a…werewolf.”

“What?” gasped George.

“What?” asked Nina, looking interested.

“Did you want to volunteer?” Mitchell asked archly.

“I’ll let you know,” said Nina, studying Mitchell with narrowed eyes.

“That’s literally it,” said Mitchell. “I thought I was going to stay in Purgatory in order for Annie to come back, but Lia said I was a piece in someone else’s journey. That my true punishment was getting back my life only to lose it. Everyone happy now?”

“You bastard,” said George. “You promised to come back.”

“I couldn’t know what was going to happen,” protested Mitchell. “None of this would be my choice.”

“This is all your choice,” said Nina. “If you hadn’t played vampire overlord and gotten involved with Lucy and made Annie feel so neglected…”

“Well, I know someone who accepted Kemp’s offer to de-werewolf themselves,” Mitchell shot back. Nina flinched and a look of pain crossed her face. “There’s no point in playing a ‘what if’ game. We all made choices that landed us here.”

“Someone most of all,” said Nina.

“I know it’s my fault,” Mitchell shouted. “I can only move on from here, but you’re not exactly helping.”

“He’s right,” said Annie, and everyone looked at her in surprise. “I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do, but until then there’s no use fighting about it. Thank you for explaining,” she said and rent-a-ghosted to her room.

***

“Who died and made her leader?” asked George, left staring at the spot Annie had left.

“She’s got every right to be angry, George,” Mitchell said wearily.

“No, I’ve got every right to be angry,” said George. “Just for once it would be nice if everything didn’t revolve around you being evil or how Annie’s going to react to something.”

George stomped into the front room. Nina and Mitchell exchanged glances.

“You know what, I don’t want to deal with it,” said Nina. “I’m just a visitor in this loony bin anyway.”

“Are you?” asked Mitchell. Nina opened her mouth but he kept on talking. “Maybe you could talk to Annie later,” Mitchell suggested. “Not about being nice to me or anything like that, just…help her.”

“In case you haven’t noticed that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I never stopped being her friend,” Nina said cuttingly. She pointed toward the front room. “But you might want to see if you can salvage at least one of your relationships.”

“Right,” muttered Mitchell and followed George.

***

George was thrilled to death about having Annie back, but somehow it hadn’t fixed everything like he’d foolishly been hoping it would. The first few hours had been magical, a perfect blend of love and friendship and family and hula dancing. Everything George had ever wanted out of life, really.

Then Annie had found out and George’s illusions of everything going back to normal were shattered. Of course, he should have expected it and he had just been putting off the inevitable. He’d been so consumed with needing Annie and Mitchell and their little circle, but the circle was broken even if they were all living under the same roof again. With Annie decidedly against Mitchell, he had to really face Mitchell’s choices and decide if he, George Sands, could live with them.

Nina’s words kept running uncomfortably in his mind. She had asked him, if it weren’t for the Box Tunnel Twenty would George still be horrified by Mitchell’s killings? George didn’t want to answer that question because he had the sneaking suspicion that he wouldn’t have cared so much. He didn’t like it, that went without saying, but he could understand Mitchell’s rage at what Kemp had done and he’d felt a little murderous himself. In fact, it had taken Mitchell being so out of control to help George retain his own. Should he be thanking Mitchell for being a homicidal maniac so long as George’s rage got to live vicariously through him?

It was bad, the whole situation was just wrong. His life was a twisted mess and he was so sick of it, sick of having to make these kinds of choices. Three years ago he’d been happy. He’d been in a relationship, he’d had loving parents, and he’d been on a fast career path. One lousy trip to Scotland and now George was a monster in the company of monsters, and he had to decide if keeping his best friend was worth the black mark on his soul he would receive.

Now this prophecy nonsense had come out and George tried to figure it in to his equations of his feelings for Mitchell. The idea that Mitchell would die, no matter what he’d done, filled George with dread, because as nonsensical as it might sound, a world without Mitchell didn’t feel safe. Then there was the werewolf factor; as far as George knew, the only werewolves Mitchell hung out with regularly were him and Nina. The idea that either of them would kill him made George feel sick, even if Mitchell deserved it.

“Do you want to talk?” came Mitchell’s voice from behind him.

“What do you want to talk about?” George asked dully.

“How are you doing?” Mitchell asked.

“Not well. You?”

“Also not well.”

“There we have it then. That’s the extent of how far these talks usually go,” said George.

“Maybe Annie’s right and we need to talk more,” said Mitchell.

“Maybe Annie’s gone Casper crazy and we shouldn’t listen to her,” snapped George.

“Don’t be mad at Annie,” pleaded Mitchell. “You know that this is all because of me, so don’t blame her.”

“I’ll do what I like,” said George. “I’m not mad at her anyway,” he said, sighing. “I just wish…when she’d come back, it could have gone back to the way it was.”

Mitchell nodded.

“I know the feeling.”

“But everything’s backwards,” said George. “You’ve put me in a very difficult position.”

“I know.”

“So I have to decide if you’re worth it.”

“Worth it?”

“Worth giving up my soul.”

“Then I’m not, without question,” said Mitchell, frowning.

George laughed bitterly and flopped on the couch.

“See, there you go again. It’s when you say things like that…that I think you are.”

“I know I sometimes act…noble, George, and I’ve done my best to hide the darkness inside of me, but I had to face things in Purgatory. What Lia showed me…I’m not a good person.”

“I looked up to you,” said George.

“I know.”

“It was so…nice, to have somebody look at me and know me,” said George, rubbing his temples. “Someone who knew what the hell was going on. I didn’t feel so alone.”

“Same here,” said Mitchell. “It was good not to be alone.”

“Now I feel very alone,” said George matter-of-factly.

“You’ve got Nina,” said Mitchell. “Plus…no matter what happens to me, Annie’s back.”

“You were the first,” George said. “The first person to…see me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop being so sorry,” said George, leaning back and closing his eyes. “It’s getting monotonous.”

“My apologies,” said Mitchell.

George had to laugh at that.

“So, go on then, tell me why you’re such a bad person,” he said. “Convince me to give you up and turn my back on you.”

“That’s a cruel thing to ask anyone,” said Mitchell.

“You’ve slaughtered thousands; I think you can deal with it.”

“It’s not so simple,” said Mitchell, sitting on the coffee table, facing George. “Evil isn’t something that you just wake up to. I mean, I literally woke up to it, but the vampire I became was something that had more to do with my life as a human than I thought. At least I think that’s what Lia was trying to say.”

“There you go again with the Lia. Who the hell is Lia?”

“She was on the train. H-12. She was my guide on the other side and she let Annie go.”

George nodded his understanding.

“Go on.”

“We, all of us…” Mitchell paused. “Every person is a shadow of their true self. There’s a core to each of us and I don’t think those cores are very good. People like to talk about how they’re essentially a good person, but I say that’s crap. Being a human doesn’t make you good. Maybe there’s more to religion than we think because we’re all basically screwed up versions of who we could be.” Mitchell sighed and rubbed his temple. “But every once in a while there are truly good people. You’ve got the Annies of this world with their beautiful and powerful souls. You’ve got the Ninas, courageous and honest souls. Most of us are more mixed bags like you. Open and loyal, fearful and angry souls. But some of us are just nasty bits of works. People like me with arrogant and hungry souls.”

“That was really beautiful right up until you got to the end,” said George.

“I think that might be the story of my life,” said Mitchell thoughtfully.

George had to laugh again.

“Do you have a point to go along with the poetry?” he asked.

Mitchell’s gaze darkened and he lowered himself to the floor beside the couch, maybe so he wouldn’t have to look George in the face.

“Becoming a vampire…isn’t really like dying. There’s a reason we refer to it as being made. You feel new, you have all the same parts but they’re better. You’re stronger, faster; you don’t get sick or old. It’s just…better. But there’s a price. You don’t understand the change until it’s too late. It’s different for everyone but maybe in the end it will all be the same, I don’t know.”

George listened carefully because it was very seldom Mitchell would talk about anything connected to vampires in such an intimate fashion. He normally liked to brush things aside, make general statements, and change the subject.

“What does that have to do with it?” George asked cautiously, not wanting Mitchell to shut down. “What’s the price?”

“Your core self is still there but it’s been revamped too. It’s stronger and faster. If you were someone like me, it would magnify all those bad things. I was an arrogant bastard who thought he could save the world, thought it was his responsibility. Hell, I still do.”

“You gave your life for your men.”

“And some might call that noble, but what was I thinking? I started my life as a vampire with pride. Everything I always hid or was ashamed of or wanted not to be was suddenly amplified. Any resistance I put up to squelch my true self was quickly negated by the hunger, the lure of power and freedom. Oh, it was so intoxicating, George. I could literally do anything. There was a war on, blood and carnage raised me, and it taught me how to be a vampire.”

George tried not to be disgusted by the nostalgic tone Mitchell was using. It was hard, but he concentrated on the despair in Mitchell’s words instead.

“What made you stop?” George asked. “I mean, really stop.”

“A woman,” said Mitchell, flashing a vague smile and George remembered how Mitchell had looked after Josie had given her life for him. “Mostly. It came on slowly, in those moments right after someone died, or the longer periods between killing someone. Once I…I realized what it meant I tried to turn those bits of me into something else. Then I tried to save humanity, tried to redeem the vampires, tried to keep myself from falling into the darkness. But…I might just be doomed to fail.”

“I won’t let you,” said George calmly.

It was quite easy to make up his mind really. Or at least give the trial in his head a recess. George wanted to understand Mitchell, to understand his struggle. Besides, if Mitchell was going to…well, Mitchell wasn’t going to die and George certainly wasn’t going to let him die from having given up.

“George,” Mitchell started.

“Nope, I’ve decided,” said George. “You are my friend and you need saving.”

“Don’t throw away your life because of me.”

“Don’t tell me which parts of my life I can have and which I can’t. I don’t deny there will be times when I will want to chuck you out the door, but then…there’s always been times like that, you useless, lazy slob.”

“Hey!”

“Did the washing up only once that I can recall. And you were in a rage at the time.”

“It’s bad for my image,” said Mitchell and George was schooled enough in Mitchell’s moods to know that Mitchell was relieved.

“Your image doesn’t need any more enhancing, believe me,” said George.

“George,” said Mitchell.

“What?”

“Thank you.”

“You’re on your own with the girls,” said George. “There will be many more talks. You don’t get to keep things to yourself anymore. I’m furious with you for not telling me you were gonna…you know. You’re on, on…temp status.” Mitchell rolled his eyes and gave George a mock salute before getting up and leaving. “You’re welcome,” George called after his retreating back.

When George went upstairs and went into their bedroom, Nina was already in there, getting ready for her shift. She was leaning against the vanity, holding her stomach.

“George,” she said, straightening up.

“Are you okay?” he asked, frowning.

“He won, didn’t he?” Nina asked, looking at George’s face.

“It was never supposed to be a competition,” George said slowly. “Are you unhappy?”

“Surprisingly not,” she answered briskly, continuing putting her hair up. “I want you to be happy, that’s all.”

“I want us all to be happy.”

“Just be prepared that someday you might not get that option,” Nina said gently, kissing his cheek before slipping out the door.

George stood for a few moments, hoping that would not be the case.