Doyle looked at the card from the Counsellor for a long time before he set it aside and microwaved his evening meal. Then he sat at the desk with the hot ready-meal beside him, and started to type, slowly.

“I’ve thought about this question, I really have, but I don’t see any point. I wouldn’t be able to change anything. The main thing that went wrong isn’t under my control. Not in any way. Going back wouldn’t make any difference to it.

Nowadays I can control it a little – I can let it out when I need it, but the trouble is I can’t keep it in, not far enough.
People are always going to know, in the end.

You can’t change the past, it’s always with you; like your genes. There’s no point.

If I could go back and talk to myself I suppose I could tell myself to listen to Harriet more. I didn’t want to lose my old friends, the people from before it happened. She wanted me to – I don’t know how to put it, explore my new self or something.

The thing is, if there’s a respectable demon middle-class I wasn’t in a position to find it. I hadn’t got the contacts. I still don’t have the contacts. That reads as though I was making excuses, but – later on Harriet found herself one who was like a stereotype of a prosperous, dull, petit-bourgeois restaurant owner. Mr Dull. He and his family tried to murder me. No malice involved – it was just their custom. What can you do in a situation like that?)

The laptop screen was getting worn or something, and anyway his eyes were stinging. He printed out a first draft and started to edit it with a pen.

After a few minutes he remembered his ready-meal and started to fork the food into his mouth without tasting it

Doyle.
Angel, the series.
Words, 310

Doyle came home early that evening. He looked tired and drained, but he turned to the laptop moments after microwaving his meal and he started to look up local news as he ate. After a few moments he swore, sighed and turned away from the screen.

As he looked around the room he noticed the familiar cream envelope lying just inside the door. So the counselor had found him. He tried to remember if he owed the man money but felt too weary even to think about it.

The arrangement where the Counselor had sent him words and questions and he had typed some kind of response seemed far in the past; it was almost as if it had happened in another life. It had never seemed to help much anyway – but then, he didn’t know how bad things might have been without it.

It was when he opened it and saw the prompt that he started to laugh. In the end he supposed he had just got snowed under and forgotten to write,

Typing things out had sometimes seemed to get them clearer in his mind, even though he couldn’t imagine telling anyone who wasn’t from the underside the kind of things that bothered him – and with that thought he turned back to the laptop.

It might be worth giving it another try, at that.

Muse; Doyle
Fandom, Angel, the series.
Words, 226

Chapter 1

This time the vision had been specific enough to make it seem easy. All he had to do was locate the potential victim, warn her and hope to be believed. Finding the house was likely to be more difficult but it was in a poor area and the graffiti in the street was distinctive.

He climbed the few steps to the entrance and was looking at the numerous bells when he saw that the front door was open a crack and went in. The hall was stuffy, heavy with the scents of multiple occupation, years of tobacco, a united nations of cooking smells, halitosis and sweat, air-freshener and cheap disinfectant. It was the kind of aroma that made him wonder just how much of a sense of smell pure-bred humans have.

Doyle had once found a ring in a sewer by scenting a trace of the owner’s DNA – he had made a half-unconscious discipline of shutting off the worst, but sometimes a change of odour could hit him, in the first few seconds. He guessed that the place must have a dozen residents, even omitting the complex of smells that meant there was a baby nearby – that had been in the vision, too, and the memory made him shiver.

At first it was a relief when he heard someone ask who he was and saw the old man standing on the stairs, glaring at him and asking what he wanted. He asked which was the blonde girl's apartment …

A few moments later he was back outside, thankful that the landlord hadn’t chosen to follow him. The oldster had opened his mouth and bellowed and Doyle suspected that he would hear the tirade in his dreams,

“I am landlord here for years! Am I a pimp, then, that you come in here asking for a young blonde that you don’t know the name? No blondes here, no bad women here! You don’t come looking for your no-name blonde in a respectable house! You don't get out now I call the police, you hear me?”
……………………………………………………………………………………
Chapter 2

All the houses looked alike and he’d been trying to find the right place for almost an hour when the police cars came screaming past him. When he retraced his steps he saw that the house he had tried to enter had become a crime scene. The tapes were up and the circle of activity was widening by the moment when he faded off into the dusk, trying to remain unnoticed.

It was when he saw the newspapers next day that he headed for a bar to drown his bewilderment and, after most of a bottle, he found himself telling part of the story to a very small demon with a vaguely familiar face.

“The crazy thing was that it must have happened while I was there, or near enough. But it couldn’t have done. The murder was – have you seen the papers? The place stank, but it wasn’t enough to hide the smell of blood. Nothing could have covered all that, and she must have – the papers say she screamed. That’s why the neighbours called the police. If only I’d called them, called them first, they might have got there before…”

“Could the landlord have done it? Could he have turned you away and then…?”

“No, he was nothing like what I …” Doyle caught himself on the verge of saying that he’d seen the crime. “He was just a withered little guy, he couldn’t have thrown her through a wall. He didn’t have teeth that could do that kind of damage, either … he had nasty, rotting black smoker’s stubs. He … Nixi, he was shouting right at me. When I was backing out he was about ten feet away, near enough to smell, and … he didn’t – his breath should have stunk, his clothes should have … He didn’t smell of anything. Nothing at all.”

“And you’re a Brachan. You would know.” She paused thoughtfully, with the glass halfway to her lips. “I wonder if it was The First?“ Doyle looked at her, stricken.

“Don’t say it's going to be a serial killer; just … don’t, okay? I’m not police, I’m not Angel, I can't …” He drank on, losing all focus on the conversation while she tried to explain about an immaterial thing that could take the appearance of anyone who had died.

When he staggered away to the Gents she pocketed his contact number and scrawled a short note that she pasted to the table before leaving.

“The other night, upon the stair,
You met a man that wasn’t there,
Sometimes It isn’t there to stay,
I hope it’s going to quit LA,

xxx N.

P.S. Why don’t you get a proper job?”

Afterward, she wondered if the note really explained what she'd been trying to tell him - she hadn’t been very sober when she wrote it.


Muse; Doyle.
Fandom, Angel, the series.

Words, Part 1, 366; Part 2, 456

“Can one bad day change who you are?”

Doyle looked at the subject line of the e-mail and wondered why he’d ever started writing to the counselor again. At least he could probably be more honest by e-mail. He might even be able to write about demons without getting locked up by some kind of therapeutic toughs in white coats, one day – but today wasn’t going to be the day.

They’d had “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” on late night TV a few hours back – the ending of that probably answered the question. The truth was that that idiot’s life had really ended from the day that they’d put the diagnosis on him. That was what’d let them do it. After that the psycho’d had no more civil rights than if he’d been a demon or something. He’d been an outlaw in the real, old meaning of the word - no rights under law.

“Anyway,” he said aloud, “I’d better get on with answering the question.” After staring at the keyboard for some minutes he carefully went off-line, opened Word and typed,

“I did well in my own exams, but one or two of my friends did badly. One girl claimed she had a migraine right through the exam period. That changed her life; she passed, but not well enough for the career she wanted. She got caught by family responsibilities and – the last I saw of her she wasn’t the person she was when she was a student, and she wasn’t the person she’d wanted to be, either.

After I qualified I taught the ninth grade for a few years. Exams weren’t much of a factor, there – but a bad day can really change a child, and a parent having bad days can be worse. Probably the real life- personality changers are the ones that make you think feel differently about yourself and the ones that make people think differently about you.”

He saved the document and then stopped, pausing for a few moments before typing, rapidly,

“Then there’s accidents, car crashes and things like that, or getting bitten by a werewolf or a vampire or something and getting turned, or just getting infected or something. I mean with diseases. Then there’s the people who get used as hosts for demon spawn and

I don’t think Brachen do that. Well, they do in a way. I mean, it’s a fertile cross but the females live through it. I don’t know if the hybrids are fertile and it’s best not to find out.

I never saw the beginning of that film but what the idiot who got lobotomized probably did wrong in the first place was to tell people he’d got a problem.”

He checked again to be sure that there was no risk of sending the thing before he could edit it. Then he closed the document and clicked “No” when Word asked if he wanted to save the changes.


Muse, Doyle,
Fandom, Angel, the Series.
Words, 490,

My computer has failed completely. I will be back as soon as I can - apologies to everyone.

I thought I saw Cordy the other day.

It was late and the street wasn’t well lighted. Visibility had got much worse after the rain started, and then this girl came around the corner ahead of me. She was hurrying down the sidewalk toward the theatre, walking away from me, wearing a ridiculous short raincoat with the collar turned up.

I thought the coat must be a fashion thing. It was in some sort of shiny material that looked water-proof, but it wasn’t long enough to protect the bottom of her skirt. I could see that it was wet and starting to cling to her. It must have been uncomfortable.

It was one of the times that I wished the visions worked for me. I knew it would be raining. I’d seen that. I just found myself thinking that, if I’d looked ahead properly, I’d have had an umbrella. I could have hurried and caught up to her and maybe made some joke … and offered her the umbrella and maybe talked for a bit...

Then she passed under a streetlamp and I got a better look. She moved just like the Princess but her hair was much shorter and a sort of streaky blondish dyed colour. It wouldn’t have looked right with Cordy’s skin at all.

It wasn’t the long dyed auburn of the stripper type I’d seen in the vision, either, so I turned away and headed off across the street toward the new bar.

That was that. It’s funny that I keep remembering her.

Muse; Doyle
Fandom, Angel (the series)
words, 261

377 Secret ingredient.

I don’t cook. Well, I do, but not in a gourmet way. I don’t mess about with secret ingredients. I just cook to eat, when I feel like it. Mostly I just eat out.

One time I complained about the eggs. I don’t like any part of the white to be slimy or runny, but I like the yolk to be completely liquid, unless I hard-boil an egg to take as a snack, or something. Then, if the egg’s soft-boiled, I used to like to take yesterday’s bread, put on some nice fresh creamery butter and then cut the bread into strips to dip into the yolk.

After I complained about the white being runny my mother decided to have me cook the breakfast eggs for a week.

You’d think it would be easy to just get the white solid and keep the yolk completely liquid, wouldn’t you? Toward the end of the week, well, after a couple of days, anyway, I switched to frying the breakfast eggs. That way you can see whether you’re getting it right. The taste isn’t the same, not quite, but after a while I got so I preferred the eggs fried. (I never can do bacon, though; not the way they do it here. It either lies there looking raw or it crisps up so much that you could powder it and sprinkle it on.)

Salt and pepper wouldn’t count as secret ingredients, would they? Would leaving out adding salt to the egg itself but making sure you have salted butter on the bread? I’ll tell you what might. When I had boiled eggs I always made sure that the bread I had with them was a day or two old and not kept in the fridge or freezer. That firms it up and you can dip the strips without them getting broken and lost in the egg so quickly – but I always had to use a spoon in the end. (The other trick is to use soda bread, but there’s nothing secret about that, you’d know from the taste.)

I’m not really fussy about food any more – nowadays I just make sure it’s single malt.

Muse; Doyle
Fandom; Angel, the series.
Words; 360

I thought we’d covered this – I act like a kid. I was a kid. Oh, I didn’t think so at the time. I was married at 18. That was legal even back then, but you had to get your parents’ consent. I remember someone asking me what my mother was thinking of when she gave it - I can guess, by now. A green card and a nice new start in a nice new country-of-opportunity. I’m pretty sure she never expected to have to face up to the reasons why it wasn’t a real new begining. There are things you can’t run away from.

It’s just as well that you don’t need your parents’ consent for a divorce. The Church doesn’t allow it, and that locks some of the devout into a real life of misery. My wife and I were too young to marry anyway. We’d both of have been Hell to live with by the time we split up, but at least nobody could stop us from ending it. (… is that right, I wonder? I was over 21 by then but Harriet … I never knew that she hadn’t divorced me until the day she turned up on the doorstep wanting me to set her free. I’ve wondered since why she hadn’t done it right away, but maybe she needed someone else’s consent. I guess part of my mind will always wonder. She said that I took everything over, while we were married - that I organised and planned her out of her mind; so I left it to her to get the divorce – and she didn’t. Not then. Maybe if I’d done things differently she wouldn’t have …)

I guess the answer is that I act wrong during break-ups, one way or another.

Muse; Doyle
Fandom; Angel, the series.
Words, 300

5 p.m.
I meant to get something at the drug store, but the flu got too bad too fast. I can’t go out, now. There are areas in this city where demons are tolerated, but it’s necessary to be tactful about it. I can’t go sneezing in the street; it makes me look like my father and people would notice.

I’ll just have to stay in until this stage is over and make do with what I have. My mother always swore by hot orange juice with a slug of whisky in it to cure flu. I think she made it half and half. I guess the orange juice was for vitamin C; I’m not sure what the whiskey does but it helps, in a way. I’m trying to find the right temperature to heat it to. I read somewhere that if wine gets used in cooking all the alcohol burns off, or evaporates or something. Seems dangerous. It’d be a waste of a nice single malt, too.
………………………………

Midnight

This hasn’t cured anything, yet. Maybe if I cut the whiskey with boiling water and … I checked the kitchen. No fruit juice at all. I‘ve got baked beans in tomato juice. Isn’t a tomato a fruit? Vitamin C and riboflavin or something? I’m not going to mix them, but maybe a swallow of whiskey to every spoonful of beans?

............

3 a.m.

The portions proportions are wrong. I’ve got one can of beans and one bottle of whiskey and the vluma volume – where’s the spellchurk button?

I feel a bit sick. Mum used to say,

“Feed a cold and starve a fever.”

I’d better leave the rest of the beans and … I’ll finish this later…

Muse; Doyle
Fandom; Angel, the series
Words, 282

I suppose I know a couple of jokes, but you might not get them if you don’t know L.A.

Let’s see now. A man walks into a bar. He looks around and sees that it’s a decent looking place even though some of the bar snacks are a bit unconventional. Anyway, he’s looking for company and when he sees a smartly dressed, good looking woman ordering a vodka he walks up behind her and says,

“I hate to see a lady buying her own drinks. Can I get that one for you?” The woman turns to face him and looks him over; she checks out his suit and then looks him in the face and says,

“Maybe I can save time by explaining that I’ll screw you, but it will cost you. I’ve been screwing people ever since I got out of college. I make my living that way. I’m good at it and I enjoy it – so, your place or mine? I’m really good at what I do; I’ll screw you like you’ve never been screwed before - just remember, it will cost you. “ The man looks at her, grins and says,

“Hey, that’s a coincidence - I’m a lawyer too! Are you with Wolfram and Hart? I'm on the third floor.”

Muse; Doyle
Fandom; Angel, the series.
Words, 217