========================================================================= Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 16:49:12 -0500 Reply-To: Sandra1012@AOL.COM Sender: Highlander TV show stories From: Sandra McDonald Subject: Lay Down Your Sword 8/8 Warning: violence, language and a small hint of games Duncan plays in bed! Part 8 of 8 Who wants to live forever? Amanda and Rebecca, dressed as men, strolling through a French marketplace of the seventeenth century. She'd lifted his purse from his pocket with an astonishing deftness. Amanda, hanging in a harness in a dead-silent museum as she prepared to liberate yet another treasure for her own personal gain. Amanda, in his bed, her eyes devilish as she tormented his trapped body with toys and tickles and a number of creative ideas. Amanda, gone forever. She'd had a special way of looking at him that sent his heart hammering against his ribs every single time. A look that told him she knew all his secrets, all the way to the bottom of his soul, and loved him just the same. A look that threw caution to the wind and could have charmed the devil into doing her beck and call. Amanda, dead, and this bastard had taken her head. These thoughts of Amanda nearly got Duncan killed as he threw himself at Ris with a flurry of swipes and blows released in wild anguish. Ris easily parried the inaccurate, ineffective thrusts. Duncan cried out his anger with sounds that meant nothing in any language but the heart. He knew nothing but a red haze of fury, a fresh outpouring of hate, the need to annihilate the enemy in front of him. Ris sliced him across the right shoulder. Duncan recoiled, reason coming back to him a bit, and then he brought over eight hundred years of training and practice to the moment. He parried the next blow, retreated again, thrusted, advanced, caught Ris off guard, feel back. He could hear more blades clashing behind him, the sounds of the women fighting, but couldn't turn to see if Holland needed help. She was as good a swordfighter as most, but had no natural instinct or flair for it the way Duncan, Connor and Richie did. The way Amanda had. And Amanda was dead. Duncan was the one who needed help. Ris was the best enemy he'd ever faced. They battled across the clearing, up the path, back down again - slipping in the mud, lost a little in the darkness, but focused on destruction all the same. He heard a woman's death cry. Saw, out of the corner of his vision, the lightning return with supernatural force. It jumped tree to tree, rolled through the earth, leapt towards the moon. A woman's cry. The anguish and joy of the most wild thing Duncan knew, a Quickening. But who was taking it? Minette or Holland? Would he walk away from this battle to find both women he loved dead on the ground? Duncan threw himself against Ris. Their swords arced with power. A woman fell to her knees behind them. *** Gregor's whole world was coming down around him. The burning monastery, the injured brothers, the horrible weeping of Dom Stephan as their best efforts failed. Richie, dead at his knees. And, in the mud beyond the gate, the last stand of Connor MacLeod against the force of evil that had brought them all to this ruinous moment. Connor fought with every bit of strength he owned, refusing to believe he could be beaten. His hands went numb, and sweat made it desperately hard to hold onto the grip of his sword. His shoulders failed to lift fast and high enough. His breath came roughly as iron bands tightened around his chest and stomach, driving redness into his brain. Ris had been good. This man, this Valery Constantine, was ten times better. Gregor watched helplessly, knowing that even if the rules of the Game allowed him to team up with Connor against this monster, he could not do it. He'd taken an oath to God that transcended his needs as an Immortal. He could not serve both the holy and the murderous at the same time. It had been decades since he'd lifted a sword, and any skill he might have once used in his battle against Duncan on a hospital roof in the twentieth century was far too rusty to be of any use anyway. Sweat blinded Connor's vision. Valery danced in and out of focus. "You've been a thorn long enough," Valery told him, mocking him, his voice betraying no effort or fatigue. "You killed my most prized champion, the Kurgan. You cut him down in the best years of his life." Connor could barely remember now the fight that Valery meant. He was too busy trying to stay alive to relive old victories. Every second beneath Valery's hammering blows was a triumph. He'd landed maybe two blows that meant anything, and Valery had already healed. Connor himself was not wounded, not yet, but he was fatiguing fast. Already his legs were like tree stumps as he dragged them through the endless mud, and his arms could barely lift the sword. Who wants to live forever? He'd practiced for centuries. He'd taken the heads of hundreds of men and women. He'd never grown so cocky as to believe there wouldn't come a day when he would fail, but the actual realization that the day had finally come sent ice running through his veins. He'd tried his best, there was no doubt about it. If Valery was stronger, faster, better, then there could be no shame in it. Connor dragged up everything he was and danced forward into a blow that should have knocked Valery's head straight off the mountain. Valery stopped it. Spun it out, so that Connor's sword arched away into the trees. With a swift, vicious cut he slashed down, nearly severing Connor's legs, sending the Highlander to his knees. Who wants to live forever, anyway. The last thing Connor saw as Valery's sword came around to cut off his head was Heather's face. *** Duncan was losing. Ris had gone for a tiny opening that shouldn't have been there, that Duncan had somehow overlooked. The resulting rip of flesh and blood and bits of rib out of his side sent Duncan gasping to the ground. Discipline held him where his body did not, and somehow he lurched upward to avoid a downward blow that would have at the very least severed his shoulder. But Ris kept at him. Blood welled across Duncan's forehead, blinding him in one eye. Sweat and blood down his arms made it hard to keep the katana from turning beneath his tingling fingers. A jab to his right thigh brought an excruciating bolt of pain that went straight to the base of Duncan's skull, and he might have cried out his torment. "Give me what's mine," Ris snarled at him. "Your head." Duncan left knee went out from under him. He rolled with the pain, trying to get by Ris, but Ris caught him with the edge of his boots and smashed two ribs. Only instinct brought up Duncan's sword, and he did so with a last minute desperation that barely, just barely, saved his head. "You're pathetically bad, you know that?" Ris asked. "And you talk too much," Duncan gasped, dragging himself upright. Their swords clashed in a flurry of action. Paused. Clashed again. Whosever Quickening had just been taken behind them died to small flames in some of the trees, and an unnatural stillness that tore at Duncan's heart. He tried to drag more air into his aching chest, but no air would come and give him strength. He tried every trick he knew, but Ris countered with a grim, sweating, straining superiority. Until one misstep. Until Duncan lost his balance, went down. Ris tried to drive his sword through Duncan's stomach. Duncan drove up first, instead, impaling him, seeing his face change from obvious triumph to stark terror. Blood from Ris' mouth splattered down on him. Duncan kicked him away, heaved back on his sword, and then growled, "This is for Amanda." He swung around the sword. And when Ris' Quickening had finished blasting through him, he found himself laying on the ground beneath a full moon, the sky clear and starry above, the mud cool and soothing to his cheek, and Holland was holding his head and crying and laughing at the same time. Exuberant and flushed with the rush of power into their bodies, they held each other for a long, impassioned moment. Then they remembered Amanda, and broke apart to stare at her body with shared tears. Then another Quickening lit the sky. Duncan dropped his sword. He'd never done that before in his life - just dropped it, left it, abandoned it. The katana meant too much to him for such casual indifference. But he dropped it, and scrambled up the steep slope back towards the monastery. The Quickening was done by the time he reached the gate. The one who'd taken the Quickening had vanished back into the woods. Only the body of a fallen warrior remained, in the mud, his body still warm, his neck still pulsing blood, his head far from where it should be, his eyes closed, his expression at long last peaceful. Connor MacLeod of the clan MacLeod lay dead. "No," Duncan heard someone say. Whoever was saying it repeated it. Whoever was saying it broke into a howl of denial that reached up to heaven and yanked on God's ear and poured out an anguished explosion of grief. His knees went out. He stumbled forward. His hands found the head, and he clutched it to his chest weeping as if all the world were lost, which it was, and if there were no justice or kindness or life left in the world, which there wasn't. "Connor, no," someone cried, over and over, and the small, icy, rational part of Duncan that still seemed to function wondered who could be wailing like that. He would have looked, but his eyes didn't seem to be working. The rain had returned - hot, scalding, burning, acid-like rain, washing down his face, searing through his heart, boiling through his stomach. Cooling blood drenched his hands. He rocked, back and forth, as if rocking could do anything, as if anything could ever be fixed again. Someone was calling his name. Calling Duncan MacLeod back from the land of the dead. A woman's voice. But not Amanda, because she too was dead, her beautiful body back somewhere in the mud, her head gone like Connor's, but she'd never even stood a chance because Minette had tied her hands behind her back and put her on her knees and let Ris take a swing at her just for fun. Sixteen hundred years gone, just for fun. "Connor, no," he whispered, his throat raw. It couldn't be true. This couldn't be the end. If he put Connor's head back on his neck, perhaps, then he would heal and be whole again, would rise to his feet, would fix Duncan with his small ironic smile and serious eyes, and they would go back to the Highlands together, they would go home. He began crawling with Connor's head. Hands and voices tried to stop him. "Duncan, no!" Holland said. "Please, Duncan, stop!" He pushed her aside blindly. Connor's body lay crumpled; he straightened it out, arranging his lax arms and legs. Horrible cuts marked the corpse. The glimmer of bone beneath flesh stopped him for just a moment. Connor wasn't healing yet. Well, of course not. He didn't have his head. Duncan had to put it back on. The hands again, trying to stop him. "Get back!" he shouted at them. They backed away. Duncan took Connor's head and put it down on the ground, carefully aligning with the neck, and he made sure the jagged flesh was wedged precisely together despite the fact he still couldn't see very clearly, and he sat back to draw his knees to his chest and sit in vigil. Connor would need a friend when he woke up. "Oh, Duncan," someone was saying, but he didn't know if it were Holland, or Gregor, or Richie. All he knew was that he would sit there forever, so that he and Connor go could back to the Highlands together. He was still sitting there when the sun rose over the Alps the next morning. Only when he saw at sunrise that Connor was truly dead did he realize that Richie and Holland had sat with him all night. He let them take him inside, into the ruins of Gethsemani. He was confused, so very confused, and very tired, and the sun played a trick on his eyes. Because at the gate he looked back, to where Connor still lay peacefully, as if napping in the morning light, and swore that he saw Connor and Amanda and Tessa in the trees, watching him. Tessa in a white dress. Amanda, with her brightest smile. Connor, his sword in his hand, his kilt straight and crisp with the MacLeod colors. Duncan raised his hand to say farewell. But then the light shifted and they were gone. *** Gregor didn't go with them. He said his job was still at the monastery, which needed extensive repair work. With his injured brothers, who'd suffered so badly that night of the Quickenings. With the graves of Amanda and Connor, who'd been buried on holy ground so that they could rest easily for the rest of time. They went to Methos, and with Methos to Sanctuary. Even Richie, whose grief over Amanda made him change his mind about staying to fight the battles of the world. Gregor knew that Richie would be all right. He worried more about Duncan, who seemed crushed by Connor's death, but only time could heal that wound. Gregor hadn't been able to identify the man who took Connor's Quickening, but when the man walked into Gethsemani a week later, the monk's heart turned to ice. "So you remember me," the man said, in the courtyard. Gregor didn't answer. His first thought was for the safety of his sixty three brothers. His second was that if the man intended to take his head, it would be a very short fight. "What do you want?" Gregor asked. "Where have they gone to?" "Who?" "Don't patronize me. Methos, MacLeod, Jason Sanger. The whole pathetic group." "Away," Gregor answered truthfully. "I don't know where." Valery took a careful look around the courtyard and monastery. "I think you do." "You're wrong," Gregor said bravely. "They didn't tell me, and I didn't ask." "MacLeod and his woman killed two of my colleagues," Valery said, sounding calm and strong, like an iron fist under a silk glove. "In self-defense. And you killed Connor MacLeod. When does it all stop?" "With the Prize," Valery answered, as if it should be perfectly obvious to him. Again, he took a long look around the compound and monastery. "There's nothing for you here," Gregor insisted, as fear dried his throat. "There's you. Come away with me. You may have some passing skills in swordsmanship. I might find you useful." Gregor shook his head. "No." "You still don't know who I am, do you?" Valery asked. "No." Valery took out his wallet. He displayed his credentials in a sharp three-d hologram that spun lazily in the sunlight and fresh breeze. Gregor paled, but didn't run. He became aware of Dom Stephan in the doorway, praying. "You'll have to come and take me," he said. "Or take my head now. I'm not leaving." "Stupid man," Valery said, disapprovingly. "You know what we did to Richie Ryan and Felicia Martins." He went to the gate. "By the way," he offered, "I know Richie Ryan and Jason Sanger are the same person. I don't know why that's important, but you might. And wherever Methos has taken him, I'll find him. I'll find them all. And I'll cut them down, the same way I cut down Connor MacLeod." Gregor didn't answer. That night, he told the monks to leave. But they didn't. Instead, all sixty four brothers stayed up through the night, singing to God, praying, holding mass. When the airpods commanded by Valery Constantine's forces arrived the next morning with warrants and weapons, Gregor went peacefully. He was a thousand feet up in the sky when he saw the SIDI officers open fire on the monks below, slaughtering every one. He himself died several months later, as a prisoner at Versailles, and there was no one to take his Quickening. Another triumph for the Special Investigations Division, Interpol (SIDI) Taskforce on Immortals. *** Connor woke in the sweet green grass of the Highlands. "Come on, brother," a voice was saying merrily. "You don't want to be late." A woman's voice said, "How can you be late for the end of time?" He sat up with a gasp for air. Ramirez was sitting on a rock beside him, polishing his sword. Amanda had her arms folded across her chest. "Well, it's about time," she said, although her voice was kind and a smile played around her face. "Where are we?" Connor demanded. "The Gathering," Ramirez said, and lent him a hand. "Up you go." Connor knew the place the minute he was upright. "This is the home of the MacLeods," he said in awe. "If that's what you think," Ramirez said agreeably. "Come on." The Spaniard set off across the grass. Connor took a moment to examine himself. No wounds or traces of wounds. He put his hands to his neck, and realized Amanda was shaking her head. "Don't even ask," she warned. "I just got here myself. Get the feeling you've recently been separated from your head?" Connor frowned, although the thought brought no pain or specific memory. "Maybe." "Me, too," Amanda said, and set off after Ramirez. The summer sun felt warm and life-giving on Connor's face and arms. He could smell the sea on the air, and if he strained hard enough he could hear music on the wind. Or maybe that was Ramirez, whistling as he set the pace. They came to a plain where the sunlight seemed more golden than yellow, and the sky changed to lovely hues of rose and purple, and thousands of men and women stood shimmering in the a breeze that came from nowhere and went nowhere. He saw many of his old Immortal friends there, good men and women who'd lost their heads. And he saw many of his own enemies - the Kurgan, Slan Quince - although, when he looked at them, he couldn't remember why they'd been bad or why he'd hated them. He felt only goodness radiating from them, and when they looked upon him there was no more malice in their eyes. "Where are we?" he asked Ramirez. "Look," his mentor said grandly. "This is what we're all here for." Connor gazed past the sea of Immortals through a different shimmering, and focused on a scorched, barren plain. Three Immortals stood there - the two who would fight for the Prize, and the third who would judge them. "This is it?" he asked Ramirez. "This is it. The Prize awaits." The battle was fought. An Immortal won. And when it was through, Connor went back through the grass to the home he'd once built, where Heather saw him, smiled, and came running to his arms to stay forever. THE END Coming soon . . . "The Heat of the Sun" - Hundreds of years have passed since Methos led his fellow Immortals to Sanctuary. While world civilizations collapse outside, inside pressures build . . . Richie deals with startling reminders of Versailles in his quest for love, Duncan and Holland struggle as parents, and Ceirdwynn tries to hold the Immortals together. Meanwhile, Methos is beginning to remember his very early days as an Immortal . . . and having visions of a scorched, barren plain where the final battle for the Prize will be fought . . . (P.S. Also includes Joe Dawson!) "Come to Dust" - The world has been reduced to ashes. And the last Immortals on the planet square off for the Prize . . . ****************Notes, Credits, Disclaimers************** Credits: The excellent book "Voices of Silence: Lives of the Trappist Monks Today" by Frank Bianco served as source material for most of the monastery information. The series of choirs/hours is Vigils (3 a.m), Lauds (5:30 a.m.), Tierce (8 a.m.), Sext (noon), None (2 p.m.)Vespers (5:30 p.m.) and Compline (7:30 p.m.). The real monastery called Gethsemani is in Kentucky. If you climb the Stanserhorn today, you ride by train and funicular to a very popular tourist spot and can take your picture where I took mine - at 6,300 feet. The story about the restaurant couple served in the sea is from a Reader's Digest excerpt by, I believe, Robert Fulgham. Disclaimers: So you think I wanted Connor to die? I honestly wept . . . I didn't make up that rule, remember. . .and I'll dearly miss Amanda in this arc of stories. ******** Notes: Writing this was like a marathon - 25,000 words in 4 days. Thank you to Janette92 for proofreading and putting up with two days (what an enormous amount of cybertime!) of cliffhanging. I didn't want to turn this into a sci-fi story so used terms and technology just for show . . . I-mail is the successor to e-mail, but I don't know what it is either. I never intended to go back and show what happened at Versailles because 1. it's way too horrible and 2. I thought I'd give Richie and Felicia some privacy. ********Thanks to Rachel Shelton at rjsheltn@tol.net for forwarding stories - my bill has gone way down! Wendy Kelley at ladyslvr@xmission.com has generously offered ftp space and hopefully we'll get the stories up there soon. Thanks also to Lisa Krakowka at hck1@cornell.edu for putting stories on her page, and to Janine Shahinain for her wonderful support. (I feel like I'm at the Oscars now, I'll speed this up!) ! ****As for when "Heat of the Sun" and "Come to Dust" will be posted - I can't do back-to-back marathons like this, I'm going on 10 days of leave to find a house to buy, I'm moving myself, my stuff and two cats to Connecticut, I'm going to SyndiCon and I'm starting a new job. All within the next six weeks. So, I don't know. Something with only three or four parts would be nice. Right now, Richie is tapping on my shoulder to tell me how after he left France in "Testimony" he wound up in a deserted Washington D.C. airport and had to take Special Agent Dana Scully hostage . . . and Tessa wants me to tell about the time she, Duncan and Richie got involved with some unsavory criminals in London . . .so we'll see. ********* And I want to thank each and every person who has ever written me. If I haven't written back, it's purely an oversight, and I apologize. I deeply and sincerely appreciate reader comments because, although I write for myself, it can get lonely sitting at a computer for hours on end . . . and you all are a great motivation and inspiration. Sincerely, Sandra (not of the clan MacDonald, but of the tribe sitting around Kelly's Bar on St. Patrick's Day)