Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 22:34:49 -0500 Reply-To: Sandra1012@AOL.COM Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: Sandra McDonald Subject: "If I Could Turn Back Time" 1/1 Author's notes: All routine disclaimers apply. I only just saw "Under Color of Authority" and hate the ending. Maybe the Eurominutes change some things, but I found Duncan unaccountably cold and ruthless at the end. I know things work out, but wrote this in a three hour spurt as my way of rectifying history. It's a very definitely alternate universe. Remember, it's not over until it's over . . . If I Could Turn Back Time by Sandra McDonald sandra1012@aol.com Tessa came to me angrily, her face dark and brooding, her eyes full of wrath. She slipped away from my every effort to embrace her. She wagged her finger at me reproachfully, but whatever words she was saying were whipped away by the wind. We stood across from each other on the roof of the building where our antique store had been. We'd made love on that roof, entwined in an old woolen blanket spread beneath the city glow that blotted all but the most brilliant stars from the sky. Sometimes we'd enjoyed summer picnics, wines and breads and cheeses, and then made love under sunny blue skies. No love marked Tessa's face now. She walked away on a carpet of swords, and when I tried to follow, my feet remained paralyzed beneath me. When I woke in my sweat-soaked bed, sharp pangs of regret poked me in the chest as surely as one of Tessa's fingers would have in our roughhousing or lovemaking or arguments. I thought I could smell her perfume against my pillow. She'd been dead for not even a year. But now she was mad at me, and I cringed in the face of the words she'd been mouthing to me in such anger. Why had I been so cruel, in the end? Because I thought I was doing the right thing. In four hundred and one years I've made a great many mistakes, and the way I'd left things with Richie was just another one. This one could still be fixed, though. If I could screw up enough courage and humility, if I could dump my pride and judgments. The Universe spent the morning conspiring to show me exactly how off balance I was. The toast burned, the coffee tasted old, and the milk had gone sour. The radiator clanked ominously as if the old oil heating system was about to die. The mailbox was crammed full of bills that had come yesterday and that Richie would have normally handled. I couldn't find his accounting ledgers. The dojo remained empty - not unusual for a Sunday morning, but I was lonely and wanted company. Two hours of kata failed to clear my head or my heart, and when I discovered I'd forgotten the two bo kata of the Okinawa Kenpo system because of disuse, I flung my bo across the room and let it clatter on the hardwood floor. I picked up the phone, but hung up when I realized there was no one to call. I was a man without friends in a city of a quarter million people. No one would go to a foreign film with me, no one would come over to practice swordfighting, and no one would care if I lost my head today. Against my better judgment I went to the locker room. Richie's locker was empty, but he'd left pictures taped inside the battered metal door. A centerfold cut out, Miss April. A motivational article from a sports magazine. Postcards of Paris. And a photo of he, Tessa and I taken a few weeks before Tessa's death, at a dinner to celebrate Richie's nineteenth birthday. Three smiling faces. No observer would have been able to foretell that in less than a year the beautiful woman would be dead, the teenager driven away, and the long-haired Highlander between them guilty of both the death and the betrayal. It had been two weeks since my mistake. I hadn't lost my temper or inflicted harsh words. Not the calm, collected, icily cool Duncan MacLeod. My cruelty to Richie had been in my impassive tone of voice and flat words of severance, as if our relationship was nothing more than a failed business transaction. I told myself that I hadn't been angry over Richie killing Mako, but that the whole incident had merely illustrated it was time to end Richie's training and set him free from his informal apprenticeship. There's a difference between setting someone free and turning your back on them. Richie had made his choice. The fight, born of fury and grief and heartbreak, hadn't needed to end in death. In the end Richie could have chosen not to swing his sword, and Mako would probably have left him alone for the rest of their Immortal lives. Richie could have chosen the merciful path. He'd done it before, with Annie Devlin. But instead he swung his sword for Laura Daniels, whose still-warm corpse lay outside in the street. Richie's rage was no less than the white hot fury I'd experienced from time to time, and I couldn't say why his reactions and decisions disturbed me so. Why this, his first Quickening, spurred me into ending our relationship. Maybe I was angry at myself over failing to protect Laura. She'd lied to us about the charges facing her, but that was what frightened young battered wives often did when faced with such fear and pain. In other circumstances, I would have been the one protecting her. Instead I sided philosophically if not wholeheartedly with Mako, who technically had the law in his corner. I'd told Richie he couldn't beat Mako. That he'd have to kill Mako to stop him from apprehending Laura. Laura's death had spurred him into the fight, and even through his tears he must have realized how close he was to dying for her. He did it out of love and vengeance. If I'd caught the bastard who killed Tessa and ended Richie's mortal life, I would have killed him without a thought of police or jury. Out of love and vengeance. I didn't need Tessa's angry words in my dreams to point out my own hypocrisy. Maybe I'd been feeling the pang that comes when a student inevitably outgrows his or her teacher. Maybe I'd been feeling old, and superfluous, and afraid of losing him. In the few seconds before Mako's Quickening gathered, Richie had turned to me and cried out my name in anguish. His severe injuries were already healing, and it was mental pain more than physical that prompted his cry. The pain of taking a first kill. The knowledge he'd just irrevocably taken another Immortal's life. We'd known that day would come. I just wished, in retrospect, that Mako could have been more clearly evil. That the circumstances hadn't been so shaded by the grays of law and justice. That Richie had been able to hold onto his rage and sorrow long enough to remember that vengeance cut both ways, and return to his good- natured, sweet self. He'd called to me. I'd turned away, unwilling to watch his torture beneath the Quickening, unable to reconcile the seventeen year old I'd adopted in my heart to this man who'd killed so ruthlessly. That was the first turning away. The second had been in my loft as I, Duncan MacLeod, judge of all I survey, had turned my back to Richie. He'd made a move as if to embrace me, and I couldn't allow that. I was too angry. Too righteous. I didn't answer him when he thanked me for all I'd done, and I'd let him go away without any more words of good luck or goodwill. The photo in Richie's locker was worn and crumpled, as if it had been carried in a pocket or wallet. My thumb nail pried off most of the tape. I held the picture tightly to my chest as my eyes burned. **** Richie's apartment was empty. His landlady told me he'd sold his second hand furniture to a neighbor and given away the rest. Richie had never accumulated much in the way of material possessions. Seventeen years of bouncing between foster homes had left him light on his feet and easy to pack. The landlady didn't have a forwarding address, and neither did the post office. Joe Dawson wouldn't tell me who Richie's Watcher was. He seemed willing to entertain the idea of checking on Richie's status, but only after I turned myself into a maudlin drunk over a bottle of Scotch. Joe listened to my woes with an expression that tried not to be judgmental. "I always find it difficult to equate law with justice," he finally said. "Legally, Mako was doing his job. Legally, she had the same chance of a fair trial in front of her peers as you or I would." "But . . . " I prompted. Joe Dawson was full of "but"s. "If she had been returned to custody, and murdered by her father- in-law, wouldn't you or Richie been just as guilty of killing her?" "She could have been lying," I said thickly. "She could have made the whole story up." "You're the four hundred year old judge of character, MacLeod. What do you think?" "Four hundred and one," I corrected. The devil is in the details. Connor had taught me that. Or maybe it had been someone else. I poured myself another Scotch. Joe's gaze shifted to the photo on the coffee table. I'd been carrying it everywhere with me. "Mako killed Laura, intentionally or not, " he said thoughtfully. "Richie killed Mako. One life for another. Call that justice. Or call it vengeance, but don't be so quick to condemn it. You've killed in vengeance yourself." I scowled into the depths of my glass. Scotch and self-pity were synergistic. "How would you know?" "Because I'm your Watcher, remember? I know more about your exploits than anyone else." Joe checked with Richie's Watcher the next day. She'd been caught off guard by his abrupt departure. He'd left town within hours of my rejection and was currently unlocated. She figured he'd left on his bike, not by plane or bus. I told Joe he should be careful, working with geniuses like that. Tessa visited my dreams with eyes bright and furious. Laura Daniels came to me, stretched on my sofa, her body damaged beyond repair by Mako, her face red where her husband had beaten her. No word from the Watchers. No postcards, letter or phone calls from Richie. I made a half-hearted attempt to track down Connor, to goad him into reading me the proverbial riot act, but he remained steadfastly out of sight. Three weeks after Joe's first report, he came to the dojo wearing a grim, gray face of bad news. Richie was dead. He'd run across a seventy year old Immortal in a seedy biker bar outside of North Platte, Nebraska. Richie's Watcher said the other Immortal cheated. He shot Richie in the back and then beheaded him with the sword I'd given him all those months ago. The Immortal who killed Richie was named Clay Fetchko. I caught up with him in Tokepa, Kansas, twelve days later. I didn't call the police or have him arrested for murder. I took his head in a fair fight. By taking Fetchko's Quickening, I inherited Richie's. His dreams, his hopes, his fears. In drunken dreams I relived the agony of a bullet smashing into my back. I saw, from his point of view, the first killing he'd seen me do - Slan Quince, who'd threatened Tessa. I realized how much he'd come to look on me as the father he never had, and felt the empty desolation in his chest as he rode past the bitter winter farmlands of Nebraska. The cold truth had hit him out there; he had no one in the world who cared about him. No parents, no friends. Tessa and I had both abandoned him, in our different ways. He hadn't gone into the bar looking for trouble. I needed to believe that. Tessa and Richie vanished from my dreams. In their place came marching armies of those I'd beheaded, blood streaming in a river behind them. The howling of winter wolves filled my ears, and blackness pulsed behind my eyes whether I was awake or asleep. Joe tried to talk sense into me. I turned my back on him, too. Two weeks later, I stumbled during a sword fight on the darkened riverbanks just below where I'd killed Quince. My opponent, Stephen Sommerville, had been a student of Clay Fetchko. Sommerville reminded me of Richie - young, fast, furious. Vengeance cuts both ways, and runs in endless circles. In the split second before Sommerville took my Quickening, I saw Tessa on the roof of the antique store. Her hair shone like gold; her white dress billowed in the wind, shaping itself around the curves of the body I knew as well as I knew my own. Richie stood with her, laughing, his face young and strong, his eyes bright. They took me into their arms and led me to a picnic spread beneath the bright blue sky. *** I didn't expect Joe Dawson at my door. I expected Richie, whose presence I could sense in the dojo below. There were things I had to say to Richie, words I'd been rehearsing in my cold anger all morning. I wanted to say them while the anger still sustained me, and didn't want to delay any further. "I'm busy," I told Joe. He moved past me to the kitchen. "What I have to say won't take long." I gave him a stony look that he easily ignored. "I know everything that happened yesterday," he said. "Laura, Mako, Richie's first Quickening. It was a fair fight, MacLeod. Richie took what was his." "How do you know?" "Because I saw the whole thing. I was there." I shook my head. "You couldn't have known." "That's not the point. The point is, you've got it in your head that Richie did wrong. Or that he's gotten too dependent on you, and needs to live his own life. Or that you and he have to part ways now." I narrowed my gaze. He was unerringly close to the truth. I tried a diversionary tactic. "What business is it of yours?" "Because in a few minutes you're going to send him out of here with the impression you don't ever want him to be a part of your life again. He's going to ride out of your life forever, MacLeod. And I mean forever. He's going to be shot and beheaded by an Immortal named Clay Fetchko in the middle of Nebraska almost two months from now. You're going to be so guilt ridden you get yourself killed soon after." The blood drained from my face. "How do you know that?" Joe told me everything. It took thirty minutes of argument before I sat down in defeat. "Don't blow it, Mac," Joe warned before he left the loft. "He's a good kid." "I know," I murmured. Richie came up in the elevator a few minutes later, wearing the careful expression he adopted whenever he anticipated pain. "It's getting cold out," he said. "Probably going to snow soon." I let myself look at him. I let myself feel the love of a friend for a friend, mentor for student, and maybe even father for son. "You have to leave," I said. He nodded ever so slightly. "It's that time?" I put my hand on his shoulder. "Time for you to strike out on your own. I've taught you what I know. You need practice and experience you won't get from me or in this place." We'd discussed it before, although neither of us had wanted this day to come. "Was I wrong about Mako?" he asked. "I don't know," I said truthfully. There'd been a time when I wouldn't admit that. "I thought you were, but now I'm not so sure. Richie, the important thing is that you act according to your principles and your heart. Everything else will work itself out." "Do I still get to come by, once in a while?" he asked hesitantly. He'd misunderstood. Suddenly Joe's story made even more sense, and I saw how narrowly this parting could have turned to disaster. If I'd been my normal proud self, if I hadn't given him the benefit of the doubt, if I'd turned my back . . . Richie sighed in my silence. "I understand." "No, you don't," I said firmly. "Of course you can come by. I'll be hurt if you don't. We're still going to be friends, and we can still do things together. But you're an adult now, and a fully realized Immortal. Time to leave the nest." "I can do that," Richie smiled. It was one of his best grins, the one that reminded me of Tessa's silvery laugh. I gave him a quick hug and then sent him on his way. Sometime later I went downstairs and found Joe in the office, carrying on a conversation with himself. He stopped when he saw me and raised his eyebrows as a question. "We worked it out," I said, feeling somewhat sheepish. And vastly relieved. "Good," he nodded. "Thank you," I added.. He might have said more, but a strange expression came over his face. I felt a frission of energy like a very faint Quickening run through the room. Then the Joe I knew blinked at me in startlement and wonder. "MacLeod," he breathed, "have I got a story for you!" We've argued plenty of times since about what exactly happened. Neither of us can say for sure. We never told Richie. He just spent six months touring the wide open highways and cities of America on his bike. At my unexplained insistence, he stayed out of Nebraska. Now he's enrolled at the community college, and we meet a few times a week for practice or dinner or, if he's willing, foreign films. I think about Dr. Sam Beckett and his quantum leaping every now and then. His story, whether it was true or not, saved me from pain too easily imagined. I wish him luck. After all, if he can believe I'm an Immortal, I can believe he's a Time Traveler. There's not really a huge difference between the two, is there? THE END Author's note: This story can be read two ways - either the tragic version or with the optional happy crossover ending. I always intended it to be a crossover, but when I got to the tragic end I almost stopped. But I come to fandom to cheer myself up, not be depressed! Comments and constructive criticism are welcome . . . THE END Author's note: This story can be read two ways - either the tragic version or with the optional happy crossover ending. I always intended it to be a crossover, but when I got to the tragic end I almost stopped. But I come to fandom to cheer myself up, not be depressed! Comments and constructive criticism are welcome . . . =========================================================================