2002-01-23 at 10:46 a.m.

Highlander: Thy Will Be Done

Part 5: Switch!

by the Vault

“She finished up twenty-three journals,” Meggan said, turning from the bookshelf with her arms full of the embossed leather-bound books. “Towards the end she was quite an accomplished writer and published two volumes of poetry and prose under a nom de plume.” She sat them down beside him on the bed, arranging them so that the brass numbers on their spines were in order. “I told her that she could just relax, but she thought that if I worked so hard, she should too. So I let her keep my house for me. Soon she’d grown beyond that, however.” Walking to another bookshelf, this one lines with home movies, she chose one apparently at random and inserted it into the VCR.

“What is this?”

“You’ll see.”

The picture on the television resolved itself into an image of Meggan and Rachel mugging furiously for the camera. Meggan had deep dark circles undeneath her eyes, and Rachel wore a big floppy comfortable hat. The time stamp on the video placed it as four years old.

“She’d just begun her chemo then,” Meggan said as she sat down on the unoccupied side of the bed, “and she was so self-conscious as she began to lose her hair.” She chuckled, despite herself. “So I bought her hats. Every new occasion, everywhere we went she got a new hat. We counted one day... she had over two hundred.”

“Hi, Connor!” the Meggan on screen was saying. “This video is being made for Rachel to show off her concerto for piano and violin. She’s graciously allowed me to assist her...”

“I can’t watch this,” the live Meggan stated firmly. “It’ll make me teary, and I’ve got two doses of jetlag catching up with me. Could I sleep here?”

“Of course, go ahead,” he replied distractedly, his eyes fixed on the screen as Meggan slumped onto the empty spot of mattress beside him and apparently fell fast asleep. Now the view improved to see them both seated on the same piano bench, Meggan facing the piano with her back to the camera, Rachel seated facing out. She raised the expensive violin, set it under her chin - and at a signal he could not hear or see began to play.

Connor gasped. Rachel was playing solo. It sounded like traditional Scottish pipesong, but no melody he’d ever heard before. It spoke of loss and loneliness, of wind whistling over the highlands, bitter and chill.

She played the melody for a bit before the piano barged in, childlike. It played the melody louder, as if to get attention, then took the notes apart and put them back together in a bouncing Jewish children’s song.

In the nature of a concerto the instruments strove against each other - the persistance of the highlander loneliness against the charming good nature of the childlike piano. Eventually the piano thawed the violin’s heart, gradually leading it into the major chords and there they frolicked in harmonious counterpoint until the melodies moved to a close.

“You did it justice,” Rachel said after the last note had faded.

“It was wonderful work,” Meggan replied.

They stared at each other for a long moment, then said “Switch!” at exactly the same moment. Giggling they traded instruments, Rachel now taking position at the keyboard while Meggan cradled the violin. He could tell from the way it fit her so easily that she’d owned it for many centuries - may even have commissioned it for herself. Again at an unknown signal they began, and with the skill of four hundred years Meggan made the violin sob with its agony.

Then she lifted her eyes to the watching camera and gave a wicked grin that showed the performance as completely spurious. Still with none of it showing in her notes she continued to smirk at the camera, the eyes of four years ago meeting his, chiding him for a melancholy she believed had no place in his life.

And when the violin’s song was drawn into the major key she pushed a little syncopation into it, giving it a rollicking beat. “Yeah... yeah,” Rachel murmured, her hands always moving, the music flowing like a river. They chased the song home again, faster and more raw than before.

As soon as the last note faded, Meggan took the neck of her violin and the bow together in one hand and wrapped the other arm around Rachel, pulling her into a laughing embrace. There was a flash on the film, as if someone had opened the door to the room from the sunny outside - but instinctively he knew it was not so, for when the picture cleared Meggan’s shoulders drooped a bit more steeply.

Rachel looked just the same.

The video dissolved into static... he turned it off with the remote.

The girl beside him drowsed deeply, curled around her dreams like a tiny animal in its burrow. Carefully he laid a hand on her shoulder. She did not move but the connection was electric, allowing him to feel her sleeping soul in his own once more.

He opened the first journal, palm still on Meggan's flesh as if for comfort.

"I feel like my life has been ripped asunder," Rachel began. "I've lost my home and my belongings all in one afternoon. I've found you and lost you again all in one night. Now I'm in a huge lonely hotel room, with a stranger in the other suite, writing to you. You could be days or years away -- I don't know. I wish I could reach you. I wish I could hold you, and hear your voice, and tell you all the things I was too stupidly timid to say when I had you here beside me. I love you, Connor. You've been the only man I've ever loved. Should I be angry that you never saw it, and that I grew so old while you stayed so young and beautiful?

"No, my Connor. I was with you and that was enough. If YHWH grants it, I will be with you again, and soon.

"Goodnight, Connor."

He turned the pages. The stars wheeled outside the bedroom window. Meggan stirred once, rolled to face him and laid her arm across his legs, all unconsciously. He cradled her in his free arm and kept reading.

"Such a foolish old woman I am," Rachel reported two years and eight journals later. "I still feel my body rouse when I think of you. Should I even talk of these things? I remember when I was thirteen and my menses arrived. You sat me down and explained to me what was occuring, very gently and thoroughly, but you couldn't look at me. I wondered then if you hated me. I wonder now if it might have been something completely different..."

Third year, thirteenth journal. She was making two and three entries a day, painting her life in words, telling him all her secrets. "I was sixteen when I glimpsed you naked. You'd come in late at night (from a fight, perhaps?) and staggered tiredly into the shower. You thought I was asleep. I know you did, because if you'd known I was awake in the dark of my room you never would have walked past my open door naked and still wet.

"I waited until I heard you collapse on your bed, until I could hear your snoring (and you do snore, but not badly) down the hall. I padded to your door so quietly and pushed it open. I can't tell you how long I walked back and forth around your bed, silently, examining you from every angle. You were so beautiful, so scarred. It was then I knew I would have no husband but you, only you. All I had wanted to do was touch you, but I knew you'd wake if I did. So I went back to my bedroom at last, at dawnlight, and touched the warm spot there on myself..."

Fourth year, fifteenth journal. The entries completely vanished for the space of two months. Then they began again with this:

"I'm dying. I've not felt quite like myself for a while now, and a couple of months ago the doctors confirmed it. I have cancer, and it has worked its way into my bones.

"I've not even been able to say or write the words until now. I just wanted to shut it all out. Meggan took me to Monacco and we both splashed around on the beach and got lovely tans but nothing really made either of us forget.

"Now I can't let it go. I can't give up. We're going to do all we can, but something inside me says it won't be enough. I'll try to wait, Connor.

I'll try to make it until we have you back. Until then, though, I have so much to do. So much I wanted to get done..."

The entries thinned out to quick updates on a week's worth of life, book signings and publishers meetings. She talked of life with the lawyers, of her slowly growing pain, of the embarassment of losing her golden hair.

Then, a strange entry from four years ago: "Meggan has taken to sleeping in my bed. She tells me it's to make sure that if I need anything in the night, I would have it, but I don't think that's entirely so. I think she needs someone near her. I think she finds it comforting to have another body in the bed, someone she can trust.

"She proved it to me last night, but I don't yet know what to think of it. I woke in the night for no reason and lay there, listening to her breathe. After a while she shifted in her sleep and reached out to hold me. I didn't mind; I'd woken like this with her often before and it feels... not unpleasant. But soon she sighed in my ear, and I felt her wake up.

"She came to herself slowly, dreamily. I could feel her hand stroking my stomach. Once she woke enough to know what she was doing, she froze, murmured an apology in case I too was awake. She tried to take her hand away.

"I held it, and led it lower.

"She drew in her breath. I don't know what I was thinking. I don't think she knew what she was thinking either. But she wrapped her other arm around me and moved that hand languously, competently, as if she was stroking herself. I felt her lips on my shoulder, felt them on my breasts when I opened my nightgown for her.

"My age didn't matter in the dark... we were both the same; much too old for sex and games. She held me, and sported with me, until I lost myself. It was pain and then pleasure; I never knew I'd been a maiden all this time, waiting for you like a bride.

"But her fingers inside me brought me back. I wanted you. I bit my lip to keep from crying your name, even as I touched her as well, aroused her and satisfied her as best I could. I would never have you there. She would be my only lover, your touch by proxy. I know it. I know she'll live to free you, and be your beloved.

"She curled up beside me and slept like a child afterwards. I lay awake all night, hot with desire and jealousy. But what can I do? I will not live forever. Not like you.

"When she woke, she looked at me in the dawn light -- me with my nightgown open wide -- and blushed bright pink. Gently she buttoned it back up and whispered without looking into my eyes.

" 'What does this mean?'

"My heart broke. I could not hate her for her future, or my lack of one. 'We are friends, always,' I replied and hugged her close. 'That is all it means.'

"But I do not think we shall play like that again. I think she knows it too. I don't think either of us could bear it."

Towards the end of her life, Rachel's entries became more vibrant, more imaginative and vivid. "I'm trying to cram all my life into these last few days," she admitted in the book at the end, which was pitifully half-empty. "I never really lived before now. I can't blame you, my Connor, but it *was* because of you.

"I waited silently for you. You never saw how I loved you every morning, and went to bed burning for you every night. But I saw you. I saw how you would glance at me when you thought I wouldn't see, trace the curves of my young body with your eyes and then jerk guiltily away.

"It wasn't wrong, Connor! I wasn't your child and you weren't my father! How I longed for you while I was still young and beautiful, wanting you, your body, your seed. I would have done anything for you.

"But I couldn't tell you, and you couldn't ask.

"And now I'm old, and wrinkled -- although Meggan says I am still beautiful. I am a dying woman dreaming of what it would be like to have your lovemaking, to arch beneath you and have you fill me. Yes, there is nothing left to fear now! I would have died to be your wife for just one night. What would you have done? You would have kissed my throat, my breasts. You would have twisted my nipples gently. You would have spread my thighs and I would have let you, begged you on, even; just to hear you call my name in your pleasure.

"I still dream, though, and in my dreams you are so good to me. You wake me in the morning, naked beside me, and you turn to me again with the fires of the night before undulled.

"Why, Connor? Why am I dying alone without you?"

The last entry cut him in two. The handwriting was light and shaky.

"Meggan is already asleep. I know now that she has sustained me so long... don't see how I could have missed her own weakness, and the dying of the earth around this house. She has wanted me to see you so much but now it's killing her.

"I can feel her in my mind. She wants to throw herself into it completely, try and save me with every ounce of her remaining strength. She can't, though. I can feel the cancer all through me, like hot red spiders. Nothing she could do would save me now. But she refuses to think... to see it...

"I'm not going to let her any more. Tonight will be the last. I've not lived so long with sweet Meggan without learning a few of her tricks. I have shut her out of my energy, turned it back on herself. Soon both she and the land will heal. I will not be a leech on her any longer.

"I'm sorry, Connor, but I cannot stay. Perhaps I'll see you someday, in a world beyond this one. Perhaps you will touch me as lover, or only embrace me as father to daughter. It will not matter for I will have you one more time, and that will be all I need, all I ever need.

"Be good to her, Connor. Love her as you never let yourself love me. Perhaps in this way my own selfishness with you can be redeemed, because she has never been held, truly held, and loved. Even I have been blessed beyond what she has received, and I've only lived a tenth of her life.

"I remember you hated long goodbyes, dear Connor... my Connor. So I will leave now and wake her gently to tell her goodnight. I cannot think of anything else to tell you that I've not repeated over and over in these many beautiful books; save this: Dying is for the mortals, Connor. Live now. Live and love and continue onward, for without love death is meaningless and life is colorless.

"I am blessed by YHWH for having had you to love.

"Goodnight, Connor. See you in the morning."

The sun was rising now, and MacLeod's tears flowed unashamedly. Meggan stirred underneath his hand and woke, craning upward to see his face, then pulling herself into a sitting position and wrapping her arms around him.

Show me, his fingers on her temple demanded, but gently. Show me.

She shut her eyes and opened them, suddenly full of tears. As if he had been her, Connor felt the memory of a hand laid on his shoulder, the touch of a mind rousing him. Her body had been too weak by now, drained by the effort of moving the pen, unable to speak aloud but she told her/him, told her everything, showed to Meggan her deep love.

The light in Rachel's heart grew as the life in her body faded, until Meggan held an empty shell, surrounded herself by white radiance. Slowly and regretfully Rachel left, ascending, until there was nothing left but darkness again.

Emptiness.

Meggan called her servants. They dealt with her... with the body. Meggan lay in the old sheets and did not move, did not attend the burial of the empty thing, did not get up to wash or eat, barely breathed.

Two weeks later she stood up again, and continued the fight. For Rachel. For anything to make this sacrifice meaningful.

Connor folded her into his arms and held her while she cried one more time. Someone should heal the healer, comfort the comforter. He held her and rocked her and did not let go.

On to Part Six