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All In How You Read It
by Lissa R.
Email: liss2302@yahoo.com
Rating: G
Spoilers: speculation only, post-Home
Summary: Lindsey. Angel. Contracts. And what to bring to a funeral.
Notes: Thanks to Nestra for the initial beta read. All subsequent problems with this story are mine. Quote from Chaucer, Balade de Bon Conseyl.
Distribution: Yes, but please let me know...
Feedback: Oh, yes please! To: liss2302@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Fox: not mine
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups milk
paprika
ground nutmeg
salt and white pepper, to taste
~Melt the butter in a heavy saucepan....
Lindsey McDonald is in the kitchen early on a hot summer day, a smear of flour across his forehead after three tries at the basic white sauce in his only cookbook and on his way to figuring out that the pans he's painstakingly collected from the local grocer, $2.99 each with a $25 purchase, are probably not what the author means by "a heavy saucepan".
He's not really sure why he decided that this dish needed white sauce instead of cream of mushroom soup. He's not even sure why he's cooking, unless it's to fill the hours before he needs to leave for Los Angeles. He doesn't remember attending any funerals when he was there, doesn't know if it's appropriate to bring food to the house after the service. If there even is a house. At Wolfram and Hart, it never paid to ask where to send the flowers - never mind what Maintenance did with the bodies.
But the message he'd gotten last night said there would be something afterwards, so he's thought a little further back to figure out what to do. He remembers eating lots of casseroles as a child, mixed down with milk or tomato sauce at the start of the month and water at the end, and more than once just noodles, soft from sitting overnight when his mother held back a bit for the next day in case his daddy didn't get paid.
Casseroles for poverty. Casseroles for crises.
He supposes he should make one for himself.
*
//read me the recipe, Lindsey//
Ten years old and trying to speak around the lump in his throat, voice whisper-soft so he can hear his mother in the other room, listen for the sounds she's making to bleed through the murmur of women's voices.
If she stops crying he's sure he'll start, and not at all sure he'll ever stop.
//Lin, honey, where does your mama keep the flour? And how much milk again? This is so much easier with a can of soup, I swear, who shops in this house?//
Lindsey bends over the old recipe book, running his finger down the page and picking at a crusty spot near the bottom. He doesn't answer, thinks that maybe his aunt is just talking to herself. Like Mama does when she's cooking, opening cabinets and peering into the old refrigerator like something she needs will magically appear between one moment and the next.
He knows his aunt won't find any soup, he'd fixed the last two cans of it for the children the day before and since then no one's given him money or a shopping list. And while he's pretty sure he could figure out what his brothers and sisters need he knows he'll never get it right for all these other people who'd somehow shown up late last night. And getting it wrong is something he's learned the hard way not to do.
So he sits in his corner, watching his aunt make a casserole from what's left from his last trip to the store and wanting to apologize for not knowing she would need more soup for it. For not knowing why they couldn't just eat the other things the women in his mother's bedroom had brought.
He wraps his arms around himself. Hugs himself hard.
*
~Add the flour and cook, stirring, over low heat for 3 minutes....
This is where the problem had started the last time: he'd dumped the flour in, panicking as it joined the already-burning butter and started spitting at him as he tried to tease the lumps apart with a fork. Maybe if he just barely melts the butter, and sprinkles the flour in one spoonful at a time...and maybe the big serving spoons aren't what the author means by "tablespoons". Although Lindsey clearly remembers his mother setting the table every night with the big silverplated spoons she'd gotten as wedding presents. Weren't they tablespoons?
To be on the safe side, he takes out one of the spoons he uses to measure sugar into his coffee and uses it for the flour. Three spoonfuls, and it's back to the fork. Better this time. Not quite so much spitting.
~Raise the heat to medium, and slowly add the milk, stirring constantly with a wire whisk....
Lindsey's fairly sure he hadn't bought one of those when he furnished the little house - his kitchen in L.A. had come fully equipped, but he rarely used more than his cell phone when he was hungry. And his sole houseguest hadn't been much more interested in cooking than he was.
~Continue whisking until the sauce thickens, about 5 minutes....
He wonders what will happen if he stops stirring. The stuff will probably cook itself into concrete in the pan, and then he'll have a good excuse to open the can of soup sitting so temptingly within reach on the counter. Three minutes, four, five...the hand sweeps around on the heavy steel Timex he'd bought when wearing his Rolex seemed to say something he didn't want to say anymore.
He'd left Los Angeles wearing his cowboy boots and carrying his guitar and very little else. The handmade shirts, sure, those wouldn't really fit anyone else, but he hoped that Lupe had taken the other stuff as soon as she realized he wasn't coming back.
Or was he?
He puts that thought away firmly, wipes his forehead with the back of his right hand.
~Add the paprika, nutmeg and salt and white pepper. Stir well, and remove from the heat.
Okay, where did he put that recipe? His cookbook doesn't extend to food made with soup, so he'd asked one of the women at the diner for her tuna-noodle casserole recipe. After fending off three or fours offers to make it for him, he'd gotten her to write down a list of what he needed to put in it and how long to cook the results. Sounded just like all the others he'd eaten as a kid.
He'd thanked her with the smile that didn't quite reach his eyes, and driven away. Thinking, as he fiddled with the old truck's radio, that at least they no longer thought he was gay.
Bet they didn't realize he wasn't gonna use the mushroom soup.
He finds the list stuck to a milk carton in the trash he'd already taken out.
~2 lbs egg noodles - wide curly ones
Boiled, no doubt. Damn.
Lindsey fills his largest pot with water, adds salt, and sets it to boil.
*
//Lin, honey, do you think your mama has another bag of noodles somewhere?//
His mama never lets him cook noodles, all that boiling water to deal with and he's only ten and still not very tall, so when he goes to the store he tries to make sure he buys things he can fix for the children when they're all by themselves. Bread for sandwiches, lots of peanut butter and jelly and the soft cheese his sisters like. Bologna if it's in the big packages. Cereal and milk.
He uncurls himself. I never buy noodles, he says. Probably not.
And isn't too surprised when she looks at him, really looks at him, and he finds himself wrapped in strong thin arms so different from his own embrace that his mind finally accepts what his skin had known
(That the twins were cold.)
and not grasped the truth of till now.
(That the twins were dead.)
That he would always be able to hear his mother weeping.
*
~3 cans tuna in water, salt and pepper to taste
He wonders if Lilah's mother will be there. If she will weep.
If Lilah has a mother.
He drains the noodles and dumps them into Wal-Mart's cheapest casserole dish with the white sauce and the tuna, and stirs it all together with one of the tablespoons he'd discarded earlier. Seasons it generously but rejects the idea of actually tasting the glutinous mass.
(Flowers. Next time, McDonald, flowers.)
Roses, maybe. Lilah hated lilies.
He'd sent her lilies once, in the beginning, when they were still circling around each other and before things went so spectacularly bad. Later, remembering how she'd reacted, and how she'd bitched when Accounting made her pay the bill for cleaning the carpet herself, he'd made sure to send lilies - big, extravagant ones - whenever she won a case.
Anonymously, of course. Although he's sure she'd known.
~breadcrumbs and melted butter or crushed potato chips for the top
Potato chips, definitely, one of the five major food groups and like ketchup or Cool-Whip, an all-purpose food enhancer back where Lindsey grew up. He pokes a hole in the bag and rolls a beer bottle over it till the chips are reduced to a greasy pile of crumbs.
Had his aunt even started cooking that morning, the morning after the night the twins died, the morning he woke up to a house filled with sunlight and food and, after a long moment spent trying to figure out why it all sounded wrong, realized he would never really feel warm or full again?
He grips the edge of the sink, fighting off a surge of nausea, splashing water on his face until it passes.
Potato chips. Oven.
Trash.
In a minute. Maybe once the thin red scar that goes all the way around his right wrist stops itching.
He stares at it, horrified.
And then he is sliding down the cabinet to sit on the floor, putting his head between his knees because he knows that if he doesn't he is going to throw up or pass out or simply shatter into pieces.
(Here is not home.)
He'd stopped running after about a year, after making a long looping circuit of small Western towns that stopped short of Oklahoma and Canada and eventually landed him only a few hours north of where he'd started, in another small town that doesn't offer much: one road in, the same road out, and shopping pretty much limited to a little grocery store slash gas station out on the highway. A diner that's never open after nine at night and a cowboy bar that can manage a good burger if the owner's in the mood. Blazing summer heat and nights as quiet and dark as he remembers from his childhood.
Just another place in a long line of places.
(Here is but wilderness.)
But he likes it here, feels safe. Happy, even, Wolfram and Hart and Darla and Angel a few years behind him and his nights dreamless again.
Until yesterday. Last night. When a message on his answering machine told him that Lilah was dead. Again.
That they had always known exactly where he was. And that they could get him back.
Whenever they wanted, apparently.
And so he is going to L.A. Again.
***
Up on the roof again, since they all seem to have forgotten that's where he goes when he needs to
(get away from them)
think. He remembers the first time, coming back down with the scent of the rising sun in his clothing to a frantic chorus of "Angel! Where were you? We were worried!" that shredded his hard-won serenity and nearly sent him back up there, sun or no sun. Second and third times brought much the same response, bafflement on both sides as they fluttered around him and he wondered at their confusion. More recently, they've accepted that sometimes he just
(disappears)
leaves for unexplained periods of time.
Seeing how uncomfortable they make him, Lilah was doing her best to limit their access, tying up his time with a flurry of planning sessions and theirs with a host of projects. So he has - blessedly - seen less and less of them each week.
They haven't yet figured out what's driving him to stand on the parapet until dawn makes his skin itch.
(so many questions but they don't know to ask)
He's losing them.
(Mother)
(Sister)
He can feel it, wonders a little vaguely when, exactly, it started this time.
(Darla)
(Buffy)
He suspects it might have been something Angelus said.
(Son)
Now Wesley and the rest, sucked into the open jaws of Wolfram and Hart the way he had gone into the belly of the beast all those years ago. Had he put the sword into them himself, whispered "I love you", sent them to some unknown hell dimension for Connor's sake?
He should ask Lilah.
Because his memories of hell dimensions may have faded but hers are too new. So maybe she can explain to him exactly when hellfire and brimstone became emails and meetings and strategic reviews and hiring decisions. And contracts in perpetuity.
Although he probably knows the answer to that one.
*
He hadn't been all that surprised when Wesley appeared in his doorway at the end of that endless day, shadows in his clear blue eyes and deep lines etched into the flesh around his mouth. Wes had been buried in some research project for what had seemed like weeks, leaving Angel feeling increasingly guilty for his relief at the other man's absence.
But not guilty enough to ask any questions.
Angel had read determination in the set of Wes' shoulders, scented the barest hint of fear underneath the other man's exhaustion.
Wondered when the closest friend he'd ever had started to be afraid of him.
He had glanced over at Lilah, somewhat surprised to see her eyes fixed desperately on Wes.
(they are drowning in each other)
"Angel."
"Wes."
She had gotten up to go and Wes had turned to her, reached out, ghosted a hand over her hair.
"Stay. This concerns you too."
Her contract. As Wesley had apparently suspected, the Scroll of Aberjian had held the key. Shanshu, it seemed, was an infinitely flexible concept.
*
An hour later and the silence in the room had been the quiet of peace, of decisions made and steps taken, of the anticipation of grief.
No lilies. White roses, old garden roses, thorny and awkward and heavily fragrant with a perfume that Angel knows he will file away with the scent of jasmine under Never Under Any Circumstances Again.
Because he has come to care for her, in his way. As much as this new ...situation...can be said to work, she has made it work. And if Wes and the others sometimes stare at him as if they're hearing the echo of another voice, well, he can deal. Secrets, burdens, the nagging suspicion that he's going to be paying for this one for a long, long time - Angel is prepared to cope with his version of immortality.
Another hour, another stack of folders and Angel had realized that eternity was one thing. The day-to-day running of the litigation department was another thing entirely.
"Nope. Not doing it. Even my life is too short."
"Angel."
"Find me someone. Then you and Wesley can - " He couldn't finish that thought, in any of its possibilities. Maybe they would reconsider, for his sake.
But when Lilah had glanced at Wes and they both started to smile, Angel realized that his life was about to get even more complicated.
*
He's going to need to go inside soon: the sky is pale pink over the hills and indigo shifting to blue in the west, and the last of the stars disappeared a while ago. He has been smelling the dawn for hours, remembering how it felt to taste sunlight on Buffy's skin. His memory, his alone, her hazel eyes that morning swimming in tears and love and farewell.
Her eyes slipping past him in the end.
(Connor)
And when he thinks about Connor's eyes, it is always the baby's eyes he sees, wide and laughing, no hint of the feral child pitched out of hell to kill him.
The baby's eyes were dark like his sister's.
He has no idea what color his hellchild's were.
Angel remembers another pair of eyes spitting fire as he beat the unmerciful crap out of their owner and shattered his prosthetic hand.
He remembers seeing desperation and blind determination in those blue eyes, scenting fear and something more on the younger man, feeling oddly vindicated when that blank look of resentment turned to horror at the very end.
And he remembers his own reluctance to say goodbye.
He remembers those eyes. Lindsey's eyes.
He gets out his cell phone. Time to explain a few things.
The new Los Angeles office. The view from his new windows.
The fine print on his contract.
Family.
Perpetuity.
Angel feels sure he can make Lindsey understand.
End
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