Disclaimers:
Methos does not belong to me, nor does Duncan MacLeod or anybody else
he thinks of in this story. The child belongs to nobody but Methos,
and him only because she chooses to.
Rated: R, for a slash
relationship and some recollection of messy moments.
It begins with laughter
You lean out the window of the loft, trying to catch the sound, although you know already there is no child there to make it. Still, you look. Not quite wanting to admit yet, that it is time. Not wanting to leave MacLeod, or Joe, or the life you have found here. Not when there is no way of knowing when you will return, no way to estimate how much time you will require. Not wanting to trek up to your cabin in the mountains, far from convenience and variety and the awareness of this particular reality you have chosen to inhabit.
So for a few days you will act as though nothing is different, though the laughter will ring through you at the oddest times and in the strangest places. You'll strain to hear it, most of your considerable attention focused on catching a bare breath of laughter floating in the sun. A child's laughter, light and free and rising on the wind, on the edge of your hearing and just barely out of sight. Your friends will notice, eventually; you will shrug off their inquiries with a careless laugh and self-deprecating sarcasm. It will grow fainter; if you wait, close your eyes and seal your ears, concentrate on the mundane and the day to day minutiae of life. If you set your mind and do nothing, it will grow farther and farther away, weaker and less compelling, until a month from now, or three, you'll no longer hear it.
If you ignore it.... there is always that option, and as always you consider it. But you have walked that road before, and you have learnt that this request your spirit makes of you is no idle one. Should you choose to, you know you could stave off the inevitable for a while, build yet another wall about your core. You could fight the compulsion the faint laughter brings, should you put your mind to it. You have done so before. And so you know, too, that eventually relief must come. That if you do not take it when it is offered, the price you pay when it finds you will be high. It will seek you out, with no regard for time or place or sanity. You cannot hold yourself here indefinitely; no matter what you do it will come regardless. For you can't cut an hour, and you can't halt a minute, and nothing can stand against the passing seconds. You ignore it at your peril.
And so, in a day or a week or a month, you will find a phone out of sight of MacLeod or Joe or Amanda, all of whom seem determined not to leave you alone long enough to arrange it, and you will place a single call. You will rise before the dawn, slide out of the bed you have shared with MacLeod for the past two years, more or less, and slip out the door. Quieter than a ghost, softer than a breeze. You take great care that MacLeod will not waken, and you take nothing with you except the clothes you wear and the money the pilot will ask of you. You leave nothing behind except the ghost of your love, the hope you will be back sooner rather than later, and one token in place of your body in the bed, to reassure your lover that you have not, will not, abandon him.
The plane you engage is small, noisy, frenetic. Much like the skin you shed, figuratively if not literally, with the worries and concerns you have carried unnoticed. The laughter strengthens as you slough the pleasures and the pains and the thought patterns you have picked up almost unwittingly along the way. You straighten your spine, abandon the slouch you have so habitually drifted into again and again over the millennia. You smile, enjoying the sound as the airy peals wash through you, despite the roar of the plane as you fly.
You don't notice when the laughter crests, overflows the boundaries of your space and vanishes. You are too deep in contemplation and memory, planning and figuring and reckoning. The supplies the pilot has brought per your instructions are in the back, and you pry the tops off the crates, slide your hands along the cool lumps of metal. You caress the edges, watch your fingers trace the imperfections in the ingots, while part of your mind catalogues the feel of the scratches and the swirls and the bumps against your skin. You catch yourself comparing it to the feel of MacLeod's skin as you convince him of your love with hand and tongue and body. A frown creases your forehead, and a resurgence of laughter drives all such thoughts from your conscious mind. There is a time for remembering, and this is not it.
You close your eyes, let your fingertips trail leisurely over the surface. On a whim you follow a fancy, try and make sense of the patterns passing beneath your fingers, as though you were reading braille. For a second, the pattern almost coalesces into sense, and you pause, stunned, on the verge of comprehension. Then the plane rocks, just enough to startle you out of your fancy, and you blink, reminded that you are not alone, not yet, not here. Reluctantly you remove your hand, brush the straw back over the ingots, and reclose the crate. Satisfied the pilot has done his job, that the metal is as you asked; you head forward again, resume your seat, and let your mind wander the clouds before you.
Much later, the plane lands, on a small airstrip you had built almost eighty years ago. The village beside the airstrip is tiny; a mere dozen homes. On winter's nights, they gather in the town hall and tell age-old tales, many of them about you. The modern world has hardly reached this mountain; there is no electricity, no easy road access, no indoor plumbing. What there is is history; long and detailed and never forgotten. It suits your needs perfectly.
You hand the pilot the money you brought for him; wave off his questions about when he should return for you. You tell him you will return when you return; that he is not to worry. He is persistent, though, and as a compromise you remind him of the radio he has packed in one of the crates you have just unloaded. Assure him that you will be fine, that you will radio if you need anything. Mollified, he climbs back into his plane. You stand back, off the runway, and watch as the aeroplane circles higher and higher, soon becoming no larger than a bird. You watch, long after the plane has disappeared from your sight, lost in the nearness of the sky and the reality of the earth beneath your feet.
A star blinks into your vision, and you smile, caught by a wonder you have not felt in decades. The sky has grown velvet around you, you reach out your hand, caress the softness, imagine you can feel it settling about you, draping itself over your body and enclosing you in a blanket of safety you had forgotten existed.
A smile lights your eyes and you watch, entranced, as another star appears. Your thoughts slip in time, and you stretch up your arms, reminded of the days you spent, once upon a time when innocence was more than just a word to you. The nights you waited, curled up in a tree, for the stars to lower enough for you to reach. Your fingers strain, your body lengthens to its fullest stretch, and you balance precariously on your toes, caught up in memory and reaching for a star. You know, somewhere so deep inside you've never thought to question it, that if you could somehow stretch just one finger taller, you could do it. You could reach out a hand, tumble a star from the sky, and catch it as it fell. You could hold that light in your hand, no longer distant and cold, and in your pouch you could carry the reality of your dreams.
You never stopped hunting for that star. All your life, through darkness and through light, through love and despair and desperation. Through freedom, through pain, through slavery, hate, fear. Through anger, pleasure and passion. Every time the world got too much, too deep, too close. too entwined, you went hunting for the lights in the sky. ..
You would watch, half the time not even knowing you were doing it. And when a star would fall, you would track its path, calculate trajectories, estimate speeds, and you would spend days or weeks hunting for the landing site. Millennia of failure never discouraged you. Reality, when it was defined, made no impact on your hunt.
So a falling star was not truly a star. So a star was impossibly far and really no more than another sun to warm some other planet--what difference did these things make? Your mind accepted it, gradually, but your spirit--deep inside, you know that, if you could somehow be just one finger taller, you could touch a star. You could tumble it out of the sky, catch it as it fell, and hold it in your hand. What is science in the face of that? To this day your hunt continues. You stretch, impossibly, and your finger rises another inch. Almost there.... just a little further.
As always, you overbalance. Your body reaches the limits of its form, your finger falls just short of its goal, and you tumble to the earth unbowed. Laughter spills out--your conscious mind is reminded of the absurdity of attempting to tumble a star from the sky, and your subconscious mind is convinced that you almost managed it this time. Together, they create a wave of humour you can feel move through you. It builds in your belly, deep inside where your soul resides, and it spreads. Rolls up, into your chest, expands to fill your brain with light and merriment. At the moment it reaches your toes, you spring up, feeling lighter than air, and you wonder, for a moment, why it is you don't float away. Smiling, you leap instead, high, and before you know it the laughter is moving you, whirling and sliding and flying over the airstrip. You dance, absorbed in the fluidity of your freedom, lost in the happiness bubbling through your being.
They move slowly at first, the villagers. The children are first, as always, shyly inching onto the field to join you. You become aware of them only gradually, as always. But when you do, you welcome them into your dance, smile an invitation and swirl through their hesitation. Laughing, they take up the challenge. The mirth gliding through you spills over, mingles with their laughter and enriches it. You dance, together, swirling and whirling and twirling, following the eddies and the currents of the laughter you generate amongst you.
In the morning, you wake. You're buried beneath a pile of small bodies, they curl against you and above you and around you. You discover, somewhat to your surprise, that you are smiling, and in that instant you become aware of the laughter that awakened you. A tiny child, dark and fey, watches you from beneath tousled curls, eyes solemn and sweet. Another pair tumble laughing in the doorway, and you grin a greeting to them all. You shift, carefully, watching the answering ripple pass through the bodies surrounding you. Feeling much like a dog working her way out from beneath a batch of puppies, you free first your hands, then your torso, and, finally, watching carefully where you step and how you move, you gain clear floor. You glance over your shoulder in time to see the pile of children flow, still asleep, to fill the hole you left in the stack. The child watching you claps its hands over its mouth to stifle the giggle rising in answer to the mirth in your own eyes. You offer a hand, and, carefully and with a surprising dignity, the child takes it. Together, you wander out to greet the day.
Breakfast is a leisurely affair; the children hand you food and drink and the adults ply you for news of the outside world. In the more than two millennia you've been coming here the greeting is always the same. The details differ but the ritual remains. You talk, and smile, and piece by piece you feel the last of your tensions uncoiling within your body. The child whose laughter awoke you this morning appears to have appointed itself your companion; claims your hand after breakfast and gently tugs you to your feet. You resist for a moment; filing the details away in your capacious memory, to reproduce later, when you will need it. As always, names are not offered or asked. The villagers know who you are; even though it has been several decades since last you came here, they know you by the manner of your arrival, by the silence you keep, by the laughter you share. In this one place, you are living legend, but not myth.
The child is young, no more than five or six, and on closer inspection proves to be female. She tugs again at your hand, a hint of impatience in her quiet eyes, and you absently put down your mug before rising. You follow the child, and the others follow you. She takes you on a tour; behind you the older children chatter away, point out the changes that have come to the village within their memory; a new way of harvesting the crops, a new type of dye for the clothing, a way to spin wool that involves less labour. You nod, and smile, and behind your eyes you note the changes that have come about since last you were here, but which the children have never known. And your soul smiles to note all the ways in which this one special place in the world remains the same.
The tour concludes when the child leads you to your destination, and the smile in your soul reaches your eyes and your mouth as you note the careworn stone and the timeworn carvings about the door. In your mind's eye the wear vanishes, and you see again the stone as it stood so many centuries ago, when you rose from your crouch and surveyed the completed decorations for the first time. In echo of that long ago moment, the hand not clutching the child's reaches out and traces an outline, following the intricate spirals you've carved time and again, with skill and patience and love.
A gentle tugging gains your attention, and you look down to find a small hand on the door, pushing it open with mischief peeking through the solemnity in its owner's eyes. You enter, you and your companion, and as you approach the anvil in the centre, you feel the heat of the forge brush over your skin. The warmth slides through you, beats against your clothes and your muscles and your bones, invades every fibre of your being. You free your hand and stretch luxuriously, breathing deep to taste the fires. Smoke and metal and soot, heat and lightning, the swing of the hammer and the call of the art. You raise the hammer, relish the burn through muscles that strain at the weight. Bringing it down again is an act of intense concentration, the direction and the placement and the force all critical. A smile steals over your face as you watch the metal take shape beneath your blows, and you settle into a rhythm, beat and counter, aim and strike, reheat and cool.
The eyes are what you notice first, large and liquid and fixed on yours. Slowly, it comes to you that there is no fire, no hammer, no metal heated and pliant beneath your hands and tools. You shake your head, once, confused, staring at the tiny figure perched upon your anvil. She continues to watch you, saying nothing, and it occurs to you eventually that you'd been lost in memory again. She nods, once, and hops off the anvil. She spins about the room, and you follow her with your eyes, noticing as you do the crates you'd left on the airstrip have been carried in here and opened, the metals and tools they contained lifted out and placed upon the shelves. The forge itself is swept clean and kept tidy, the tools you'd left here well cared for. You smile, again, and the child jumps into your arms, delighted laughter spilling from her. She is pleased that you are pleased, and your smile becomes a grin as you whirl her about the forge, careful not to disturb the equipment hanging about and delighting in her pleasure.
She takes you to gather wood, and together you pick up and discard branch after branch. Eventually you have enough stacked in the cart, and you return to the forge. You start the fire, feeding it carefully and building it strong. By tomorrow, with care, it will be hot enough for you to begin work. You brush over the metals you brought, pick up block after block waiting for the one that tells you what to make. It doesn't take long to set up the forge for use again, and when it is done you seat yourself outside the door, set your internal alarm so as to feed the fire, and stretch out on the grass. You watch the child run laughing around you, weaving and ducking between her fellows in the grass. Memories tease at the edge of your awareness, all the thousands of times you've been here before, and you are so involved in debating the wisdom of losing yourself in them that you fail to notice when you slide into sleep.
Over the next few days you let your mind wander where it will, as your body relives the well-remembered dances through the forge. Metal melts and sizzles, shapes and reshapes, resists and relents and bends, ultimately, to the dictates of your hands and your mind.
You remember Alexa, the sun shining on her hair and sheer deviltry in her eyes. You remember the ocean waves murmuring so softly behind her, the way the moon highlights her profile, the taste of her skin the first time you kissed her, impulsively and in the midst of laughter. You remember the way she looked at the end, pale and wan with the life drained out of her eyes, lost in the tubes and machines that kept her heart beating but stole her soul. You think of the tears in her eyes when you took her to Paris, the joy in her smile when you asked her to marry you there. The hesitation in her voice when she agreed to a ceremony in the spring, when you and she were to return to Paris, and the fear in her eyes that she would not be alive to carry it through. The memories slice through you, and tears blur your vision, and you pound the metal in pain and in love and in memorium of a happiness so sharp and real you know it cannot possibly last.
You remember the way light glinted off the can as a beer arced through the air, the first time you saw Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. The sound of wind through his hair, the first night he kissed you, under the bridge in Paris, the day you were to have married Alexa. You feel again the tension that went bone deep, the first day you met Joe Dawson as Methos, the oldest of them all. The relief that you felt winding through every cell of your body, when you realised that history would not repeat, this time.
You remember the violent light of Silas' quickening, tearing through you and wounding your very soul. The betrayal in his eyes as you struck your sword to his axe, and the shock in Kronos' voice the last time he'll ever say your name. You pour into the metal all the despair you felt, when all your schemes came to naught and you knew, truly and with such spirit-destroying finality, that you were going to have to kill them. You feel the words in every fibre of your body, and you howl your grief in a language long unheard on this earth. 'Brother', you cry, and wind whistles through the door and drowns the beat of your hammer. 'I didn't want you dead,' you sob, and the truth of the words burns its way into your very being. A storm blows through the forge, and you have no way of telling whether it is all in your mind or whether the very elements are mourning with you.
Spent, you whisper to the twisted spirals that remain of the design you had thought you were making. 'Damn you, Kronos,' you say, and it seems to you that the very forge around you echoes with your words. 'I especially did not want to have to arrange that death myself,' you tell the winds, and the catch in your voice shakes you to your toes. You look up, tears in your eyes, and you ask the ghosts you have never seen: 'When I killed Death so thoroughly, my Brother, how could you think I would want him back?'
The ghosts do not answer, and you collapse as the grief you have so long denied yourself comes pouring out. It does not matter that Kronos would have destroyed the world. It does not matter that he did destroy your world. He was your Brother for a thousand years, and in all that time he never knew who you were. He never saw who you might become. Silas, and Caspian, and Kronos, and you--a thousand years together, and not a one had been able to see the most fundamental truth you owned. If you were to let yourself really think on that, it would kill the hope you had managed to resurrect with MacLeod.
And, in and of themselves, the Horsemen are worthy of grief. They were so much larger than life, such a large part of your life, and now they are gone, reduced to lightning and fury, nothing left of strength or love or hate. Remnants of Brotherhood ashes in your soul....
The forge is deserted when you come to yourself, this time. For the third time in memory, you are afraid to face the talisman you have created. You edge past it, eyes closed, groping blindly for the door. When you exit, the sun on your face is a shock equal to a bullet through your heart. You blink, stunned, your mind unable to cope with the brilliant blue of the sky beyond the horizon, the rays of the sun beating down on your head so different from the heat of the forge. You stumble, half-panicked, down the slight incline into the centre of the village and collapse to the grass, your body refusing to cope, your shock is so great. Closing your eyes does nothing to alleviate your body's reaction, and you moan, your mind twisting back on itself in an effort to escape.
You open your eyes, blinking startled in the late afternoon sun. You move, and your muscles protest the action. You become aware of a hand on your shoulder, and wonder, idly, how long it has been there. It feels small, too small to belong to one of the adults here, and it is no surprise when you turn your head to find yourself staring into the eyes of your child. She searches intently for something in your gaze, her tiny fingers digging into your shoulder the only other sign of the upset you see behind her eyes. She moves her other hand, runs it down your jaw, over the bump of your Adam's apple, pauses over your heart, and then brings it to rest finally atop your stomach, where once you believed your soul resided. And then she smiles, a smile of heartbreaking purity, and your spirit leaps in response. Tentatively, you smile back at her, and she pats your cheek, and you know the fear behind her gaze is all for you.
She is gone in a flash, and you sit slowly, wearily, wondering what it is you did and when you lost such complete control. Your hand meets a resistance you were not expecting, and for several minutes you stare incomprehension at the object. Then the shape resolves itself before your eyes, and you lift the canteen gratefully, draining it completely before the burn of the liquour hits you. You rise to your feet, staggering a little at first, and look around you wonderingly. You wonder, at the back of your mind, how long it's been since you slept, or ate, and the liquour hits you before you quite realise it.
You spend that night and the next few as far away from the forge as possible. You dance with the children, listen to the stories, laugh with the village. You help in the fields during the day, pitch in on the make-work at night. Slowly, an almost imperceptible peace reclaims your mind, and when you re-enter the forge it is with the knowledge that whatever demons you needed to purge, they are not done with you yet.
You barely glance at the talisman that held such terror over you earlier. You lift it from its resting place, carefully, gently, placing it with the others you have made. The villagers have kept the fire going in your absence; it doesn't take long before the needed ferocity is achieved and you putter about the forge for a time, making hoes and ploughs and shears for the villagers to use in their labours, jewelry and sculptures for their pleasure. Every time you leave you forget the plateau you hit in the middle of your quest, so that every time you reach it it comes as a shock. You use the time between the memories to fulfil some of the village's needs, the closest you can come to thanking them for their care.
It is several more days before you are ready to face the rest of your memories. When the moment comes, it is not you who recognises it, but the little girl who so rarely leaves your side. She leads you to the forge, places the hammer in your hand, and points you to the metal ingot you are to start with. You stare at her, not ready to begin and yet not ready to deny her, either. And then, blinking back tears, you dissolve the wall in your mind and you let the memories come.
It starts with Amanda, this time. Her face, the pity and horror so clear in her gaze after your fight at the railway, when you searched out the Methuselah Stone for Alexa. The dismay in her eyes when it fell into the Seine, so close, so close, so close. The feel of her arms, around you in the hospital, urging you away from the bed where Alexa had been, up until a moment ago. You feel again the tears that soaked her coat, the rough fabric scratching your cheek, the trembling she couldn't quite contain as you cry yourself out against her slender frame.
Music winds its way into your thoughts and you think of Joe, curled about his guitar in the witching hour, entrancing a bar full of people with his song. You remember his smile, as he saw you off with Alexa, filled with concern and hope for you both. You remember his voice, gruff and sad and so painfully understanding, when you phoned in the night to tell him she was gone. You feel again his hand, warm on your shoulder as you stand by her graveside, the only point of warmth in a world grown too cold to bear. You hear his laughter, alive with friendship and care, as he regales you with yet another tale of MacLeod's antics. You recall the amusement in his eyes and the warmth in his voice, as news of some escapade of Amanda's makes the Watcher rounds.
You see light glistening off the last stone Amanda roped you into helping her steal, the rush when you succeeded, the two of you, and the helpless laughter you concealed well enough to worry her when she double-crossed you on the payoff. The ease of her company winds through you, and you smile softly as you tap gently at the metal beneath your hands. Laughter weaves itself through your memory, and you look up to see your child, poking curiously through a pile of knick-knacks, selecting one and holding it up for your approval before sliding it into a pocket. It amazes you how fitting it seems, that she should choose a talisman made to Amanda's spirit. You nod your approval, and ruffle your hand through her hair, laughing outright when she giggles at the sensation, her hand clenched tight about her new treasure.
The thought of new treasure turns yours inward again, as you think of Duncan MacLeod, and the first night you made love, nearly another two years after that first kiss under the bridge. He unwrapped you that night as if you were a treasure he'd found put on this earth for him alone. It embarrassed you, the intensity with which he regarded each segment of your flesh he bared, the thoroughness with which he caressed you. He found your blush unbearably sweet, and when he finally entered you, you felt that contact everywhere his fingers had brushed you that night. Your climax rolled over you, sweet and passionate and inexorable. He trembled above you, and the love in his gaze as he came was your undoing.
You work the metal with care and tenderness, much the way he worked your body, the last time you made love. He seemed to know instinctively how to flatten all your barriers the first time he saw you, and when you finally became lovers, you felt naked in mind as well as body, the response he coaxed from you was so free from the masks you had affected for millennia.
Your smile becomes a smirk, as you recall how hungrily he took you, that night in the alley outside of Joe's. You had spent the day provoking him, and by the time he finally gave in and let you both have what you wanted, you were neither of you in the mood for gentleness or teasing. You gasp, heat rising through your body, as you think of how clearly the love shines through his gaze, when he thinks you aren't watching. The fond exasperation in his glare as you indulge in your favourite hobby; baiting him.
And tears track unnoticed down your cheeks, as you finally allow yourself to admit how badly he hurt you, when your nightmares gained life with Kronos' return.
Love, and fear, and pain, and pleasure. Your relationship with him has encompassed all of these, and more. Every emotion under the sun, you think at times, he's inspired in you. And you in him, most likely. But dominant is love, and that shows in the talisman you build from him, solid and loyal and strong, elegant and straightforward and beautiful.
You finish, eventually. You put down your hammer, and you exit the forge, blinking up at the stars you've failed to notice spattering the night sky before now. You let the fire die out, and you romp with the children, and you let your memories settle, deep into your bones and your flesh and your blood. You take the talismans from the forge, and you carry them, one by one, to a building outside of the village proper, deep inside the woods to the north, following the stars to get there because there is no path to take. The child follows you, now, her hand in yours and trust in the eyes she turns upon you. You take her, show her the way, knowing that when you are gone she will hug the truth of your visit to herself, guard jealously the secret of what you do with the talismans you forge. You know this, because every time you come, there is a child. Every time you come, the cottage is clean and whole and free of dust, the talismans undisturbed except for cleansing. Yet none in the village know what becomes of them, except for the few who once, as children, kept you company while you threw your memories into the fire and tempered them.
There are centuries of memories inside the cottage, and it is not unexpected that you will explore them. Many are good, many are bad, most are a mixture. You find a niche for each of the new memories you have made, and place it with care. You will explore them no more this trip; the talismans are for the future, for reference and reminder and relief. Your journals are useful, but when it comes down to it all they are is words. Your sweat and your pain and your joy; the very memories themselves have gone into the making of these talismans you keep in this cottage, in a village that is nowhere and everywhere. When you relive your life through these, it is total.
Through it all, it is the child who keeps you anchored, more or less, to this world. You have lost yourself here before, and you do so again, and, always, she brings you back. You come to yourself to find a half dozen pieces scattered at your feet, and a child's laughter in your ears. Her mirth leads you back to yourself, when the emotions of the past threaten to overwhelm your slipping grasp on the world. And, when your memories are of death and despair and the end of a world, when your mind dwells on the depths you can sink to, her tears break into your preoccupation and guide you to her, and before you return to your travelling, you restore the merriment to her eyes.
Eventually, you are done. You never know beforehand how long you will spend here; and you are never sure when you are done. You mark time by the stars you hunt, you mark life by the laughter in her eyes. You have reflected, in the past, on what it is you do here, exactly. On why it is when you are done, you feel refreshed, renewed, relieved. Why it is when you arrive, you feel as distant from the earth as the stars you reach for the day you land, and when you know, finally, that it is time to go, you feel connected again. Young, and new, and fresh. You wear your five thousand years lightly, the weight of your memories vanishing into the weight and bulk of the metal sculptures you leave behind. You have never found an answer, and, to tell the truth, you've never really looked. It is enough that it works. It is enough that, after so many years, you can still slip into the mindset of the children who lead you through this. That, when all is said and done, you will return to the world you left with a new lease on life, a new appreciation of the wonders you had ceased to see years or decades or centuries before.
You clean out the forge, before you leave. And before you go, you find yourself doing something that you have never done before. Always, after the forging is done, it is done. You put away the tools, and you sweep up the scraps of metal, and you scrub away the soot. Then you sleep one last night in the pile of children, and you walk out of the village, or, in recent years, you call up the aeroplane and you fly. And you do not think of this place, or its nameless children, until one night, years or decades or centuries down the road, you hear laughter, and you leave your friends and your family and your life, and vanish, for a week or a month or a year, or sometimes even a decade or two.
But this time, this time. You find yourself picking up one of the scraps. You reach for the tools, some of the smaller chisels and hammers used for fancy work and decoration, and you seat yourself on the floor by the anvil, and you carve. You carve a child's doll, tiny and delicate, caught for eternity in a state of endless mirth. It is small, about the height of your finger, and the features, when you look closely, resemble the child who has guided you so aptly through this, your latest venture in metal working.
You stand, later, in Seacouver. You can feel the buzz flowing steady from inside the loft, and your heart leaps eagerly in your chest, your body trembles slightly in an anticipation you cannot deny and do not truly want to. With one notable exception, you return to the loft with precisely the things you left it with, so many days ago. You pause, your hand on the doorknob, as it occurs to you to wonder how long ago that was. You have no idea, you couldn't make so much as an educated guess; there is never a way for you to tell the passing of time in the mountains.
The doorknob turns in your hand, and you step back, startled, wondering how long it is you have stood here. You are aware, suddenly, painfully, of what you must look like. Your clothes are torn and dirty, smudged with soot and flecked with burnt spots, where embers lodged unnoticed. You shaved in the plane, so at least you don't have a beard and moustache, but your hair is unkempt and untidy, although combed. You are thinner than when you left, but there is more muscle along your shoulders and in your arms, and you wonder what he will think of these changes, when they are revealed. You are drenched, and you start to shiver, suddenly aware of the rain you had forgotten hours ago was falling. Water drips down the back of your neck, slithers down your spine, pools at the waistband of your jeans. You watch, with a detached sort of fascination, as the door inches open in slow motion, and a part of your brain wonders if it is really moving that slowly, or if it is just you. You raise your eyes, stunned by the unquestioning love you see in his gaze, and blood drips over the metal doll clutched too tightly in the hand you raise to meet his....
As he offers you the token you left in pledge of your return.
Notes:
Normally I don't do these sort of Notes, but, well -- Renewal haunted me, quite literally. *After* it was written. So I tried to figure out where it came from, as much as I could anyway. It didn't help much. Maybe if I write it down and send it out, and anybody else figures out what the hell went on with me -- let me know, would you?
This story started when the question of Muse Dexterity was brought up on a list -- i.e. what *else* our Muses can do. So this got me thinking; Methos in a forge, Methos hot and sweaty, Methos creating intricate and beautiful artwork from metal. And then about the same time, Rhi mentioned in a thread on the ROG-L something about memory dividers, and how useful they'd be for an immortal. How they'd want them, particularly with five thousand years under their belt.
Well, this combined with the Methos-creating thing had me wondering --- what if Methos made time every now and again to *make* his memory dividers? What if, instead of using events or history, he actually created a physical object for that purpose?
Then I had to go to work. And it just happened that that was the day we were salvaging airconditioners from a condemned building on campus; not a lot of brain activity involved, not in contrast to the computer programming and maths I'm normally doing during the day anyway. So these two things mated busily in my brain for most of the day, when I wasn't busy cursing the heat or the weight of the airconditioners that is. I considered lots and lots of possibilities, and decided that, yeah, I could write a story on this, after it'd percolated in my backbrain for a couple of weeks and when I had a little more time. I even figured out a little of the plot, and I use the term loosely since I don't tend to do plots.
This is not that story. Or any of the other stories I considered while lugging air conditioners about campus in the heat.
I got home, and logged on, and stumbled across the 'Where Does He Go?' challenge devo gave out ages ago, that I wasn't going to answer -- well, now I've got him heading off every so often to make memory dividers in his forge.
That was what I had when I sat down at the computer to make a couple of notes. I got up, a lot of hours later, with a six thousand word story that scared the shit out of me when I thought of sending it to anyone to read. It still scares the shit out of me, when I think of posting it to the lists. You could say I have a few mixed feelings about Renewal. You'd be absolutely right. I have absolutely no perspective on this story, it's got too many pieces from too many parts of me. Time and distance hasn't helped any, either.
So, my heartfelt thanks to Rae and Cassidy for responding so wonderfully and so quickly when I sent it to you. If you hadn't, this probably never would have seen the light of day. And more thanks also to Rae, for the beta. I really appreciate all the time you put in at such short notice, and on a Friday, too :-)
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