Historical Inaccuracy

Rated: PG

Category: Angst, Mitchell/Annie if you squint, General Friendship, Ficlet.

Season: Post-Three.

Spoilers: Wolf-Shaped Bullet.

Summary: Annie finds something that needs correcting.

Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to the wonder that is Toby Whithouse, not me.

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Warning: Series Three Finale Spoilers! Do not read on if you haven't seen it!

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It was cliché, she knew.

A ghost in a library?

How lame.

Then again, this place could hardly be called a library by modern standards.

If that label applied, she wouldn't have had to come all the way to rural Ireland to find what she needed. She could have found it online somewhere.

But alas, here she was, digging though microfiche archives in a dank and dusty library in the dead of night like a walking horror movie trope.

She would be ashamed of herself if not for her motive, which has kept her at her task for days. Again, she thinks of how much easier this would be if the library had any sort of modern organizational system, and she sighs in frustration, but still she plows on.

And finally, on this third night of searching, she finds it.

She stares at it for a moment, then prints it out.

And like a flash, she is gone.

She is back in her room in Wales.

Two minutes later, the printout is encased in glass.

After all, she's had the frame ready for weeks.

Somehow, it fits perfectly into the opening, but as she looks at it, something seems off.

It's not the fact that his hair is shorter. She'd expected that, of course.

It's not the uniform, either. In fact, she rather likes that.

It's not even the eyes, which changed so much in ninety-odd years.

No, it's none of those things. As John Mitchell stares back at Annie Sawyer from the only photograph she could think to find of him, he is perfect. He is young and whole and this is how she will remember him.

She frowns at him, though, as she scans the rest of the frame.

That's when she sees it, and she shakes her head at her own obtuseness.

Carefully, she takes the printout from the frame and corrects an error in the text around the picture.

When she replaces it, she smiles. Because now, as wrong as it is, the obituary is also, finally, just right.

John Mitchell: Beloved Son, Soldier, and Friend.

July 29, 1893 - March 13, 2011