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'Well, this is awkward,' said Methos. 'Keaogh, was it?'
'Keane,' replied the other, stiffly, and that was mainly what Methos had gathered of him in their brief and violent encounters. Stiff as a board, that one. Too much English manners did that to a man. And noble quests. Methos had had his fill of noble quests, right down to the righteous set of those straight shoulders.
'I didn't come looking for trouble,' Keane declaimed then, still framed in the open door of Shakespeare & Company, hand hovering over his long coat but not yet reaching inside to the weapon no doubt stashed there. 'I didn't come looking for you. I'd just heard about the bookstore, and I... I like old books.'
'No sin in that.' Methos freed a hand from the stack of, yes, old books he was currently carrying to scratch at the faintest sensation of memory itching his throat. Yes, how terribly, terribly alike. 'Make yourself at home,' he said, and finished his journey to the checkout counter, and by happy coincidence his electric kettle. 'Tea?'
'You would-- serve me? After...'
'After what happened,' Methos corrected blandly, emptying a mug of pens and another of spare coins and flipping the kettle on. 'I will if you shut the door and stop letting the heat out.'
Keane obeyed that, at least, accomplished it gingerly, and came a step further in, but no more. Hands now twisted behind his back, more of those English manners, perhaps, or perhaps only nerves. 'For the record, that hidden dagger trick was low. But I bear no ill will to you,' he said formally.
'Great,' Methos nodded. 'Cream? Sugar?'
'Er... cream, yes.'
Bagged tea, that most delightful of modern inventions, so pedestrian and handy. Methos plopped one each in the mugs, and then there was a bit of standing about in tense silence as the kettle rumbled.
'Do you--'
'Any particular--' Methos screwed his mouth to the side as Keane stuttered. 'Any particular books you were interested in?' he finished first.
'More of an impulse collector,' Keane admitted sheepishly. 'Although I've chased a few prize pieces down in auctions over the years. I'm especially fond of Books of Hours.'
He did have a monkish sort of air, at that. 'I've got a lovely 1459 Four Gospels,' Methos said, and plucked the kettle off its base as soon as it began to steam, pouring. 'It's hard to find horae in one piece, these days. They'd be cut up for scraps or repurposed. Sold off for less scrupulous buyers. It's in the basement, if you're of a mind to look. I'm rebinding it.'
'I've no desire to fight.'
'Most especially not in my basement,' Methos agreed pointedly. 'Where I keep all my real treasures. It was an invitation, not a Challenge.'
'You own the store?'
'It's a living.' Cream, cold from sitting against the windowpane. He nodded to the mugs, and Keane loosed one hand to take it up. 'Not so much a living, actually,' he confessed casually, and sipped from the other. 'More a tax burden atop a hobby.'
'Oh.' Keane drank, eyes roaming the stacks, sliding over the display of John Grisham translations with a little flicker of distaste. Too many Immortals clung to their own century, didn't change with the times. A flash suit and a diamond stud was the look, all right, but it was the little reactions that made a man. Watchers taught an entire course on identifying Immortals at the Academy. Immortals didn't generally make it very hard.
'Amanda said something about you owning a club in town?'
'An investment property.' Keane gazed down into his cloudy tea as if it held answers, or rescue. 'I own three in London. Expanding to Paris was a... goal.'
A goal. A goal that may or may not have been the expeditious locating and dispatching of one Duncan MacLeod, Immortal lodestone. 'Bit permanent. You must have been confident. In your investment.'
And there it was. Another little flicker, a lingering shadow. Guilt, but relief, also. That, Methos liked. Arrogance was taking the time to decorate an abandoned submarine base in gothic chic on the sure bet you would find enough brothers to fill it. Buying a club in Paris with the sole intention of beheading a part-time residential Scot would have been wasteful.
'I've wine in the cellar, as well,' he said. 'If the tea's not to your liking.'
'Thank you,' Keane sighed, and his rigid shoulders sagged. 'Yes, please.'
'You wrote all of these?'
'More or less. I do also hide some pieces too good for sale upstairs.' Methos touched a few pages of his perennially flood-damaged journals and judged them sufficiently dry. He removed a few from the clothes lines and set them aside to sort later. 'Ah, now this is a good entry. I learnt to read Sumerian from a beer merchant. It was all very commercial, back then, not religious-- the priests didn't like to write down their rituals, undercut the mystique. Who owes who what for how many barrels, that sort of thing. If you're lucky, some fun nuggets like gossip or prayers or banquet menus tucked in amongst the receipts.'
'Sumerian!' Keane looked on him with open interest, now, aided along by the wine he was rapidly imbibing. 'Now that's worth collecting. Tell me everything!'
Methos grinned at that. He poured another slosh of wine into his own cup, and heaved himself into a chair, propping his feet up on his desk. 'Hard to even describe,' he said, tipping his head back to rest on the hair rail of the chair. 'The deserts were encroaching on the green land, then. I'd been more than a century on its edge, trying to eke a life out with nomads and villagers, but it was harder every season. You've never known hunger like that, year after year of drought and dust. I'd never thought it safe to venture where the mortals gathered in such numbers, but there was no choice, eventually. Uruk was the first city I'd ever seen, and it was... incredible. I'd never been in a structure more permanent than a hut; I had no idea mortals had come so far. The walls seemed a thousand miles long, ten metres high, soldiers stationed all about... the women were all impossibly elegant, draped in bold dyes and jewellery, fantastic headdresses, their faces painted with kohl and rouge. I thought I'd stumbled into heaven. What I remember the most is the White Temple. The ziggurat towered over the city. It looked as if the gods themselves must have built it, not human hands, so perfect was it.'
Keane had gone white, himself. He clutched at his wine, now, and when his throat bobbed suddenly in a swallow, it was so still Methos could hear it.
'Thought we'd get it out of the way,' Methos said.
'You're...'
'Rip off the bandage, so to speak.'
'But you're...'
'More wine?'
Keane moved, finally, like a puppet jerked on its string. He downed the last of his cup with a harsh gasp. 'Jesus,' he managed.
'That kid? People are always mistaking us for each other,' Methos said, and when he winked, Keane near swooned. Oh, the good ones were so easy.
Then Keane slapped a hand to his mouth. 'I duelled you,' he said, muffled and horrified at himself. 'I'm so-- so sorry-- I threatened you at MacLeod's boat, I--'
'Emotional decisionmaking never looks good in hindsight.'
'MacLeod, he's your student? Please forgive me, I--'
The fun rather went out of it, then. 'No,' Methos said, and took an overlarge swallow of the wine. He breathed dank basement air. 'He's not my anything, Keane. Don't worry about it.'
'You took a Challenge for him.'
'Yeah, that was a real stinker of an idea from Amanda. She owes me big for that.'
'Is she a student of yours, too?'
'No,' Methos laughed that off immediately, hand raised in protest. 'I don't want that credit or curse. Just an inconveniently attractive pair of big brown eyes, so far as I'm concerned.'
'I did notice that quality, myself.' Keane was starting to settle, looking not quite so spooked and self-flaggelating. He gulped at his wine, and Methos pushed the bottle to the edge of the desk for him. They were going to need another at this rate. 'What... what brought you to Paris, then, if not MacLeod?'
'Some of that emotional decisionmaking, I fear.' He cradled his cup to his belly, and took his turn at gazing into the depths, wishing them to produce a vision. The future. His future. But he already knew his fortune. As soon as Kronos had ridden into town, any future had been erased by the past. 'I won't be here much longer,' he said then, the first time he'd said the words aloud. 'Just tying up some loose ends. Packing.'
Keane spied the boxes in the corner. Stacked against the wall, not even unfolded yet. 'Where will you go?'
'Haven't really decided. London, maybe. I haven't been there in a century or so. Easy to get lost in a big city.'
'Get lost-- or hide?'
Definitely time for a new bottle. Methos heaved himself up, and wandered to the wine rack. Time for a red. He selected a Côtes du Rhône, Massif d’Uchaux, peppery, spicy, dark fruits. He'd bought it with MacLeod in mind, in what felt like more innocent times. Innocence. He missed that. That all too brief window between awe and disgust. That all too brief minute when MacLeod had actually welcomed him, wanted him, turned to him. He had that minute timed to a tee, didn't he. He'd played it out a hundred times, and sweet as it was, it always ended.
He stabbed the tip of the screw into the cork, gave it a hard twisk and a yank, spraying his grey jumper with red dots. He filled his glass back up to the brim.
'If you need any assistance,' Keane offered, cautious and seeking, 'I have a man who handles passports, travel arrangements.'
Methos toasted him, and drained half the glass without hardly tasting it. 'Every Immortal has a passport guy, but thanks.'
'Are you... do you mind my asking...' Keane finished his own wine, liquid courage, and blurted it out. 'I might help you pack,' he offered, rushing the words all together.
And then blushing in the aftermath, which was Methos unfortunately giving into his worst nature and laughing inappropriately. He tried to cover it with a cough, but it hung there, an echo in the small basement room, two people breathing who had no right to be.
'If I took you up on it, it wouldn't be for the right reasons,' Methos said. He sank back into the chair, this time to hang his head low, tense muscles straining.
'The right reasons to let someone help you pack?'
'You seem like a nice enough guy,' he told the floor between his knees. 'Kind of my type, in all honesty. Which is why it would be an extraordinarily stupid thing for me to-- I'm not Jesus, I don't do disciples.'
Silence, then. The drip of water, somewhere, he'd never managed to track it down, not in all the years Don had hosted cards nights in this basement, not since taking it on himself. Eking out a life in the desert, a nomad searching in vain for an oasis to sustain him.
Fuck. He was going to cry, and he didn't do it half so prettily as Amanda.
'It seems I've come at a bad time.' Oh, English manners. Yes, he should get himself to London, he'd never have to suffer another embarrassing moment, not with that English allergy to the infelicitous. Keane cleared his throat and dithered, for a moment, but, in the end, he picked the right answer. He left. The bell at the front door announced it with finality, a moment later.
He didn't weep. He wasn't that far gone. But he gave it the old college try, down in the basement with wine and that metronomic drip, hour after hour.
**
‘Mac?’ Methos ventured slowly down the steps, but the empty feel of the barge, absent its owner’s presence, told him more than the lack of reply that Mac wasn’t home. He debated– he did, truly– but signs had never been much his thing, and putting it off wouldn’t sweeten the necessity. He stripped his overcoat and the blade it held, that great equaliser of Immortal etiquette, and left it hanging in prominent place on the hook. He was nearly to the couch, ready to flop himself backward and hang his head off the edge in something a little too like awaiting an execution, but something caught his eye. There, on MacLeod’s desktop. Books, a great many, several open and bookmarked, but the map was a fine piece, an antique more suited to a museum than a boat. A map of the Fertile Crescent.
The Fertile Crescent. And those books– history books, some library editions with plastic covers and barcodes, some leatherbound encyclopaedias, some old histories from bygone eras when the study had held more popular appeal. And, that was noteworthy, two theses published by Adam Pierson, late of the Sorbonne. Mac had been doing his research. The Bronze Age, digested for those who couldn’t begin to imagine what they were reading about.
‘I was…’ said a familiar, unfamiliar, baritone behind him. He hadn’t felt MacLeod approaching, absorbed in his own reading. He let fall the cover between his fingers, the fine paper pages whoofing softly as they settled.
‘So I see.’ He cleared his throat. Five thousand years, and the art of conversation failed him in the face of something unspeakable. ‘I came to talk,’ he said.
‘Talk?’
‘You didn’t want to, before. I didn’t want to.’ He shrugged one shoulder ambivalently. ‘I think it’s clear we need to, before someone else…’ Arrived with more news MacLeod wasn’t constitutionally designed to hear. Absorb. Forgive. But–
‘I’m trying,’ Mac said softly, beseeching with those two simple words, two words Methos had longed to hear and now found exquisitely inadequate to bridge the gulf between them.
He had to clear his throat again. ‘I know,’ he answered. ‘I see that.’
Silence, then. Mac spotted the coat, and removed his own. He’d been out, dressed well, a handsome cashmere that fitted to muscles perfected over a warrior’s lifetime. The hair was down. He smelled like good cognac, even at a distance, and cigar smoke, woodsy and astringent. But that gesture of peace was mellow, and accepting. ‘Want a beer?’ MacLeod asked then, abruptly, hoping.
‘Yeah. No. Er, water. Tea, maybe, if you have it.’
‘I have it.’ MacLeod didn’t have to pass him, where he stood at the desk, but had to put his back to him, momentarily at least, and that was a ginger operation trying desperately to pretend it wasn’t, memories of easier days when it had been done unthinking, now unspoken. Detente, Methos thought dimly, and solved it by sitting, his back to MacLeod in the kitchenette, resting his head on the cushion behind him as he’d originally intended. Vulnerable, yes. Offering, yes. That had always been between them, even if Mac didn’t believe him any more. It would always be.
‘It’s hot,’ Mac said, bringing him a small ceramic mug filled to the brim with English-style tea, a cloud of cream blooming still in its depths. Sugared, even. Methos sipped, letting the burn wash his tongue and gums and heal with the slightest frisson of Immortal magic. Let that be a sign, he thought, and smiled despite himself. Whatever Mac thought of the expression, he returned it, and settled uneasily, not on the couch beside him, though Methos had left the spot open, but on the leather chair, arms laid flat on its arms, big hands curling over the ends, ready to clench.
‘How do we start this thing,’ Methos began, and sighed at himself. He cradled the tea to his chest and let his head fall back again. ‘Sorry. That wasn’t fair to either of us.’
‘I don’t know what’s fair or not, right now.’
Honest, that. Far more honest than last week’s instant judgement. Byron might still live if MacLeod had taken that enlightened attitude a few days earlier. But, then, MacLeod might never have managed without that between them. And kinder than Methos had been, really, when he’d taken Kristen’s head and told Mac he’d learn to live with it. They all learnt to live with it, if they lived long enough; few of their friends would. Deservedly or otherwise.
‘Did you have any questions?’ Methos asked instead. ‘I can just talk, but maybe there’s something specific you want to know.’
‘Like how you could do it,’ MacLeod said, repeated, really, because Methos thought he remembered those words, shouted at him at the car he was about to ride into the horizon in, but for a stubborn Scot’s infamous timing. Maybe not. He didn’t really remember what MacLeod had said, accused, demanded, any more than he recalled what he’d said, except the way the poison had felt on his tongue. Burning.
‘We could start there,’ he managed evenly enough.
MacLeod looked away. To the bulkhead window, to the night beyond, to whatever pleasanter pastime he’d been at before Methos had invited himself in for an overdue chat about the apocalypse.
‘The times were different,’ MacLeod murmured. ‘The whole bloody world was different. I’ve been– I can’t even– I can’t even begin to understand that. I’ve been trying.’
‘I know,’ he said again. ‘I see that, Mac. Thank you.’
Mac’s head dipped, acknowledging that. It was quiet enough in the barge, just the slap of small waves on the keel below, to hear a man swallow down more. ‘Tell me about it,’ Mac said roughly. ‘Please.’
He could happily have gone another five thousand years without this conversation. But he honoured it. He owed it. He inhaled, and held it. Let it go only when he saw spots over his eyes.
‘I don’t remember where I was born, or who I was, or when even,’ he said. ‘Some vague things, little more than inklings, memories of memories. I don’t know even if they’re real or something I imagined or believed or if they’re even mine. The first thing… the oldest thing… I remember the birds in the sky. Flying away from the water… blurs on the blue sky, flocks of them, fleeing the water. And then darkness. Darkness for a long, long time, feeling– smothered. Trying to breathe, weight on my chest, crushing me. I still wake in the night from it. The weight of all the water, drowning me over and over.’
‘A flood?’ Mac sat forward, elbows coming in to rest on his knees.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know where I was, and likely it wouldn’t have meant anything to me even if it had a name.’ He bit his lips together to wet them. ‘It might have been Doggerland. What they call Doggerland now. The land between Europe and Britain, the tsunami that separated them with a new sea. I think. I didn’t know about that for a very long time, however. It’s only speculation.’
‘Doggerland?’ Mac shoved to his feet, and Methos watched him as he retrieved the map from the desk, to bring it to the low coffee table. A brown finger traced the area on its aged surface. ‘The tsunami– that was more than six thousand years ago.’
‘As I said. It’s just a guess.’
‘Tsunami.’ Mac looked up, brows meeting over his nose. ‘You drowned. Along with thousands of people. You– must have been swept out to sea. For… for who knows how long, before you… drifted back to land. New land.’
‘I don’t remember.’ He breathed. Sometimes just to prove he still could. ‘Burial is a bad end for an Immortal, but not an uncommon one. Digging my way out of a pharoah’s pyramid was no mean feat. The Vikings like to bury thralls alive to appease their gods, that was a fun one. Landslides, sinkholes, flash floods… it happens.’
‘Reviving over and over til you can finally… dig out.’ MacLeod wet his lips, this time. ‘No wonder you can’t remember.’
‘I saw Carl Jung, you know. As a patient. He thought I was quite mad, retrieving dreams or fancies, not memories, but in either case I never did retrieve anything much. I’m past missing it, for the most part. Whatever life I had, it’s long since gone, anyway.’ He breathed, and let it out. ‘Something you have to understand. I didn’t know what I was. I might have, before I lost my memories, but I didn’t know after. I wandered. It wasn’t easy to be… there’s not even a word for it. Not a part of a people. It was unheard of, to not belong somewhere, to some tribe. There was no-one to take me in for a very long time, and so I hardly knew I was dying over and over. I’d starve, lay down to sleep, wake up a bit renewed… encounter some wild beast, bleed to death, wake up whole… I didn’t know what was happening to me, that it didn’t happen to other people. I was hardly human, then. I didn’t know the local language even when I did meet people, and there were so fewer people then, Mac, you could go months, years without seeing another face. My clothes, such as they were, fell to rags, and I didn’t have the craft to make new. Had nothing to barter when I did find a tribe or a village, no skills. I was profoundly alone, and terribly lonely. You have to understand that part. How possible it is to want to die of loneliness, truly, but I hadn’t even that escape.’
Unwilling empathy in those brown eyes so much more accustomed to warmth than suspicion. Appeal to MacLeod’s pity, that would have been a surefire way to win him over sooner, Methos had known that almost instantly. He probably would have had MacLeod on his side for the asking, even with Cassandra plying her truth in his ear, if he’d just started with that. MacLeod had lived a few years in exile from his clan. A hundred years or more of that? MacLeod would have believed him.
Did believe, now. Not even a question. Only a very quietly offered, ‘I’m sorry.’ And he was, bless him. He was.
‘Don’t be,’ Methos cut him off. ‘I’m explaining, not– not–’
‘I know. I’m still sorry for what you suffered. It doesn’t mean anything other than that.’
‘It’s the story of almost all Immortals, MacLeod, once our true nature is revealed. We live apart, the price of living at all.’
‘I know.’ MacLeod gentled him with a hand, a downward motion, soothing. ‘Did you ever find anyone to take you in?’
He licked his teeth. Dry. Remembered his tea, cooling now, tolerable temperature, and drank, draining half of it only to forget it again the instant he set it aside. ‘Eventually. At the outskirts of Uruk. Uruk was beautiful, you know. Nothing at all like a modern city, nothing we’d call a city now, but incredible to me then. I was far too intimidated to dare the city walls, but I found a lookout where I could watch, and I began to learn from what I saw. The women washing at the river. I watched until I was sure of their routine, and I got the drop on the boy who guarded them, ran wild at the women to scatter them, ran them off. I stole their clothes right out of the river, and their food from their baskets, and vanished back into my cave to hide. Repeated that a few times, had to be careful not to be too much of a pest or they’d send the menfolk to roust me out. One of the women– a girl, really… took pity. She left me little gifts, treats. Oatcakes and honeycomb. Dried fruits. She took to waiting for me, trying to draw me out. I must have looked some alien thing to her, a wild beast more than a man. Eventually I was brave enough to show myself, I was so… desperate for any human…’
‘What happened to her?’
Appropriately cautious, that question. Appropriately dreading the answer. ‘Sickness,’ Methos said, and didn’t miss that slight spasm of relief that no worse end awaited. ‘One day she stopped coming, they all stopped coming. I ventured into their village, finally, found them all dead in their huts. I buried them, as well as I could. I sat there over their grave and I thought about crawling in after them, to be honest. I might have done, but others came to scavenge. Waste not, and all. They wanted nothing to do with me, I might have been a carrier of whatever disease, but I followed them. The girl had taught me something of her dialect by then, and I begged them to take me with them. But they wouldn’t. I wasn’t one of them.’
‘They left you?’
‘Nothing so cruel. They gave me a swifter death. They didn’t know I’d revive. I awoke alone, in the burning remnants of that stinking little village in the middle of nowhere.’ Mac’s lips parted, but voiced nothing; his face was scrupulously expressionless, lest one emotion win over all the others vying for the privilege. Methos laid his head back again, and closed his eyes. ‘That is all the mercy I had from humankind for thousands of years, Mac. And, eventually– all the mercy I was inclined to give in return.’
Mac did struggle with it. He did at least question it. 'That's not a good enough reason,' he said eventually.
'We could be here another five thousand years if you want to hear the whole sorry tale. Mac-- MacLeod--' He closed his eyes. 'No. You're right.'
'When did... he... come in?'
'Kronos.' Scent memory of him, too. Leather, horses. Flames. 'Has any of your reading covered the history of warfare?'
'Warfare? What, Sun-Tzu and the art of war?'
'Not strategy. Not craft. War, whole civilisations intent on obliterating each other for prize of a few acres of land.' He was cold, a bit. The barge was always cold, excepting a few summer months when it was a roasting tin can. Immortals born before air conditioning. 'Sargon of Akkad, have you ever read about him?'
MacLeod stirred, but didn't rise. Eyes closed, Methos only heard the shifting, fabric on skin. 'Can't claim as I have.'
'Sargon the Great, as he styled himself. One of the mortal warrior-kings. Founded the Old Akkadian Dynasty. Most of Mesopotamia, parts of the Elamite lands, the Hurrians. He destroyed Uruk. There had always been war between the city-states, but Sargon had something of a genius for it. Kronos fought with him. I don't know where he'd come from or when, but rose to some prominence for his... ferocity.' He didn't have to look to sense the contempt radiating off MacLeod. 'That was a thing of great honour, then. Warriors were venerated. Fearsome cruelty was rather the point. And Kronos was nothing if not eager to learn from the mortals perfecting the art.'
'Get to the point, Methos,' MacLeod said tensely.
'I am.' Opened his eyes, to the plain steel and bolts of the ceiling. 'By then I'd managed to get myself inside Uruk. I was enslaved to a brick maker. It was hot, hard labour, under the threat of a whip, starvation, being sold somewhere worse when my owner's fortunes faltered. But then came Sargon, and our king Lugalzagesi called all fit men to arms. And I discovered something about myself, fighting in the sea of humanity that was thousands of Akkadian soldiers in a marsh under a burning sun. Every limb I hacked off, every head I bashed in-- I liked it. I felt something very like exhiliration. I was equal to every man on that field, more than equal-- for my wounds healed and I could fight on.' He registered the weight on his gut, and discovered his hands there, pressing against remembered ache. He curled his fingers into fists. 'I felt him before I saw him. His presence rang out like a bell. I had never encountered one of our kind. I had no idea what it signified. But he did. He sought me out. Suddenly I was facing him. He was...'
'Was what?'
Mad with blood lust. Or perhaps the sanest man Methos had ever met, before or after. 'Covered in blood and gore. Alight with it. Beserker, we might have called it later, but it was no trance. If anything, he was intensely focused. On me, in that moment. I thought my time had come at last. If any could release me from this torturous existence, it was him, this glorious angel of destruction. I took up the spear of the man who had fallen at my feet, and I struck at him. Stabbed him right through the shoulder. And he laughed at me. Broke the blade from the pole and pulled me in, so close I felt his lips on my ear. Even over the roar of battle I heard what he whispered to me. Come with me.'
'And just like that, you did?' Mac said, low and unhappy.
'The only thing holding me bound to those wretches was my belief they could bind me. It had always been that simple: just walk away. But I could never have done it alone. I needed him.'
Suddenly MacLeod was on his feet, a great rustle of leather and muscle that startled Methos out of his reverie. Mac stalked to the bar cart, to pour himself a drink with unnecesseary clatter of glass and ice. Methos was surprised to find a cut crystal tumbler offered, and took it uncertainly. MacLeod didn't sit with his own, but paced, prowled, the small circle of space about the couch, the desk, the unlit fireplace, the porthole. He stopped there, staring at the mirror image of his face, too dark outside to see anything else.
'I needed him,' Methos said into the silence. 'For a very long time, I did. And I couldn't leave until that was no longer true.'
'He was your teacher.'
The breath trembled in his lungs. 'He was my brother. The first being to care whether I lived or died in all I could remember. For the first time, I was not alone.'
'And the killing? The raids, the wars?'
'No different than the mortals. Sargon laid waste to all of Sumer. Salted the fields, razed the cities, trampled carelessly over the naked bodies of the dead, enslaved any who escaped death. We did nothing like the damage the mortals did to themselves. Their wars went on for generations without end, and that was just this one small corner of the world. That was the world.'
'The whole world was different,' Mac repeated once again, distant and dismayed. 'You tried to tell me.'
'I'm explaining. Not excusing.'
Silence. Such a very long silence.
'I can't accept it,' Mac said.
No breath at all, now. Ice in his lungs. His hands were frozen in a protective curl against his belly. 'I know.'
'When I first met you-- you seemed so-- you deliberately--'
'I know.'
'Wise. The wise elder, looking on all us children with amusement, because you knew all the answers before we knew to ask. You let me think that.'
'I know,' he said dully.
'I liked that. And you fed it to me like so much crock.'
'I know.'
Mac never turned to face him. He drank, the ice clinking in the glass, drained it dry. 'Would you ever have told me?'
He did know that answer already, as it happened. 'No,' he said truthfully.
'Why, Methos?'
'Because it never had anything to do with you.'
'Except whether I could trust you! Whether you were worthy of trust.'
'The very night we met, you spared my life for no better reason than my name. You didn't ask me anything, MacLeod.'
'Oh, so it's my fault!'
'No.' He drained his own drink, chilled whisky that hardly even burnt as he swilled it. 'Good-bye, Highlander.'
'Methos...'
'Ask me to stay,' he said, to the melting ice in his tumbler. 'Or let me leave. Don't make me wait forever while you decide.'
Silence.
'I know,' Methos said, and left the tumbler on a coaster as he stood. He grabbed his coat from the hook by the door, and didn't even slam his way out. He didn't stop moving til he was well ashore, though, and then he stood shivering in the cold, arms bare and all to gooseflesh, but nowhere near as cold as he was on the inside.
**
'Bonjour,' Methos called from the back, straining atop a ladder to reach the shelf-- ah, just barely. 'Un moment, s'il vous plaît.'
'Hello?' Footsteps. Methos made a grab for something stationary, wobbling-- 'Got you!' Keane cried, stabilising the ladder just in time to stop Methos taking a tumble off it. 'You can still break your neck, you know,' Keane remonstrated him.
'Yes, well, it seemed the thing at the time.' Arms full, Methos climbed carefully down. 'I packaged the Four Gospels for you,' he said. 'I was planning to mail it. Well, I'd have got round to it eventually. Probably.'
'That's very kind.' Keane relieved him of his pile of books, only losing two paperbacks in the transfer, and Methos gathered those up, nodding Keane to follow him round the corner of the stacks to the boxes. 'You've made some progress,' Keane observed.
'I've decided I'm motivated.'
'More emotional decisionmaking?'
'Quite probably.' Methos dusted his sleeves. 'You came back.'
'Very emotional decision.' Keane pretended to be absorbed in an end-stop display of James Baldwin. 'Did you know Sean Burns?'
'Knew of him, more like. Current circumstances notwithstanding, I don't generally dwell amongst our kind. Too many pointy objects for my taste.'
'You don't find it lonely?'
Only a deep, dark well he wasn't willing to gaze into. 'Some people are better off alone,' Methos said, and headed back up the ladder. 'For everyone's sake.'
'I think you do yourself a disservice, sir.'
'I would have taken your head, you know,' Methos informed him nastily, and rained a trio of hardbacks on his hapless visitor to make his point. 'Stop sucking up.'
'I only meant-- that--' Keane was really too old to blush like a schoolgirl. Methos gathered another clumsy armful. 'Sean was my teacher,' Keane got out in a rush. 'And he was everything a teacher should be. I'm saying I neither need nor want another. But I've been rather at a loss for companionship, myself. Vows of vengeance... they have a rather all-consuming quality.'
'I am not a good man.' Methos leant his forehead against the bookshelf, closing his eyes. Just for a moment. The moment between awe and disgust, the moment where he'd always tried, futiley, to warn against being placed on a pedestal. Where he'd maybe not tried hard enough, in the most recent case, wanting someone to look at him like he was worthy, and it was entirely his fault, inviting a faux-Highlander in for a hopeful redux.
'I'm just a man,' he said. 'Men fail. I want you to hear me on that. You'll inevitably learn something about me that you won't like, and that'll be the end of it, but I am far too tired, Keane. I can't go through that again.'
'I have a country house in England. You'd be welcome. A bit of quiet. You seem as though you could use a bit of quiet.' Keane laid a hand on the ladder, not quite beside Methos's hand. 'You could come and go as you wish. I don't even have to be there.'
Mac had welcomed him, once. Mi casa es su casa. Welcome wore out.
'Thank you,' he managed, reasonably enough. He descended, and sat on the bottom rung. Scrubbed a hand over his face. 'But I think it's best I make my own way for a while.'
Keane took the hint. He backed a decent distance away, hands behind his back again, safe from temptation. 'I suppose a man who duels like you isn't in overmuch danger.'
'Bright boy.'
'I'm glad MacLeod proved worthy, of your good opinion at least. Although, stabbing me three times til he arrived to break us up was a bit much.'
Methos pulled a face. 'Sorry about that. Immortal revival times are more art than science.'
'So you did stage it to allow him to interfere.' Keane scuffed a shiny loafer over a broken floor tile. 'Or to give me time to think it through.'
'Keane, no offence meant, but I would have taken your head without blinking.'
'No, you wouldn't have,' Keane countered, with what Methos thought to be distinctly unearnt confidence. But before he could completely write the man off for a fool, he amended himself, with a small quirk of a smile. 'Or, at least, with a blink.' The smile faded. 'I hope he forgives you for it.'
Not a snowball's chance in hell. And more fool Methos, for wanting it when he'd gone in knowing it was never to be.
'Live a good life, Keane,' he said. 'Live your own life, now.'
'I'll try.' Keane inclined his head in something short of a bow, thank God, and turned to go. The bell rang, once with the door opening, once with finality as it closed.
Methos wiped his nose on his sleeve. Right. Enough feeling sorry for oneself. Since he'd declined help with packing, he'd best get on with it.
But if he sat there in the dust hoping the door might open again, he had only himself to blame when it didn't.