Part Sixteen
The woman that Angel brought him to was not nearly so creepy as she had been painted. She was small and compact, with short, curly hair that had been clipped back into a bun that morning but had long since begun to escape into energetic rings around her face. She reminded Lindsey of many of the English teachers that he had had throughout high school, and the traces of blood still trapped beneath her nails did nothing to dispel the image.
The metal table that Lindsey was resting on was cold enough to send riots of gooseflesh racing along his skin, while the multiple kerosene lamps that his makeshift doctor worked by cast eerie, twisting patterns on the walls and ceiling. Lindsey focused as much of his attention as he was able upon the dancing shadows in order to distract himself from the rhythmic dip and pinch of the needle entering his flesh, clenching his teeth until his jaws creaked. As far as pain went, he could still compare it to the many others that he had lived through and find it greatly wanting. He would pretend that that did not say something sobering about his life in general.
"You'll have to hold more still than that," the English teacher turned butcher turned amateur surgeon-though she had told him before beginning that she also answered to Madeline-said without taking her eyes from her task. Her words were muffled by the fact that she was speaking around several needles held between her teeth. Each one had been bent into a curved shape so that it resembled a fishhook. Morbid imagery or not, Lindsey was glad that the instruments themselves had come from a hospital even if the stand-in doctor had not. Every few minutes, Madeline would pause in her stitching long enough to pull one of the needles from her mouth, douse both it and her hands liberally with rubbing alcohol, and begin again with scarcely a hitch in stride.
"Are you sure that you should be holding those in your mouth?" Lindsey asked, the first time that he watched her do it.
"Can't afford to lose the needles," Madeline answered crisply, raising her head to flash him a smile from which a needle jutted every few inches. "I'm not going to give you anything."
Back in the present, Lindsey flinched as the needle seemed to go directly through a nerve and was given a curl-framed glare as his punishment. "I know, I know, hold still," he said. "I'm trying."
"My old clients were not nearly so much trouble," Madeline said, adopting for a moment a look of irrepressible nostalgia. Lindsey had the feeling that, had he only been dead, Madeline would have been adopting him as her newest grandson. He wondered if that could explain why she seemed to like Angel so much. He tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and cursed his own lamentable sobriety.
"He's lost a goodish amount of blood," Lindsey heard Madeline speaking over him, presumably to Angel.
Angel, standing silent guard in the corner, confirmed Lindsey's assumption by replying in a low voice, "He's used to it."
Madeline also had the sharp, piercing stare of an English teacher. Lindsey could feel it prickling along his skin as she looked him over, raising knots of gooseflesh that even the chill of the room had not been able to accomplish. Lindsey shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "What am I going to do? He speaks the truth," and did not bother to open his eyes.
A moment later, Madeline went on, "Not enough to be life-threatening, or I would not be so calm-" Anyone with the presence of mind to turn an apocalypse into a novel career change had to be possessed of nerves that would make an army general proud. "But goodish all the same. He won't be useful for any fighting for at least a few days, and these stitches'll pop right out if he does anything too pulse-raising." Lindsey would be more offended at being spoken about as if he was not there if it wasn't also the truth. Madeline finished her work with one final jab and patted at Lindsey's knee in apology when he muttered an oath beneath his breath.
"Hopefully if won't come to that," Angel said, though he sounded doubtful. 'Hopefully' probably wasn't a word that he had used without irony in quite some time. Lindsey opened his eyes to discover that he was not the only one viewing Angel with a dubious expression.
"The portal is really closed?" Madeline asked. Her voice became less muffled with each word as she pulled the needles from her mouth and set them carefully into a dish placed off to one side. Lindsey sat up, wincing as the skin in his thigh pulled, and caught the pair of jeans that Madeline threw at him. "Don't put those on yet," she cautioned. "The stitches will drive you crazy if we don't get a bandage over them first." Lindsey sighed and laid the jeans to the side, resigning himself to being nearly nude for a while longer. At least this time he had boxers.
Angel nodded in response to Madeline's question, but his eyes maintained the hooded, closed-in expression that he had brought to perfection. "Yeah, it's closed." He looked past Madeline to lock eyes with Lindsey. Lindsey wasn't sure what he was supposed to be seeing there or what Angel wanted him to do in return, except that a long moment stretched by in which neither one of them was willing to be the first to look away.
Madeline pressed her lips into a line so thin that they appeared to have fallen off of her face. The rest of her face remained steady and calm; it was her hands, still stained to the wrists with streaks of Lindsey's blood, that betrayed her by clenching and unclenching themselves into an endless series of fists. She was trembling, so slightly that it was only detectable by watching the movements of the curls around her face. "Then why doesn't the city feel any different?" Madeline demanded. "If it's all over now, then why does everything still feel like it's waiting?" Madeline's calm reached its breaking point at long last and then shot past it, driving a shrill note into her voice. She paused, breathing harder, and stared at Angel with a look that demanded he give her an explanation.
Angel looked at Lindsey. Lindsey did not know why he kept doing this or what answers he could possibly be expecting Lindsey to give when he was not even sure what the question was. His puzzlement must have shown on his face, for within the time it took for him to blink Angel had turned back to Madeline.
"I don't know," Angel told Madeline at last, using a tone so gentle that Lindsey at first had trouble believing it. "But we will find out." A certainty had come into Angel's voice that Lindsey had not heard since he came back. Maybe, if he listened hard, he could believe that it was the beginnings of fire. Lindsey felt a quick surge of triumph, his defiant words to Lilah forgotten. If he was willing to be perfectly honest with himself, then that fire had been gone long before Lindsey had died, and his stay in hell had turned him into a creature that craved the heat.
In the moment of silence that followed Angel's words, Lindsey began to feel a whisper of the same sense of waiting that had been wreaking havoc on Madeline's nerves, as if the universe had transformed itself into an amphitheater and the audience was still waiting for the curtain to go up. He sat up a big straighter, cocked his head to one side, and stared at Angel hard. "I promise," Angel finished. The invisible audience sighed and shivered as one.
Madeline let out a breath that she had likely not realized that she was holding, just as Lindsey had not realized that he was holding his own. She nodded. "All right." Madeline looked towards Lindsey again with that eagle-eyed stare that almost made him smell the chalk. "Don't go anywhere." Lindsey stuck out his newly-stitched leg and raised his eyebrows in incredulous inquiry. He received a smile and another pat on the knee. "I'll be back with the bandages." She left, taking one of the lamps with her. The shadows leapt into new shapes to accommodate the loss.
Angel's face was transformed into radiant ripples of light and dark by the movement of the flames. The gleaming coffee-black of his eyes was the only part of his face that did not twist and change. They followed Lindsey's movements with a returning shadow of their old intensity, making Lindsey feel that even if he were on the other side of the city those eyes would still be able to pin him to the nearest wall. Under the power of that stare Lindsey thought that he could be forgiven for not noticing at first that the beginnings of concern and even a flash of respect. "You still smell like brimstone."
"How can you even tell? The whole city reeks of it." Lindsey scratched at the dried blood on his leg and came away with rusty flakes buried beneath his nails. His head continued to insist that vertical was not the smart way to go, making Lindsey hope that Angel did not ask him too many complicated questions in the meanwhile. In his impaired state, there was no telling what the right one would provoke him to say.
Angel snorted so softly that Lindsey would not have noticed if not for the miniscule movement of Angel's shoulders. He could still pick out the smallest twitch that Angel made in any room that they both happened to be in. Lindsey supposed that he should be glad that he had emerged from his mess with his priorities intact. "That bothers me."
"That I smell like brimstone, or that the city still does?" Lindsey was hanging his head between his shoulder-blades in an effort to discourage it from throbbing, so distracted that he almost missed Angel's swiftly muttered, "Both." Snapping his head up was a mistake; by the time that Lindsey's vision cleared, any betraying expression that might have moved across Angel's face was long gone.
"That soul eater wasn't just killed. It was burst out of, like that…" Angel paused and made a hesitant gesture with his hand, as if he were searching for a word. "Movie about the aliens."
"That would be 'Alien'." Lindsey was too tired and dizzy to give the sentence the full sarcasm that it deserved, but he still appreciated the glare that he retrieved for his trouble. "And you're not far off. That thing…" Lindsey could neither suppress his shudder nor ignore the way that Angel's eyes moved to catalogue every move. "I didn't win that fight."
"What happened to the sensory deprivation plan?" Angel's voice was soft. If Lindsey's blood loss had been affecting him just a bit more, he might even have said that they were having a moment. It was both too much like the way that things had been before and not similar enough, and the air was beginning to hum.
Angel's eyebrows lifted. Lindsey jolted back as he realized that Angel was still waiting for an answer. The best that he could do was lift his shoulders into a shrug. "An did something," Lindsey said, deciding that now was not the best time to mention that yet another attempt had been made to barter with him for the contents of his soul. Angel had too many thoughts on that subject as it was. Lindsey made a soft sound of incredulity and jerked his chin in the direction of the window, where shouts echoed and flashlight beams danced and crisscrossed each other. He thought that the yells still sounded uncertain and subdued, as if everyone in the city was still awaiting the final chapter before they began to celebrate in earnest. From so far away that for a few seconds Lindsey thought he was imagining it, a helicopter could be heard. He finished softly, "It looks as though An did a lot of somethings, doesn't it?"
Angel followed the direction of Lindsey's stare out the window, his face hardening for a moment into the same expression of steel that Lindsey knew well, as it usually ended with blood being shed and body parts being separated from their rightful owners. Seeing it from a position where it was not directed towards him was a novel change of pace. "Yeah," Angel muttered. "Especially when you compare it to what she was able to do before." He looked back towards Lindsey. "But we both know something about making deals with the devil, don't we?"
Before Lindsey could reply, Madeline came hustling back into the room with a stack of bandages in her hands. She paused for a moment in the doorway to scent the room's new tension and give both Angel and Lindsey speculative looks before she came forward. "A few more minutes and you'll be ready to go," Madeline said, sinking into a crouch with a spryness that a woman half her age would have envied and unwinding a roll of gauze around Lindsey's thigh. The chaos of curls wobbled and bobbed as she dipped her head in order to better view her work, obscuring the largest part of her expression from view. Lindsey waited with scarcely veiled impatience until she was done, as the room was not getting any warmer, and then grabbed for his jeans. As Lindsey was pulling them back over his legs, Madeline turned back towards Angel. "Getting on towards dawn."
Angel glanced out the window once more, this time with a more relaxed look on his face. "There's still plenty of time. We won't be going far."
Madeline looked as if she still would have liked to issue an argument or admonishment before she snapped her mouth shut with an audible clicking sound. The look that she shot Lindsey afterwards was heavy with messages even though Madeline herself remained silent. Lindsey nodded and lifted one hand slightly: 'Message received, we'll be careful.' Madeline relaxed and went about gathering up the rest of her supplies. Lindsey wondered if Angel managed to keep up the pretense of a lone hero in spite of how many people cared for him, or if he honestly did not know.
"Ready?" Angel asked as Lindsey was pulling on his shoes.
"Yes." Lindsey hopped down from the table and pulled his lips back from his teeth immediately as all of the muscles in his injured leg seemed to contract as one motion. The world around him began to sway in a manner that was hard enough in its intensity and went on for long enough to make Lindsey wonder why his blood had not yet found a more efficient way of replenishing itself, as he seemed to spend so much of his life losing it. He held out his hand to ward off the designated white knight in the room as his vision cleared. "I don't need any help."
Said white knight had not moved from his position by the window and was watching with Angel's own form of badly concealed amusement. Lindsey had seen it often enough that he could still recognize it at a glance, even with those strange curlings of concern that kept taking his center of balance away and moving it to a new location. Knowing that some things would remain the same no matter how badly the world spun off its axis with a bizarre sense of comfort. "I wasn't going to offer it."
Lindsey tested his leg, easing his weight back upon it gradually until it agreed to take him on a grudging provisional basis. "You're all heart, has anyone ever told you that?" He limped towards the door and could feel Angel following closely behind him.
"The subject has come up." The words curled out from a place almost directly behind Angel's ear, and he had the feeling that even if he were to fall he would not hit the ground.
Spike was sitting on the curb outside of the hole in the wall-nearly literal-which served as Madeline's base of operation when Angel and Lindsey exited, made visible by the glint of the reappearing starlight on his hair and the cherry-red glow of his cigarette. He quirked his eyebrows in greeting, but said nothing immediately. His fingers clenched the cigarette with such force that it was a wonder he didn't snap it in half, while his eyes roamed over the humans as they celebrated in the same place where demons had cavorted hours before. The sounds of the helicopter had come back, louder than ever, and Lindsey wondered what this meant for all of the little backroom deals that they had struck. He noticed that Angel had also tilted his head to listen to the sound with a speculative expression.
The pattern of Spike's eyes as they moved across the crowd was restless, unceasing. Lindsey knew without needing to ask that the figure Spike was searching for came with a killer set of legs and a skin tone that Revlon did not know how to cope with. He was not one for platitudes and knew that Spike would not mind liberating him of what blood he had left if he tried, so he coped with the lingering voice telling him that he should give it a shot all the same by moving his weight back over to his good leg and muttering a series of soft obscenities beneath his breath.
Spike paused to gauge how close his cigarette was to burning his fingers and lit a second with the embers of the first before he rose to his feet. He didn't bother stomping it out after dropping into the gutter, so that it found the debris there and made a few feeble attempts at rising into flame before giving up altogether. Spike never even glanced down, keeping his eyes moving over the crowd as if he expected Illyria to come bounding out like a blue-tinted and bad-tempered puppy at any moment. He said to Angel, "Look at them. Give them two hours and it's like the last year and a half didn't exist."
Angel's expression remained as placid and blank as he watched the same scene. "Scar tissue. It makes the world go around." A touch of the fire came back, refusing to die out as the cigarette had done, so that Lindsey wanted to step closer to him again.
Spike rolled his eyes and flicked ash from the end of his cigarette. "That's deep." He gave Lindsey an once-over. "Surprised not to see you dancing a jig in the middle of them."
"Not one for dancing." To emphasize his point, Lindsey tried to rest more weight onto his bad leg, only to wince and immediately take it off again. "I'm surprised to see this much pessimism, though. This is what you guys have been working for, isn't it? Why aren't you off playing the conquering heroes and getting decorated with laurel leaves?"
"We weren't the ones who ended this," Angel said quietly. Meanwhile, Spike stared at Lindsey as if he was the stupidest life form that he had ever wandered across. He and Illyria were already beginning to resemble each other. Lindsey was sure that they would make a great couple.
"You see any demons out there on that street?" Spike asked Lindsey in a low, hard voice, leaning so close that the tip of his cigarette was only a few inches away from Lindsey's face.
Lindsey narrowed his eyes and refused to lean back from the radiating heat. "They know that they're beaten," he said. "They're trying to cut their losses."
"You're still thinking like a lawyer," Spike said. "Stop doing that." Lindsey rolled his eyes. "Shake off all of that training that Wolfram and Hart put into you all of those years ago so that they could get their obedient little drone."
Lindsey abruptly traded in rolling his eyes for narrowing them into slits so small that it was a wonder he could still see.
"Think instead like someone with their back pressed so closely against that wall that they can feel the brick rubbing through their shirt. You were closer to it last year than you think." Spike took Lindsey's sudden flinch as one of anger rather than apprehension, and that suited Lindsey just fine. "Under those circumstances, what would you do? Would you hide in the shadows and tell yourself that you were only cutting your losses so that you could live to fight another day? Or would you be right out there in the middle doing as much damage as you possibly could before the guillotine came crashing down?"
Lindsey looked over the growing crowd. As Spike's words echoed away, the people seemed more to be operating under the false cheer of a last supper than a mood of real celebration. "The demons know that it's not over."
"They aren't the only ones," Spike finished, shuddering as if his mood was something physical that could be thrown off. While he looked towards Angel, Angel continued to stare back in his best impression of a wall, and the twitch of annoyance that ran through Spike's shoulders said that he liked this state of affairs about as much as Lindsey did.
Lindsey flicked Angel an irritated glance right along with Spike, his happiness at seeing that there was still something of fire beneath Angel's façade being overshadowed by his desire that it would come to life faster already. The whole gig had been far easier when all that had been required of him was that he punch the right buttons on the big panel of Insta-Hatred to get Angel moving. When Angel was pushing past tolerance where Lindsey was concerned and into something that was nearly friendly, the whole mess became much more complicated. He had been released from his fealty to the Powers That Be from the moment that they had failed to come through on their end, he had openly spit upon taking up his old contract with Wolfram and Hart, so he should owe no one anything. Lindsey still felt no urge to start taking himself out of the city as fast as he could, and he paused so that he could spend several seconds cursing himself for being a fool.
"The whole city's waiting," Spike added when Angel did not answer immediately, finishing his second cigarette and looking annoyed when he could not immediately locate a third.
"We'll figure it out," Angel said at long last, looking tired but once again more alive than Lindsey could remember seeing him in quite some time. "We'll find An, we'll find Illyria, and we'll save the day." Angel glanced towards horizon and grimaced. "Or we'll save the night. Getting short on time." To Lindsey, he said, "Can you walk back, or am I going to wind up carrying you?"
Lindsey thought over that question and decided that the best answer that came back was, "Maybe." Contemplating the other option for too long was apt to send blood into places where he could not afford to spare it at the moment. "I think I can manage," he said dryly, for a moment thinking that he could smell the smoke and brimstone that seemed to concern both Angel and Spike so much before deciding that he was imagining things. With such great portions of the city still in a continuous blaze, he would be unsurprised to learn that smoke had been ground all the way into the brick and the earth, and a little extra brimstone was not much when stacked against all of that.
"Yeah, Angel's been all touchy-feely like that lately-" Spike broke off suddenly, snapping his head around in the direction of the apartment building. He was closely mirrored by Angel repeating the gesture on Lindsey's other side. They were right, Lindsey realized as he doubled over without warning, it had been brimstone. The wave of it was so sudden and overpowering that Lindsey wondered how he could have missed it.
"Catch up as fast as you can!" Angel snapped at Lindsey. He scarcely waited for Lindsey to nod his acknowledgement before he and Spike went tearing off down the street, their dusters fluttering in sync too perfectly to have gone unrehearsed. The people on the street barely paused to note their movements or the new scent on the air, so used where they to chaos and death that a small return to the status quo seemed like a small price to pay.
Never let it be said that Lindsey had been one to be satisfied with the status quo. He broke into the fastest run that he was capable of, wincing as a few of the newly placed stitches pulled and blood began to trickle down his leg. He was unharassed in spite of the fact that he still reeked of blood, which to Lindsey's mind was a far more ominous sign than the sulphur that was now almost as familiar to him as the sound of his own heartbeat. More so.
Within blocks of nearing the apartment building, Lindsey realized that he would need no streetlights to guide him the rest of the way. The glow of the sky was more than enough, and he knew that the period of waiting had come to an end.
End Part Sixteen