Disclaimer: I own nothing. I'm just a lowly student with too much time on her hands. (And this in the middle of my finals. I must be either incredibly cocky or just that good. I'll be sure to keep you posted on which.) I'm just playing in somebody else's proverbial sandbox, and while I can't promise to leave everything exactly as it is, I'm not planning any major architectural changes either. Faye, however, is mine, and the challenge is out to anyone willing to try and prove her Mary Sue-ness.
A/N: Finally, here I am with chapter two. It was written in a single session this morning, which really says nothing either about the quality of the chapter or my competency as a writer, except, possibly, that I am no more consistent in output than I am in chapter order. I make no promises as to chapter three. Only this, that it will, eventually, be written. I'm keeping 'Of chickens and eggs' as a title for the whole. I'm quirky that way. Also, I've changed the genre to parody. I figured that, in good grace, I couldn't get away with just calling it humor anymore. Finally, allow me to add, just for clarity, that chapter one comes at the end. All the rest will be a prequel to it.
BTW: As for keeping you posted on my finals: I finished with honours. Still, I'm probably more cocky than good.
Joe approached the two at the corner table who were happily ensconced behind their beers. They stopped talking to regard him in a comically identical way, like two cunning six-year-olds denying that they'd been plotting a scheme to raid the cookie jar. Or the bar, as the case may be.
"Don't stop talking on my account," said Joe, looking from one to the other. "Whatever you were talking about, it must have been interesting, 'cause I could hear you giggling from all the way over there."
"We were just pondering the unthinkable, Joe," said Methos, faking a dreamy look and failing as the tremendous amount of Stella he had thusfar consumed was making his eyes cross.
"Inventing meaning for the insignificant," added Faye with an enigmatic frown.
"Right. Sort of like the chicken and the egg?" ventured Joe.
"Nono, we've solved that one," said Methos, lifting his half-full Stella to his lips and emptying it in one gulp. "See, the chicken is merely the egg's way of making another egg."
Faye pointed a swaying index finger in his general direction by way of an accusatory gesture. "You so copped that line. Admit it. This is rich. You even suck at faking intellectuality."
"I did not." Methos gave her an even stare over the rim of her glass which was now also rapidly being emptied.
"Did too," Faye insisted, setting the glass down with a satisfied clunk. "Samuel Butler. I know my sociobiologists, dude."
"And who do you think he'd been talking to the night before he wrote that?" said Methos, eyebrows impressively drawn up.
"No way..." said Faye, mimicking his expression. "You don't mean to tell me that you have an original sense of humour..."
They eyed each other a moment, then collapsed into helpless thigh-slapping laughter.
"Right," said Joe, failing to recognize what was so funny. "I'll just get you another couple of beers, then."
This produced no intelligible response, so he headed on back to the bar to meet the Highlander who had just strayed in and was arranging his coat and himself on stools by the empty bar.
"What's going on over there?" he asked of Joe, motioning to the two in the corner as he took a perch.
"Beats me," said Joe, rinsing a couple of glasses and moving to the tap. "I think Faye is trying to out-Methos Methos. Or maybe it's the other way around. Who knows. I'm just a Watcher. I observe and record and never quite understand."
Macleod gave a small grin. "The odd couple. Who'd have thought?"
"Yeah," replied Joe as he pulled two beers. "Either of them on their own can be entertaining company, but put the two of them together and they tend to give you that funny feeling that the conversation has been mugged."
MacLeod grinned again, took the beers from Joe. "I'll take them over."
"Thanks."
"Should I expect to get paid?"
"Of course not. The tab they've got running could feed a small country for a decade. A state of affairs I should remedy at some point, I know," he added when he caught MacLeod's look.
Macleod sidled over to the pair in the corner just in time to hear the end of a story that Faye was telling with some vehemence and dramatic gestures.
"... And that's what he said to me. I was outraged. Outraged."
"As you would be," agreed Methos.
"Quite. I mean, the cheek of it."
"Right, right," nodded Methos. "But, you know, just for clarification, um – was that before or after you murdered his only son?"
"Whose side are you on anyway?" said Faye with a smouldering sidelong glare.
"His own, I should think," interrupted the Highlander. He set down the glasses, gathered up the empty ones, ignored Methos' poisonous look. "Here's your Stella. Pay your tab." And he was off.
"He's a bit dry, tonight," he caught Faye's remark.
To which Methos replied something in a language that probably hadn't been spoken since hot water was invented and cracked them up again.
MacLeod sighed and went to strike up a conversation with Joe.
"Business a bit slow tonight, isn't it?" he said, looking around the room which held only eleven people, including themselves and the pair at the corner table.
"Yeah," said Joe wretchedly. "Nothing like a report of a 'freak lightning storm' to keep away customers."
"I'm surprised that your sound installation survived the event."
"It didn't," said Joe drily. "I replaced it."
"You had the funds for that?" asked the Highlander, looking concerned.
"Not really. I'm seriously in the red."
"Well, that takes the biscuit. First she threatens you, kidnaps you, shortcircuits your livelihood, and then leaves you on the brink of bankruptcy without a second thought." Macleod was lightly rapping a large fist into the shiny polished surface of the bar and frowning ominously. "That kite won't fly."
"Not without a second thought, really, I wouldn't say," objected Joe weakly. "She did promise to pay for the damages."
"And why hasn't she already?"
Joe shrugged with one shoulder, rubbing vigorously at an imaginary spot on the glass he was drying off and didn't reply.
"Come on, Joe," persisted the Highlander. "She's probably been saving up since they built the pyramids. You know she has plenty of cash stashed away somewhere."
Joe continued not to reply.
"You're not afraid of her, are you?" asked MacLeod then, much in the same tone as one might use to say 'you didn't fart, did you?'
"Well," said Joe, after a long pause, "considering she's held me at knifepoint, gunpoint and swordpoint – in that order – and stolen my legs twice, I'd say I'm remarkably unafraid, wouldn't you?"
At exactly this point, implausible-looking Faye popped up beside MacLeod like a jack-in-the-box, held out two equally implausible-seeming empty glasses and placidly requested "two more."
MacLeod leaned on the bar and looked at her thoughtfully in exactly the sort of way that normally lets people know unmistakably that they're being Watched.
Faye did her level best to return his gaze icily, even while her eyes couldn't quite seem to agree on what she should look at. "Do you have a problem?" she asked in the low voice that normally lets people know unmistakably that the speaker is Unimpressed.
MacLeod gave her the once-over. Bushy dirty blond hair that seemed to have missed the invention of the comb. Thick eyebrows hovering asymmetrically over grey eyes, usually piercing clear but now considerably hazy. Crude features, interesting rather than attractive. Square jaw, long neck, stocky build. Dressed like a preschooler's idea of fashion, including odd socks and an improbable assortment of accessories, rather heavy on the large wooden beads and ornaments of indeterminate ethnic origin. MacLeod found that if he ignored the few modern-looking pieces in the ensemble and squinted ever so slightly while tilting his head to the left, he could just about make out the woman's humble cave-dwelling, mammoth-hunting origins.
"Well, what is your problem?" she said again, hopping impatiently from foot to foot, in due obedience to the laws of Excessive Consumption. "Joe, could you hurry it along with those beers, please. Nature shouts."
"Sure," said Joe. "If you could tell me what brand other than Stella you would like." In deference to those same laws, the barrel had run out.
"No Stella?"
"No."
"Then I don't care. Actually, I'll pick them up on the way back from the little girls' room." And she scurried off.
Joe sighed heavily and went to dig out two bottles of Palm, knowing – as he would – all about Methos and Faye's arbitrary preference for Belgian beers. Arbitrary, at least, to most Americans, whose taste-buds seem congenitally ill-equipped for the task of discerning a truly good beer when they meet one.
"Joe," MacLeod interrupted his nervous fumbling with the bottle opener.
"Um?"
"Would you like me to talk to her?"
"No!" The cap came off with a plop and narrowly missed the Highlander's left eye. "I'll get my money, Mac. Sooner or later," he added miserably.
MacLeod took a generous swig of his beer, exhaled contentedly with drawn back lips in that way only men do, as if wanting to prove that there's a manly sort of way of enjoying a drink which is incomprehensible to women. "Well, Joe, you might be looking at later rather than sooner. Don't forget, we have time," he told his friend with a rather premature I-told-you-so look.
"Right," said Joe, carefully pouring the Palm's into the appropriate bowl- shaped glasses raised on a short foot. "I'll get my money, Mac," he repeated. "Don't you worry about that."
The Highlander conceded with another swig of beer and mandatory manly growl. They kept a companionable silence as the Palm's sat frothing on the bar and were shortly after picked up by Faye. MacLeod avoided meeting her eyes, having decided that no good would come of it anyway. He and Joe spent the rest of the evening talking about this and that and the weather and making a point of drinking moderately, while such fragments of conversation from the jolly drinking buddies in the corner wafted towards them over the music as "good grief! Wouldn't that be a bestseller! Bigger than the New Testament!" ("Good grief?" echoed Joe to MacLeod, making a funny face.) and "you did what to the sheep?!"
Sometimes they exchanged a knowing look. Most of the time, they didn't bother.