Chapter 2:
The sun was climbing in the sky by the time Duncan pulled the sports car back up to the barge. It had taken him nearly an hour to haul the garbage bags filled with his friends remains into the woods and bury them in a hole with some rocks piled over top so the animals wouldn't have him dug up in a few hours. He'd been surprised (and slightly dismayed) to find that Marc's remains, while dismembered had been carefully and respectfully wrapped and cleaned before being put into bags. His body being separated out from his clothing and person affects which were all in a separate bag. It hadn't made Duncan feel any more righteous that's for sure. Nor had the realization when he went back to scour the ground that the girl had tossed his own wallet at him – the thing he was coming back to retrieve – before trying to flee.
He'd cleaned up the scene, opting to put the tarp and other used items into the trunk of his own car rather than the black van. He could dispose of them later and without knowing for sure who the van belonged to he was less than keen on leaving behind evidence of this nights deeds.
Duncan had been less sure about the girl. He'd tied a make-shift bandage of gauze around her arm, but she hadn't woken up by the time he was back from burying Marc, and he couldn't leave her unconscious and bleeding in the middle of the field. That wouldn't be fair, especially considering he was the one who had struck her unconscious in the first place. But, at the same time, he couldn't exactly drive her to the nearest hospital either. At least not until he knew what she knew and why she was dismembering the body of the man who he'd killed by chopping off his head in the middle of the night.
He had checked her over when he carried her into the car and she seemed to be breathing alright. Her nose was still bleeding and definitely appeared to be broken. On a growing hunch, he reached out and pulled up the sleeve from her right wrist but it was bare of any markings. She wasn't a watcher. Which was good; if she had been Joe would've skinned him alive.
Definitely flog him anyways, Duncan reaffirmed to himself as he carefully carried the girl inside the barge, glad that at this early hour none of his neighbours were up and about to see him. He had enough awkward explanations about his coming and going at all hours, without adding unconscious, bleeding girls to the mix.
Duncan stood at the bottom of the steps, looking around the inside of the barge at a loss. The chivalrous thing to do would be to give the girl the bed…but Duncan didn't want to give the wrong impression and he'd already done nearly everything wrong already tonight. Definitely the couch then. He took the few steps necessary and carefully set her down on the couch, pulling a blanket over her before he walked back into the kitchen to put on the kettle. Might as well boil the kettle make some coffee since it didn't look like he'd be sleeping any time soon.
Jordan awoke with a splitting pain across her face and the taste of blood in her mouth. She moaned and tried to move but the world seemed to lurch unexpectedly and she felt a hand rest gently but firmly on her shoulder holding her still.
"Shhh," a lilting voice said quietly. "You've had quite the knock on the head."
She felt something soft and warm move over her face, the feeling at once comforting as it cleaned some of the sticky stiffness off and yet painful as it brushed over bruised skin.
"Ouch," she mumbled, her lip large and causing the word to come out more blundered than she intended.
"Shhh," the voice repeated. "I have an asprin and some tea here, do you think you could take a sip?"
She tried to nod and then stopped as the world tilted uncontrollably again and she managed a "Mmm hmm." A large hand cupped the back of her neck and she felt the wrenched muscles there protest as she was raised ever so slightly and an edge of a mug pressed gently to her lips. She took a sip and tasted the bitter tang of the asprin briefly before it was washed away with another swallow of sweet tea. It tasted like honey and lemon and brought back memories of when she was young and her mother had made her tea when she was sick.
"Let's give that a bit to work," the voice said and lowered her back down. She could feel pillows beneath her head and smooth leather to the side and underneath her.
"Do you know where you are?" the hands continued to wipe her face, the movement even and smooth while she fought to focus when all she wanted to do was fall back into sleep again. She fought to remember the events leading to this moment and how she might have gotten hurt.
It had been the end of the 36 hours shift in the emergency room. She was looking forward to a hot bath and a full night of uninterrupted sleep when she got the call. That was always the way it seemed to be, these immortals picked the most inconvenient times for a duel or challenge. She'd picked up the van, driven out to the edge of Paris…she gasped as the rest caught up with her, pushing off his hands she struggled to sit up and nearly fell off the edge of the couch.
"Easy," he murmured. And with her eyes open, her face clear of blood she could see the man who sat before her. Duncan had a hard profile, the masculine lines of his face softened by the long hair that hung in dark waves around his shoulders. His hands steadied her when she would have slid down again. "It's ok."
"Easy for you to say," she hissed, pulling out of his hands and wiping at her nose that had started to drip blood again at her sudden movement and her arm that ached and she found it stiff with dried blood. "You're not the one who's bleeding and has broken bones and probably a concussion."
Duncan actually looked a little sheepish as she glared at him, grabbing the cloth out of his hand and holding it to her nose pinching the bridge to slow the flow of blood. "Do you have any ice?"
"Ice?" he asked in astonishment.
"Yeah, ice? Cold, wet, frozen water?" Her dry wit forced a smile from him even as he berated himself again and he stood up, walking into the kitchen to fetch it.
She took stock of herself while he gave her a moment alone. Her head and most of her neck and upper shoulders ached with pulled and strained muscles. She knew her nose was likely broken which meant that she must look positively ghastly with bruises across her face. At least that would mean that you couldn't see as many of the freckles that seemed to take up residence across her nose at any and every time of year. Her lip felt puffy and a quick exploration with the tip of her tongue found that it was split. Other than her face the only thing that caused her pause was her left arm; it was stiff and she could feel blood caked and drying her clothes to her skin in an uncomfortable tightness. When she picked at the edges of her coat she felt it pull at the skin and an unpleasant tearing burning feeling that caused her to hiss in pain.
"Here, hush," Duncan said, returning quickly from behind the couch and passing the ice into her hands. "We'll need to soak that off."
"I don't suppose you have much in the way of first aid?" she asked as he dipped the cloth that she had been holding over her nose into a bowl of steaming water and began to dab at the tear in her sleeve.
"Not a lot, no," he said apologetically.
"Well, I don't suppose you'd have much use for it." She murmured and lapsed into a few moments of awkward silence as the ice dripped coldly between her fingers and he soaked warm water onto her arm. Watchers' weren't supposed to interact with immortals. That was rule number one as it had been explained to her and even though she didn't consider herself much of a full time Watcher, she knew that was at least one rule that even she was expected to follow. And she was pretty sure that sitting in an immortals home sharing a cuppa tea qualified as "interacting" even if she was bleeding and had been unconscious for most of it.
"So you know about immortals then?" Duncan asked casually, but the too calm and uncaring inflection in his tone betrayed exactly how much he actually cared about the answer.
Shit, she thought. Silently cursing the slip of sarcasm that was always a vise she couldn't control.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Jordan," she answered automatically even while some part of her mind hissed at her: don't give him your real name idiot. "Crap," she muttered, again not quite quietly enough for him not to hear her. A small smile formed on Duncan's lips as he guessed the train her inner monologue was taking.
"Well Jordan, I'm Duncan –"
"MacLoud, of the clan MacLoud, yeah I remember," she said, her hands moving to mime Duncan holding the sword posed to strike earlier but she winced in pain as the motion pulled on her hurt arm. "Not about to forget that," she added, glaring at him from above the ice pack still pressed to her nose.
Mac felt his stomach lurch as the guilt settled into a firm knot somewhere in his mid-region. Now that more of the blood was cleared off, he could see that the fair skin of her face was bruised on one side and she had the making of a spectacular black eye coming on. Her arm had started to bleed again as the movement tore some of the clotted fabric and blood free and he suspected she needed at least a few stiches. Duncan reached for the bowl again to try and soak more of the fabric free but she moved away from him down the couch. He held his hands up slowly, palm out in the universal gesture of unarmed surrender: "I'm not going to hurt you."
"All evidence to the contrary," she said, the distrust and anger clear in her tone and posture as she slid a little further away while still keeping him clearly in her line of sight.
"If I wanted you dead I wouldn't exactly have brought you back here now would I?" Duncan mentally added a point to his tally for chivalry even if in the balance he was still in the red from actually causing the wounds that he needed to then save her from.
"I dunno, somewhere private and away from prying eyes seems like a better place than the middle of a field to kill someone to me." He couldn't deny she had a point there. He could tell she was smart even with the concussion and obvious lack of familiarity with interrogation…which he could turn to his advantage.
"Just what were you doing there anyways?" he asked.
"What was I doing there? I wasn't the one running around with a sword," she challenged.
"No, you were the one cutting up a dead body," he retorted. Point for him.
"Who you'd killed by cutting off his head!" Duncan rolled his eyes: point for her.
"I could've just left you there to bleed out or freeze to death," he said frustrated, falling back on the only thing he seemed to have going for him at the moment. She was right, so far in her eyes: he'd killed someone with a sword, come back and attacked her before kidnapping her while unconscious and bringing her to an unknown location. The night just wasn't adding up in his favour.
"It's not that cold, and don't flatter yourself, your sword isn't that sharp."
"It's plenty sharp!" he retaliated, positive that he kept the blade in pristine condition and insulted that she would think he would disrespect it with anything less. "You need stitches," he said as if this proved his point.
Duncan watched as she eyed him suspiciously from the couch, seeming indecisive for a moment before she made up her mind. To do what though, he wasn't sure.
Jordan silently measured the distance between them; he was at least 3 feet away from her now, if he made a move towards her she would be able to see it coming and…do what? She wasn't exactly an expert at self-defence, those few classes taken when she was a freshman had been long ago and she suspected that in his centuries of fighting and god-only-knows-what-else he probably far outstripped her meager abilities. If he was going to kill her there wasn't a thing she would be able to do about it. But he had brought her back here, given her asprin and tea and did seem genuinely concerned about her injuries…speaking of which, Jordan could feel the warm blood beginning to seep down her arm again. She sighed, turning to face him more directly so that she could keep an eye on him, she dropped the ice and cloth into a bowl on the table and began to shrug out of her jacket. Her arm was stiff, the muscles in her shoulders and neck sore and awkward.
"Stay there," she motioned when Duncan automatically moved to begin helping her off with it. He sat back in the chair, arms casually resting on his knees and bent forward at the waist; the perfect image of relaxed attention. It didn't fool her for a minute.
She pulled off the coat and grimaced at the cut in the material and blood staining a large area over her sleeve. With an easy motion she gripped the edge of the fabric and pulled, the whole sleeve tearing free to lie loosely pooled around the cuff at her wrist.
"Shit," she swore. Out loud this time and not caring if he heard her. He'd been right. The cut wasn't too long – barely 4 inches but it was full thickness through the skin and she could see the whitish-pink layer of subcutaneous fat and darker smooth muscle tissue showing from beneath it. "You're right," she admitted, carefully probing the wound with the fingers of her other hand, barely noticing the blood flowing and staining her skin. "I don't suppose you have a suture kit?" she asked without much hope. She was surprised he had asprin as medical supplies weren't really things his kind needed. Maybe they got hangovers.
"Hang on, I think I have something that will do," Duncan said, standing up and moving deliberately slowly across the room to where an old olive green trunk was pushed up against one of the curved walls. She watched while he lifted a few items off the top and then opened it and began to shift some of the contents. Wait a minute, curved walls? Jordan let her eyes travel up from his bent form kneeling in front of the trunk to take in her surroundings: the walls were in fact slightly curved, with metal joists visible and large round rivets holding the bones together. There were small round windows high up on the walls through which she could see nothing but the nondescript grey of sky or stone, it was impossible to tell which.
"Where I am?" She asked curious.
"My barge," Duncan replied, turning around with a grin more suitable to a schoolboy with a secret than a fully grown man who had lived for god only knew how long and should therefore have reached maturity long ago.
"Your barge?" She repeated incredulously. Then remembering that she hated people who just repeated statements as questions when they didn't have anything better to say (she firmly believed it made you sound like an idiot) she add: "You live on a boat?"
Duncan pondered the question for a moment, falling into a memory before he surfaced again enough to reply: "it can come in handy being able to make a quick exit sometimes."
"I bet it can," Jordan agreed, her attention shifting from their surroundings to the item held casually in his hands as he turned and walked back towards her. The full weight of what his life was finally dawning on her with the sight of what he held. It was a small canvas pack, olive green, in very good condition all things considered with only a few stains a less knowledgeable person would think were dirt or mud on the edges. The white cross was faded but only slightly obscured on the front.
Duncan came and silently laid the pack on the table, making room by pushing the bowl of water now rose-coloured with blood, and some books and odds and ends to the edges of the coffee table. His hands easily opened it, undoing the canvass ties with the smooth motions of long practice and muscle memory even though it had been years – decades - since he'd last had cause to open it. The inside was just as he remembered it; smooth metal and glass glinted as his fingers briefly traced over the contents, pausing briefly over a space or two where a pocket was empty or over the edge of one instrument. It was a surgeons' field kit. His field kit. From the war. Memories threatened to overwhelm him and for a moment he could taste the dust and blood, smell the tang of mustard and sulphur in the air and hear the screams of the dying before he pushed it all down again. He pulled out a little paper package that opened to reveal a selection of metal needles in various sizes, and opened another package sniffing at the contents before sticking his fingers in and withdrawing some beige strands and passing them over.
Jordan reached out and took the offering silently, feeling the smoothness between her fingers. "Silk" she identified the material easily. In med school there was one particular surgeon who still worked in nothing but silk and sinew stitches; refused to use the new nylon and synthetic materials. Most people had thought he was doddering but she'd seen the way his hands could move. It had been like watching magic. He'd been a surgeon in the war and she had never seen anyone better at trauma medicine even decades later.
"You were a doctor?" she asked, despite her resolve to not be interested. Don't get involved, that little voice in her head whispered at her but she was intrigued. She wanted to know what it had been like, what had happened to bring that haunted look into his eyes. Hell, she didn't even know which war it had been.
Duncan nodded, his eyes still on the table, "field unit, infantry," he answered briefly before looking up. He saw an indecisive look cross her face and she actually opened her mouth twice before finally voicing a question.
"Do you have anything to sterilize these?" she asked briskly. "It's probably been awhile."
Duncan laughed. "A wee bit yes. Alcohol work for you?"
"Works just fine."
Twenty minutes later Jordan was sitting back on Duncan's dark leather couch, a glass of possibly the best scotch she'd ever tasted held loosely in one hand (after opening it to disinfect the needle and silk thread, Duncan has suggested they have a glass: "why waste it?" and she couldn't think of a reason not to agree), wearing one of Duncan's older white t-shirts, her arm displaying a neat row of tidy stitches (she'd done them herself – Duncan's answer of "a wee bit" hadn't inspired the most confidence in how up-to-date his medical skills were). She let herself relax back into the firm cushions, the scotch and exhaustion from being hyper-alert combining as she contemplated her companion in silence.
Duncan was sitting on a chair beside the opposite end of the couch, his posture a careful mirror of her own; leaning back as if at ease with a glass of scotch gripped in one long fingered hand. They could be two friends (or lovers, her mind whispered before she firmly told it to shut up) enjoying a drink and some silent moments of comradery. Duncan seemed content to wait. But then he had forever.
"So what now?" Jordan asked, surprised to hear that her voice was calm and steady. She sounded almost as if she was asking where he wanted to go for breakfast rather than trying to determine if she was going to end up decapitated and dumped in the Seine.
He took a sip of scotch, nursing the glass. Its smooth taste refreshingly try and familiar on his lips. "I don't know," he admitted.
"This can't be your first time." God, don't joke with the man who can kill you! the little voice yelled and Jordan felt a blush rising into her face that she hoped was disguised by the bruising. She must be out of her mind to be teasing him. Clearly he had knocked all sense out of her head in addition to breaking her nose. But did she detect a hint of a smirk that he quickly hid while taking another drink?
"Usually I know people for some time before telling them about me," he answered easily.
She wanted to ask who he had told, how they'd reacted. She wanted to know who they were to him that he would trust them with something so enormous. She thought about her own life, so solitary and innocent it seemed in comparison to his and yet there were so few people who she really let in. A few friends from med school who she would email with, some colleagues from work who she would occasionally go out for drinks with, and the weekly phone call with her parents for 45 minutes like ritual every Sunday. There hadn't been anyone who she'd had a real conversation with, not really real, since Pierre. They used to sit and talk about anything and everything for hours. It didn't matter that he was decades older than her. He was her friend. A kindred spirit who she could tell anything to. Since he'd died suddenly there was no one who she found she could really talk or confide to. And certainly no one who she'd told about her extracurricular work activities. And it would be so much less costly for her to tell anyone than for him to. The vulnerability of choosing to tell someone, anyone, a secret that big, and knowing that he had probably told more than one or two people over the years, humbled her.
"And you obviously know what I was doing anyways. I still don't know what you were doing in that field last night," he left it a statement. The question hanging open and obvious.
"I suppose you wouldn't believe wrong place, wrong time?" she asked half-heartedly.
He gave her a look over the top of his glass as he took another sip that clearly communicated he expected better of her by now.
"You were cutting up Marc's body," he observed but the distasteful expression made the thought behind the words evident: desecration.
"I'm a doctor," Jordan answered defensively, hearing the disgust in his tone. She wasn't telling him anything he probably hadn't already guessed from her ability to suture anyway.
"Who lurks around crime scenes by night waiting to dismember bodies?" Mac asked, his anger at her unexplained actions breaking through in his tone finally. He might have ended Marc's life in the end, but he had once upon a time been a friend. A friend who deserved better than being hacked apart in a field in the middle of the night.
"Better to be the person disposing of the body than the one who killed him in the first place," she shot back, her own spark of anger and righteousness rising in response to his own.
"I'm just an antiques dealer," Duncan responded casually, gesturing around at some of the items and artefacts around the barge. He had accumulated a fair amount of things that were now worth quite a lot of money, and having lived through the history made it easy to evaluate and judge the worth of similar pieces. The ones he kept here were often the more personal items that he wouldn't choose to part with or sell, but it made the point; they both had their facades.
"An antiques dealer by day who goes around cutting off peoples' heads by night," she snapped, frustrated, before she could stop herself.
"And a doctor by day who goes around cutting up and disposing of bodies by night," Duncan observed, still so cool and calm she wanted to hit him. "We make quite the pair."
Suddenly she had a flash of premonition that even if the impossible happened and she ended up surviving this encounter and ended up seeing Duncan again, possibly even becoming friends and knowing him for years, this would always be how it was with them; going from an easy calm to frustration at a moments' notice. Their personalities sparking and clashing off the rough edges of each other. She sat in silence as this revelation took hold, the tension growing between them and Duncan doing nothing to stop it. She felt a sudden calm descend and she stared at Duncan with the same self-assured expression he had on his own face. She so rarely felt sure of anything, but she was sure of what needed to be said next:
"Look, we can sit here until I die of old age or starvation or whatever. But I'm never going to be able to give you an answer to why I was in that particular field last night, at that particular time. I made a promise. You're just going to have to trust me. And trust me when I say that I don't want to know why you were there either. I really don't." Jordan stared at him, watching his unreadable face and dark eyes trying to get a sense of whether he believed her or not. "As far as I'm concerned, you're just Duncan the antiques dealer and I'm Jordan the doctor. Whatever else we might be or do doesn't matter since we never need to see each other again anyways." She finished, slightly out of breath at the magnitude of what she was suggesting. Would he just let her walk away from this? Could she even let herself just walk away?
Duncan processed her words, his expression inscrutable behind hands steepled in front of his chest. He could tell that she was sincere; she really didn't care what he had been doing there and would be willing to walk away from all of this if he did the same. But that was what puzzled him even more. She had been there last night when no one should have been there. She obviously knew about him and his kind. Everything but her lack of a tattoo suggested that she was a Watcher. But she wasn't asking the right questions. And no Watcher that Duncan had ever encountered would just walk away from something like this with a promise that they would never meet again. They were too curious. Too consumed with their importance to history in recording the lives of immortals to think of doing such a thing. So who was she? Not a Watcher. Not a clueless everyday person off the street either. So who?
And did he trust her enough to let her walk out the door? A quiet voice in his mind whispered that she intrigued him and asked if he actually really wanted to let her walk away…but he brushed it aside.
Having reached a decision Duncan let his hands drop to the arms of the chair, one hand curling around the cool glass as he raised it to his lips and drained the contents, the smooth scotch sliding down his throat. "The door is behind you," he gestured with the hand holding the empty glass, his eyes never once leaving Jordan's face. She looked calm and collected but he could still see a hint of fear in her hazel eyes. "If you turn right when you get to the bank you'll find the stairs up to the street. You'll be able to catch a taxi from there. Your bag is by the door. Be careful on the gangplank; it can be slippery when wet."
Jordan looked at him a few moments longer – the hesitation clear in her eyes and demeanour. Was he really going to let her walk away, or would she feel the cold sweep of his sword across her neck as soon as she turned away? Either way the choice was his. There was nothing that she could do about it. Nothing other than do what she had asked him to do: trust.
Carefully she got to her feet, setting the glass of unfinished scotch down on the table and pulling her bloodied coat around her shoulders. It may not have been cold enough for her to freeze to death in a few hours outside but it was still Paris, in winter after all. Taking a deep breath, Jordan turned and crossed to the door, each step taking her farther from where Duncan sat motionless and the growing distance seeming to build rather than decrease the tension between them. When she reached the door her hand grabbed the old metal latch and swung it open, seeing the beginnings of a grey day stretching out before her, the sun just rising behind clouds that hinted at snow. It was beautiful. She paused, one foot over the threshold on the deck outside, the other still inside the barge, and turned to look back at Duncan.
He was still sitting in the armchair, the empty glass twirling between his fingers as he stared out into the middle distance of the room where she had been standing. He looked lost in thought and timelessly, vulnerably alone.
"Duncan?" She was speaking before she even realized that the word was out of her mouth, drawing his attention back to the present, back to her. She had a desire to go back into the room, to sit and finish her scotch and talk to him about the day, the world, the weather, anything and everything that might come to mind. But she held onto the door, her hand gripping the metal to hold her there and feeling the cold air brush around her face, bringing the sounds and smells of life awakening in the city behind her and firming her resolve.
His eyes met hers and locked on the sight of her standing half in the morning light and half in shadow, and suddenly he remembered a saying from days passed about lingering while crossing thresholds…He didn't speak though and soon enough the memory sank back into the quiet of his dreams.
"Duncan, don't you ever wonder what happens to the bodies?" she asked quietly, and then turned and was gone.
[A/N - The first story I've written in over a year. I think this is progress. I can end it here or continue. It seems like a natural break to me, but there are the beginnings of some thoughts on what could happen next circling my brain. Review or PM me if you'd like to see more to this story or if you're happy as-is. xo. ~Xan]