Archive of Our Own

The call came just after midnight. He'd been doing nothing in particular-- he would remember that detail, in times to come-- puttering idly about the dojo with a glass of wine in hand, examining the dents in the plaster walls, contemplating a renovation.

And then the call, his mobile ringing from its pocket in his coat. He rifled pockets, found the vibrating slip of plastic, tucked it between ear and shoulder. 'Hullo?' he asked, mellow and too sleepy to even check the incoming number for identification.

And Joe's saw-edged tenor answered, bringing a smile to his face. 'Mac. It's me.'

'Everything all right?' He checked his watch without really reading it. He'd remember that, too, how the moment would come to feel disconnected, adrift in time. 'It's late in Paris, isn't it?'

'Watchers operate all times of night.'

'I suppose the job is never done, eh.' He sprawled on the bench, kicking his long legs in front of him to peer at the scuffs on his boots. 'Something happen, then?'

'Something happened.' Joe's voice ran dry at the end of the word, and he followed the statement with a long pause. Alert to that tone after so many years, Mac sat up straight, his muscles tensing, but something stayed his tongue, and he didn't press.

'Mac,' Joe said, and repeated it again, as if working himself up to it. 'Mac, it's... it was a short fight. Ambush, really. His Watcher got it on tape.'

Some part of him registered the 'he', relieved only to eliminate Amanda. 'Who, Joe.'

'One of those young bucks who crops up every once in a while, a hunter. We'd tracked him through a couple dozen kills, lost him for a while in Russia. He turned up in Paris about two weeks ago--'

'Joe,' Mac said.

But Joe rambled on, relentless in his frustrating pace, as if he had to get the whole story out. 'It's been quiet here. A few of the usual suspects in town, but the big names spend their summers out of this corner of the world, you know, so I thought he'd blow through. Had word he'd been spotted headed out of town, he has one of those cars you can't miss, American, flashy. But he came back two nights ago. He might have a feeler out there, someone who's feeding him information, we don't know yet.'

'Joe,' Mac said. 'Who.'

Joe's voice hitched. He breathed out once, shaky. 'Adam fought well, but he didn't have a chance.'

He'd been doing nothing in particular. Had been doing nothing in particular all week. He'd remember that, because it meant he could have stopped it, if he'd been there. Could have fought for him. I haven't the fire, it was one of the first things Methos had ever said to him, and he'd known the fire would come calling one day, he'd just... forgot to worry about it, as the years dragged on. He'd pushed Methos into the open, pushed him back into life, and he'd been doing nothing at all when life snuffed him out.

His own breath felt frozen in his lungs. It was barely enough to speak with. 'You're sure?' he whispered.

'The Quickening took out the city's entire power grid. Mac. Come home, okay.'

'Yeah.' He wet his lips. 'Yeah. I'm on the first flight out. The other one, the hunter--'

'I won't tell you. Revenge doesn't bring Adam back.'

'Vengeance, Joe.'

'No,' Joe denied him, brutally blunt. 'You don't use me for that. You just come the fuck home, Mac, so we can bury him decently.'

He found his vision had gone dark. It was only his hand, pressed tightly to his eyes. 'Yeah. Joe... yeah. I'm sorry.'

'Just get on a plane. I'll pick you up at the airport.'

'Joe. I'm sorry. He was your friend.'

'I've buried plenty of friends.' Joe's attempt at gruff faded, and he didn't speak again. Mac didn't hang up, didn't rise from his bench. He just waited, a connection on a phone, giving Joe the time to get through it. His palm came away from his eyes with wet on it. He brushed it away, rubbed at the tightness in his throat. Yeah.

**

They cremated him. It was Joe's choice; there was a testament, and in it were a long lifetime's accumulation of property and books and knicknacks, but it was also a bequeathment of choices, and that choice was left to Joe. They scattered the ashes on the Seine.

'Do you even know where his latest hide-away is?' Mac asked. The wind was strong today, chill gusts whipping at their coats, their hair. Joe's was going white, he noted, the fresh pangs of grief more than ready to latch onto evidence that another funeral might not be long behind.

Others had come. He was grateful for that, evidence of its own; a life that long had included at least some few lasting friendships. But they were Mac's people, not Methos'. There was no way to reach out to others who might care. There never had been. Amanda was back at the hotel, keeping the peace with Gina and Robert Valincourt. Stephen Keane had come, of all men, who'd been Amanda's sometime travel companion and Methos' sometime correspondent. That relationship had surprised him. Methos had inserted himself into Mac's life in ways Mac himself had been hardly cognisant of, so concentrated on the interferences that most itched. Kalas. Jakob, Kristin. Richie. Coltec and Sean, double victims of the Dark Quickening. He hadn't thought of that in years. Byron. Kronos. They'd never been able to speak of those last two, though in truth they'd never spoken much of any of the others, either. So much unspoken.

'He's been in London,' Joe answered, hunching awkwardly on their rented boat's lone seat. He propped his cane between his knees, rested his fists on it. 'He was in Paris for some research. Playing Adam Pierson, reluctant Watcher.'

'I didn't know he still used that identity.'

'He never really stopped. Watchers were onto him. Not as Methos,' Joe clarified, catching Mac's surprise. 'But the Immortality bit was out of the bag. He was seen taking a Quickening a couple of years ago.'

'Who?'

Joe shrugged off his query. 'It was a personal vendetta. The other guy, not Adam. From well before you knew him. And he avoided it as long as he could, you know. He always walked away first.'

'I'm not asking to blame him.' Mac crouched at the motor, but didn't restart it just yet. He wrapped the empty, plain cardboard box that had held a life of such great magnitude reduced to its barest dust. There was a thin smudge of grey on his sleeve. He brushed a circle around it, not yet willing to wipe it away. 'He told me once he hadn't taken a head in two hundred years. Kristin was the first. Then Silas.'

'Sometimes it gets harder, for the older ones. We've had that theory for a long time, anyway. Always meant to ask him.'

'So why didn't he walk away this time?'

Joe shook his head. 'You go looking for answers, you're gonna be disappointed. None of it makes any damn sense, Mac, not a single shitty piece of it. I'm tired of the question.'

He almost fought that, but decided against it, and swallowed it down. Instead, he said, 'You're shivering. Let's head in.'

Joe held the box, as they chugged back toward the pier. Mac steered them in for their berth, tossed the mooring to a dockhand who came to help, got Joe to his feet and boosted him up the stepladder. When he thought to check his sleeve again, he found it damp, and clean.

**

'It was here.'

Keane found it first. The sweep of his hand torch had stilled. Mac turned, slowly, from his weary stare at the downed and melted power lines, the shattered windows, more than one warehouse almost entirely collapsed from the force of the explosion. Watchers had cleaned up the bodies-- it was what Watchers did-- but the devastation reached for blocks. Natural disasters were not so catastrophic. There had been fire, storm. The electric release had flattened the earth itself, turning tar to sleek frozen waves, radiating out from the centre.

The spot where Keane now stood. Mac joined him, or nearly, finding his feet simply stopped moving before he crossed the final boundary. There was blood, or had been. The blacklight caught what had been doused in bleach. He could smell it even through the dust.

'It's like a meteor hit,' Keane mumbled. He craned his head away, his breath expelling in a cloud against the cold. 'He was an old one, wasn't he.'

'He didn't ever tell you?'

'I thought I had the time to get to know him. Coax it out of him.' Keane's face went lined, something that was not so much a smile as a grimace. 'I've never seen anything like this. You?'

'Once,' Mac admitted, thinking and then choosing not to think of that night at Bordeaux. 'We'll never have his like again.'

'The Game's not done yet.' Keane waved off his suspicious glance. 'It won't be me. I've never wanted it and I don't hunt. Now,' he added, with a ghost of that strange expression again. 'I won't live to see the end. You might. He thought you would be the One.'

'I wonder how many Immortals he's backed, through the centuries.' The Chronicle had gone to Joe. That was fitting, and much like Methos, Mac thought. The secrets of thousands of years in the hands of a man who'd likely only live another dozen, if that. Wherever the secrets would go next, Mac didn't think he'd ever read them. Methos had preferred a sideline view on history. His one mark on it was too dark to bear risking again. Even standing a few ever-wary feet from the Highlander had brought him a touch too close. He'd stayed, though. Mac had been awed, at first. Irritated, oh, often irritated. But part of him had always known the why.

Keane broke the silence. 'I need a drink,' he said. 'Your friend Joe's bar?'

The week had been one long wake, really. But Mac only nodded. It seemed fitting.

They were greeted at the door with the warm orangey light of candles. The grid was still down. The candles filled Le Blues with a smoky, waxy scent that reminded Mac sharply of times that were long gone, but it was a cleaner thing, a modern surprise. And the beer that found its way to his hand was sweeter and stronger and free of the cloudy silt of his youth. The stool he sat on was covered in soft manufactured velvet, the bar stained whiskey-gold with chemicals, not the polish of a generation's hands. The man who worked the kegs tipped a pint glass at him, a mute toast.

Amanda mimicked it. 'To old friends,' she said.

Mac slid a hand around her dress, the catch of sequins at his palm softened by the whisp of dark hair when he pressed his lips gently to her neck. 'To old friends,' he seconded. Keane raised his pint, and clinked it to Joe's. They drank.

'Robert and Gina got out all right?' Amanda asked.

'They might even make it a few more years,' Mac said wryly. 'Nothing like a little perspective to remind you that the exact position of the toilet seat doesn't matter all that much.'

'They've really been together three hundred years?' Keane asked curiously. 'I've never heard of Immortal relationships lasting so long.'

'On more than off,' Amanda said. Her slim fingers curled over Mac's. 'I've always envied them that.'

'It'd be easier to stay in one place if you weren't always wanted by the police,' Mac pointed out.

'A lot less interesting, though.' Her grin faded as she pulled her bright red lip between her teeth. She touched Mac's brow, smoothing it tenderly. 'Maybe it's time to give it a rest,' she murmured. 'Give it a try, anyway.'

He kissed her, because he couldn't do otherwise. He didn't expect her to stay and never had, but he knew why she said it just then.

The buzz of a phone went almost unnoticed, though Le Blues was quiet tonight, with only a few staff sitting in back folding napkins besides the posse of Immortals gathered at the bar. Joe answered, turning a shoulder away to excuse himself. Mac paid little mind, sipping his drink. His own stay in Paris was open-ended. He no longer owned the barge and he'd long given up his other handholds in the town that had housed him-- more on than off-- for decades now, but it might be time to return. Besides, he had a private notion of something to occupy his time. Joe might be right that it was inappropriate to go to the Watchers for word of this hunter who'd taken the eldest Immortal's head, but there were other ways to track a man like that. The world would be a better place when Methos' Quickening had a better home. He would wait til Amanda made her way onward. She wasn't a strong fighter, more reliant on tricks and ruthless imagination to make her escapes, and he didn't want her tempted to play too actively in Mac's game.

Joe slammed down the phone, whirling on unsteady legs. 'Out,' he ordered them brusquely. 'Now. All of you.'

'What?' Mac, jostled by startlement, wiped sloshed beer from his chin. 'What was that call?'

'None of your business. Get out now. Now, Mac.'

He registered the urgency and was on his feet, but Amanda and Keane were slower. He nudged Keane by the shoulder, the most they'd ever touched, and tried to ignore the way the other man flinched just slightly away. 'Are we coming back?' he hazarded.

'I'll ring you. Out the back.' Joe was out from behind the bar, headed toward the front door. He yanked the curtains closed over the windows, checked the little window in the door. 'Am I unclear? Hurry the hell up, people.'

'Rude,' Amanda snapped, grabbing her pocketbook. 'There's a polite way to tell people they've overstayed their welcome.'

'Watcher problem,' Mac whispered to her, though he didn't share the same with Keane, who was confused but at least moving as ordered. Amanda stalked after him, Mac right behind her.

Til he felt it. This buzz was like bells, vibrating him from head to foot, like-- gibbering wild tongues, a cacophany of noise and feeling that was oddly familiar. Keane had whirled about, Amanda with a hand at her mouth and her skin gone pale.

'The hunter,' Keane breathed, and then he was sprinting past Mac freeing his sword from his coat, leaping to defend Joe from the opening door.

'Damn it,' Mac cursed, running to catch up. The frightened screech of one of the barmaids distracted him, but they fled at the sight of weapons, out the storeroom exit that the Immortals had been headed for. He placed himself between Joe and the door as it began to creak open.

The man who pushed it wide was youngish, perhaps mid-twenties, with kinky hair brushed back from his coffee-brown skin and large brown eyes. His leather jacket was zipped to the throat, but he put a large hand on the weapon that was unhelpfully secured beneath, rocking back a step as though unprepared to find himself facing a pair of armed challengers, as though he hadn't noticed the buzz of fellow Immortals in the bar.

'Is this him?' Mac demanded of Joe. He heard Amanda locking the back door, saw from the corner of his eyes as she slid wide around the edges of the bar, her sword low and ready.

Joe's face was consternation and resolve in one. He inhaled once, and nodded.

'You want first go?' Keane asked him politely.

'Gladly.' Duncan dipped the tip of his katana in a warning swirl, bringing it back up to chest-level. 'I am Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod,' he said coolly. 'And you picked a very bad night to go drinking.'

'If you kill me I can't pay my tab,' the hunter retorted, almost lazily insulting, but his body was tense and leaning away. He put both hands out at his sides, empty palms out. 'Joe, I know I saw Amy out there dogging me. You want to bring her in on this?'

'Memories from the Quickening,' Amanda said, drawing the hunter's gaze. 'And a paltry trick. You don't get to speak to him like you know him. You speak to us.'

'I'd like to, darling Amanda,' the hunter answered. His eyes slid to Mac. 'Maybe we can do this sans sharp objects. I'm not here for a Challenge.'

'Too bad,' Mac said. He swung without further ado. The katana bit deeply into the door as the man ducked, knocking over a chair and stumbling out of the way. 'Draw.'

'How many times have I pleaded with you to actually fight like that, and now you finally do?' The hunter whirled with his arms outstretched. 'I see I have some explaining to do. I'd like to, very much, but I really insist we all lower the temperature in here. Joe. Please. Call in Amy. Ow!' He jumped back, holding his side. Amanda had got close enough to jab him. The tip of her sword gleamed red. 'Shit, Amanda, that hurt,' he complained.

'Your turn, Stephen,' Amanda said sweetly, as Keane took the next lunge. The hunter finally responded, deflecting the blow with his leather-clad arm and using Keane's momentum to rebound, their bodies passing within a breath as he ripped open his coat and drew his sword. With a jump he was at the bar, planting his vulnerable back to it, and he focussed on Mac, crouched and ready.

'MacLeod,' he said, as Mac raised the katana again, 'even at Culloden you never killed an unarmed man. You won't now.' He threw down the blade. It clattered on the wooden floors, skidding between their feet.

Amanda stepped over it as Mac hesitated. 'I'm not as scrupled as they are.'

'You gave me Rebecca's crystal, for luck. For Alexa.'

'Even speaking that woman's name sullies her memory,' Mac snarled. 'You're making it easier to kill you.'

'Joe, for the love of anything holy, will you get your fucking daughter in here! Stop that,' he snapped at MacLeod, and then just stood, crossing his arms. 'Why must you always push to the breaking point? It's me, you great bloody assassin. And if we'd all just calm the hell down I'm happy to explain.'

Where it might have gone from there was far from uncertain. Mac had no sooner determined to ignore the vile lies and take the opening the hunter had left him, consequences aside-- and with Keane and Amanda at his side in approval, no less-- but the hunter had been angling for help and it arrived. A slender girl came poking through the door. Joe jumped to get it closed, but she pushed back, shoving her way indoors as Joe tried to hold her back.

'I'm afraid he's right,' she said, struggling to get through. 'Or at least I'm afraid enough to listen to his explanation.'

'Who is that?' Keane demanded.

'My Watcher,' the hunter said. 'And she was Watching the other night. Weren't you, Amy?'

'Amy?' Joe said.

'Watcher?' Keane repeated.

Amanda was staring at all of them, and she was the one who cut through the chaos. Tentatively, she said, 'Methos?'

'Methos?' Keane repeated, more alarmed than ever.

And Methos let out a blustery sigh and flipped his hand in aggravation. 'Yes.'

**

'I really don't think this is necessary.'

'And I really don't care what you think,' Mac said again, checking the rope binding the hunter's wrists to the chair. 'I'm only interested in what you can prove.'

'Your face is gonna be so red.'

'Enough joking, wise-ass,' Joe said, prodding the man with his cane. 'If you are him, I'm gonna smack the crap out of you. I believed you died.'

The hunter sobered, his face going peculiarly still in a way that made Mac's stomach twist. He knew that look. He'd seen it in troubling times before.

'I did,' the hunter said softly. 'Let's just talk, please, and I'll try to explain to everyone's satisfaction.'

Keane brought a mug of steaming tea to the two mortals. Joe ignored it, but the girl took hers with an absent smile of thanks. She sat near her father-- her father, Mac reminded himself, making a promise to get that story soon as well. Keane offered Mac a drink, and when he shook his head, Amanda got it instead. The hunter got a sip from Keane's glass, held to his lips for just as long as necessary.

'Thanks,' the hunter said hoarsely. 'You at least can keep a cool head.'

'I'm hardly convinced,' Keane replied pleasantly. 'Just keeping you fighting fit for when I issue my Challenge, now that MacLeod's deferred his.'

'Amy,' Joe said, speaking without once looking away from the bound Immortal. 'I read your report. You were sure.'

'It happened exactly as I wrote.' The girl nodded toward the hunter. 'He was stalking Adam Pierson. Pierson attempted to evade him, and managed it for a day. But the hunter drew him out. They met just before midnight in the meatpacking district.'

'I prefer to keep more people around,' the hunter murmured. 'More chance of timely interruptions. But he had news that made it worth the fight. He knew where to find Cassandra.'

That name dropped into a well of silence. Amanda knew enough to look apprehensively at Mac. Joe knew enough to go wide-eyed, scratching at his beard to cover the sour turn of his mouth. Keane knew enough to guess, perhaps, but he kept it to himself.

Mac said, 'If you are who you say you are, that leads only to more questions. You have no reason to take a Challenge for her.'

'Don't I?' The hunter tipped his head back, baring his neck. It was only to stare at the ceiling, but Mac had to flatten his hands on his thighs, look away. 'In three thousand years I never went near her, Mac. The world's not that large a place. She's lived in no small part because I owed it to her.'

'Then tell me how a hunter even learnt of her existence.'

'There aren't that many old ones left. As I've said. The world isn't really all that big, not anymore. When we meet we don't meet well.'

'But he had reason to know you'd do that. Take him on in her place.'

'There's a mole somewhere, I'd imagine,' the hunter replied. He cocked a sideways eye at Joe and the girl. 'The Watchers have funneled information to the hunters before. It may be time to purge house again.'

'We're running out of Watchers to trust,' Amanda muttered.

'I trust those two.' The hunter shook his head, just slightly, as if to clear it. 'He was good. He was better than me, and I realised that rather immediately. He laughed. I remember that. He laughed. And I laughed. Because it was so unbelievably stupid. Five thousand years, and this stupid young punk with no thought in his head but “next” was going to win. We've argued about it before, MacLeod, but in that moment I wished you'd done it. Or even let Cassandra do it. Better someone who understands... but that's not what happened.' He caught the girl's eyes. 'You saw.'

'I saw him win,' she said hollowly. 'A hamstring strike, and the final blow. The Quickening was-- I've never-- even compared to Morgan Walker's, this was-- unbelievably immense.'

'More age than heads,' the hunter said, 'though I suppose that's a debate for another time. But tell them about the result, please, Ms Thomas.'

'I saw a man rise from the fire.' She faltered. Joe took her hand, and she bowed her head over it. 'You. You staggered away. I followed you. You seemed confused. You were-- glowing, almost. I almost couldn't look directly at you. You went to the river, you washed yourself. Then you slept there. That was when I put in the report. But--'

'But what,' Mac said.

'But when I've seen kills before, it was never like this. The energy always seems to dissipate and the Immortal goes back to-- well, back to normal. But you went to Adam's hotel. Not wherever you'd come from, Adam's. And you just went inside and fell asleep and didn't act like anything unusual at all had happened. He was there for almost two days, and I was going to check in for re-assignment...' She trailed off. Joe shook his head but didn't encourage her onward. She did it herself, straightening her shoulders. 'I don't suppose I know what stopped me, except for regret. Adam was kind, and I wanted to see it through, for him. For you, Joe. So I waited. And that was when it got strange.'

'Stranger than people who watch Immortals fight and record all their movements?' Keane muttered, as if he couldn't resist. The idea that he'd been Watched all his Immortal life obviously rankled.

'It's only disturbing at first,' the hunter told him. 'I've come to rather like it. It gives me a sense that our history won't vanish when we do. I find I crave permanence more and more the older I get. Despite or perhaps because of immortality.'

'Is that why you infiltrated us?' the girl asked tartly.

'Permanence and self-preservation are happy companions. Tell the rest, Amy.'

'He went to Adam's places,' she said. 'The Bibliothèque, where Adam had been conducting research. Shakespeare and Company.'

'The bookstore?' Mac blinked. 'Your Watcher friend ran that place.'

'Don,' Joe confirmed. 'And he left it to Adam. Adam's let us cycle Watchers through there. It's a good base.'

'And he seemed confused when they didn't know him,' Amy said. 'When in fact they were quite alarmed by him. Because we knew him as the hunter. He didn't attack them, didn't try to hurt them, but they called the police--'

'Panic?' Joe disapproved.

'Wisdom,' Amy said. 'Better to arrange for one of those timely interruptions. Watchers have died in that shop before, when Immortals come hunting. But he just ran. And then he stopped in front of a window and he looked at himself for almost an hour. Just looked, touching his face.'

Mac put up a hand. 'Stop. Stop. You're telling us that-- that-- his Quickening--'

'Transferred,' the hunter said. 'And not that I want to open a can of worms, but... it might be worth pointing out this isn't the first time.'

Keane's mouth actually dropped open. Mac caught himself and clicked his teeth together. Amanda only pursed her lips, her eyes narrowed.

'Jesus,' Joe said shakily. 'You wanna tell me how that's even possible? I thought the Quickening was just--'

'Energy, mostly,' the hunter replied. 'Feeling, and sometimes memories, though rarely so specific as addresses and names. Whatever we are, we're not entirely of nature, and nature abhors the release of the Quickening. It contains it in the next nearest Immortal.'

'Go back to this not being the first time,' Mac commanded.

'To be honest, it answers questions,' Amanda said thoughtfully.

'What questions?'

'Tall, white, finely featured.' Amanda dropped her chin onto her hand, and she and the hunter exchanged a long look. 'Not your immediate description for a man more than five thousand years old.'

For some reason that profoundly shook him. Mac tried to speak, and couldn't. Keane looked equally stunned. 'Jesus,' Joe muttered, and Amy squeezed his hand.

'How many times,' Mac managed.

'The once that I'm sure of,' the hunter said. 'Rome. He called himself Flavianus. Ancient Roman, put plainly, so he may have been old, by the standards of the time. Just not older than me, and not old enough to... withstand it, I suppose. I've suspected there was another time, but it's always been blurry. Now perhaps I know the reason why.'

'When else?' Joe asked, the clinical precision of the Watcher seeking detail. With the blunt candour of a man who sees no reason not to answer, Methos supplied it.

'I have no idea how old I was when I took my first head,' he said. 'But I have an inkling how it went for the Immortal who first took mine. There was a flint knife. I never knew how I came to have it, only that it was suddenly in my hand.'

Mac shook himself. 'If I... believe this...'

'Then you start by letting me loose,' Methos said. 'And someone could find me something to eat, please. It's been a long few days. And more of that whiskey. A lot more.'

'Ditto that,' Joe said, sounding dazed. 'Adam...'

'Joe.'

Joe could only shake his head. Mac found himself sore-throated as well, his eyes prickling. 'I'm just glad,' Joe rasped.

The taut muscles of a face that was not a stranger's eased, just slightly. 'Me, too, brother.'

**

'He's almost embarrassingly fit,' Methos said, examining his own abdominals in the mirror. He poked them with a frown. 'It's going to take me years to run down a liver this healthy.'

'I'm sure you're up to the task,' Mac said dryly. He flung a clean shirt at the other man. 'Will you finish packing? I don't want to be late.'

Methos obediently finished dressing himself, though he wandered barefoot through Mac's hotel room before stopping at the gurgling coffee percolator, and helped himself to another mug. 'You're getting on with Stephen, then.'

'No,' Mac replied amiably. 'But we're both behaving, if that's what you mean.'

'Good enough.'

'I didn't know you'd kept in touch with him.'

'He's a nice enough sort. After he agreed to stop hunting you, at least. He wanted for a bit of direction, and I was looking for anyplace to be that wasn't Paris.'

That was a familiar sensation. Coming bump up against the same old topics, the names they'd neither of them say.

But, faced with it, Mac broke their tacit pact. He said, 'It might have happened to me, what's happened to you. If Kronos' Quickening had been strong enough.'

'I've thought of it.' Methos left the coffee carelessly on the bureau beside Amanda's hairbrush. He leant against the open window, gazing out on the dark city. Paris in the dark was as it had been for a thousand years, quiet and windy and a bit alien. The stars were buried behind decades of light pollution, but it was easier to feel them near, with the grid still down. 'I'm sure he thought of it,' Methos added then, moodily. 'He knew me. He shouldn't have. I wasn't the same when we rode together. Silas... Silas knew me, too. The Quickening can be that strong, it can be strong enough that even others know you by it.'

'Then it was luck. Pure chance.'

'No. You were stronger.' Brown fingers traced the cracking plaster of the window jamb. 'I was banking everything on it.'

'And if Kronos had taken your head?'

'I don't know.'

Admitted baldly, it was more than a little terrifying. Mac was slow folding a pair of trousers, fussing over the lines. 'You may be the only true Immortal,' he told the grey wool. 'The rest of us can die.'

He didn't have to see the haggard expression. It soaked the words, almost drowning them. 'I've thought of that, too.'

'Then maybe you are the One. Who really knows what it means? Why not this?'

'I don't want it.'

'Maybe—'

'Mac. I don't want it. Much as I want to live, much as I've always wanted-- I don't-- I don't want that.'

He drew a deep breath, forcing air to flush his lungs. He finished the fold, and laid the trousers in his suitcase. 'What will you do now?'

It was too soon to ask that question. They hadn't even cleaned out his London flat, and their trip to do so would have to be carefully conducted. Amy Thomas had filed her report, and Adam Pierson was officially dead, unless or until she changed that fact with a report on the truth. Neither Joe nor Methos seemed worried about her, but Mac was, worried at the impact of something so enormous. Every Immortal would be, had to be suspect. Who knew how many other times it had happened? Or would again?

'New lease on life.' Methos' voice was soft and strained. 'I don't know that, either. The Watchers haven't been specially trustworthy the last ten years or so, and they were changing before that. It's not where I've wanted to be. Who I've wanted to be. But I don't know what something different would look like. There's no-where I haven't been, no-one I haven't been.'

'I know that feeling, lately.' He about-faced. Folded his arms over his chest. 'There's no rush. To figure it out. Don't disappear.'

'No.' Methos glanced over his shoulder. Eyes that were no longer hazel smiled briefly, wearily. 'Not for long, at any rate.'

'I'm renovating the dojo.' He flopped it out there like the lie it was, and fumbled the catch. 'Well-- thinking about it. I'd like to, I think. I could use-- I could use some help.'

'That sounds dangerously like an invitation, Highlander.'

'I'm trying not to scare you off.'

'I'm not the one who's scared.' Methos faced him, too, shoulders hunched in that old way. Head cocked, eyes unblinking. He was shorter, now, and that look worked better, slyly upturned, better than it had in Adam Pierson's lanky height.

'No,' Mac said, not quite remembering what he'd been intending to deny. Methos' mouth curled in a smile.

'Dunno,' he said, and picked up Amanda's hairbrush, playing the tines over his knuckles. 'Dunno if I want to work that hard. You take on too many projects at once.'

'I don't like sloth.'

'I love sloth.' He shrugged. 'You don't have room for all my books.'

'Loan them to Keane. He'd enjoy the read. Seems like a bookish sort.'

'Probably.' He shrugged again. 'Guess it would be all right, then.'

'Yeah?'

A badly-timed swallow betrayed a moment of uncertainty. For a moment two faces warred, new and old, but the old won, re-arranging to something entirely familiar. 'Mac.'

'Methos,' Mac said. No longer white skin against his tanned hands, when he took Methos' fingers between his. But they fitted.

'Right,' Methos said, faintly, but when Mac grinned at him, he laughed and tossed his head and agreed.