A Hospital, and George's Place, Baltimore, Later Saturday Evening

[vanillajello]

Barely half an hour later, they were sitting in a hospital waiting room - or at least most of them were. Mitchell had veered up as soon as they were there, dogging the orderlies and doctors running about about what was going on with Becka.

George mostly just stared at his hands to while away some time.



Kate was leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed, biting on her lower lip and looking a whole lot like there was something she was refraining from saying.

Or, y'know, asking.

Mostly she was looking down at her lap, but she kept stealing glances at the others.



Jack was stealing glances right back at Kate. So, I'm guessing you didn't know your favorite teacher is a vampire... didn't exactly trip off the tongue, and ... he didn't know. He badly wanted to be anywhere else. He'd already paced to the vending machines and back about fifteen times.

He turned to George. "Sorry I didn't help you more with her," he said softly. "I -- thought I was doing the right thing."



"No, it's fine." George's voice sounded rough, and full of a strange kind of fear. "I didn't know what I was doing, either. It was just too... savage. I guess."

He glanced up, then, as Mitchell's form became obvious again, walking back in, taking his seat next to George.



"She, um."

Mitchell closed his eyes, slumping back.

"She didn't make it."



"Is this how it ends, then?" He was sure the others had questions, but if he didn't voice this one, he'd explode, or rain down into a million pieces, or -- something.

His voice was monotone, though. "They connect her to you, and you to Lauren." His voice skipped. He swallowed. "Everything gets blown open. We lose it all."



Mitchell's words made Kate's expression soften with empathy; but then George spoke, and her face went blank, save for a slight hint of apprehension.

She stayed silent, now definitely only looking down at her lap, listening. Holding back her questions.

It helped that she was getting more and more certain that she didn't actually want to hear the answers.



Jack bit his lip hard, and his nails dug savagely into his palms. A girl was dead (and Jack had to blame himself for that a little). More might have been lost, if George was right.

He let out an explosive exhalation. "What are they calling the cause of death?" he asked, trying to be slightly more reasoned than George.



"Don't worry about that," Mitchell said. He'd finally forced his eyes open to meet Jack's. "We've been around--"

Right. Kate. His eyes slid towards her for a split second. "...For a long time," he said, trying to soften whatever blow was going to wind up falling. "They've ways of doing this, and there's branches everywhere. It'll be an animal attack, likely. A heart attack, if they get her to the right coroner."

George looked relieved; then he looked guilty for looking relieved.



And now Kate's head was suddenly up again, and her eyes were on Mitchell.

"Okay, what the fuck is going on?"

Her voice was moderately quiet - she wasn't looking to cause a scene - but it was also sharp, like someone who'd been denied explanations before, and who wasn't going to take no for an answer anymore.



Mitchell paused, as if attempting to find the right words to sort of... well. Something. "Kate," he started. "It's just--"

A homicidal ex?

Yeah. That would go over well.

"Lauren's a vampire." That was a good start, right?



Jack felt as if his voice was coming from very far away. "I think that after everything Kate saw and did," he said quietly, "she deserves a full explanation."

Seriously, now.



Vampire. Kate's eyes went wide at the word.

And now she already knew that wasn't all of it, and there were things, connections, trying to make themselves heard, in her mind. Something Lauren had said...

"Mitchell. Tell me."

Before she got to any conclusions on her own.



"I was working on it," Mitchell said. Irritable was a distraction, right? If he could carry it through the whole way, rather than mixing it up with rueful and somewhat in shock.

Once the latter passed, who knows what mood he'd wind up in.

"And so am I, in case you hadn't worked it out yet," he said, rubbing at his temple. "I was born in the 1890s."



Well, he hadn't been giving any indication of working very hard on it ... and irritable made for a fine cover for shock for Jack, too.

"I've known since summer," he contributed simply, looking to Kate to see if she was all right. "I knew a bit about why George was worried today, and that's why I was worried."



Kate jerked herself up from her chair. Yes, she'd worked it out before Mitchell had said it, and now she had nothing to say. She felt shocked, and tired, and betrayed.

She just looked angry, though, which - whether the others knew it or not - was better than the alternative.

Irritable definitely made for a good mood of the moment.



Mitchell managed a smile. It was very, very weak.

He resumed staring at the other wall.

George muttered something that sounded an awful lot like let's go home, there's tea, but he didn't quite pick it up.



Jack believed he could have handled about anything anyone said.

It was no one saying anything coherent (he couldn't make out George's mumble) and Kate looking angry that had him even more on edge. Angry, quiet people sometimes exploded in very messy ways, and this was not exactly a subject most people were rational about. Wasn't one he trusted himself to be rational about at this moment in time, for that matter.

He rubbed his temples with his fingers and, quirking an eyebrow to George by way of invitation in case he wanted to escape as much as Jack did, started on his sixteenth round trip to the vending machines.

Perhaps they'd dance this time.

-----





By the time they got to George's apartment, there wasn't much left of Mitchell beyond a slumped-over form in a black wifebeater listening to Johnny Cash records - 'Hurt' featuring rather predominantly right now, as one of his hands had drifted over to adjust the settings eventually.



"Does anyone want any more tea?"

George had been trying to be a good host. Honest. He was just a little... busy keeping his eyes on Mitchell.



Kate, for her part, was not looking at Mitchell. She was staring down into her cup, absently wondering why the tea hadn't made her stomach turn this time, like it had done every time since the tea-induced paralysis in Ghanima's class.

Her anger had faded, somewhat. Or gone into hiding. Sometimes it was hard to tell, even for her.

"No," she said, voice a little weird, like she'd been crying even though she hadn't. "Thanks."



"I'll take some if you're making it anyhow," Jack said. He appreciated the soothing value of having something to do with his hands. "Thank you."

His eyes flickered from person to person as he tried to gauge what to do. There didn't seem to be a project to embark on at the moment, and .. he was tired. The tea might help that too.



George just liked cooking. Sure, heating up water wasn't exactly what you'd call the pinnacle of haute-cuisine, but it had been a welcome thing while he parsed the night and ran it through his own, personal translator.

The one wired into his brain came from a whole other angle. Monsters, and all that.

"I'd forgotten what they were like," he spoke up as he put the kettle on. It was the first thing he'd said since the hospital that didn't have something to do with trying to calm things down to some level of normality. The night had been a shocker to Kate, no doubt. For him, it had been a reminder he'd sorely needed. "The others."

He turned away from the stove to peer at Mitchell through the doorway. "Most of them are predators," he explained. "Of ours, I mean. Every inch of them is just... hunger and fury..." He trailed off. Bit his lip. "The energy it must take him, every single minute, not to be like that."



Kate looked up, and for a moment there her tough act went away, and she again looked like the 16-year-old girl she was, tired and confused, and her voice was softer and more concerned than she wanted it to be.

"Why isn't he? Why isn't he like the others?"



"Some of them aren't," Jack said, though he sounded far more uncertain about it than he would have been a week or a month or a year ago. Between this, Raven, and what had happened to Rose, his faith in Sebastien and the system he'd grown up in had been badly battered. It was all different worlds or different breeds, and he kept reminding himself of that, but the pattern was hard to ignore. "I'm not from their world, but I was raised by one. He did a far better job with it than the humans had been."

"And" -- he added, with a glance to George to see if he felt like filling in more particulars -- "Mitchell didn't choose this all that freely, from what he told me. Maybe that makes the difference."



"His life or the life of his men, he told me," George filled in. He leaned back against the counter. "When I met him, he saved me from a couple of vampires. They were trying to kill me."

Because of what he was, but even if everyone in this room, or two out of three of the people in this room knew, George and 'accepting of himself' had never quite been in the same room.

"He was going to leave. And I had-- nothing. So I called out. 'And then what?', I said. That's what took us here to begin with. 'And then what'."

He shrugged his shoulders. So maybe and then what was the answer. This was one of those uncomfortable, painful moments that made him feel not quite human.

More tea, then. More tea and something to get his mind off that feeling.



Right.

After an incredulous look at Jack - raised by a vampire, what? - Kate leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and rubbed at her temples. This was really a lot, a lot to take in and process.

There were times Kate almost wished she could have transitioned, escaped, just like her mother.

This was, without a question, one of those times.



Jack returned Kate's look. 'Raised by' was actually a simplified way of describing his bond to Sebastien, but he didn't need to go into all the details.

"Are you all right?" he asked her, for the second time that night. "Because I'm not certain I am. No offense, George."



The kettle whistled. George turned around to tend to it. "Maybe it's because we're all crammed in here," he mused. His voice hit a cheerful note. "We should go out again. Keep out of locking ourselves in our homes. Can't let the shock beat us, after all!"

... George, your coping methods could occasionally be terrifying.



"I'm fine, Jack."

Kate's tone indicated that the actual meaning was somewhere along the lines of 'that is the dumbest fucking question I have ever heard, of course I'm not all right'.

And then she opened her eyes again, and looked at George, raising an eyebrow. His... whatever that was, was just disturbing. "I think I'll pass."



Well, yes, it was a dumb fucking question, but it was the only starting point Jack had if he wanted to actually have a conversation about this. If Kate was determined not to answer it, Jack was going to quit asking.

... so there.

He rubbed his forehead. "No, he has a point," he said. "We need to get home sometime. I signed up for the spring break trip."

Which was ludicrous, all things considered. All of it was ludicrous. And Jack was rapidly deciding he loathed Johnny Cash.



"See? It'll all work out!"

George's voice was hitting truly inappropriate levels of cheerful as he poured Jack another cup of tea. And then a second. For Mitchell.

"We'll bundle you all up, get some take out on the way -- ooh, I know this excellent place just down the street. Vintage gourmet."

He handed Jack his cup.



They needed to get home. Home. It was a tricky concept. But Fandom would have to play that role, for now, and Kate would decide about the spring break trip later.

It seemed like a distant thing right now. Like a part of someone else's life, almost.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Fine, whatever."



George beamed at her, a little over-brightly, and took a mug of tea into the living room, where he almost thrust it into Mitchell's subdued grasp.

[ooc: NFI & NFB, OOC-okay, follows this. Bits taken (and tweaked) from Being Human S01E01. Again, preplayed with the wonderful chose_humanity and bitten_notshy, and coded by chose_humanity.

And we're done! And now I have the line "once again, we all will be so broken" from this one song stuck in my head because it fits so very well. Bring on the fallout.]