It does not take them long to drop into a deep sleep, once they have cleaned up and stripped down to their boxers, tangled their legs together and drawn the hotel sheets and blankets over themselves. Anders is exhausted from a day of touring Bristol that had followed a 26 hour red-eye flight from New Zealand, and Mitchell wants nothing more than to bury himself in the blond’s scent and drift off.
It’s nearly 1 am when Mitchell wakes. He’s had the nightmare again, and his eyes fly open in a start, his body covered in sweat and shaking. Actually, he knows it’s not so much a nightmare, or even a dream really; his mind always seems keen to force him to relive his worst memories in his sleep. That’s what they are. Not dreams. Tenacious memories.
He’s dealt with the memories of his kills all of his life, but he’d gladly relive any one of the worst of them than the one that has continues to haunt his sleep almost every night since he left New Zealand.
The images still assail him, images that have haunted his dreams both waking and sleeping, half of which he isn’t even certain are real, or perhaps that is wishful thinking. He’s wondered how much the drugs in his system that night may have distorted his memory of what actually occurred. He wishes he could talk with someone about it. He’s been alone in these musings these past months, unable to bring himself to tell even his housemates.
He has never hidden his past from George and Annie. They know what he is and how he has lived at the expense of hundreds of innocents. But this…Somehow this is so much worse. He knows he is hurting them by shutting this away from them, but he is afraid of their reaction, and they are all he has left.
Anders still sleeps peacefully next to him, his golden head buried in the crook of his shoulder. Carefully so as not to wake him Mitchell pushes him gently backwards so as to look at him at arms’ length. . Snow is falling outside, and the moonlight coming in through the gauzy curtains over the hotel room window shines on Anders. The shadows of the snowflakes travel sideways down the contours of his temple, across the bridge of his nose, over dewy eyelids, sliding laterally down the topography of his face…
Mitchell reaches out his hand, stretching out his fingers, brushing them through the air in front of Anders’ right cheekbone, and then flinches as though struck by lightning as an image replaces the view before his wide open eyes--
Anders screaming as Mitchell’s fingernails claw lines across that face,
He gasps, feeling a stab of nausea in his stomach, closes his eyes and shakes his head to will the image away, but when he opens them again--
Anders crying out in pain as his ribs crack from being thrown against a wall,
Mitchell moans, pulling his hand back and anchoring it under his side, shutting his eyes again, but the images still come inside his head, flashing into his mind like a knife--
Anders huddled into the corner of his bedroom walls as Mitchell slowly advances on him, his voice hoarse and shaking with terror,
“Mitchell, please, this isn’t you!”
It had been real. All of it.
-------------------------------------
Anders is roused by the soft sobbing coming from the pillow in front of him, and opens his eyes to see Mitchell looking at him. Huge tears are sliding out of the vampire’s eyes and down into the fabric of the pillowcase.
“Mitchell…?”
“Sorry to wake you…”
Anders raises his eyebrows, blue eyes staring.
“Anders, how much do you remember from…that night?”
A shadow crosses the blond’s face as he shakes his head, “I’ve actually been working pretty hard to forget it.”
Mitchell’s mouth twitches as he nods. “I wish I could do that.” He reaches a hand out to pull the sheet away from Ander’s body, tracing his fingertips down his arms and chest. “No scars here, either.” He murmurs almost absently.
“No, Mitchell, so why—“
“Shhh…” He continues to lightly trace Anders’ arms, touching the places where the bloody gashes were in his memory, flinching as his own ruthless memory flashes at him. His long fingers spread against Ander’s chest, feeling the warmth and steady heartbeat of a human body fresh from a trusting, deep sleep.
Abruptly Mitchell’s body crumples inward, his forehead pressing against the blond’s sternum as his shoulders shudder with sobs he can’t contain.
“Mitchell,” Anders’ voice trembles slightly with forced cheer, “You’re creepin’ me out, mate.”
But it’s the pounding memory of Anders’ heartbeat that is filling Mitchell’s ears.
“Your heart was beating so fast…” he gasps out, “you were so frightened…you were begging me to stop… and I just…!”
Anders looks down at the tousled head against his chest and doesn’t know what to do. He’s never been very good at dealing with other people’s pain, particularly if it involved him, and Mitchell is bringing memories back into his mind that he’d been trying to lock away.
This feels all wrong.
Mitchell is the strong one, the wise one, the big brother he wished Mike had been. While his brothers criticize, judge, and roll their eyes at Anders, Mitchell’s twinkle-eyed gentle regard for him never seems to waiver. He was the first person he’d ever known who really knew everything about him, even the stuff that wasn’t so nice, and liked him anyway...loved him, in fact. He doesn’t want Mitchell falling apart against him. He doesn’t want him to be ashamed of that one horrible night, he wants them both to forget it, to go back to how easy and solid it had been, with Anders as flippant, thoughtless and full of himself as he needs to be and Mitchell as his tall, dark and understanding knight in knitted gloves.
His hand reaches up and fumbles awkwardly through the brunet’s curls, an ache pulsing in his chest as Mitchell’s shoulders continue to heave silently. Anders lets him cry, not sure what else to do, lowering his nose to bury it in the vampire’s hair and breathing in the sweet pine needle scent, sighing deeply, adding a soft “sshh” for good measure because he’d seen that comforting technique in a movie once.
Mitchell finally raises his head to look at Anders.
“God, I’m so sorry!” The moonlight is behind him and his face is in shadow but Anders can just make out the whites of his wide eyes amidst a mess of frazzled hair.
For a fleeting moment Anders considers using Bragi, but then thinks better of it. Something tells him Mitchell might resent that right now.
“Mitchell, it’s all right, you weren’t yourself that night.”
“But it was me, I did those things to you…”
“You were drugged and brainwashed, Mitchell! That isn’t who you are...I know you, I know you never would have behaved that way otherwise.”
But he can see the brunet shaking his head against the pillow even before he has finished talking, “Anders, you’ve only known me for a few months.” Mitchell takes a long, ragged breath. “I’m over one hundred years old. I’ve killed hundreds of people, and I didn’t behave much differently with them than I did with you that night.”
“But you turned away from that life!”
“Yes…”
“Herrick manipulated you into a weapon and then pointed you at me, and then made sure I was right in your path!”
“...which exactly describes the last 80 years of my life before I met you, Anders!” Mitchell grasps the blond’s shoulders for emphasis, “...and all it took to drag me back to it was one drink and a voice on a mobile!”
They are silent for a moment. Mitchell’s fingers reach up to trace a path through Ander’s curls.
“Your brother Mike is right. You’d really be safer without me around--”
“--and completely miserable.”
Mitchell sighs heavily. “Yeah?”
Anders nods rather uncomfortably,casting his eyes downwards “yeah. I’m pretty much shit without you.”
One side of Mitchell’s mouth turns upwards at that. Anders look back up at him.
“You’re even worse, though, Mitchell. You look like death warmed over if you’ll forgive the pun. You obviously can’t live without me.”
The brunet snorts and laughs softly at this, so Anders presses on.
“Annie told me about your nightmares, how you’ve barely eaten or slept or enjoyed anything since you came back here. You really want me to leave and not come back?”
Mitchell doesn’t answer. He’s thinking of Herrick and the other vampires, wondering if they know yet that Anders is here and if they’ve traced them to this hotel. He imagines the cloaked, obsidian-eyed creatures circling around this fragile safe bubble of a hotel room like hyenas circling an isolated pair of gazelles.
“Don’t you think I knew it would be dangerous to come to Bristol to see you, Mitchell? I came anyway.“ Anders sits up beside Mitchell, “I don’t have any business in Norway. Dawn didn’t even book a return flight for me yet. I’ll take the danger, mate.”
They are silent again until Anders shrugs and speaks once more,
“Anyway, I can’t just let you get away. You’re way too good a lay.”
Mitchell lets out an amused breath at this as Anders pushes him over onto his back and flops down onto the brunet’s chest, his arms folded and one finger tracing a circle on Mitchell’s collarbone.
“...So we take some precautions, that’s all. We watch what you drink, “ he whispers. mouthing a kiss to the crook of Mitchell’s jaw, “...we cancel your mobile,” he presses another kiss against Mitchell’s earlobe, breathing warmly into his ear “and if you still really feel worried for me I could always tie you to the bed before we go to sleep every night.”
Mitchell smiles and hmphs softly, catching Anders’ head in his hands, bringing his lips to his. They both smile into the kiss, which quickly becomes more serious, and then sloppy, their heads angling and jaws opening to access every bit of each other’s mouths.
OK, this is nice...
But Anders can still feel Mitchell hesitating, the brunet’s hands fluttering over his back as though he is afraid to touch him. Suddenly the frustration of it peaks in him; his lover’s sadness, and the darkness and danger around them, and the violent memory that seems to threaten everything and all this walking on eggshells around all these fucking feelings…
He pulls abruptly away from the kiss with an overwelming urge to cut through all this crap.
“For God’s sake, Mitchell,” Anders clicks his tongue impatiently and he takes both of Mitchell’s hands and moves them firmly down to clutch his own buttocks, then practically shouts down into Mitchell’s wide eyed face,
“I feel like I’m fucking a ******!!!!”
Mitchell’s head tosses back into the pillow and his generous mouth opens into a full hearted laugh. The rich sound falls on both of them like warm rain. Anders feels the knot loosen in his gut, and dissolves into giggles himself, his head falling against Mitchell’s shoulder. They laugh helplessly until the last of the tension is wrung from them, and then the brunet rolls the god over onto his back and wraps his long arms around him, settling his hipbone against Ander’s crotch and grasping Ander’s head firmly and angling it to look directly into his eyes,
“So what you’re telling me is,” says Mitchell as his knee slowly pushes Anders’ legs apart, “You’d like to be touched with a bit more conviction?”
“mmmh…” is all Anders has the chance to say.
Yes, this was much better.
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Updated 13 Episodes
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