by Westwind
October 2003
Spring 2061 ~ moving on
April 10, 2061
time is so very
strange--the seasons drift on by
like a rush of leaves
First a short nap, then a timeless period of meditation, Methos rose naked and began. His straight razors were sharp, but he sharpened them again; stropping them was a kind of meditation. Putting them both back down, he stared at himself in the mirror. His eyes were too old for his face. Which was ridiculous; they were just as old as his face. He looked at his teeth, then pulled his face into a series of grimaces. Nothing diminished the prominence of his nose; well, he had lived with it a long time.
Squaring his shoulders, standing to his full height, he looked into his own eyes in the mirror. They were hazel--sometimes gold, occasionally green. Methos must have been about five hundred, older than Duncan was now, the first time he had looked in anything like a mirror, poor and wavy though it had been.
Picking up one of the straight razors, he made six shallow cuts, one after another, slicing through the skin over his ribs. The blood ran free, pooling at his feet, until the healing started. He picked up the remaining razor and drew the pattern of his discontent on his left side, flicking lines of blood across walls.
The flutter of the healing stopped too soon. Methos drew the blade down the length of his left arm, then back up, down, then back up. The blood had quit flowing almost before he stopped cutting. If he didn't watch his balance, he could slip in the growing rivulets of blood.
Washing the blood off the razors, Methos leaned in close to the mirror and looked again into his eyes. The pupils were enormous. He leaned in closer with his nose almost touching the glass. Sometimes he could see the boy who had left the fields and huts of his childhood to end up on the shores of the Black Sea--but not today.
Picking up the razor, he stepped back and began to cut up, then down, the left side of his body; he continued to score his side as blood ran down to add to the blood on the floor. He was naked on this bright spring day. One shaft of light from the setting sun came through the single window and shone bright on the mirror and, by reflection, on his face. Light-headedness came and went as his healing caught up with the cutting, then was outrun again. Continuing to look in the mirror, Methos watched as the world slid away and gray surrounded him. He was alone; he always ended alone.
Using straight razors kept him from making any stabbing wounds. But repeated cuts in one spot produced the same results. Methos stepped back a few steps, and fell to his knees, and closed his eyes. He let the scoring go down to his thighs and continue. Across both legs with one hand, then back across with the other. Up, then down his chest with one blade, then up and down with the other. He flung his head back; the pain was very real, but he didn't care.
He shifted the blades down and began to slice at his groin. Emptying everything out of his mind, he went elsewhere. Finally Methos touched his cock with a razor; lines of blood appeared, and he shuddered in pain, in fear that he might go too far, and in ecstasy. He was beyond rational thought, beyond the bathroom, beyond Dallas, beyond Duncan.
At last, he came back to the present. He sighed and stood up. Not doing this often, he had forgotten how messy it was. He sighed again. This was like a reset button; sometimes he just had to do it. All that wasn't clear now was; all the questions that had been unanswered now were, and everything was solved. Maybe. Then he began to clean up the bathroom.
This was easier fifty years ago. You got dirty; you took a shower. He eyed the washtub of water, now tepid. The fire burned merrily but only on one side; he was sure to be half cold. He picked up the sponge and, with determination, dipped it into the water and started to scrub.
Methos felt washed clean and not just from the water in the washtub, he'd had to empty that and start over. Sitting on the hearth, his back to the fire, dressed in a ratty, old pair of long johns, he sat writing haiku. The discipline of having to fit his thoughts into three lines of five, seven, and five syllables gave order to his thoughts, brought him back to life.
bright sun shines down on the earth bringing the rapture of spring to her young
He could remember when someone he could trust did this for him. Methos's lips twitched briefly. Darius, on occasion, had helped him; usually he started with Methos's problem in mind, then lost his sense of Methos and just beat him bloody. He missed Darius.
how can it be so? the flaying of flesh can be the cause of great peace
April 14, 2061
capture the words on
paper, don't let them go, now.
you might lose them all!
So it's goodbye to this version of my life. I've said goodbye to Jaime and his son Jacob, and the shop; I hope they have success. They're just waiting to move the lathe but are too polite to do it in front of me.
The sun is bright; the sky is clear--a beautiful day for April. Flights of birds have been coming from the south for the past few weeks. I know that the plague showed itself first in birds; there is nothing so sad as an empty sky in spring. When the unstoppable plague wiped the sky of bird-kind, I knew that they would be back. But it was so quiet.
foxes are thrifty! they drowse through the daytime hours, and hunt through the night.
I'm going to go the long way and visit the foxes one last time. They started out with four kits, but they're down to three now. I've watched them and their brethren for eons. They don't change, though they've adapted to living right next door to humans; we're surrounded by Dallas, yet they've flourished.
They still carry in their fox hearts the memory of endless green and lots of prey. They've moved on now to garbage and mice and living under woodpiles and in sheds.
There's the Mama; she has the blond eyebrows. She's sleeping curled around the kits; all of them almost hidden in a sandy hollow. One of the kits wakes and looks around; too inexperienced to find me, he yawns and goes to sleep. But now Mama is awake, and the kits begin to stir. Unerringly they all wake up and look in my direction. Now they're beginning to look to see where the scribbling comes from; I'd better go.
the river flows on uncaring, unknowable, onward to the sea
The banks of the Trinity are encumbered by masses of people fishing. I don't see anyone pulling one up, much less sending a fish swimming through the air in sheer exuberance. I've caught fish here in all weathers and through the year though the summer months are slow.
I like sunfish; they're a little bony, but the flesh is so sweet and tender. I've caught bass mostly for sport but let them all go except the odd fish that was too damaged to survive. I made some little boys very happy.
The footbridge across the river is unstable with so many patches that the patches have patches. You can see where some of the poles have rotted away below the waterline. It's an act of faith to walk across it.
oh fried pies, fried pies, they're crispy on the outside, luscious on the in.
Now, to say good-bye to Mr. Sam's Famous Fried Pies. I like the apple ones; they're cinnamony all the way through. Duncan says he doesn't like them because they're fried in "God only knows what grease", but I've seem him munching on them, especially the blackberry ones.
"Heard you were going south." Sam is a large black man with a perpetual toothpick in the corner of his mouth, another reason MacLeod disapproves. "Nothing down there but Mexicans." And he smiled at his Mexican wife. She stuck out her tongue at him and went inside. Sam chuckled.
"A beautiful woman."
"Yes, indeedy!"
"I want take some with me..."
"Not as good."
"...for Duncan. Are there enough blackberries ready to make the filling?"
"Yes.
"An apple one for me right now, then put two blackberry and two apple ones in a sack for later. "Hmmmm. Good." He munched on his pie. "Sam, it's been a joy. Take care of yourself." He was surprised, then grateful, when Sam took him in a bear-hug.
"I'll miss you. Not many love my apple pies as much as you do." He set him back down again, and brushed him off. "Good bye, Adam, good luck."
His swords were at Duncan's along with everything else of importance, except the box with his straight razors; he'd been using that as a writing case. Of course, there were just his ordinary, every day weaponry--a pistol on one hip, and a large knife in a sheath on the other, and a stiletto in a wafer-thin sheath at the small of his back. Oh, one more thing, a garrote ran up his arm and across his back. Sam could see part of it, but the swords would have surprised him.
a final good bye, when I pass this way again, it all will be changed
Greeting Duncan, greeting the cats, Methos came up on the porch with Lily in has arms and Duncan right behind with Maggie. "You're going to tell me where you're going?" He let Maggie down.
"I don't think so." Just a glint of Methosian humor. "But I'll tell you where I'll be--on the dock of your island two years from now." He watched Lily follow Maggie into the house.
"Two years!" Duncan turned to Methos.
"I'm going to miss you all; and I'll miss you the most. But I have a long way to go." The silence grew until it was almost a living thing. "I've got to live by myself awhile, not be dependent on you. I speak Spanish and I have a grounding in Maya, even if it's 800 years old."
"Maya! You're going all the way to Southern Mexico? You're not dependent, Methos; you're so independent, it's frightening. Eight hundred years--. "
"Ask me how Itzamna slew Cizin two hundred years before Cortez got there."
"You were Itzamna." Methos just laughed. "The names sound familiar. Weren't they two of the Maya pantheon--the gods of death and writing?
Methos nodded and murmured "And both of them old."
"What?"
"Nothing."
the ocean is wide; the land so green and fecund, wide, narrow, deep, long
Once in a land not so far away in a time long, long ago, a group of adventurers crossed a wide sea (though this was at it's narrowest point) to find an enormous river and impenetrable jungles. Going northward around a great cape, they explored westward, then northward along the coast for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
Slowly these explorers poked into every bay, inlet, and river mouth, meeting the people, feasting with them, fucking, fighting, and dying with them; our leader (and my lover) was killed by a flint sword (a pole with rows of razor sharp flints) When he rose up from the dead, Tomas created a sensation.
Yes, I was one of the explorers. You can carry a conceit too far. We were all immortals; we wanted to sail with just an immortal crew. We had heard of land to the west of the Sahel, across the ocean. We were not the first. Everywhere we went in the New World we heard of other explorers who came before us--bearded and pale or dressed in silk. The Chinese almost surely got to the west coast of the Americas; we didn't hear anything about Zheng He until the Twentieth Century. If the Chinese could vanish from history's view, their western counterparts could also disappear.
After ten years of sailing, fighting, loving, we reached Cuba, and decided to go home. But that's another story.
enjoy it! you don't know what you will be eating for those months to come.
They had baked potatoes with cheese, a brisket done just right, a salad of walnuts and carrots, fresh bread, and a pound cake with fresh picked dewberries.
"Only one kind of cheese?
"Yes." Duncan smiled. "No monkeys either."
Methos tucked a smile firmly in place and twinkled at Duncan. "I should hope not." And gestured for Duncan to go first.
After dinner they were both sitting on the couch side by side, replete. Duncan looked at Methos with eyes half-lidded and half a post on his face. "You love my body." It was a statement not a question. And it deserved a serious reply.
"I was attracted to your face; when I first saw a picture it seemed to me that you were happy, with a natural zest for life. I liked that face. I watched you after you moved to Paris, and I fell in lust, especially with your body, but after I knew you, I was drawn to your sweetness." He kissed Duncan's neck, nibbling partway around it. "To your stubbornness," and went around to the ear, then in. "Your playfulness." Lick by lick, he moved down and down the left arm. "Your bravery," and licked, then bit each finger. "Your passion." He crept inside Duncan's shirt and ripped it off. His mouth closed over one nipple, then the next. "Even your righteousness." He traced the line between the nipples and the navel with his tongue, meanwhile unbuckling and unbuttoning Duncan clothes. "And, especially, I love you for your intelligence." Gradually, Methos was using his talented mouth to reduce Duncan to incoherence and need.
"You're using that word pejoratively, aren't you?" The pout had developed, and his voice had changed to breathless.
"Mmmmm, of course." His tongue went inside, then out, then lower yet. Methos traced the line of hair from navel to pubis with his tongue. Licking up the line, then down, he engulfed Duncan's cock in one gulp. Letting up to blow on his cock, Methos sent fingers walking into his crack.
Duncan slouched almost off the couch, but not saying a word. He thrust his crotch up into the air, wiggling. Again swallowing the cock, Methos sucked strongly, trying to draw everything out. Duncan came with a shout. Sometime in the midst of all the action, Methos had lost his pants and shirt but retained his long johns. Reaching down and releasing his cock, he put it between Duncan's legs; Duncan tightened them and Methos began to move.
I can love you now but what of tomorrow when I wake up alone
In the gray transitional time before the sun begins to rise, I sit holding Lily; she doesn't know that she's not going with me. While I go south, she'll go west with Maggie and Duncan. I hope she remembers me; she's beautiful but none too bright. Maybe it's better if she doesn't, just be Duncan's cat.
Last night--well, it was a night for truths. I was getting ready to tell Duncan how much I love him, what his continued survival means to me, how desperately I need him to survive. And he said, "I know."
Carrying two cups of coffee in one hand and a basket of rolls in the other, Duncan came out onto the porch. Methos set Lily aside and got up to take the rolls and put them on the table. Handing a cup of coffee to Methos, he leaned forward to kiss him, then put his cup down on the table and went back inside for another load.
Coming out with a tray loaded with butter, preserves, bacon, sugar, and cream, Duncan had to move to one side to let Lily get by. Methos had risen to grab the tray and steady it, necessitating another kiss. They both set the tray down and took seats on either side of the table.
"Are we going to receive a visit from Mama and all the little Rosario's?" Methos looked up from preparing the rolls.
"I told her you were allergic to good-byes."
"Duncan, I don't want to offer you advice when I don't want any, but don't take every challenge that comes along; just walk away. Please."
"I promise. Let me offer one piece of advice; be on my front porch, April 15th, 2063, so that I don't have to scour Mexico to find you."
"I promise."
Duncan nodded. "You know I'd be seriously put out if you didn't, and I imagine you would be too."
"Any more coffee?"
"I'll get it."
mosquitoes,spiders,
cockroaches, gnats, scorpions
did I mention flies
Finis.