TITLE: The Things That Remain...

AUTHOR: Feli

EMAIL: ophelia_rd@yahoo.com

DISCLAIMER: Joss, not I.

DISTRIBUTION: Let me know where it's going

CATEGORY: A/L (maybe some Co)

RATING: M

PART: 1/?

FEEDBACK: Yes please!!!

VISIT ME: http://au.oocities.com/dra_gon_fly_er/

The Things That Remain...

Lindsey's POV


He often wondered if things may had turned out differently if only he had managed to convince himself to trust Angel enough to take him in and protect him from the deadly and omnipresent arms of Wolfram & Hart. How differently his life might have turned out if only Angel hadn't mocked him that one fateful night. If only the vampire's eyes hadn't looked at him with so much distrust and if only Angel hadn't been all that plain obvious about how much of a fake and a liar he'd considered Lindsey to be.

He'd wanted out - wanted out so very badly - still did, although in an impossibly strange and twisted way his wish had been granted. But since it was W&H of course there had been a price.

And what price...

With a sigh Lindsey lowered his gaze to the troubled features of the handsome teenage boy curled up by his side on the sofa. Even in his sleep the child seemed haunted and tense and not for the first time Lindsey wished that there was some way he could protect the kid from whatever was done to him during the so called Instruction Session held by no other than Wolfram and Hart.

Four years, in little more than a month it would be four years that the boy - his boy - had come to live with him. His miracle child, his reward for parting gift given to him in return for his hand and soul which he'd
lost to the Firm and Angel.

Angel...

Subconsciously Lindsey's good hand reached out to tug a stray strand of blond hair behind the sleeping kid's ear. If anyone had told him four years ago that he, Lindsey McDonald, would end up in a two bedroom unit being a fulltime caregiver to a 15 year-old child that wasn't even his, living because some time in the past said child had happened to be a) instantly enthralled by no other but Lindsey refusing anybody but him within a 10 feet radius and b) by doing so making Lindsey indispensable to the Firm he would have laughed right into their faces. And yet the tiny handful of abandoned human being had managed to turn his life inside out influencing him to a point of turning into a white hat - almost.

So yes, in a way he'd gotten his heart's desire - W&H had arranged for him to get out while at the same time entrusting him with one of their strictly confidential cases although he'd never once looked at his charge in that way.

For months on no end he'd been suicidal and depressed after Angel had cut off his hand. A living corpse spending what in retrospect had felt like eternity being locked up in padded rooms or being carted from one treatment to another and back. He knew now as he'd known back then that the Firm had been running out of patience with him and his obvious inability to bounce back and deal with his losses. He'd known that he'd been scheduled for cancellation the moment Holland had sent his lackey to have him brought to the office.

Lindsey still remembered the day as though it was yesterday.

How his skin had been sweaty and hot from humidity and the late afternoon sun and how his sight had been all blurry because of the impossibly high dose of drugs his body apparently seemed to have needed at that time in order to function on at minimal efficiency and how he had felt the mind reader probing his foggy brain for proof of improvement and how after that he had felt the cold metal nose of a firearm pressing into his temple and how in his mind's eye he had already seen Holland nod his go ahead to his goon...

He shuddered remembering the day only too vividly.

How he had started to pray and how tears had threatened to fall and how he had been prepared to throw out what was left of his dignity and beg the man for his life - and how this had been the very moment Lilah had barged in on things.

A small smile spread across his face when he recalled his stressed out former colleague carrying an almost blue-faced baby crying from the very top of his lungs trying to hold the poor thing as far away from her already formula dotted designer suit.

It had been instant chemistry. The moment the bawling infant had set one teary and miserable blue eye on Lindsey-soon-to-be-put-out-of-his-misery-McDonald he had started to gurgle and laugh. And Lilah - never one to look a gift horse in the mouth - had dumped the little thing on him faster than a vampire could have ripped their victim's throat a sigh of relief on her lips that most possible still could have been heard in W&H's N.Y. office.

He couldn't really say what happened after that. He knew that he'd been ushered out of the room in order to allow Holland and Lilah a certain degree of privacy, or at least allow them as much privacy as two people could hope to have under the roof of W&H.

With a tender smile Lindsey's eyes lingered on the sleeping boy by his side, the boy he wasn't supposed to think of as his son and who he loved so very much nonetheless. From the moment he had left W&H with the sleeping baby cradled to his chest with his good arm and a ridiculously high check given to him with the simple instruction to get whatever necessary in order to take care of a baby plus a 200 pages folder on the Firm's probably youngest case.

He had never questioned or looked into he little boy's origin, the kid was his and his alone!

Oh what a lot of crap, he sighed knowing perfectly well that there was little good in lying to himself - some little character trait he'd given up on little after he'd been gifted with his miracle baby. He tiredly rubbed his watering eyes and decided that it was time to go to bed.

"Dad?"

As if sensing his inner turmoil the boy's bluer than blue eyes fluttered open and eventually focused on him. He'd always been such a light sleeper - well not always, not after W&H had taken him away the first time for one of their so called Instruction Sessions which would last from a couple of days up to several weeks - returning his boy "matured", there was no other word for it, sometimes as little as weeks yet some other times as much as three or four years.

Putting on his brave face Lindsey forced himself to open his eyes and meet the boy's questioning gaze.

"Is it time?"

He knew there would be no way for him to conceal his reaction the moment he learned what the kid wanted him to answer. And the boy knew that he knew that he knew about this and therefore there was no use in playing possum ore denying the obvious.

"Almost, m' boy, almost but not quite yet."

A nod and the fact that the small hand held on to his forearm a little more tight was all the reaction he got. However, Lindsey felt as though he'd just taken a severe kick to the guts. It hurt - he hurt, hurt so god-damn much - knowing that the boy Wolfram and Hart had insisted on to remain unnamed and who he had come to look at as his own would once again be taken away from him.

*******

Penn.

Drusilla.

William.

Even now, after close to two centuries after creating his three true childer their dying human faces still came to haunt his dreams every now and again - or more. The people he'd turned into minions or simply left to die after a night of violence and blood - their nameless faces hadn't yet to vanish from his memory. They were still lurking and sulking somewhere in the back of his head always ready to press the guilt button whenever he'd managed to convince himself that it was a good idea to seek redemption in the warm rays of the morning sun.

Buffy.

Willow.

Xander.

Giles.

Jenny Calender.

Joyce Summers.

Their images were as fresh as they'd been the day he'd last seen them. In fact they popped up the very second his thoughts would stumble across their names or the teeniest-weeniest detail related to them: a smell, a face, a comment - anything!

However, the two faces he so much wanted to recall were all but wiped from his memory; Connor, his beautiful baby boy and Darla, the woman who had gifted him with their miracle child. Either had they been ripped from his life, brutally and no warning whatsoever and even worse without the ghost of a chance for good-bye. First Darla who had taken her own life so that their child could be delivered, leaving him with Connor, the son he'd always longed to but never thought possible to have, only to have him kidnapped and taken away from him once again by W&H.

"I want out!"

Had his heart been beating it would have skipped a beat when the face of a man he'd hardly thought about since the disastrous outcome of their run-in more than five long years in the past appeared before his minds eye.

Lindsey McDonald, beautiful sandy-haired man-child who'd mysteriously disappeared from the face of the Earth shortly after the night he'd jumped in and completed the ritual which had brought back Darla and added a brand new dimension to Angel's already rocky road to redemption. Later, a long, long stretch of time later, Angel had made several careful inquiries as of the whereabouts of the man he'd crippled so brutally - yet to no avail, it almost seemed as though outside his muddled brain Lindsey McDonald had never existed. Which made the man another ghost face to haunt his nights and push him a little step closer to insanity.

For the longest time the vampire with a soul hadn't been a force to be reckoned with. Sure, he still helped out in the good fight, that was if the A-Team insisted on him to tug along which unfortunately they happened to do on a rather regular basis, yet his heart wasn't in the good fight anymore.

Funny, how Darla killing herself in front of his eyes and Wolfram and Hart Kidnapping his son had made him realize something neither 25 human years nor 250 years as a vampire or half a millenium spent in a hell dimension hadn't managed to make him realize: the key to redemption was to simply not care - to do as requested but to keep oneself detached from the living.

Once figured out the concept worked like a charm. And after three months and twenty-three days of refining and practicing his new means of soul saving, the few living who'd managed to stick around had learned that keeping their distance was the smart thing to do around him.

Doyle.

Cordelia.

Wesley.

Gunn.

Fred.

They all made their guest appearances in his dreams, but their faces were the tangible ones the faces he could deal with.

Connor.

Darla.

Maybe even Lindsey McDonald.

Those were the ghost faces, the ghosts of his ghosts, fading memories of the life he'd lost.






*******

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

this is written from connor's POV. and i think i should tell you beforehand i decided to make his communication/social skills very limited à explanation: W&H has considered this the best possible way to "shield" him from unwanted influence be that a person or news or whatever...

"Dad?"

The teenager inched a little closer to the man who'd taken care of him as long as he could think back. To him Lindsey was the closest thing to a father figure he could imagine. Not that he'd ever been encouraged to think about the man in that way - if anything it was the other way around. But no matter how many times the dark men told him he wasn't to call his dad dad but Sir or Mr. McDonald he could read it in his dad's eyes that he didn't mind him calling him dad, didn't mind him doing so at all.

Of course his dad wouldn't openly encourage him to disobey the dark men, he would tell him that the dark men were right and that he really shouldn't call him dad but Sir or Mr. McDonald or maybe Lindsey if he had been really really good or if there was an emergency. But no matter how often his dad would tell him thinks like this his eyes would always tell him differently and he was grateful for that.

He briefly wondered when he had picked up the meaning of the word grateful, but he let go of the thought quickly. After all, according to the dark men who'd come to check on him every Monday night - that was when he was with his dad and in the happy world - he wasn't supposed to focus on anything that wasn't related to his IS - Instruction Sessions.

He didn't like the dark men, didn't like them at all. Not that they'd ever been mean to him he guessed that they were far to afraid of him to ever try and be mean to him. He could tell that they were because he could smell it on them they stank of fear every time they would come to their place to check on him.

In the beginning he hadn't been able to tell what the difference in their smells meant after all his dad's smell never changed around him no matter how close he got.

When he had asked the dark men about it and tried to explain his observation to them they had never commented on it, however, after that they started to apply fake smells which they stored in metal bottles and which only made their original smells smell bitter and foul.

When he had asked his dad about it he had explained to him that human beings usually were unable to smell certain things - things as sadness, anger, happiness, fear and so on. His dad said that he scared the dark men with his ability to smell their feelings and that it made them uncomfortable around him, but that I shouldn't worry about them since it was their job to deal with things that made them feel uncomfortable.

His dad had never asked him how he'd come to recognize that there were smells that he could smell that other he or the dark men could not. And after listening to the older man's explanation how people were afraid of things that they didn't know he had felt that it was better not to tell his dad about his IS and the things that he was taught when he was away from the happy world.

His whole body tensed up by the mere thought of the last couple of IS he'd been taken to and the things he had learned while away.

"I don't know you, lad."

The creature - a vampire - had told him sniffing him from head to toe.

"So how come your blood sings to me? Calls to me only the blood of a childe calls out for the blood of his sire?"

He had killed the creature just as he had killed hundreds of his kind before and was going to kill hundreds of his kind again as soon as the dark men would come to pick him up and take him to the next IS world.

Unaware of the onslaught of thoughts flooding the child's mind Lindsey held out his good hand for the teen to pull himself up and into a sitting position.

"C'mon, m' boy," he said and briefly hugged the kid to him, "It's time to go to bed." A wave of sadness washed over him by the thought that there was nothing he could do to separate their lives and future from Wolfram & Hart and the money transfers allowing them the modest yet comfortable lifestyle they had at the moment.

Maybe if he still had his second hand - maybe then thinks would look differently and Lindsey wouldn't be so afraid to lose what little he was granted.

But on the other hand...

The ex lawyer looked down at the fair-haired boy who had wrapped himself around his waist - well on the other hand the kid would have never ended up in his care if not for his temporary insanity due to the loss of his hand. He knew that there was only one way out of W&H just as he knew that he should be bloody well grateful for the opportunity he had been given - should be...

"C'mon, kiddo!"

Lindsey playfully tugged at the boy's little too long locks indicating for him to move along, which the child immediately did without complaint. Once again Lindsey felt a new wave of sadness wash over him - his boy was such a lovely child - and he couldn't but sigh at the thought of whatever kind of future Wolfram & Hart might had in mind for him.

"Coming, dad?"

Letting the youngster take the lead he let himself being guided right through the living room and into the boy's bordering domicile.

Once there Lindsey waited patiently for the kid to change into his PJs and curl up under the duvet.

"You want me to sit with you for a minute?" He asked the sleepy teen knowing perfectly well that the kind of affection he was showing his charge would not go unnoticed and most definitely be severely disapproved of by his employers.

He was getting far too attached and he knew it but there was a thing he could no make that wanted to do about it! However the decision to sit and stay or return to the living-room immediately was been taken away from him when the boy's drowsy blue eyes fell and remained shut.

Taking the hint Lindsey quietly switched off the light and just as quietly headed for the other room.

"Is there an angel in this word, too?"

He had almost managed to make it to the door when the half coherent question was directed at him.

"What makes you think there are angels at all?"

He knew it was mean to answer a question with a question, yet the fact that the youth had used a word he shouldn't have known and which meaning he obviously knew and understood as well had startled him into lawyer-mode. Keeping the lights of he turned around and went back to the small single bed at the other side of the room.

"Why do you think there should be angels?" He repeated his original question when the boy hesitated to answer. When after another minute or so there still had been no reply Lindsey retook his place on the kid's bed and held out his good hand in silent gesture of encouragement.

"I met an angel."

The older man was eventually told in a shy voice.

"I fight him on my IS."

He could feel the much smaller hand hold on to his left.

"He was on my last IS..., and the one before..., and the one before that..., he helped me..."

He grip on his hand lessened as his words faded and the boy ever so slowly drifted of into sleep.

"Sleep tight, m' boy," Lindsey carefully freed his hand. "May your angel be watching over you on your next IS as well." He whispered before he rose from the bed and once again headed for the living-room.

"He will, you know."

Lindsey held in mid step not sure whether he was being addressed or if the kid was just talking in his sleep.

"My blood sings to him. He said it calls out to him like the blood of a childe calls out to the blood of a sire - what's a sire, dad?"

"Sleep now," Lindsey managed to keep his voice even although on the inside he was seething with anger. He couldn't believe W&H had done to his child what he thought that they did. He had never told the boy about vampires or demons or angels - Angel - as a fact and yet he was talking about "childer" and "sires" and "angels" as though they were the most normal thing in the world.

He was shaking - how could they do this to a child - his child.

Of course he had known that Wolfram and Hart couldn't be up to much good the moment they had come and taken his baby boy along for his first IS only to return him a toddler after less than a week.

~Calm, Lindsey, you've gotta stay calm!~ He forced himself to calm down although he was pretty sure the youth - if still awake - must have long since sensed his distress. So after taking in several deep breaths Lindsey quickly fled from the small bedroom pulling the door shut behind him in the process.

***

-The Hyperion-

"Well yes, of course I'm sure!"

He heard their voices - Cordelia's voice - floating from the downstairs lobby up to room 217 where he'd set up camp.

Great, so the girl's had a vision. He sighed accepting his fate waiting for one of them to barge in on him demanding him to get up and assist them with whatever ugly of the day they were dealing with.

"Yes, Wesley, it definitely was him!"

He tried to block out their bickering.

Why couldn't they just stay away for good?

Didn't they realize how much their presence was killing him?

How them being near him was bringing up the memory of the son who'd so brutally been taken away from him?

"In case you forgot I had the dubious pleasure of bumping into Angel's better other not once but twice - so don't you dare ask me again, Wesley, if I'm sure it was him!!!"

"But you said yourself that there was something odd about him."

"I said his HAIR was kinda odd and seriously last century!!!"

His curiosity got the better of him - why would Cordelia have a vision about his evil twin? After all it had been a long time since he'd had the last remotely happy thought, so why would the Powers That Be...

"...send you a vision of a cow Angelus happened to eat 200 years in the past?"

Angel could hear the brunette huff at the speaker he yet had to identify - Groo, he guessed, eventually, when he remembered that apart from Fred he was the only one who occasionally happened to refer to the other living as cows.

"Why are you looking at me? It's not like those visions come with a manual and apart from that I never said the vision was about the old Angelus!"

"From what you said about..."

"His HAIR, Wesley, I said his HAIR was last century!!!"

Angel snickered.

There were certain character traits one just had to admire about Cordelia as her ability to always get her priorities right. He continued to listen.

"The vision was about here!"

With his mind's eye he could see her gesturing around the Hyperion lobby which the Ghostbusters apparently had chosen for HQs.

"He was right here and the place was literally crawling with minions."

"What about us?"

Yes, what about them?

Angel wondered briefly although he had a pretty good idea what exactly his bastard? better probably had done to them.

"There was no us."

Excuse me???

"There was no us as in our dead bodies weren't rotting away in some dark corner or as in there was no us as in us nowhere to be found?"

"Do you remember how the place looked when Angel first brought us here?"

He could almost see their collective nods.

"Well, that's how the place looked - abandoned hotel with a nest of vampires in it."

Angelus reigning his own clan and the A-Team nowhere to be found?

Maybe his way of seeking redemption wasn't all that smart at all?

If loosening the grip on his demon was all it took for him to get rid of the bunch of them he may have been all wrong headed about this...

part 2

well, tell me whatya think so far ;)