More of Sword and Sorcery is on the way, holidays and family medical emergencies (yes, plural.) distracted me for a while there. In the meantime, have this random little vignette.
Do Not Look For That Day
"I don't know when I'll be back…"
Rachel didn't need to be told. She studied the man with a hand on the door, observing the fall of his long, ratty old coat and the tense set to his neck and shoulders. Connor MacLeod was wearing a quiet half-smile that was meant to be reassuring, but she knew him too well. He was going out to a fight, and every time he did there was a chance he might not come back at all.
He had raised her well, taught her to be brave and strong, and live for the present. Do not look for that day, he'd told her, do not live in fear. She'd taken that lesson well, maybe better, in some ways, than he had. It wasn't the fights that scared him, she knew. In his current quiet tension, she saw a state of alertness, of readying to meet the battle ahead. He wasn't afraid of crossing blades with any man, but he was afraid. In his eyes she saw that his only fear was for her; what would become of her if he didn't come back, and worse, what would someday become of him if he lived on to watch her grow old, and die.
Even from his own student, a man Rachel knew as a kind of uncle, she had heard Connor was a hard man to read. To her he was an open book. From the moment he'd rescued her as a child, he'd become her hero, and the years turned with the two of them clinging to each other. He never aged, and that forced them to move, and move again, timed to her graduation from one level of schooling to another. She'd been encouraged to make friends, of course, but knowing she'd soon have to say goodbye left her wary, and keeping his secrets didn't help. She'd never blamed him for it, but they were two alone against the world, and Connor MacLeod was the one stable thing in her life. How could she not make him the center of her world? How could she not study him, until she had learned to read his every mercurial shift of mind?
All this, Rachel thought about, as she crossed the expensive rugs of the antique store on her way towards him. Eyes nearly five centuries old looked down at her, pleading forgiveness, begging her to be brave. She reached up, because even now that she was a grown woman he was a head taller, ever the towering hero in her mind. Her hands, delicate, smoothed down the collar of the ratty old coat and lifted, just briefly to stroke the stubble of his jaw. He was a careless mess, a disheveled, rumpled, unshaven old man with a face that was more unlined and youthful than her own was, now. He'd looked no better, the day he first became her knight in shining armor.
"Well, there's some purchasing orders for you to look over, and don't forget you said you'd take me out to lunch tomorrow." Her hands fell, and she kept her tone light. Of course he'd promised to take her out to lunch. It was all part of the pretense, part of his clumsy but well-meant efforts to keep her from worrying.
He nodded, and leaned down, stubble and lips brushing her cheek in a light, paternal kiss. Then he pushed open the door, and with the quiet jingle of the bell he was gone. She watched him go through the glass, a lone swordsman off to a duel in some dark place where no one would ever see or know, but her.
He would come back. He always came back. She was too old to be naïve, too old to believe in knights in shining armor or fairytale endings, but she refused to expect anything but his safe return. Someday he might not come back, but she refused to look for that day. With a sigh Rachel Ellenstein turned away and finished closing up the shop for the night.