Title: His Place in the World, an Angel story from Lindsey's perspective
Author: Brenda Antrim
Email: bren@bantrim.net
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended.
Spoilers: For the episode Blind Date

Thankfully, Angel was much better at it than he was, since Lindsey found himself tossed around like Raggedy Andy, and about as much help in the fight. At one point he realized he was flying through the air upside down, and he crashed into the wall only to have a couple hundred pounds of randomly flailing vampire tossed down on top of him. He took a huge gulp of air, trying to drag breath into badly bruised lungs, and realized several things at once.

His face was buried under Angel's chin. Angel smelled good.

Angel's arms were holding him against the wall, strictly by accident, and in a futile attempt to keep his weight off Lindsey. Those arms were rock solid. He didn't particularly mind the weight.

He had the gut-deep feeling he had thrown everything away for nothing. She was going to win. They were going to die. The kids were going to die. He was harder than he'd ever been. He wanted her to be dead. He wanted Angel to go on holding him.

Happily for what little was left of his sanity, Angel rebounded back into the attack and took his body away from Lindsey's before they both discovered things about him he'd just as soon neither knew. Then the vampire found a way to kill Brewer with her own sharpened white cane. Lindsey pulled himself over to the children and did something he hadn't done since he was ten.

He reached out and gathered them up in an embrace. He put his body between theirs and the threat before them. They held onto him and he held back. He was muttering something, "It's alright, you're alright," his tongue slick with his own blood, his head ringing, his arms quivering.

Then Angel gathered them all up and shooed them out to the car. When the children were safely in the back seat, he headed shakily for the driver's seat. A strong hand wrapped around his biceps and brought him to a halt, nearly pulling him off his feet at the same time. He looked up, blearily.

"What?" he tried to ask. The word didn't make it out of his throat. A shadow blocked out the moon, a big body moved faster than anything that large had a right to, and he was held again, up against the car. He closed his eyes as Angel kissed him, tongue flicking out to lick the blood from his lips. He started to shake even harder. Guessed he hadn't been quite fast enough to hide it. Didn't know whether to laugh, cry or throw up. Didn't have the chance to do anything but breathe through his nose and stare, wide-eyed, as Angel backed away and stared down at him.

"I'll drive," was all the vampire said. Then he opened the back door, shoved Lindsey in with the kids, and they took off. The children moved closer to him, moths to the flame, and held onto him tightly all the way to their mentor's safe house.

They didn't let go of him until their mentor called out, then they flew away like startled birds. He watched them go, then slipped away himself. As he slid into his car he looked back.

Angel was watching him.

In the little bit of light casting shadows across the vampire's face, Lindsey saw the tip of his tongue come out and lick at the full bottom lip. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew that Angel was tasting him. His blood. His mouth.

He was hard all during the short, fast drive back to Angel Investigations. He downloaded a few select files with machine-like efficiency onto a zip disk then stashed it in a stamped padded envelope and addressed it to the post office box he rented under an assumed name in Calabasas and shuffled it in with the out-going mail. Then he gathered the original disks up and, mind racing with possibilities, headed back to the Firm.

Thoughts were chasing themselves in his head. If he'd had the brain God gave a goat he'd get the hell out of town and mail the disks back instead of heading bare-naked back into the lion's den. But he couldn't leave. He'd known Holland for fourteen years. He really hadn't wanted to betray him, had hated lying to him.

Hadn't had a choice.

He had to talk to Holland. He didn't have the faintest idea what the hell he was going to say. Had even less idea what he was going to hear. There were other things to consider, now. The fallout from his actions in helping save the kids, in going over to the enemy for the rescue operation. Whether there ever was any such thing as 'getting out' from an organization like Wolfram and Hart. Whether he'd ever actually be safe if he did.

Just what Angel had meant when he'd kissed him.

Shaking the last thought off, Lindsey sat in the car and called on every lesson he'd ever learned in a lifetime of putting up a good front. By the time he stood in the doorway of Holland's office, it was as solid as he could make it.

The boxes took him aback.

Holland shifted, his head going up much as if he scented Lindsey on the air before anything was said. Lindsey swallowed, moistened his throat, and spoke his mentor's name.

The following conversation was yet another surreal note in an utterly unreal week. He wasn't killed on the spot. He wasn't threatened, or rounded up and given to the demons as a snack, fresh people-kibble. He wasn't even tossed out on his ass.

He was offered a promotion.

Was that what bucking the trend got a guy? It didn't make any sense.

Holland told him again to think about his place in the world, to look deep into himself and make a decision about where he belonged. Then Holland walked out the door and left it open behind him. If Lindsey stayed it would be his choice, his acknowledgement that his place was with Wolfram and Hart. Where the power was.

Lindsey leaned against the desk, staring at the lighted hallway behind it. Part of him was sure there was a guard waiting to blow the top of his skull off if he actually did try to leave. Much more of him knew there wasn't. Holland meant it. One way or another, it was up to him. Mind chasing itself again, he walked slowly to the double doors. He gently closed the right door, then just as gently closed the left one.

He remained inside the office.

He'd had too many places taken away from him. Been vulnerable and helpless and shat on too many times. He didn't know where he was going from there, but it wasn't back out in the cold.

Not that it wasn't cold enough inside. He walked back over to the desk and ran his hands along the rounded edge. The black marble was cold, as cold as he was feeling in the pit of his stomach. Moving slowly to sit behind the desk, he removed the receiver from the 'phone and put it silently down on the desktop. Then he swiveled in the comfortable black leather chair and looked out over the nightscape of LA.

His town. If he had the balls to take it. He had a place in it, he knew. He wasn't a hundred percent sure what that place was. There were some question marks.

Just before dawn one of those question marks, more urgent than most, urged him back across town. He parked in the alley behind the building and came in the back way, ducking down the stairway before Chase could look up from the computer and spot him.

"You came back." Angel's voice came to him out of the semi-darkness of the inner room, and he paused at the base of the stairs.

"Yeah." He wanted to say something, but he didn't know what. As he always did when he was unsure of himself, he kept his mouth shut and watched. Even with his eyes wide open and glued on the vampire, he missed the move. Next thing he knew, Angel had him pinned against the wall. The position made him think of a bug stuck on a board, and didn't do much for the aches and bruises he'd picked up fighting Brewer. "Ow," he tried experimentally.

Angel kissed him again. Black dots were swimming in front of his eyes when he was finally allowed to drag in a breath. Dimly he heard a question, it sounded like 'why?' but he couldn't tell. Didn't care. The erection he'd been fighting through near death and battle and confrontation all fucking night had caught up with him, and he wasn't hearing anything at all but the demand to do something about it.

So he did.

Wriggling around until he got a hand free, he grabbed Angel by the back of the head and pulled him close. This time it was Lindsey doing the kissing. The pressure of their mouths grinding together reopened the cut on his lip, and the rasp of Angel's tongue licking at the seeping blood made him moan. Angel caught the sound and swallowed it, too.

It was quiet in the room. Quiet and dark. He'd not have known it was daylight, in the little nest the vampire had made for himself. There was an intimacy in the dark, in the quiet, the only sounds his own gasping breath, the rustle of cloth as Angel stripped him, as he stripped Angel in turn.

The last person he'd fucked had been an actress, a nobody, no threat and no risk. Angel was both, the enemy and the embodiment of betrayal. Lindsey touched him, knowing nothing but that he had to, his hands tracing cold skin like satin over marble, outlining tensed muscles, the sweep of Angel's back, the curve of his ass, the length of his throat. Angel did the same, hands hard but not hurting, urging Lindsey's legs apart, winding around Lindsey's waist, one hand up into his hair, one hand working at his groin.

Angel's hands didn't shake.

Lindsey's did.

The first time Angel made him come right there, shoved up against the wall, shuddering and convulsing in arms that held him solidly as stone. He buried his face in Angel's neck and screamed silently, or as silently as he could, biting at the soft skin, tonguing it and wondering at the lack of sweat. His world had narrowed to the hand holding his hip and the hand between his shoulder blades and the neck under his mouth and the chest that didn't move against his. By the time he got his breath back, they were in Angel's bed and Angel was in him.

He was on his belly, Angel curled around behind him, those strong arms banded around his chest now, his face buried in the bedspread. His entire body was on fire except for his ass, and Angel felt like a different kind of fire there, a cold fire, incredible cold opening him up. Owning him.

Ephemeral.

No one owned him.

Lindsey bucked back against Angel, and the vampire growled, a warning or a sign of pleasure, he couldn't tell. Then he was on his knees, slamming back almost as hard as Angel was slamming forward, and the ownership went both ways. He was taking as much as taken, growling as fiercely as Angel did, grunting and shaking, all his weight thrown forward onto his straightened arms with their locked elbows, his head hanging down, hair in his eyes and blood dripping off his chin. His second orgasm hit him unexpectedly, and he howled, the sound stifled by Angel's fingers suddenly in his mouth.

Angel stiffened and whipped hard against him, and Lindsey bit down on Angel's hand. He was licking it and sucking at the fingers unconsciously, and Angel moved them in and out of his mouth, picking up a shadow of the rhythm their bodies had made. Then Angel was slipping out of him, twisting him around on the bed with one abrupt, inhumanly strong movement. Lindsey found himself cradled underneath the vampire, staring up into yellow eyes, a ridged forehead, and a snarling smile showing sharpened fangs.

He lay completely still, barely breathing. Oddly enough, he wasn't afraid. Angel, or Angelus, or whoever the hell it was holding him, laughed softly.

"It ain't perfect bliss, but I'll take what I can get." The unholy face dove at him, and a single fang raked across his lower lip, widening the cut, then sucking the wounded flesh between sharp teeth, tongue probing and washing it.

Lindsey bucked again, startled by how erotic the pain was. Then the strong sucking eased into a deep kiss, and he opened his mouth to give Angel full access. By the time the kiss ended, Angel was back in human face.

He didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

Angel stared down at him. Through him. It was as bad as the mind readers. "Why?" he asked again.

"I had to know," Lindsey answered honestly, although he couldn't tell Angel just what it was he had to know. He wasn't quite sure himself. The vampire stared at him awhile longer, then nodded, probably seeing more than Lindsey wanted him to see. Angel usually did. Damn him.

"Did you make a choice?" The arms around him tightened fractionally.

"Yes." He had. Before Angel could take it any further, Lindsey hooked an arm around Angel's neck and drew himself up to kiss him again. Angel allowed himself to be distracted.

Perhaps he didn't want to know what that choice had been, either.

Five hours later, Lindsey let himself into his new office and walked slowly over to the executive washroom at the side. He looked around as he walked, noting that nothing had been disturbed from that morning. It was waiting for him, if he was going to take it. Turning on the cold water, cupping some to splash on his face, he looked up to meet his own eyes in the mirror.

On the surface, as usual, they showed nothing. In the depths, where the shadows had always been, he saw his place in the world. Not on the right side, or the wrong side. On the winning side. Patting his skin dry, he straightened his tie, walked over to his desk, and put the telephone back on the hook.

FIN