DISCLAIMER: Highlander and its canon characters are the property of Davis/Panzer Productions; no copyright infringement is intended.

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For upwards of an hour, the silence had only been broken by the clash of swords and occasional grunts. The gunshot erupted with the force of a thousand normal gunshots, an explosion that should have rent heaven and earth.

So it seemed, at least, to Dirk Holland. He marveled at finding his eardrums intact.

And it was he who had fired.

At first Duncan MacLeod kept coming. Holland felt a surge of fear. Bulletproof armor? He dropped the gun and clutched his sword with both hands.

MacLeod must have heard I don't play by the rules. Stands to reason he'd at least bend them a bit...

Then a fountain of blood gushed from the Highlander's chest. He staggered, but refused to go down.

Incredibly, Holland saw no fury in his opponent's ashen face. No outrage. No dread of death.

And no surprise.

Only a faint disgust, as if he considered Holland a particularly loathsome species of bug.

MacLeod somehow managed to lift his katana above his head. A trembling Holland braced to ward off another blow. But the Highlander was at the end of his strength. The sword slipped from his hands and fell behind him.

Holland could have struck at that moment. He chose instead to wait, cruelly, until the greatest of the Immortals had fallen to his knees.

Even then the man retained his dignity, his proud bearing. Unnerved, the nominal victor had to close his eyes before he could swing.

But the head of Duncan MacLeod toppled to the ground with a highly satisfying thud.

Holland raised his sword aloft, leaned back, and gloried in the blood that dripped onto his face. Catching a few drops in his mouth, he savored the salty taste. In the last moments before he was hit by the Quickening, he spread his arms wide and screamed to the uncaring tundra: "In the end, there can be only one!"



***



If he'd entertained any doubt that he and MacLeod were the last two Immortals, what happened next would have dispelled it. For this was truly the Quickening to end all Quickenings. It battered him for over an hour, swamping him with hopes and fears, sounds and images, from every land and every
time.

His identity wavered in and out of focus. But when the storm abated, he was himself. Stunned, drained, limp as a wet dishrag...but still a megalomaniac bent on driving the world to its knees. As he had MacLeod.

If he could only conquer by destroying, so be it.

At the moment, however, he was a flaccid husk, sitting in a rapidly freezing pool of blood. The cold bit into him; every body part that wasn't numb had begun to ache. He fumbled for his sword, hoping to use it as an aid in getting up. But his nerveless hands failed to grasp it.

As he was trying not to retch, a shadow fell across his field of vision.

He looked up...into the implacable visage of a very ordinary middle-aged man. One of the puny mortals he so despised.

Here? A hundred miles from the nearest village?

The mortal was hefting Duncan MacLeod's katana. Tucked into his belt was Holland's gun.

"And now," he announced, "the last Immortal faces the last Watcher."

"Watcher"? He'd spoken the word as if it should be capitalized. But Holland had no idea what it meant.

"We've seen this coming for centuries," the Watcher said grimly. "And MacLeod saw it for centuries.

"He never wanted to rule the world, wouldn't have presumed even to guide the world. He had no real desire to live on and on, with all his Immortal friends and lovers gone.

"Besides, he always valued his honor above his life."

A partisan of MacLeod's.

Suddenly realizing he was in danger, Holland made a feeble lunge for his sword.

A lightning-swift kick sent it out of reach.

"You can't do this!" he gasped. "The rules--"

"Rules?" A harsh laugh turned his blood to ice. "I'm not an Immortal. Your rules mean nothing to me.

"And they've meant less than nothing to you. Do you think I don't know what you are, what you've done? You attacked MacLeod without giving him time to recover from Rollin Bane's Quickening. But he was still better than you--so you shot him.

"You'll get no mercy here."

As Holland floundered helplessly in the muck, the Watcher raised the katana and spoke his long-rehearsed lines.

"I'm Ian Dawson of the Clan Dawson.

"In the end, there can be only none."



***



The blade sliced through the air with a chillingly final whoosh.

But the last sound heard by the last Immortal was his own ignoble whimper.




(The End)