The Half Killed, a being human fanfic

Half a kilometer from the outskirts of the remains of Bapaume, Mitchell sits in a shell crater and concentrates on rolling a cigarette.

Somewhere nearby a German moans, repeating, "nein, nein" over and over again, wide eyes staring as Herrick feeds from his commanding officer. Seth giggles, a low tremor of happiness, watching the kill with black eyes. A few kilometers to the west an artillery gun begins firing, almost blocking the German's screams when Seth finally sinks his teeth into the grimy skin of the man's neck.

Loosely packed soil shakes itself loose, sliding down into the fold of Mitchell's collar; he shrugs and sighs, itching beneath layers of dirt and blood and exhaustion. Even now, with the singing rush of another man's blood in his veins, he wants nothing more than a wash and a shave followed by a pint of bitter.

He uses the last match in his pack to light up, savoring the scent of burning phosphorous, coughing, mostly out of habit, at the acrid taste of the roll up. Thousands of burnt matches and dog ends of cigarettes litter the scorched ground of France; Mitchell grins, imagining all the small marks of a soldier's life he has left scattered in his wake.

"Nasty human habit, that." Herrick says, the top half of his face appearing above the edge of the crater. He is every inch the jovial, war-weary CO, out on patrol with a few of his men, a heartless killer in mud-stained wool and spats. Mitchell tilts his head back and shrugs, unfolding himself from his spot.

"Need something to pass the time while Seth plays with his food." Herrick laughs at that, and offers a hand to pull him up beside him. They pass Seth kicking the German's corpse, propelled forward by a desperate desire to hurt and abuse and strip even the dead of their humanity. Herrick cuffs him about the ear and says something about it not being proper, and Seth slinks behind him with a mumbled apology.

Mitchell takes a drag of his cigarette, exhales blue tinged smoke into the morning air, and steps neatly over his last kill. The boy's eyes stare vacantly into the distance, pupils reflecting a swatch of blue sky and a single bird gliding towards the sound of war.

On the road west, Mitchell stumbles over the corpse of a young man in an officer's uniform lying half out of another shell crater. There is a ragged mess of meat and bone where his lower limbs should be, and the stench of tainted blood and rich mud makes Mitchell shiver involuntarily in desperate need, the faint after scent of recently expired life lingering in the air. He imagines neat rows of drably dressed women typing letter upon letter, the bleak finality of black letters marching across creamy paper.

He takes the man's pack, out of habit, and finds real cigarettes, a few bullets, a tin containing an old razor and shaving brush, and a neatly folded letter, dirt staining its creases.

iDear darling Maggie/i, he reads, mostly because it's a good way to ignore Seth's general air of maniacal hatred towards anything smarter than he is and his constant digs at Mitchell's undead character.

iDo you remember how we spent last summer? I imagine those long hot days fondly now, lying here in the damp and cold. How I complained at the time, of how improper it was to go swimming alone. I remember the way you laughed, uncaring of the propriety of it, and how that was the moment i knew I loved you/i-- He stops there, hands shaking, hastily folds the letter back up, and jams it inside his breast pocket.

Up ahead Herrick yells something about the wounded, and Seth whoops and takes off running into the distance. Mitchell trudges after them, tilting the brim of his helmet down to shade his eyes form the sun's glare.

He wonders if he will be presumed killed in action, or missing in action, and how long it will take for the letter to reach his wife. He stops, picturing the turn of her mouth downwards as she answers the door, one hand resting lightly against the chipping doorjamb, sees a pale-faced officer holding his cap in one loosely balled fist.

He was twenty-six; he is endless, and he aches.

He asks Herrick, over a stolen dinner of dry rations and water, "I'll always look like this, then?"

"Like Dorian Gray himself," Herrick responds, always the learned poet collecting scraps of genius. "Watch out for portraits," he continues and laughs to himself.

Mitchell never understands Herrick's literary references, but he smiles anyway, just so he doesn't have to say anything else.

There is something akin to sadness in Seth's voice when he says, "the fucking war had to end sometime."

The thing is, Mitchell understands the sadness. He tries to hate himself for it, or atleast Seth for saying it, tries to dredge up that old feeling of anger burning slowly against his breast, the unthinking petty hatred of a fellow man, but fails.

He can feel himself slipping away slowly, becoming less and less Johnny Mitchell, Donal's lad who works the docks, but instead J. Mitchell, MIA, 1918.

They get piss-faced drunk their first night back in London, still smiling faintly of blood and death. At the first pub their drinks are free, pint after pint, as strangers with red faces and wide grins go on and on about the end of the great war. At the second place a barmaid with a lopsided grin takes Mitchell's coin and returns with two drinks and a look just for him.

She has neatly brushed hair that gleams golden underneath the bar's grimy lights, and she is entirely and completely herself, a creature of pale flesh and bone and vitality. Over the pitted surface of their table Herrick looks back and forth between them and gives Mitchell a slight nod.

Go ahead, it says. iLive/i a little.

"My name is Lizzie." She tells him later that night, a slip of a girl in a long brown coat walking through the gloom of a London evening. She skips a little bit, trying to match her stride to his longer legs, and he grins, hidden, at the action.

"Knew a girl named Lizzie back home," he says, lying through his teeth, just to make conversation. She chatters away at him, telling him about the bar and her cousin Ned what went away to war and came home missing a leg and Mr. Cooper down the hall who is always trying to catch her in the bath the pervert, the detritus of a small human life lived in cramped rooms and grey streets.

Her flat is tiny, one room filled with an iron post bed, a wardrobe and small bedside table, a small window looking out to the street. There are pictures on one wall; he resolutely looks anywhere but at them, and lets her get halfway through the door before he pulls her to him and slams her into the wall, her mouth warm and soft underneath his.

The bed serves its purpose well enough, tiny as it is, and she unfolds smooth and almost innocent against him, with whispers and moans and small hands hot against his skin in the dark of the room. Afterwards, lying tangled in the sheets, she leans across him to reach the table, one pert breast sliding across his chest, and offers him a cigarette.

He grins his thanks, and blows smoke up to the ceiling, where it eddies about the still room in colorless wisps. "Have you ever heard of Dorian Gray?" He asks, just because he can.

"No." She says and gives him a toss away grin, "Is he a politician or somethin'?"

"Ah," he says, noncommittally, and flicks his cigarette to the floor. She doesn't even have time to scream before he kills her; barely even struggles at first, thinking he's just being overzealous with renewed lust. He dresses, arranges her neatly in the bed, and smokes her cigarettes one after the other, leaning against the wall to stare out the window at the pedestrians in the street below.

He kills Mr. Cooper too, later, out of a leftover feeling of something towards the small corpse in the unmade bed. Herrick finds him a few hours later, somewhere near King's Cross, and they stumble home together, two bleary-eyed soldiers blinking in confusion at this new world laid out before them.

It is 1919, a particularly unspectacular day in March. Rain sleets down, managing to work its way past Mitchell's umbrella into hidden places, soaking his neck, his back, the creases of his palms in their military issue fingerless mitts.

He doesn't attend the funeral, because just seeing a priest or a church sets his teeth on edge, and he is half afraid the very idea of crossing the church's threshold would make him burst into flame. Instead he spends the morning in a cramped bookshop, hiding behind a book he vaguely recalls later was about the Crimean War.

A little after three he makes his make to the local cemetery, brushing past a young woman in black carrying a screaming infant, its face slick with rain and tears. He blinks, lost, and then hurriedly apologizes, and she huffs and walks on, making vague shushing noises at the infant.

The tombstone is an overdone piece of shit, he thinks to himself, and laughs and laughs, until his stomach burns with pain and he can't see because of the tears.

He remembers how Sarah clutched his hands and sobbed, deep ragged moans of agony when she saw him, too gone with the pain to wonder why he felt so solid. He could practically smell the bacteria in her bloodstream, a slick rancid feeling that left him feeling sick for hours afterwards. Her hair laid in a heavy plait of black against her side, tickling his arm, and he could almost see his memory of her reflected back at him in her glazed pupils. "I thought you'd never come," she said and he smiled and traced the smooth skin of her neck.

He remembers a girl with laughing eyes, and carrying the letters she wrote him tucked underneath his undershirt where they crinkled and rubbed against his skin, ticking down the days until he returned home with a weary smile and outstretched hands. Writing a new name in each letter, and thinking eventually they would stumble upon the right one that fit just iso/i.

He never discovers his son's name, and decades later, when he tries to imagine him as an adult, living some gray life in a village in Ireland, all he can picture is a screaming faceless infant.

The funny thing about being a vampire, Mitchell realizes, is you're not thrust newborn into inhumanity the way everyone thinks. You just get tired of it after awhile, of all the pain and the petty hardships of remembering who you were, of who you could have been.

It is May 1940. Somewhere near Lille a vampire sits in a field, smoking a cigarette, upturned helmet beside him. He is twenty-six and forever, stuck in some hellhole in the same old war.

He has only begun to understand just how far he has to go.