Title: Me In You
Author: Brenda Antrim
Email: bren@bantrim.net
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended
Author's Note: Set post-"Dead End." Quotes from matchbox 20's Mad Season CD.

Breathing room


I think I've already lost you


He'd forgotten how red the dirt was. How damned dusty the air was. How wide the sky, and how empty the earth.

Lindsey shifted in his seat, calming the horse with a twitch on the reins and a shift of his knees. He got a snort and a head-toss for his trouble, but the mare settled down. The fences were all mended, and work was done for the day, but he found he didn't particularly want to go back to his sterile little room at the back of the ranch house. He'd left LA to find himself again. So now he had.

Hadn't realized how damned boring he could be.

He grinned at the thought and clucked at the horse, pressing in with his right knee and encouraging her to a slow walk. It was more than that, and he knew it. He'd lived like a monk in the five months since he'd left his old life behind, and contrary to his expectations, nobody'd come after him. Maybe it was Lilah, watching his back for a change instead of aiming a knife for it. Maybe the Firm just didn't think a cowboy in the middle of West Texas was any real threat.

Maybe that was going to change. The location, not the threat. He had no desire to take it to the Firm. He felt a little like a rattler. Leave it alone and it left well enough alone. But he was getting sick and tired of being alone.

He stared sightlessly at a magnificent sunset, and remembered Angel. Funny how, with everything that had happened to him in Los Angeles, the only memory that came back clearly and often was that blessed vampire. The only thing he missed was the one thing he never thought he'd ever miss. The one thing he knew for damned sure he'd never have.

Oddly enough, he hadn't been the least afraid when he'd shot up Nathan Reed's office and flat-out dared Wolfram and Hart to come after him. Now, months of quiet solitude and bone-jarring hard work later, he was finally a little scared. Because he wasn't as strong as he'd thought he was, and he wasn't as weak as Angel had believed him to be.

He'd thought he was walking away from an empire. As it turned out, he was walking away from the soul he'd been trying to save. If he'd even thought that far, beyond escape and exhaustion.


I think you're already gone.


A suspicion had been born the night he left, when Angel left his sophomoric little poster on the tailgate of Lindsey's truck. One crusty highway patrol officer later, Lindsey'd removed it, but it had made him laugh, as he had the feeling Angel had intended. For enemies, they made decent allies. From the first time he'd approached Angel, with all their sniping, they'd worked well together. Their last raid had been a success.

The memory of the light dying in Brad's eyes still hit him when he least expected it.

But that wasn't what scared him. What scared him was the fact that he was thinking again, and his thoughts were leading him to an inescapable conclusion.

It was time to go home. Not to his roots; the wide open west hadn't been home in so long he felt like a tourist even when he looked like the Marlboro man. There was a lot of land to rove on the West Texas plains. A lot of quiet to think in, and a lot of room to breathe.

He was suffocating.

Thought he could leave it all behind. He hadn't realized that he carried it with him. Within him. Angel had challenged and pissed him off since the moment they'd met, and the feeling had been mutual. Because they'd recognized one another.

In themselves.

There was an awful lot of Angel in Lindsey, or more aptly a lot of Liam who had become Angel. And there was something of Lindsey in Angel, too, or he wouldn't have kept coming back. At least, that's what Lindsey told himself, when he woke in the middle of the night with semen on his belly, Brad's hand wrapped around his dick, and Angel's name caught in his throat.

For an undead son of a bitch who'd been his worst enemy, Angel was proving impossible to get over. Without the sharp edge of his presence, Lindsey felt sluggish and dull. From the way Angel's eyes had sparked at him, in unexpected humor and anger that fired the blood, Lindsey had a notion Angel needed him more than hated him.

Wasn't sure, in fact, that Angel hated him at all. He had an inkling the need was real, though.

He snapped the reins lightly against the mare's neck and she broke into a trot, shaking some of the dust from him. The motion brought a slight wind that felt good against his skin, drying the sweat from a day of pounding fence posts. A lot of the resentment Lindsey'd carried since LA had sweated away over the weeks, but a little of it remained, itching under the surface.

The way Angel had given Faith a second chance, after she'd kidnapped and tortured Wesley, yet never gave Lindsey even the ghost of a chance. Sliced off his hand when he could easily have knocked Lindsey away from the flame and saved the scroll without maiming him. Angel never listened, never gave him any credit when he tried to change, watched like a hawk for him to fail then beat him to a pulp over it. Was it any surprise that Lindsey had gone back to the Firm?

The memories made him tense, hardening his hands on the reins, and the horse nickered protest at him. "Sorry, girl," he murmured, relaxing back into the rhythm of her gait. Lindsey had known too much, from the beginning, and Angel hadn't liked that. Hadn't been able to deal with it. He could deal with a rogue slayer acting like a one-woman hit squad, but he couldn't handle the all-too-human lawyer who'd hired her.

Not that Lindsey could, either, any longer. Since he'd been out of the pressure cooker, hell, since he'd gotten involved in the Brewer case, the emotional numbness that had sustained him since childhood had begun to fade. Long-unused emotions had prickled like damaged nerves coming out from under anesthesia, and it hadn't been a pleasant experience. No damned wonder he'd been such a basketcase by the time he'd finally run.

Didn't matter now. He'd stopped running and started paying attention to his instincts; other than his survival instinct, he hadn't listened to them in too long. And they were telling him to go back.

To try.

Scared the shit out of him, but he was going to return to LA and this time, he wasn't going to talk. He was going to listen.

And hope like hell Angel would talk to him.