Don't leave a voicemail, seriously.

This was the original idea that spawned the sister story (although you know, Lar, that we have talked about his family over and over). This isn't even a fic, just an idea that sort of tickled me.

Z read over both of these for me. Thank you, sweets. I did you like you normally do me, though.

If I post Xander in the next week, I suppose we'll know that I really am back home again.



Facts aren’t really hard to come by. People like to pretend that information is a hard-won commodity, but Lindsey knows that’s a lot of shit. What’s difficult, and sometimes impossible, to get your hands on is motivation. The what is easy. The why is more slippery than a bucket full of eels.

He’d had a few days to cope with the facts. To digest them enough for the guilt to be sitting up front, ready to take him on and take him down. He bailed out, just like a man, just like a McDonald, and Darla was three times dead. And the third time’s the charm, some of those old clichés are rooted in old knowledge.

He hadn’t left Lynette waiting on him, not this time. Off the plane, into LAX, and he’d made three calls. The first to the car service, the second to Lynette, the third to someone who’s name he’d prefer to never know. The one with the facts. The one who laid it all out in a report that looked at neat and clean as this whole culmination of events very much wasn’t.

The chair under him was hard enough to keep him awake despite the two scotches. He’d chased down two bumps of coke just to be sure, so it might not have mattered if he was ensconced in a tub of cotton batting, really. Having no precents to cull, or if he did unaware of where to look for them, Lindsey bided his time watching the figure on the bed. Watching the slow trickle of blood from the hanging bag flow into the still vein. Waiting for resuscitation.

Technically, he’d never been fired. And you can’t quit Wolfram and Hart. His resources might not be unlimited any longer, but quite number of his IOUs had never been called in, and most of his codewords were still active. That’s when he started to really think it was a trap. The notion was embedded in the very pictures and emotions they’d spurred into wakefulness. What better way to lure him back to certain death than through Angel who was the conduit to Lindsey’s real mover, Darla? Lilah likes her games obvious to the victim.

But even if there were people watching him, even if his progress was definitely monitored, the tap never came. There were no calls, no clever notes or surprise visits. And it only took two psychics, a code-breaker and a lot of money to find Angel. Oh, and the boat and wench.

“Is this real?” The voice was creaky, unused and thin. Lindsey’s focus was less than sharp, because he hadn’t heard a stirring.

“Do you usually hallucinate about me?” He set his glass on the table next to him and drew his chair closer to the side of the hotel bed.

“Is this hell again?” Lindsey laughed at that, laughed at Angel, and there was a dormant, familiar feeling there. Triumph. But it was brittle and fled rapidly.

“Would you say I did my job well?” Angel looked like he wanted to move then. But his body wasn’t responding correctly.

“Where’s Connor?” Lindsey knew that one. He knew a lot of things. Not the important ones, though. Not the ones he’d gone to quite a bit of trouble to discover.

“No, my questions first.” His bracelet rattled slightly as he ran his hands through his hair, and Angel managed to turn his head enough to follow the movements.

“Even if I never killed you it doesn’t mean this time will be the same.” Menace Angel wore like his skin, and Lindsey figured that if this was any other situation, he’d at least have the good grace to be slightly scared.

Instead he leaned his forearms on his legs casually. “Let’s see you try.”

The only sounds in the room for he next few minutes were the hum of the overhead lights, the buzz of the electronic blood diffuser, and Lindsey’s breathing.

“Sedated.” Lindsey wondered if Angel was so loquacious when living.

“I’m not Lilah, all clever puns and no plan.” He scooted his chair back, retrieved the bottle of scotch and the bucket of ice, and settled himself well away from Angel’s line of sight.

“Tell me how she died. The details. What she said. Everything.” Angel had all of Lindsey’s whys, the ones that were ever to be told, and the telling took a while since Angel was working drugged blood through his sluggish system.

In the end, they were at the same wary truce they’d been in when Lindsey had left for Texas, but the whole world was a different place. There wasn’t quite the same tilt to all the possibilities life might hold for Lindsey. He was freer, far freer in a way he didn’t think he would live to see, but that somehow seemed not really such a wonderful thing to be. Free. Some burdens are meant to be carried, to be cherished and even desired.

One of his burdens was gone and explained in its absence, and Lindsey didn’t even have the energy to wonder if she’d loved him at all before the end. Which he thought might be better than having to live with Angel’s new burden, the one Darla’d given him at the sake of her own half-life.