Summary: Everything comes crashing down around him when he hears that one word. (in which we shadow Mitchell during Series 2, episode 8, "All God's Children")

Disclaimer: Not mine. Toby's.

A/N: You could consider this a companion piece to my other fic, "Oy Vey, Indeed" (George POV).

JAGGAT.

With that one word, it all came together.

That is to say, with that one word, Mitchell suddenly realized it was all falling apart.

Stumbling away from the priest and the church, back out into the sunshine, Mitchell suddenly saw himself in sharp relief: the vampire in him had abandoned the human in him. When? How had he let it happen?

Lucy Jaggat.

Where did his loyalties lie? Again, this question. Asked a thousand times over a hundred years. Asked of himself.

Home again, hastily, to find… what? Something, anything that would indicate the whereabouts of this facility George (and Annie?) had run off to.

How had he been so absent from their lives that he didn't even know where they were? Or even whether they were there?

He would tear himself away from himself, again, if he had to. He would deny his own nature, again: repress the vampire, indulge the human, and vice versa, as it suited his purposes.

And his purpose, in this moment at least, became clear.

Get to them.

Did he feel it when Annie was ripped from the world?

Yes. Yes. (How had Kemp guessed?)

In fact, the world had seemed to turn inside out. There was pain, of course—he'd been shocked by it, and hindered. But more shocking was the sudden revelation that he'd been looking at the world backward for weeks. Maybe months. Lucy, who a moment ago had seemed like the most important thing in the world, the way to balance the scales, suddenly faded to nothing, and Annie, that wisp of a girl, became the single, solid fact of reality. Annie and George.

Righteous anger. That's what he felt. How could anything but the thought of revenge course through his veins at that moment? He was still wasted on blood, but there was love and pain beneath that.

Annie was gone.

A shooting pain, through… his heart, he knew… and then a throbbing one, pulsing throughout his body. Drumming in his head, louder and louder. Something had been ripped from him. Something had been torn away. The tearing had brought him slamming back into himself. Sober, now, but still raging.

But how? How was it possible that he'd felt it, so tangibly, so jarringly? How had he known what it meant?

No time to question it. Possibly, though, time to rectify it.

Desperation, instinctual and unquenchable. Clawing his way through every nook and cranny of this facility. Killing anything that moved, if it got in his way. What other choice did he have?

He'd lost Annie.

And she had been the linchpin. It was so obvious now. He and George, the dynamic duo, sure, but Annie the linchpin. And he hadn't even realized it until just now. Just now. When it was too late. Figures.

It was anger he'd felt, yes. Anger at the monsters who'd will-o-the-whisked his friends away, anger for the world that didn't want them, but mostly anger at himself. Hadn't he learned, over his hundred years, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone? And yet here he was, learning it again—or for the first time, really—in gruesome technicolor.

He had to get her back. He just had to.

Now how the fuck was he going to do that?