On A Clear Day, You Can Live Forever
and Lucy's nephew Adam comes to dinner
Torago, USA--It was going on ten when they sat down to a movie on Saturday night. Amanda had been pretending to yawn ever since Nick had called her on the phone earlier and asked if she had any plans. She yawned almost four times during their ten minute conversation at seven o'clock, begging that she couldn't possibly be up for anything more energetic than sitting very still on a comfortable couch with a glass of wine.
He had been infuriated at how those yawns had affected him, even across the phone lines. That quick intake of breath and long exhale that he couldn't help but draw out longer in his mind to a moan. He made himself sick sometimes. Even caught himself wishing she were in the same room with him, yawning into his neck, his ear, so that he could feel that soft rush of wind past his sideburn. Four yawns during that call. He could only think of one reason she wouldn't want to go out. He was pretty sure she was planning a new heist.
If he had been able to read Amanda's mind, in the ways that she had always been adept at understanding most men's on certain subjects, he would have realized that the slow and calculated yawns were less there to disguise a mind bent on needing rest and time to strategize her next con, than to keep both of them at home, where she wouldn't have to share his company with anyone else. Where if the evening lead in a more intimate direction, certain things would be on hand. Or certain hands could be on things.
But truth be told, if anyone is ever looking for the worst in a situation, it's a cop. Burnt once, they're forever suspicious. Holding to the ethic that as long as they believe in the lowest common denominator, at least they can say, "I told you so," when (and if) it finally appears. And if Nick Wolfe's humanity, ethnicity or sexuality were ever called into doubt, one thing was for certain; he was a cop, on or off the force. "Detective" was etched onto his birth certificate as sure as his Christian name.
"So," asked Amanda lazily from her position stretched along Nick's poor, celibate only-living-room-furniture couch, "what's tonight's feature presentation?"
He looked back at her from where he stood at the entertainment center, unaware that she was more than enjoying her seat, from where she could so expertly peruse his. He could think only--and he hated himself for several reasons when this happened--of the many other couches that had supported her frame over the years, and how few, how very singular even, were the number of women's bodies his sorry, lonely, leather sofa had become acquainted with. And his couch, well, it was not so much for the eyes.
"You didn't sound very much like you'd want a comedy tonight on the phone." He pushed the tape into the machine, and began to walk toward the couch, wondering if she was going to move so he could find a seat, without having to lie down beside her. Oddly, the idea of her not moving seemed filled with exciting possibilities. "So I got us a drama."
The previews were beginning to roll up on the screen.
"Aren't you going to tell me?" she asked, and moved back to one side, sliding along the leather only moments before he sat.
Nick smiled and grabbed for a handful of Brazil nuts out of the bowl he had placed on the floor. Suddenly, the idea of not telling her held some appeal. He grinned through a mouth of nuts, reaching for his beer and shook his head.
"Oh, I see how it is with you," her eyebrows drew together, and she snatched his beer before he could get at it.
Now available on videocassette, the announcer was saying on TV.
"Looks to me like somebody," she had Nick by the ankle now, "could use a little punishment to remind him how to treat a lady." She had his sock off. His mouth was over-full of nuts and his throat very dry and wanting that beer. Nick grinned only because he couldn't seem to do anything else with his mouth, and was pretty sure he couldn't have spoken even had he wanted to stop the game.
"What say you, milord?" Amanda was addressing an imaginary adjudicator, "Ah, yes," she agreed with the non-existent fellow, "then it is unanimous--death by tickling!"
It is a true and honest fact that Amanda, through centuries of training, hapkido, and sword-wielding was very strong for her size. When she chose to show it, surprisingly so. She chose to show it now.
Nick was not always consciously aware of her strength. It was hardly something she displayed often. Then again, he had rarely, if ever, been on the receiving end. There was no telling how things would have turned out differently, had he not had a mouthful of Brazil nuts his dry throat made him unable to swallow, had he already not been starting into another beer, and had he not been born a child of his mother, and therefore uncommonly susceptible to the tickling of his feet.
Amanda had a firm grip on his ankle, which was not an easy task, seeing how it was jerking around involuntarily from her touch. She wrestled it successfully into position under her arm, and held it against her side, where no options remained except to quit trying to say, "Manda!" in a reproachful and winded-from-laughing voice, and give in.
"Uncle!" he cried, wiggling in an effort to get free, pushing at her shoulders with the hand that was not holding the nuts in his mouth. Tears were streaking down his face, and he halted his escape attempt to brush them aside. "Uncle!"
She let him go once she was satisfied she would soon have her answer. He gasped, "beer!" And with its help, was finally able to swallow.
"You are a bad one," he gulped, a few tears still in his eyes. "Pay up," she said, dangling his sock from an extended finger.
"Remember, there's always another," she threatened.
"Okay, okay," he said compliantly, hiding his bare foot by sitting on it. "I got Schindler's List."
Now available in stores, the TV announcer was saying, from MCA, the Academy-Award-winning soundtrack to Schindler's List.
"Oh," Amanda pouted, "Let's not watch that tonight. That's so depressing. Let's watch How to Steal a Million with Audrey Hepburn or Oceans 11. She really tried to sell that one. "Nick you'd like that so much better." She sounded like a kid begging candy in a checkout aisle. A really persuasive kid. "It's got Mr. Sinatra in it and Dino. Oh, you'd love it. And for me," she went on, making her case, "there's Vegas in the sixties."
"Come on, Manda," Nick said from his seat on the couch, where moments ago he had been having a pretty good time. "I don't want to go back out to the video store. Have you ever even seen Schindler's List?" She shook her head no. "You'll like it. It's a really good film, got Oscars I think." His voice was all but jumping out of him, willing her back to the couch.
"It's okay," Amanda said, looking to her coat and hat by the door, "I'll go pick something else up. You won't even have to move."
Nick didn't like something here. He wasn't sure what yet, but he said, "Amanda, just sit down and watch the movie. It's starting now."
And it was--names were rolling past on the screen, and the haunting score could be heard flowing from the speakers into his apartment, where the air had suddenly turned--cold.
"I'm not watching this," she said, standing a few feet from the TV but not looking at the screen. "Nick, turn it off."
"No," he said, getting riled. "I'm sorry if you don't like my choice in films, but this is what I got, and this is what I'm going to watch." He hadn't even finished when she had stepped to the VCR and ejected the tape. The room was now filled, quite jarringly, with the sounds of a soccer match on ESPN2.
"What is going on here?" he asked, incredulously. "Is a serious movie too much for you to take, or is it just that you can't deal because it's in black and white?" He rested his head in his hands for a moment, rubbing his finger and thumb into his eyes, where only a few moments ago he had been laughing so hard he had teared up.
"Or would you just rather be shopping?" He couldn't say what made him put that last bit out there. He should have known better. Amanda had become uncharacteristically silent.
"You know what?" she asked, in an apparent huff, searching for her shoes and coat so that she could exit with some dignity. "You know what Nick? Forget you. I don't have to take this."
And the next thing he knew, she had left, with only the air she had stirred in the room to remind him that she had been there at all.
Still angry in an upsetting, unspecific way that he often felt around Amanda, he let himself tip over onto her spot of the sofa, the shouts and noise of the soccer match washing over him and reminding him that the rest of the world did not revolve around Amanda.
Sunday, after Nick had gone to early Mass (an old habit--cops had a lot to think about when it came to eternity), he drove over to Amanda's apartment. He planned to extend the olive branch by way of a lunch invitation. Even though he was not entirely sure what had happened between them the night before, he knew that with several of the last cracks he had thrown her way, he had been selling her short, in a way she didn't deserve. The best he could ever hope for from Amanda was that she might feel inclined to explain herself.
Nick walked up to the double doors to her luxury flat. He had taken the stairs, all six flights, in the hopes of coming to some good decision about how to present himself, something diplomatic to say. All he had gotten was a little heated under his leather jacket. At the stairwell door he had paused and squared his toes in their boots. Only ever one chance to get these things right. He knocked.
Instead of the familiar approaching sound of Lucy's shorter high-heeled strides, or Amanda's long smooth ones, he heard nothing. He felt sure she was inside. He knocked again, noticing where the door had been repaired from several police-forced entries.
He heard an unfamiliar voice, a man's, and for some reason it frightened him not to hear Amanda, and some base instinct went into overdrive. He tried the door, feeling something was wrong. Something immortal. He had never known Amanda to go out of a Sunday morning, at least not until after brunch.
The door was unlocked and had not needed any of the strength he put into opening it, which left him standing in the small foyer, struggling for his balance as he pulled his gun.
"Amanda?" he shouted, though there was no noise to require it.
He quickly rounded the corner into the sitting room, with his gun held in both hands and pointed to the ceiling. There, sprawled across the sofa, was a man in casual clothes: a grey henley, jeans and bare feet, reading.
"Who are you?" asked Nick, suspicion still clouding his mind, "and where's Amanda?"
The man had decidedly little humor playing around the corners of his eyes.
"'Who exactly are you, barging in on my apartment this way?' seems a much better question to me." He made no move to sit up, but he had lowered the book several inches. It was Orlando, by Virginia Woolf.
Nick's suspicion was dissipating and sheepishness was starting to set in.
"Amanda Montrose lives here," he said, his gun still to the ceiling, at the ready.
"Yes," agreed the man, "and you are...coming to kill her?"
Nick almost laughed, but saw no irony in the eyes glaring back at him.
"No." Nick realized that he no longer held the upper hand, if he ever had. "I'm Nick Wolfe, a friend of Amanda's. I, uh, got worried when she didn't answer the door." He was pretty sure he might be blushing. "She isn't usually out on Sundays." He had no idea what else to say. He wanted to be somewhere else, like back out in the hallway.
"Well, from the looks of things, you're quite embarrassed enough without my adding to it, or venturing to ask when chivalry had come to such a pretty pass that when a woman doesn't answer the door of a morning, men come after her with guns." Now a bit of humor, "or her houseguests."
The man stood up now, taller than Nick had realized. Thin, Nick noticed. Probably not much of a boxer. Might not make the worst runner, though, he thought.
"Adam Pierson," the would-be runner introduced himself. "Lucy's nephew. I've come for a bit of holiday." Nick shook the extended hand.
"I didn't realize Lucy had family in Britain," Nick said, in hopes of steering the conversation elsewhere.
He heard the elevator ding and turned to see Amanda step off the car and walk in through the door he had failed to shut. She was wearing a stunning white linen dress and scarf, with only a small pocketbook.
She looked alarmed, as no doubt anyone would arriving home to find their door pushed in and a former cop holding their sidearm in the way Nick was still holding his.
"Nick?" she said slowly, and then seeing beyond him, to the couch, "Meee--yyy, my," she strung out the vowels, "when did you get in?"
She stepped past Nick, as though Adam Pierson were the only one in the room, and hugged him fiercely. Nick wondered if he was going to have to explain himself again.
"Nick," said Amanda, all the gracious hostess, "have you met Adam?" She had her arm slung across the other man's shoulders and she was smiling the way a proud parent smiles in a graduation photo.
"It's always good to meet a part of Lucy's family," Nick said politely and noncommittally.
"Well I'm glad to know you two are getting along so well." The gears in Amanda's mind, always turning, had settled on an idea. "In fact, as long as you're here, can you keep Adam company while I run just a few short errands? I would be so appreciative." That smile again. Nick could see no way to turn her down in front of his new charge. He agreed, and Adam sat back down to his book, while Nick followed Amanda into the next room.
"Who is this guy, Amanda?" he asked.
"Didn't he tell you?" She was searching around her drawers for something.
"Yeah, he said he was Lucy's nephew."
"Well?" She didn't even look up.
"Well? So how long have you known him?"
"Long enough." More searching.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Not good enough for you?" She looked up, clearly put out, hand on her hip, "Okay, I taught him how to drive his first car."
"So he knows...about you?"
"Oh, yeah, he knows." Back to rummaging, in the wardrobe this time.
"You trust him then."
"Darling, I never said anything about trusting him." She found what she was looking for. It was either a pawn ticket or dry cleaning receipt. He couldn't tell.
"Manda, about last night..."
"Last night?" You'd have thought she hadn't been conscious last night.
"Yeah, I want to say..."
She didn't let him finish, interrupting with, "what is it that guy on TV says, that show with the skinny girl? Yeah, bygones. Last night, Nick, bygones. Let's not talk about it."
And with that she was through the door in a mist of Chanel Number Five. And he was left with the prospect of amusing the nephew until she returned. He thought someday it was very likely Amanda would cost him an ulcer.
Nick stayed in the other room for a moment, collecting himself before going into the sitting room to talk to Pierson. He was not looking forward to his afternoon. There was something about this guy that he didn't trust, no matter that Amanda had been his driving instructor. He thought briefly that perhaps it was jealousy. That this other guy had had more of Amanda, spent time with her throughout the years.
Nick had met several immortals and older mortals that Amanda had known in her past, but never just a regular guy, someone he'd felt could size up to be some sort of competition. He remembered the hug. The look in her eyes when she saw who was here. A look not directed at Nick. He hated himself for the thought, was ashamed of it, but had to admit it was true. He just might have a new rival for Amanda's time. He took a breath and stepped through the doorway.
"So," he said to Adam, "any ideas on what you'd like to do while we're waiting?"
Pierson lowered the book, "I could go for a bit to eat. I've looked around here," he gestured to the kitchen, "and as you can imagine--nothing, save a few discarded takeout boxes in the rubbish bin." He smiled companionably, as though he understood Nick's feelings from his stance, the way he was holding his hands on his hips, hiking up his jacket to his waist. Pierson's smile seemed to say, "it's okay, we can be, at the very least, civil." It made Nick uncomfortable.
They agreed on a local restaurant that served, to Nick's mind, some overly expensive, undersized subs. He had only known about it from coming here with Amanda, and realized this Pierson fellow apparently shared some of her tastes. Great.
Over lunch they talked about their work. Pierson said he was in grad school off and on, and was just now taking a break from his most recent position as a researcher.
When Nick asked what he was researching, Pierson waved his hand dismissively and said, "Oh, histories, that sort of thing," and bit into his sandwich before saying more. Nick felt dismissed, as though he had not come across smart and cultured enough to understand the job's more specific aspects. Nick was having a horrible lunch, and thought he was also feeling a case of indigestion coming on when he remembered the video which he had to return.
"Anywhere to go around here for a good beer?" Pierson asked.
Nick offered one out of his fridge across town, explaining he had to pick something up at his apartment.
When they arrived, and Pierson realized it was a movie to be returned, he curiously inquired as to the title.
"Schindler's List," Nick told him.
"And Amanda was over here last night?" Pierson asked.
Nick wasn't sure where this was going.
"Yeah, so?"
"Well, if you tried to get her to watch that, it explains a lot of things." Pierson looked smug, and took another drink of his beer, his eyes now fairly dancing over the rim of his can.
"Explains what?" Nick was trying to keep his tension at bay, knowing that being sharp with someone who has the information you want never goes well.
"It explains why she was in such a hurry to leave the apartment when she saw that you were there, and throw both of us together while she ran off probably for the rest of the afternoon."
Nick just stared.
Adam Pierson, pissant grad student, sometime Watcher-employed researcher. The mythical immortal Methos. By most accounts the world's oldest immortal, his existence and identity known by very few, sat on the sofa in Nick Wolfe's apartment with his beer, admiring Amanda for her cleverness, and at the same time wishing a curse on her man-cluttered life.
This poor fellow Nick, he thought. He thinks I'm some sort of competition. Probably doesn't even have a good grip on the feelings my showing up have sparked in him. In fact, he took another sip, most likely wants to throw down right here in his living room. He smiled in the direction of the blank TV, thinking about how many blows such a fight would come to before he would win. No more than six, he thought, because he was certain that this ex-cop would play fair.
Why on earth did Amanda keep picking these types up? And why were these types of men so inspired by her careless hit-and-miss morality? Good thing this Nick isn't going to live forever, thought Methos. The world couldn't hold more than one Duncan MacLeod eternally bent on reforming her.
His mind drifted back toward the TV screen, and to Nick, leaning across the kitchen's counter.
"She sent you off with me because she knows I can tell you what your fight last night was about and she won't have to talk about it. Won't have to think about it."
Nick didn't move from his spot at the counter, and Methos looked at his reflection on the screen.
The Old Man spoke into the air ahead of him. "You know about Amanda's first death?"
"Yeah," conceded Nick, "something about waking up on a pile of bodies during the plague? And being rescued by her mentor Rebecca, and then she," He was going to go on when Methos interrupted.
"Yes, yes, right, but only that first bit is important here." He took a deep breath to begin, "from what I've read in my research on Immortals." His eyes instinctively looked to his wrist tattoo, wondering if Nick had seen it, and was thinking this whole Lucy's nephew bit was a charade. "Their first death stays with them always, as one of the most visceral and powerful moments; that second between mortality and infinity, that last true feeling." As a bit of an aside he added, "that's why most of them become obsessed with hunting down their killer."
He stretched, to settle into his seat and his story. "Anyway, it was Nineteen forty-one, or forty-two, and Amanda was in Poland, living, as I'm sure you can imagine, large."
Nick was not sure he wanted to hear this story. It seemed to be heading somewhere that would cast his words of last night into an even worse light than a few moments ago. He needed to know though. Amanda didn't often talk about her past selves, leastways not at length, and it wasn't often anyone else was around who might know. He leaned into the counter and took another pull on his beer.
"So she stole something, some jewels, diamonds, maybe an emerald, from a shop in Krakow. And while she was fencing it, practically across the street from the shop--which was not unusual in those days--she hears from the man appraising them that he recognizes them as coming from Olszewski's, which, he leans over the counter toward her, is a no good Jewish shop. Of course Amanda pays this no mind, she's just interested in her percentage. The jewels are good quality, and this fellow gives her her cut, which is larger than usual. She doesn't ask why, but right before she leaves, he whispers his thanks to her for taking them out of Olszewski's, so that the family hadn't been available to bribe the soldiers who had come for them that morning to take them away.
"Shaken up, she walked across the street and saw that it was true. The windows of the store were smashed, yellow Stars of David painted on the pieces of glass still in the frame. Propaganda posters strewn everywhere, the usual."
Nick interrupted, "where are you getting this from? She tell you this?"
"Another immortal's journal--what I was researching," Methos said. "She went to this other immortal that had some knowledge of such matters to ask for his help in finding Olszewski in the camps."
"Yeah," said Nick, "what's this guy's name?"
"Methos."
"Okay, so she goes to this Methos..."
Amanda had gone to Methos that day, though of course he was using an entirely different name then. Something Russian, Vladimir Rasmonovich something or other. He was the first one to tell her what was really going on in the camps. The ovens, the showers, the killing. And so she asked him to get her in.
She smiled as she sat at Windy City, a corner cafe, in the late Sunday afternoon, wondering vaguely about what Nick and Methos were up to. Remembering how Methos had told her no. Flat out no.
But she had told him about some golden insurance she had stashed away for safekeeping. He almost agreed. Finally she had thrown in her rainy day jewels as well, and he consented--to get her in, as well as wait in the nearby woods for her and Olszewski after she got him out of there.
"Why are you so fixed on this, Amanda?" Methos had asked, with his usual casual disregard for current affairs.
"I got him into this." She realized that response would never stand up on its own, "and he's going to be one of us."
"All the more reason for you not to worry," said the Old Man. "I haven't heard the Nazis've taken to beheading just yet."
But she hadn't been able to sleep at night, with images of her own death stuck in all her dreams; coming back to life on that heap of bodies. If Rebecca hadn't been there like an angel, to rescue her, to explain. She never let herself go further than that.
"So you want to be his angel," Methos shrugged. "You want to save him from your fate. I don't get it, personally, but you are offering me an incredible compensation, so I'll keep my opinions to myself."
They had had no trouble getting in, though Methos acted uncharacteristically skittish the entire time, despite his own words condemning her "new-born high ideals" that had brought them to such a place.
Amanda often wondered after if he hadn't been right.
"So Methos helps get Amanda in, under the guise of a potential secretary to the Kommandant. The kind of secretary that can't necessarily type all that well. She gets the job, but they hadn't planned on what to do if Olszewski was already slated for termination."
"And of course he is?"
"Yes, the very next day of her new job, Amanda steps outside and sees him in line for the showers with a group of men. He had apparently fallen ill. And they took the sick and old first.
"She follows the men, almost all the way to the showers, entering a part of the camp where security is very tight--the genocide wasn't all that well-publicized yet--trying to figure some way of escape. But there are too many guards, and they find her.
"She doesn't even try to tell them who she is, the Kommandant's secretary, because she has realized in her reconnaissance that the other side of the shower building, where they dispose of the bodies, is barely guarded, and run by only a few prisoners. So she gets herself caught and thrown into line with the men."
Amanda could still see how that day was, the sunlight glaring off the bare pallid flesh of those around her, the breeze of that summer causing them to shiver. She yelled and fought when they caught her, and had had to rein herself in before she got away. Had to let herself be captured, her red-with-white-polka-dots dress and her slip torn off her, her shoes cast aside, useless in the caking mud. She must have looked like some psychotic strumpet standing there in her garters and ripped nylons, lipstick smeared down her chin.
One of the guards, not yet too calloused to notice her had tried something with her as the line moved, and she had bit his nose so hard he probably needed stitches. For that she got a rifle butt across the cheekbone, and she had to check herself not to wipe at it with her hand, to smear away the blood and reveal that it was quickly healing.
She had felt like she was approaching final death more than she had felt it in any of the many immortal duels she had fought in a century.
She could no longer see Olszewski in the line.
"So what happens then?" Nick asked, his chest and hands in knots behind the counter.
"Well, it seems when she and Olszewski made it to Methos and to the woods, when he asked her about what had happened, all she would say was that they were playing a recording of Wagner."
"So that's the end?"
"That's as much as I can tell you," Methos replied.
"And Olszewski, where is he today?"
"Well, the Chronicles show Amanda taking him back to Rebecca in Britain to be trained, but he wouldn't stay very long, instead he went back to Poland in the underground. After the war he immigrated to the States and was killed soon after by Luther, who thought he had part of the Methuselah crystal. Olszewski didn't, it seems, and consequently didn't live beyond a mortal's life expectancy."
Amanda was watching the sun set behind the flags on the Michigan Avenue bridge, and remembering how it had been, to find him alive finally underneath--she glossed over that--underneath everything. Knocking out some guards to steal their clothes, and running for the nearby woods, that part of her rejoicing with Olszewski as well; that loudly beating heart each held within them saying that they were alive.
It had not lasted long though, that moment that felt tandem only with the discovery of a new love. In the woods they had to cross some train tracks, and paused for the passing engine and cars. They were hidden in the undergrowth, barely able to keep their joyous breathing quiet, their giggles under the roar of the boxcars.
He saw it before her, that the train held human cargo, heading east, where they had just been. Saw it and wept, wailed without sound into his hand.
"There are things you have to learn," she tried to tell him. That this was not his fight. She couldn't tell him, could only see his future, where his world, already upside down, would tremble and break under the weight of things he had yet to learn. That his parents were not his own. That his people were not his own. That he had to put away his jeweler's trade, his fine uncalloused fingers, and take up arms to protect his own life from opponents more zealous than Hitler's Nazis.
The earlier moment of relief and abandon had passed, and when they got to the car, she couldn't answer Methos' questions.
"They played Flight of the Valkyries," she had said, with a dry mouth and eyes like walls, as though he'd asked about last week's symphony performance. Olszewski said nothing.
Nick had turned away from the living room. He did not know how long things had been silent between him and Pierson. He had been trying to imagine the Amanda he knew; graceful, wily, impeccably put together, lying on a heap of dead bodies like those in documentaries he had seen about the Holocaust. He thought about the smell, how he had read that the gas was so strong that often bodies came out fused together. He wanted to puke, to punch through glass, to do something to relieve the pressure on his sternum. And then he realized that it was okay.
Okay because Amanda would be coming back to her apartment tonight, looking fabulous and charming everyone in her path. And that even Olszewski had gotten a second chance, even if it had been brief.
It was supposed to be a positive story, something Amanda had done that was good, something noble. But the truth was that the sight and scene to which Amanda and Olszewski had revived was more than just a pile of refuse, of smells and fear. It had been people, as innocent as children. And that was something he didn't know how to process.
Methos was done with his beer, and felt for a moment that he had ended the story inopportunely. If only he'd held the ending back longer, inserted another few details, he probably could have asked for another before he and Nick Wolfe had entered that strange place where men don't want to be looking at each other, much less be reminded they were in the same room. Damn, he thought, trying to think of a way to break the silence.
He let the empty can drop to the floor, where it rattled loudly against the hardwood. "So sorry," he said, turning around apologetically.
Wolfe looked up. "Don't worry about it," he said.
Neither could be sure they were responding to the story that had passed between them or a carelessly dropped aluminum can.
Amanda was getting out of her Mercedes, flipping her sunglasses stylishly to the top of her head. She winked at the new doorman, who offered to help her with her bags, but declined with a beautiful smile that insured he would ask her again the next time she went shopping, when quite frankly, she planned to buy a great deal more.
She hadn't bought much today, shopping hadn't been to her taste. Instead she had stopped to look in on one of her rainy day jewels. It was an emerald, the size of her thumbnail and perfect in both cut and clarity, marks of a master gemologist who had had perfectly smooth hands and the sharpest of eyes. A man who had been vulnerable to beauty.
In nineteen forty-two Amanda had returned to Krakow after leaving Olszewski in Rebecca's care. Her stay had been short. She had visited her fence across the street from Olszewski's now vacant shop. Of course her fence's business hadn't been open at the time, but she was sure he'd gotten her message. The emerald had gone with Olszewski on his trips with the underground, and finally settled with him in America.
It had been hers twice out of theft, and had come in the end to her as a gift, left to her in Olszewski's will. Since then she hadn't thought about it much, and had never had it put in a setting. Like many things in her lifetime, it occupied a part of the past that would never be easy or painless. But today something had told her that it might be time to see it again, to have it with her while she thought.
Amanda's knuckles grazed it now in its black flannel pouch as she reached into her pocketbook for her key. She thought of how Methos would laugh if he knew that she still had it. That she had gotten it out today to carry around. But she knew underneath his teasing about sentimentality, he could understand.
She walked into her apartment, and saw the time. Lucy would be home soon, she realized, and Nick and Methos were bound to arrive back as well. Lucy would be delighted to see the Old Man again, and Amanda was feeling like a proud godmother at the thought. Her little family.
How on earth would she entertain them? Cajun food, she thought, and dancing. Tonight they would all go dancing. Lucy was a great dancer and if anyone could coerce Methos' tired feet out on the floor, it would be her. After all, a boy couldn't refuse his aunt. She laughed. And Amanda had been just dying to try out Nick's moves.
The End
3/28/99
DISCLAIMERS
The characters of "Highlander" are owned and operated by Panzer/Davis Productions Gaumont/Rysher/etc.Specific Story Disclaimer:This piece takes place in Torago (called such after Alice in Stonyland, and because the name "Chironto" sounds even sillier), although Highlander:The Raven never returned there.
I want to play with the timeline of actual events a little, because I would like this to occur after Nick and Amanda's kiss in The French Connection when each realizes the other is still alive, and after Nick has been told about the Watchers. Also, paying further homage to Alice in Stonyland, as in her story The Kiss, this piece operates on the assumption that Amanda and Methos knew of each other before their meeting in Finale, although it is unlikely that she knew his true identity at that time.
Thanks to my beta-reader Yakut for spending her time correcting mistakes in the Highlander Universe when she could have spent it reading Missy Good fiction.
All characters, save Olszewski, belong to TPTB.
2000 (c) Neftzer