A/N – My very, very late entry to the OC Challenge. Thanks to ilovetvalot for being patient with me and my sucky exams.

Disclaimer – I don't own it, and to be honest if I did the end of season seven wouldn't have been as good as it was. So for once I don't mind that I don't own it.

March 9th 1986

It had been a terrible day, truly bloody awful. It started raining at eight am and just didn't stop, and Andy had to drag a photographer with an attitude problem all the way to the other side of town for a stupid report about a new restaurant opening, of all the things! As though that counted as news! But the sub-editor had stuck him with it because he once dared to suggest that things like cat shows and new additions to the local economy didn't seem like the sort of thing a newspaper should concern itself with.

Now Andy got all those fun jobs, as well as being landed with the worst people to work with. If he didn't need the job, he'd have been out of there so fast the sub-ed's stupid wig would fall off in the draft. As it happened, Andy had his sights set on the big leagues – The New York Times, or The Washington Post – and he knew better than to lose his toehold on the ladder over some disagreement with someone as petty as the sub editor.

Keeping half an eye on the weather so he could try and make a break for it between showers, Andy took a sip of his lukewarm coffee and looked over his notes once more. The only saving grace of the day was that he had ended up stuck with Mario, the half Italian camera jockey who thought he worked for Vogue, and the people who owned the restaurant were newly in the US from Bologna and hadn't learned much of the language yet. Mario had been a great help with translating, even if every so often he and the owner's daughter had looked at Andy and smirked, obviously talking about him. He remembered enough Spanish from high school to know what they were saying wasn't too flattering. Luckily, he wasn't much for caring what people thought – it was what made him good at his job, and what was going to push him into that dream job. It was all about patience, and he had crates of the stuff.

The newsroom was fairly chaotic that Friday evening, with all the section editors pushing to get the features for the upcoming week ready to go. From his desk in the corner, Andy had a pretty good view of it all. His piece wasn't due for another week yet, so he had a little breathing space, and he'd definitely had enough for one day. He reached down to his bottom drawer and took from it, at random, one of the books he kept in there. Glancing at the cover, he smiled; a collection of poems by Walt Whitman, cracked at the spine and dog eared from years of use. He had other poetry in there too; John Donne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ezra Pound. Just a few, smuggled from home, to keep him sane at moments like this.

He'd barely cracked the Whitman open though when his desk phone rang. Irritated, he snatched it up.

"Andy Hopper, Evening Post."

"Are you a reporter?"

"That's what I just said, isn't it?" he snapped, wondering what kind of loon had gotten a hold of his number now.

"I need you to tell people…what I've done," the man practically whispered, his voice cracking, "I need people to know, or I'll kill them."

"I beg your pardon?" Andy asked, astonished, his book falling from his hand, "Who are you going to do what to?"

"They're only babies really," the man rambled, "Four precious angels, none of them older than ten you know, but no one is missing them. You need to tell people or I'll have to kill one to make my point."

And the phone went dead.

The man's voice had been remarkably calm by the end, sounding as though he barely cared if Andy was listening or not. Perhaps he didn't. He was probably just some nut job. They had to deal with a lot of them. But then again, death threats against children were something new. Maybe he should call the cops, just in case.

Feeling somewhat dubious, Andy dug through the disaster zone of his top drawer, rooting out a stack of little used business cards. One was for a local detective he's interviewed a few months before. It couldn't hurt to let the guy know, just in case.

After all, it was the responsible thing to do.