rurounihime (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rurounihime) wrote2006-09-06 09:45 pm
rurounihime) wrote2006-09-06 09:45 pm
Entry tags:
Duncan/Methos fic
ALL MY HIGHLANDER FRIENDS... I'm sorry for the wait! Here is another fic for you guys and dolls. ^__^
Title: View From a Window
Author: me
Pairing: Duncan/Methos (Highlander)
Rating: R
Summary: The night is young and Duncan's view stretches inward.
Warning: Future-fic, slightly. A canon character has died in this story, but it is the truth about the passage of time after all. SPOILERS for various episodes after "Methos."
Disclaimer: The Highlander characters do not belong to me. They are the property of Panzer and Davis and I make no money off my little schemes to drown them in angst.
Also posted at AO3 and at HL Fiction.
...
View From a Window
An hour ago, the bed was occupied by two, and Methos’ head had drifted back over the pillow, leaving his throat bare and rippling as he sighed. His fingers searched out Duncan’s against his sweaty chest and squeezed them, and Methos had let out the exhalation of the utterly content. Long limbs stretching like a cat’s across the sheets, skin flushed and gleaming with the exertions of a mere moment ago.
“My god,” he breathed, half on a laugh, and it was a carefree sound that brought a smile to Duncan’s lips. “And that’s that, then.” The moon had not yet risen.
Now, Duncan leans against the windowsill, the smooth wood edging into the bare skin of his lower back and the air a comfortable cool to his still heated flesh. He faces away from the shining nightlights of Seacouver and watches the lithe, white glow of the half moon playing over the contours of his lover’s body. Methos’ chest rises and falls, partially draped in a sheet that looks ephemerally thin. His face is turned toward the light and his eyelashes throw long shadows across cheeks painted ivory. He swallows, parting his lips, and turns his head, bathing his profile in the glow. Duncan stares, transfixed.
Eventually he will have to get up and put the leftover sushi in the refrigerator, because Methos never thinks of such things. Food is food and it is all relative, and Duncan wonders how many times his lover has passed away over a bad tidbit of meat or cream. It would be Methos’ experiment; just the sort of thing to intrigue the strange Immortal. As for Duncan, he has never even wondered what it would feel like.
Pain, after all, is pain, and it is all relative.
Methos sleeps easier these days. Duncan has yet again faced the fascination of how little he knows about most of his friends simply because he is not their lover. People keep one whole half of themselves hidden in the light of day: When Joe was alive, did he give treatises on the better uses of bottle caps in his sleep in nearly incoherent phrases, like Methos does? Does Amanda still pluck at her pillowcase with all five fingers at half past two?
He’d never known that Methos might have nightmares until he shared his bed. But it strikes him as odd even now, nearly fifty years after that first night– when he fell at long last and tumbled into thousands of years of skill and downright indecency– that he should not have considered the possibility. Nightmares are the force of forgetting, and Duncan knows that between the two of them, there is plenty to go around.
Methos’ hand lies splayed across his hip, just far enough within the light to toss deep shadows over the white sheet. Such long fingers; they twitch, curl and uncurl in response to some dream. Duncan studies that hand for seconds or even minutes, tracing the slender hint of vein and hollow of knuckle with his eyes.
This body… So old. The signs of age are everywhere, if one knows where to look, and yet the form is young. The eyes that stare from that aristocratic face are flooded with the years they have witnessed, but now Methos’ eyes are closed and there is nothing to belie the youthful serenity gracing his form. Methos finds his innocence here at night; Duncan wonders if he is aware that it has not fled him utterly, but instead only waits for starlight and the infinite blackness of the cosmos to sneak in and unfurl itself yet again. He knows Methos believes himself ancient at all times. Two weeks ago, with Methos’ arms bloodied to the elbows, comfortable old sweater slashed to rust-colored ribbons and a sword held quivering at last over the headless body of a pale, pale man with cornsilk hair, Duncan feared the ancient, saw it everywhere and could not imagine it ever again departing from the body he loved. That Quickening had been harsher than most, older and more rabid, and Methos’ nightmares had tangled themselves back into his sleep for five nights.
Methos sniffs; his nose scrunches. Such a childlike quirk. Duncan smiles faintly and bows his head in silent thanks to whomever may be watching.
Tonight it was all about touch. Some nights it is about voice, and Duncan finds new ways to speak, learns just a bit of Norse or Renaissance Dutch from his cunning lover before forgetting it completely. It ought to drive Methos insane, how quickly Duncan forgets, but there is plenty of time to re-teach it, and the old Immortal uses much more than his words and hand gestures to remind Duncan. Other nights, it is that age-old act of forgetting that drives Methos to topple Duncan into bed, or vice versa, to unclothe him just enough to sate them both, and then to sleep until the stupor of sex wears away and morning sweeps in to take its place. On still other nights, emotion wears through the cracks in walls too carelessly built, and there are bruises and hurts and scratches that can’t be explained to concerned friends in the light of day, their gazes tracking the swipe of fingernails down an arm or peeking through the open collar of a shirt.
Well, perhaps Amanda would understand, but that’s a whole other box of spiders to open.
But tonight, it was touch. An hour went by before they remembered to progress beyond the lazy stroke and slide of hands under shirt hems and beneath beltlines. Methos’ newest sweater hangs over the doorknob, ice gray in the translucent light. The sleeves are rumpled from being constantly rolled up, and it smells like patchouli and rice vinegar; Duncan can still taste the mixed scents on his tongue.
For the love of god, MacLeod, get it off me, I haven’t time for your laissez-faire attitude, Methos had said. He’d been in fine spirits, and the laughter was as much of an aphrodisiac as the vanilla he’d spilled on the countertop that afternoon. Duncan studies the sculpted calm of Methos’ countenance and remembers times when it was marred, once bent by the death of their friend, and once warped into the expression of a long-dead killer. Wizened as only an imperfect and damnable past can manage.
The man has had enough time to be all kinds of human– tawdry and inconstant, moral and profane, insane and genius, sinner, griever, innocent, repentant. And if Methos has decided in the end that one should give oneself over to the quiet moments full of dog-eared pages and too much well-aged stout, of seeking out a lover's fingers beneath mountains of quilts– holding on for dear life and slurring the aesthetics of that much-loved scattering of freckles in a mishmash of five dead languages– then who is Duncan to argue that he is wrong?
There is no one more qualified to come to such a conclusion.
Duncan has not asked how and what shaped Methos’ eventual slip into self-contemplation, this need of his lover’s to seek out his own past in such a way that he never really finds it. Reading about it in books instead of searching his own keen and extensive memory. He knows Methos was a slave, several times, and the word, while meaning many things, can really only boil down to the fact that one does not, cannot, own one’s own body, one’s own mind and heart, and soul. There can be solace in that sometimes, but one hundred-odd years of slavery is far too long for such an escape. Duncan suspects Methos did not, in fact, escape.
He suspects he was consumed. And there is no way to know what happened afterward, because he still can't find the words, the voice in which to properly ask for such a personal disclosure.
Duncan wishes he wanted to know all the intimate details, that he could sit and listen and ache right along with his lover, and suck out the poison of it. The truth is, he’s afraid to find out what other things may lie buried behind those golden eyes, what events sharpened that instinct and what blows befell those arms, that back. He already knows the ultimate climax of it. He nearly watched it overtake Methos again, and he nearly abandoned him to it.
Corporeal death very nearly walked the earth once more.
It is strange to think that death begat itself so long ago, twisting and pulling an already warped life into something heinous and horrid. How many times had Methos died before the pain and helplessness of drowning, choking, and bleeding embedded itself into his heart? How long did it take, how many years of watching others die before one threw in the towel and said, take me along, my constant companion, I’ve only got you now?
That was what pain did; it was not a static thing, waiting like an old bad dream to float to the surface again and again. It changed, it fed off of other pain and grew more distended and poisonous. It lied about a person until the lies became the truth. And then one day the pain heaved and ignited like some devastating oil slick across a once clear ocean, and the only way to escape it was to go down, under it into the dark.
Duncan relishes the moonlight, the cold and the white, because it is the opposite of that red, heated darkness, and Methos cannot hide in it as he could in the void of that haunt in Bordeaux. The only light then had been the double Quickening that dropped the ancient Immortal to his knees, left him gasping, sobbing out the helplessness of being two people at once.
But Duncan had underestimated him then, and Methos had done what was necessary for the world, even if he only went through with it for himself.
Duncan still feels Kronos roiling about inside him sometimes, and Caspian’s deformed soul still hacks away when he forgets to be vigilant. But Methos was the one who ultimately killed them, who brought Duncan right to their doorstep because in the end he feared he wouldn't have the strength to finish all three of his fellows, and the necessity of their deaths was paramount. Maybe Methos thought he'd found some penance for all the horrors he'd committed. A way to finally pay in full for all he had wrenched from the world and the people unfortunate enough to meet him in it.
Duncan had been a fool to let Methos’ scholarly bumbling define who the man was. And he'd never underestimated the old man again. But now, looking at the complacence splashed all over that familiar body, the strength in that half-bared thigh and the pinking shape of his own lips against pale throat, Duncan cannot help but be tempted once again. Methos’ pulse flutters steadily under the slope of his neck and it’s easy to go back to the taste of that life force under his teeth and tongue, and think it only the dwelling of the persona Adam Pierson.
A futile effort; he is not in love with Adam Pierson. But Adam does make him wonder about buried things and things brought to light. Would Methos’ Quickening be a dark one because of the dangerous riptides beneath the surface, or has it risen into calmer waters for good? What would it take for it to drop back again?
“The problem with immortality,” Duncan murmurs into the room. Just too many unanswerable questions. Even the eldest living Immortal has no answer for the malignant abundance of time. If an Immortal’s Quickening can shift and warp over the years, soaring one century and venomous the next, how can any of them ever be certain of who they are? Time crawls by in all its tedious increments, and when the days are not filled with the annoyances of living, the mind pulls in and examines itself instead.
Given enough time, would all of them eventually experiment? Seek out– and embrace– their shadowed halves?
That power has an inexplicable, terrific draw. Duncan has felt it already, though he did not go seeking in order to get it. Not like Methos did. And they've both met others, too many others who have drifted into that sphere and decided not to claw their way back out.
Methos, Duncan thinks, noting the shift of shadow over the sheets as the sky swings overhead, is the abomination, perhaps. The one who got away and then came back to gaze on what he’d been. Methos had watched his own sins through the eyes of another person, knowing the entire time that he’d been the one who had cut that man’s throat here or taken that girl from her family there. That his hands had lit the fires that burned entire peoples to the ground. He’d seen it all, wallowed in its horrors, and then swam wearily for the surface again.
What must it be like to loathe oneself entirely, without reservation– to the core? And then to have accepted that self-loathing? Risen past it, or at least learned to walk alongside it instead of in its shadow?
But hasn't he loathed himself like that once? Duncan frowns. Forces himself not to spirit the thought of Richie away to a safe and dark corner of his mind. Yes, he has hated himself utterly. He has had reason to do so.
Methos sleeps the sleep of utter abandonment, and for a long, still moment, Duncan aches at the trust inherent in the splay of his body, the slight bend of a knee and the careless curl of his hand atop the sheets. Duncan is another Immortal, one who knows Methos’ weaknesses, the places to prick and the perfect angle of a sword that will bring the man to his knees in a sweaty, wide-eyed heap. And yet Methos’ fingers twitch, stretch in his direction for a scant moment as if he can feel Duncan by the window. As if he wishes Duncan closer. Duncan is awed by such a display, completely and utterly humbled by it, and surprised every time it is revealed to him just how willing Methos is to give Duncan that opening, simply because he knows Duncan will not take it. Because he knows it will be protected instead, by the skin of Duncan’s teeth and the blood pumping heatedly through his veins. Duncan is jealous of it, of Methos. Envious that Methos has strength and self-assurance enough for such staggering trust, and that he can lie in the warmth and sweat of a once-again christened bed and sleep the sleep of abandonment.
That conscience is not clear; it is merely at rest. It knows itself at last, and who in this wide world can ever say that?
There is no one else. There is, after all, no other Methos.
Duncan knows Methos isn't the only one with a history. What is somewhat shocking is that Duncan sees it all as a cohesive whole here at midnight, turned by the white spill of light into the stuff of dreams rather than the painful reality he always viewed it as.
It has taken every lover to get them here. Every brutal death and desperate thirst for revenge, every abomination, every friend, and every fight to get this beautiful, tragic, imperfect man into his bed and his arms and his body, and is it wrong for Duncan not to hate all of it, in light of what it has given him? Perhaps even to whisper his thanks to the absolute stillness of nighttime?
There was a time when such a thing would have felt sacrilegious. Now, Duncan has to shake himself harder, remind himself again of the immenseness of what he is forgiving. It's more difficult to label the thought as grotesque now.
It is not something Duncan likes. He still finds less than cold comfort in the sins and gore of Methos' past. But it is, in any case, the truth. And if Methos has taught him one thing, it is that the truth will not stay buried, despite one's best efforts. It rises on the backs of other truths to see the light again.
Duncan's new truth is Methos himself. Many things... contemplation, respect. Love. Need. It all melds together into one massive truth with so many facets Duncan is blinded when he looks at it. Methos. And he cannot pick and choose, cast away that which he doesn’t like or admire or worship. It comes together, a six-thousand-year-old package deal, and without even one of the ancient Immortal's intrinsic parts, it would not be Methos he is in love with. Just a shade, a single face of the diamond, carved and shaped by a well-meaning but ultimately destructive hand.
A repetition of days, without the background– the horrors and the wonders– to drive it over the rim and on into what came after. Instead it is just one moment on its own.
Methos is not any single moment. He is the culmination of many moments, and there were times when he strayed, slipped into an endless whirlpool that never quite sucked him down, never quite let him free. When it became too hard to go forward, he stayed where he was with what he knew, even if what he knew was bloody and violent. Duncan knows it; he recognizes it. He has been there as well.
If a day were to suddenly and spontaneously begin repeating itself with no consequences from the previous time around, would a person not allow a moment of brief moral abandon simply because he knew he could?
Duncan shudders and crosses his arms over his chest. A terrible thought. Then again, their days are repeating, in the eyes of some. Byron would have called it so; Duncan knows he would have. He knows Byron intimately.
But Methos... for him every day is as new, somehow. Duncan has seen him with his face lifted toward the icy sunrise, light glowing burnished gold across his skin. He has watched Methos contemplate with a child's eyes the angles and curves of the new buildings rising in the city. He, who has witnessed the birth and death of countless people, countless ways of life, is again looking simply to look. To witness. To count the days as they flow steadily forward and not back in around themselves.
Duncan's days do not repeat. They cannot; they haven't the power any longer. One older than himself has stepped in, no, eased his way in, comforted his way in, aggravated his way in, requested his way in, and taken hold of Duncan's days, turned and molded them until they can be nothing but new. New ways to see the shift and swell of the mortals living and breathing around them. New ways to remember a history lost to banality and inconceivable deeds. New ways to feel across taut, quivering expanses of skin and muscle, to need more than anything he has ever in his long life needed, to rise with, to explode into, to touch, caress, hold and... and know.
New ways to hear Methos gasp. Murmur. Arch, curl, enfold. His own name, in a voice Duncan never knew he treasured so very much. Methos invites Duncan inside his body and his soul, gives him the time to search around, to overturn and mess things up and hate or love accordingly. Never asks for such a precious chance in return, never once. But Duncan has given the same over and over because to refuse is to destroy himself slowly. To refuse is to lose what Methos constantly gives him: himself, unconstrained... repenting, but unashamed of what cannot be changed.
In short, Methos has given him the gift of himself, in tousled hair darkened with the centuries, passive eyes that house a youth's spiraling intellect and an ancient's massive sorrow, and a body that allows its defenses to be ruptured again and again in the hopes that Duncan will leave them stronger when he recedes.
If he, this, were taken from him, Duncan's descent might very well consume him this time.
Methos' eyelashes are like refined silk, thickened as if with the void of the sky. They dust his cheeks in the shadowy light, and the curves continue: finely arched cheekbones, elegant brow and prominent nose. It is the face statues were carved from, gods exalted with, theories of great civilizations built upon. It is of the ages, and yet it is strangely ageless.
His body is the same, molded from the same slab of alabaster and vibrating with blood and breath and feeling. A statue come to life, given a voice and sent off its pedestal to walk the earth. There is a scar just in the crook of Methos’ elbow, faint and ice-white, and never healing. Duncan touches it every time he touches Methos’ naked skin, because that is a piece of the original man, a herald to a mortal life that even its owner cannot remember. But it shaped him, in slick curves of hips and the fine sweep of thigh to calf. Under the sheet, Methos’ feet are slender and refined, his second toes longer than his big toes, and the arches are calloused and steady. Duncan can see the outline of lax muscles on Methos’ abdomen, and just like that, with his eyes and not his hands, he can feel them again, rippling and tensing under his fingers.
Duncan knows he isn't the first to look upon this magnificence, this innocence. He is not the first– nor the only one– to have touched those gracefully arched feet, linked his fingers with those slender artist’s fingers, pressed that body across soft cotton, or traced the reality of those breathless cries and gasped murmurs with his mouth. There have been countless others, eyes that stroked Methos’ skin lovingly and filed the image away for years in the future. Hands that clutched, grasped, and strained into rigidity. But the way Methos moves beneath him, around him and in him, the way his voice breaks just this side of Duncan’s name when he comes… it gives no hint that this is anything but new.
Duncan has to wonder if this is not in fact a repeat, but truly novel to Methos. Not being loved, or in love, surely; Duncan has never been that disillusioned. But being loved in this way, being in love this way… Duncan feels the taut rub of Methos’ chest against his all over again, the shuddering, helpless flex of his own hips as if he has not yet come, as if he is there in that bed, pressed against that body all over again, waiting to be brought to the brink. Hands that could keep the very air from his lungs stroke tentatively, ever cautiously. His lover explores him constantly during sex, finding each muscle and sinew as if tracing a relief of his body. Methos looks at him when he comes. When his eyelids fight to close, he keeps them open. The heated gold in his eyes is of a dangerous and sublime quality, one which Duncan likes to fantasize is virgin, and his alone.
Perhaps it is not, after all, such a foolish fancy as it seems.
On a night like this, only a week or so ago, with the window open and the cold wind sweeping in to brush the edges of the sheets like fingers, making Duncan draw his feet up until they found a nook in the blanket’s crumpled folds, Methos spoke thoughtfully. His chest was bare, skin pale and somehow free of goosebumps, but then Methos had always been a winter soul. He bloomed in the frost and unfurled against the coldest of memories with enough warmth to fend off any chill in the end.
“I’d like to take a student again,” he said, a curious lilt to his words.
Duncan looked up, turning a cold ear to the warmth of Methos’ belly. “Would you?”
“Yes, I think so.” Methos cocked his head and looked at Duncan sidelong. “Give them another golden reference for their resume. What else can I do with my infamy?”
The laughter is long and hard, and shared.
Duncan knows Methos is feeling the fit of his life again, though he has not yet mentioned to his lover that the focus of that life has drifted away from Methos First and Foremost. He suspects his lover is already aware of the change.
Methos First and Foremost has worked for years. Tried and tested. That is not arguable, and Duncan can’t disagree with the benefits of such a battle plan, as Methos is here, now, sleeping under his sheets, his nude, arguably perfect body resting just an arm’s reach away should Duncan feel inclined to touch him. And he does. Oh, he does, if only to convince himself once again of that body’s vitality, to see Methos’ eyes pop open and hear that pained voice telling him to bugger off, you insatiable lunatic, some people still like to sleep in between their rousing choruses of orgasms.
Duncan smiles. He could wake him and have on with it. And Methos would most likely go back to sleep halfway through anyway, just to prove a point. And then awaken again to crow about it. But isn’t that the point of this? The whole point of why this feels new?
Methos First and Foremost has kept the man in Duncan’s bed alive long enough to join him in his trek through the centuries. But, always the clever tactician, Methos has adapted to something utterly new yet again.
Duncan muses that perhaps, when one reaches six thousand years of age, priorities change. It is no longer simply about living at any cost, but instead, living with, at any cost.
If there is no one left to recognize, to speak with, to weep alongside, to commiserate understand kill defend save fuck need love—
—is it still living?
He’s beginning to understand that he doesn’t want, or need, to find out. It is one experience this world has to offer that is fast losing its appeal.
Duncan knows that Methos never mixes love with forever. Except he has now. It's enough to make one feel very privileged indeed.
He rises and goes on quiet feet to the bedside. Methos shifts even as he sits, the lithe muscles in one arm going taut as he stretches. Fingers brush over Duncan’s bare thigh, half-clutching. He sees a hazel eye crack open.
“Finally.” Methos sighs it instead of saying it, and curls just a bit onto his side. Duncan marvels at how one tiny movement can jump the brink from mere openness to overt welcome. A lesson he has centuries to learn, if all goes well. “Thought you were going to sit there all night.”
Duncan shakes his head, mouthing the sweet slope of Methos’ shoulder. “I couldn’t possibly,” he whispers.
Methos’ teeth shine as he smiles. “Good,” he murmurs against Duncan’s lips. “I’ve spent enough time being lonely.”
~fin~
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Thanks for reading! ♥
Title: View From a Window
Author: me
Pairing: Duncan/Methos (Highlander)
Rating: R
Summary: The night is young and Duncan's view stretches inward.
Warning: Future-fic, slightly. A canon character has died in this story, but it is the truth about the passage of time after all. SPOILERS for various episodes after "Methos."
Disclaimer: The Highlander characters do not belong to me. They are the property of Panzer and Davis and I make no money off my little schemes to drown them in angst.
Also posted at AO3 and at HL Fiction.
...
View From a Window
An hour ago, the bed was occupied by two, and Methos’ head had drifted back over the pillow, leaving his throat bare and rippling as he sighed. His fingers searched out Duncan’s against his sweaty chest and squeezed them, and Methos had let out the exhalation of the utterly content. Long limbs stretching like a cat’s across the sheets, skin flushed and gleaming with the exertions of a mere moment ago.
“My god,” he breathed, half on a laugh, and it was a carefree sound that brought a smile to Duncan’s lips. “And that’s that, then.” The moon had not yet risen.
Now, Duncan leans against the windowsill, the smooth wood edging into the bare skin of his lower back and the air a comfortable cool to his still heated flesh. He faces away from the shining nightlights of Seacouver and watches the lithe, white glow of the half moon playing over the contours of his lover’s body. Methos’ chest rises and falls, partially draped in a sheet that looks ephemerally thin. His face is turned toward the light and his eyelashes throw long shadows across cheeks painted ivory. He swallows, parting his lips, and turns his head, bathing his profile in the glow. Duncan stares, transfixed.
Eventually he will have to get up and put the leftover sushi in the refrigerator, because Methos never thinks of such things. Food is food and it is all relative, and Duncan wonders how many times his lover has passed away over a bad tidbit of meat or cream. It would be Methos’ experiment; just the sort of thing to intrigue the strange Immortal. As for Duncan, he has never even wondered what it would feel like.
Pain, after all, is pain, and it is all relative.
Methos sleeps easier these days. Duncan has yet again faced the fascination of how little he knows about most of his friends simply because he is not their lover. People keep one whole half of themselves hidden in the light of day: When Joe was alive, did he give treatises on the better uses of bottle caps in his sleep in nearly incoherent phrases, like Methos does? Does Amanda still pluck at her pillowcase with all five fingers at half past two?
He’d never known that Methos might have nightmares until he shared his bed. But it strikes him as odd even now, nearly fifty years after that first night– when he fell at long last and tumbled into thousands of years of skill and downright indecency– that he should not have considered the possibility. Nightmares are the force of forgetting, and Duncan knows that between the two of them, there is plenty to go around.
Methos’ hand lies splayed across his hip, just far enough within the light to toss deep shadows over the white sheet. Such long fingers; they twitch, curl and uncurl in response to some dream. Duncan studies that hand for seconds or even minutes, tracing the slender hint of vein and hollow of knuckle with his eyes.
This body… So old. The signs of age are everywhere, if one knows where to look, and yet the form is young. The eyes that stare from that aristocratic face are flooded with the years they have witnessed, but now Methos’ eyes are closed and there is nothing to belie the youthful serenity gracing his form. Methos finds his innocence here at night; Duncan wonders if he is aware that it has not fled him utterly, but instead only waits for starlight and the infinite blackness of the cosmos to sneak in and unfurl itself yet again. He knows Methos believes himself ancient at all times. Two weeks ago, with Methos’ arms bloodied to the elbows, comfortable old sweater slashed to rust-colored ribbons and a sword held quivering at last over the headless body of a pale, pale man with cornsilk hair, Duncan feared the ancient, saw it everywhere and could not imagine it ever again departing from the body he loved. That Quickening had been harsher than most, older and more rabid, and Methos’ nightmares had tangled themselves back into his sleep for five nights.
Methos sniffs; his nose scrunches. Such a childlike quirk. Duncan smiles faintly and bows his head in silent thanks to whomever may be watching.
Tonight it was all about touch. Some nights it is about voice, and Duncan finds new ways to speak, learns just a bit of Norse or Renaissance Dutch from his cunning lover before forgetting it completely. It ought to drive Methos insane, how quickly Duncan forgets, but there is plenty of time to re-teach it, and the old Immortal uses much more than his words and hand gestures to remind Duncan. Other nights, it is that age-old act of forgetting that drives Methos to topple Duncan into bed, or vice versa, to unclothe him just enough to sate them both, and then to sleep until the stupor of sex wears away and morning sweeps in to take its place. On still other nights, emotion wears through the cracks in walls too carelessly built, and there are bruises and hurts and scratches that can’t be explained to concerned friends in the light of day, their gazes tracking the swipe of fingernails down an arm or peeking through the open collar of a shirt.
Well, perhaps Amanda would understand, but that’s a whole other box of spiders to open.
But tonight, it was touch. An hour went by before they remembered to progress beyond the lazy stroke and slide of hands under shirt hems and beneath beltlines. Methos’ newest sweater hangs over the doorknob, ice gray in the translucent light. The sleeves are rumpled from being constantly rolled up, and it smells like patchouli and rice vinegar; Duncan can still taste the mixed scents on his tongue.
For the love of god, MacLeod, get it off me, I haven’t time for your laissez-faire attitude, Methos had said. He’d been in fine spirits, and the laughter was as much of an aphrodisiac as the vanilla he’d spilled on the countertop that afternoon. Duncan studies the sculpted calm of Methos’ countenance and remembers times when it was marred, once bent by the death of their friend, and once warped into the expression of a long-dead killer. Wizened as only an imperfect and damnable past can manage.
The man has had enough time to be all kinds of human– tawdry and inconstant, moral and profane, insane and genius, sinner, griever, innocent, repentant. And if Methos has decided in the end that one should give oneself over to the quiet moments full of dog-eared pages and too much well-aged stout, of seeking out a lover's fingers beneath mountains of quilts– holding on for dear life and slurring the aesthetics of that much-loved scattering of freckles in a mishmash of five dead languages– then who is Duncan to argue that he is wrong?
There is no one more qualified to come to such a conclusion.
Duncan has not asked how and what shaped Methos’ eventual slip into self-contemplation, this need of his lover’s to seek out his own past in such a way that he never really finds it. Reading about it in books instead of searching his own keen and extensive memory. He knows Methos was a slave, several times, and the word, while meaning many things, can really only boil down to the fact that one does not, cannot, own one’s own body, one’s own mind and heart, and soul. There can be solace in that sometimes, but one hundred-odd years of slavery is far too long for such an escape. Duncan suspects Methos did not, in fact, escape.
He suspects he was consumed. And there is no way to know what happened afterward, because he still can't find the words, the voice in which to properly ask for such a personal disclosure.
Duncan wishes he wanted to know all the intimate details, that he could sit and listen and ache right along with his lover, and suck out the poison of it. The truth is, he’s afraid to find out what other things may lie buried behind those golden eyes, what events sharpened that instinct and what blows befell those arms, that back. He already knows the ultimate climax of it. He nearly watched it overtake Methos again, and he nearly abandoned him to it.
Corporeal death very nearly walked the earth once more.
It is strange to think that death begat itself so long ago, twisting and pulling an already warped life into something heinous and horrid. How many times had Methos died before the pain and helplessness of drowning, choking, and bleeding embedded itself into his heart? How long did it take, how many years of watching others die before one threw in the towel and said, take me along, my constant companion, I’ve only got you now?
That was what pain did; it was not a static thing, waiting like an old bad dream to float to the surface again and again. It changed, it fed off of other pain and grew more distended and poisonous. It lied about a person until the lies became the truth. And then one day the pain heaved and ignited like some devastating oil slick across a once clear ocean, and the only way to escape it was to go down, under it into the dark.
Duncan relishes the moonlight, the cold and the white, because it is the opposite of that red, heated darkness, and Methos cannot hide in it as he could in the void of that haunt in Bordeaux. The only light then had been the double Quickening that dropped the ancient Immortal to his knees, left him gasping, sobbing out the helplessness of being two people at once.
But Duncan had underestimated him then, and Methos had done what was necessary for the world, even if he only went through with it for himself.
Duncan still feels Kronos roiling about inside him sometimes, and Caspian’s deformed soul still hacks away when he forgets to be vigilant. But Methos was the one who ultimately killed them, who brought Duncan right to their doorstep because in the end he feared he wouldn't have the strength to finish all three of his fellows, and the necessity of their deaths was paramount. Maybe Methos thought he'd found some penance for all the horrors he'd committed. A way to finally pay in full for all he had wrenched from the world and the people unfortunate enough to meet him in it.
Duncan had been a fool to let Methos’ scholarly bumbling define who the man was. And he'd never underestimated the old man again. But now, looking at the complacence splashed all over that familiar body, the strength in that half-bared thigh and the pinking shape of his own lips against pale throat, Duncan cannot help but be tempted once again. Methos’ pulse flutters steadily under the slope of his neck and it’s easy to go back to the taste of that life force under his teeth and tongue, and think it only the dwelling of the persona Adam Pierson.
A futile effort; he is not in love with Adam Pierson. But Adam does make him wonder about buried things and things brought to light. Would Methos’ Quickening be a dark one because of the dangerous riptides beneath the surface, or has it risen into calmer waters for good? What would it take for it to drop back again?
“The problem with immortality,” Duncan murmurs into the room. Just too many unanswerable questions. Even the eldest living Immortal has no answer for the malignant abundance of time. If an Immortal’s Quickening can shift and warp over the years, soaring one century and venomous the next, how can any of them ever be certain of who they are? Time crawls by in all its tedious increments, and when the days are not filled with the annoyances of living, the mind pulls in and examines itself instead.
Given enough time, would all of them eventually experiment? Seek out– and embrace– their shadowed halves?
That power has an inexplicable, terrific draw. Duncan has felt it already, though he did not go seeking in order to get it. Not like Methos did. And they've both met others, too many others who have drifted into that sphere and decided not to claw their way back out.
Methos, Duncan thinks, noting the shift of shadow over the sheets as the sky swings overhead, is the abomination, perhaps. The one who got away and then came back to gaze on what he’d been. Methos had watched his own sins through the eyes of another person, knowing the entire time that he’d been the one who had cut that man’s throat here or taken that girl from her family there. That his hands had lit the fires that burned entire peoples to the ground. He’d seen it all, wallowed in its horrors, and then swam wearily for the surface again.
What must it be like to loathe oneself entirely, without reservation– to the core? And then to have accepted that self-loathing? Risen past it, or at least learned to walk alongside it instead of in its shadow?
But hasn't he loathed himself like that once? Duncan frowns. Forces himself not to spirit the thought of Richie away to a safe and dark corner of his mind. Yes, he has hated himself utterly. He has had reason to do so.
Methos sleeps the sleep of utter abandonment, and for a long, still moment, Duncan aches at the trust inherent in the splay of his body, the slight bend of a knee and the careless curl of his hand atop the sheets. Duncan is another Immortal, one who knows Methos’ weaknesses, the places to prick and the perfect angle of a sword that will bring the man to his knees in a sweaty, wide-eyed heap. And yet Methos’ fingers twitch, stretch in his direction for a scant moment as if he can feel Duncan by the window. As if he wishes Duncan closer. Duncan is awed by such a display, completely and utterly humbled by it, and surprised every time it is revealed to him just how willing Methos is to give Duncan that opening, simply because he knows Duncan will not take it. Because he knows it will be protected instead, by the skin of Duncan’s teeth and the blood pumping heatedly through his veins. Duncan is jealous of it, of Methos. Envious that Methos has strength and self-assurance enough for such staggering trust, and that he can lie in the warmth and sweat of a once-again christened bed and sleep the sleep of abandonment.
That conscience is not clear; it is merely at rest. It knows itself at last, and who in this wide world can ever say that?
There is no one else. There is, after all, no other Methos.
Duncan knows Methos isn't the only one with a history. What is somewhat shocking is that Duncan sees it all as a cohesive whole here at midnight, turned by the white spill of light into the stuff of dreams rather than the painful reality he always viewed it as.
It has taken every lover to get them here. Every brutal death and desperate thirst for revenge, every abomination, every friend, and every fight to get this beautiful, tragic, imperfect man into his bed and his arms and his body, and is it wrong for Duncan not to hate all of it, in light of what it has given him? Perhaps even to whisper his thanks to the absolute stillness of nighttime?
There was a time when such a thing would have felt sacrilegious. Now, Duncan has to shake himself harder, remind himself again of the immenseness of what he is forgiving. It's more difficult to label the thought as grotesque now.
It is not something Duncan likes. He still finds less than cold comfort in the sins and gore of Methos' past. But it is, in any case, the truth. And if Methos has taught him one thing, it is that the truth will not stay buried, despite one's best efforts. It rises on the backs of other truths to see the light again.
Duncan's new truth is Methos himself. Many things... contemplation, respect. Love. Need. It all melds together into one massive truth with so many facets Duncan is blinded when he looks at it. Methos. And he cannot pick and choose, cast away that which he doesn’t like or admire or worship. It comes together, a six-thousand-year-old package deal, and without even one of the ancient Immortal's intrinsic parts, it would not be Methos he is in love with. Just a shade, a single face of the diamond, carved and shaped by a well-meaning but ultimately destructive hand.
A repetition of days, without the background– the horrors and the wonders– to drive it over the rim and on into what came after. Instead it is just one moment on its own.
Methos is not any single moment. He is the culmination of many moments, and there were times when he strayed, slipped into an endless whirlpool that never quite sucked him down, never quite let him free. When it became too hard to go forward, he stayed where he was with what he knew, even if what he knew was bloody and violent. Duncan knows it; he recognizes it. He has been there as well.
If a day were to suddenly and spontaneously begin repeating itself with no consequences from the previous time around, would a person not allow a moment of brief moral abandon simply because he knew he could?
Duncan shudders and crosses his arms over his chest. A terrible thought. Then again, their days are repeating, in the eyes of some. Byron would have called it so; Duncan knows he would have. He knows Byron intimately.
But Methos... for him every day is as new, somehow. Duncan has seen him with his face lifted toward the icy sunrise, light glowing burnished gold across his skin. He has watched Methos contemplate with a child's eyes the angles and curves of the new buildings rising in the city. He, who has witnessed the birth and death of countless people, countless ways of life, is again looking simply to look. To witness. To count the days as they flow steadily forward and not back in around themselves.
Duncan's days do not repeat. They cannot; they haven't the power any longer. One older than himself has stepped in, no, eased his way in, comforted his way in, aggravated his way in, requested his way in, and taken hold of Duncan's days, turned and molded them until they can be nothing but new. New ways to see the shift and swell of the mortals living and breathing around them. New ways to remember a history lost to banality and inconceivable deeds. New ways to feel across taut, quivering expanses of skin and muscle, to need more than anything he has ever in his long life needed, to rise with, to explode into, to touch, caress, hold and... and know.
New ways to hear Methos gasp. Murmur. Arch, curl, enfold. His own name, in a voice Duncan never knew he treasured so very much. Methos invites Duncan inside his body and his soul, gives him the time to search around, to overturn and mess things up and hate or love accordingly. Never asks for such a precious chance in return, never once. But Duncan has given the same over and over because to refuse is to destroy himself slowly. To refuse is to lose what Methos constantly gives him: himself, unconstrained... repenting, but unashamed of what cannot be changed.
In short, Methos has given him the gift of himself, in tousled hair darkened with the centuries, passive eyes that house a youth's spiraling intellect and an ancient's massive sorrow, and a body that allows its defenses to be ruptured again and again in the hopes that Duncan will leave them stronger when he recedes.
If he, this, were taken from him, Duncan's descent might very well consume him this time.
Methos' eyelashes are like refined silk, thickened as if with the void of the sky. They dust his cheeks in the shadowy light, and the curves continue: finely arched cheekbones, elegant brow and prominent nose. It is the face statues were carved from, gods exalted with, theories of great civilizations built upon. It is of the ages, and yet it is strangely ageless.
His body is the same, molded from the same slab of alabaster and vibrating with blood and breath and feeling. A statue come to life, given a voice and sent off its pedestal to walk the earth. There is a scar just in the crook of Methos’ elbow, faint and ice-white, and never healing. Duncan touches it every time he touches Methos’ naked skin, because that is a piece of the original man, a herald to a mortal life that even its owner cannot remember. But it shaped him, in slick curves of hips and the fine sweep of thigh to calf. Under the sheet, Methos’ feet are slender and refined, his second toes longer than his big toes, and the arches are calloused and steady. Duncan can see the outline of lax muscles on Methos’ abdomen, and just like that, with his eyes and not his hands, he can feel them again, rippling and tensing under his fingers.
Duncan knows he isn't the first to look upon this magnificence, this innocence. He is not the first– nor the only one– to have touched those gracefully arched feet, linked his fingers with those slender artist’s fingers, pressed that body across soft cotton, or traced the reality of those breathless cries and gasped murmurs with his mouth. There have been countless others, eyes that stroked Methos’ skin lovingly and filed the image away for years in the future. Hands that clutched, grasped, and strained into rigidity. But the way Methos moves beneath him, around him and in him, the way his voice breaks just this side of Duncan’s name when he comes… it gives no hint that this is anything but new.
Duncan has to wonder if this is not in fact a repeat, but truly novel to Methos. Not being loved, or in love, surely; Duncan has never been that disillusioned. But being loved in this way, being in love this way… Duncan feels the taut rub of Methos’ chest against his all over again, the shuddering, helpless flex of his own hips as if he has not yet come, as if he is there in that bed, pressed against that body all over again, waiting to be brought to the brink. Hands that could keep the very air from his lungs stroke tentatively, ever cautiously. His lover explores him constantly during sex, finding each muscle and sinew as if tracing a relief of his body. Methos looks at him when he comes. When his eyelids fight to close, he keeps them open. The heated gold in his eyes is of a dangerous and sublime quality, one which Duncan likes to fantasize is virgin, and his alone.
Perhaps it is not, after all, such a foolish fancy as it seems.
On a night like this, only a week or so ago, with the window open and the cold wind sweeping in to brush the edges of the sheets like fingers, making Duncan draw his feet up until they found a nook in the blanket’s crumpled folds, Methos spoke thoughtfully. His chest was bare, skin pale and somehow free of goosebumps, but then Methos had always been a winter soul. He bloomed in the frost and unfurled against the coldest of memories with enough warmth to fend off any chill in the end.
“I’d like to take a student again,” he said, a curious lilt to his words.
Duncan looked up, turning a cold ear to the warmth of Methos’ belly. “Would you?”
“Yes, I think so.” Methos cocked his head and looked at Duncan sidelong. “Give them another golden reference for their resume. What else can I do with my infamy?”
The laughter is long and hard, and shared.
Duncan knows Methos is feeling the fit of his life again, though he has not yet mentioned to his lover that the focus of that life has drifted away from Methos First and Foremost. He suspects his lover is already aware of the change.
Methos First and Foremost has worked for years. Tried and tested. That is not arguable, and Duncan can’t disagree with the benefits of such a battle plan, as Methos is here, now, sleeping under his sheets, his nude, arguably perfect body resting just an arm’s reach away should Duncan feel inclined to touch him. And he does. Oh, he does, if only to convince himself once again of that body’s vitality, to see Methos’ eyes pop open and hear that pained voice telling him to bugger off, you insatiable lunatic, some people still like to sleep in between their rousing choruses of orgasms.
Duncan smiles. He could wake him and have on with it. And Methos would most likely go back to sleep halfway through anyway, just to prove a point. And then awaken again to crow about it. But isn’t that the point of this? The whole point of why this feels new?
Methos First and Foremost has kept the man in Duncan’s bed alive long enough to join him in his trek through the centuries. But, always the clever tactician, Methos has adapted to something utterly new yet again.
Duncan muses that perhaps, when one reaches six thousand years of age, priorities change. It is no longer simply about living at any cost, but instead, living with, at any cost.
If there is no one left to recognize, to speak with, to weep alongside, to commiserate understand kill defend save fuck need love—
—is it still living?
He’s beginning to understand that he doesn’t want, or need, to find out. It is one experience this world has to offer that is fast losing its appeal.
Duncan knows that Methos never mixes love with forever. Except he has now. It's enough to make one feel very privileged indeed.
He rises and goes on quiet feet to the bedside. Methos shifts even as he sits, the lithe muscles in one arm going taut as he stretches. Fingers brush over Duncan’s bare thigh, half-clutching. He sees a hazel eye crack open.
“Finally.” Methos sighs it instead of saying it, and curls just a bit onto his side. Duncan marvels at how one tiny movement can jump the brink from mere openness to overt welcome. A lesson he has centuries to learn, if all goes well. “Thought you were going to sit there all night.”
Duncan shakes his head, mouthing the sweet slope of Methos’ shoulder. “I couldn’t possibly,” he whispers.
Methos’ teeth shine as he smiles. “Good,” he murmurs against Duncan’s lips. “I’ve spent enough time being lonely.”
~fin~
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Thanks for reading! ♥
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.... I like the final title. I think it works, btw.
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*cuddles Snoggles* SheHeIt needs cuddling.
*snortsnerkguffawsnarfsnerk*
Thank you, precious, about the title. ♥
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