A/N: Sorry this update is so late, but real life managed to get in the way. It's an awesome real life though . . . I spent wednesday working both Sound & Stage Crew and I even helped with Hospitality at an AMAZING concert (Passion Pit and Matt & Kim, in case you're curious) which will be exhausting and I have classes and homework and a much-less-fun-but-pays-more job to deal with sooo, yeah:

Anyway this is still a largely reactionary fic that follows Canon almost exactly, unless otherwise is directly stated. This chapter is set immediately after the events of the third episode (Ghost Town), and assumes Canon. This one tries to look at what it means to be a human agent, acting inside another person's world, and at the sort of motivators that move Mitchell to certain actions.

Love & Sex, and Other Drugs ~

Here on this earth, Love is always so much more complicated that it should have been. It should have been the opposite of Death, the biggest reason that anyone could ever have for wanting Life. But more often than not, it is complicated.

It's the sort of complicated that hurts, the sort of complicated that tangles things up and mixes love and lust and obligation with guilt and pain.

Mitchell knew that better than anyone ever should have.

What he'd done with Lauren . . . what he'd done for her with stealing the blood from the hospital . . . he'd done it without a thought, without hesitation, with pleasure and almost thrill at the act. And that he'd done it because of what he'd done to her . . . it was a mess.

It was a disgusting, revolting and bloody, mess.

And it was all Mitchell's fault.

For a while, however short it might have been, Mitchell had thought he'd loved Lauren.

But now he'd messed that up, as well. Whatever potential that relationship had once held, it was gone forever now.

Lauren was back with Herrick's organization, feeding again. That was Mitchell's fault too, somehow. He hadn't been supportive enough, or firm enough, or human enough to help her how she needed him to and she'd given up.

Just thinking about it made his head hurt, ache with all the guilt.

He wondered vaguely about whether or not they'd have gone out with each other again after their first night together, had he not Turned her, or even had he not been a vampire at all.

Honestly, the answer was probably no.

Mitchell had only felt a real connection too her twice in their jagged and abrupt relations. The first night he'd laid eyes on her was one, but then she'd hardly been human to him. Then she'd been the object of his hunger, his bloodlust and sex-drive united to fixate on her. For vampires, their bodily thirst for blood and their sensations of sexual lust were often one in the same.

The second time was when she'd first come to him at the hospital, asking for his help with dealing with the withdrawal of going off blood. Then she'd been his fault, his mistake, his chance for redemption. He wanted to help her. Listening to her cry about the pain just beneath her skin, the boiling acidic burn that seared her veins after the first 24 hours without blood, the echoes in her head, Mitchell had felt for a moment like he really knew her, like he understood.

For one moment, he had truly wanted to help her.

That had probably only lasted for a few minutes. After their first night back together, that bloodbath in the hotel, Mitchell had been too disgusted with it all to even articulate it. He was a monster, his world was bloody and dark and revolting and he'd managed to claw his way to the edge of oblivion and stick his head up into the light of the real world, the human world.

Half of him, more than half of him really, hated Lauren for dragging him back down into the Dark. The other half latched onto her as a way of saving himself. If he could make her less dangerous, could get her off of blood and on the wagon, just maybe he could feel a little bit better about himself.

But he lost his temper with her, he wouldn't feed with her, he couldn't do it the right way for her, and she'd given up. It was his fault, again. Everyone she killed was his fault.

It was all because he'd thought he loved her.

Upstairs, Annie's chair moved roughly across the floor of her room, reminding Mitchell that her pain was also his fault. That she had found out about her death how she had . . .

"Poor Annie," George sighed looking up through the floor to where he knew she would be as he went on, "Who could have guessed that Owen would be a murderer?"

"I could."

"What?"

"I could've guessed," Mitchell told him. "And I did. I guessed that Owen had killed her, that's why I didn't want her poking into things that might remind her of it."

"You knew? Since when?" George asked, scandalized.

"Since we first talked to him," Mitchell replied. "If I can do anything, I can recognize a Killer. I knew Owen was a monster the moment we met the bastard."

Still appalled, George demanded, "Why didn't you say anything, to me at least? Don't you think I might have found it interesting that our bloody landlord was a murderer?"

"It didn't matter. He's just a human, he couldn't actually harm any of us now," Mitchell explained. Then looking up at where Annie was, he added, "Besides, she looked so happy when she talked about him . . . I didn't have it in me to ruin it for her."

George opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came out.

He doubted that he would have been able to tell her either, their poor sweet Annie.

George and Mitchell sat together in the near silence of the living room for a while longer, until Mitchell felt the pressure was getting to be all too much. He stood abruptly and snatched his coat off its hook so roughly that he nearly knocked the whole contraption over. Violently shaking out the leather article, Mitchel stepped out the door before he'd even pulled his coat on.

"Oh. Hello."

Mitchell looked up sharply, reflecting the surprise on the face of the girl he'd almost walked into as he'd rounded the corner.

"Clara."

"Mitchell, is everything alright?"

"Yeah, things are great."

Clara looked him over with sad eyes. "Mitchell, you look awful. Why don't we go down to the pub and you can tell me what's happened?"

"I don't really want to talk about it, Clara," Mitchell told her, more angrily than he'd meant to. He was just so frustrated with himself that he couldn't contain it, couldn't rein it in the way he should have.

It didn't seem to faze Clara. "If you say so," she said. "Then why don't we go down to the pub and I can tell you about what's happened to me?"

"What's happened to you?" Mitchell asked immediately, his attention suddenly focusing down on her to see if she'd been hurt. He didn't know what he would do if Clara became his fault.

"Oh, no, no, don't worry, it's nothing bad," Clara hurried to soothe. "You know that story I was working on to do with the Nomer case? Well, it' just a novella and I sent the first draft in to my editor this morning and he loves it so I've got three whole weeks to send him the revised version. Now, you might not be aware of this, but the publishing industry is typically brutal in its time demands, so this really is something of a miracle."

"No kidding," Mitchell said, relaxing into his pretending to be perfectly friendly default.

"Honestly. I've been asked before to revise a four hundred page manuscript in three days," Clara explained, stepping just a bit away from him to see if he'd follow.

Mitchell walked after her, tagging along as she walked towards the nearest pub, talking about her manuscripts and the publishing industry as a whole. When they reached the door, Clara invited him in for a drink. He hesitated.

"Oh, come on, Mitchell," she pleaded. "I don't bite."

Sighing and stepping across the threshold, Mitchell thought, 'but I do'.

"So, how are things with you," Clara asked, "other than that thing that you don't want to talk about even though it sounds terribly interesting, of course."

Mitchell smiled to himself at her curiosity as he sat down with a beer. "Things are good."

"You would make a fabulous writer with that kind of acute specificity," Clara pointed out, straight faced until the very end. "Throw a girl a bone! I'm just so curious about you."

"There's nothin' to be curious about. I'm just a bloke. I live with my best friend and we work the graveyard shift at a hospital in Bristol," Mitchell told her with a shrug.

Clara nodded, latching on to his words. "That's exactly what I mean. You live with your best friend and work on the night shift of a hospital in Bristol. That's the kind of set up that writers would kill themselves to make sound plausible. And you just live it. Do you have any idea what I would give to spend a day inside your head?"

"It's not that much fun being me," Mitchell promised. "It's pretty boring actually."

Clara responded immediately, "That's what everyone says."

"Well, I'd expect that most people are pretty boring. Not everyone can have the sort of exciting adventures you'd want to put in a book after all," Mitchell countered.

"But everyone does have adventures, countless amazing adventures that seem so ordinary to them, but could be made into something wonderful in a book. One of my favorite scenes I've ever written is about a young man, a chronic obsessive-compulsive shoplifter, going grocery shopping and trying not to steal anything," Clara returned, looking into her beer fondly as she remembered it. "Something that seems simple can always be rendered differently."

Mitchell shrugged. "I guess that's why you're the writer."

"It's part of it," Clara agreed. "There's also the fact that I'm obnoxious and talk too much. I like hearing my own voice I guess. You should stop me you know, before I talk your ear off."

"I don't mind it. You're not that bad, really. I've got a friend, Annie . . . now she'll talk your ear off if you let her, can't bear a room to be quiet for two minutes," Mitchell laughed.

"How about George? Does he talk your ear off too?"

"Sometimes. Usually he likes a bit of peace, but sometimes . . . he gets into these nervous rants and he just goes on . . ." Mitchell was grinning just thinking about how George could get when he was worried about something. Then he noticed that Clara was smiling too. "What?"

She shrugged. "The way you talk about them . . . you really care for them, don't you?"

"Well, I live with them. It'd be harder not to get attached, wouldn't it?"

"I lived with a mate from college for a while, but we never got that way. I'll say 'hi' to her if I see her in the street, but I never smiled like that when thinking about her," Clara countered. "Though I wish I could say I have, it must be nice having friends like that."

"Yeah, it kind of is . . ."

Mitchell's smile was reflective as he paused to truly appreciate what having George and Annie in his life really meant to him. The cheer faded from his expression as he remembered what having them in his life meant for them.

"Sorry, did I make you think about that thing we're not going to talk about, even though it seems really interesting? I didn't mean to, honest," Clara apologized. Her curiosity about it as well as the sincerity of her apology rang in her voice as she spoke. She was somehow able to be incredibly nosy and yet equally polite and considerate at the same time.

Mitchell looked back in the general direction of the house. Sighing, he decided to give Clara a nibble of the meaty story she was looking for. "It just Annie," he told her. "She's going through a bad break-up, right now. I feel responsible somehow, like I should have told her that I didn't think Owen was a good guy or something that would have lightened the blow."

"Wouldn't have helped," Clara promised. "Love is a drug, just like sex, just like heroine. They all affect how the brain perceives things, liking and being liked, it's a positive feedback cycle that spirals away from reality."

"You don't believe in love? I don't believe that for a second," Mitchell protested. "If Annie reads your books, which she's promised she does, then there has to be a romance in it. She won't read anythin' without a love line in it."

"My books always have love stories, true, but that doesn't mean I believe in them. My books end before the relationships really start," Clara replied. "I'm not sure if I believe in love."

"Then you've never been in it," Mitchell told her.

"You have?"

"Yeah. It's nice."

"Where is she then? Or . . . is it Annie?"

"Annie? No, it's not Annie," Mitchell said with a shy smile as a flash of the kiss he'd accidentally shared with her flashed into his mind. "Her name was Josie . . . we were together for a while, a long while, but she had dreams to chase that I couldn't help her with."

"I'm sorry."

"It worked out for the best, I think," Mitchell said, "She's happy, last I heard."

They were both quiet for a long moment. "You're very kind, Mitchell. I really hope you never forget that. Do whatever you can to help people."

"Where's this coming from?"

"It's just, when I help people, I do it because I'm supposed to, or expected to," Clara explained. "When you do it, it's because you want to, and I think that people can feel that."

"I do what I can, but I'm not the best role model."

Clara just laughed him off. "The best role models are always the ones who start out as the worst. I think a kind-hearted, struggling ex-junkie makes for a pretty great role model."

"What?" Mitchell asked darkly. His mind had gone into overdrive. She knew he was a junkie, but did she know what his drug was? How the Hell did she find out? Was she here to patronize him about it or just to threaten to reveal the secret?

"Shit, I didn't mean to say that," Clara apologized immediately, flustered. "We can pretend I didn't, I swear I won't bring it up again, unless you want me to."

"What do you know about it?" Mitchell asked, his voice torn between demanding answers and maintaining a bit of friendly-sounding control.

Clara guiltily looked down into her glass. "It's just . . . I know the signs. I can recognize a junkie and an ex-junkie from a mile out. They're so careful, you especially. And the coffee thing and how you chain-smoke . . . and . . . I'm sorry . . . I should probably, go now, right?"

"No, it's okay," Mitchell said, relaxing back to his superficially friendly state. He could hear Clara's heart-rate still charging along at twice what it should have been. Her face was flushed with embarrassment and Mitchell had to set his glass down for fear of breaking it as his grip tightened at his resistance to the temptation. "You just surprised me is all."

"Nah, I really should probably go, but thank you," Clara told him, standing and handing over some cash to the bartender.

"Can I walk you home?"

"I've actually got work," Clara told him, adding, "and you've an afternoon off to salvage, I wouldn't want to ruin it all for you."

"Trust me, you haven't," Mitchell promised.

"Thanks. Oh, and even though, I said it wrong, I meant it when I said that I think you could make a great role model for someone," Clara said, sliding her arms into her coat sleeves.

Mitchell smiled. "People don't really say that to me very often."

"They should."

Mitchell looked away briefly, half shaking his head. As he turned his head back he hit Clara, who'd leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. She caught the corner of his mouth in the action, but didn't seem to notice.

Without saying anything Clara, looked down, embarrassed to have been caught. Then she said, "I'd like to do this again sometime." Then she trotted away without waiting for Mitchell to reply.

He would have agreed.

Whoever Clara really was, she certainly had a way with words. And honestly, for all she talked about her stories and her work and everything, she seemed just as secretive as Mitchell. She hadn't told him anything more real about herself than what he'd told her.

Even so, every time he talked to her, he walked away feeling very human.

A/N: Thank you so much for reading! I'm using Clara as something of a catalyst for Mitchell and his choices, particularly this time with how her suggestion of being a good role model plays into how Mitchell wants to help and befriend Bernie.

^_^ Again, THANKS FOR READING!