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moogingWhy is that I can't write anything for ages and then when I do write something, it's ridiculously obscure and a bit rubbish? Never mind, it was good to write, even if I can't write Prior (argh).
Right: Being Human was a pilot drama recently on BBC Three about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a flat, but that description just doesn't do it justice - it was funny, and touching, and so sodding well-written, and here's hoping it gets commissioned for a full season really really soon.
Regeneration is a trilogy of books written by Pat Barker about WW1, and soldiers therein, dealing with the issues of male relationships, and madness, and it's set in the war hospital Craiglockhart, and I can't tell you to read it enough. The first book in the trilogy is called Regeneration, go now.
Anyway, fic.
Title: Breaking Bread
Fandom: Regeneration/Being Human
Pairing: Prior/Mitchell
Rating: High pg13, probably.
Disclaimer: Regeneration is not mine; everyone fictional is the property of Pat Barker, everyone real belongs to themselves. Being Human is not mine either, but BBC Three should TOTALLY make it theirs, and quickly. I am making no profit from this.
Summary: "One day, there’s another man eating breakfast with them. He’s pale. He’s tall. He’s new. "
One day, there’s another man eating breakfast with them. He’s pale. He’s tall. He’s new. He looks up, catches Prior looking at him: he doesn’t smile, but then he doesn’t not smile. He has dark eyes, and dark hair, and a prepossessing mouth, and Prior leaves his food untouched that morning.
**
Rivers says, "You seem distracted this afternoon."
Prior says, "I wish you did."
**
Wearing full uniform hurts Prior sometimes. The band of the hat presses into his forehead, the leather in the shoes hasn’t softened and he suspects it won’t do, now, and all the khaki layers are heavy, too heavy, maybe, but it’s protocol and regulations, and Prior knows the damn thing suits him, even if it’s not his main concern at the moment. He walks outside in the crisp winter sun, that false brightness with no heat to its glare, an argument without any real passion, and counts his footsteps as they crunch on the gravel drive. Once round the hospital grounds, twice. His arms swing by his side. He wants to get out.
**
"Do you want that toast?" asks the new man, sitting across the table from Prior.
Prior does. He says, "No, go ahead."
The man takes it, doesn’t butter it, tears off the crusts and eats it in pieces. Prior watches him. The man looks up, a length of bread crust balanced between his fingers like a cigarette. "Mitchell," he says.
"Prior," says Prior, and then, "you’re welcome."
Mitchell eats another crust of bread. It rips into the flesh of the slice, leaving the square lopsided, and vaguely triangular. "I know," he says.
**
"You talked to Mr. Mitchell this morning, I noticed," Rivers remarks.
"Of course you did," Prior says, and looks out of the window.
**
"Did you really want that toast?" asks Mitchell, falling into step with Prior as he crosses a shadow cast by the bare trees to his right.
"What?" Prior says. He loses count of his footsteps, swears.
"Fifty-two since the door," says Mitchell, idly glancing at Prior, "but four hundred and three since you started. It’s colder today; you’re walking faster. Fifty-eight, fifty-nine. Sixty."
"I can count, thanks," snaps Prior. They pass a tree branch, snow-covered, lying on the ground. It is too big to be easily broken, too small to have fallen on its own. Prior says, "Have you been watching me?"
"Not deliberately," says Mitchell, slowly.
"What does that mean?" Prior says, looking across to Mitchell, angry, irritated.
"What do you think it means?" Mitchell asks him, and Prior stops, closes his eyes.
"I’m a soldier, I’m not a fucking psychiatrist," Prior says, and when he opens his eyes, Mitchell has gone, and for the life of him, Prior can’t tell where. He stares around, annoyed just in the tops of his shoulders and the static of his legs, an ache, frustration and relief together somehow, and then he kicks some gravel between his feet, mutters, "Seventy three," and starts walking.
**
"Here," says Mitchell, and slips Prior a slice of toast in the corridor, sometime around noon.
**
"Who’d have this job?" complains a nurse, half-joking, to her friend, as they walk down an empty corridor between shift rotations that evening. "The things you find -!" She picks a piece of toast up off the floor. It has long since gone cold; it is heavily buttered, white bread, slightly burned. "God knows how this got here."
Her friend laughs.
**
"You didn’t eat breakfast this morning," Rivers says, as conversationally as he ever sounds, leafing through more endless beige-brown files. "Weren’t you hungry?"
Prior shifts, prickling discomfort surprising and sharp in his spine. "Not really," he says. "Rationing’s a bugger."
"Are you saying you weren’t hungry or you didn’t want the food?" asks Rivers, looking up at him from behind the desk, and, when Prior doesn’t answer immediately, he says, "Or maybe neither?"
"Slept much recently, have you?" Prior shoots at him, and Rivers sighs, because Prior can always make him sigh, and changes the subject.
**
"He looks tired, you know," Mitchell says, walking the other way through a doorway that Prior is already stepping across.
"Who does?" Prior asks, standing side-on against the wooden frame.
"Rivers," says Mitchell, sliding past him, a sliver of evening gas-lit air hovering between them, warm and yellow-tinted, green on the flat colour of their uniforms. "But you knew that."
Prior turns, watches Mitchell’s back as he crosses the room to a bookcase, insouciant in the sleepy dusk light from the window, just out of the gas-lamp’s circular range. Someone says, "Excuse me," waiting British and polite in the corridor, and Prior puts his shoulders straighter back and walks on out.
**
Mitchell has him cornered against a bookcase and the curve of a battered leather armchair, and as Prior stares at him, half-disbelieving and a lot more amused, he sees that Mitchell has long, white canines set among his careful white smile, and when he starts backwards, Mitchell’s eyes go stark black, empty, night, and he lunges at Prior’s neck, and Prior is bleeding, bleeding.
Prior wakes up in a hot-cold sweat, shaking like he’s been dreaming about the war, and wastes the rest of the night in sitting against his head-board with his knees drawn up close, one hand open, protective, against the skin at his throat.
**
Prior has porridge for breakfast.
**
"Eating again, I see," says Rivers, resting his chin on his steepled fingers. The pose pushes out the flesh underneath his chin; Rivers is by no means overweight, not fat, but he looks jowly like this, and Prior thinks, large veins, and shivers.
"Well observed," says Priors.
"And I hear you didn’t sleep well last night?"
"I hear you don’t sleep," guesses Prior, and Rivers sits back in his chair, says, "Yes, well," and that is the end of that.
**
"I bit someone," says Mitchell, and Prior jumps, startled, and hates it.
"Have you not noticed where we are?" he says, accusatory. "Sneaking up on people is perhaps not the wisest move."
"That’s why I’m here," Mitchell continues, blithely. "I bit someone, a man I was fighting with, and then I wouldn’t tell them why."
"How different of you," Prior sneers, as cruelly as he can. "It’s a wonder they didn’t court-marshall you."
"Mmm," says Mitchell. "Then again, they do think I’m pretty deranged." He smiles widely, clearly tickled by something. Prior doesn’t know what. Prior looks at Mitchell’s teeth before he’s thought about what he’s doing.
"So what about you?" Mitchell asks, and Prior says, "What about me?"
"You’re here," says Mitchell. "Why are you here?"
Prior stares at him.
Mitchell says, "Yes, I know it’s not the done thing to ask."
Prior says, "Why did you bite him?"
**
The man is screaming, screaming, grabbing at the side of his throat with both hands. He is bleeding; the blood drips red from between his fingers, stains black and brown on the green and brown and dirt of his uniform. Around him, everybody is moving: someone is restraining a tall officer, someone is running for the telephone, someone else is brandishing a dented box, the hinge broken, carrying it too loosely in their hurry, and it opens, and the meagre medical supplies fall out. The tall man is laughing, or maybe he’s crying, and the sun is shining down hard and out of place.
**
"Does it matter why I bit him?" Mitchell asks Prior, leaning back on the unforgiving wooden back of the bench they are sitting on, draping one crooked elbow over the armrest.
"Does it matter why I’m here?" Prior returns.
Mitchell shifts into the corner of the bench; angular, he nearly fits into the join of bench-side and bench-back. "I needed to get out," he says. He smiles. "I needed to get in."
"In where?" says Prior.
"Anywhere with a roof," says Mitchell, and looks at Prior with big, dark eyes. Just dark; not black. Not that Prior is checking.
"You’re outside now," Prior points out.
"It’s cloudy," says Mitchell, like that makes a difference, and Prior wonders just when something like the weather became important to when a person could fight in the army, fight for their country, and when they broke down and started biting people.
"So?" says Mitchell, eyebrow raised.
Prior waits, his throat tight. He says, "I – I had to clean the trench -"
**
The man’s skin is raw, burnt and peeling, but he doesn’t wince when the nurse changes the bandage.
"They won’t send you back if you don’t start talking," she says, all discipline and order in a blue skirt and a starch white apron.
The man looks at her with shuttered eyes, long enough to make her uneasy, and she says, "Suit yourself," and tends to someone else.
The bed the man is lying in is lumpy, the sheets are itchy, and the sunlight from the window never quite reaches him, rays falling long and exaggerated across the room but stopping just short of the foot of his bed. It is lucky, perhaps.
He stays in the hospital for a week. After a week, he is no longer injured: he is being invalided away to be forgotten in the cold and the snow of a Scottish winter, and that’s quite all right, he thinks.
**
"It doesn’t matter," Mitchell interrupts, and he puts a hand on Prior’s arm. He takes it away when Prior glances down, but only after a moment. Their eyes meet at his long-fingered hand, curving and distinct against the fabric of Prior’s coat.
"Of course it matters," spits Prior, and he walks away.
**
"Have you been speaking to Mr. Mitchell recently?" asks Rivers.
"Have you been sleeping recently?" asks Prior.
They sit in silence.
**
"I didn’t know you stuttered," says Mitchell. They are eating breakfast, again. Prior is sick of regular meals, just like he got sick of irregular meals. Monotony versus unpredictability: neither suits.
"I don’t stutter," says Prior. He starts to drink his tea, too quickly. He coughs.
Mitchell bangs him on the back. "You did, on the bench."
Prior’s eyes are watering. His chest hurts. "What I did, or did not do, hardly seems to be the concern of a man who bites his soldiers. Excuse me." He leaves his breakfast unfinished, porridge congealing thick and filmy in the hardy cream bowl, and goes to his room; he coughs and coughs until the room spins, and then everything goes dark.
**
"Mr. Prior, I do hope you aren’t going be making a habit of becoming ill," says Rivers, standing at the end of the bed in the ward, gripping the metal bars. His knuckles are white; then again, maybe it’s just the way the room is lit.
"I hope you aren’t going to making a habit of visiting me," says Prior. He rolls over in the bed, pulls the sheets up over his shoulders, and listens to Rivers, who isn’t saying anything.
"I certainly don’t wish to visit you in the w-ward," says Rivers.
Prior sits up fast enough to make his head pound, and says, "It’s you that stutters," going red in the face, and Rivers says, "I believe we have already discussed this matter."
"Yes," says Prior, and he feels a sense of inexplicable thwarted exhilaration cold and unwelcome at the back of his eyes, and he lies down, and Rivers eventually stops watching him lying there, immobile.
**
It’s loud, and bullets are flying; it’s muddy and horrific, blood and waste and fear lining the slick wet planks at the bottom of the trench. Mitchell huddles under a tarpaulin, chill to the touch and sweating on the collar of his uniform, fires until his gun chocks up blanks. He blinks: it is suddenly brighter. He looks up, squints, curses. The clouds are dissipating, soundless in their retreat (he wishes everything would retreat), and around him, his men exchange remarks about the weather, because every man among them is British, and a little thing like fighting a war hardly seems to matter above inconsequential asides to one’s fellows.
His hands, cold, taint a dull red, slowly. He pulls them back inside his sleeves, and closes his eyes.
**
"Feeling better?" Mitchell asks, as Prior passes him in the grounds.
"I don’t like tea," says Prior, and Mitchell nods, jumps down from his perch on the thin uncomfortable back of the obsequious bench, ingratiating itself into every conversation and listening to the facsimile of privacy, and he and Prior walk together into the entrance hall, not speaking.
**
The two men walk inside. Their steps are perfectly in sequence; they don’t seem to notice. One steps aside to let the other pass through the door before him.
River lets the curtain drop back to the glass panes, smiles.
**
"Have you noticed the doors don’t lock here?" Mitchell says, sitting on the edge of Prior’s bed. The sheets are tucked under the mattress. The top blanket is green.
"What did you expect?" says Prior. "We can’t be trusted."
"Of course not," says Mitchell.
Prior leans against the closed door, folds his arms. "So," he says.
"Yes," Mitchell agrees. His uniform looks too big and perfectly tailored simultaneously, a casual subservience and a masked reluctance to be serving. He takes in the room, running a finger across the dingy white wall immediately behind him, looking at the door handle, the empty bed on the other side of the room, testing his weight on the mattress springs. "So."
Prior rolls his eyes.
"All right," says Mitchell, "all right," and he gets up, presses his hands against Prior’s chest (the buttons dig into Prior through all the layers of regalia) and kisses him, carefully, soft.
Prior says, "All right," and grabs Mitchell’s hips, and thinks about how thin Mitchell feels.
**
"How are you finding it here?" Rivers asks Prior, shortly after he has found his voice.
Prior says, "It’s no front-line."
Rivers says, "Mmm, I see," and Prior thinks, what the fuck do you see?
**
"D’you think any of them are – you know?" the nurse asks her friend, as they pass two patients walking the opposite way, their military stride in line, their arms almost touching on each swing, quite close together, just not quite apart.
"’Course," says her friend. "Could be why they’re here."
"Shame," says the first nurse, glancing back over her shoulders at the two men. "It’s a waste."
"It’s unnatural," says her friend, and they go their separate ways at the top of the stairs.
**
Prior says, "Open your eyes," and Mitchell shakes his head. His hair sticks to his forehead, damp with perspiration, but there is no flush in his cheeks.
**
"Don’t worry," says Rivers, in the first session he has with Mitchell, as Mitchell sits, folded into the chair on the defensive side of the desk, louche and unconcerned, his face white.
Mitchell says, "Why should I, do you bite?" and laughs too loudly, and Rivers sees his hands shake a little on the arms of the chair.
**
"Open your eyes," says Prior, after a while, with more difficulty, and Mitchell does.
A few moments later, Mitchell tenses beneath Prior, stomach muscles juddering against the bones of his ribcage, bony and clear, and for a split second, his eyes go jet and coal and ebony-raven, and then he arches his back and Prior can’t see his face anymore.
**
"Do you believe in vampires?" one of the nurses asks Rivers, as she waits for him to sign a document, the edges of the paper in creases.
"Would this have something to do with Mr. Mitchell?" Rivers says, looking for a pen.
The nurse proffers a scratched blue pen from her own pocket; Rivers takes it, smiles at her in thanks. The nurse says, "It’s just – he bit someone."
"Yes," says Rivers, handing her back the pen. "He did."
**
Prior fastens the buttons on his shirt. Mitchell is already fully dressed.
"So," Prior says, setting his jaw, "was that good for you?"
"I’ll see you at breakfast," says Mitchell, tersely, and leaves.
Prior’s hands tremble: he knots his fingers together, breathes out through his nose and thinks of sensible things, like painful shoes and structured activities. He is cold.
**
"Do you want that toast?" asks Mitchell, over breakfast.
Prior doesn’t. "Yes," he says, slathering as much butter as the rations will allow on top of it, and feels sicker with every mouthful, and tired.
**
"I haven’t seen you with Mr. Mitchell lately," Rivers says, at the end of a session.
"It gives me great pleasure to know you care," says Prior.
"I hear you haven’t spoken to him for a few days."
"I hear you haven’t slept."
"I haven’t," says Rivers. "And neither have you."
**
"Do you believe in vampires?" asks the nurse, to her friend. They walk slowly up the main staircase.
Prior passes them, stepping brisk and impatient. He can see the lawn outside, the gravel, the clean outside air and the yellow-white shine of the late-morning light.
"Well," says the nurse’s friend, "do you?"
Prior thinks, maybe, and steps into the sun.
*
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 01:40 am (UTC)as George once said to Mitchell.unf unf unf. I just love how both of them are so desperately cool and unflinching, except that actually Prior's getting slightly unravelled by the whole thing, and you think that Mitchell is totally winning the cool and unflinching battle, and then he turns out to have bite-guilt issues, and and and. (Why yes, this comment does mostly consist of me writing words three times over.)
Rivers says, "You seem distracted this afternoon."
Prior says, "I wish you did."
I AM INAPPROPRIATELY IN LOVE WITH THIS EXCHANGE. IT IS SO THEM. I love how Rivers is just watching the whole thing play out, aware of more than anyone thinks he is, and the attempts to talk about it, and Prior just being NO NO WAY, because the more sarky he gets the more threatened he feels, y/n?
Prior rolls his eyes.
"All right," says Mitchell, "all right," and he gets up, presses his hands against Prior’s chest (the buttons dig into Prior through all the layers of regalia) and kisses him, carefully, soft.
Prior says, "All right," and grabs Mitchell’s hips, and thinks about how thin Mitchell feels.
ALSO THAT. The eye-rolling, because, yes! Prior being slightly impatient! And I can see the kiss so clearly in my head, Mitchell sort of taking charge, and then Prior needing to take over, nnnnngh
MOOG, BASICALLY YOU ARE AMAZING, OK? OK. ♥ ♥ ♥
no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 10:28 am (UTC)I can't write Prior though (as you may have guessed from ALL THE EMAILS).
Phnnng, look, you make things I write sound good and make me go :DDD and generally, you liked it! ♥
ALSO glad you liked the kissing, because in your Sam/Prior fic (which I read again after I'd written most of this, because I remembered your Prior being awesome, he doesn't kiss and is actually all Prior-like, and here he does kiss and is wildly OOC, so, er, hurrah that you liked the kissing?)
It was a bit weird trying to cross-genre Military History and Fantasy with vampires, I have to say (lol war lol biting gud tiems).
no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 10:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 12:17 pm (UTC)The short sections set a very distinctive pace, but I didn't find it jarring; in the same way, it seemed quite a departure from your usual style, but it suited this fic entirely. The whole thing felt very considered, each word carefully chosen, and yet by the time I'd gotten to the internets - was out Friday night, at work Saturday - you'd sent me two emails and already finished the thing. I'll always envy your ease, speed and natural ability, but you know this.
Monotony versus unpredictability: neither suits.
That's so Prior, good lord. You've got him in a single sentence.
The whole "Have you noticed the doors don’t lock here?" section was perfect, and this pairing has just so much potential, really. jdtbkwntwe. (wait, I said no keyboard-smashing, o lord)
Prior sits up fast enough to make his head pound, and says, "It’s you that stutters," going red in the face, and Rivers says, "I believe we have already discussed this matter."
My favourite line, for some reason. I think because it sums up Mitchell's effect on Prior, being able to displace him, and Rivers' effect on Prior, being able to calm him (which isn't the phrase I want, but it's the first that comes to mind) - is it wrong to think that the one might not have effected him so much without the other? Rather, it felt like a combined effect. Poor Prior. Who could compete with that?
I need to be quiet and do collegework. Nonetheless, I love you. This was fantastic. xxxx
no subject
Date: 2008-04-16 08:36 am (UTC)Perfect.
Utter perfection.
The bleakness and the outline and the details you don't give, and Priors with Rivers and Mitchell being Mitchell.
...in short, I adore and admire this. And it's going directly into my memories for being something rich and strange.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-16 05:40 pm (UTC)Er, yes, in other, non-capslock words, hello and I'm very glad you enjoyed.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-17 08:30 am (UTC)Though I have no icons of either *uses Lucifer just because*
Hello! and thank you for writing it. There should be comms to host such rare slices of loveliness...have you found
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 09:49 pm (UTC)I love how Rivers is so perfectly Rivers and how you never spell anything out but it's still absolutely clear, and the way it all plays out feels so perfect and natural! I also loved this little tricolon: for a split second, his eyes go jet and coal and ebony-raven. It made me shiver in the good way.
And you get many many awesome points for using the word 'insouciant'. XD
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 10:07 pm (UTC)ESPECIALLY RIVERS
BECAUSE HE IS MY FAVOURITE
AND I CANNOT WRITE MY FAVOURITES
yyyyay, 'insouciant'. :DD