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"Therefore the skilful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field." --Sun Tzu, The Art of War

~ ~ ~

Lindsey looked up as the doors to his new office opened. "I thought I said...." He trailed off as he realized it wasn't his secretary in the doorway, outlined in the fluorescent glow. The doors closed with a quiet snick and suddenly the light illuminating his desk felt blinding, the single recessed bulb a giant spotlight.

"...you didn't want to be disturbed?" Angel finished the sentence. "It's too late to stop now, Lindsey. You proved that when you sold out. Again."

Lindsey resisted the urge to shift in his chair, refusing to give any outward sign that the accusation had stung. He did what he did because it was better than being like his father, a man who had worked himself half to death only to be forced to stand by and watch everything he had--including his wife and daughter--slip through his fingers. Lindsey had done whatever it took to guarantee himself success and stability, and he'd never had any qualms about the nature of Wolfram & Hart's activities. At least not until those actions involved children.

Angel would never see it that way; his world of moral absolutes was populated solely by good guys and bad guys--easily distinguishable from one another by the color of their hats. Maybe that was the way things seemed when you were a vampire with a soul, if you had only ever been at the extremes of the continuum. But Lindsey knew the truth Angel didn't: black and white didn't really exist.

Not about to open himself to Angel's derision a second time, he buried the anger and put on his best defense-attorney mask, all sincerity and truth. The pose was pointless; he knew the vampire could hear his rapidly beating heart, smell the beginnings of fear, but still he smiled politely and maintained the fiction. Yes, it was a lie, but lying was what he was best at.

"Angel." The name was more a statement of fact than a greeting. Some part of him had been expecting their paths to cross again, sooner rather than later. He just hadn't expected Angel to turn up here, to walk into his office as though he had every right to be there.

"Lindsey."

Even though he'd braced himself for it, Angel's mocking tone cut more deeply than he'd expected. Why did it matter to him what Angel thought? And why had he bothered to try explaining in the first place? Life was what you made of it; if you didn't look out for yourself, no one else would. With more than a century of unspeakable atrocities in his own past, Angel had no right to judge.

Yet Angel obviously believed he could play judge, jury, and executioner in pursuit of his cause. And having tried Lindsey and found him guilty, Angel had apparently come to carry out the sentence.

"What can I do for you?" he asked, stalling until Security showed up. The shamans should have sensed a vampire's presence in the building by now. Except that he'd given Angel the key to getting in and out of the building undetected. Life was just full of irony lately.

Angel moved silently toward him in the darkness of the circus tent, stopping just short of the invisible barrier between the shadows and the bright spotlight. "Aren't you afraid for your life in this viper pit?" he asked, gesturing casually at their surroundings. "The trapeze can be pretty tricky, if you don't know what you're doing."

Lindsey nodded, fully aware of the dangers of working without a net. "That's why I'm on the ground; I leave the high-wire act to people more foolish than me." He pointed overhead, where Lee walked the tightrope, his arms loaded with file folders emblazoned with "CONFIDENTIAL: WOLFRAM & HART" in blood-red letters. Documents leaked from the folders and drifted toward the ground in a paper snowstorm of depravity.

"There's plenty of danger to go around, even down here," Angel purred, his sleek, shadowy figure pacing the edge of the center ring. Inside the big top it was nearly silent, the only sound the low, restless noises of the animals as they waited their turns to perform in the ring; the audience was still, holding its collective breath.

"I can handle it. I have protection." The whip handle was reassuringly solid in Lindsey's grip. Slowly he reached behind with his other hand--half an inch, an inch--until he could feel the strong wooden back of the chair, ready to be flung between Angel and himself if the panther should suddenly pounce.

"Don't you worry about your soul?" Smooth muscles glided under black fur as Angel continued to pace.

"Don't you worry about yours?" Lindsey countered. "Drusilla, Margaret, Jilly, Andrew," ticking off each name with a flick of the whip, "Daniel, Anne, Elizabeth, Joseph, Helen, Charles, Avril, Miriam, Paul, Claire, Niamh, William...." Angel seemed to flinch from the litany of lives he'd ruined, so Lindsey pushed his advantage. "The list goes on and on, Angelus."

It was the wrong move; he knew it as soon as the name passed his lips. Angel squared his shoulders and leaned forward into the circle of light, palms flat on the gray marble of the desk. "Angel," he corrected, brown eyes steadfastly locked on Lindsey's. "Angelus is gone. And the situations are hardly comparable; your lapse into humanity lasted for two days, while I repented a century ago."

The wind rustled the leaves overhead, scattering sunlight and shadows in an ever-changing patchwork. Lindsey stood from his seat on the park bench, meeting Angel head-on. If he'd gained anything from the hours he'd spent in courtrooms, it was an instinctive sense of when not to back down. "What about Jenny, then? Or Theresa or Mark or Stuart or any of the other hundred-odd people you turned or killed in Sunnydale? Fall off the wagon?" He paused, letting the quiet twitter of birds punctuate his sentence. "Maybe they don't count, when measured against the yardstick of your good deeds?"

Sarcasm and enmity. This was firmer ground, a place where he knew how to deal with Angel, where he felt no need to justify himself. Angel's biggest weakness was his humanity. It saddled him with guilt and left him vulnerable.

Lindsey narrowed his eyes, gauging the impact of his accusations. For the first time since he'd initiated the confrontation, Angel broke eye contact, stared down at the grass.

"That--"

"Didn't count because you're really sorry?" Lindsey interrupted, stepping forward until he was a nearly touching Angel, pushing his advantage physically as well as verbally. It was closer than he'd ever been to Angel, to any vampire, and for the split second before Angel backed away, Lindsey felt powerful, energized.

"No! I...." Angel took a deep breath, ran one hand through his hair.

Pushing again, turning Angel's own words against him: "So now we've gotten to the part where you're evil." It felt good to poke at that sore spot, to watch Angel flinch as the barbs tore in. Give him revenge over forgiveness and compassion any day; revenge was far more satisfying.

Lindsey hitched one hip up onto the edge of his desk and crossed his arms over his chest. His own face in shadow now, he no longer had to peer into the darkness to see Angel's expression--the vampire was still staring guiltily at the carpet.

"What I did, I did when I had no soul, no conscience." The dark eyes focused on his face again, as though Angel was looking for some sign that Lindsey understood. "I'm not Angelus anymore, but I still choose to atone for his sins."

He had swallowed his pride and gone to Angel for help, for the sake of the children. He'd offered himself up on the altar of Angel's understanding, had even put his life on the line to prove his sincerity, but Angel hadn't accepted his penance. He was not about to grant Angel absolution now.

"Everyone makes their own decisions," he said, hearing the echo of Holland's words in his own. He glanced to his right, trying to gauge the effect his statement had on the jury, and was gratified to see several of them nodding in agreement.

This wasn't an easy case, not like most of those he tried for Wolfram & Hart, but he felt confident. People could always be counted on to be swayed, if only you had the right argument. And Angel was a vampire, something that was sure to be a strike against him in the eyes of the jury.

Then a flash of movement caught out of the corner of his eye drew his attention, and he turned back to see Angel rising from his seat behind the Prosecution table, a half-smile on his face. "And they have to accept the consequences of those decisions, isn't that right?" he asked, trailing his fingers idly over the edge of the table as he walked out from behind it.

Somehow, in a split second, the balance of power had shifted again and Angel was back in control. Well, what had changed once could change again, and Lindsey was good at power games--in and out of the courtroom. With practiced nonchalance, he smiled and leaned back against the table again, watching Angel's movements as the vampire moved closer to him.

"That's what the law is for," Lindsey said, addressing the jury once again, "and what Wolfram & Hart specializes in: protecting people from the consequences of their actions." He shrugged, focusing on projecting an air of indifference, ignoring Angel's increased proximity as though he posed no risk whatsoever. "As a junior partner in the firm, that protection extends to me, as well."

With preternatural speed, Angel reached out, his hand closing around Lindsey's throat. "Oh really?" he said, still calm but with a smile reminiscent of Manson or Dahmer.

Half a second of blind panic, then Lindsey clamped down on his reactions, determined not to let Angel win. The grip on his throat was too loose to cut off his breathing; Angel was only trying to frighten him. As long as Angel wasn't quite prepared to commit murder, Lindsey still had the advantage.

"And how are they going to protect you from me, Lindsey?" Answer me that."

This was how he'd imagined Angelus--the same impatient contempt Angel exuded, but with an edge of madness. Up until that moment some small part of his brain had still been half-convinced that the building's security guards would kick down his door and dust Angel before it went too far. Instead, Angel's hand tightened against his throat and black spots danced in front of Lindsey's eyes; he clawed at the hand, his instinct for self-preservation overriding everything else. Despite struggling, he was lifted up and shoved onto his back on the desk as though he were merely a rag doll. Pens and paper scattered.

"Relax." The grip loosened slightly. "I'm not going to kill you...yet." The blackness faded but Angel's face was still in shadow, his head and shoulders blocking out the light from above.

Despite the fact that adrenaline-laced blood was thrumming loudly in his ears, Lindsey felt strangely cool and logical--almost as though his mind was disconnected from his body. He wasn't sure whether it was the peace that comes from the acceptance of impending death or some instinctive knowledge that he wasn't going to die.

If Angel wasn't here to exact punishment, then he had to have another motive. In search of information, probably, with death by exsanguination the consequence if Lindsey didn't cooperate. On the other hand, if Holland caught him collaborating with the enemy again--and there was no doubt that he would be caught--his blood would be staining the conference-room carpet. It was a catch-22.

There was a third option, though: telling the truth, at least part of it. Gambling on the humanity that Angel seemed to think made him the better man, Lindsey said, "There's nothing I can tell you. I helped you once, but the next time the partners will have me killed." His voice sounded rough in his ears, his throat still raw.

"Which would be a damn shame, since that'd prevent you from selling your soul to them for a third time."

Angel's hand, cold as death, slid down from Lindsey's neck to his shirt-front, leaving goosebumps in its wake. A handful of the material and a tug, and Lindsey was vertical again, sitting on the edge of his desk with scant inches separating them. Angel toyed with the front of Lindsey's shirt, working buttons free one-handed, almost absent-mindedly.

So much for that tack. Angel just wasn't going to give him a break, any more than when Lindsey had first come to him about Vanessa. And that thought gave him an idea for another direction to take the conversation, another of Angel's weaknesses to play on. Guilt.

"Lucky for you Buffy and company were a little more open-minded than that, or you'd be a pile of dust," he said.

Angel shook his head. "Sorry. Remember, a century of atonement versus a day?"

"But you had to start with your first day, and your second and third." He could tell he wasn't getting anywhere and he was running out of ideas.

Angel laughed, a mirthless sound that made Lindsey's skin crawl. "Like a twelve-step program? Evil Minions Anonymous? Nah. Besides, you've got the wrong idea," Angel said. "I didn't come here for answers, I'm here to give you something. Something to think about."

Fingers slid inside the collar of his shirt, pulling it away from the left side of his neck. He knew what was coming and he was going to fight it with his last breath.

They tumbled to the floor, Angel beneath him, too surprised to react immediately. Adrenaline singing in his veins, Lindsey aimed a couple of hard punches at the vampire's face, then threw himself off and scrambled away. Spotting a pencil on the floor on the other side of his desk, he dived for it, but a hand closed around his ankle, jerking him to a stop and then dragging him back.

"Ah ah," Angel chided, standing and pulling him to his feet. One steel-like arm wrapped around him from the left, pulling him until his back was pressed hard against Angel's chest, threatening to break ribs if he struggled. "None of that, now. The time for your games is over."

"My games, your games...what difference does it make?" Lindsey ground out defiantly, heart pounding with exertion. "They all have rules, Angel. I'll always win in the end because I know how to make those rules work to my advantage." He hoped it was the truth, though his confidence was waning.

Breath ghosted past his ear--or was that just his imagination? Real or not, the sensation made him shiver and sent blood flooding towards an erection he just now consciously registered. When had the situation become sexual? And, more importantly, when had he lost any semblance of control over it? He had an uncomfortable feeling that he'd never really had any, that Angel had merely been setting him up for a fall from the beginning.

Still, he wasn't going to just roll over. "What rules do you want to play by, then?" he asked. He expected Angel to make a speech about fairness or to declare that there were no rules in the war between good and evil.

Instead, Angel whispered, "The Marquis de Sade's."

For a split second, Lindsey's head was filled with images of razor-sharp blades and riding crops and fine lines of red, red blood, beading up on pale white skin. His fingers clenched cold marble.

Angel's hand skimmed over Lindsey's chest and down until he encountered the bulge of Lindsey's erection. "What's this?" Mock surprise in the voice. "Maybe I was wrong about you, Lindsey. You're not just a self-serving bastard. You're a self-serving bastard who's also an adrenaline junkie. Is that why you're working for these scumbags--you get off on the danger?"

Lindsey could feel the heat rising in his face at that grain of truth. He opened his mouth to deny it--lying, he knew, as much to himself as to Angel--but the grip on his balls tightened and what came out was a soft moan of aching need.

"In that case," Angel said, "why don't we add a new rule to our little game. I'll do whatever I want," he licked a long stripe up Lindsey's neck, from shoulder to just beneath his right ear, "and if you want me to stop you just have to say 'stop.' Think of it as a safeword." Long fingers caressed his cock through layers of fine wool and cotton.

"What makes you think I'm willing to play your game?" Lindsey asked, uncomfortably aware that he was really in no position--literally or figuratively--to refuse. The length of Angel's body was hard against his back, nearly as unyielding as the slab of marble that pressed into the front of his thighs.

"You don't have a choice. Well, except for the safeword. The catch is that if you use it, this is completely over; I walk away and we're done." Angel's hand moved from caressing Lindsey's cock to unbuckling Lindsey's belt.

Lindsey closed his eyes and made a conscious effort to slow his breathing. In their current positions, he couldn't help but notice the hardness of Angel's cock pressing against him, and some small part of his mind wondered why he was far less afraid of that than of Angel's fangs near his neck. As if he'd read Lindsey's thoughts, Angel arched his hips and ground his erection against Lindsey's ass.

"The partners will never leave you alone," Lindsey said, trying to sound nonchalant. "They have plans for you that I have no control over."

"You still don't get it, do you, Lindsey?" With a tug, Lindsey's belt came free. "This has nothing to do with Wolfram & Hart and everything to do with you. It's personal." Angel shifted back slightly, pulling and crossing Lindsey's wrists behind him, cinching the warm leather tight around them. "Very, very personal."

Lindsey couldn't move, couldn't protest, almost couldn't breathe.

"Remember, one little word and this is all over." Angel was against his back again, both hands trailing along Lindsey's chest to the front of his pants, unzipping and pushing them down over his hips. Over the embarrassment of his erection. "One word. Say it once for me, Lindsey, so I know you can."

Lindsey took a deep breath. "Fuck you, vampire."

For an instant Angel's chuckle vibrated against him. Then the side of Lindsey's head crashed into the marble desk and white-hot sparks flashed before his eyes. His shoulders burned with the strain as Angel pushed his bound arms upward, and his still-hard cock ached as it was trapped between his body and the desk. With the kind of crystal clarity that happens when you know you're going to die, he recognized that those were minor irritations compared to what Angel had planned.

The word stop formed on his tongue. Lindsey opened his mouth, licked his lips, and had gotten as far as the first, sibilant letter when Angel's cock slammed into him, the word turning into a hiss of agony. His world was being turned inside out. He was being turned inside out, split in two and set on fire.

He screamed, but it came out sounding like "please."

Angel pulled all the way out before driving himself deep inside Lindsey again and this time the agony was dulled to something approaching bearable.

"Cordelia always says I'm too soft on people like you and like Faith." A hard thrust, sliding along the knife's edge between unbearable pain and indescribable pleasure. "What do you think, Lindsey? Am I too soft?"

Forming coherent words was, at the moment, as far beyond his ability as flying. Another of those perfectly aimed, perfectly timed, perfectly perfect thrusts and he moaned, the sound crawling up from the tingle in the pit of his stomach.

"No, I guess not. What about you? Are you soft?" Strong fingers encircled his cock. They were cool; cooler even than the marble desk beneath him.

"I...oh, god...." Lindsey searched his brain again for the word, the important word that would make Angel leave, but he couldn't find it. And when Angel's hand started moving on him, expertly stroking his cock, he couldn't remember why he'd even been looking.

Then his balls were tight and hot and he was coming all over his desk and Angel's hand. Behind him, he heard a quiet noise, and then Angel thrust hard into him and stilled.

When Lindsey opened his eyes, he was lying on his back in his own bed, the dream imagery already beginning to fade.

~ ~ ~

"It was easy to plant the idea." The mind readers spoke simultaneously, their soft contralto voices blending until it was hard to tell that the words were coming from two separate mouths.

"Good," Holland said, swiveling his chair slightly and toying with his pen. "How long will the suggestion last?"

"A week at most. We will have to continue to reinforce it whenever we are in his presence if you wish it to last longer."

He nodded. "That won't be a problem. I'll make sure he's at my side during the next few random tests. Will that be close enough for you to keep his desire for Angel strong?"

"Yes."

Holland smiled. This was going to be interesting.

fait accompli

A/N 1: Consider this A/R in that it branches away from series canon after the events in the first-season episode "Blind Date."

A/N 2: My deepest thanks to Gwyn, who did an amazing job editing this beast. She asked me hard questions, tightened up my prose, and made the story much better than it would have been without her. Any remaining mistakes are my fault, not hers.