For tesla321 who celebrates her 50th birthday on Wednesday and for lostakasha who requested Fred, Lorne and a mutual crush on Angel. Hope you both enjoy it!


TITLE: Sea Breeze
AUTHOR: starlet2367
RATING: PG-13
PAIRING: None, really
SUMMARY: People came here for a reason. To forget. Cordelia’s let them do that. All of them. Him included.
DISCLAIMER: Move along. Nothing to see here.
FEEDBACK: Sure!
NOTES: Thanks to littleheaven70 and psychofilly for the honest critiques. Next round's on me, ladies!




Lilly likes Beatles songs
The words are off, but they don't feel that wrong
She came in through the bedroom window like a blue girl
Like a blue girl, like a blue girl

”Little Lily” – Widespread Panic



Lorne ran the blue-striped towel over the bar, smoothing the surface back to its shiny, black finish. Though the front door was locked, the bamboo shades were still rolled up, letting the ocean breeze blow through.

With one hand he opened the lid on the Laphroaig; with the other he rubbed the small of his back. Not as young as he’d once been and standing for fourteen hours didn’t suit him any more.

Maybe it was time to get out of the business.

He glanced around at his bar, Cordelia’s, and tried to imagine life without his barflies Joe and Jerry, his ever revolving staff of ever younger waiters, the sparkle and laugh of his patrons and the fresh breeze that ruffled the table cloths as he mixed drinks.

The piano caught him, as it always did, and pulled him over, drink in hand to sit on the padded bench. He took off the lavender sport coat and laid it over the bench next to him. The fatigue lifted as he slipped into a medley, “Moonlight Sonata” to “Candle in the Wind” and finally to Prince’s “Purple Rain.”

With sad songs like that in his mind he wasn’t surprised to look up and see a ghost.

She stood in front of him, long hair dancing in the light breeze, a smile on her face. “Purple rain, purple rain…” she sang, charmingly off-key.

He laughed, toasted her and sipped the drink. “Fred. You look surprisingly…corporeal.”

He’d been seeing ghosts since he left Los Angeles. Mostly in his dreams, but sometimes, like tonight, when the waitress moon had spread a dazzlingly white tablecloth over the inky bay, they’d saunter in and settle down for a visit.

Lorne might have worried about seeing ghosts, especially as they seemed to be showing up more often these days. But he’d heard stories about outcasts in Pylea, those who dreamed in color, or heard something whispered to be music, or who saw the dead. Seemed like he’d gotten a dose of all three and the older he got the more like one thing they became.

Dream-music-death.

Fred glanced down at her trim jeans, covered by a thigh-length cotton tunic in sunshine yellows and oranges. “Well, why shouldn’t I?” she asked, sounding surprised.

“Because you’re, er—“ Well, holy Hannah. What if she didn’t know?

He tossed back the rest of the scotch. In his experience ghosts who thought they were alive were a hell of a lot worse off than ghosts who knew they were dead and just dropped by for a friendly chat.

Before he had to decide which she thought she was, her face cleared. She laughed, a big, full sound that was as Texan as her voice. “You think I’m *dead*?”

Lorne closed the piano lid and shuffled toward the bar. She fell into step beside him, her boots registering like a heavy heartbeat against the teak floors. She smelled like coconut oil and the orchid she wore behind her ear.

God, they were making them more real every year.

Maybe it *was* time to shut this place down. Genetics aside, the late nights and the booze were obviously pickling his brain.

He dumped four fingers of the Laphroaig in his glass and bit half of them off.

Fred giggled. “Aren’t ya gonna ask if I want any?”

What the hell? He dumped some in a glass for her and bumped it across the bar with his fingertips.

She picked it up, slugged it back, and wiped her watering eyes. “G-god that’s good.” She laughed again.

Lorne’s head spun. The most Cordelia had ever done was stare longingly at the Cosmo he’d mixed for her and bitch about not being able to get Kathy Griffin reruns on TV in heaven.

He must have looked a fright, he thought, since Fred rounded the bar and gathered him to her. Her body felt so real, so solid. The smell of the orchid nearly overwhelmed him.

“Here, let me help you—“ She took his weight and aimed for one of the long, low rattan couches by the windows.

They settled in and she put her drink to his lips. “Drink this.”

He shook his head and pushed it away. “I think I’ve had enough.”

He was close enough to see the pores of her skin. Even regular facials at La Prairie wouldn’t have dulled thirty years of aging. Which left him one other option.

“Illyria.”

“Well, yeah. Who’d you expect?” Illyria patted his thigh and moved in an eerily Fred-like way, back to the bar. She hoisted herself onto a bar stool and spun around, the tails of the tunic flipping around her like the lazy flap of a ceiling fan. “You stayed good and hid for a good long time, I’ll say that.”

Just what he needed. A goddess with the face of a ghost.

He slammed into a wall of suspicion. “Angel didn’t send you, did he?”

Her hand clasped the bar and stopped her spin. She shook her hair out and the dense tangle—curlier than he remembered—fell nearly to her waist. “Angel? Naw. I did see him a few years ago. Ran into him—“

“Well, isn’t that nice. Good to know Mr. Boss Man’s still dead and kicking.” He stood and bustled to her side, preparing to shoo her off and pray she never returned.

He’d come to the island to forget her and Angel and Lindsey and everything they represented. It was bad enough that he’d wound up with their ghosts. But getting a face full of a real one was more than he’d bargained for—and the life he’d purchased had come at way too high a price to ever be called a good deal.

His smile felt pulled into taut lines, like a cord stretched too tight. “Now, how about you skedaddle and don’t come back?” He’d given up being polite for polite’s sake about the time he’d murdered Lindsey.

Illyria rested her cheek on her folded arms and gazed at him with soft eyes. “Thirty years. You haven’t changed much.”

“Uh huh. Come on, your far-from-excellence. Time to go annoy someone else.” He tugged her up and hauled her toward the door.

She was stronger than she looked and when her boots dug into the floor she was impossible to budge. Rather than risk long skid marks from her Tony Lamas, he dropped her arm. “Fine. I’ll go then.”

People came here for a reason. To forget. Cordelia’s let them do that. All of them. Him included.

All he’d ever wanted was to be left in peace.

“I knew I should have put those wards back up.” He said, as he marched to the door. “That’s the problem with complacency. It bites you in the butt cheek, right where you live—“

She winked into existence right in front of him. “Just ‘cause I like to look like Fred don’t mean I can’t still work a little magic.” Illyria waggled her fingers at him.

“Don’t be rude, Lorne. I didn’t come for anything but to catch up on old times. And new ones, too.” She looped her arm through his. “Now come on. Offer me some supper. I’ve traveled a long way to see you.”

She’d always been stubborn, before and after. If he hadn’t known Fred, if he hadn’t seen how she’d survived what he personally knew was hell, he’d probably just kill her and be done with it.

“Fine. But only for Fred.” The words were as clipped as his pace as he dragged her into the kitchen with him.

***

Over a steaming bowl of etouffee Illyria said, “So, how long’ve you been in paradise?”

He glanced around at the little bar built like a deck over the bay. The edges of the wooden tables were worn smooth, the shades starting to fray. The fabrics, in style thirty years ago, might have been ready to make a stylish reappearance if they hadn’t thinned to nearly white from so much use.

Lorne shrugged. “Even paradise wears thin.” The etouffee was spicy with a rich slick of sauce that begged to be sopped up with bread. He sliced the end off of a baguette and set it down next to his plate. “So, why Fred?”

She glanced up at him. “Hmm?” There was a splash of red sauce on her lower lip and her little cat tongue slipped out and caught it. “You mean, why not Illyria?”

He nodded.

Illyria shrugged. “It’s easier to walk among people when you’re clothed as a human.”

Lorne narrowed his eyes, wondering if that was a racial slur.

She put her hand on his. “That wasn’t anything against you. I just meant….” Her eyes became dreamy. “It was demeaning at first to pretend to be such puny creature. I only used this face because it made life convenient.”

Illyria tore off a hunk of bread and used it to sop up some gravy. “Now,” she said, around a mouthful of baguette, “I hardly remember what my real face looked like.”

He caught a glimpse of his own face in the mirror and shivered.

***

“So, you said you ran into Angel?” God, he must be drunk if he was willing to talk about Angel.

They’d moved back to the couch. The lights were low and there was an open bottle of wine between them.

Fred pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Yeah. He went back to that monastery in Sri Lanka. Remember, right after I got back from Pylea, and that Buffy girl died?”

“What about the demons?”

She shrugged. “Either killed them or made peace with them.”

“Peace was never Angel’s strong suit.”

The image of Angel, sword in hand, flashed through his mind. It had been a long time since he’d let himself think of Angel at all and when he did he tended to get stuck in that last year with him, when their relationship had gone rancid.

“He was haunted.” She shrugged again. “I never figured out why. He didn’t kill nearly as many people as I did and I never felt guilty.”

Lorne blinked. He’d fallen so far under the Fred spell that he’d completely forgotten about Illyria. “Maybe that replacement soul wasn’t sturdy enough to hold up under the pressure.”

“Or maybe he just liked being all Heathcliff. Cordy always called him Broody McBrood, Mayor of Broodville.”

Lorne laughed.

“You named your bar after her.”

“It was her idea.” His first ghost visit—if you didn’t count seeing Lindsey bleed to death in his dreams. “I was vying for Angel’s title when she sat down on the beach next to me and said, ‘Lorne, you gotta get up off your fine, green ass and do something with your life.’”

Fred didn’t even blink an eye at the idea that he’d been seeing spirits. “Sounds like Cordy.”

“Sounded even more like her when she told me I should open a bar then finished by saying, ‘And you should totally name it after me.’”

She studied her toes, wiggling them in the bright socks. “We had a good time with them, didn’t we?”

Lorne slumped against the couch and propped his feet up on the oversized conch shell that served as an ottoman. “Before that last year at Wolfram and Hart? I guess we did.”

“They were as close to family as I had after Pylea. When Angel saved me….” She sighed, a girlish sound. “What a hunk of hero sandwich.”

“As vampires went, he was hardly cuddly.”

Fred elbowed him. “Lorne. Looooorrrne. Tell the truth.” Her eyes sparkled. “You thought he was hot. You called him…what was it…Angel cakes?”

He rolled his head so he could see her face. Never let a goddess out of your sights, he thought, with his Laphroaig-mushed brain.

Behind her, Lorne saw the two of them reflected in the mirror that spanned the wall behind the bar. His face, a little looser, a little more lined, the paunch of his stomach slightly more pronounced. Her lanky frame and the fall of hair the same color as the scotch he’d been drinking since dawn.

She pushed her glasses up her nose and peered at him. For a moment he was thirty years younger, serving this girl her first drink in a bar in five years. Watching as she stared down the arrow of a lethal crossbow, ready to shoot the demon hunter who threatened him and her friends.

And Angel, willing to die for all of them.

She smiled at him. “But no one else could have gotten you to kill Lindsey.”

The warm evening condensed into ice leaving the words to hang in the air like frost.

With a hot spurt of rage he threw the glass into the mirror and watched them both shatter. Felt himself shatter with them. Images flying free with the shards and landing all around him, the busted, useless glass of his life ready to be swept over the edge of the deck and into the sea.

“What’d I say?” She had a line between her brows and looked cutely, drunkenly confused.

“It's called a moment of clarity, my lamb, and I've just had one.” Lorne pointed toward the door. “Out.”

Her face slid into a pout. “You don’t mean it.”

When he didn’t say anything, she stood. In her stocking feet she barely reached his collarbone, which made him feel mean for kicking her out. Delicate, sweet little Fred.

Who’d died more than thirty years before.

Along with Wesley, Gunn, Cordelia and the world he’d known and even loved. He was stranded on this island, stuck with nothing but memories and rage. And until she walked in that was just the way he’d liked it.

She put down her beer, pulled on her boots and walked out of his bar.

***

Like a storm surge the memories came, drawing him under and spitting him out to lie helpless in his bed. He lay, wearing nothing but his azure blue silk pajama bottoms, under the lazy whip of the ceiling fan.

The mirrored ceiling showed his hands tracing the tattoos on his arms and chest, the runes he’d risked his life to obtain. An homage to the man he killed, a reminder that he could never escape justice.

One day, he’d pay.

Lorne hummed an old song, a song about a blue girl and watched his aura snap into sight. Gray shadows, like inky twilight.

The air shifted. He turned his head.

Cordelia, in white, settled next to him and started poking her fingers in his shadowed aura. “Wow. Not really the effect I was hoping for.”

He waved his hand. “Quit poking me.”

“Don’t be a baby. It’s not like you can even feel it.” She grinned, plumped a pillow and leaned against the bamboo headboard. “Guess who I saw last night at the bar?”

Lorne rolled over and presented her with his back. “Okay, I know I'm probably going to regret this. In fact, being prescient, I'm actually sure of it.”

“Looking hot? Singing songs about Okalahoma?”

He squeezed his eyes shut.

She laughed. “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

He sat up and grabbed for her throat but only came up with air.

Her smile was as sharp as the glass that still littered the dining room floor. “Hey, I know! Why don’t you sell this place? Go back to the mainland. Or, here’s an idea! Go shack up with Angel.” She waved a hand. “He’s having about as much fun as you are.”

Lorne fell back against the pillows and stared at his reflection in the mirror again. Beside him a shadow wavered, barely visible in the glass. “Maybe I will.”

“You can’t escape it, you know.”

He rolled his eyes. “Escape what?”

“The great Caritas in the sky?” She pointed. “Everything comes from this. Everything goes back to this. You can waste your life brooding about minor indiscretions—“

“I hardly call murder a minor indiscretion!”

“You people,” she huffed. “I send Illyria to try to make you see all the great—“

He gritted his teeth. “I should have known.”

“Well, you could thank me. That’s the first time you’ve spent with a real friend in decades.”

“Fred was my friend. And Fred is dead.”

“Oh, please.” Cordelia shook her head. “It’s all just semantics.”

“I gave up everything I had and followed Angel, and you know what happened?” Lorne waved his hands wildly. “A big, fat nothing. I wasted my life for him—and not just that. Everyone who followed him died! Gunn, Wesley, Fred, you…. I should have known the first minute I read him—“

Cordy sighed. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You should have known. You should have seen. You should have guessed.” Her brow furrowed. “Well, ya know what, big fella? I had the *visions* and I never guessed. And here I am, and I’m pretty much fine.” She wrinkled her nose. “Stuck following you fools around till you get something right, but whatever.”

“No one asked you—“

“And you know what else?” She acted like he hadn’t even spoken. “Lindsey? Lindsey’s fantastic. Lindsey is lickably gorgeous. He’s playing guitar every night up here, living it up. Which is more than I can say for you.” She looked dourly at him.

Lorne closed his eyes, hoping she’d go away.

For a second he thought he felt someone stroking his hair. When he opened his eyes again, the room was empty.

***

“What’ll it be, sugar?” Lorne asked, as his regular, Joe, slid into the same seat he’d warmed for the last five years.

“I think I’ll change it up tonight, Lorney-baby,” Joe said, tapping his fingers on the bar. “How about a Sea Breeze?”

Lorne smiled. “I seem to be mixing a lot of those tonight.”

“A little voice keeps telling me I should have one. Who am I to argue?” He palmed a handful of mini-pretzels. “Why don’t you have one with me?”

He shook his head as he mixed the drink. “Maybe later.” He’d had his fill of Sea Breezes around the time Caritas got shot up.

“How about one for me, too?” Fred slipped into the seat next to Joe’s.

“I didn’t see you come in,” Lorne said, voice cool.

“I snuck in, in case you were still pissed at me.”

“Can you believe this?” he asked, with false brightness. “Not even ten o'clock and we've already run out of Yak's bile.” Lorne pointed at Joe. “Take over for a minute while I get something out of the store room.”

He walked down the hall, past the bathrooms and entered the large closet that served as storage. There he blew out a breath, trying to regain his composure. After a minute he felt level again and started back for the bar. Then he remembered that they really were out of yak’s bile, and went back to the closet.

“You’re not still pissed, right?”

He peeked around the edge to find Cordelia standing there. “Not much I could do about it if I was.”

“You really should have one of these,” she said, gesturing with her Sea Breeze.

Lorne snorted. “Should have known.”

“Yep.” She shot him a smartass grin.

“Go bother Angel. I’m busy.”

“Angel? Please. He’s being all meditate-y.” She fake-yawned, waving her hand in front of her mouth. “Hey, how do I look?” She spun in a circle, her long hair fanning out behind her. The red leather pants and yellow camisole were a knockout.

“Gorgeous. Who’s the lucky guy?”

She leaned in. “Lindsey,” she whispered.

Lorne huffed. “I hate you more than the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Weber.”

“You asked.” She grinned. “Gotta go or I’ll be late. Don’t wanna keep the hot Okie waiting.”

He took the bile jar back to the bar and popped the lid. The image of Cordy in those red pants, wiggling her ass in front of Lindsey had him grinning before he could help it.

“Hey, Lorne, what happened to the mirror?” Joe swigged the last of his Sea Breeze as he took his seat at the bar.

Lorne put the glasses in front of them and wiped his hands on the towel in his waistband. The bar was filling up with locals and tourists, the breeze carrying the smell of ocean. Through the open door a couple came, dressed for a party.

Lorne’s eyes caught Fred’s.

She smiled.

“Thought it was time for a change,” he said.

END