Title: A Slight Change of Plan, an Angel/Lindsey story
Author: Brenda Antrim
Email: bren@bantrim.net
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended.
Spoilers: For To Shansu in L.A. with significant alternate universe elements (no paw lopping, people die, choose your own ending). Caveat lector - Reader beware!
Author's Notes: Direct sequel to His Place in the World. With thanks to Kevin R., the direct inspiration for Plan B.

Finding the Oracles slaughtered had been unnerving, even for him. Being a vampire with a soul, an abomination to his own kind, engaged in a quixotic quest for redemption, he'd seen some doozies. Talking with the Spirit of the female Oracle had pretty well topped the list.

Angel knew what he had to do to save his friends, his surrogate family. He tracked his prey to its lair, interrupted a Ritual in progress, and proceeded to play Obi-Wan Kenobi with the Beast in the role of Darth Maul. Somewhere behind him as he kicked and slashed, ducked and parried, a wind kicked up. He was vaguely aware of Lindsey McDonald's voice snarling Latin, and screaming at the goblins to "say it!", when he kicked the Beast into the middle of the Acolytes and left Lindsey to raise hell all on his own.

He was disappointed, but he had no doubts the lawyer could do it.

Flinging himself out of the way of the scythe the Beast swung like a baseball bat, Angel crashed into a group of humans dragging a big wooden box by chains. The humans went over like bowling pins and he grabbed the chains, swinging them up and over to catch the scythe on its downward swing and divert it into the side of the box. He had a brief impression of movement, the echo of a feral howl, and something dove from the box, landing on one of the fallen humans. He didn't have time to check, although the howl sounded oddly familiar.

The haft of the scythe caught him across the top of his right shoulder, numbing his arm down to his fingertips, and the pain combined with an adrenaline rush brought his demon to the fore. Angelus screamed out, left hand curving around the top of the blade where it attached to the handle, and with a vicious sideways yank he buried the tip of the curving blade dead center in the Beast's chest. The metal slid through bone and flesh like they were water, and the body cavity flowered open. The stench nearly knocked him over, and maggots boiled out of the eviscerated torso. The shock jolted him back into human form, and he tumbled over sideways to avoid the mass of the now-dead Beast as its corpse toppled forward.

Panting from exertion, Angel shook his head to clear it, clenching and relaxing his right hand, trying to regain use as soon as possible. Braced for a further fight, he rolled to his feet and crouched, ready for an attack from any quarter. Eyes gold-tinged, nostrils flared, mouth slightly open, he rocked on the balls of his feet and growled out warning.

No attack came.

The humans in the room were either dead, clawing at the door to get out, or unconscious. A smell he recognized caught his attention and he pivoted, looking for the source. Terror. Lindsey's terror, to be specific. A sound like a scream trapped behind clenched teeth accompanied the scent. Scanning the trail of corpses, he saw a slight, fair-skinned female vampire land on Lindsey, bearing him to the ground as the mortal was reaching out for the Scroll.

Ah, good. Two birds, one stake.

Launching himself forward, Angel triggered the sheath along his left forearm and threw himself at the female. In one fluid move, he staked the vampire from behind, dusting her with a spare inch between the sharpened end of the stake and Lindsey's breastbone, and scooped up the Scroll with his right hand, thankful he had enough strength left to grip it. As the female disintegrated he felt a tearing sensation in his own chest, and Angelus shook inside him, nearly breaking Angel's iron control.

"Darla!" he screamed, unable to hold it back. The loss of his sire, twice, by his own hand, scorched him, and he found himself curled over the remains of her dust, scattered over Lindsey's startled face. For an instant, he howled, a short, uncontrollable burst of grief, then he pulled himself off Lindsey and ran shakily for the door. An older man got in his way, and he threw the unfortunate human halfway across the room in his urgency to escape.

He had the Scroll.

No one need know the price he had paid to get it.

Except, perhaps, Lindsey. Who knew what he'd seen in Angel's eyes?

Ignoring the thought, he made his way to the hospital. He had to get the Scroll to Wesley. Had to heal Cordy. Had to figure out what to do next. Had to forget Darla.

Again.

Lindsey held the torn remains of his jacket against the wound along his collarbone, trying to staunch the blood flow, thankful Darla hadn't taken him down at just the right angle to rip his throat out. At least some of his fabled luck was still intact. Not that he'd had much since Angel had shown up on the scene.

He was gonna kill that son of a bitch. He didn't know how, or when. But that was the plan. He was going to find a way to permanently kill that undead do-gooding son of a bitch. He resolutely ignored the fact that the last time he'd taken that particular vow he'd ended up sleeping with the undead do-gooding son of a bitch instead.

Staring across the room to where Holland was shakily getting up with the help of two surviving clerks, he made a rapid reassessment of the state of his luck. Perhaps he'd've been better off if she had been able to kill him. After this latest interference by Angel, death would be a bonus compared to what the senior partners could do to him.

Taking a deep breath, a little light headed from blood loss and feeling gritty from the Darla-dust scattered all over him, he pushed himself to his feet and went to meet his fate. Holland was looking pretty pale himself.

More than a little pissed off, too.

"I'm sorry, Holland," he got out before his mentor could begin to castigate him. It wasn't his fault, necessarily. Although he'd gotten a weird feeling as they'd left the Firm, and he probably should have said something at the time. But he hadn't known it was Angel. And he surely hadn't known the crusader would crash the party and fuck up the Raising.

Had he?

Putting that thought away, to take out and examine at a less dangerous time, he held out a hand to help steady Holland. The older man glared at him.

"My office, nine a.m." Holland ignored the hand and turned, with some difficulty, to walk away. Lindsey knew better than to offer again. "Go get yourself patched up," Holland threw over his shoulder. "You're going to need your strength."

Lindsey swallowed dryly. That wasn't encouraging. Although he hadn't been killed immediately, which was encouraging. A delicate pat to his unmangled shoulder by Lilah, and he nodded shortly. Wrong move. The world spun, and everything went black.

When the lights came back on again he was in the in-house infirmary at the Firm. Doctor Preston was taping gauze over his shoulder and onto his chest, and he felt pleasantly numb. An ache in the back of his right hand drew his eye, and he saw the nurse remove a canula, attached to a tube from a now-empty bag of blood.

"How many pints?" he asked, mildly annoyed at the weakness in his voice.

"Three units," the doctor answered, no surprise anywhere to be seen on him. Then again, triage after a demon sortie wasn't an unusual occurrence at Wolfram and Hart.

"How many casualties?" Not that he cared, particularly, but one of the clerks Darla had eaten had been assigned to him, and the man hadn't been as stone stupid as most of the underlings he got stuck with. Now he had to break in a new one.

If he wasn't too busy being broken, himself, of course. The thought distracted him, and he muttered a token, "Hm," when the doctor gave him the stats. Only five down, not bad for a Ritual as badly botched as this one had been. He went to rise, and the doctor pressed him back down again.

"You're not going anywhere. Overnight stay, so we can keep an eye on you."

Unspoken, but understood by everyone in the room, was the rider "so you can't run." Lindsey sighed. An understandable precaution, given his previous behavior in the Brewer case. But it didn't help the fact that he hated hospital beds. He'd be in no shape to face whatever Holland and the senior partners were going to throw at him in the morning if he got no sleep all night. Briefly, he considered asking for a sleeping pill, then decided against it. After all, there was no way on God's green earth he was going to walk out of the Firm a second time. If he was going to live through the next twenty four hours, he had to have a plan.

He had all night to think of one.

It was a very long night, or so he thought until it was over.

Morning came too damned early.

Night passed too quickly. He'd thanked Gunn sincerely, and sent the young man home with his men and women to get some rest. Cordelia was coherent again, exhausted and distraught but no longer locked in her own mental hell. Wesley was recovering nicely, bouncing back with a resilience that surprised Angel. He left them in hospital, admonishing them to listen to their doctors and get some rest, then trailed home through the tunnels as dawn was breaking over the city.

It had been a hell of a night, in a series of hellish nights. As he collapsed onto his bed and stared up at the ceiling, he finally allowed himself to remember the details of the fight. The scythe, the cyclone wind, Lindsey's chanting, the dead humans sacrificed to Wolfram and Hart's schemes, the maggots pouring from the belly of the Beast.

Darla.

Slaying his sire ... again. Feeling the beginning of the bond, wrenched apart, stillborn by his own hand. The shock on Lindsey's face. The pain contorting his own. The silken feel of the dust of his progenitor coating his hand, his face, settling into the creases of his clothing. The heat of Lindsey's body burning into his own. The smell of his terror. The scent of his blood.

Dimly, he could feel Angelus raging. If the demon escaped, truly escaped, there would be Hell on Earth for those who had done this, had brought her forth only to cause him to kill her again.

Twice damned.

He rolled over onto his side, eyes staring blindly, lost in sense-memory. Ireland, Poland, Romania, death and life and joy and no regret in any of it, until it was over. Doomed to live in memory for as long as he remained, doomed to repeat if ever he escaped that memory.

Doomed to love the people he could never have, should never want.

Thrice damned.

Settling into his memories, he gathered the darkness around him and let himself sink. It was better to remember the past than to think of the future. His future was the present, fighting to redeem the unredeemable, save the lost.

Always damned.

Lindsey sat in a comfortable leather chair at the end of a long table in a conference room he'd never seen before. He never wanted to see it again, either. He was the only one in the room.

The walls moved.

More precisely, they writhed. Barely seen at the edge of his field of vision, never directly, they bled, too. It was unnerving. He'd seen a lot of things, participated in quite a few of them, and he'd washed blood from his hands up to his elbows. But he'd never been the center of the vast malevolence he served. It made him feel powerless.

Something he'd vowed never to be.

It also made him feel like a loser. Something else he'd vowed never to be. The thought stiffened his spine, and kick-started his brain. There'd been the outline of a plan teasing at his mind all night, and it was starting to gel. If he could just keep the sheer gut-liquefying terror suppressed long enough to finalize it, he just might have figured a way out of this mess.

Then the walls started to talk.

The sound reverberated inside his head, seeming to surround him, coming at him from all sides at once. His skin crawled and his stomach turned over. His brain felt like it was on fire. His fists clenched and he arched in the chair, holding on to the bare essentials of his composure with everything he had in him. He wouldn't scream. He wouldn't cry. He sure as hell wouldn't wet his pants, no matter how much he felt like he had to.

The cacophony finally muted from the anguished screams of anger and pain to a single trumpeting call, singeing his nerve endings. There were no words, but he understood every emotion plainly. He was a failure. A disappointment. He'd shown promise, but he'd not fulfilled that promise. He'd obtained a shadow, and that shadow had overturned Prophesy. They required a sacrifice.

He would be it. Pain so sublime it would be bliss before he melted like slag under the onslaught. An object lesson of the fruits of failure.

The plan came together with a near audible snap in his mind.

"Bliss!" he yelled. The sounds in his head stilled. The walls froze.

As the pressure began to build again, he clutched at his skull with both hands, physically trying to retain enough mental ability to make them understand. "I can turn him! Angel is our -- my -- nemesis. Angelus would be our strength!"

The walls moved again, and he read a question in the sibilance swelling around him. He licked lips so dry they were cracking, and struggled to make sense.

"Angel can be destroyed by reclaiming Angelus. Angelus can be reclaimed by providing Angel with perfect bliss." The pressure subsided just enough for him to take a deep breath, and when he continued, his voice was calmer. More certain. This would work. It had to work. It was his only chance. "His file shows that he's drawn to lost causes. He saved Faith, the rogue slayer." He winced at the small surge of anger all around him, and hurried on. "He thinks he can save me, thinks he can redeem me. I can play into that. Seduce him." He took another deep breath, and consciously allowed himself to remember sex with Angel, knowing they were reading his mind. "There's an attraction there. I can work with that. Make him fall in love with me. Give him that perfect moment, and destroy his soul."

An image came into his mind then, of Angelus tearing him into bloody pieces.

"I'm willing to risk it." What was the alternative, after all? "Angelus would be an asset to Wolfram and Hart, as much of an asset as Angel is a liability."

The noise swept around him again, high pitched chittering piercing his brain, and this time he couldn't keep the cry of pain back behind his teeth. He curled up into a fetal ball in the chair, knees up to his chest, arms wrapped protectively around his head. Fighting not to whimper, he focused completely on Angel, on revenge, on sex, on anything but the urge to run far and fast.

He wouldn't get ten feet, and he knew it.

An eternity and a near-migraine later, swaying on his feet from the sleepless night, aftermath of the battle and close encounter with the senior partners, Lindsey found himself in his office. He had no memory of getting there. Slumping into his chair, he stared dazedly at his daytimer. The pages rustled with an invisible breeze, and he gulped. The book flipped open to Friday, and a word appeared on the page.

"Bliss."

So much for killing. He'd painted himself into a corner, so there was going to have to be a slight change in the plan. There were no other options, not if he wanted to keep breathing. He didn't know how much time they'd give him, but he had his orders. Swiveling around in his chair, he stared out over the city and wondered how in the hell he was going to pull it off.




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