Swordbearer: Part Eight "Phoey"
by Vega
October 19th, 2006 - Morning
I by-passed the coffee line once more and headed straight for the lecture. Not at a run, but fast enough to pass people around me. The sword was still strapped to my hip, but I carried my coat over my arm on that side so it hung down and hid it.
I had been the first to exit out of the rear door of the bus when it had reached the stop at the University, and I had not waited to meet Adam. I wasn't MAD at him, I just... I just didn't want to DEAL with it. With anything.
It was all just too damned complicated.
I entered the lecture hall to find Professor Martin, as usual, pawing through and ungodly amount of over-heads. I slipped into my seat and pulled out my notebook as quietly as possible, hoping he wouldn't hear me over the rustling of the plastic in his hands.
My plan worked and he remained oblivious to my presence for a good few minutes, before the door clattered open and the same group of girls who had been talking to him yesterday morning entered. Upon seeing me, they began to whisper and giggle, (annoying!) and point.
I watched, giving them a slight glare that I hadn't used since I was newly Immortal and unaccompanied and alone by a fire place in a tavern full of stupid lusty men - a "don't think that just because I'm outnumbered I can't kick your ass, dick" look.
I was mildly impressed - MILDLY - when one girl got up the guts to flip her hair over her shoulder and approach me. I glanced briefly down at Prof. Martin, who was watching us with keen interest in his eye. Oh, fabu - no help from the peanut gallery.
"Um..." she began, and oh-so-eloquently at that, "Are you... you're Abigail Deirdre, aren't you?"
"No, I'm another Immortal who just happens to go to this University." She blinked and I sighed. Sarcasm was just lost on some people. Honestly. "Yes, I am. What can I do for you?"
"Um," she said again, obviously gathering her thoughts. I wondered how long it would take to get a hold on so little. "I'm Miranda, and, um, I'm the president of Phoey."
I knew my eyebrows had to be somewhere around my hairline. "Phoey?"
"Yeah, um, Phoey. Eff - Oh - Eye."
"Phoey," I repeated again, unsure. "OH! F.O.I."
"Yeah," she smiled, a blindingly vapid show of little pearly teeth. "Friends of Immortality."
I suppressed a groan. I had heard of FOI and had purposefully steered clear of it - it was a bunch of Immie loving wackados with more Peeping Tom tendencies than the Watchers, as far as I was concerned. From what I heard more than half of the club had committed suicide together in a hope to trigger latent Immortality. None of them had revived.
The rest had sworn to devote their lives to Duncan McLeod's ideals - the preservation of peace and harmony between Immortals and Mortals alike .They held Watcher-Journal readings in coffee houses and petitioned to have text-books changed and there was even a riot in a nearby town when several members had attempted to stop a Challenge from happening. One of the members ended up getting severe electrical shocks and had to be taken to the hospital.
"Yes, I've heard of you," was the most polite comment I could think up.
Her eyes lit up. "You have?!" I nodded. "Well, we thought that you... could, um, come to our... um... meeting tonight to you... you know... talk about it."
"It?" I was growing more unimpressed by the second. I almost would have rathered have Adam Pierson glaring at me from the other side of the bus again. She nodded. 'No' was on the tip of my tongue. 'Fuck off' was a bit further back, somewhere around the middle of my tongue. And 'what the fuck is wrong with all you pervy little wierdos!?' was making a lump in my throat.
I smiled thinly, attempting to appear all friendly and non-threatening like, and managed to choke out -"Sure, when and where?"
Because, you know... world peace and all that shit.
She handed me a pre-printed business card - good GOD they had CARDS?! - and then turned and ran back to the safety of her numbers with a hurried "Thank you. See ya tonight!"
I stuffed the card into my jeans pocket and slumped down on my chair.
Luckily the lecture hall filled up and Prof. Martin began his speechifying well before I had thought up any suitable way to tell them I had changed my mind. Luckily for them, that is.
I noted only briefly that Garret Small was not in lecture today.
I ran into Adam in the courtyard again, and it was mostly empty. I had a spare and so, apparently, did he, so I gulped down my pride and annoyance and accepted his invitation to coffee in his office. I was surprised to see how much crap he had already moved in, and when I mentioned it, he winked and said he'd had some stuff in storage for a while, and had had it shipped to the school this morning.
Again I got the sneaking suspicion that maybe Adam Pierson was not as young as he claimed to be, but I didn't press the issue. We all had our reasons.
The coffee was mistrustfully good - much better than the school usually had, and he confessed that he preferred to grind his own blend of beans by hand. At first we started talking about the usual Immortal stuff - our opinion of the Prize, our ages, where we'd been and if we'd popped up in history at all.
Eventually the topic turned to Watchers.
"You were one, weren't you?"
Pierson, who had been refilling both our mugs, paused. "Yes," he finally said, "I was."
"Before or after your First Death?" I accepted my now-full mug back and settled back into my seat as he returned to his seat on his own plush office chair and put his feet up on the desk.
"Before. I was actually killed by a stray bolt of lightning from a Quickening I was Watching. Irony of Ironies, eh?" He took a deep pull off his cup and sighed, doing that no-bones-cat-lounge-thing I had noted earlier in the bar.
"Yeah. Adam, can I ask you... What do Watchers DO?"
"They Watch." His lip curled in amusement of my sudden bristling annoyance. "Geeze, relax. You're as wound up as a violin string."
"Well, I've had a stressful few days," I snipped, running a hand through my hair and setting down my mug on his desk.
Adam set down his own mug and stood, coming around the desk. He moved behind me and placed his large warm hands gently on my shoulders, which made me slide my hand down to the hilt of my sword.
"You don't trust anyone, do you?"
"In a world full of people who either want to stare at me or kill me? No–ooooohhhh." His thumbs began to press against the knots in my traps and rub in circular motions.
"What about the other 99% of the people," he prompted, continuing his massage. "The ones who aren't Watchers and don't want your Quickening?"
I couldn't form a coherent response, even if I wanted to.
He chuckled to himself and lifted his hands away from my back. I reached up and grabbed his wrist - "I never told you to stop."
"You didn't answer my question about the other 99%"
I turned in my seat to look him in the eyes - they were sparkling with mischief. "YOU didn't answer MY question about Watchers."
"Watchers... gather information," he began slowly, tracing the pad of his thumb around the pulse point of his wrist, where I could see the faint tracings of where his tattoo much have been once, before his Immortality began to eradicate all the 'defects' in his body like it always did.
"What for?"
"Well, if the... many Immortals think that the Prize is, you know, to rule over the world or some such rubbish. If that's the truth, then the Watchers want to... to manipulate it so that the one who wins won't be... well, a complete and total wanker."
I paused, chewing on my bottom lip as I chewed on his words. He had unknowingly paraphrased Garret's answer from the night before.
So did this mean... that was the truth? That Watchers haven't been sticking their depraved little noses into my life for the past few centuries, and had only paid enough attention to me to figure out whether or not I'm one of the 'bad guys'?
".. .um," I said softly, and hated myself the second it crossed my lips. I sounded like Miranda, the ditz president of FOI. Which gave me a nasty idea... which I would use in a moment. Watchers first. "So, there's' no photos of me around in compromising positions, and, live, no one's collecting my dirty underwear and used band-aids or anything sick like that?"
Adam laughed - "Maybe! Depends on how through your Watchers have been. However, I can assure you that none have pried into your private life nor have they witnessed anything that is not for public consumption. Watchers don't go inside houses, and they don't root through garbage."
Well - I felt at least a little comforted.
"Right then," I said, releasing his wrist. "You may continue your massage."
He rolled his eyes but did as he was told. Mmmmm. Heaven. "Now your turn. What about the other 99%?"
I shrugged. "Indifferent, I guess."
"Even to Garret?"
I tensed up. "Yes, even to Garret. Well, this has been a pleasant visit, but I must be goiningnowthankyou." I got to my feet and collected my things and turned to find Adam blocking my door.
"The boy loves you," he said.
"I have absolutely no requited feelings whatsoever," I answered, feeling the anger rising. I wasn't quite sure if it was a lie, or not. Right now I wasn't willing to think about it.
"Well, then, I have no qualms about this--"
Before I knew it I had dropped my bag out of shock and his hands were on my elbows and his lips on mine. The kiss was not as time-stopping as Garrets had been the night before, but still gave me that fuzzy balloon-head feeling. When we parted I jammed a small rectangle of paper in his hand and ducked quickly under his arm to scoop up my bag and zip out the door.
As I ran down the hall, unsure of these strange new emotions I was feeling - shouldn't I be annoyed at the smug git? - I snickered to hear Adam's raised voice calling "What's a Phoey?"
Author's Note:
Gaah! New job and lack of inspiration has made this chapter long in coming, and I apologize.
Reviews:
Lili - Sorry it wasn't updated sooner. Maybe the next chapter will be more forthcoming. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write a decent chapter in decent English when you spend all day teaching English to ESL students? Gah!
MorganaPendragon: Lovely name. All in one sitting? Didn't you cramp up? Glad I'm on your fave's list, thanks. As to wether or not they'll ever find out he's Methos.... I actually don't know. If I have my way, no. But my characters sometimes get minds of their own.
Alynna: I hope there's more soon too! I'm really just playing with this on a chapter-by-chapter basis. I sort of know what the ultimate outcome will be, but I have no idea how far away that is. Hopefully more than thirty chapters, if I can swing it. I love long fics like that, myself, when they're worth it.
Jenetri: I never 'not finish' my stories! I just... um... let them sit for a while... like, erm... "Solitare" and "Jisedai". They're not ABANDONED so much as just... I'm waiting for the plot bunny to come back and play with me again.
Ovo: Um... thanks? Thanks. I will be proud when the plot actually starts going somewhere.
Village-Mystic: I appreciate deeply one who reviews every chapter. I love all of your suggestions and may use some - except making Matthew the FBI agent a PR wrangler... he's dead, remember? Yes, I agree that Abby's getting a bit heavy and moody - I intend on having a slow upward slide to normalacy once she gets over her damned self-consciousness. As for Adam's flirtiness - yup. Flirt flirt flirt. laughs at the Jack-Ass Idea PLEASE SOMEBODY WRITE THAT!! I don't really plan on adding to many other mainstream characters, except maybe in cameos. I don't really want this to be a Mary-Sue that way. I just want it to be a different story in the same universe. But HOW could I leave out the ROG?
Name1: Squeal away!
Rihw: I'll update whenever my bunny comes back. Got a carrot?
TheWreched87: This soon enough? And lovely bizarre name... 87 people are a lot of wretched people.
Ridea: I would LOVE TO SEE THAT FIC! I've been trying
by Vega
October 19th, 2006 - Morning
I by-passed the coffee line once more and headed straight for the lecture. Not at a run, but fast enough to pass people around me. The sword was still strapped to my hip, but I carried my coat over my arm on that side so it hung down and hid it.
I had been the first to exit out of the rear door of the bus when it had reached the stop at the University, and I had not waited to meet Adam. I wasn't MAD at him, I just... I just didn't want to DEAL with it. With anything.
It was all just too damned complicated.
I entered the lecture hall to find Professor Martin, as usual, pawing through and ungodly amount of over-heads. I slipped into my seat and pulled out my notebook as quietly as possible, hoping he wouldn't hear me over the rustling of the plastic in his hands.
My plan worked and he remained oblivious to my presence for a good few minutes, before the door clattered open and the same group of girls who had been talking to him yesterday morning entered. Upon seeing me, they began to whisper and giggle, (annoying!) and point.
I watched, giving them a slight glare that I hadn't used since I was newly Immortal and unaccompanied and alone by a fire place in a tavern full of stupid lusty men - a "don't think that just because I'm outnumbered I can't kick your ass, dick" look.
I was mildly impressed - MILDLY - when one girl got up the guts to flip her hair over her shoulder and approach me. I glanced briefly down at Prof. Martin, who was watching us with keen interest in his eye. Oh, fabu - no help from the peanut gallery.
"Um..." she began, and oh-so-eloquently at that, "Are you... you're Abigail Deirdre, aren't you?"
"No, I'm another Immortal who just happens to go to this University." She blinked and I sighed. Sarcasm was just lost on some people. Honestly. "Yes, I am. What can I do for you?"
"Um," she said again, obviously gathering her thoughts. I wondered how long it would take to get a hold on so little. "I'm Miranda, and, um, I'm the president of Phoey."
I knew my eyebrows had to be somewhere around my hairline. "Phoey?"
"Yeah, um, Phoey. Eff - Oh - Eye."
"Phoey," I repeated again, unsure. "OH! F.O.I."
"Yeah," she smiled, a blindingly vapid show of little pearly teeth. "Friends of Immortality."
I suppressed a groan. I had heard of FOI and had purposefully steered clear of it - it was a bunch of Immie loving wackados with more Peeping Tom tendencies than the Watchers, as far as I was concerned. From what I heard more than half of the club had committed suicide together in a hope to trigger latent Immortality. None of them had revived.
The rest had sworn to devote their lives to Duncan McLeod's ideals - the preservation of peace and harmony between Immortals and Mortals alike .They held Watcher-Journal readings in coffee houses and petitioned to have text-books changed and there was even a riot in a nearby town when several members had attempted to stop a Challenge from happening. One of the members ended up getting severe electrical shocks and had to be taken to the hospital.
"Yes, I've heard of you," was the most polite comment I could think up.
Her eyes lit up. "You have?!" I nodded. "Well, we thought that you... could, um, come to our... um... meeting tonight to you... you know... talk about it."
"It?" I was growing more unimpressed by the second. I almost would have rathered have Adam Pierson glaring at me from the other side of the bus again. She nodded. 'No' was on the tip of my tongue. 'Fuck off' was a bit further back, somewhere around the middle of my tongue. And 'what the fuck is wrong with all you pervy little wierdos!?' was making a lump in my throat.
I smiled thinly, attempting to appear all friendly and non-threatening like, and managed to choke out -"Sure, when and where?"
Because, you know... world peace and all that shit.
She handed me a pre-printed business card - good GOD they had CARDS?! - and then turned and ran back to the safety of her numbers with a hurried "Thank you. See ya tonight!"
I stuffed the card into my jeans pocket and slumped down on my chair.
Luckily the lecture hall filled up and Prof. Martin began his speechifying well before I had thought up any suitable way to tell them I had changed my mind. Luckily for them, that is.
I noted only briefly that Garret Small was not in lecture today.
I ran into Adam in the courtyard again, and it was mostly empty. I had a spare and so, apparently, did he, so I gulped down my pride and annoyance and accepted his invitation to coffee in his office. I was surprised to see how much crap he had already moved in, and when I mentioned it, he winked and said he'd had some stuff in storage for a while, and had had it shipped to the school this morning.
Again I got the sneaking suspicion that maybe Adam Pierson was not as young as he claimed to be, but I didn't press the issue. We all had our reasons.
The coffee was mistrustfully good - much better than the school usually had, and he confessed that he preferred to grind his own blend of beans by hand. At first we started talking about the usual Immortal stuff - our opinion of the Prize, our ages, where we'd been and if we'd popped up in history at all.
Eventually the topic turned to Watchers.
"You were one, weren't you?"
Pierson, who had been refilling both our mugs, paused. "Yes," he finally said, "I was."
"Before or after your First Death?" I accepted my now-full mug back and settled back into my seat as he returned to his seat on his own plush office chair and put his feet up on the desk.
"Before. I was actually killed by a stray bolt of lightning from a Quickening I was Watching. Irony of Ironies, eh?" He took a deep pull off his cup and sighed, doing that no-bones-cat-lounge-thing I had noted earlier in the bar.
"Yeah. Adam, can I ask you... What do Watchers DO?"
"They Watch." His lip curled in amusement of my sudden bristling annoyance. "Geeze, relax. You're as wound up as a violin string."
"Well, I've had a stressful few days," I snipped, running a hand through my hair and setting down my mug on his desk.
Adam set down his own mug and stood, coming around the desk. He moved behind me and placed his large warm hands gently on my shoulders, which made me slide my hand down to the hilt of my sword.
"You don't trust anyone, do you?"
"In a world full of people who either want to stare at me or kill me? No–ooooohhhh." His thumbs began to press against the knots in my traps and rub in circular motions.
"What about the other 99% of the people," he prompted, continuing his massage. "The ones who aren't Watchers and don't want your Quickening?"
I couldn't form a coherent response, even if I wanted to.
He chuckled to himself and lifted his hands away from my back. I reached up and grabbed his wrist - "I never told you to stop."
"You didn't answer my question about the other 99%"
I turned in my seat to look him in the eyes - they were sparkling with mischief. "YOU didn't answer MY question about Watchers."
"Watchers... gather information," he began slowly, tracing the pad of his thumb around the pulse point of his wrist, where I could see the faint tracings of where his tattoo much have been once, before his Immortality began to eradicate all the 'defects' in his body like it always did.
"What for?"
"Well, if the... many Immortals think that the Prize is, you know, to rule over the world or some such rubbish. If that's the truth, then the Watchers want to... to manipulate it so that the one who wins won't be... well, a complete and total wanker."
I paused, chewing on my bottom lip as I chewed on his words. He had unknowingly paraphrased Garret's answer from the night before.
So did this mean... that was the truth? That Watchers haven't been sticking their depraved little noses into my life for the past few centuries, and had only paid enough attention to me to figure out whether or not I'm one of the 'bad guys'?
".. .um," I said softly, and hated myself the second it crossed my lips. I sounded like Miranda, the ditz president of FOI. Which gave me a nasty idea... which I would use in a moment. Watchers first. "So, there's' no photos of me around in compromising positions, and, live, no one's collecting my dirty underwear and used band-aids or anything sick like that?"
Adam laughed - "Maybe! Depends on how through your Watchers have been. However, I can assure you that none have pried into your private life nor have they witnessed anything that is not for public consumption. Watchers don't go inside houses, and they don't root through garbage."
Well - I felt at least a little comforted.
"Right then," I said, releasing his wrist. "You may continue your massage."
He rolled his eyes but did as he was told. Mmmmm. Heaven. "Now your turn. What about the other 99%?"
I shrugged. "Indifferent, I guess."
"Even to Garret?"
I tensed up. "Yes, even to Garret. Well, this has been a pleasant visit, but I must be goiningnowthankyou." I got to my feet and collected my things and turned to find Adam blocking my door.
"The boy loves you," he said.
"I have absolutely no requited feelings whatsoever," I answered, feeling the anger rising. I wasn't quite sure if it was a lie, or not. Right now I wasn't willing to think about it.
"Well, then, I have no qualms about this--"
Before I knew it I had dropped my bag out of shock and his hands were on my elbows and his lips on mine. The kiss was not as time-stopping as Garrets had been the night before, but still gave me that fuzzy balloon-head feeling. When we parted I jammed a small rectangle of paper in his hand and ducked quickly under his arm to scoop up my bag and zip out the door.
As I ran down the hall, unsure of these strange new emotions I was feeling - shouldn't I be annoyed at the smug git? - I snickered to hear Adam's raised voice calling "What's a Phoey?"
Author's Note:
Gaah! New job and lack of inspiration has made this chapter long in coming, and I apologize.
Reviews:
Lili - Sorry it wasn't updated sooner. Maybe the next chapter will be more forthcoming. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write a decent chapter in decent English when you spend all day teaching English to ESL students? Gah!
MorganaPendragon: Lovely name. All in one sitting? Didn't you cramp up? Glad I'm on your fave's list, thanks. As to wether or not they'll ever find out he's Methos.... I actually don't know. If I have my way, no. But my characters sometimes get minds of their own.
Alynna: I hope there's more soon too! I'm really just playing with this on a chapter-by-chapter basis. I sort of know what the ultimate outcome will be, but I have no idea how far away that is. Hopefully more than thirty chapters, if I can swing it. I love long fics like that, myself, when they're worth it.
Jenetri: I never 'not finish' my stories! I just... um... let them sit for a while... like, erm... "Solitare" and "Jisedai". They're not ABANDONED so much as just... I'm waiting for the plot bunny to come back and play with me again.
Ovo: Um... thanks? Thanks. I will be proud when the plot actually starts going somewhere.
Village-Mystic: I appreciate deeply one who reviews every chapter. I love all of your suggestions and may use some - except making Matthew the FBI agent a PR wrangler... he's dead, remember? Yes, I agree that Abby's getting a bit heavy and moody - I intend on having a slow upward slide to normalacy once she gets over her damned self-consciousness. As for Adam's flirtiness - yup. Flirt flirt flirt. laughs at the Jack-Ass Idea PLEASE SOMEBODY WRITE THAT!! I don't really plan on adding to many other mainstream characters, except maybe in cameos. I don't really want this to be a Mary-Sue that way. I just want it to be a different story in the same universe. But HOW could I leave out the ROG?
Name1: Squeal away!
Rihw: I'll update whenever my bunny comes back. Got a carrot?
TheWreched87: This soon enough? And lovely bizarre name... 87 people are a lot of wretched people.
Ridea: I would LOVE TO SEE THAT FIC! I've been trying