Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 09:18:40 -0700 Reply-To: WOLFEM@CGS.EDU Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: Michelle Wolfe Subject: my so-called immortality 2/? From: WOLFEM 10-NOV-1995 09:15:12.52 To: WOLFEM CC: WOLFEM Subj: my so-called immortality 2/? Thanks for all the comments and encouragement. This was written before we learned this season that Richie was coming back to the dojo, so think of it as an alternate universe...Also-- if I haven't said this alredy, this is about exactly a year after Richie got kicked out of Paris... My So-Called Immortality (or, "never trust anyone over 300"): a Highlander excursion by M. Wolfe Part II: It's a Small World After All PARIS MIDMORNING, SAME DAY "...I've never took the smile away from anybody's face. And that's a desperate way to look, for someone who is still a child..." --Big Country, "In a Big Country" Richie Ryan pulled his baseball cap down low on his forehead and pressed his John Lennon sunglasses hard against the bridge of his nose. Ouch. He wondered if he would feel less conspicuous if he hadn't just listened to Mac lecture him for an hour on how utterly and absolutely conspicuous he was. Coming to Paris hadn't seemed like such a stupid idea on the plane. Of course, that's probably what Kennedy had thought riding in that convertible through Dallas. When he bought the ticket, his justifications had seemed airtight. The small Toronto film company into which he had smooth talked himself a job needed someone to scout locations in Paris; he knew the city better than anyone else in the office (the only co-workers who said they also knew the city kept claiming that they couldn't check out sites during the day...); the ticket was free; he would only be there a week, and if he avoided the 'cycle circuit, who would notice one more blond American? Sure, he was one blond American who was supposed to be dead. But, hey, it was only a week. Twenty minutes after landing in Paris, he had literally bumped into Mac, going through customs. One glance at the look of seething exasperation on MacLeod's face, and his invincible wall of rationalizations crumbled into dust. Now, three hours later, he was walking next to Mac and their friend Joe Dawson-whom Mac had met in customs-- wishing he could melt away into the sidewalk. Anything to dodge the knowledge that he had disappointed Mac. Again. Joe and Mac were talking, but Richie had tuned out their out their conversation completely. Mac, in his anger, had seemed bent upon ignoring Richie, and Richie was happy to be ignored. He himself was absorbed in developing escape routes. Whatever plans Mac and Joe (*Why* weren't they in Seacouver?) had for Paris or each other, he didn't have the time to tag along. He really was here on business. And he had alot of ground to cover in a week. A sudden vision punctured his self-absorption: a gothic shelter of thick brown stones, an image of Tessa, in jacket and gloves, her wise blue eyes tolerantly rolling, and a lean Jesuit in a rough brown cassock offering an endless stream of fatherly advice. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his jet-lagged eyes. There it stood, a few hundred yards away: l'eglise Sainte- Jeanne d'Arc. Darius' church. His senses suddenly opened to outside stimulation, he saw MacLeod point to the church, and heard him saying to Joe in his best curatorial voice: "Well, there it is-- not much to look at from the outside, just your typical late-medieval church. The chapel is not terribly spectacular-- it was erected for everyday worship by the town-dwelling artisians and merchants, not the nobility." Richie watched Dawson's eyebrows rise with ironic enthusiasm, "Yes, but Mac, not every French parish had the same priest for 400 years. The architecture is kind of secondary, you know?" Dawson starting walking toward the church-yard gate. "Well," he said, "Let's go in." But Mac didn't move. Usually the _Ur_-form of agility and decision, he stood frozen, spasms of pain and helplessness crossing his face. With a creeping sense of de-ja vu, Richie wished he had been paying attention. He wished he knew why they were here. And he wished he knew a cure for a grief with layers centuries-thick. But he hadn't, he didn't, and so he simply turned to Mac, hoping against all odds that his dismal twenty-three year-old understanding could offer something to a guy who'd seen Shakespeare stage a play. "Mac," he asked quietly, watching Joe move slowly ahead, "Is this supposed to be sightseeing, therapy, or some new abstract form of S&M?" MacLeod rewarded his attempt with eye contact and a weak smile, but no answer. Richie tried again. "If Joe wants to see the church," he said, "you don't have to be here. I could take him around. I'm not exactly a font of living history, but I could tell him the all stories you've told me. And then we could meet you somewhere after." MacLeod closed his eyes. Richie watched as MacLeod's entire body seemed to inwardly tense, the pain and paralysis seeming to surge, and then fade away. That familiar MacLeod aura of control rippled back into place as he opened his eyes. Richie wondered when he would get Mac to teach him that trick. Mac shook his head, "No. I have to go in. I have an appointment with the prelate. And I promised Joe." As they both stepped forward to follow Dawson, the thunder started crackling in his head. That old black nausea started rising in his chest. Mac's eyes met his own. God, not again. MacLeod shrugged, and Richie saw something almost like amusement dancing in his brown eyes. "Churches have always been popular places," he told Richie. "Holy ground never seems to go out of style." Richie felt really strongly that it was his turn to stand stock-still, but Mac was throwing a fatherly arm around his shoulders and propelling him forward. "Come on," he said to Richie, "Joe's waiting on us." Smiling, MacLeod unsheathed the full-force of that scary Scottish charisma, sharpened for any situation: "And we have an acquaintance to make." As Mac forcibly strolled him into the church, Richie pondered the Many Moods of MacLeod. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ They caught up with Joe, wandering through the gloom of the chapel, oblivious to the overgrown urchin kneeling before a shrine to the Virgin. She was looking around the chapel desperately, like a child scanning the shadows for monsters. Her eyes searching every door, window, and cleft in the chapel, she seemed to have forgotten the candle she had been lighting. Two of her fingers were resting in the flame. It must have been his imagination-- considering the distance and the darkness. But, looking at her hand, Richie thought he could see the skin blistering. As she saw them, just shadows backlit by the sunlight streaming through the chapel door, Richie felt that flash of empathic communication, that mutual burst of recognition. Of the quickening, recognizing itself. At the same moment, her face convulsed with pain; eyes widening, crying out, she pulled her hand away from the candle. The cry finally got Joe's attention: he looked away from the dreary and ancient oil painting of the crucifixion he had been examining, to see his two friends confronting a kneeling girl-- burnt hand cradled against her bony chest, dirty tangled hair falling in her face, thin shoulders shaking and teeth drawing blood from cracked red lips- who was looking pretty medieval herself. "Nous voici sur terre sacree," she said. How MacLeod could tell a native English-speaker from a few French syllables, Richie just couldn't fathom. (although the writer mused that perhaps it was due to the fact that she herself did not know French...) But Mac answered her in English: "We don't want to hurt you. We were just visiting the church." MacLeod's eyes scanned the chapel, finding the door which once led to Darius' quarters, and then returning to her. "An old friend once lived here. That's all." MacLeod smiled at her, looking into her frightened face with compassion and curiosity. He stepped toward her. She tried to back away from him, but stumbled, falling face first to the stone floor. Mac walked over and knelt down beside her. In a low voice, the cadence gentle and calming, he said to her, "I remember being your age, you know. Desperate and on the run. Afraid I wouldn't live to see the next year, or the next day. Certain that the next sword I saw would be the one that took my head. But I survived. And so can you." He offered her his hand. She accepted it warily, as she rose to her feet. Richie shifted his weight from foot to foot, feeling a little restless. He'd seen MacLeod's social-worker-act before-- after all, despite his best efforts, he was still a client. Not that he objected to Mac taking on a new charity case-- from what he could see of her in the gloom, she looked like she could use a MacLeod or two on her side. No, that he didn't mind. Hey, she had his sympathy- he knew what it was like to be the new kid with the big knife to your neck. And any time MacLeod spent helping her would automatically decrease the time Mac spent riding his case. By a direct one-to-one ratio. But call it intuition, or maybe even learning from experience-- Richie was having one of those telepathic twinges telling him that he would get dragged somehow into MacLeod's latest exercise in altruism. She was standing, and seeming a little calmer. Looking down at her hand, already healed from the burn, she began to apologize to MacLeod in very American English. It wasn't what she said, but how she said it that stunned him. That voice: stripped of its pretense to a French accent, it was rough-edged and deep, its smooth and cultured pronunciation marred by a faint whiff of Staten Island. No. It couldn't be. Richie studied her face, fitting its contours to a remembered image. He made the connection, but he couldn't accept it. Not the girl he'd met a year ago in Prague-- sleek, composed and professional-- no, she couldn't possibly be this ragged waif with hollow cheeks, torn clothes and eyes red-rimmed and shadowed from a year of sleepless nights. He was staring at her un-selfconsciously now, trying by sheer force of will to bend the truth back into a more palatable shape. He stared at her as if he'd been told that if he stared long enough and hard enough, her face would change into a stranger's. He stared at her with such intensity and absorption, he didn't even notice that she had turned away from MacLeod and was staring back at him. "Ryan?" she asked, hesitantly. "Cuzo," he said, with a sinking feeling. ______________________________________ Flames, comments, and criticism ardently longed-for at: And yeah, I took the liberty of re/naming Darius' church. Forgive me. I couldn't resist including a reference to an armor-wearin', sword-wieldin' Frenchwoman. =========================================================================