[No screaming horror or recoiling or hissing, or shouting, or threats of violence and brutality. Mitchell actually echoes that little huff of a laugh. Not of disbelief, just-- of quiet acceptance. Of course. Yeah.]

Right.

[Zombie. It explains-- well, it's not a total explanation. A zombie, only there's the fact that he's a zombie who's doing a perfectly good job of talking and communicating and not rotting. Even Sasha was rotten, even if she was really good at talking. But this place takes all kinds, doesn't it. Vampires that can drink animal blood and werewolves that can turn whenever they like. Why not slightly awkward teenage zombies, too?

The level of impossibility is slightly lessened by that Type Four incident, back on Barry Island. Mitchell, with all his years, had never met a proper zombie--because they hadn't existed, not until he and Annie had inadvertently created them. Zombie fatherhood is not something he wants to think very much on, or take credit for. And the sooner he gets out of here, the better, so. Fine. Whatever, yes, zombies. He looks away, down the locker bank, buying himself a second of thought, before he looks back and points toward the case he'd helped to recover.]

Contact lenses? For the eyes, yeah?

A rising. Yeah. Just one in specific.

[Not counting his own technical rise from the grave. Just the one zombie--there were others, but Mitchell's not going to get into the video he and Annie had found. Corpses thrashing around on the gurney, and the whir of the saw. There's vampire shit, and then there's torture. Sometimes they overlap, depending on who you are, but never for Mitchell. Even when he was at his worst, you have to have standards.

'Like before', like when he was alive. It doesn't need to be said. Vampires are lucky, they get premade disguises. Then again, it could be worse for Kieren. He thinks, again, of Sasha, simpering and giggling and rotting to pieces, all I need is a bit of slap--Christ. It could be so much worse.]

But I'm guessin' the one you're talking about is a bigger thing. Did you do the contacts yourself?

[Reintroduction after rising from the grave--reintroduction to what, exactly. To human society, with the help of some programme. It's totally mental. A world framed with that kind of emphasis implies structure, processing. Something refined. A system. And Mitchell doesn't know how to feel about that. It's easy to say that things like them--him, and this kid, two separate categories (thank God, and there's that old vampire superiority), but still both supernaturals--it's easy to say that they never should have been created. Voluntary or involuntary, they should not be. But they are. And he's spent so long rejecting and hating what he is, ignoring that part of him that wants to be anyways.

Fuck it, he thinks, and pushes all of those thoughts away. Zombie issues. Leave the good and evil vampire bullshit for later. Christ knows he'll have time enough to dwell on it, tied to a chair.]

Yeah, where I'm from-- [Ireland??? he leaves it undefined] --there's not many of you around. You're new. There was this girl, Sasha, she got out of the morgue and ended up living at ours after she followed my housemate home. But she wasn't part of any rising. It was just-- a fluke.

[Easier saying that to an actual zombie's face than saying your type was a mistake. All the self-loathing in the world turned outwards would probably not be enough to get Mitchell to say that--at least, not Mitchell as he is now, in this weird twilight state of near-sobriety.]

There's no need for programmes when it's just one. [Slightly jaded to supernatural programmes, he adds with some bitterness:] No one's got it together enough t' run one anyways.

[Four all told, and the more that he thinks about it, the more he's thinking about what he'd said, that it was their fault for creating them. Like they had some responsibility. It doesn't translate here, he tells himself that as well, like it will help him to feel differently, keep it all at least at arm's length.]

Yeah. Worst thing she did was try to go out partying, but she came back again. For a time.

[And then she rotted back into death. He knows that's insensitive to say, borderline blood addict though he is, and so he doesn't. Anyways, Kieren's line of questioning is starting to fit a different picture together.]

Should she have been hurting anyone? 'Cause from the way you're talking, I'm guessing it you think it should all have gone differently.

[Not a threat, right? Who says that but a threat.]

[A beat of silence follows that defensive statement, as Mitchell considers Kieren without saying anything at all. it's too flat a stare to be true disagreement, maybe, but it lacks any other more sympathetic convictions.

But he wants to be sympathetic--Christ, he wants to be more than that, he wants to agree. Except he gets stuck on the word treatment. Treatment, and he's thinking of a chair, and rope. Carl at the piano and fireworks outside, Paris in the New Year. Annie's hand, cold on his, and the bars of the cell. All that shit that's ahead of him, blood leeching out, leaving him surrounded by the murdered without anything in between. And all for what?]

Yeah. [He passes a hand over his face, his shoulders hunched.] Yeah. I know.

[Any accusation of Mitchell's previous tone is gone, for now, just as quickly as it had come over him. Moodswings!! He drops his hands at his sides, shrugging them into his pockets.]

Whatever your-- treatments are. You don't have to say, and I don't want to know. [Probably best not to talk about what they're preventing, either.] Just be careful. The people here, it's too easy for them t' get mixed up in it. Half the time it seems like they're asking for it.

[That sarcasm just turns his expression toward bitterness--a little smile that's a little patronising in return, like you have no idea--but maybe he does. Youth is relative with the supernatural, so many monsters wearing masks. Something in Mitchell bristles at the disregard, like it's some display of insolence--but he can shrug it off, right now. Later, maybe, it will not be so easy.]

Yeah.

[He just agrees instead, yeah, you will be careful, because what choice have any of them got? This is enough to pass for some--accordance of understanding, for now; he shrugs his hands into his pockets, with a nod at the introduction.]

Mitchell. And good luck with it all, if luck's your thing.