Part Seven

The boys were named Alexei and Fideo, Lindsey was told when Fideo was first sitting up and then feeling strong enough to walk a distance. Taken together, the three of them made for quite the multicultural bunch. Strange, since Lindsey listened hard but could detect no hint of an accent on any of them, not even the regional ones that he would expect from a group of typical American teenagers. Their voices were so devoid of any kind of cultural stamp that they may as well have been rolled from an assembly line. Lindsey wondered if maybe this was not the reason that the back of his mind was tickling and buzzing so. No, he thought only a second later, wrinkling his brow and tightening his grip upon the sword. It was something else, something that only grew stronger the longer that he was around them. Lindsey glanced towards Alexei and was not particularly surprised to see the kid staring back at him with an intent and unfriendly gaze. Fideo was leaning heavily on An and Alexei by turns and seemed to be suffering from much the same problem with kneecap instability that Lindsey himself was still experiencing bouts of, but the look that he turned onto Lindsey now and again held much of the same air.

For a group of people so bloodied and battered as they were, they attracted surprisingly little attention as they strode down the street. Lindsey led the way, shouldering a path through the thickest portions of the crowd as the sun sank lower towards the horizon and muttering apologies when he jolted people. The sword that he still held worked far great wonders than the apologies, actually, and more often than not the people were scurrying away before the words had fully exited his mouth. Lindsey's lips quirked up into a bitter smile as he watched them go. All that money and time invested in learning charm and in earning the degree, he though, and all that it really took was a big stick.

Once he got down into it, actually, that wasn't all that surprising. Nor was it that funny.

As the crowds grew heavier with the lowering of the sun, people rushing to get indoors before the big league nasties came out to play, it became increasingly difficult for the four of them to stay within sight of each other. Lindsey extended the hand that was not occupied with the sword back towards An, intending to give her something concrete to grasp onto, but he was only met with a cool stare and quick shake of the head. "We can manage."

The concerned glance that she could not stop herself from turning Fideo's way betrayed her. Since Lindsey was feeling generous, he decided not point that out. "Suit yourself." With his head turned partway around to speak to An, he didn't see the distracted woman in front of him and only just avoided running her through with the sword. "Sorry," Lindsey said, lowering the sword into what his rational mind told him was a safer position even as the baser, more lizard-like portion of his brain screamed that danger could still come rushing out from any unwatched shadow. "Sorry, sorry,"

The woman, who had a head full of gingery Shirley Temple curls set above a face and body designed to be forgotten again within seconds, set off another round of desperate and unquantifiable sensations racing through Lindsey's brain. He had had about enough of those in the span of one day to last him the rest of his life, however short that might turn out to be, and the way that his hand tightened around the sword and raised it back into a defensive posture probably wasn't the most comforting gesture that he could have made. The woman paused long enough to turn a wide-eyed stare over Lindsey and his three charges before she was taking an exaggerated step around them and hurrying down the street at a pace that was not quite a run but wanted to be when it grew up. Lindsey watched her as she disappeared, feeling each hair on the back of his neck stand at attention while the crowd resumed its ebb and flow around them.

"Ex-girlfriend?" Alexei inquired at his elbow. The ridiculousness of such a statement coming from Alexei's baby face was somewhat mitigated by the fact that he was still covered in blood.

Only somewhat. Lindsey paused long enough to flash the smartass a grin that took some of the steam out of him, even if was not enough to make him step back. "No. My exes tend to have bigger teeth." Lindsey let a beat go by before he added, "Also, they're not nearly so much with the sunbathing."

It took a second fro the kid to get it, and then his eyes widened. Lindsey thought that there might have been respect and even possibly a bit of envy there. "Really?" Alexei grinned. "Awesome!"

Lindsey could already see the terror that this kid was going to be when he grew into himself and found his stride where the girls were concerned. He snorted, shook his head, and could not stop the faint smile that curled the ends of his mouth upwards. "High maintenance," he said as he led his charges up the steps to Angel's new fortress of almost-solitude. He kept his back turned so that Alexei could not read the lie as he said, "Trust me. In the end, they're not worth it."

The setting sun blazed at his back as Lindsey stepped back into the lobby, giving him reason to pause while his eyes adjusted and letting the kids catch up to him. Fideo halted immediately inside the doorway, tilting his head back against the frame and closing his eyes. Doing so exposed the long, protectionless line of his throat, a move that Lindsey had the feeling was not the wisest one that could be made these days. An and Alexei seemed to feel the same way, because they each took several steps closer to him until the three of them were forming a rough triangle with the wounded member at the back. In the low light, the blood across their faces and necks almost looked black.

"You came back."

Lindsey turned his head. The same little girl was still sitting on the lowest stair and watching the door with the fierceness of an army general. For all Lindsey knew, she had not moved since he had left that morning. They girl swiveled her head towards the trio of adolescents, giving the kind of frank, appraising stare that only young children could get away with without being chastised for rudeness. Something that she saw there drew a faint line of apprehension between her eyes, and it did not go away when she looked back towards Lindsey.

"I said I would, didn't I?" Lindsey asked, giving the little girl half of his attention and keeping the other half fixed on Fideo. Even though his companions were not acting as if they were in the middle of a medical crisis (for all that Lindsey knew, they gave themselves aneurysms in the name of telekinetic vigilantism on a regular basis), the kid was looking rough.

"No, you didn't," the little girl said. She leaned forward, hugging her knees to her chest and thrusting her head out until she resembled nothing so much as a large and extraordinarily blonde turtle. "Sometimes people don't come back. We wait a few weeks, and then we take their stuff."

Lindsey stared at her. "Do you think that Barney would approve of that?" The girl flashed him a winsome smile but said nothing.

The door reopened behind Lindsey, causing him to turn and reflexively raise the sword as a few new drops of adrenaline found room to course through his system. Finding that it was the second time in as many hours that he had nearly run a woman through, Lindsey thought that this was the point when it was all right for him to admit that he was getting just a little bit too jumpy. The woman froze and stared at him with one of her hands still braced against the door to hold it open, her eyes wide and constantly moving back and forth between Lindsey's face and the sword point only a few inches away from her chest. She was in her early thirties, with olive-toned skin and long black hair that looked as if it had been gathered back into a careless braid at least a day previously and then forgotten about altogether. She had been pretty once, Lindsey decided, an effect that was only partially ruined by the pink band of scar tissue that split her lower lip, ran across her chin, and disappeared into the soft flesh of her throat. It made the woman look as if she should have been carrying a machine gun rather than a discarded shopping basket. "Put that away if you're not planning on using it, sailor." The quaver in her voice ruined the attempt at bravado, as did the quick hitches in her breathing which snuck through every few seconds.

"Sorry." Lindsey lowered the sword and stepped back so that the woman could enter the building and thereby escape the approaching dark. "Didn't mean to frighten you."

"Good intentions…" The woman had barely edged around Lindsey and into the relative safety of the lobby before the girl on the stairs had launched herself across the floor in a whirlwind of blonde. Two seconds later her arms were wrapped fiercely around the woman's waist, nearly knocking the shopping basket to the floor, and the girl had her face buried into the woman's midriff.

"Miss Vasquez!" The words were muffled against the woman's stomach, so that Lindsey had to strain in order to hear them. He raised his eyebrows at her.

"Alicia Vasquez," the woman introduced herself, stroking the little girl's hair with her free hand and making soft shushing noises between every other word. There were dark circles beneath her eyes to match the ones that Lindsey knew must still be marking up his own.

"Lindsey McDonald." He didn't offer to shake hands, but neither did Alicia. She nodded and looked over his shoulder to the adolescents still clustered behind him. The lift of Alicia's eyebrows said it all. "Guests."

"Ah." Alicia turned her stare back onto Lindsey, clearly trying to size him up and figure out where he fit within the microcosm of the building.

"He's staying with the people upstairs," the little girl pulled her face out of Alicia's stomach to pipe up helpfully.

"Oh." Alicia's dark eyes widened and her face contracted into something tight and wary as one movement. "Oh."

Lindsey wasn't sure what kind of stories were being told about the new guy upstairs, but he didn't believe his smile was of the sort that would make people doubt the worst of them. "Does my reputation precede me?"

Alicia detached the little girl from around her waist and resettled the basket across her arm. Lindsey saw a box of crackers, a few withered apples, and a couple of cans of chicken placed inside. The girl poked excitedly at the apples before pulling one out and taking a large bite from it. Alicia turned her eyes up towards the ceiling for a moment before looking back towards Lindsey. "Yours doesn't," she said. Another glance at the ceiling. "Theirs do." She took the little girl's hand up in her own free one. "C'mon, Katie. I don't want you that close to the door when it's getting dark."

Katie allowed herself to be led away, still chewing at her apple. "I had to make sure that you were coming back."

Something twisted on Alicia's face, but she ruffled at Katie's hair without saying anything. She nodded towards An, Alexei, and Fideo as she passed them. "Kids. Have a nice night."

Fideo opened his eyes. "You, too, ma'am."

Alicia's eyebrows ticked upwards a notch as she looked over the blood which covered them all. For a moment, Lindsey thought that he saw concern rewriting her face. She shook it off with a visible shrugging motion, leading Kate down the hallway and disappearing into one of the apartments. From behind Lindsey, Alexei said brightly, "She seemed nice."

A troubled expression sat on An's face, different from the one that she normally wore. "Weird kid, though." She turned back to Fideo. "How are you feeling?"

"I'll be all right." Fideo pushed himself away from the wall, pausing for a moment as his brain consulted his legs on whether or not they would hold him and smiling brilliantly when the answer came back yes. Lindsey noticed that he did not decline the arms that his friends offered out to him.

Lindsey inclined his head towards the stairs. "This way." He turned and started climbing without looking around to see if the others were following him, marking their progress by the sound of feet scuffing on the steps behind him. There was the short sound of a stumble about halfway up and Lindsey spun about, certain that he was going to see Fideo going ass over head all the way back down to the bottom. Alexei flashed him a sheepish grin instead as he righted himself from where his toe had caught on a bulge in the carpet. "Sorry. Tripped." Lindsey made a faint noise of exasperation and turned back around. He could fee An's eyes resting against the back of his neck as he did so, could feel the judgment there. Now there was a girl with issues.

Lindsey wondered how far Angel's, Spike's, and maybe even Illyria's hearing extended as the four of them trooped down the hallway and towards the apartment where Angel and his people crouched during the daylight hours. There was no sound from within to greet them as Lindsey reached the doorway and placed his hand upon the knob. Unlocked, of course. The door creaked slightly as it opened, a textbook horror movie sound. Lindsey gestured the kids in ahead of him and noticed that each one hesitated slightly before stepping over the threshold. So on some level they were still normal, at least.

Lindsey was still fumbling along the wall for the switch when an accented voice called out dryly, "The polite thing to do is call and let Mommy know before you bring home guests."

An jumped and made a startled, breathy sound that may have been a scream forced back down into the throat before it could emerge too far. Her jerk carried her backwards into Lindsey, and there was a brief press of flesh on flesh as their arms touched. For all the speed with which she jumped away again, an outside observer would have thought that a stove had somehow been hidden beneath the surface of Lindsey's skin. He found the light switch and flicked it, filling the room with light that still made him hiss and turn his eyes away for a few moments. When he raised them again Spike was lighting a cigarette and looking more amused than anyone had a right to with a group of people soaked in both their blood and the blood of others standing in their living room. Illyria leaned over his shoulder and watched the blood with great interest, while Angel filled the rest of the doorway like a dark cloud behind them. Even half-shrouded by the shadows of the other room, he drew Lindsey's eye right to him.

"Looks like you had a fun day," Angel said, putting his hand on Illyria's shoulder and moving her gently to the side. She bared her teeth at him half-heartedly before she acquiesced, still watching the blood. Spike stepped out of the way without prodding, though he did make a point of flicking the ashes from his cigarette in the direction of Angel's shoes as he did so. Angel only spared him a moment for a dirty look before he said, "Making friends in the sandbox?"

Lindsey smiled and realized that he was still holding the bloodied sword, so tightly that his knuckles had long since begun to ache. He set it down against the nearest wall, where it left a reddish-brown smear on the plaster. The marks left by Lindsey's torn elbows the night before were still there. He added a new one by leaning back against the wall himself, folding his arms across his chest and hearing a faint squelch sound as his shift was pressed up against the paint. In the old days, before he and Angel had turned such a neat one-eighty around each other, the smirk which graced his face would have invited violence. "I had an enlightening day, at any rate." He waited for An to pipe up and tell Angel where her group had come from, why they were here now. She certainly had not been shy about sharing that knowledge before.

But An, and the boys as well, had been struck dumb. The look written across An's face was a mingling of disappointment and disgust, and also…also something a little like reverence that she could not quite force herself to get rid of. Lindsey's eyebrows quirked up. Curiouser and curiouser. He waited a few more seconds for An to get over her bout of surprise, or hero worship, or whatever it was, before he gave up and said, "These guys here are from the Powers That Be, apparently to give you guys a hand with-" He ticked his head in the direction of the window. "Our current situation."

Angel's eyes moved back towards the kids, giving them a real stare rather than the quick, appraising glance that he had flicked over them when they first entered. "Really." The flatness which overtook Angel's voice was entirely different from the one which normally overtook his voice when he was nearing violence, but Lindsey felt a Pavlov's dog reaction straightening out his spine all the same. His blood-sticky shirt made a soft ripping sound as it left the wall. Angel's eyes ghosted over Lindsey before coming to rest on Fideo, where they widened slightly. "You."

An and Alexei swiveled to look at Fideo as one motion. He smiled sheepishly in response and ducked his head, allowing his sunglasses for a moment to slide down his nose. Those definitely were not normal human eyes hidden under there. Lindsey straightened further. He was so damned close- "I wanted to see him," Fideo said.

Alexei rolled his eyes and turned away, muttering, "Moron," beneath his breath while An made an exasperated huffing noise.

"It had to have been at night," she said. Lindsey, feeling very much as if the conversation had moved onto a topic where he had no chance of catching up, shifted against the wall again but said nothing. The cut on his back, disturbed by the motion, opened up wider and sent forth a fresh rivulet of blood. Angel's eyes ticked towards him. "You could have been killed."

Fideo smiled again, less sheepishly and with the kind of bravado that only teenaged boys could manage, or teenaged girls find endearing. Sure enough, Lindsey saw the corners of An's mouth twitch upwards by a millimeter or two. "Wasn't, though."

Alexei repeated his muttering of, "Moron," but with greater conviction and not a small amount of amusement.

Angel had returned to staring at the kids, a slow kind of comprehension dawning across his face that made Lindsey feel as if there was some kind of textbook that he should be consulting. His eyes narrowed and he almost, almost had it, until Angel looked at him again the by doing so made the world contract. "As glad as I am to see that you're playing nicely with the other kids, Lindsey," Angel said, lifting the corners of his mouth slightly in response to Lindsey's bared-teeth smile, "I do have to wonder why you brought them home with you."

An's eyes had narrowed into fierce slits along with Lindsey's at the "kids" reference, but she did not take the invitation into adolescent temper tantrum that Lindsey had been expecting. Her spine straightened, her chin lifted, and in the span of time it took to make those few small adjustments the kid had transformed herself into a regal, if still bloodied and painfully young, queen. "We were sent by the Powers That Be," she said in a flat, even voice, staring Angel straight in the eye. The chill with which she had said the same sentence to Lindsey was gone, but he could not say that there was a hell of a lot of warmth filling up the spaces in between. It was a small ego boost to realize that it was a defect within her rather than something personal.

Or maybe not something entirely personal, at least. From the trio's point of view, Lindsey imagined that the differences between he and Angel were so small as to be immeasurable. He watched intently from his position by the wall, waiting for the moment, waiting for one of them to say what they must surely know, if they were half as powerful as Lindsey was beginning to suspect that they were. Fideo glanced towards him, his expression unreadable, before he looked away and scrubbed at the dried blood covering his upper lip. No one said anything, and Lindsey slowly eased back into his original position against the wall. The only one who noticed the movement was Illyria, and her expression of slightly disdainful amusement went unaltered.

Angel's eyebrows arched upwards. "You're twelve."

"Fourteen," Fideo muttered without any real rancor.

An turned exasperated looks upon them both in turn. "Be that as it may," she said slowly, giving the impression that every word from her mouth was merely a substitute for the shorter and infinitely more interesting ones running through her mind, "here we are." She parted her lips into a sunny smile. "We're here to help."

"Are you now?" It was the first time that Spike had spoken since addressing them upon entering. He had taken to smoking in the meanwhile, and a long column of ash dangled from the end of the cigarette where he had forgotten about it. "Forgive me for saying so, but the three of you don't look much past solving your problems by giving each other bloody noses on the playground." Spike ran his eyes slowly across their faces and clothes. "Or not at all past it, as the case may be."

An looked towards Lindsey, her eyebrows raised slightly. The implication that it was his turn to speak now was clear. Again Lindsey compared her to a queen within his head, this time not nearly so favorably. "I ran into some demons while I was on the street," he said.

"The neighbors can be surprising if you're not used to them," Spike said, but he looked more interested now. He leaned forward onto the balls of his feet, giving the ash at the end of his cigarette an impatient flick when he realized that it was there.

"I think they came from the portal," Lindsey continued as if Spike had not spoken. Angel nodded and made a 'Go on' gesture with his hand. "Granted, there are a lot of them out there, anyway…but this group didn't seem too eager to mingle and make nice with the humans." Angel's eyes dropped down to the bloodied sword still resting against the wall at Lindsey's side. His expression evolved into the one of mingled disdain and disbelief that Lindsey already had whole worlds of experience with. He could well imagine the thoughts which had to be running through Angel's head, picturing Lindsey playing the hero. Let him keep at it for a few more seconds; Lindsey thought that it suited him. He jerked his thumb in the direction of An, Alexei, and Fideo. "And then these kids jump in front of them on the street." An's eyes narrowed again and the expression of approval that she has assumed vanished at the return of the "kids" reference, but she did not interrupt. Lindsey nodded towards An's jaw and cheekbone, where a bruise could be seen beginning to paint itself in green and indigo across the few patches of clean skin. "The fight was going less than well for them, as you can imagine. I jump in, keep An from cracking her head open on the pavement, and off we went." Angel's face cleared at hearing that Lindsey did not immediately jump in to play the hero but had to be prodded, making it akin to a man learning that the course of gravity was reestablishing itself after a brief hiatus. "I got one of the demons' swords away from them and was doing my part. Admittedly, I was waiting for the moment when I was going to get shot in the chest, but I was there." Sometimes the cheap shots were the only ones that mattered. Lindsey shifted, winced as his muscles reminded him that they had been out of commission for too long to take to swordfighting again without a few grumbles along the way, and continued. "Meanwhile, these guys are pulling a routine that would have put Carrie White to shame. Whatever demons I didn't get, they made kill each other, right down the very last." Lindsey's monotone shifted away from him, slipping open and allowing some of the visceral experience of it to slip back through. He cleared his throat and ran his fingers lightly across the top of the sword, almost as someone would pull a string of rosary beads through their fingers. No one noticed him doing it, as every other pair of eyes in the room was fixed upon An.

She bore out the last part of Lindsey's speech with an expression of blankness too perfect to be real, her hands clasped demurely in front of her. She took no notice of the gore that was still ground into the knuckles. An waited a beat to see if Lindsey was finished before she said, "They weren't exactly marching down the street because they were looking for a new place to found their puppy orphanage, okay? We were using our own talents in the best way that we knew how." An turned her head slightly to include Lindsey back into her field of vision. "Just as you were doing with that sword of yours. The only difference between us is that my group went straight to the source." Her tone was defensive, jarring against the doll-like stillness that dominated the rest of her face. The impression given was that of a distinctly different girl's voice being dubbed over a neutral body. Spike stirred faintly; Angel and Illyria remained as still as statues.

"You couldn't do that before." It was from Angel, and it was not a question. Lindsey cocked his head to one side.

Alexei grinned and actually bounced up onto his toes for a moment before settling back down. "Well, we've grown up some since then."

"Clearly." Angel folded his arms over his chest and looked at each of the kids in turn. Lindsey could not read his face, and as a result felt as if the ground beneath his feet was shifting away from him. "Though I wonder why you're here now."

A line appeared between An's eyebrows. She glanced between Angel and Lindsey and back again, and for the first time since meeting her Lindsey saw that she was genuinely at a loss for words. "We're from the Powers That Be," she said at last, in the same tone that another person might use to explain that, yes, the sun really was shining. "You…we seem to share a certain set of interests, is all."

Angel didn't turn his head to look, but Lindsey got the impression that he was being scrutinized all the same. "So it would seem." His lips lifted into a smile that Lindsey hoped was not meant to come across as cold as it actually was. "We're not really interested in what the Powers That Be-or their opposite number, I might add-" Lindsey knew now that he was not imagining that stare, "have to say these days."

An's jaw dropped open, only to snap shut again a few seconds later with an audible clicking sound. "You…" She drifted off, as if the very thought was too large and possibly too obscene to finish.

"So you're going to spit in the face of the same people who have pulled your ass out of the literal and metaphorical fire more than once. That's nice. Really. It's classy." It was Fideo rather than Alexei who said it, and as far as Lindsey was concerned there as not a worse combination of words that the boy could have chosen. Fideo for his own part did not seem particularly inclined to notice or care about this error. He was leaning forward onto the balls of his feet, his whole body vibrating with an energy that almost needed a physical force to hold it back.

Angel's face remained as bland as a Grecian statue, but the air around him crackled and seemed on the verge of singing with tension. Illyria perked and leaned forward, for the first time looking like a living creature rather than merely a robot gifted with motion. Lindsey caught the way that her nostrils were flaring, as if she was scenting the blood even before it had a chance to be spilled, and wondered what sort of living thing he meant with that statement, after all.

Spike gave Angel a speculative look and was gifted by both an impassive one and a brief shake of the head in return. "Hate to bust your bubble, kiddo," Spike told Fideo in a low voice, "but the spirits in the sky aren't exactly all that you're building them up to be." Fideo took a quick step forward and was only halted when Illyria mirrored him from the other direction. Illyria did not stop until Spike held up his hand and said softly, "It's all right, Babe."

Illyria drifted backwards, an expression on her face suggesting that of a cat that had been dropped unexpectedly into a tub of cold water. "I do not do it for you," she snapped, taking a further step back until she had returned to her position by the far wall. Lindsey would go so far as to say that her body language had become wary, perhaps even a bit sulky.

"I know," Spike assured her, causing the tension in Illyria's spine to ratchet itself up even further, before he turned back to Fideo. "Whoever's been talking to you, filling your head with these tales of the great and noble Powers That Be against the forces of darkness, my guess is that they left out a few details. The Powers and the Forces, whatever you want to call the creepy bastards, the two of them aren't as different as you want to believe, and that?" Spike threw his arm out in a wide arc that included the far window, where the curtains had been thrown open wide to allow views of both the stars and the continually burning city. "Don't think for a single second that it could have been done without the help of both of them."

Fideo had gone the color of old linen beneath the healthy bronze of his tan. An's and Alexei's reactions were not quite so extreme, but Lindsey did not think that the expressions of awe and reverence that they had worn upon first entering the apartment were going to be returning anytime soon. Fideo took another step forward, this time undeterred by Illyria's quick answering step.

"Fideo." An did not raise her voice above a normal speaking tone, but it carried across the distance between them and halted the boy all the same. Though Spike was the one who had spoken, it was Angel that An locked eyes with. "Let it go. It's fine."

"But-"

"It's fine," An said, swiveling to look at Fideo at last. "We can do it alone." Big words from a little girl still covered in her blood, Lindsey thought. There was still a part of him that wanted to believe it. It was from the small, quiet part of his brain, the one that he had trained himself to ignore, even if he never could make it shut up forever.

"We fight them," Angel told An. His arms were still folded across his chest, the only defensive gesture on an otherwise entirely neutral form. "Don't think that we won't help you in every other way that we can." The pause between those words and Angel's next lasted for so long that it seemed to have no beginning and no end. "But we are never going to fight under that banner again." Angel locked eyes with Lindsey as he said it. Lindsey did not know exactly what message he was supposed to be reading there, except that the glimmers which did manage to come through raised the hair on the back of his neck and caused the beat-beat-beat of war drums to go coursing through his blood once more. By the time he blinked twice Angel had looked away from him and back towards An. "I'm sorry, but there are other forces at work here that you and your bosses cannot understand."

Rods of steel had been slipped into the spines of An, Alexei, and Fideo, turning them into a trio of slighted royals rather than the scared and battered children that should have been in their place. An lifted her chin. "It's your choice," she said in the same tone that Lindsey could attribute to a half-dozen different preachers from his childhood and early adolescence. It was as polite as it could be on the outside, but scratch that surface by so much as a millimeter and the undercoat of, "But you'll burn for it, see if you don't," came shining out bright and bloody from underneath. The frost had returned to An's voice and posture and then spread to the others, making them all seem older than their years. Lindsey thought that he could detect a twinge of disappointment and even sorrow thrown into the mix, though it was gone so quickly that in the end he could not be sure. An raised her hand and waved it around to indicate her own bloodied face. "May we use your facilities to clean ourselves up?" Her attempt at a smile only limped forward by a few paces before falling down flat. "I get the feeling that going out there like this might not be the best idea ever."

"Right that way." Angel lifted his arm to indicate the direction where the bathroom lay, not taking his gaze away from the trio until they had disappeared from sight. He lifted his eyebrows in Spike's direction once they were gone from sight. "Thoughts, opinions, irreverent color commentary?"

"They were puppies," Illyria sniffed. "Weakling. Their influence would be minimal at best, unworthy of our attention." A moment of uncertainty crossed her face as she pronounced the word 'our'.

"They weren't lying, love," Spike said. He gestured back and forth between himself and Angel. "We would know. Even sociopaths can't pull it off without leaving signs."

Illyria lifted her chin and for a moment seemed on the verge of smiling. "They need not be lying," she said. "They that overestimated their own significance were always more amusing than the mere liars, when the battles were done and spoils were divided." Her lips split into a full and decidedly dreamy smile.

"…right." Spike pulled his cigarettes from his pocket and fiddled with them for a moment before shoving one into his mouth and lighting it. The crinkling of the cellophane on the packaging was the loudest sound in the room. "You sure you're doing the right thing here?" he asked Angel, pulling the cigarette from between his lips long enough to allow him to speak. He blew twin streams of smoke from his nostrils.

"Yeah." Angel did not hesitate for more than a second before he spoke. He glanced towards the bathroom for a moment with a line appearing between his eyes, making Lindsey wonder what sort of conversations were taking place beneath the perception of human ears. The mask had fallen back by the time that Angel had turned around again, reminding Lindsey of nothing so much as the weighted-down corporate drone that had greeted him on his triumphant return to Los Angeles some two years before. But then it had been his assignment to straighten Angel's brain space out for him, by force if necessary, kick his ass until his head popped out of it. Even now, when he did not owe his allegiance to anyone that he did not want to give it to and all of his fights with Angel were going to be of the purely extracurricular variety, Lindsey's fingers itched to take Angel by the collar and shake him until something like fire came back into his eyes and lit up the planes of his face, even if it was nothing more than the purely visceral anger of years before. Lindsey took a deep breath, curled his hands into fists, and rested them against the wall behind him as if to hold himself up. His stomach came alive with an abrupt gurgle, reminding him that he had yet to eat anything since his resurrection. The biological drives, at first slow to reassert themselves, were now crashing onto him with greater and greater speed.

"You guys keep any human food around here?" From the briefly startled looks cast his way, Lindsey was willing to bet that the other three had nearly forgotten that he was there. He would have to work on that. "Not that blood isn't the best new fad diet ever, but I'm looking for something a bit more solid."

Angel jerked his head in the direction of the tiny kitchen, a room that Lindsey had had no more than glanced into in passing since his return. It was hard to work up an appetite when the taste of sulphur was still lingering in the back of one's throat, and Lindsey told himself that he did not need to investigate Angel and Spike's blood supply that closely. "There's bread and peanut butter in there. Illyria eats human food sometimes."

"It's sticky," Illyria offered up from the other wall, once more sounding bored with the entire affair.

Lindsey nodded and pushed himself away from the wall, surprising himself when his knees returned to their old habit of wobbling for a second or two before supporting him. 'Thought I was past this, man.' Lindsey waited until his vision had cleared before he headed for the kitchen, knowing without needing to look around that there would be a crimson stain to mark the place on the wall where he had been. One of the consequences of trying to play the hero when one didn't have accelerated healing or powerful patrons on their side.

Angel's hand came down on his shoulder as Lindsey was striding away, and it was the shock more than anything else which brought Lindsey to a halt. When he and Angel were not fighting one another that left a limited pool of other things that they could be doing. "There are no hospitals to run to if that doesn't stop bleeding, and no hole in the wall places nearby," Angel said, his mouth close enough to Lindsey's ear that Lindsey would have been able to feel the heat from his breath if only Angel had been human. "How bad is it?"

Lindsey stepped back so that Angel's hand was forced to leave him. "It'll be all right." He had lived through worse. Hell, he had lived through worse by Angel's own hands. Lindsey was very aware of how empty his words would be if he were to fall on his ass, and he focused very hard on not wobbling as he put one foot in front of the other on his way into the kitchen. After locating the food and a knife, Lindsey had barely made the first sandwich before he was wolfing it down in three quick bites. He lingered more slowly over the second and was just finishing it of when he ambled out of the kitchen again.

The trio had emerged from the bathroom by then, their clothes still splattered with blood mostly their own, but their faces scrubbed shiny and clean. The boys' eyes lit up the second that they saw the food in Lindsey's hands. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder and, as Alexei and Fideo barreled past him, secretly thought that Angel and his merry band would be lucky if there was a scrap of food left in the apartment afterwards. An watched them go with an faintly indulgent expression before she turned back to the conversation that she had been having with Angel. With her face no longer obscured by blood and grime, the green and purple bruise marking up the side of her face was very prominent. Lindsey paused in the doorway and leaned against the frame so that he could finish off the last of his foot and listen in.

"I don't think that you understand," An was saying. "The fact that we look young doesn't mean that we can't take care of ourselves." There was a sulky, pouty quality to her tone that was oddly soothing, as it pulled her out of the realm of the supernatural and back into the land of the teenager. She ruined it a few seconds later by parting her lips into a smile better suited to a reptile than a girl. "There are about three dozen dead demons out there who can stand as proof of that."

Lindsey thought that An was talking to the wrong person if she was looking to impress anyone with the number of heads that she had rolled. Angel looked as if he might even be close to smiling, though Lindsey had serious doubts as to whether it would be a nice one, as he said, "And there are a couple thousand more who would have heard about it by now and would love to make your acquaintance. You think you can take on all of them?" Angel waited a beat before he took An's lip-jutting silence as a negation and went on. "It's dark and you all smell like blood. It would be like throwing a bucket of chum into shark infested waters."

An folded her arms across her chest, pausing to push a few strands of damp hair out of her eyes. "Does this mean that you're offering us a place to stay?"

"For the night," Angel said. "Illyria or Lindsey can get you back safely when the sun rises." Through it all, the dead look never fully exited Angel's eyes. Lindsey thought that it was more than a little ironic that he was using an reanimated corpse as his barometer for liveliness, but a prickle of unease ran up his spine all the same.

"You used to be better than this," An said, undergoing another one of her amazing, mercurial shifts and dropping the sulky teenager routine like she would an unwieldy coat. Lindsey thought that their might even be disappointment in her tone, and if déjà vu didn't stop hitting him about the head with a two by four, he vowed, he was going to hunt it down and kill it.

Angel's expression did not change as he said, "That was a long time ago."

"Guess so." An sniffed, turned on her heel, and stalked away to join the boys in their quest for food. She started to brush against Lindsey as she passed him but jerked away at the last second, before their skins could make contact. Lindsey was starting to wonder if another one of her powers was the ability to detect beginning-stage leprosy. Given where Lindsey had spent the past several months of his…whatever the hell it was that he had now, it wouldn't exactly be surprising, and it would explain a lot.

Lindsey waited until An was gone before he looked back towards Angel and was unsurprised to see that Angel was already looking back at him. Lindsey had spent years trying to read beneath the surface of those eyes with only intermittent success; he supposed it should come as no surprise that he was having about the same amount of luck now. And yet, he couldn't seem to stop himself from trying. "They seem like a great bunch of kids," Lindsey said, settling himself more fully against the doorframe and wincing as his back twinged. Next stop, first aid kit.

"They've been through a lot," Angel said. Blank stare or not, his tone was saying that An's parting words were having a far greater effect on him than Angel himself was willing to admit. Lindsey tilted his head to one side. He was getting more than a little sick of all these impenetrable conversations taking place around him.

"They've been through a lot?" Lindsey echoed, hearing the testiness as it entered his voice and feeling the furrow as it crawled into place between his eyes.

Angel stared at Lindsey for so long that Lindsey was tempted to move up so that he could catch Angel's eyeballs when they inevitably fell out of his head. He could have gone the rest of his life without seeing the return of that look, the one that said that Lindsey had just said something so categorically unbelievable that Angel had to pause and process it before he could even think about going on. Lindsey could feel himself bristling up already. "You don't recognize them?"

Lindsey couldn't keep the snap out of his voice as he said, "That's what I'm saying, isn't it?" He couldn't claim that he was trying all that hard, either. The déjà vu was back, stronger than ever, rapping against his skull nearly hard enough to give him a concussion.

Angel stared at him for a beat longer before he said slowly, in a tone that that unsettled Lindsey all the more because he had no previous reference for it, "They're the kids that we saved six years ago, Lindsey." Lindsey thought that the indecipherable tone might even have been concern, or maybe he was only deluding himself. 'The last time that you tried to go straight,' rested heavy and unspoken on the air between them, just begging for one of them to throw a punch, break the tension, and return to the status quo. Lindsey tasted something thick and sour on the back of his tongue and pushed it down before it could interfere.

"The ones who 'see into the heart of things'," Lindsey said softly, feeling his stomach drop down to the same level as his kneecaps. It was worse than he had thought.

"Yeah." Angel went silent for a moment, though Lindsey could still feel him scrutinizing Lindsey's profile. At long last Angel said, "They've changed a lot since then. Grown up." His tone was…Lindsey thought that it would be a cold day in hell before he would ever call Angel's actions towards him gentle and that was a promise that he would get to keep for a while longer, but there was still something there, some limping, fledgling gesture that might even someday grow up to be respect. He had heard that tone coming form Angel's voice once before, talking about choices on the return journey from a mission in which Angel had been there to save the day and Lindsey had been there only to get answers. And why shouldn't it be turned towards him now? Whether Angel had rejected them in the months since or not, the fact remained that Lindsey had in the recent past been an agent of the Powers That Be. That was not an association that Angel could shake away nearly so easily as he pretended.

Lindsey stared at the wall, avoiding eye contact with Angel and repeating the vampire's words from a few moments before: "That was a long time ago."

End Part Seven