Disclaimer: I don't own Angel. It belongs to the genius Joss Whedon. This is for entertainment purposes only. I make no money, and I mean no harm.

A/N: First off, the thank yous: to –J, YOUPIN, Louvil, angel-cordy, justawritier, and gopie. Second, it's a slightly shorter chapter than the last couple. Sorry!

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Connor wasn't quite sure how he ended up out back in the little courtyard with the Higher Power and a plate of reheated pizza. Cass had just swept him up in a whirlwind of talking and herded him out here. Now she was sitting beside him on the bench in front of the wishing well, munching quietly on her pizza.

She paused about halfway through her first slice and turned to look at him. "So, we got off on the wrong foot."

Connor snorted at the understatement.

"I'm sorry I didn't show up sooner," she continued, looking down at her food instead of at him. "I've had your case for a couple of weeks now, but I just never got around to popping in. God, I feel like an ass for not coming sooner. If I hadn't been dawdling, then maybe…" The Oracle trailed off, her eyes not really seeing the pizza.

Connor picked a clump of sausage off his own slice of pizza and tossed it in the well. "Maybe what?"

"Maybe I could have been there for your parents."

He felt his gut clench and surge of familiar anger well up inside of him, but he tamped it down, forcing himself to swallow his bite of pizza. The spices in the sauce burned his split lip, but he ignored that too. "There wasn't anything you could've done," he said once he was sure he could speak without losing it. He wanted to punch her, to feel her delicate jaw snap under his fist, but he was also sickened by the thought. "They were dead when I got to the house."

Cass set her plate down, the look on her face suggesting that she'd lost her appetite. "Still, I was supposed to be your guide, and I wasn't even here."

"I'm sure you had your reasons." Connor had no idea why he was feeling so sympathetic towards her. Might have something to do with the fact that she'd almost died, just a couple of hours ago. Angel nearly killed her—would have, if Cordy hadn't magically been able to heal her—for him. To protect him. All because Connor had lost his temper because of something that had very little to do with this Oracle and had picked a fight. That was enough to make him lose his appetite as well. "So what does you being my guide mean?"

"I'm supposed to keep you out of trouble," she said, "Not get you into it."

He reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. "Don't beat yourself up about it. I was having a bad day—I provoked you."

She looked up at him, still unsure, but managed a weak smile. "Thanks for trying, Connor. Here you are trying to comfort me, when it's you we're supposed to be focusing on. Like getting you cleared of your parents' murder."

"What?"

Standing up, she pulled a newspaper clipping out of the pocket of her khakis and held it out to him. He took it and unfolded it. 'Los Angeles Family Found Dead in Home; Son Suspected in Killings' it read. Connor suddenly found it very hard to breathe.

"It's from tomorrow's newspaper," the Oracle said, very softly. "I went by the house before I came here—you left shoeprints through the blood and your fingerprints are on the corpses."

His mind was a swirl. "I…I had to check…to see if they were alive. What about the demons? The ones I killed—didn't the cops find them?"

Cass shook her head, making her fiery curls bounce. "There wasn't any sign of demon activity in the house. Not even any strange blood. Are you sure you killed them?"

"Did you see the blood on me when you arrived?" he snapped.

"Oh-kay, point taken. Wolfram & Hart must have come through after you left and cleaned up their mess. Well, enough of it to leave the police with no better suspects than you."

She fell silent for a moment, and they both watched as ants crawled across her plate and onto the remainder of the pizza. Night in LA was never truly dark, thanks to light pollution, but he had a feeling that he still shouldn't be able to see the ants in the shadowy courtyard. Just one more quirk of his bizarre heritage, he supposed. Funny how it didn't seem like such a big deal at the moment, when earlier it was all he could think about. It seemed like his moods had been on a pendulum ever since he'd killed Sahjahn. One moment, he was his regular old self and the next, a violent beast that he only half-remembered.

Cass broke the silence first. "Step one, I guess, will be to clear your name. From there, we can figure out what else to do with your life."

"How do you plan to do that?"

She smiled, still looking down, and it wasn't a pleasant sort of smile. "I just might know a lawyer who can help us."