Part Eighteen
"I remember falling.
I remember marching
Like a one man army
Through the blaze.
I remember coughing.
I believe in something.
I don't wanna remember falling
For their lies."
-Our Lady Peace, "One Man Army"
"My memories of anything that happened for about a week afterwards are hazy," Angel said. There had been a moonlit funeral in the cemetery where Buffy had spent far too many of her living hours, with Angel digging the grave and Xander sitting on a tombstone as his strength failed him. Giles had been thoroughly drunk and showed every indication of staying that way. Then there was a break, and the next memory was that of the maggots that crawled through Xander's eyes, turning steadfast brown into a roiling mess of milky white. He had been dead for days. Giles had been gone for only a few hours. "I buried the three of them as well as I was able, then went to the college and buried Willow, too. Her girlfriend might have been immune and wandered off, or she might have gone looking for a more private place to die. I didn't see her, anyway." Angel's voice had descended into a flat, mechanical tone, as if it were a computer relaying the tale rather than a man. "I began having the dreams the next day."
"And here you are," Cordelia said. She was giving Angel a decent run for his money in seeing which one of them could most resemble a machine.
"And here I am." Cordelia wasn't looking at him, instead focusing on her nails with an intensity that suggested that the secrets to cold fusion could be found in her torn cuticle. "I dreamed that you were dead, Cordelia, and it wasn't one of the dreams from Flagg." Her head ratcheted up. "If I could do things over again I would come back and make damned sure for my own eyes that it was true, but it felt so real, and-" She wasn't ready to know the other part. Not if he wanted the slightest chance of getting her out of Las Vegas in one piece. "They felt real."
Cordelia dipped her head but with her hair pulled back and unavailable to hide behind, all of her emotions glittered at the surface like broken bits of glass. "I want to hate you," Cordelia said in a low voice. "God, how I want to hate you. If I could hate you I could be done, and I could leave. It wouldn't Ihurt/I like this." She lifted her head, and Angel was unsurprised to see unshed tears gleaming in her eyes. Nor was he surprised when she took several deep breaths and chased them back before a single one could fall.
If it was worth saying once, it was worth saying again. "I'm so sorry, Cordelia." Angel placed his hands on her shoulders, feeling her flinch but not pull away.
"I wish that both of you would quit saying that." Cordelia sighed and very deliberately picked Angel's hands off of her shoulders, giving a squeeze so faint that he wasn't sure if it was real before she released them. Her gaze turned distant. "Both of you." Cordelia's expression cleared, becoming nearly disgusted, and she kicked the table leg hard enough to make it rattle. "Ow!"
Angel's eyebrows went up. "Do you feel violent a lot now?" His tone was not joking.
"We help the helpless," Cordelia said. "That's the whole point of it, right? That's what makes us different from Flagg's bootlickers. We help people even when they can't or won't do anything for us in return. That's the deal…even when helping that person might actually make the ultimate evil realize that you betrayed them and, oh, crap." Cordelia looked as if she wanted to kick the chair again. "My vision was of both of you," she said. "I can't leave Vegas. Not yet."
---
Lindsey wasn't going to ask for, or wish for, death. No matter what Flagg did to him, and if the working over that his guards had given him was any kind of appetizer, Flagg could do quite a lot. Death wishes were no more than Mother Nature's own twisted form of population control, her way of weeding out the herd. Lindsey allowed himself a snort of laughter, painful through his bruised face. Nature didn't need many population control mechanisms now; she had taken the colossal cock-up of the planet by her most destructive children into her own hands and administered a global enema so powerful that it would be centuries before global warning was spoken of again as anything more than a campfire tale.
So, no suicide games for him. He had fucked things up-only now was he beginning to grasp how far back his string of mistakes went-and fucked up so powerfully that he figured his chances of walking out of Las Vegas were on the same level as the chance that Flagg would his hippie song and dance into actual practice. When he exited the stage, though, he was going to do it kicking, screaming, and taking as many of Flagg's people out with him as he could manage.
He had done a fair amount of kicking by now. There had been more than a few head traumas in his recent past, so there were holes in his memory like a video camera that people had repeatedly placed their hands in front of, but he suspected that there had been more than a little of the second, too. That left only option number three unexplored. Lindsey couldn't say that he minded the prospect all that much.
"Lindsey, Lindsey, Lindsey," Flagg said, settling on his haunches in front of the chair where Lindsey had been dumped, in too much pain for much need of restraining. Or maybe Flagg was just getting off on the power of it.
"It's such a shame that things had to end this way," Flagg continued, sounding like a disappointed uncle even as he wore the face of the Big Bad Wolf. It was only a hop, skip, and a jump away from the tone that Holland had used before ordering Lee killed. Lindsey's balls shriveled towards his stomach as he realized the full scope to which he had been played.
A faint smile passed over Flagg's face, as if he were reading Lindsey's thoughts and agreeing that, yes, he truly had FUBARed himself something fierce. He very well might have been; Lindsey had not forgotten how the two of them had come to know each other in the first place and doubted that Flagg had gotten Las Vegas back on its feet again through spit and willpower alone. But, unless he was mistaken on a level comparable to the one he had spent the last month in, there was a twinge of uneasiness on Flagg's face, as well. Flagg wasn't so omniscient as he would like to be, as he felt he should be, and his eyes demanded to know why.
Lindsey didn't like that nervous look, wished that there was something that he could to turn it away from himself. Men who wore that look shot their wives and neighbors and then claimed no memory of the event in court. For some of them it was even true.
Flagg rose into a standing position, placing his hand on Lindsey's shoulder. There was a bruise larger than his fist spreading beneath Lindsey's shirt, souvenir of the impromptu flying lesson that he had been given earlier. Flagg squeezed just so, and the pain that had been hovering like a kind of elevator music in the back of Lindsey's mind became a full on rock concert in less time than it took to breathe. Lindsey hissed air in through his teeth and felt tears of pain springing into his eyes. It took every ounce of will that he had to avoid crying out.
"I don't understand this change of heart," Flagg said, increasing the pressure by increments until black spots were doing a ballet in front of Lindsey's eyes. "Was I in any way unclear when we came to our little arrangement? If you give me what I want, 'if you worship me', and in return I could have given you back everything that had been taken from you." For a moment, Lindsey thought he felt the sensation of fingers returning to him, doubly bitter when his downward glance reflected only the garish scar tissue. "Wasn't that the deal?" Another wave of pressure. Lindsey bit the inside of his cheek and tasted blood bathing his tongue.
"Yes," he managed.
"I thought so." While Flagg's voice had not changed, the ruddy good humor had bled out of his face, leaving a ghastly Dia de los Muertos mask behind. "Now, contrary to what you're thinking right now, I am not the devil. I think, had you given me a chance, you would not have found me to be all that different from the Big Guy himself, except of course for the part where I keep my promises. Neither one of us minds a healthy dollop of fear mixed into our reverence. Hell, if you'll excuse that one small pun, we even welcome it. What makes us different, though, are those few things that we don't tolerate." Flagg's voice dropped into a growl and his fingers spasmed. There was a dry, cracking sound as Lindsey's collarbone snapped, like a wishbone being jerked in half. The pain was immediate, glorious, and Lindsey's scream choked him as it caught in his throat. "What I don't put up with is disobedience. No sirree, Bob. That's where El Hombre and I go our separate ways. This raises an intriguing question, y'see. Now that you've broken my cardinal rule, what Iam/I I going to do with you?"
"I figure you'll get around to killing me eventually," Lindsey wheezed. He had been given a good working over before he ever saw the inside of Flagg's office, taking care of whatever ribs Angel hadn't gotten to in the first go around. Full breaths were out of the question; shallow pants were an agony.
Quicksilver flash of weasel's teeth. Lindsey expected Flagg to lean over and bite a chunk out of his face at any moment. "No doubt, no doubt. I only wonder how late we can make it."
'Make your stand, boy.'
Lindsey jerked, the resulting wave of pain bringing his teeth together so sharply that he nearly took off the tip of his own tongue. Flagg, assuming that the movement was made through pain alone, didn't change expression. It was not an unfair assumption, as Lindsey's entire body stood out in sweat and it was only an empty stomach that kept him from throwing up on the carpet. The old woman's voice came from everywhere, nowhere. It echoed through Lindsey's head, simultaneously as loud as a shout and as intimate as a whisper, and carried with it the smell of growing corn and the faint twang of a guitar.
'You've been content to stand at the crossroads with your hat in your hand for too damned long, waiting to see which side holds the most winning cards before you throw your lot in with them. That might have gotten you by before, but the world's stopped playing by those rules. Like it or not, it's time for you to go about picking a side. How's this one working out for you?" Though no more than a twinge of annoyance crossed the old woman's voice, Lindsey had never felt more dressed down in his life.
'Get me out of here,' he dared to think back, unsure if she could hear him, or that Flagg wasn't at that moment listening to them both.
'The Lord helps those that are willing to shuck their buns and help themselves first.' Lindsey's heart sank to the level of his kneecaps. 'But none of us are quite what we used to be, either. Abby Freemantle, she's learned a trick or two. God willing, I'll see what I can do.'
Flagg had realized that Lindsey's attention was divided and stared at him with narrowed, suspicious eyes. The pig that adorned one of his jacket buttons appeared to give Lindsey a conspirator's wink. 'Better fucked together than alone,' the look said. Lindsey turned his eyes away from it.
"So tell me, Lindsey," Flagg said. His voice had gone low and soothing, turning him into the ultimate snake-oil salesman. His grip on Lindsey's shoulder didn't ease up by so much as an inch. "What brought about his shift in loyalty? I know all about your tendency to waver." The feeling that he was about to lose a large chunk of his face came again, stronger than ever. "But you don't expect me to believe that you were led astray by a nice piece of ass, do you?" 'Tell me why,' Flagg's eyes ordered. 'Tell me why I can't read you.' Once the certainty had planted itself into Lindsey's mind, it was inescapable. His lips split.
And he laughed.
It was a weak, pained sound that took as nearly as much from him as it gave, but it echoed and reechoed through the room until it had grown to many times its previous size. As it had with Cordelia before him, the very air seemed to curl around the sound like indignation to an insult. Though he knew that he was going to pay dearly for the outburst, while it lasted it was the purest, most wonderful sound that Lindsey could remember making in years. "I did it for me, you moron," Lindsey said. "Isn't that why you chose me? Because I always look out for Number One? I decided that I'd rather be dead than shackled to one more master.
"I did it for me."
Lindsey's hand closed around the stone about his neck, the one that he had been unable to take off even as he had betrayed Flagg in every way imaginable. It was cool and clammy in the way that the hand of a corpse would have been, and it hummed beneath Lindsey's touch. Lindsey swore that it writhed as he broke the chain binding it to his neck, a death throe. He hurled it to the ground at Flagg's feet before he could be bitten by it. When he died, he was going to do it as his own person and hope that was enough.
The air in the room disappeared as the stone bounced to a halt against the toe of Flagg's boot, sucked into the tornado created by Flagg's towering rage. A red flaw appeared in the stone ever as Lindsey watched, twisting and blinking up at him like a baleful eye. It was matched by the rising red gleam that had begun to swallow Flagg's eyes. It was like watching a storm roll in from the coast and knowing that there was nothing that he could do to stop it even as he was about to be engulfed.
"I see," Flagg said in a robotic voice entirely unlike his normal tone. His fist flicked out, and Lindsey was on the move.
No open-handed slap this time, but a full punch that caught Lindsey square on a jaw that already had a rainbow arcing across the skin. Lindsey's head snapped back and he was lifted over the top of the chair, landing in an ungainly sprawl behind it. Lindsey had no time to soften the landing and wound up taking most of the impact upon his wounded shoulder. A mortar round went off beneath his skin and Lindsey made no attempt to bury his yell as colors the likes of which he had never seen before blossomed in front of his eyes. His face bounced against the floor and a fragment of jade, a forgotten remnant of Cordelia's earlier assault on Flagg in this very office, sliced a three inch long gash into Lindsey's cheek that ran nearly to the bone. The pain from his face was one extra bucket of water poured into an ocean when compared to his collarbone, but the sticky-hot feel of blood rushing across his skin chased the sluggishness from Lindsey's mind. He closed his hand around the tiny weapon as he rolled to his feet to meet Flagg's charge.
"Gonna make such an example out of you." Flagg lifted Lindsey off the ground by his shirt. "You'll be the last one that betrays me, do ye ken? The very last-"
Lindsey swung the jade in a wide arc and plunged it into Flagg's right eye, cutting him off mid-tirade. Flagg made a high-pitched squealing noise, like his customary giggle gone awry or a pig being beaten with a bat, and dropped Lindsey so abruptly that his knees could not keep up with him. Lindsey tumbled to the floor, an excellent vantage point from which to witness the damage that he had done.
He had buried the jade into Flagg's eye until his hand had struck up against the socket. Vitreous fluid ran down Flagg's face in a thick, runny ooze, mingled with blood and what Lindsey had the terrible suspicion might actually be maggots. He vowed then and there to never eat eggs again. The jade gleamed amongst the mess, a newborn, malevolent eye to replace the one that Lindsey had destroyed. Flagg's left eye still glared about the room, glowing more red than ever and passing over Lindsey even though he stood directly in its path. Flagg appeared to be having a screaming conversation with an entity that-Lindsey sincerely hoped-was not even in the room.
"You promised me that it couldn't be like this!" Flagg shrieked, careening sideways until his hip cracked against the desk. A marble paperweight crashed to the floor. "You promised!"
Lindsey watched the undoing of a god with equal parts awe, fear, and pride. "How's that for making a stand?" he murmured, and felt an old woman smile.
The explosion from outside the casino was enough to make every window in the building rattle in its frame.