The Oak and the Ash - Highlander Fanfiction  
 Author: Parda
 August 2004
 Rated: PG-13
 Length: 50 pages
Summary: When husband and wife are immortal and mortal, "happily ever after" can never be. Connor and Alex navigate the maelstrom of an immortal marriage.   Characters: Connor, Alex Johnson, Rachel Ellenstein, Jennifer Corans

Note: This story take place in the HL3 universe, so the events of HL2 and Endgame didn't happen here.
Disclaimer: Not my original characters (except Jennifer and Mitzi), not my created universe.  No money is being made from this story.
Links to more stories about Connor and Alex.

The Oak and the Ash



Chapter 1
Uncovered
Chapter 2
Memories
Chapter 3
Time
Chapter 4
Digging
Chapter 5
Advent
Chapter 6
Epiphany
Chapter 7
Home
Author's
Notes











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Chapter 1 - Uncovered


===== EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND  2016=====

Connor MacLeod had not wanted to spy on his wife.  He had, in fact, been performing the weekly task of emptying the trash when he had tripped over Callie, his son's elderly calico cat who had been soaking up the patch of sunshine at the top of the stairs.  The contents of the study's trash basket went up, the trash basket went down, and the cat went sideways.  Connor went on swearing as he knelt to pick up the scattered papers, while Callie stalked away, tail held high.
 
A mustard-yellow scrap of paper fluttered out from inside last month's newsletter from the Society for the Historical Preservation of Edinburgh, and Connor reached for it with his left hand as he dropped the newsletter into the trash basket with his right.  He paused when he noticed the handwriting on the yellow paper--neatly slanted letters written in thick black ink, a rarity in today's world of v-mail and digi-pens--and he found himself reading what was written there.  The receipt was from the Stanford Hotel on George Street in Stirling, for the sum of 120 euros (cash) from Mrs. A. Johnson, on October 5th, 2016.
 
Connor sat back on his heels, that patch of sunshine warm on his shoulders, and stared at the paper in his hands.  Last Wednesday.  A hotel room.  Paid for in cash by one "Mrs. A. Johnson."  But Alex had gone to work as usual that Wednesday morning and been home for dinner that night.  Connor remembered; it was only a week ago.  He'd made barbecued chicken and roasted potatoes for them.  They'd eaten outside in the garden and talked about the Ibero-Celtic archeological dig in Spain, about their children--Sara's agony over her latest English term paper and Colin's latest agony over his latest girlfriend--and about the possibility of visiting Duncan and Susan in New Zealand over Christmas.  Alex had been quiet, but no more than usual--or no more than usual lately.  No more than usual these last few months.
 
Connor put the receipt in his pocket then collected the rest of the papers and the trash from the kitchen and bathrooms.  He hauled it all to the rubbish bin in the alley behind the house, and then he called Alex at her office at the museum.
 
She wasn't there.  "It's Wednesday," said Sally, one of the student interns, as if that explained it all.
 
"Wednesday," Connor repeated.
 
"Why, yes.  Dr. Johnson goes to class every Wednesday.  She won't be back until five."
 
"Oh, yeah," Connor agreed, as if he'd known that all along.  He added a self-deprecating chuckle.  "I seem to be a little disorganized today, Sally.  Can you give me the phone number there?"
 
"I just call her cell phone.  She won't answer if she's in class, of course, but she usually checks her messages around lunchtime."
 
"Of course," Connor murmured, but it was past lunchtime, and suddenly he didn't feel like talking to Alex anymore.  "Thanks, Sally," he said, and she signed off with a cheery goodbye.  Connor walked from his Georgian townhouse to the Waverly station and caught a ride to Stirling.
 
He got off  the train at twenty after two.  Connor walked to George Street then sat on a bench in the small park across the street from the Stanford Hotel.  He watched the front door for nearly half an hour.  A family of four went in, a white-haired woman in a dark blue coat went out, and just before three, a tall man with graying hair in a gray business suit left the building and turned to the right.  Seven minutes later, Alex walked out the front door and turned to the left, in the direction of the train station.  She had plenty of time to catch the 3:36 and get back to work by five.
 
Connor waited another ten minutes before he went into the hotel, an old-fashioned, genteel kind of place.  The elderly lady behind the wooden desk in the lobby was impeccably dressed, frostily efficient, and terrifyingly honest.  A black fountain pen lay next to the guest book in front of her, the guest book she ostentatiously closed as soon as Connor started asking questions.  "I have nothing more to say to you," she informed him.  "The staff of this hotel does not answer questions about our guests, and if you do not put that money away immediately, I shall summon the police."
 
Connor nodded politely as he flipped his wallet closed, and he walked out of the lobby.  He immediately went to the service entrance in the back.  The West Jamaican man working in the kitchen was much more reasonable.  "No, I never seen that lady," he said, peering at a photograph of Alex as he pocketed the cash.  "But then I don't see the guests ever."  He called across the steamy room to a young woman in a gray uniform with pink barrettes in her blonde hair.  "Hey, Cecile!  You know this lady?"
 
Cecile set down a tray of dirty dishes on the shiny aluminum counter and came over to look.  "Oh, yeah.  Every Wednesday."
 
Every Wednesday.  Week after week, Alex taking the train out to Stirling, renting a hotel room in the middle of the day to take a "class," and never once saying a word.  Connor put the picture away, careful not to crease the edges, careful not to crush it in his hand.  "How long has she been coming here?" Connor asked, withdrawing more bills.
 
"Oh, I don't know," Cecile replied as she made the money disappear.  "A couple of weeks, I guess.  No, September it was, I came back from my vacation and then she started coming, so that's five or six weeks now.  Always orders tea and sandwiches for lunch, doesn't she, Jake?" she asked, and the cook nodded vigorously, his short braids swinging.  "She tips good," Cecile continued, "polite enough, but not real friendly.  Kind of cool, you know?"
 
Connor knew, especially lately.  Alex was usually "too tired" in the evenings, and "still sleepy" in the mornings, and "not in the mood" in the middle of the day.  For the last five or six weeks now, maybe longer.  At least, that's what she been saying to him.  "How many sandwiches?" Connor asked, forcing himself to stay cool as well.
 
"Two, of course," Cecile said, with a simper and a giggle.  "Tea for two.  I've never seen her fellow; she always orders before he gets here, and then I'm usually off my shift, except today, because I'm covering for my friend Angela, but I think it's kind of sweet, especially at her age and all.  She's got to be forty at least."
 
Alex was fifty-three, and Connor didn't think any of this was sweet at all.  In fact, the tightness in his gut made him want to vomit.  He breathed slowly and deeply before he asked, "Does she use the same room?"
 
"Usually, unless someone's already in it."
 
"Anybody in it now?  I want to see it."
 
"Oh, I mean ... I couldn't ..." Cecile looked around nervously, and Connor handed her another few bills.  "Well, I suppose," she agreed.  "Georgiana just finished cleaning it, I know, because there's a couple coming in tonight at four.  We've got a few minutes.  You just want to take a look, right?"
 
"Right," Connor agreed and followed her out of the kitchen and up the narrow service staircase at the end of the hall.  She unlocked the door for him, then stood anxiously just inside the room, fidgeting impatiently.  Connor glanced once at the queen-sized bed, neat under its blue and white coverlet, then he went to the spacious sitting area in front of the bay window.  He twitched back the white lace curtains and stared across the street to the small grassy park below.  Did they sometimes walk there, hand in hand?  Or did they spend all of their time in that bed?
 
Connor closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe slowly, evenly, calmly; forced himself to let go of the curtain before he ripped it off the wall.  Never lose your temper in a fight.  He pulled out his camera and took a picture of the view from the window, then took a picture of the hotel room, the bed looming large.
 
~~~~~
 
Alex was late getting home that night.  She'd been late a lot lately.  "I've got a huge amount of work to do, Connor," she'd told him.  "You know what it's like, getting ready for a dig."  She was planning on leaving this Friday for Spain, and she'd be gone for eight weeks.  This time she hadn't asked him along.  In fact, she'd pretty much told him not to come.  "We won't have much time to do anything together anyway, Connor," she'd said when they talked about it last month.  "I'm heading up one of the teams, so I'll be really busy.  Besides, John and Gina have been asking you to visit.  They need some help building the rock walls around their new house, and you haven't seen Davey for nearly a year, and you know how fast children grow. And you can spend Thanksgiving with them."
 
And Connor had agreed to her eminently logical plan.  He was supposed to fly out to Denver on the twenty-first to see John and Gina and their toddler, a week after Alex left for Spain, for an archeological dig.  For two months without him.
 
Connor didn't bother to make dinner for her tonight.  He sat in the kitchen while the darkness gathered around him, a bottle of Scotch on the table, a single shot of untouched whisky by his hand.  He was not going to be drunk when she got home.  He was not going to lose his temper.
 
He was not going to kill her.
 
Around seven o'clock, she let herself in the front door then called out his name uncertainly in the dark house.  Connor didn't answer.  He listened to her slightly uneven footsteps as she came through the hall, her limp a legacy of that car crash a year and a half ago.  He blinked when she turned on the kitchen lights, and she stopped in the doorway, blinking too.  "What's wrong?" she asked immediately, her gaze pausing on the bottle, then going to him.  "Are the kids all right?  Is Duncan--?"
 
"They're all fine," Connor told her.
 
"Rachel?"
 
"She's fine."
 
Alex sighed in relief and came into the room, dropping her purse on the floor, then taking the chair across from him.  "So, what's wrong?" she repeated.
 
Connor slowly lifted his head.  "You've been really busy at work for the last couple of months, haven't you, Alex?" he asked, giving her a chance to tell him the truth.
 
"What?" she asked, her eyes narrowing in a good show of confusion.  "Of course I am; I've told you--"
 
"Busy every day?"
 
"Yes, every day," she agreed easily.  "Meetings, scheduling, last minute supply problems ... you know what the chaos before a dig is like."  She leaned forward with a smile.  "Look, Connor, I'm sorry I'm late for dinner, but--"
 
"Busy with a class?"
 
"A class?" she repeated, and the word sounded of blank surprise, but her eyes showed sudden fear.  "I don't--"
 
"Talk to me, Alex," Connor demanded, reaching over to take her hand in his, the bones of her slender fingers bird-delicate in his grip.  "Talk."
 
Alex stared at him across the table, her dark-blue eyes narrowing.  "You're hurting me, Connor."
 
Connor relaxed his hold on her slightly, but he didn't let go, and he didn't look away.  With his left hand, he picked up the photo of the hotel room and dropped the picture on the table between them.  "Busy every Wednesday, Alex?  For the last six weeks?"
 
She glanced at the picture and yanked her hand away.  This time Connor let her go.  She shoved her chair back from the table and sat there, poised on the edge of her seat.  "You've been spying on me?" she asked, her voice quivering with anger.
 
"You've been lying to me," he snapped back, his own words icy calm, with that frozen rage he knew so well, and had never once shown to her.  She shook her head mutely, her lips pressed tight together, then rose from the table and started to leave.  Connor shot from his chair and grabbed her by the arm before she had taken two steps, yanking her around to face him, crushing the smoothness of her silk blouse into the softness of her skin, so that he could feel the bone of her arm between his fingers and thumb.  "Don't you ever lie to me!" he snarled, but Alex only stared back, silent.  "What's his name, Alex?" Connor demanded.  "What's his name?"
 
"You think--," she began, with a half-strangled and incredulous laugh.  "You think I have a lover?  Me?  Me?" she repeated, the word rising high and hysterical.  She blinked rapidly, and tears slipped down her cheeks as she asked in bewildered despair, "Who would want me?"

"Alex...," Connor whispered, as his rage drained away in a confusion that left him nearly shaking with sick relief.  He released his grip on her arm and reached out to hold her, because whatever was going on, it sure as hell wasn't some clandestine affair.  "Alex," he said again, gently now, but she pulled away from him and ran stumbling up the stairs.  "Oh, Jesus," Connor muttered, and he stood there for a moment with his hand over his eyes, before he went to try to comfort his wife.
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Chapter 2 - Memories


When Dr. Alexandra Elise Johnson (respected archeologist, equestrienne, and star pitcher for the high school softball state championship team two years in a row) had married Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod (antique dealer, eccentric recluse, and oh, by the way, a 476-year-old Immortal who was in the habit of living, eating, and sleeping with his sword), she had known it wouldn't be easy.
 
But she hadn't imagined it would be quite so hard.
 
Not that they didn't have a good marriage, and a good life, all in all.  Connor was rich--very rich.  Filthy rich, as some liked to say.  Compound interest and long-term investments can do that for a person who lives for hundreds of years.  Alex was rich, too, in her own right.  Connor had given her a fortune when they had gotten engaged.  The money helped, no point in pretending that it didn't.  The majority of fights in a marriage are about money, and Alex and Connor never fought about that at all.
 
They owned an entire building in New York City, a farm in the Highlands of Scotland, a townhouse in Edinburgh, vacation cottages and condos here and there.  Factories, computer companies, whisky distilleries (an excellent long-term investment, Connor liked to say, with other returns than money), race-horses, orange groves, mushroom farms, shipyards--Connor knew the value of diversifying.
 
All that money paid for weekend trips to New York and Paris, month-long vacations in the Mediterranean or New England or Australia, lovely jewelry (gold and sapphires to match Alex's hair and eyes), a stable of horses (long-legged beauties who whickered in welcome and nuzzled for apples), and gifts and flowers and clothes.  Household help was a given; Alex hadn't had to scrub a toilet in years, though she still did on occasion, just to remind herself of who she really was and what she'd been: a normal middle-class girl.
 
Oh, they squabbled about some things, neatness for one.  "It's a good thing you're an archeologist," Connor would often say, surveying the piles of papers and mounds of books in her office, "or you'd never find anything in this mess.  You must like to dig."  Which, of course, she did.
 
They argued about his sexism and outmoded ways of looking at the world.  "Protectiveness," Connor liked to call it.  "Caution.  Chivalry.  Common sense."  And sometimes (often) it was, but Alex chafed under his autocratic highhandedness just the same.  So he swore at her for being stubborn, and she yelled at him for being arrogant, but they both did it out of love, and they both knew it, so they tolerated each other better than they might have done.
 
They had children, lovely children, even though Connor (like all Immortals) was sterile.  Adoption had given them John, a fine son from one of Connor's earlier marriages (Alex was Connor's third wife, which was in itself a challenge, living with--competing with--ghosts by night and by day).  Artificial insemination had given Alex and Connor twins of their own, a girl and a boy.  Sara Heather, bright-eyed and stubborn, chattering and observant, dancing her way through life.  Colin Duncan, persistent and quiet, slower than his sister perhaps, deeper anyway.
 
Love, yes, they had that aplenty.  Alex loved Connor deeply, and she knew without a doubt that he loved her, adored her, would die--or kill--to protect her.  She knew that too, without a doubt.  She'd seen the blood on his sword, and on him.
 
She'd welcomed him home after a kill, after he'd fought to the death and won.  She had held him in her arms after he'd beheaded a body and then ripped out a soul, knowing this man who killed so often and so easily would never hurt her.  She'd taken him to bed, or rather she had let him take her, for it was all taking and no giving at times such as those, when he still trembled with the energy arcing through his body, when he fought his way back to life after a fight to the death, when he was just so fucking glad to be alive and to be loved, and to be able to love in return.  Later, after he'd slept, after the blood was washed away, she knew he'd be again the tender and generous lover she loved so well.
 
And all of that was fine.  The problem, Alex had slowly come to believe, was Cassandra, who had come into their lives one warm summer day, two years after Alex and Connor had married, when Alex had been pregnant with the twins, and John was a boy of not-quite-thirteen.
 
Cassandra the Immortal, the Witch of Donan Woods, a prophetess of old, ancient and beautiful and fey.  Cassandra, Connor's teacher and former lover.  Aunt Cass, friend and mentor to their children.  Cass, Alex's best friend.
 
"Let's go dancing!" Cass would say.  Or, "Let's go to a movie!  Let's go shopping!  Let's go!" and Alex would go, gladly, to the clubs and shops and museums, to the movies and concerts and plays ... laughing, playing with the children, making unbelievably bad puns, staying up all night talking and getting tipsy on wine.  They went skiing together, too, and Alex pushed Cass to try the more difficult slopes.
 
"Perhaps tomorrow," Cass said.  "I'm still getting warmed up."
 
"Oh, come on," Alex urged.  "The weather might be bad tomorrow, and it's glorious today.  Besides, what's the worst that can happen?  You'll break a leg and have to wait five minutes for it to heal?"
 
That did it.  Cass stood there with her mouth open, then smiled even as she shook her head and sighed.  "Right."  They took the T-lift to the other side of the hill.
 
"Oh my," Cass breathed when they stood at the crest, looking down over the white expanse, broken here and there with great, jagged ridges of gray and black rock.
 
Alex grinned.  "We could have started all the way at the top," she said, motioning to the trails still higher up the hill.  Cass gave her a dirty look, and Alex said, unrepentant, "It's the only the first bit that's tricky.  It gets easier."
 
"You mean it goes from Very Difficult to Difficult," Cass corrected.  "I can read the signs."
 
"You can do it," Alex said cheerfully, and with a quick shove of her poles, she was off, knees bent and arms tucked for even greater speed, skimming over the snow, flying sometimes, exulting in the combination of glorious freedom and demanding control.
 
Alex waited at the bottom.  Cass arrived some minutes later, covered with spangles of snow.  Her sunglasses seemed a little bent.  "Fun?" Alex inquired brightly.
 
"Oh, yes," Cass agreed, brushing off her legs and then ruefully regarding her knee.  "I think it was only a sprain."  She looked up at Alex and grinned.  "But you were right.  It was fun.  I'm ready for more!"
 
They skied at a more sedate pace to a different chair lift, and went back to the top again.  The wind blew cold, fresh and exhilarating.  Alex reached into her parka pocket and pulled out a Chap Stick to moisten her lips.  She offered it to Cass, who shook her head and kept studying the terrain.  "This one isn't so bad," Cass said, sounding relieved.
 
"It's only difficult, instead of very."  Alex pointed to the right.  "How about Allison's Route, between those rocks?"
 
"How about it?" Cass muttered, not sounding very happy now.
 
"Wimp," Alex declared.
 
Cass gave her another dirty look.  "I'll race you," she challenged.
 
Alex smiled.  Cassandra might be undeniably gorgeous, psychically gifted, musically talented, and eternally Immortal, but Alex could beat her any day on skis, and Alex enjoyed that for all it was worth.  "Sure," she said and counted, "One, two, three!" and was off.
 
Alex won the race, and every other race that afternoon, too.  It was a wonderful day, and they had many other wonderful times through the years.
 
So many years.
 
"Have you ever considered a rinse, Madame?" Henri had asked her at the salon, when Alex had taken Sara (who was twelve and wanted to be twenty) there for a fancy haircut.  Henri had lifted Alex's once-gold hair in his fingers.  "A rinse will even out the white and the gray."
 
She'd said no, but a year and a half later, after she'd watched Cass braiding her long auburn tresses, Alex had gone back and said yes.  She never told Connor of her twice-monthly visits to the salon, even though he colored his own hair gray.  Her hair looked dull silver now.  She wasn't sure what it color it really was underneath all the dye.
 
She wasn't sure who she was.
 
"You tell your daughter to marry that boyfriend of hers," the waitress instructed Alex while they watched Connor help Sara with her coat on the other side of the room.  "Not many young men have such nice manners today.  I saw him pull out that chair out for you.  Why, even when you and I were young, there weren't many gentlemen like that about."
 
"No," Alex murmured, looking at the other woman.  "Patricia" her nametag read, a plump woman in the blue uniform of the establishment.  Her kind and faded blue eyes had crow's feet at  the corners, and deeper wrinkles chased around her mouth--a cheerful, engaging face under short-cropped gray hair.  A grandmotherly type, Alex would have said, and thought no more, but "you and I" Patricia had said, and neither of them was young anymore.
 
"Do you have children?" Alex asked.
 
Patricia smiled happily, revealing bright white teeth much too regular to be real.  "Three, and two granddaughters and then a grandson on the way.  My oldest boy is thirty-seven now.  Do you have grandchildren?"
 
"Oh, no," Alex replied quickly, in some surprise.  "Sara's not quite eighteen."
 
"And she's your oldest?" Patricia asked, equally taken aback, then added with another smile, "There now.  I guess not everybody starts as young as I did, getting married at twenty and having my first within the year."
 
Fifty-eight, Alex calculated.  This grandmotherly woman was fifty-eight, six years older than herself.
 
"Ready, Mom?" Sara called from across the room, and Connor was waiting, too.  Alex smiled automatically at the waitress and said goodbye.
 
That evening, on the walk home through the frigid winter air, Alex watched her daughter and her man.  Sara was cheerful, laughing, full of life and promises, butterfly-bright and free, still resting on the cocoon of childhood, yet poised to fly, eager and almost ready to test her strength on the winds of the world.  Connor strode next to her proudly, her arm tucked around his, his head bent slightly to listen to her plans.
 
Alex walked on Connor's other side, her arm also entwined, the quiet strength of her husband familiar and reassuring and real.  But other women walked inside her--lived inside her--the prospective mother-in-law, the grandmother, the great-grandmother ... the little old lady hobbling along, toothless, incontinent, and bald.
 
She was pregnant with death.
 
Death lived inside Sara, too, and inside Sara's children, and inside Sara's children's children, all as-yet-unborn.  The fatal parasite was passed from generation to generation, a long-dormant egg, a writhing white maggot that devoured you alive from the inside, leaching color from your hair, boring into your bones and sucking the marrow, oozing into your teeth and eyes and ears, growing until your withered sack of skin split open in an eruption of decay, growing until you gave birth to death on your own deathday.
 
Alex knew the useless husk of her body would be properly buried and truly mourned.  Connor loved her, would always love her, as he would always love Heather and Brenda, his other two wives.  But eventually Connor would move on, would have to move on, and he would walk with a different young beauty by his side, again and again and again.
 
Yet Cassandra was waiting.  Cassandra would be there.  And that was good, Alex reminded herself--tried to convince herself--as they walked down the hill to their home.  Connor shouldn't be alone, not through all the long years of immortality.  She shouldn't be selfish.  Duncan and Cassandra would be there for Connor, and Alex didn't want Connor to be alone.  They would help him, heal him ...
 
Love him.
 
Someday, Cassandra and Connor would be lovers again.  Alex knew it, was certain of it.  She'd known it for years.  Maybe not for decades to come, maybe not for centuries, but Cassandra could wait.  No maggot of death lived inside her.  Cassandra was immortal.  She could wait forever.
 
A thought came winging, sudden and vicious, and Alex welcomed it home: Didn't Cassandra ever get impatient, waiting around for the mortal lovers to die and get the fuck out of her way?
 
Sara asked a question, and Alex peered around Connor at their beautiful, young daughter.  "What did you say?" Alex asked, and both Sara and Connor laughed aloud.
 
"Oh, Mom," Sara said, still giggling.  "We were just talking about Aunt Rachel's hearing aid, and how nice it is that she doesn't say 'What did you say?' all the time anymore."
 
~~~~~
 
A few days later, Sara asked to borrow one of Alex's dresses for the annual New Year's party at their Edinburgh home, and Alex agreed.  Sara looked exquisite in Alex's aqua ball gown, better than Alex ever had.  The velvet emphasized the smoothness of Sara's skin, and the color brought out the turquoise of Sara's eyes.  "Can I borrow jewelry, too?" Sara asked eagerly, and Alex stood back with a smile and got out of the way.
 
"Connor and Sara dance well together, don't they?" Cassandra observed on New Year's Eve.
 
Alex nodded absently, watching her husband whirl her daughter around the room.  "They make a handsome couple," Alex agreed.  Sara's dress was a vibrant swirl of aqua against the black of Connor's tuxedo.  She'd let her honey-brown hair grow past her shoulders again, and she was wearing it in a sophisticated French twist that made her look unnervingly mature.  Duncan's wife, Susan, had chosen to pull back her still-red curls with a dark green ribbon, but the girlish style couldn't change the fact that Susan was forty-three years old, anymore than Alex's strict (obsessive) regimen of exercise, diet, skin care, and regular visits to the salon could hide--or change--the fact that she had just turned fifty-two ... and was growing older every day.
 
Cass tapped her lightly on the hand, and Alex turned in surprise.  "What did you say?" Alex asked, because Cass was obviously waiting for something.
 
"I asked if there were more people here this year," Cass repeated patiently, and as she turned to indicate the dancers, she casually tossed the shining cascade of her waist-length hair off one bare shoulder.  Her gown of deep green silk was shot through with copper and bronze and gold, and Cassandra shimmered as she moved, butterfly beautiful, eternally young.  "It seems like quite a crowd."
 
"Yes, I think so," Alex replied vaguely and turned away from the immortal woman.  Sara and Connor did indeed waltz well together, a lovely couple, a beautiful young woman in a young man's arms.  Alex wanted to look away, but couldn't.  Over the years, she had become used to hating Cassandra, now and again, sometimes in dull resentment, sometimes with piercing pain.
 
Alex wasn't used to hating her own daughter in exactly the same way.
 
"Alex?" Cass asked, sounding concerned.
 
"I'm not feeling very good, Cass," Alex announced abruptly.  "I'm going upstairs."
 
Ten minutes later, Connor came into their sitting room, and Alex immediately closed the family photo album she was holding on her lap.  "She told you to come looking for me, didn't she?" Alex asked him, and Connor shrugged, a full-body movement for him, involving his shoulders and his eyebrows and the corner of his mouth, an endearing and familiar mannerism, his silent and more subdued version of the snort of reluctant admission.
 
Cassandra had named those snorts of his over four centuries ago, when she and Connor had been lovers--the first time they had been lovers.  How long would it take, Alex wondered, for Cassandra to make her move once the mortal wife was dead?  A century?  A decade?  A month?
 
Connor sat beside her on the couch, and Alex set the book--and the feelings--aside.  Connor loved her now.  That was all that mattered.  He would never betray her, never leave her, and Cass would never do anything to come between them.  Alex knew that.  Cass was her friend.  And Sara was simply growing up, as all young women grow up.  It couldn't--shouldn't!--be stopped.  Stop being selfish and paranoid, Alex told herself sternly.  Stop this right now.
 
"Cassandra said you weren't feeling good," Connor said in concern.
 
"I'm just a little tired, Connor.  A bit of a headache."  She smiled at him.  "It's a big party.  Too much noise."
 
His hand slipped under her hair to gently massage the back of her neck, and Alex relaxed under his touch and closed her eyes.  "Does that help?" he asked softly, and the quiet rumble of his voice was yet another endearing and familiar part of the man she loved.
 
"Mmm-mm," she murmured, leaning forward and bowing her head to give him more room.  He used both hands now, the cushions of the couch moving under them as he shifted his weight to get behind her.  The tips of his fingers grazed the sensitive places behind her ears, and Alex exhaled softly as shivers of warmth cascaded down her spine.  Connor kissed the nape of her neck, and that felt even better, but Alex pulled away.  "We have a house full of guests, Connor," she reminded him.
 
"I told Duncan to take over the host's duties," Connor said easily.  "They won't miss us."  His hands slid down to her shoulders, his fingertips just reaching the neckline of her gown, right above the top curve of her breasts, and he kissed the back of her neck again.  Alex placed her hands on top of his, stopping them, and Connor stopped as well.  "Right," he said, after a moment.  "You have a headache."
 
"I'm sorry," Alex said.  "I know that sounds so--"
 
"It's OK," Connor said, leaning back and pulling her with him, and Alex relaxed completely in the comforting circle of his arms, her head on his shoulder, her legs intertwined with his. They lay there, not speaking, content to listen to the familiar sounds of breath and heartbeat.
 
"I love you," she told him, and it was more true now than it had ever been before.
 
His arms tightened in a hug, and he kissed the top of her hair.  "I love you, too, Alex," he said simply.  That was all, and it was everything.  She blinked back fiercely hot tears and kissed his hand.  Then she closed her eyes again, content and at peace.
 
Ten minutes later came chanting from downstairs:  "Ten, nine, eight ..."
 
She rolled over to face her husband, and she kissed his eyes on the counts of four and three, and his nose on the count of two.  She kissed his mouth as the crowd on the floor beneath them shouted, "One!" and erupted into cheers of "Happy New Year!"  Then a frenzy of horn-blowing and foot-stomping shook the house.
 
Their kiss lasted until the tumult below had died down, and the bagpipes had started in on Ould Lang Syne.  "Maybe you should get headaches more often," Connor said, when she finally pulled away.
 
"You're good medicine," she told him, licking her lips and tasting the whisky from his.  "Tasty."
 
"Does that mean I go down smooth?" he asked.
 
"Smooth and easy," she agreed, leaning forward to kiss him again.
 
Connor held her off him, his hands firm around her upper arms.  "If you're not feeling good, Alex ..."
 
"I'm fine, Connor," she insisted, and she was--now.  "It was just too much noise, that's all. Besides," she said as she moved against him, ever so slowly, her leg between his, her breasts against his chest, "I think it's time you unwrapped your birthday present."
 
Connor's hands moved lower, down her back and then lower still, pulling her against him until Alex couldn't move slowly anymore.  "Silk dress this year, isn't it?" he asked, as he gathered the fabric in his hands.
 
"Mmm-mm," she managed, and then Connor kissed her, and Alex felt wonderful, everywhere.
 
~~~~~
 
The next morning, after another long and luxurious "present-opening"--this time in their bed, instead of on the couch in the sitting room--and after she had showered and dressed, Alex tidied their room, straightening pillows, picking up things.  She didn't open the photo album.  She knew what she would find: pictures of their family over the years, at the beach and in the Highlands, John growing from a teen to a young man, the twins moving from infancy to adolescence, herself growing older--and Connor always looking exactly the same.
 
Alex set the photo album on the bookshelf and picked up their evening clothes from the floor, then went downstairs to eat, already thinking of what still needed to be done for Connor's birthday party that night.  He was four hundred and ninety-seven years old.
 
"That won't be enough plates, Sara," Alex said that afternoon, looking over the dark expanse of mahogany in the dining room and counting the delicate green and white circles of china, matching them to the people staying in the house--four couples (Duncan and Susan, Rachel and Mitzi, John and Gina, Connor and herself) and four teens (Sara and Colin, of course, and Susan's two children from her first marriage: Paula and Tom)--then adding one more for Cass, who was due to arrive at five.  "There are only twelve; there should be thirteen."
 
"Oh!" Sara said, tossing her long shining hair off her shoulder as she looked up from her task, a bundle of white linen napkins still in her hand.  "I forgot to tell you.  Right before she left last night, Cassandra said she wouldn't be able to make it."
 
"Oh," Alex said in return.  She straightened the fork at the place setting in front of her.  "Did she say why?"
 
"Something about an old friend and her having to leave town."
 
An Immortal?  Or one of her ever-growing string of boyfriends, the last of whom had called Alex "ma'am"?
 
"She dropped off Dad's birthday present really early this morning, while you were still upstairs," Sara said, walking around the table and laying down the napkins.  "It's another set of drawings of the family, like usual.  Dad hasn't added them to the book yet; I think they're still in the parlor, if you want to see."
 
"Maybe later," Alex said.  She'd had enough of pictures last night.  She gave the knife a twitch to the right, a little closer to the spoon.  "Cassandra would have made an unlucky number, anyway, so perhaps it's for the best."
 
~~~~~
 
Three weeks later Cassandra moved to London, and somehow, she and Alex didn't find the time to see each other before Cassandra left.  Alex spoke to her briefly on the phone and wished her well, and Cassandra said good-bye.
 
In May, Alex went shopping for baby presents for John and Gina.  She never saw the car that hit her as she was crossing an Edinburgh street on that cool spring day.  She heard nothing: not the crunch of metal, not the shattering of glass, not the screams.  She never remembered the ambulance ride to the hospital, and she never knew that Connor was by her bedside for days, holding her hand.
 
People told her of these things later, and she supposed she had to believe them, because there had obviously been some sort of accident.  The cast on her leg and the bandages around her ribs and on her face were real enough.  Her pain was real.  Her scars were real.
 
"You are very lucky, Mrs. MacLeod," the doctor said, her brown fingers wandering over the bandages, her brown eyes peering at an x-ray of Alex's ankle, but Alex didn't reply.  "Some therapy, yes," Dr. Janaswamy said.  "You will have to practice walking, but in time, it will be good."  She nodded and smiled, no doubt well-pleased with a job well-done, then stood and picked up her clipboard, ready to move on with her rounds.
 
"No skiing this winter, I take it," Alex commented, trying to be upbeat.
 
Dr. Janaswamy's smile disappeared, and she stopped halfway to the door.  "Mrs. MacLeod ..."  She came back and sat down on the chair near the bed.  "Mrs. MacLeod, your ankle was badly damaged.  Very badly.  I cannot recommend that you ski.  Ever."
 
Alex let that settle, suddenly grateful for the dulling effect of the drugs.  "Dancing?" she asked next, the word brittle and controlled.
 
"Yes," came the careful reply.  "With a partner to lean on, you won't need your cane--"
 
"My cane?" Alex interrupted, hearing her voice going shrill and helpless to stop it.  "I'm going to need a cane?  Just to walk?"
 
"Mrs. MacLeod," came the calm and authoritative voice of the doctor again.  "I do not think you understand.  Your ankle was nearly crushed.  The other surgeon suggested amputation below the knee.  But we operated and repaired much of the damage.  You have both legs, and after a year or so of therapy, you will walk again."
 
But not easily, quickly, or well.  She wasn't an Immortal.  She would never heal instantly with tiny blue sparks.  She'd been growing older, and now she was defective as well.  Permanently.  For the rest of her life.
 
"You are very lucky, Mrs. MacLeod," the doctor repeated on her way out the door, and Alex supposed that had to be true, too.
 
"More flowers for you, Alex!" the perky blond aide announced cheerfully from the door.  "Lovely ones, too," he said, coming into the room with an enormous vase of nodding daffodils in his arms.  He set the vase on a table in the corner.  "There's a card here, from Cam."  He squinted at the writing.  "No, that's not it.  From Cass."
 
Of course.  "Give them to someone else," Alex said.  "I have enough flowers here."
 
"If you like," the aide said dubiously, picking up the vase again.  "And the card?  Would you like me to read it to you?"
 
"No.  Throw it away."
 
~~~~~
 
Cassandra sent other cards and letters, books to read and puzzles to do, but Alex was busy with doctor's appointments and surgery and learning how to walk again, and she never got around to opening any of the things Cassandra sent.  They stopped coming after a while; Alex wasn't quite sure when.
 
Throughout the long months of therapy, Connor was helpful, patient and sweet.  Alex tried to be, but it was hard.  "A glass of water?" he would offer.  "Soup?  Tea?  Something to read?  Shall I carry you down the stairs?" until Alex wanted to scream at him and tell him to go away.  She hated being helpless, being sick, being tired and hurting all the time.
 
"I know it hurts," he said to her once, and she nearly snapped out: "How the hell would you know?" because Connor didn't know pain.  No Immortal did.  Oh, they got cut, they bled, they even died, sometimes in screaming agony, but that was just a nodding acquaintance, a quick "nice to meet you," and then the pain was gone and they were fine.  They didn't have to live with it, day after day, night after night.  They didn't go to sleep with pain curled up beside them on their pillows; they didn't wake to see it grinning at them with bared teeth, just waiting to gnaw its slow and torturous way through muscle, tissue, and bone.  They didn't know pain intimately; it didn't live inside them and devour them alive.
 
Immortals also didn't have scars.  "Plastic surgery is a long process," the doctor explained, while the long angry scar throbbed from Alex's hairline to her jaw.  "You must heal in between each procedure."
 
And with each healing, came more pain.
 
"Some more medication, Alex?" Connor would ask, being patient and unfailingly kind, and reminding her every single time he trotted up or down the stairs to cater to her needs that she would never be able to run or ski again.  "Water to wash it down?"
 
Go away, Alex wanted to say.  Just go away.  She didn't want the medication; she didn't want to have to need it.  She didn't want to be dependent on drugs just to get through the days--and through the nights.  She did go without once, for nearly a week, to prove to herself she could, but she ended up despising herself even more, because she was absolutely horrible to Connor and to Sara and Colin, and they didn't deserve that.  They were only trying to help.
 
So Alex smiled at Connor and took the medication and the water and said thank you, because it wasn't his fault that he was an Immortal, and it wasn't his fault that she'd been hurt, and she loved him and he loved her, and that would make things better soon.  It always had before.
 
But the problem hadn't moved away with Cassandra.  It simply had a new name.
 
~~~~~
 
"Sara!" Alex yelled up the stairs.  "Sara!"
 
After a maddening minute, Sara appeared at the top of the stairs, slouching low-hipped against the railing, wearing a lime green T-shirt above a black miniskirt and a sullenly stubborn expression on her face.
 
"It was your turn to clean the kitchen tonight, Sara," Alex reminded her.
 
"Sorry," she said, but she didn't sound that way.  "I forgot."
 
"Again?"
 
"I've been busy."
 
"Doing what?" Alex demanded.
 
"Homework."
 
"You have housework to do, too.  We all have chores in this family, and--"  Sara rolled her eyes and sighed, and Alex stopped cold.  She'd heard that sigh before.  "Clean the kitchen now," Alex ordered.
 
"But, Mom--"
 
"Now," Alex insisted, and Sara sighed again.  She thumped down the stairs and dragged herself off to the kitchen, then started banging dishes around.  "Don't break anything, Sara," Alex warned from the dining room.
 
From the kitchen came the sound of shattering glass.  Alex shoved back her chair and marched as best she could with her cane to the kitchen door, ignoring the grinding pain in her ankle that shot clear up to her hip.  "Sara!"
 
"It was an accident!" Sara yelled back.  Her hands were covered with soap suds, and her bare feet were surrounded by splintered shards of bright yellow glass.
 
"My grandmother's bowl?" Alex said in disbelief and rage, and her eyes burned with sudden tears.  "You broke my grandmother's bowl?"
 
"It was an accident!" Sara repeated, near tears herself, but Alex didn't believe it, didn't believe her.
 
She didn't believe Connor, either, when he came later that night to plead Sara's case.  Sara had always been his "princess," just as he had always been Sara's "white knight."
 
Sara's friends from college liked Connor, too.  "I could go for some of that," Aleah said, her words as hot and sultry as the summer air shimmering above the sand of Breezy Point beach.
 
"Aleah!  That's my dad!" Sara said in scandalized reproach, even though Sara (and Colin) had known of immortality and Connor's real age for years.
 
Alex stopped short with her hand on the door.  Through the screened window, she could see Connor stripping off his T-shirt while Colin retrieved a Frisbee from the waves.  The girls were lying six feet away from her, sunbathing on the deck.
 
"It is?"  Aleah shrugged one naked shoulder, her naked breasts moving, too.  Her oiled body gleamed lithe and perfect in the sun, a black G-string her token attempt at a bathing suit.  Alex was wearing a sedate one-piece suit (to hide some, but not all, of her scars), and that was covered by a head-to-toe caftan (to protect her skin from the sun and wrinkles).  A wide-brimmed hat was in her hand. 
 
Aleah grinned and said, still saucy-hot, "I like older men."
 
"Find a different one," Sara ordered Aleah crossly and flopped back down on her towel.  Aleah only shrugged again then set about oiling all her limbs.  Any man could go for some of that.
 
Alex turned around and limped back to her room then changed into slacks and a shirt.  In the kitchen, Rachel and Mitzi were playing canasta, the game Alex's mom had always called "the old ladies' substitute for sex."  Rachel was old now, seventy-six, still an attractive woman, gracious and poised and elegant, but still old, with completely white hair and age-spotted hands, with artificial knees and a quaver to her voice and wrinkles on every part of her face.  In just twenty-two years, Alex was going to be as old as Rachel was now.
 
"Want to play canasta?" Mitzi asked, and Alex said, "Yes."
 
"Want to play?" Connor asked her later that night in their bedroom in their Hudson Street apartment, his eyes alight with invitation, his smile as charming as ever, his body as young and supple and perfect as it had been over twenty years before, when they had first met, when she had been young and beautiful, too.
 
"No."
 
She said yes to a walk by the Hudson River a few days later, and they walked hand-in-hand in the park as they used to do when they were courting, once again laughing, contented, in love.  Until Connor kissed her, and a passing teen said, "Gross!  That guy's giving the tongue to his mother!" and his friends hooted with laughter and jeers.
 
Connor went rigid, and Alex clamped his wrist hard.  "Connor," she called to him, for his eyes had gone dark with cold killing rage, and he trembled under her hand.  "Connor!" she said again, and when he looked at her Alex summoned all her acting skills and smiled.  "Let's go home."
 
"That boy needs a lesson in manners," Connor growled, his gaze following the group of teens.
 
The boy hadn't said anything that Alex hadn't already thought.  "Please, Connor," she said, and she didn't have to manufacture the tremble in her voice or the tears in her eyes.  "Take me home.  I want to go home."
 
As she had expected, Connor's chivalry overpowered his outrage.  He walked her home.  "I want to make love to you," he told her that night, and Alex smiled at him and said yes.  Later, after he was asleep, she cried.
 
The next morning, Alex told Connor she would walk arm-in-arm with him, not hand-in-hand, and she asked him not to kiss her in public again.  "Damn it, Alex, you're my wife!" Connor said, barefoot and wearing only a pair of jeans as he paced their bedroom floor.  "I won't hide that.  I don't care what other people think."
 
"You did," she pointed out, sitting quietly on the edge of their bed.  "And so did I."
 
"One punk kid who needs--"
 
"Yes, he was rude, because he was indiscreet enough to say what other people only think.  But they do think it, Connor, and they're going to think it more and more as the years go by.  We knew this would happen, Connor," Alex said, making herself be calm and logical about it, so she wouldn't start to cry.  This was hard enough for Connor; she wasn't going to make it worse.  This wasn't his fault.  He couldn't help being immortal.  She had no reason to be angry with him.  "We talked about it before we got married."
 
Connor was looking out the window, his back to her, one hand braced on the wall.  She could see his frustration and anger in the flexing of his fingers and the tightness of his shoulders.  Those beautifully sculpted muscles that she loved to caress were moving just slightly under the supple skin.
 
"You don't introduce Rachel as your daughter anymore," she said, showing him the way.
 
He turned and came to kneel before her.  "You're my wife," he pledged.  "I'm your husband.  I'm proud to be by your side ... always."
 
She took his hands between her own, like a lady of old accepting the service of her knight.  "Connor, I'm not asking you to lie or hide me away, but we shouldn't advertise what you are.  When we're in public, we can just make it easier for people to assume other things."  Like seeing her as Connor's mother--and eventually grandmother--the elderly widowed Mrs. MacLeod.  "You can be as gallant as ever, chivalrous, considerate, all of those ... just not passionate."
 
Connor was shaking his head.  "Alex--"
 
"I don't want them to look at me that way!" she finally burst out, and where logic and reason had failed to convince him, the threat of her tears prevailed.  Connor agreed instantly, willing to do whatever he could to make her happy.
 
Except he couldn't make her happy, not anymore, no matter what he did or didn't do.
 
Sara caught the worst of Alex's anger that summer, beautiful blossoming Sara, with her shining hair and soft smooth skin, with the boys calling her everyday, with the men following her everywhere with their eyes, while Alex trailed along beside.  Sara, her father's little princess.  Sara, who had her entire life ahead of her.  Sara, who seemed more and more like Cassandra every day.
 
It was early in August, the last day of their visit in New York, when Sara was talking about going back to college the next week, chattering on and on about her classes and her prospects, her boyfriends and her girlfriends, Aleah included, and about how Cassandra had taught Sara so many wonderful things: scrying and dreams and listening to the heartbeats of trees--things of course that Alex didn't know and couldn't know, since Alex had no such powers, no amazing psychic talents, no special abilities like them--when Alex was seized by the sudden and overwhelming desire to slap Sara hard across the face.
 
She didn't do it.  She walked out of the room and down the stairs, her hands trembling, still shaking all over with murderous rage, because it simply wasn't fair.
 
 But she couldn't fix it.  No one could.  Alex had hoped, early on, that perhaps the problem wasn't that unusual, that maybe other women--other women her age--could help. She'd tried talking about it, cautiously, first with Marge at work and then with Kaleigh at the gym, but neither of them seemed to understand.  "I like being this age," Marge said. "The kids are out of the house, I can travel now, Tim and I have more time for each other ... what's not to like?"  Kaleigh didn't even seem to notice. "I'm in better shape now than I was when I was thirty," she said, trotting on a treadmill.  "I only wish I looked as good as you!"

"But, are you... I mean, what about your husband?" Alex asked Kaleigh.

"He wishes I looked as good as you, too," she said, grinning.

"No, I meant, how does he feel about ... getting old?"

"He'd rather be young, of course, and me, too. But it happens to all of us."

Except it didn't.  But Alex couldn't talk about that.

"He's not a young stud himself anymore," Kaleigh said, almost laughing, then she shrugged.  "Death and taxes," she said simply, then picked up her pace as the treadmill shifted to a faster speed.

Alex did call Susan, the other member of the exclusive Immortals' Wives Club, but Susan was full of plans for a vacation she and Duncan were planning to Australia, and Alex didn't want to spoil that with questions about getting old and dying.

Because that was the problem, after all.  Not Cassandra.  Not Sara.  Death.  And the problem was in Alex herself.  That maggot of death had lain submerged and waiting all these years, slow-growing, inevitable, relentless.  Ripples had revealed its presence, its slow turning and burrowing inside, but through the years, every single time, Alex had turned her face aside and pretended it wasn't there.

She couldn't pretend anymore.  She'd realized that this summer, when she'd gone to see Tommy Maclure.  She always visited her longtime friend and co-worker whenever she went back to New York, but this time she'd had to drive to Connecticut, because Tommy was dead.  The grass was  bright green on his rectangle, the new stone still white.  "Thomas Patrick Maclure," the inscription read.  "29 September 1967--12 April 2016."  The college intern she'd first met a quarter of a century ago, the curly-headed kid with a love of historical reenacting and a storehouse of horrible puns, the friend who'd warned her against marrying Connor MacLeod but come to her wedding anyway--gone.  Forty-eight years old, burned to death in the fire from a terrorist's bomb one beautiful spring day.

Death came to others, too.  Catkin, Sara's pet cat, had died in September, and in early October, Alex's mom had written to say: "I'm sorry to tell you that Lynn Siddons died last week."  Lynn's obituary from the hometown newspaper had been enclosed, and Alex had read over and over those few sparse details that close out a life, the words shaped into odd rectangles to make room for the ads for heating oil and new brakes, the scrap of paper to be clipped out then left to yellow and fade.
 
"A 1980 graduate of Valley High," the paper read.  (Alex and Lynn had sat next to each other on the school bus nearly every day from kindergarten to twelfth grade.)  "Teacher at Franklin Elementary school, active in community affairs.  Died at home."  (Asthma attack, Alex knew, but newspapers never told you why.)  "Survived by her parents, her husband, Kevin, and their two children.  Services will be held at the Gardiner funeral home on Tuesday afternoon."
 
The paper had said nothing of Lynn's abhorrence of peanut butter, nothing of the time she and Alex had accidentally dyed their hair green right before their high school prom, nothing of Lynn's passion for making the perfect margarita or of her love for hiking and canoeing and the way she had picked up daddy-longlegs on Girl Scout camping trips and terrorized the other girls, nothing of her.  Lynn Siddons was gone, just as Tommy was gone, just as Alex herself would someday be gone.  Alex couldn't hide from that anymore.
 
And she wasn't going to hide anymore.  Not from herself, and not from Connor, either.  She was tired of hiding.
 
Alex wiped the tears from her face with her sleeve then pushed aside the winter coats and crawled out from the darkest corner of the closet in Colin's bedroom, where she'd hidden after leaving Connor in the kitchen thirty minutes ago.  She had heard Connor looking for her when he'd come upstairs, but she hadn't wanted to see him so she hadn't answered, not even when he had opened the door to Colin's bedroom and called out her name.  Alex had held her breath until he'd turned and slowly gone away, because she had desperately needed to cry, and she couldn't stand for Connor to see her that way.

Besides, Connor hadn't answered her either when she'd first come home tonight, so why should she have answered him?  

At least Connor wasn't sitting in the bedroom right now, waiting for her to emerge from her wallow in self-pity.  But she had to see him.  She had to make him see her.  She knew that now.  Alex walked to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, brushed her hair, and straightened her clothes.  Then she went downstairs to look for her husband, so that he could see her as she really was.
 



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Chapter 3 - Changes


Connor got up from his leather wingback chair in the darkened library when he finally heard Alex's footsteps on the stairs, and he waited for her in the hall.  There'd been enough of this hunting for each other tonight.  "We need to talk, Alex."
 
She stopped five steps up.  "Yes, we do," she agreed, but she made no move to come down the rest of the stairs.
 
It took Connor a moment to realize that she didn't want to get any closer to him.  Oh, Jesus Christ, he thought in dismay.  Had he scared her that much in his earlier rage?  Or hurt her that badly?  She'd have a bruise on her arm; he was sure.  Connor swallowed hard, vowing to himself that he'd make it up to her now.  "Let's go to the parlor," he said.  There was a sofa there; he could hold her in his arms while they talked and then ...
 
Alex shook her head.  "The kitchen."
 
Right back to the scene of their earlier fight, to hard straight-backed chairs and a table that would keep them apart.  Connor took one look at the stubborn set of Alex's jaw and headed that way, sitting down before she got there so he wouldn't be too intimidating.
 
She sat down across from him, and Connor suddenly realized with wry amusement that he'd taken the chair she had used earlier, so that their positions were now reversed.  Accordingly, he asked her the same question she had asked him.  "What's wrong?"
 
She started to speak then shook her head and looked away.
 
"Talk to me, Alex," he said again, but it was a plea this time, not a demand, and he offered her his hand.  She looked at it with wary suspicion, in exactly the same way Cassandra often had, and Connor swore a vicious silent oath, damning his temper and himself.  He'd never wanted to have another woman look at him that way, certainly not his own wife.  "I won't hurt you, Alex," he promised.  "Just tell me what's going on.  Why are you going to a hotel room in the middle of the day?"  And who was she meeting, and why the hell hadn't she told him, and what the fuck was going on?  Connor didn't ask those questions, and eventually his patience paid off.
 
"I never even thought about how that would look to you," she finally admitted with a rueful smile.  "I'm sorry.  I didn't think you'd find out.  I didn't want you to know."
 
Know what? Connor nearly exploded.  And why?  But he said nothing, and after a long and tremulous breath of air, Alex went on.  "I'm not seeing a lover, Connor.  I'm seeing a therapist."
 
"A therapist," Connor repeated, and at Alex's nod he shoved back his chair and stood, going over to the window to look at their garden behind the house, lit to gray and silver shadows by the street lamp on the corner.  "Why?" he demanded, swinging around.
 
Alex was still sitting at the table.  She shrugged.  "I needed someone to talk to."
 
"Not that," he said, with a chopping motion of his hand.  "Why did you keep it a secret from me?"
 
"I didn't want you to know," she said again.
 
"Why?"
 
"Because--," she began, hot and angry just like him, but then she stopped and said calmly, "Because I was embarrassed to need that much help."  She gave him half a smile, an attempt to convince him of the truth of her words.  "You know I like to do things on my own."
 
She did, that was true, but it wasn't her real reason.  He could tell.  Connor had had a lot of experience in dealing with women who wrapped up their lies in the truth, creating pretty little packages meant to convince and deceive.  Cassandra had taught him well.  "Alex," he began, then stopped himself, took a deep breath, and sat down again.  No more fighting.  No more rage.  No more hurting the woman he loved.
 
"No lies between us, right, Alex?" he said, for they had promised each other that twenty-two years ago.
 
"Right," she agreed, her voice shaky with unshed tears.
 
Connor asked the question again, giving her another chance.  "Why did you keep this a secret from me?"
 
The tears broke through, and Alex wiped them away with a quick, angry hand then gave him a truth he could believe.  "Because I didn't want you to think I was anything like her."
 
"Shit," Connor muttered, because even though Cassandra wasn't living in Scotland now, she was exploding like a bombshell smack in the middle of his life once again.  She'd spent ten years in therapy, and Connor had sometimes made less-than-kind comments about Cassandra's neediness to his wife.
 
Alex had gotten up from the table, and Connor followed her to the middle of the room, but he still didn't touch her, not yet.  "Alex, you're nothing like her.  I love you.  You're my wife, you're the mother of my children, you're everything to me.  She's an old friend, that's all.  Hell, I haven't even seen her in ..."  Connor stopped, trying to remember the last time Cassandra had stopped by.
 
"In nearly two years," Alex finished for him.  "At the New Year's Eve party.  Right?"
 
"Yeah, I guess."  She'd moved to London a month later, and then Alex had been hurt in the car accident that spring.  After that, Connor had been busy helping Alex with her physical therapy, taking her to doctor's appointments, just being there for her day and night.  Then the twins had started college, and John and Gina had had a baby, and Connor and Alex had gone on that trip to New Zealand to see Duncan and Susan ...  Connor hadn't given Cassandra a thought in months.
 
"Connor, I'm sorry," Alex said again.  "I should have told you, and I guess I shouldn't have met my therapist in a hotel.  It never even occurred to me that anyone could think--"
 
"Oh, come on, Alex," Connor said in defense of his earlier mistake.  "A hotel, in the middle of the day, once a week, far away from home?  What else could anybody think?"
 
"But she and I were--"
 
"She," Connor broke in.
 
"My therapist."
 
Connor let out a slow hiss of realization, now remembering the white-haired woman in the dark blue coat.  "I've never seen her fellow," the cleaning maid Cecile had said, and no one else had, either, because Alex's "fellow" didn't exist.  Jumping to conclusions, Connor reflected, could put you neck-deep in shit real fast.
 
"And anyway, even if my therapist were a man," Alex said, "nobody would think that, not about me."
 
Connor went still, sensing dangerous ground.  "What?"
 
She laughed, harsh and bitter, and repeated her words from before.  "Who would want me?"
 
"But--"
 
"I'm almost fifty-four," she broke in.  "No one looks at me anymore.  I have scars, stretch marks, wrinkles ..."  The bitterness seeped through the cracks in her brittle shell of control.  "I suppose I'm lucky to have all my teeth."
 
"Alex," Connor whispered, reaching for her now.  "Alex, you're beautiful."
 
"I'm getting old," she contradicted, pulling away and crossing her arms against him, rigid and angry again.  "I have arthritis.  I ache all over when I get out of bed.  I take medicine and hormone pills every morning just to keep my body functioning.  I limp.  I'll never run or ski or dance again.  I can't even walk half a mile without pain."
 
"It doesn't matter," Connor insisted.
 
"It does to me!" she snapped, and her eyes glittered with rage as she spat out, "You arrogant, selfish bastard!"
 
"What?" Connor demanded, completely floored now.  "How can you say--?"
 
"How can you say that my pain doesn't matter?  That my getting old means nothing?  That my life is nothing?"
 
"I didn't mean it that way!" he exploded then forced himself to back off.  "You know that," he said softly, reasonably.
 
"Do I?" she asked, equally--though dangerously--quiet.  "You keep telling me how you feel.  Well, what about how I feel?"
 
Connor wasn't taking any bets on her state of mind, not after tonight.  "So, talk to me," he said again, as he had said when she had first come home, but gently now.  "Tell me, Alex."  Then he added hoarsely, "Please."
 
She dropped her hands to her sides and stood before him, unmoving.  "Look at me, Connor," she ordered.  "See me as I am now, and not the woman you remember from over twenty years ago.  Look."
 
So Connor looked at his wife--really looked--for the first time in years, and he saw that she was beautiful.  Tall and slender, with a figure that any twenty-year-old would love to have (and Alex worked hard to keep it that way, Connor knew), her delicate features had been distilled to an almost ethereal beauty by the passing of time. 

But time had also wrought other changes, less kind.  The harshness of the kitchen lights drained the color from her face and left her almost sallow in a cruelly honest glare.  Her once-golden hair had dimmed years ago to a soft ash blonde.  Shadows dredged the fine lines on her face into wrinkles, and Connor knew those wrinkles would become furrows, in the years to come.  The scar on her cheek was faint but visible, a pale pink crescent of shiny flesh from hairline to jaw.  The plastic surgeon said he could fix that, in time.  There were other scars, too, Connor knew, across her abdomen from the hysterectomy, down her leg from the accident, criss-crossing and encircling her once-shattered ankle that would never fully heal.  The finely sculpted cheekbones and delicate beauty were faintly blurred now, a face seen through a mist, a painting smeared over.
 
And none of it mattered a damn.  "I see some changes," he admitted, "but it doesn't matter. You're still beautiful, Alex. You look fantastic!"

"For a woman of my age," she countered.

"For a woman of any age," he corrected.  "And no matter what you look like, no matter how old you are, you will always be beautiful to me and I will always love you," he told her firmly.  "That will never change."
 
"But I will," Alex said, her chin high with that familiar stubbornness, and her eyes hard with a new and bitter resignation.  "And I already have."
 
=====

They stopped arguing so they could eat.  "OK, you've changed," Connor had acknowledged, seeming more wary than curious.  "Want to tell me how?"
 
Alex didn't, not anymore.  She'd made him look at her, and suddenly she knew it had been a terrible mistake.  "Let's eat first," she suggested, grabbing at that.  "It's after nine. We both need food."
 
"Right," Connor agreed.  Alex made tea and soup while Connor made sandwiches.  She drank two cups of tea and relished every sip going down, but ate only half her soup and merely nibbled at her sandwich because she wasn't very hungry, and besides, she had to watch every bite she ate.  Cassandra didn't have to be as careful with her diet.  Cassandra wasn't getting old.  "You're nothing like her," Connor had said, but Alex had known that for years.  Cassandra was an Immortal.  Alex was going to die.
 
"You done eating?" Connor asked and at Alex's nod, he picked up her plate and her bowl.
 
"I'm going to take a shower," Alex told him then made her slow and limping way upstairs.  "You're nothing like her," Connor had said, and Alex knew it was true.  Cassandra wasn't defective.  Cassandra didn't limp, and she would never have scars.  She would never have children, but then Alex couldn't either anymore.  Under the warm water of the shower, she traced one hand along her scar, remembering years ago when she had guided Connor's hands there so that he could feel the life she carried within.  He had smiled then, in awe and amazement, and when the twins had been born, she had even glimpsed the shimmer of tears in his eyes.
 
No life now, only that maggot of death within, eating through to the surface, day by day.
 
"You are so morbid," Alex said to her reflection in the mirror, but it stared back at her, the face bone-white, the eyes dark-rimmed and shadowed from tears, the wet gray hair plastered flat to the skull.  She looked half-dead right now.
 
Connor mustn't see her this way, not like this.  He mustn't know.  She locked the bathroom door against him, then blow-dried her hair and got out her makeup, even though it was right before bed.  Just a touch, the barest hint.  She'd gotten good at hiding this sort of thing.  A little eye-shadow, some foundation and some powder, but no mascara or lipstick--that would smear.  Alex put away the makeup, wiped down the counter, and flushed the tissue paper with the smear of makeup down the toilet.  She'd learned how to hide evidence, too.
 
"Ready?" she said to her reflection, and it smiled back at her, foolishly hopeful, the wrinkles creasing deeper, an old woman's face with a young woman's dreams.  Alex slammed her hand into that face, but the glass shuddered and held firm, and Alex had only managed to hurt her palm.  The face was still there, and it was still hers.  The body was still hers, too: the breasts with their once-proud curves starting to flatten and hang; the skin of her neck and upper chest mottled from sun and wind, and all her skin looser now, a slick layer of softness everywhere, so that fingers sank into her flesh, no matter how much she exercised.  Collagen loss, they said.  Change in elasticity.
 
Growing old.
 
Alex put her pajamas on, the flannel kind that covered everything.  For warmth, she told herself, but the lace teddies had lain untouched in her dresser all summer long.  She gritted her teeth, unlocked the bathroom door, and went to join her husband in bed.  He opened his arms to her and Alex went to him, her head pillowed on his shoulder, her hand holding his.  They lay still for a few moments, keeping each other warm.  "How have you changed, Alex?" Connor asked softly, being patient, kind, receptive, willing to listen to her feelings ... a real sensitive new-age kind of guy.
 
I'm older, Alex thought but didn't say, because she didn't want him to realize that, not anymore.  Connor was older, too, but on him it didn't show.  I'm angry, she thought, but she wasn't sure why, and it seemed too hard to try to figure it out now.  She was frightened, but she couldn't say of what, and she was tired, but that was part of getting old, and right now, Alex wanted to feel young, the way she used to be.  "It can wait," Alex said and turned off the light, then reached out to him, a careful wondering touch along his arm.  They always made love after they fought, and he was so beautiful, this man of hers.
 
"I love you," he told her, in that husky voice that sent shivers down her spine, and his warm fingers were feather-light against her skin.
 
"I love you, too," she answered, and she did.  His kisses followed a path from the corner of her mouth to the line of her jaw, and Alex turned her face away, not wanting him to notice the scar on her cheek, not now.
 
"Alex?" Connor asked, his hands and body going still.  "Do you ...?"
 
"Yes," she answered, and that was true, too, more than it had ever been.  But then she wondered: did he really want her?  Was his response just from habit, and not from real desire?  Or, even worse, from a sense of duty?  She'd made him look at her earlier tonight, really look at her, and he couldn't have liked what he'd seen.  Not that he'd say that, of course, but ...
 
"If you want to," she said, the words cautious and controlled.
 
Connor paused then pulled the blankets up over her shoulders.  "It's been a long day, Alex.  We're both tired."
 
"Connor, I--"
 
"Shhh," he whispered, his arms going around her in a comforting--but passionless--embrace.  "It can wait.  Let's go to sleep."
 
She didn't dare protest, didn't want to actually hear him say the words she long had feared.  His breathing soon grew regular, his arm relaxed.  Alex lay in the darkness, her tears silent and unchecked.  Connor had just been trying to be kind, to convince her that she was still attractive. He didn't really want her.  Oh, he loved her, she didn't doubt that, but he'd obviously been forcing himself to take her to bed for years, maybe more.
 
She wanted him--oh God! how she wanted him--but how could she possibly expect him to want her?

=====

Connor woke in the middle of the night as he always did, a habit from his boyhood days, when the fire needed to be stoked or the animals tended to.  He padded silently to the bathroom, got a drink and took a leak, then returned to bed, curling up against Alex's back so they lay like two spoons close together in a drawer.
 
She murmured in her sleep and shifted against him.  He held her closer, breathing in the clean familiar fragrance of her hair and wondering how he could have been so blind.  No, not blind, he realized, just looking in the wrong direction.  Ever since the accident, he'd taken care to reassure her about her injuries, but he'd forgotten about her age.
 
He shouldn't have; he'd seen this self-doubt in women before.  "How can you want me when I'm so old?" Anne had said to him.  She had been only forty-three, but she had thought him to be no more than twenty-five.  Heather had been about Alex's age when she had cut off her hair, then picked out each and every gray strand so she could give him the pure gold.  "I want you to remember me as I used to be, Connor," she'd said as she'd handed him the braided remains.  "Not as I am now.  Not as I will be."
 
Men often judged women on their youth and beauty, but women were the harshest judges of all, especially on themselves.  It had taken time and perseverance, but Connor had convinced both Heather and Anne that he did love them, that he did want them--both emotionally and physically--no matter what their age.
 
Connor was going to convince Alex, too.  She just needed more reassurance, and he would give that to her in the morning, and every single day from now on.  Not with sex, not right away.  She obviously wasn't in the mood.  "Yes, if you want to," she'd said, and Connor had realized that she didn't want to.  Oh, she'd said yes because she loved him, because it was their tradition after a fight, but he wanted her to want him, and she didn't, not tonight, and not for the last few months.  Connor understood that now.  When Cassandra had been in therapy, she hadn't wanted anyone to touch her at all, not for years.  Thank God Alex's problems weren't as serious.  He would be patient and understanding, and they would talk more in the morning, and eventually, things would be fine.  He kissed the top of Alex's head, told her, "I love you," and went back to sleep.
 
~~~~~
 
When Connor woke at dawn, Alex was gone.  "I went for a walk," she told him on the phone, when he finally tracked her down at work.
 
"In the dark?"
 
"The sun was coming up.  I needed to get outside, Connor."
 
"Yeah."  He paced between the window and the wall.  "How about I take you out to lunch today?"
 
"Connor ... I'm really busy here.  We're leaving tomorrow for the dig, I've got a million things to do, and the travel permits for two of the interns haven't come yet, and ..."
 
"Right."  Connor knew how much Alex prided herself on doing a good job.  He couldn't kick that part of her self-esteem away from her, too.  "I'll make you dinner tonight then.  Thai food, the way you like it--really hot."
 
The silence lasted for a count of five.  "I might be late," Alex said.
 
"I'll keep it warm in the oven."
 
"Really late."
 
"What time?"
 
Silence, for a count of three.  "I don't know."  Someone shouted for Dr. Johnson in the background, and Alex said, "I'm sorry, Connor.  I have to go."
 
"I love you," Connor said, but he was talking to a dead phone.
 
Alex got home at ten-thirty that evening, ate a few bites and told him it was wonderful, then apologized for being too tired to eat.  They went to bed, where she turned down his offer of a massage, rolled over on her side, and promptly went to sleep.  In the morning she was out of bed and dressed by 5:45.  "Coffee?" she suggested.
 
Connor nodded, then said to hell with shaving, wiped his face clean, and followed her downstairs.  "Alex--"
 
"Just a minute," she called, punching buttons on the microwave oven to warm up a muffin.  He poured them both coffee and handed her a mug.  "Thanks," she said and got out the eggs.
 
Connor walked over and took the carton out of her hands.  "We need to talk, Alex."
 
"And I need to eat, Connor," she told him and took the eggs back.  "I'm starving, and I have to leave by 6:15."
 
Twenty-three minutes she'd given him.  Twenty-three minutes to find out how she'd changed, to convince her that appearance didn't matter to him, to heal the hurts of the day before.
 
Alex was already busy scrambling eggs.  "You want some?"
 
"Yeah."  Connor set the table, and they sat down to eat at 6:02.  "I wish we had more time," he told her.
 
Alex glanced up, smiled, and took another bite of her eggs before she said, "So do I."
 
"I could join you at--"
 
"No," she said immediately.  "No.  Please, Connor, don't.  I don't think that will help.  I'm going to be busy with work and--"
 
"--and I'll get in the way," Connor finished, and Alex said nothing to that.  Connor pushed his plate aside and stared at her across the table, waiting.
 
She put her mug down.  "Connor, I know this morning is bad timing for us, but I've been looking forward to this dig for over a year.  I've been preparing for it for months.  It's an important dig, and I'm in charge, and I want to do a good job."
 
"I know," he said evenly.  "But maybe you can tell me why I'm getting the feeling that if you weren't flying to Spain today, you'd be looking for some other reason to leave."
 
She closed her eyes briefly and sighed.  "Connor ... I know we have more to talk about, and we will, I promise.  I'm not done with my therapy, either.  But I need to sort things out, and I think maybe this separation will actually be good for us.  I need time to myself."
 
"On a dig with fifty other people, where you're going to be insanely busy because you're in charge, you're going to find time for yourself," he said, a sarcastic snipe aimed straight at that lie.
 
"All right," Alex said coolly, an almost hostile challenge in her eyes, as she gave him the truth he wanted with all the bluntness of an atomic bomb.  "I need time away from you."
 
"Damn it, Alex! You can't--"
 
She was already on her feet.  "I have to leave.  I'm sorry, Connor.  I didn't want it to be this way, not this morning, not right before I go."
 
Neither had he.
 
"Hey, MacLeod," she said softly, and Connor looked up to see her standing by his chair, her eyes filled with tears.  "I love you, Connor."
 
"I was beginning to wonder."
 
"Don't," she said firmly and leaned over to kiss him the same way.  "Don't ever wonder about that.  I love you.  I just ... need some time," she said again.  "I'll write to you, everyday."
 
"Phone calls?"
 
"No," she said softly.  "Not now.  Not yet.  Please don't push me, OK?"
 
A woman's prerogative, Connor reminded himself grimly.  They got to choose, which meant men got to pursue, but not hound.  "OK," he finally agreed then added a reminder of what she'd chosen years before, standing to take her in his arms and hold her close.  After a moment, she relaxed against him and hugged him, too.  "I love you, Mrs. MacLeod," he told her, and kissed her finger just above her wedding ring.
 
"I love you, too, Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod."  She smiled and kissed him again, then wiped away her tears, grabbed her muffin, and was out the door.
 
Connor went straight to her office upstairs.  It took him a while to find what he wanted--Alex wasn't the neatest of people on the best of days--but eventually he got the records he was looking for: weekly payments over the last month and a half, made out to one Jennifer Corans, presumably the white-haired therapist of the dark blue coat. 

He called his detective agency and set them on her trail, because Connor wanted to know just what kind of person Alex had brought into their marriage--into their bed--and he needed to know what Alex had told the therapist about them ... and about him.  Immortality wasn't a secret that could be shared.  And he was damned curious to know what this Corans woman had been telling his wife. Connor wanted answers, and he wanted them now.

He went downstairs, cleaned up from breakfast, and threw the Thai food away.
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Chapter 4 - Digging


===== FORT WILLIAM, SCOTLAND =====

The ringing of the doorbell downstairs awakened Jennifer from a light doze.  On the TV screen in the corner of the bedroom, Dr. Who and his lovely assistant were busy repairing the Tardis once more.  Tom was sound asleep, snoring slightly, his head nodding on his chest, a single white strand of hair crossing the bald spot at his crown.  This was his favorite show, but he'd fallen asleep again.  He slept a lot these days, but that was less worry than when he was awake, when she was never quite sure what he would do, what with his troubles these last few years.

Miriam's quick footsteps sounded in the hallway below, and then came her brisk voice followed by a man's deeper tones.  Jennifer carefully eased her hand from Tom's and stood.  The furnace man had said he'd stop by today, to do a check before winter came.  She left the room and met Miriam at the bottom of the stairs.  "He's waiting in the front room, Mom," Miriam said.

"Thank you," Jennifer said.  "I left the telly on; your father should be fine, but ..."

"Don't worry, Mom.  I locked the front door.  We don't want him wandering again, do we?"

"No," Jennifer replied.  They'd spent six hours searching for him on a dark, rainy night, only to find Tom in a nearby park, soaked through and shivering.  He'd been searching for Pansy, their Cocker Spaniel who had died three years ago.  "Thank you," Jennifer told Miriam again, with a grateful smile and a hug.  "I'm so glad you moved back home, you and Tommy.  I don't know what I'd do without you."

Miriam shrugged but smiled, too.  "Once Ed moved out ..."  She shrugged again.  "I'm glad I'm here, too.  Tommy doesn't miss his dad so much since he has his grandparents now."  She patted Jennifer on the shoulder then said, "I'll go start lunch," and disappeared into the kitchen.

Jennifer glanced at herself in the mirror hanging in the hall, fluffed her curls--all white now, she'd given up dyeing them years ago--and straightened her blouse, then went to talk to the furnace man about what needed to be done.  He was looking at the family photographs on the wall, and he turned immediately when she entered the room.  Jennifer froze one step from the door, because it wasn't the furnace man.  It was Connor MacLeod, the Immortal.

A pair of wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, and his unlined face was watchful under short gray hair.  The glasses, Jennifer knew, were unnecessary, the hair color artificial.  Alex had mentioned her husband's attempts to "age."  She'd also mentioned her own attempts to stop aging.

Both attempts had failed.

"Jennifer Corans?" Connor asked.

Jennifer knew instantly by his use of her professional name instead of her married name that Connor MacLeod had come to see her, and not Tom.  Damn.  She didn't want to talk to Connor MacLeod, not at her home.  But was this about his former lover Cassandra, or was this about his current wife, Alex?  Maybe Cassandra was dead, or maybe something else was wrong.  Jennifer needed to find out more.  "Yes," she answered, then waited expectantly for him to give her his name and let her know why he'd come.

"I'm Connor MacLeod," he said, and she nodded encouragingly, but he stopped talking to look her up and down, his eyes narrowing slightly.  Jennifer forced herself not to move under that stare.  She took the opportunity to look him over, noting his worn blue jeans and the brightly patterned wool sweater in blues and teals and grays, probably hand-woven by the look of it, and expensive, no doubt.  A dark gray coat lay over his left arm.  Gray leather hiking boots, easy on the feet and impervious to the wet, completed his outfit.

Alex had explained about the Game (Cassandra, somehow, had not seen fit to mention it, not once in ten years' time), and so Jennifer knew that Connor's clothes had been chosen for comfort and ease of movement, an important consideration when he might have to fight for his life at any time.  But where, Jennifer wondered, did he keep his sword?  Cassandra hadn't carried one; she depended on her hypnotic powers of the Voice for protection (and the Voice was another little detail that Cassandra had never mentioned to Jennifer, and Jennifer knew why: Cassandra had undoubtedly used the Voice on her, at least one time, maybe more).  Alex had said Connor took his sword everywhere, all the time.  Was it in his coat?  Obviously not in his jeans.

He was still staring at her, his piercing eyes a flat gun-metal gray.  Cassandra had seen fit to mention his eyes, often, and now Jennifer knew why.

"I know you," he said slowly.  "We've met."

Jennifer never lied.  "Yes, we have," she agreed then walked past him and seated herself in the largest--and most imposing--chair in the room.  Tom usually sat in this chair.  "Please, sit down," she invited Connor, but he only half-sat, half-leaned on the arm of the upholstered chair in the corner, her own usual seat. 

"It was on New Year's Eve of 2012, at the party at your home," Jennifer told him.  "You had met my husband, Tom MacDonald, at the sheep trials that year, and you invited Tom and me to your party."  Connor still looked unconvinced, and she added helpfully, "I wore a blue dress.  We didn't stay very long."  She'd left within minutes of seeing Cassandra at the party and realizing just which of the thousands of "Connor MacLeods" in Scotland her husband had met.  It had been awkward, but Jennifer couldn't deny it had also been fascinating, to finally see the people--and the Immortals--she'd heard about for so long.

Connor nodded as the memory clicked, and he slid all the way into the chair, sitting down, but not--she noted wryly--relaxing.  He had laid his coat carefully on the arm of the chair, and was sitting poised on the edge of the seat, leaning forward with his weight partially on his feet, looking intense, focused, and ready for … well, for anything.

He was making it hard for Jennifer to relax, too.  Although, she reasoned, Connor might not even realize she was finding him unnerving.  And, to be fair, if Cassandra hadn't described (in some detail) what Connor was capable of, Jennifer wouldn't have been so wary. Connor hadn't actually done anything beyond radiate impatient curiosity and continue to stare at her.

"Is that when you met my wife?" Connor demanded.  "At the party?"

And be abysmally rude.  "Yes, I met Alex at the party," Jennifer answered, laying a slight emphasis on Alex's name.  Alex was more than just "his wife."  Apparently, Alex wasn't the only one to have forgotten that.

"You must have made quite an impression on her," Connor said, leaning forward with his elbows braced on his knees.  "She found you four years later and asked you to be her therapist.  She even convinced you to come out of retirement, and she's been paying you very well."

Indeed she had.  "I'll pay you twice your normal rate," Alex had said on the phone two months ago.

"I'm not seeing clients anymore, Mrs. MacLeod," Jennifer had replied.

"Three times."

"I'm retired," Jennifer had insisted, leaning back in the kitchen chair, trying to ignore the bills covering the table.

"Four times."

Jennifer had shaken her head resolutely.  She didn't need anybody else's problems, not anymore.  "I can recommend another therapist."

"One who knows about immortality?" had come the quick reply, and Jennifer had closed her eyes as she sighed.  Not that again.  Not now.  But, "Please," the desperate voice on the other end of the line had said, and Jennifer hadn't wanted to just abandon this woman, Cassandra's friend.

Jennifer had glanced at the number and address displayed on the phone screen.  "Mrs. MacLeod, I don't even live in Edinburgh."

"We can meet in Stirling," Alex MacLeod had replied quickly, obviously having thought this out.  "I'll buy you a train ticket and pay you the quadruple rate for your travel time as well."

Six hours worth of quadruple pay?  "I don't have an office," Jennifer had objected, but it was a token protest, and both of them know it.

"I'll rent us a hotel room close to the train station," Alex had said briskly.  "Next Wednesday, noon?"

"But--"

"I'll buy us lunch."

"I--"

"I'll mail you the check and the ticket today," Alex had concluded, and so it was done.  The money had helped quite a bit, if not quite enough, what with Tom the way he was and needing to be watched all the time, and heating costs up again and food so expensive now ...

Connor's gaze flicked over the comfortable, yet shabby, sitting room, then went straight back to Jennifer.  "Why did she want you?"

"Mr. MacLeod, I--"

"Cassandra," Connor broke in, the name sounding like a curse.  He nodded slowly, putting it together.  "You were Cassandra's therapist, and Alex wanted to talk about immortality."  He stood abruptly and went to the window, staring at the row of time-darkened brick houses across the street, then turned to face her.  "Cassandra didn't talk to me much about her time with you," he explained, and Jennifer supposed she shouldn't be surprised.  Cassandra had always been good at keeping secrets.  She still was.  Too good.

"She never told me your name," Connor added, and then he smiled to himself, a grim baring of teeth.  "But I know she told you mine."

"Mr. MacLeod," Jennifer began again, "you know I can't discuss this with you."

Connor resumed his ready-for-anything stance on the chair.  "What have you been telling my wife?"

"I can't discuss that with you, either."

Connor ignored her and kept right on going.  "Did you tell Alex to leave me?"

Of course she hadn't.  That was Alex's decision, and Alex's choice.  But Jennifer absolutely would not discuss Alex's treatment with anybody, not even her husband.  Especially not her husband.  Jennifer considered her options.  Tell Connor to get out of her house?  He was, she knew, a stubborn man, and he wasn't going to leave easily.  Threaten to call the police?  As if that would frighten him.  Ignore him completely?  Frustration led easily to violence.  Well, she'd suggested to Alex--several times--that Connor come along for a joint counseling session.  Alex hadn't been ready for that, but maybe Jennifer could turn this visit into a session for Connor.  He obviously had some issues to work through, and it might make things easier for Alex.

"What makes you think Alex wants to leave you, Mr. MacLeod?" Jennifer asked, turning the question back to him.

"Because she's gone!" he burst out, and he was up off his chair, pacing.

"When?" Jennifer asked, careful not to show any of her surprise.  Alex had given no hints of taking such a drastic step.

"Friday morning."  He turned from the window to the wall and back again.

"But ... wasn't she supposed to leave this Friday?" Jennifer asked.  "To Spain?"

"Yes," he admitted.  "But--"  Connor came back to his chair and sat down.  "The way she left--"  He took off his glasses and rubbed his hand on his forehead, his eyes vulnerable, bewildered ... hurt.  Jennifer ignored her impulse to give him a hug.  "She said she'd changed," Connor said, "but she wouldn't tell me how, or why.  She wouldn't talk at all.  She just left."  He leaned forward, almost boyish in his earnest plea.  "What's going on?"

"Mr. MacLeod," Jennifer began, but she couldn't divulge anything Alex had told her.  "I don't even know who I am anymore," Alex had said last week, twisting a handkerchief around her fingers.  "I always used to look down on women who worried about their hair, their makeup, their weight ... what a waste of time, I thought.  How shallow.  How meaningless.  I was so arrogant, because  I was beautiful; I didn't have to worry.  And now ... I'm just like them.  That's all I think about.  But it doesn't help.  None of it helps.  Not the skin creams, not the facials, not exercise or proper diet, not staying out of the sun ... I can't stop time, no matter how hard I try."  She'd folded the handkerchief into a precise square then looked up, her words coming slowly, inexorably: "I've tried so hard, and for so long, and it makes no difference.  I'm going to lose."

Alex, like Jennifer, was going to die.  That was certain, but dying didn't necessarily have to mean losing.  Life wasn't a game; it was a journey with a beginning and an end.  Jennifer had been hoping to help Alex see that, but Alex had some other issues to work through, and they hadn't gotten that far yet.  "You've been married before," Jennifer said to Connor.

"Twice."

"And with them…?"

He closed his eyes for a second, more a wince of pain than a blink.  "Yeah," he muttered, sliding both hands down his thighs.  Then he stared at her again, direct … accusing.  "But Heather never ran."

Jennifer dredged up what she knew of Heather: Connor's first wife; blonde, beautiful, good-natured; raped by an Immortal enemy; married for fifty years … and lived her life in a hut, far away from curious stares.  Also, Connor had been much younger then, and Heather had barely known Cassandra at all.  "What do you think Alex is running from, Mr. MacLeod?"

"Me."  The word was harsh with bluntness, raw with more pain.

Jennifer had to nod, because Connor was right.  But not totally.  "And?"

"Herself."

Right again.  But again, not totally.  "Can you think of anything else she might be running from?"

Connor's eyes narrowed this time as he started thinking that through, but Jennifer never got his answer, because footsteps on the stairs brought Connor to his feet.  Tom stopped in the doorway, his tall frame stooped now, slighter, not nearly touching the top or the sides of the doorframe the way he used to do.  "Jenny?" he said, peering in.

"Yes, Tom, I'm here," Jennifer said, going to take his hand.

"I heard voices.  Are the girls home from school yet?"

"Miriam's home, Tom," she said, not telling him in front of Connor that Miriam and Dorcas had finished with school years before.  "She's making our lunch.  Tommy won't be home until four."

"Who's this then?"

"It's Connor MacLeod, come for a visit.  You met him at a sheepdog trial, four years ago," Jennifer reminded him, and he nodded, but she knew it wouldn't last.  Tom didn't remember what he'd had for breakfast or where the house was.  Once, for a horrible moment last week, he hadn't even remembered her.

Connor came over, his hand outstretched.  Somewhere in the last few moments, he'd put his glasses back on.  "Tom.  Good to see you again."

Tom shook Connor's hand firmly.  "Connor.  Still keeping sheep?"

"A few.  Our son Colin is planning on taking over the farm in a few years.  He's in veterinary school now."

Tom nodded, and Jennifer said quickly, hoping to get him out of the room, "Tom, why don't you go see how Miriam is in the kitchen?"

He turned to her, puzzled, and Jennifer knew with dismay that she hadn't been quick enough.  "Are the girls home from school?" he asked in surprise, as he asked three and four times every day.

Connor immediately looked from him to her, and she saw it, there in Connor's eyes, that look she'd seen before, that flare of confusion followed by understanding and then pity as the truth of Tom's condition sank home.  But always before, except in the very young, the pity had been tinged with empathy and fear, because even with the drugs they kept saying were "almost ready", most people were haunted by the knowledge that "Someday, that might happen to me."

But it could never happen to Connor MacLeod, and he had no reason to fear.  Jennifer didn't want his understanding or his pity.  She didn't want him in her home, calculating the worth of their small shabby house, bringing her his problems, looking at the fading remnants of her and Tom's life, and feeling pity for the pair of aged mortals who were going to die.

Jennifer took a deep breath to rid herself of the sudden, unexpected rage.  No wonder Alex was having problems.  "Miriam!" Jennifer called as she gave Tom a gentle push to move him down the hall.

The swinging door opened, and Miriam appeared with a dish towel in her hand.  "Oh, lor, I'm sorry, Mom.  I didn't hear him come down the stairs."  She linked her arm through her father's and led him into the kitchen, saying, "Come on, then.  We'll make toast and cheese."  Tom mumbled something as they disappeared behind the swinging door.

Jennifer closed her eyes as she breathed out slowly and said a quick and silent prayer.  When she opened them again, Connor had his coat on and was already standing near the door.  "I'm sorry to have troubled you, Mrs. MacDonald," he said.

Jennifer nodded curtly as she took out her key and unlocked the door.  Her troubles didn't come from him, and she didn't need the sympathy of an Immortal to help her face death.

But he needed her.  And so did Alex.  Jennifer let out another slow breath before she said, "Mr. MacLeod, if you wish, we can talk another time."  Another place.

He was already shaking his head.  "You won't talk to me about Alex, and I don't need therapy."  His lip curled in quiet irony.  "Not now, anyway.  I just needed to know who Alex had been talking to--and what you'd been telling her."

Which was exactly what she couldn't share.  "I'm sorry that I can't be more helpful."

He shrugged that away.  "You've given me enough to know you're good at what you do.  Hell," he said with a sudden grin, "you managed to fix Cassandra.  You must be incredible."

Jennifer was smiling even as she said, "It's not that--"

"--that simple," he broke in.  "I know."  He took his time buttoning his coat, and finally lifted his head to ask, "Do you think Alex will come back?"

Jennifer gave him the only possible answer.  "I don't know, Mr. MacLeod."  He nodded once and reached for the doorknob, and Jennifer added quickly, "I do know she loves you, and it seems she feels she needs some time alone right now."

"That's exactly what she said."  His smile was half-amused, half-sad.  "I guess I should listen to her."

"That's always a good idea," Jennifer agreed, and Connor MacLeod nodded as he opened the door.



===== EDINBURGH =====
 
The house was empty when Connor returned.  "Get used to it, MacLeod," he muttered, and he got himself a beer and went to sit in the library and stare out the window at the garden.  The chrysanthemums were still in bloom, but they wouldn't last much longer.  Frost was forecast for tonight; winter would be here soon.  Winter was coming earlier every year.  He should mulch the beds before he left for Denver on Friday.  And maybe he should put in some bulbs: snowdrops under the apple tree, more crocus along the garden path--purple, white, or yellow?  Alex had always liked spring flowers the best.
 
Purple crocus, he decided, and he finished his beer and went to the garden store.



===== SPAIN =====

"Hey, Dr. Johnson, look at this!" Sally called, and Alex picked her way through the irregular checkerboard of one-meter squares laid out on the top of the hill.  Most of the squares were still untouched grass, but some showed dirt.  Sally and Tim's square had already been excavated down past the plow zone.  "Gold," Sally announced with satisfaction, leaning forward to brush away the soil from a small gleaming circle.

Alex set her glasses more firmly on the bridge of her nose and leaned forward to see.  "Pretty," she commented.  "Even if it isn't what we're looking for."  Arabic inscriptions curled gracefully around the edge of the coin.

"Only fifteen hundred more years of dirt to go!" Tim said cheerfully. "The Celts are a long way down yet."  His eyes were shielded from the bright sun by dark glasses, and he'd wrapped a blue bandana around his head to protect his long hair from the wind and keep out the worst of the dust.

Alex smiled, sharing their enthusiasm.  The early days of a dig were usually good days, when people were still fresh and every square still held possibilities. The end was good, too, as long as the site had been well-chosen and people had the chance to get excited digging up finds.  It was the middle days that were the challenge, when the digging seemed endless, the food had gotten monotonous, the weather inevitably turned bad, and people started to rearrange tent assignments in the never-ending soap opera of "who's sleeping with who."

At least at this dig, Alex didn't have to try to fit in with the crowd that Connor usually seemed to end up with and then pretend she was interested in their music or had seen the latest show.  She didn't have to watch Connor decline invitations to the beds of cheerful young interns.  She didn't have to endure the surprised looks and polite absence of comments from colleagues whenever she introduced a younger-looking man as her husband.  She didn't have to overhear the speculation about how she had managed to convince him to marry her and--even juicier--how she managed to keep him.

She could just be who she was: Dr. Alexandra Johnson, one of the senior archeologists at the dig.  One of the older people at the dig.  She could leave the heavier work to the younger and stronger crowd, and nobody thought it odd.  She could go to bed early instead of staying up drinking or going into town, and that was just fine.  She didn't even have to bother to dye her hair.

Tim had gone back to screening the dirt in the sieve, and Sally carefully lifted the coin from the earth and bagged it.  Alex tucked her glasses into her shirt pocket and went down the hill to the dining tent, looking forward to getting out of the sun and the wind and having a nice cup of tea while she read the reports from yesterday.  Later, after dinner and tonight's staff meeting, she'd send Connor an email and tell him about her day.

It wasn't much, and she knew it wasn't what he wanted, but it was all she had to give him right now.  Maybe later...

Or maybe not.

Alex didn't know.
Back to top

Chapter 5 - Advent


===== EDINBURGH =====

The house was still empty when Connor got back from his visit with John and Gina and little Davey on the last day of November, and everything in the garden was wilted and dead.  Time to redo the basement apartment.  Connor had been meaning to replace the paneling and the carpeting down there for years.  He unpacked his things, took a quick shower, and went shopping for groceries and supplies.

His cell phone buzzed in the evening on the fourth of December, and Connor immediately flicked the unit on.  "Connor!" came the cheerful hail, but it wasn't the voice Connor had been hoping to hear.  He swallowed his disappointment with the last of his whisky (a celebratory drink after ripping out the carpet) and greeted his kinsman.  "Duncan."

"How are things?"

"So-so," Connor answered.  "You?"

"Can't complain.  Alex still in Spain?"

"Yeah," Connor replied, trying to keep the word simple and uninflected.

"Must be some dig," Duncan surmised, and Connor didn't bother to correct him.  The dig was like most other digs--cold and muddy some days, brutally hot and dusty on others, punctuated occasionally by the bizarre joy of archeologists whenever they found something minutely more interesting than a potshard, or so Connor gathered from Alex's e-mails.  She hadn't called or written him a real letter once.  Nothing but the short daily posts that said nothing much--cheery details about the archeological dig, comments about the people she was working with, the occasional joke--bland, empty meaningless e-mails she could have sent to a hundred people on a mailing list, with absolutely nothing real in them at all.

Connor's replies to her e-mails had been equally short and equally bland, and he hadn't tried to call her, as she had asked right before she'd left him fifty-two days ago.  "Please, don't push me," she'd said.

So he hadn't, but by God! it wasn't easy.  Especially today, on her birthday.  He'd sent her a present last week, and she'd written to tell him that she planned on opening it today.  He wanted to know if she'd liked it.  He wanted to hear her voice again.  He wanted her home.

"She'll be home soon, right?" Duncan asked next.

"Hard to tell," Connor replied, because he had to say something, and he didn't want to lie.

"Look, about Christmas ..."

"I'll let you know," Connor answered.  After he'd finished the call with Duncan, he poured himself another drink and went to check his email.  A letter from Alex was waiting.  "The necklace is just beautiful," she'd written.  "It's gorgeous.  Thank you, Connor.  And I'll bet the black opal is a perfect match to those earrings you gave me on the 119th anniversary of snooker."

She'd win that bet.  Connor had gone to seven different jewelers, looking for just the right stone.  Good thing she'd left her earrings at home for comparison.

Her letter had more exclamations of how pretty it was, and she'd written something about the other women in camp liking it, too, but there was nothing about looking forward to having him put it on her--or about having him take it off.  That was how Alex usually--

That was how Alex used to let him know she was pleased.

But she wasn't interested in sex now, Connor reminded himself.  Maybe that's all it was.

Or maybe she'd thought he was pushing her for more than she was ready to give. Connor cursed and tossed back his drink.  Maybe he should have just gotten her a book.

He poured himself a third whisky before he began his reply.  "I'm glad you like it," he wrote.  "And you're right about the stone, so you win the bet.  Let me know what kind of winnings you want to claim."  He leaned back in his chair, wondering if he should leave that last sentence in.  Usually the winner of their bets claimed a special favor in bed.

The hell with it.  They were still married, and married people slept together, and he'd had enough of these damned games.  He finished with "Happy birthday, Alex," and he added "I love you" before he typed his name.  Then he added, "P.S. Got plans for the holidays?" Casually, as he might say to an acquaintance he saw once or twice a year.

It was almost twenty-six hours before he got a reply.  "I'll be back for Christmas," Alex promised, and Connor closed his eyes in relief and joy.  She was coming home.  She'd just needed some time, as she'd said.  Alex was coming home.

"I'll be in Edinburgh on the twenty-second," the e-mail went on.  "But I'd like it to be just you and me.  Can we tell Colin and Sara they're on their own this year?"

"Sure," Connor typed immediately.  "They're almost twenty.  We don't have to play Santa Claus anymore."  Not for the twins, anyway.  Connor sent the message and went out shopping for Alex right away, braving the holiday crowds.

After the basement was finished, he decorated the house, and the week before Christmas he made cookies, singing along with the Christmas carols on the radio.  He saved decorating the tree, as always, for their ceremonial Christmas Eve "draping of the tinsel."

Alex was coming home.

=====

"Here we are," the taxi driver announced, and Alex roused herself from a light doze to look at the house, smeared gray by rain and a dirty window.  It still looked pretty, though, with a green wreath wrapped with a red ribbon on the door, and more greenery woven into the decorative iron fencing along the sidewalk. The windows were dark, so it looked like Connor wasn't home, but then, she'd told him she'd be arriving at five, and it was only three in the afternoon.  This morning, after going to two stores and dealing with the crowds, she'd decided to cut short her planned shopping expedition in London and come straight to Edinburgh.  There were still three more days until Christmas; she could finish her shopping here.

"This is your house, isn't it?" the driver asked.  "This is where you live?"

Alex shook herself fully awake and started to move.  "Yes.  Yes, of course."  She opened her purse and paid him, then unbuckled her seatbelt and fumbled with an umbrella while he unloaded her bags.

"You need help with these?" he asked. "Getting up the stairs?"

"Yes, thank you," she said and handed him a generous tip, but after he left with a wave and a "Happy Christmas!" she found herself standing next to her bags in the pouring rain and wondering where she'd left her house keys.  She'd planned on putting them in her purse at the rail station, but somehow, she'd forgotten and now she had to dig them out of her travel bag. The wind gusted, the rain came harder, and the umbrella just got in the way.

By the time Alex found her keys and got the door open and the bags inside, she was dripping wet and cold.  She was also exhausted; it had rained every day during the last week of the dig, and packing out had been a mess. Yesterday, she'd overslept and almost missed her train to Madrid, then the plane to London had been delayed, and she hadn't slept well in the hotel last night. She hadn't slept on the train to Edinburgh, either, just dozed a little in the taxi.

Coffee, she decided.  Hot, sweet, and strong.  "Connor?" she called out as she walked down the hall into the kitchen, but as she'd expected there was no answer, only that quiet sense of waiting a house gets when no one is home.  Truly quiet now--Connor had written to tell her that Callie, Colin's calico cat, had passed away ten days ago at the venerable age of thirteen.  It was for the best, Alex supposed.  Callie had been lonely since Catkin had died two months ago. But it was odd to have a house with no pets at all.

The kitchen smelled of pungent freshness and crisp sweetness: cut evergreens and Christmas cookies.  Newly baked bread and an apple pie sat on the counter.  Connor had been busy.

While the coffee was brewing, Alex wandered through the downstairs, looking at the Christmas cards neatly arranged on the table in the hall, the undecorated tree in the parlour, the greenery and fruit display on the dining room table.  The faded paper Santa Claus and snowman that Sara and Colin had made sixteen years ago occupied their customary place of honor on top of the piano. Alex set Connor's gifts under the Christmas tree then, alerted by the enticing aroma, went toward the kitchen for her coffee.

She stopped dead in the library, staring at a face in the mirror. The eyes were bruised with exhaustion, and the dirty-looking white hair was a damp straggle of lank strands. Wrinkles lay deeply etched and starkly obvious against too-pale skin.  It was the face of an old, tired woman.

It was her face.  It was the face of Death, waiting.

She didn't like looking this way, but she could bear it.  What she couldn't bear was to have Connor see her looking this way, too.

She couldn't do this at all.

=====

Alex called around noon on Christmas Day.  Connor walked into the kitchen to listen, then picked up the receiver just before the phone finished recording her message.  "Hey," he started, the word rougher than he wanted.  He cleared his throat, but he ended right where he'd begun, with that single sound.

"Hey," Alex said back, and coming from her, the word was softer and smoother ... a little amused, and more than a little sad.  "Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas," he replied without thinking, even though it wasn't true.  The house was empty and recently undecorated, and he was alone.  The gifts they had bought for each other waited, unopened, in a pile near the hearth, because Alex wasn't back home for Christmas after all.  "Maybe Alex and I'll come to New Zealand for Christmas next year," Connor had told Duncan a few weeks ago.  But maybe not.

Maybe never.

"Listening to the phone-recordings again, Connor?" Alex asked him, a gentle amused nagging that had never bothered him before.

"Just screening my calls," he replied, then added with deliberate sarcasm, "I get so many."  That wasn't true, either, and she damn well knew it.

The silence between them stretched painfully thin.  "I'm at my mother's," she said finally, the words coming just before the silence broke and split into an uncrossable chasm.

"You said you would be here," Connor reminded her, clamping his teeth together to keep from adding the frustrated whine of a child: You promised!

"I was."

Oh, yeah, she'd come back on the twenty-second, just as she'd said, but on an earlier train.  She'd come back for an hour, maybe less, while Connor was out buying her flowers and a bottle of wine for her special welcome-home dinner. Then she had left, leaving only his Christmas presents under the tree, a note on the kitchen table, a still-warm pot of coffee, and the lingering scent of her perfume in the air.  "I can't see you yet," she'd written, the handwriting shaky and blotched with tears.  "I'm sorry."  And then on the next line, "I love you.  Please believe me.  I do love you, Connor.  I just need more time."  She'd even signed it, "Your loving wife, Alex."  He'd never seen that signature before.  She'd never needed to convince him before.

And then she had left.

"You never even gave me a chance, Alex," Connor said, bewildered.  "You didn't even wait for me to come home."

"I'm sorry," she whispered.  "I couldn't ... I didn't ..."  She took a deep breath and tried again.  "It's not anything you've done, or anything you haven't done, or even anything you could do, Connor.  It's me.  I'm the one having problems, Connor.  I'm sorry," she said again, and she even sounded sincere.  "I needed to go home," she explained then added quickly, "I mean--"

Connor knew what she meant.  Home wasn't with him anymore.

"I needed my mother, Connor," she continued, sounding lost and frightened, even ashamed.

He tried to be gentle, soothing.  "Alex, I'm your husband--"

"And that's precisely why I can’t talk to you about it," she replied briskly, all hesitation gone.

Connor abandoned the soft approach.  "You haven't even tried!"

Alex paused, that quiet moment of hers that heralded an attack, much like the deep breath of an infant right before it really starts to scream.  Connor had heard--and dreaded--that silence before.  "Do you willingly face an opponent before you're ready, Connor?" she asked.  "Or do you practice and train, and then chose the day?"

"You and I aren't opponents, Alex!  And this is supposed to be a marriage, not a war!"

"For you, our time together is a marriage.  For me, it's the rest of my life, and it's the only life I get."

And how the hell could he argue with that?

"You're almost five hundred years old, Connor," Alex reminded him gently, and now she was the one taking the soft and soothing approach.  "Can't you wait a few months for me?"

He could wait forever, but he and Alex didn't have that kind of time.  There was never enough time.  But he could either push her now and lose her immediately, or wait for her to "find herself," and hope she came back before it was too late.  He closed his eyes for a moment, then said, "OK. I'll wait."

"Thank you," she said, so softly he could barely hear the words.

"Any snow there?" he asked, a safe enough topic.

"Some," she responded with obvious relief.  "The roads are clear, but in the hills it's deep enough for skiing."  She stopped short, that "safe" topic unleashing an avalanche of memories for both of them.  Winters spent skiing together in the Highlands, teaching the twins almost as soon as they learned to walk, John slaloming down the side of an Alpine mountain, Alex challenging Connor to join her on a black diamond trail, the tip of her nose and her cheeks pink with cold, her eyes matching that flawlessly blue winter sky.

The doctors had recommended she never ski again, not with that shattered ankle and injured knee.  "Go with John and Gina," she'd urged him last year in Colorado, and "Go with Duncan," the summer before that, when they'd been in New Zealand and the seasons were upside down.  Eventually, Connor had gone, for a day here and there, but not for the weekend or the week, they way they used to do.  He'd come back to find Alex at her computer or reading a book, or maybe cooking an elaborate meal, but never outside.  "Too windy," she'd say, or "Too busy," but never "Too cold," though Connor knew that she suffered from the arthritic aches in her bones.  She used to like the cold.

"Having a good Christmas?" he asked her.

"No."

"Me either."

"I'm sorry," she said again, but Connor wasn't listening to her apologies anymore.  "I didn't know where to send your presents," he said and then added, quite deliberately, "I didn't know where you were."

More silence between them, more hurt and more anger, until Alex reached across it with more words.  "I would have told you where I was going, Connor, but I didn't know."

"Just wandered about?" he suggested with cruel sarcasm.  "Somehow got on a plane in Edinburgh and found yourself in Pennsylvania?"

"Something like that," she said evenly and let out a careful sigh.  "Look, Connor, I don't want to argue.  Not today.  Not on Christmas."

Neither did he.  "Then we should hang up."  He heard her draw a quick breath of surprise at that, and he added sharply, to keep himself from saying something truly vicious, "Now."

"I love you," she offered, sounding near tears.

Connor couldn't take that from her, not right now, and he couldn't give it in return.  "Tell your mother Merry Christmas for me, Alex," he said and turned off the phone.  He stood and stretched, then walked into the library and perused the selection of whiskies.  Talisker, he decided and poured himself a double, planning on getting seriously drunk.  It wouldn’t be the first Christmas he had spent this way, and he doubted it would be the last.




 
Back to top
Chapter 6 - Epiphany


===== PENNSYLVANIA =====

"What did Connor have to say, Alex?" her mother asked when Alex came back into the kitchen.

"He said to tell you Merry Christmas," Alex answered brightly.  She poured herself a cup of coffee and cut a piece of pumpkin pie.  Breakfast was one of the best parts of Christmas Day.

Mom waited until Alex sat down at the table to ask: "And?"

Alex knew that tone of voice.  It was the "I know that's not the whole story" voice.  It was the "We're not done with this yet, young lady" voice.  It was The Voice of Mom.

Well, that was why she was here, wasn't it?  "He said he wasn't having a good Christmas," she admitted.

"Are you?"

"No," she whispered.  She pushed the pie aside.  She wasn't hungry after all.

"Alex," Mom began, "I've tried not to meddle in my children's marriages. Nobody likes a busybody mother-in-law--"

"You've been great, Mom," Alex said immediately.  "Both as a mother and as a mother-in-law. Connor's told me how much he likes you lots of times."

"Thank you, dear, that's good to hear. But … it's Christmas Day, and he's in Scotland, and your children are staying somewhere with friends, and you showed up on my doorstep at ten o'clock on Christmas Eve. What's wrong?"

"I'm…  He's…"  Alex stabbed at her pie with a fork in frustration and tried again.  "I'm not sure I want to be married to him anymore."

"Well, that happens," Mom said philosophically.

"To you?"

"Oh, yes.  A few times.  And for your dad, too, I know.  We just stuck it out through the dry times and waited for the rain."  She smiled to herself, nodding her head a little.  "And the rain always came.  But Alex," she said, leaning forward earnestly, "rain won't help if you've ripped out a plant by the roots.  You can't hurt each other too badly and still expect things to go back together."

Alex nodded, wondering how much of their "plant" was left now, after the way she'd run out on him. But she just couldn't stay.  In fact, she hadn't wanted to go home, not really.  She could see that now.  Staying until absolutely everything at the dig was packed, taking a slow train to Madrid, planning a shopping expedition in London on the way home, not even getting out her keys…  It didn't take Freud to figure out that slip.

"So, why aren't you sure you want to be married to him?" Mom asked.

Alex opened her mouth to answer, thought about three different ways to explain it, and ended up with only a sigh.

Mom's eyebrows drew down in concern, just the way Colin's did.  "Alex, are you having an affair?"

"No!"

"Is Connor?"

"No."

"You're sure?"

"Yes," she said firmly.  "Connor would never do that." 

"Hmm," Mom said, and she didn't sound convinced.

"I mean, some women do hit on him," Alex explained, "but he always says no.  He's not the wandering kind."

"What sort of women?"

"Younger ones," Alex said before she could stop herself, or the bitterness in her tone.

"Oh, Alex," her mother said in sympathy, and she sighed.  "It's not fair, I know.  People say men get 'distinguished' as they age, and women just get 'old.'"

"Yeah," Alex said, still bitter.  "I know."

"It's just how it is.  You know younger women often find older men attractive.  You did."

"Yes," she admitted.  "But Russ wasn't married."

"And Connor is, and you say he's not interested in anyone but you."  She lifted all-white eyebrows, a perfect match to her all-white hair, and asked, once again doubting, "Right?"

"Right," Alex said, once again firmly.  The only woman she had to be jealous of was her own younger self.

"Besides, you're not old, Alex," Mom continued.  "And you look great!  Other women your age would kill to have your figure."

Other women her age didn't have her problems.  They didn't have a husband who would never look old. And even if Mom thought she didn't "look her age" now, Alex knew she didn't look thirty anymore, either.  She never would again.  And it was just going to get worse as the years--the decades--went on.

"What's wrong, Alex?" Mom asked again, obviously realizing that her little pep talk hadn't worked.

Alex stared at the Christmas tree in the corner of the living room, wondering how to explain.  Mom didn't know about immortality; she didn't see Connor very often and they'd managed to hide it all these years.  Alex wasn't sure how much longer that ruse could go on, but she didn't feel up to getting into it right now. "Just me, I guess," Alex had to say.

"Honey…"  Mom shook her head.  "Alex, I know you're feeling confused right now, but if you want to keep even a chance of getting back together with Connor later on, you're going to have give him something."

"I told him I loved him," Alex protested.  "And he said he'd wait for me."

"Well, that's good," Mom said slowly.  "And I know you said he's not the wandering kind, but, Alex, you've been away from him for three months.  If you're not there with him, he doesn't even have to leave home."



===== NEW YORK CITY =====

"Alex, it's so good to see you!" Rachel exclaimed.  They exchanged a hug made awkward by Alex's suitcase and purse, and then another hug after Alex had taken off her coat and set down her things near the elevator.  It had taken the place of the stairs of the four-story brownstone more than a decade ago, soon after Rachel's knee replacement surgery. 

"I was so surprised to get your call this morning," Rachel said, leading the way into her sparsely furnished living room.  Rachel and Mitzi preferred Swedish modern to the point of minimalism, saying it didn't take long to dust.  Except for some greeting cards on the windowsills, the only seasonal decoration was a large, glass menorah with five candles on the bookshelves.  "I didn't even know you were in the States," Rachel continued, sitting down on one of the two birch chairs near the fireplace.

"It was an unplanned trip," Alex explained, pulling the other chair closer to the warmth of the gas flames before sitting down.

"And Connor is fine," Rachel said, seeking the same reassurance she had sought earlier during their phone call.

"It has nothing to do with an Immortal," Alex repeated, knowing very well why Rachel was asking this twice.  Connor had sent his family away for safety before.  "I just … I wanted to see my mom over Christmas, and since I'm over here, I'd thought I'd visit you."  She smiled, hoping to hide the deception inherent in that explanation, because she wasn't ready to talk about it, not yet, but Rachel was no fool.

"Connor didn't want to come with you?" she asked, her surprise becoming confusion.  "Didn't you just get back from Spain?"

"Yes, but--"  Alex didn't know how to finish that one.  Yes, but I didn't want him to come with me?  Yes, but I'm afraid to see him?  Yes, but my marriage is falling apart, and I don't know what I want, and when I got home I panicked and ran?

"You left him alone, over Christmas?" Rachel asked incredulously, and Alex bit her lip as she nodded, afraid to meet Rachel's eyes.  "Alex," Rachel said, the very softness of her voice a warning, "what are you doing?"

That one, Alex could answer.  "Coming to you for help," she managed, and then she started to cry.

~~~~~

"So," Rachel said, refilling Alex's glass from the margarita pitcher as they sat at the kitchen table, "what's the problem?"

Death.  But that wasn't a problem to be solved, it was a reality to be faced.  And it wasn't death so much, anyway.  It was all the dying you had to do to get there.  Years of it, maybe.  "I don't want to get old," Alex said.

"Nobody does, Alex.  But that's not why you're hiding from Connor."

Hiding.  Not just running--hiding.  Rachel had picked exactly the right word.  Alex had been hiding from Connor for a long time, and when the hair dye and the makeup had stopped working, she had run. "I don't want him to see me get old," Alex said, finally putting into words the dread that had been haunting her for years.

Rachel nodded slowly and sipped at her margarita.  "Why?"

"Why?" Alex repeated.  "Because …"  She knew why, but she couldn't bring herself to put it into words.

"Because you're afraid he won't love you anymore," Rachel finished for her, and Alex had to nod.  Rachel, however, shook her head and asked, sounding incredulous, "You think he won't love you because of the way you look?"

Put that way, it did sound silly, but it was true.  Alex had to nod again.

Rachel tapped her fingers impatiently on the table.  "He's not that shallow, and I don't think you're that vain.  What's the real problem, Alex?"

"I'm tired, OK?" she said, and she didn't much care that it came out whiny and rude.  "I'm tired of working at this so damn hard and not having it work.  I'm tired of the hair dye--for both of us--and I'm tired of the funny looks we get in public, and I'm tired of Sara's girlfriends hitting on him, and I'm tired of people assuming he's Sara's boyfriend instead of her father. I'm tired of pretending, and I'm tired of all the lies, and I'm just damn tired.  OK?"

"OK."  Rachel seemed almost pleased.  "There's your problem, and there's your solution."

"Where?" Alex demanded, because she sure as hell didn't see either one.

"You're tired of trying to be what you're not.  And what you need is a make-over."

"Oh, God, not more make-up," Alex said in disgust.  "And a haircut and a new outfit can't fix this."

"I said make-over, not make-up," Rachel corrected tartly.  "And I'm not talking about just making over the outer woman, but the inner one, too.  You're not a thirty-year-old woman anymore; you're a fifty-year-old woman."

"Fifty-four," Alex corrected, even more tartly, and reached for her drink.

"Fifty-four then," Rachel agreed, with a quick wave of one hand.  "So act like one.  No, better yet, be one.  Be a fifty-four-year-old woman, Alex.  Be who you really are, and you won't have to pretend."

Alex was shaking her head.  "It can't be that simple."  She would have seen it before.

"Yes, it is just that simple," Rachel contradicted.  "When was the last time you felt comfortable with yourself?"

"At the dig," she answered immediately.  When Connor wasn't around.  When she wasn't trying to pretend.  And *that* was why she hadn't wanted to go back home.  She didn't want to go back to a life of lies.

Then Rachel asked bluntly, "Which do you dislike most, Alex?  Your looks?  Or yourself?"

After a moment of glaring at the other woman, Alex muttered "Damn it" and faced up to the real unwanted truth.  It wasn't a "life of lies" she was running from.  It was herself.  She didn't like herself. 

And that went a lot deeper than not liking how she looked.  "God damn it," she muttered this time, angry and disgusted with herself.  It couldn't be that simple.  Could it?

"That's why you haven't trusted Connor when he tells you he loves you, isn't it?" Rachel asked, more gently now.  "You don't love yourself."

Alex swallowed hard and blinked back tears, then picked up her margarita again.  She drank too much of it too fast and had to suck in air to ease the ache in her teeth from the ice.  When she could breathe normally again, she finally looked up and met Rachel's eyes.  "You know," Alex began, taking a shaky breath and trying to smile, "right before I left for Spain, I told Connor to see me the way I really was, to *really* look.  So he did, and I hated every second of it, even though I was the one who asked him to do it.  Then he said that looks didn't matter to him, and he would always love me."  She did smile then, a little, remembering that, even as her tears started to fall.  She had to swallow again before she could say, "But I knew he had only seen the outside of me, not the inside, and that was the part that was truly ugly.  That was the part that no one could ever love."

"It is very hard to love hate," Rachel agreed.  "But, Alex, the inside of us is the part that never gets old.  It doesn't matter what color your hair is or how many wrinkles you have or how many teeth are left.  Inside of you can always be beautiful--if you want it to be."

"So all I need is an 'attitude adjustment'?" Alex asked sardonically.  It sounded too good to be true.

"That'll help, but you really need a haircut, too," Rachel told her.

Alex laughed aloud, even as she wiped away the traces of her tears.  "Right," she agreed. "A make-over it is then."  She lifted her margarita in a toast, and she and Rachel clinked glasses before they drained them dry.

The next day, they went to see Francine.  "I usually hire her for brides who want a new look for their wedding," Mitzi had explained at dinner, "but Francine's main clientele is women who want a new look after their divorce--or for their new boyfriend."  After the haircut (and a massage, a manicure, a pedicure, and a facial), Rachel and Alex went shopping.

"Lovely," Rachel said in approval when Alex emerged from the dressing room in a sapphire blue sweater and white pants.  Alex had to look in the mirror before she could accept the compliment, and even though she probably would have used the word "Nice" instead of "Lovely", looking at herself wasn't painful anymore.

Maybe that was because she felt like she was looking at someone else.  But that's what a make-over was for, wasn't it?  The woman in the mirror actually looked … good. Not young, and not drop-dead gorgeously sexy, but trim and well-groomed.  Attractive, even.  "I suppose," Alex said to Rachel.

"It's lovely, and so are you," Rachel said firmly, and Alex managed a smile.  That was easier than it used to be, too.  When they stopped for Godiva chocolate and a cup of tea, Rachel asked, "Feeling better?"

"Yes, I am.  A lot."  Not great, maybe a four out of ten, but four was still a lot better than zero, which is where she'd been for days. "Thank you!  The haircut is great, and the clothes are wonderful, and it's fun just to be out with you, but … I guess I'm still thinking: It can't be this easy."

"No," Rachel agreed softly.  "The solution is simple, but it's not easy.  And it's going to get harder as the years go on.  Every day you'll have to make the choice: to stay with him or to go, and every day you'll have to answer the question: Do you trust Connor enough to let him love you until the day you die?"





 
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Chapter 7 - Home


===== EDINBURGH =====

A week after Christmas, Connor was still drinking.  Alex still hadn't called.  It was possible she might have written, but he hadn't checked his mail, either post or computer.  He hadn't opened his presents, either, and he hadn't mailed Alex hers.

Maybe he should throw them out.  But first, another drink.  Connor reached for the bottle and found it empty.  The house was empty, too.  Empty of whisky, empty of Alex, empty, empty, empty ... another empty beer on the wall.  Another bottle of beer.

Damn.  He'd better get moving before he started singing that asinine song.  Connor pulled on a coat and went back for his shoes, then he let himself out the door.  He was almost to the liquor store when he realized that it was early Sunday morning.  And New Year's Day.  Everything was closed.

Damn.

A walk, then.  A long, brisk walk in the cold, exactly what he needed; he hadn't been out of the house in days.  He wasn't sure exactly how long it had been.  Connor walked up hills and down hills, out of the new town and into the old, past buildings he remembered being built, buildings he couldn’t remember having seen before, and buildings he never wanted to see again.  Many things had improved over the years, but commonplace architecture was not one of them.  Eventually, he stopped and looked up at a building that was older than he was.

Damn.  His birthday.  Today was his birthday, and he was 499 years old.

"Happy birthday, MacLeod," he muttered to himself, but it wasn't true, anymore than "Merry Christmas" had been true when Alex had called.  Connor stared up at the forbidding gray walls atop the pinnacle of ancient black rock.  A week since Alex had called.  An entire week, and not a word.  Connor starting walking again.  Silence was its own answer.

The wind was bitterly cold as it streamed in the canyons created by the rows of buildings. Connor turned up his collar but kept wandering.  He didn't want to go back to the house, not a home anymore, just a house, an empty echoing house.  Time to move, Connor decided as he crossed North Bridge over the train station.  He could go back to New York City again, to be close to Rachel.  He missed her.  She'd call him today, he knew; she always called him on his birthday.  Connor turned at Dublin Street and started back to the house, striding purposefully now.  He didn't want to miss her call.

Clouds were gathering, and Connor walked more swiftly, his head down against the frigid wind, taking only quick glances at the few people out walking on New Year's Day--a young couple, hand in hand, muffled to the ears; a mother with two small children tugging on her hands in excitement and talking about a party; an older woman in a red coat and a purple scarf on the other side of the street.

Two seconds later, Connor stopped walking.  The scarf was new, but he knew that coat.

"Hey, MacLeod," the gentle summons came, as it had come many years before.

Connor turned to see Alex crossing the street, her hands in the pockets of her red coat.  She stopped on the sidewalk five paces away. The wind flared her short hair into a halo of pure white, the stark color somehow deepening the color of her eyes to the crystalline blue of a winter sky--defiant eyes, wary eyes, but eyes that weren't trying to hide anymore.

He took half a step forward, stopped again and cleared his throat.  "I wasn't expecting you," he explained, but that wasn't all the truth.  He hadn't recognized her.

Alex nodded slowly, the faint ghost of a smile on her face, her eyes far-seeing and sad.  She knew.  "I thought it would be better to surprise you, than to disappoint you," she explained in return, then added, "Again," before Connor could say the word.

"I like the new hair style," he commented, keeping things civil, friendly ... safe.  "You look good."  Different, but good.

Older.

But good.

"Thanks."  Her smile widened slightly, and some of the wariness disappeared.  "I had it cut on Thursday," she said and tossed her head slightly, an old habit, but her hair was too short now to matter.  "It's been all white for a couple of weeks.  It was too much trouble to keep dyeing it at the site."

"I didn't know you dyed your hair," Connor said.

"I didn't want you to know."

There'd been a lot of things she hadn't wanted him to know.  Maybe there still were.  "New scarf?" he asked, going back to safe ground.

She nodded.  "Rachel gave it to me as a Christmas present."

He nodded back, took one breath, then plunged in. "So," Connor began, wondering how long she was going to stay this time, "just visiting?"

She took a full step toward him, then a hesitant one.  "We need to talk, Connor."

He'd been telling her that for months, and she'd had her chance before she'd run away.  He shrugged and stood there, waiting.  Alex said nothing, and they stared at each other in silence on the quiet empty street.  "You want to talk?" Connor prompted finally.  "Talk."

"I'm cold, Connor," she told him instead, this woman who had never before complained of the cold.  "Can we go home?"

"Do we have a home?" he asked, because he needed to know before he ever opened that door.

"I want us to," Alex answered, clear and certain, the way she used to be.  Her eyebrows lifted, but more in a hopeful question than a challenge.  "Do you?"

An entire world can change with a heartbeat.  Connor nodded, swallowing hard, and Alex reached out to him, her eyes suddenly bright with unshed tears.  "Then let's go home," she said softly, and after a moment Connor took her hand.

~~~~~

They ended up talking in the kitchen, even though Connor had suggested they go to the dining room, the one place downstairs that he hadn't camped out in.  "I haven't been in the mood for cleaning lately," he explained in some embarrassment as Alex walked into the parlour.  She nodded and said nothing as she picked her way around the rumpled heap of blankets on the floor in front of the fireplace.  She glanced once at the empty whisky bottles placed neatly (and alphabetically) in a row underneath the grand piano in the library, then paused in the kitchen doorway for a quick survey of the pile of unwashed dishes in the sink and the collection of half-empty cartons of take-out food on the kitchen counter.

"Tea?" she suggested brightly, and Connor took the pizza box off the stove while Alex set about making a pot of tea.

"I wouldn't use that milk," he warned, and Alex calmly shut the refrigerator door and got the honey out instead.  She pushed the newspapers off to one side and sat down at the table, then wrapped her long fingers tightly around the steaming mug.  Connor could see the tremors in her hands from the rhythmic ripples in the liquid.  "I'll turn up the heat," he offered, and Alex  nodded through her shivers.

"I'd like a blanket," she called after him, and after he adjusted the thermostat, Connor scooped the red one up from the floor.  He came back to the kitchen and laid the thick, woven cloth about her shoulders, not touching her, letting Alex pull the blanket closer and tuck it in.

He sat down across from her, as they had sat so many times before, and he couldn't think of a single word to say.  Connor stirred his tea, watching the swirls and eddies, but when he lifted his mug to drink, he couldn't hide from her anymore.  She was watching, and waiting, and staring right at him.

"I'm sorry, Connor," she started, and it was a damn good place for her to start.  "I should never have left you alone like that over Christmas."

Connor nodded, accepting her apology, but he didn't say, "Don't worry about it," and he didn't say, "It's all right," because it hadn't been, and he wasn't sure it was going to be.  But he should still say something in return.  "It's nothing new," he told her with a shrug.

"It was new for us," she corrected, and that was certainly true.  "I was selfish," she went on, and that was true as well.  "Even if I couldn't--"  She sighed and continued with a rush, "I should at least have called Sara or Colin and told them to come home, so you--"

"I'm glad you didn't," Connor interrupted bluntly.  He didn't want his children to see him that way.  "I wasn't ... good company."

Alex half-smiled in bitter understanding.  "Neither was I.  My mom told me that.  So did Rachel."

"You went to Rachel?" he said in surprise.

"Didn't you get my emails?" Alex asked, seeming surprised, too.  "I've been writing to you every day since Christmas.  Just short notes at first, but then longer ones. I was trying to explain."  She stopped there, her eyes wary again. 

Connor swore silently as he rubbed his hand over the stubble on his chin.  Looked like he should have checked his mail. "I was waiting for a phone call," he explained.  "I never turned on the computer.  Or looked at the mail."

"Oh."  Her faint smile was rueful, and it quickly disappeared into a sigh.  "I didn't think I should call," she explained. "Since our last phone call didn't end well, I thought emails would be … easier."

Connor nodded slowly.  They might have been, if he'd been in the mood to read.  "Want to explain now?" he asked.  "Or should I go read my mail?"

"I came home to explain," she said steadily.  "I owe you that."

Connor checked his impulse to agree with her, and instead remained silent, waiting.

She almost smiled before she started talking; she knew what he'd wanted to say.  "After I left my mom's house," Alex began, "I went to New York to see Rachel.  I needed some advice--about growing old.  About dying."

He bit back an irritated oath, clamping his teeth shut to hold back the words:  You're only 54 years old and you're in good health and you look great, and anyway I don't give a damn what you look like because I love you and I will always love you.  And you should damn well know that I love you because I've been telling you that over and over again, but you just don't *listen.* And for this, you dump me two days before Christmas and rip out my heart?  And you don't even bother to call?

Connor didn't say any of that.  Blasting her with all the pent-up rage, frustration, and worry of the last week--the last three months--wouldn't help.  She needed him to be calm, supportive, and patient, and he would do that for her.  She'd done it before for him.  "Alex," he began carefully, "you're not old, and you're not dy--"

"Don't, Connor," she broke in.  "Don't hide from this, and don't make me hide from you.  I am growing older," she insisted.  "I will die.  We both know that."

Oh, he knew.  God help him, he knew.  But he didn't want to think about it, and so he didn't.  But Alex had obviously been thinking about it--a lot.

"I can't lie about this anymore, Connor," she went on.  "It's destroying me, to try to stay young for you."

"I never asked that of you," Connor protested in horror.

"No," Alex whispered, a half-smile breaking through her unshed tears.  "But I wanted to give it to you, just the same."

Right before she had died, Heather had told him, "I want to stay with you, forever."  But she hadn't been able to, and Alex wouldn't, either.  They died.  They all died.  "Alex ...," Connor began, but there was nothing he could say to make it better, nothing either of them could do to make it go away.  He reached across the table, and she clung to his hand tightly, her fingers cold against his own.

"I can't stop aging," Alex continued, gently, inexorably.  "No matter how hard I try."

Connor forced himself to feel the prominent veins and the swollen joints in her hands, to look at her face and see the lines that would be wrinkles, to note the drooping flesh around eyes and mouth, to admit to the inexorable changes brought by each new day.  "It doesn't matter," he told her, and it didn't, not at all.

Alex shook her head.  "It mattered to me.  A lot.  You know I hate to fail," she said with a small, self-conscious laugh, and Connor had to smile in return.  "I hated myself for trying to look young and failing, and for being so obsessed with my looks," Alex went on, blinking through her tears.  "I was angry with Sara for being young and beautiful, and I despised myself for feeling that way about my own daughter, but still ... I hated Sara, I hated her friends, I hated Susan, I hated every young woman I saw, for reminding me of what I could never be again."

And she probably hated Cassandra the most, Connor thought ruefully.  After Jennifer had asked him what else Alex might be running from, Connor had soon realized why Cassandra had been persona non grata around their house these last few years.  But if Alex wasn't going to mention her, Connor wasn't about to either.

"I hated the old women, too," Alex was saying, "for showing me what I was going to be.  And ..."  The tears were coming freely now, as she admitted, "I hated you most of all."

Shit.  He'd beaten out Cassandra for the "most-hated person" award?  Connor took one deep breath before he demanded: "Why?"  What had he ever done? What the hell for? After all he'd done to try to help--

"Because you're an Immortal," Alex said simply.  "You'll never grow old.  I know you can't help that, and I know you don't want that, but still …I hated you mostly because I was blaming you for making me feel that way.  If it weren't for you, I was thinking, I wouldn't have to try to stay young."

"Oh, Christ," Connor muttered, and he went around the table, never letting go of her hand, and he pulled her off the chair and into his arms as they sank together to the floor.  He'd seen this jealousy and rage over immortality in mortals before, and he should have recognized it for what it was in her.  But Heather had never hated him, and he'd somehow never once thought Alex, of all people, wouldn't understand…  Connor closed his eyes in dismay.   Oh, God.

"I love you, Alex, and I will always love you, whatever you look like, however you are," he told her, trying to fix this the only way he knew how.  His voice was quiet against the softness of her hair, and his hand was gentle on the curve of her spine, where the bones were more prominent than they used to be.

"I know," she said, hiding her face against his shoulder.  "And I knew it then.  It only made it worse, because I hated you, more and more every day."

OK, he could understand that.  He didn't like it, but he could understand.  Even so…  "Is that why you left me?" he asked, more harshly than he'd intended, so he tried again, "I mean--"

"I know what you mean," she broke in, pulling back to look at him, with that sad and knowing look in her eyes once again.  "'Why did I run out on you right before Christmas?  Why didn't I even give you a chance before I left for Spain?" At Connor's nod, Alex shook her head, her eyes closed, and then told him, "I didn't do that deliberately to hurt you, Connor.  I never wanted to hurt you.  I just needed time alone, and then…" 

She sighed and laid her head against his arm, a comforting and comfortable weight.  "While I was at the dig, I did a lot of soul-searching, and I felt better, and I thought I was ready to see you.  So I said I'd come home.  But when I got here, I found out that I wasn't ready for you to see me."  Her toes started wiggling, a sure sign of embarrassment.  "It had rained, and my hair was a mess, and I was exhausted and I looked awful, and I couldn't bear for you to see me that way, only there was nowhere to hide."  She looked up at him again, her face tear-streaked yet unflinching.  "I didn't just leave, Connor.  I panicked.  And then I ran."

"I didn't know I was that scary," he said, trying to lighten the tone.

It worked.  She actually smiled.  "You know perfectly well you can be that scary," she told him.  "And sometimes you want to be."

"But not with you."

"No," she agreed softly. "Never with me. But you see, it wasn't just you I was afraid of.  It was me.  I could hurt you ... so much more than I already have, Connor," Alex confided, but it wasn't exactly a secret between them, and he knew how to hurt her, too.  "I could become a vicious, spiteful, hateful--and hate-filled--old woman.  I was already starting to, and it was getting worse.  I've come to see now that it wasn't really you I was hating; it was me.  But it was easier to blame you."

"Yeah," Connor said shortly.  He knew that destructive little game.

"But no matter how awful I got," she went on, "I know you'd stay with me, because you made a vow years ago.  But over time, you would come to hate me, and when I finally died, you would be relieved and glad that you were free."  Connor shook his head, but she stopped him with a gentle hand to the cheek.  "Yes, you would, Connor.  Anyone would.  I don't want that for us.  I don't want to ruin all the memories of the love we used to share."

"Used to?" he questioned softly, and in that heartbeat his world changed again. She still hadn't said she loved him, not once today.

"I meant--"  She took a deep breath and kept going, "I meant after I'm dead.  I meant your memories of our love.  I want you to have good memories, all the way to the end."

"Me, too," Connor managed to say.

"So," she began, "love is supposed to mean sharing.  We haven't been sharing this, and I need us to. Please don't stop me when I mention dying.  Don't tell me I don't look a day older.  Don't pretend.  Don't hide. Because when you hide from me, I feel like I have to hide from you.  And I can't keep hiding and lying, because it's destroying me, and then I start to blame you. I'd rather leave you than live like that, because I love you too much to hate you that way."

And there it was, that declaration of love he had been waiting for, but not exactly tied up with a pretty pink bow.

"So, either we face my death together," Alex finished, "or I face it alone."

"Don't see me, Connor," Heather had asked of him, as she lay dying.  "Let me die in peace."  Connor had looked off and away, the burden of her frail body terrifyingly light in his arms.  He had stayed with Heather until the very end, but she had died--as all must die--alone.

"I can't go with you, Alex," he said, his voice hoarse from the tightness in his throat.

"Not at the very last, no," she agreed.  "But you could walk with me on the way there.  If you want to."

"I do," he told her immediately, another solemn vow between them.  Alex closed her eyes and sagged against him in sudden relief, and he held her close, never wanting to let her go.

She looked up him from the circle of his arms.  "I love you, Connor MacLeod."

"I love you, too," he answered, and he meant it, though it wasn't a simple thing between them, not anymore.  But it was enough.  It was more than enough.  Alex pulled him closer and kissed him, with all the sweet promise of springtime, and all the smoky passion of fall.  "Welcome home," Connor said with a shaky laugh when she finally let him go, and he tried to catch his breath.

"I'd like to welcome you home," Alex suggested with a slow and teasing grin.  "Only ..."  She looked around the tiled floor of kitchen, which hadn't been swept for days.  Her nose wrinkled delicately.  "Do you have some place better to offer?"

Connor smiled as he stood, lifting her in his arms, and he carried her up the stairs and straight to their bed.

=====

Rachel didn't want to interrupt Alex and Connor too early, so she waited until it was late afternoon in Scotland before she called.  The phone was picked up on the third ring.

"Rachel!"  Connor sounded happy, even exuberant.  "Happy New Year!" 

So Alex really had gone home, as she'd said she would, and all was going well.  Rachel closed her eyes in relief and thanksgiving as she sat down on the edge of her bed.  "Happy New Year, Connor," she replied.  "And happy birthday!"

"Thanks.  It is."

"Have you opened your presents yet?"

"One of them."

He was grinning; she could tell.  Rachel didn't need to ask why.  During the shopping spree, Alex had bought a "special little something" that involved a lot of ribbons, lace, and fringe at a lingerie store.  Good for her!  And obviously good for Connor, too.

"You and Mitzi paint the town red last night?" Connor asked.

"Oh, yes!"  Now it was Rachel's turn to grin.  "We were out dancing until the cows came home."

"Cows usually come home at sunset," he pointed out.

"Exactly.  We're old ladies; we like to get an early start on things."  And speaking of "old" ladies:  "How's Alex?" Rachel asked.

"Good.  She's good."  He sounded satisfied and content.  "She's getting dressed right now; we're going out to dinner."

"I'm glad it's working out, Connor."

"Me, too.  Except..."

"What?" she asked instantly.

"Alex wants me to go with her and talk to her therapist."

"Good heavens," Rachel said, relaxing again, and trying to sound scandalized instead of amused.  "She wants you to talk?"

"Yeah."

"To a therapist?"

"Mm-hmm."

"Oh, my."  Rachel tsked in sympathy.  "All that sharing of emotions, opening up, talking about how you feel..."

"That's the idea."  Connor sounded disgusted.

"You're going, of course."

The silence lasted two heartbeats before he said, "Of course.  And thanks, Rachel.  For everything."

"Always."

"I love you, Rachel," he said, serious now, and urgent with it, and as always, the words brought tears to her eyes.  "You're my girl."

"I love you, too, Connor."  Always.  "You're my guy."

"I want to see you," he said, all of a sudden, but she wasn't really surprised.  "You busy this week?  I'll fly over."

"Thursday?" she suggested.

"I'll be there," he promised, and then they chatted casually of other things before they said "I love you" once more and turned off their phones.

Rachel stood and stretched, feeling old bones creak and groan.  She set the phone on the nightstand then sat down again, finding a place among the many photo albums that nearly covered her bed.  Many pictures, many years.  The early ones showed Connor as her father; the later ones showed Connor as her friend. She picked up an album from the middle years and paused at a photo of Connor and herself at Mitzi's second wedding, 1972.  He was wearing a beige suit with a wide, multi-colored tie; she had long hair and a pink and blue mini-skirt on.  Connor's head was bent towards hers as she looked up at him, and they were both laughing as they sipped champagne.  Her thumb traced the outline of his cheek in the picture, then traced the outline of hers.  They looked so happy in that picture. 

So young.

"Lunch is ready!" Mitzi called from downstairs, and Rachel closed the album and put them all away.  She had made her choice, years ago, and she knew it had been the right choice for her, and the right choice for Connor, too.  Alex was making a different choice, and Rachel prayed it would be the right one for them. But either way, Rachel and Alex would both love Connor until they died, and Connor would love both of them. Rachel knew that, too.

She took the elevator downstairs and joined Mitzi in the dining room, but before she sat down, she impulsively kissed Mitzi and gave her a hug, saying, "You're beautiful," because she was, even more beautiful at 76 than she'd been fifty years before.

"Why, thank you, dahling!" Mitzi said with a theatrical flip of her hand, then kissed her in return.  "So are you, Rachel dear," she said, serious now.  "Always."  She turned to the table, beautifully set with linen and china and candles, a festive brunch to celebrate the new year.  "Champagne?"

"Of course!"  Rachel poured for them both, and they lifted their glasses in a toast.  "L'Chaim!" 

To life!

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Author's Notes

Many thanks to:
Christopher Lambert (Connor MacLeod)
Deborah Unger (Alexandra Johnson)
Sheila Gish (Rachel Ellenstein)

And to:
MacNair, Bridget, Cathy, Robin, Vi, Lori, and Selena for their help and encouragement during the writing of this story.

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More Stories 

Alex also appears in these stories.  Stories with * have her as a major character.

*Wild Mountain Thyme  The meeting of Connor MacLeod and Alexandra Johnson

*All the Good Women  The courtship of Connor and Alex

*All the Fun (in progress) The wedding of Connor and Alex

*Hope Remembered I: Friend  Alex meets her husband's former lover Cassandra.

Dearer Yet the Brotherhood Duncan visits Connor and Alex's home.

Hope Remembered IV: Kindred Cassandra visits the MacLeods for Christmas, 1996.

Hope Remembered V: Priestess  Alex and Connor's twins are named. December 1996.

Hope Triumphant I: Healer Cassandra moves to the Highlands. 1997-2006

Goddess Child Connor and Alex's daughter, Sara, attends her Uncle Duncan's wedding. 2006

*The Flowers of the Mountain (In progress) Connor and Alex say goodbye

*Hope Triumphant II:  Sister  Cassandra and Alex start the Sisterhood. 2006-2027

To read more stories by the author: http://users.erols.com/darkpanther/
Chronological Listing of all the stories in my Hope-Highlander Universe 
Summary of events in my Hope-Highlander Universe

To write to the author: darkpanther@erols.com

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