Disclaimer:

None of these characters are mine. I hope I haven't mauled them too badly.

Birthday

"Can I decorate it yet, do you think? It's not a bit too hot still is it? We don't want the icing melting off in one big puddle."

Annie and Hal stood contemplating the round sponge cake in front of them, serious expressions on their faces. Annie's was one of anxiety. Hal's showed genuine puzzlement.

"I'm really not the expert, Annie."

"Yeah, but how hot does it have to be to melt chocolate icing? Come on, haven't you read anything about that, Mr Got-the-T-Shirt?"

"I can truthfully say I haven't. But it has been out the oven for an hour and twenty six minutes. That must be long enough."

Annie bit her lip. "Have a feel."

"What?"

"See if it's cool yet with the back of your hand."

"You want me to touch the cake with my bare hand?"

"Yes, Hal. Yes I do."

He sighed, went to the sink and scrubbed his hands clean, dried them and then gingerly laid a hand on the springy golden surface. He left it there for a second, then pulled it away quickly.

"For goodness sake, Hal, it's not going to blow up!" said Annie with a smile, which quickly disappeared into a worried frown. "Or it shouldn't, unless we've done something really wrong." She saw the pained expression on his face. "I'm sorry, Hal, I'd do it myself but I can't really feel it."

He went back over to the sink and washed his hands again. "That's quite alright. I think you should be able to ice it now."

Annie beamed. This had always been her favourite part. Once the actual baking was out of the way, she was free to run riot with icing and hundreds and thousands and silver ball bearings and gummy bears...

George had preferred cakes that were a little more restrained. Mitchell had always eaten anything she'd put in front of him. Owen had always insisted on a coffee cake for his birthday, and she'd obliged but it didn't seem in the real spirit of the thing to her. She didn't really know what Tom would like best, so she was just going to go for it, and make the kind of baked-goods equivalent of an accident at a fireworks shop that she'd made for her mum and dad's birthdays ever since she'd been tall enough to reach to countertop.

Now she was all business. "Right. You melt the chocolate. I'll get the stuff."

The pack of icing chocolate flew from its position near the whisk towards Hal, who grabbed it before it hit him. He carefully read the instructions on the wrapper, then followed them to the letter, placing the glossy brown rectangles into a glass mixing bowl, then putting them into the microwave for repeated thirty second bursts on medium to melt. As he watched the bowl rotate, making sure the chocolate didn't burn, Annie buzzed around the kitchen gathering a rainbow of sugary decorations.

She peered over his shoulder. "Come on, it must be done by now."

"Not quite. There are still a few bits that haven't melted."

"Oh, never mind that." She elbowed him out of the way and fished the mixture out of the microwave. "We can just stir them in."

Hal thought about reminding her that unlike her, he would actually be eating the cake, so he'd like a little more input into its concoction. But he saw how happy she looked and pushed away that mean-spirited thought.

They'd returned to looking at the sponge. Annie held the bowl of chocolate icing, and pondered aloud. "Shall I spoon it out, or just tip it over?"

Hal knew what he would do, but he kept quiet.

"I'll just tip it over, I think." she concluded. "Though I'm taking that lumpy bit off the side first." She sliced off a bit of sponge that had risen unevenly, and held it out to Hal. "Waste not."

Earlier, he had refused to try the raw cake mixture, because it contained raw eggs. She had been mildly offended. "It's not like you're going to get salmonella!" she'd pointed out, quite correctly. He felt he should be polite this time, and took the bit of cake.

"Mmm, it's good."

Her smile was dazzling, but he suspected that was because for a moment all the lightbulbs in the room shone a little brighter. "Really? Because it was from the side right against the baking tin, so it might've been a tiny bit burnt."

"No. No, it's very tasty. Delicious."

He was lying. In truth, his sense of taste was almost entirely non- existent. It hadn't always been. For the first two hundred years or so, he'd been able to enjoy human food - it was all inferior to blood of course. But after that, taste had dulled for everything else but blood, whilst all his other senses had grown incrementally sharper. He could remember the taste of roast meat, ale, spiced puddings, boiled oats... and, with undimmed clarity, blood.

He'd never told Pearl or Leo this. Leo might have suspected. Once, in an early attempt by Pearl to make a Jamaican chicken curry, she'd used the wrong spoon to measure out the chilli. As the three of them sat down, he'd watched in alarm as Leo's eyes welled up at the dinner table, but when Pearl wasn't looking, Leo had put a finger to his lips, and they both cleared their plates without comment. Later, Leo had told him that the dish had been ten times hotter than was traditional, although Hal hadn't noticed anything. Leo told Pearl that it was like being back in the Caribbean sun, but he discreetly supervised the cooking the next time she tried the recipe.

"I do make the best cakes." said Annie matter-of-factly. "I won a prize in Mrs Singleton's class for the best fairy cakes, so it is official." She tipped the chocolate out over the sponge, and spread it out over the top and down the sides. "Not that I'm saying this is all me. I've never seen such precisely weighed flour. Go team!" She held up a hand. "Don't leave me hanging, mister!"

He gently touched his palm to hers, a lop-sided smile on his face to apologise for the half-hearted high five. It seemed to satisfy her though, and she turned back to the cake. Hal watched her work. She looked so sweet and innocent and content - a good little housewife. But she'd never got to be that wife, and four hours ago, she had... he didn't even know what she'd done to Kirby. There had been no door. She'd simply removed him from existence with her bare hands and that inhumanly blue cold gaze. He'd never seen anything like that before. It had frightened him. In that moment, he'd never been more scared of another being. Even Snow couldn't destroy someone as utterly as she just had. Except, he thought, wasn't such oblivion just what would happen to him, when the end finally came? There would be nothing left of him to step through a door. Still, at least he would leave a pile of ash and some empty clothes as a memento mori. And perhaps the cause would be little Eve, the War Child Annie had fought her way back to save. There was purpose and comfort in that.

She hadn't mentioned Kirby since. Hal had learnt she wasn't much of a talker, or at least, not about the serious things. Or perhaps he just didn't truly trust him. That would be understandable. And sensible, unfortunately.

"There!" she said, pulling the knife away with a flourish. "Ta da!"

"It looks very good."

A drop of chocolate dripped from the side of the cake through the wire rack and onto the kitchen surface. Hal noted the position for later.

"It's fine," said Annie to herself, "I can cover that up later. It's going on a plate anyway." She grabbed a tube of writing icing and started picking out Tom's name. "Are you sure he never told us it was his birthday?"

"I'm positive. I would have remembered it."

"I've just got it in my head that he told me some time and I forgot, and if I did then I just feel horrible about it."

"Annie, he's young and he's trusting. He assumed we'd know and he was encouraged in that belief. Please don't worry about it."

"Twenty one years old! I remember my twenty first..." Her eyes slipped out of focus as she went back to that night, but when she reached the memory they became sad. On her twenty first, Owen hadn't felt like going out, so they'd stayed in and watched an action film on DVD that she hadn't much liked. She'd lit the candles on the cake she'd made herself, and blown them out. Owen hadn't looked away from the TV for longer than it took to take his slice. She lied a bit and told Hal what she'd done for her twentieth instead, before Owen. She'd gone home for the weekend, had a big family tea with cake, then she had gone out to town with a load of girl friends dressed as the Pink Ladies. She'd snogged a chemistry student from Solihull called Simon, and she'd given him the wrong number at the end of the night.

"A night to remember!" she said, finishing off the M. She drew a very anatomically incorrect heart around Tom's name. "Right, I'm going the put the date in the calendar so I don't forget again."

Hal glanced at her in mild rebuke.

"Ok, ok, so I probably didn't forget, but I'm going to put it in so I definitely for certain don't forget next year." She picked up a pen and walked over to the calendar hanging on the side of a cupboard. It had tacky pictures of vintage-style pin-up girls. Nina had bought it as an ironic present for George, saying it "matched the house's sophisticated aesthetic".

Annie scribbled in Tom's birthday. She called over her shoulder to Hal. "While I'm over here, when's yours?"

"I don't know."

"Really?"

"No one thought to make a note. Apparently it was winter."

She turned to look at him. "Do you want me to make one up? Let's see. Mine's in August, Tom's is now. Eve's was only a couple of months ago. We don't want to mess with Christmas. How about mid-November?"

"Actually, I'd rather just leave it, if you don't mind." he said quietly.

He hated birthdays. Like Annie, Pearl had loved them. She made a huge chocolate and orange cake every year for Leo, and she made a beautiful fruitcake with white icing every year for herself. The fruitcake would take days to prepare. She wouldn't let either of them help. "It's my special day, it has to be perfect." she'd say to every offer of assistance. Leo and Hal would sing "Happy Birthday" for Pearl, and she and Hal would sing that and "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" for Leo, which was apparently something of a tradition in her family.

As the years passed by, Pearl began to see why Hal hated birthdays, although they never spoke about it. They could both see it. They saw it before Leo saw it. Tiny lines began to etch themselves into the skin around Leo's eyes. White hairs crept onto his head. He started using his arms to push himself out of chairs rather than just standing up. Pearl stopped putting the right number of candles on the cakes in 1976.

From the moment Leo had told him about the "big, ordinary life" he wanted, and offered to share it, Hal had known it would only be a temporary arrangement for him. He had known then that there would be life after Leo, and the fear of knowledge only grew stronger with time.

With the rigid routine he had imposed on him, Leo had freed Hal from the decades and centuries by focusing him on the minutes and the hours. He kept off blood for those five hours, and in that time he wouldn't think about what would happen in fifty years, when that man would most likely claw his way to the surface again. And yet those hours had added up to fifty years and more. Leo's system worked. In the now, Hal could stay in control, and the concentration that took allowed him to ignore the future.

Birthdays, especially Leo's birthdays, shattered the safe world of minutes and hours. Another year, another step closer to losing Leo, and himself in the process.

He could most likely have stopped the little celebrations, or opted out of them, by claiming they interrupted his routine. It would have been true. But he didn't, and he didn't say anything, because who was he to deny Leo the acknowledgement of a real, human life? A very finite life. It was Hal's own problem - although it later became Pearl's too - and not Leo's responsibility

And now the process was beginning again with Tom. How long before Annie noticed what made him so uneasy?

Annie was looking at him. "How old are you, Hal? Not your, you know, grrr age." She made a teeth-baring grimace and clawed her hands. "How old were you when you were...?" She did her unconvincing vampire impression again.

"I was somewhere between twenty four and twenty six, I believe. Although it could be have been a few years longer. A good innings, for the life I led. Why do you ask?"

She smiled sadly. "I was just thinking, you made it the longest before this caught up with you. Tom was a baby, I was twenty two. Little Eve, she was born into this madness even if she's not a werewolf. In fact, you've spent longer as a human than the rest of the house put together."

He hadn't thought of it that way before. "Annie, look. Being human isn't to do with... biology or magic, or whatever you want to call it. It's not about being happy either. It's about what we choose to do and what we choose not to. You might not be human but you can be human." He believed only half his words. Leo was better at these kind of speeches, but he wanted, he needed Annie to be her usual self. "And we should probably finish decorating this cake before the icing sets and Tom gets home."

Annie glanced at the clock. "Oh my bloody God! He'll be here any second!" She armed herself with handfuls of sweets and proceeded to encrust the sides of the cake with them.

Her moment of melancholy seemed to have been instantly forgotten, although Hal was still not quite sure how much of her brave face was a facade. Rightly or wrongly, he was grateful to her either way.

He raised his eyebrows at her colourful handiwork. "That's quite an assortment of E numbers."

"Yep, this is the good stuff! You'll both be bouncing off the walls tonight if I get my way!"

Hal heard Tom's footsteps approaching on the road. The cake-making had been carefully concealed by sending Tom to pick up some more nappies for Eve while they mixed the sponge, and another run to buy conveniently forgotten milk formula while they decorated. The plan had gone a bit wrong when Annie had delayed the icing process. "He's back." he told Annie."

"Right, that's ok. We're fine. No biggie." She grabbed the cake as Tom turned the key in the lock. "Look normal!". She vanished, taking the cake with her.

After a moment's hesitation, Hal grabbed a cloth and started wiping down the kitchen counter, making sure he got the stray drop of melted chocolate first.

Tom stepped into the hall, and called out in greeting, "Alright Hal, Annie." He dumped the plastic bag of shopping he'd just returned with on the floor and headed upstairs. Hal finished cleaning the kitchen surface, put away the ingredients and moved the assorted mixing bowls and spoons to the sink, resisting the desire to start washing them up immediately. The he picked up the bag of shopping cast down by Tom and put the milk formula away in a cupboard.

He'd have to remind Tom that it was customary to put shopping away rather than just dropping it – although not today. The young boy would do anything Annie asked of him without complaint, but some of the finer points of domestic life still eluded him.

Although he's not a boy, he's a man. Tom may be young, buthe wasn't to be underestimated as a friend or a foe.

Annie reappeared in the kitchen, making him jump as always, and put the cake down carefully. "Well, go and get him then!" she said reaching for the candles. "Actually, keep him up there for five minutes, it's gone a bit wonky here."

As far as Hal could see, none of the cake adhered to classical proportions, but he nodded and went upstairs to find Tom. He didn't find him in his room, but he did find the crumpled pictures Tom had been carefully cutting from newspapers and magazines, lying like autumn leaves on the carpet. Football matches, holidays, birthdays, weddings – the picture of the couple with the ring Leo had kept for so long. A broken collage of a normal life.

A life he couldn't have, but Tom could, if he was lucky.

Hal picked up the photo nearest his feet, smoothed it out in his hands, and started putting it back together again.

Author's notes: Thanks for reading, I hope you liked it. I just wanted to write something with Annie! Reviews make my day…