1988

Torchy felt her head swimming, the back of her head was killing her, and through her closed eyelids she felt a bright light shining on them. She opened her eyes and with momentary horror realized the reason her head was swimming was because it, along with the rest of her upper body, was dangling off the edge of a bridge directly overlooking the river 200 feet below. A yelp of surprise escaped her, and she swung her upper body up to pull herself back up onto the bridge and find out what had happened.

On the bridge, it was dark but Torchy was able to make out a few details, the two swords and one long knife discarded in the middle of the bridge, the one body without a head laying several feet over on the left, and…Caspian, who seemed to be knocked out cold on the right. Oh yes, now she remembered, now she remembered everything. Torchy approached the body of her husband and up close and personal was able to see him in better detail, and he looked unusual, even more so than usual. Every inch of his skin looked pure white, like a corpse with all the blood drained out of it.

As though he didn't already look weird enough when he started shaving the side of his head, revealing a dragon tattoo underneath, Torchy thought, it was no wonder he grew it out when he was working in the court, there was no way that they would've ever taken him looking like…

His eyes opened, and rolled to the front and a sound escaped from him that sounded like he'd been hit by a truck.

"So now what?" Torchy asked him.

The next thing she was aware of was two strong arms crushing her ribs as he pulled her down and pinned her to the ground, then he was on top of her, and what followed was a violent struggle as the two Immortals rolled around, each trying to throw the other and pin them down. One quick move and Torchy got lucky, leaving Caspian on the ground groaning, but he quickly recovered and got to his feet, but now Torchy was ready for him.

Standing with her feet firmly apart and her hands balled into fists on her hips, Torchy regarded her husband as he stood up and she told him with a murderous glare in her eyes and a venomous tone in her voice, "If you ever try to rape me again, I'm going to cut off anything that hangs, dangles, or swings. You got it, you little psychopath?"

In two steps he was all but on top of her, barely a fraction of an inch between them, and he leaned in towards her face and slightly ominously asked her, "And if I don't?"

She cocked her head to the side but what actually got Caspian's attention was the sudden pressure jabbing him below the belt. One eye looking down, he saw that in Torchy's had she had concealed a knife, which she now was using to drive home her less than subtle message.

"Point taken," he remarked as he took a prompt step back from her.

Torchy waited a minute before putting her knife away, then she turned back to the body on the other side of the bridge.

"You knew him," Caspian said.

All she could do was nod.

"I didn't know he was Immortal," she finally told him.

Caspian walked over beside her, looked at her, and noticed that she looked like she was trying not to throw up.

"I had him on trial for murder, first degree," she said, "He got out in five years!"

Caspian folded his arms against his chest and inquired, "Who'd he kill?"

Torchy just looked down at the decapitated body for a minute, then broke into a fit of kicking and stomping on the corpse, puncturing through its flesh with the metal heel in her boot. Caspian watched this in mild amusement for a minute, but even he knew when it was overkill and even more unnecessary than usual, he grabbed Torchy and pulled her away from the body.

"Let's just get out of here," she told him.

"First thing's first," he told her, "First the body has to go."

Torchy took it by the feet, Caspian by the arms, and they walked the corpse over to the edge of the bridge and tossed it over, and it plummeted into the river below.

"What about the head?" Torchy asked.

"I don't see it anywhere," Caspian told her as he picked up the opponent's sword and chucked it over the edge as well.

"So who was he?"

"I don't want to talk about it here," Torchy told him as they walked away, "I need a drink, several."

"We've got plenty of that back at the house," he pointed out, "I have a feeling anything you're about to say would open us up to an investigation if breathed in a public atmosphere."

"He wasn't the first," Torchy finally told her husband after drinking half a bottle of whiskey in one breath, and handed him the rest of the bottle, "He wasn't the first, but he wasn't the last either, I remember all of them."

"Of what?" Caspian asked. During the trip home he had been surprisingly patient but now that they were alone, he was more than curious about what had gone on tonight other than a run-of-the-mill challenge.

She looked at him and told him, "I don't expect you to understand, you slaughtered thousands of people, what the hell would you care?"

Caspian grabbed her again to get her attention and emphasized, "What-did-he-do?"

She stared him dead in the eyes and answered, "He-murdered-his-five-year-old-stepson."

Caspian let go of her, Torchy walked over to the kitchen table and collapsed against it.

"I could handle any other case: rape, homicide, guy shoots his wife 15 times, woman sets her husband on fire, teenagers suffocate their mother and lock her in a trunk for being an abusive fanatic, I'd take all of them, no problem. One of my finer qualities, I could take any case no matter how brutal and I never blinked." She finally found her way into one of the chairs and as she sat down she explained, "I never threw up so much as during the first battered child case I tried. No matter how many of them I tried, I never got used to them, if you tried a thousand cases, you still wouldn't get used to them...they're…snowflakes…no matter how many cases you see, no two are ever alike, it's like…" she pushed herself out of the chair and up from the table and told her husband, "It's like all these bastards got together and decided to have a contest, to see who could do the most bodily damage to the smallest bodies possible, every time you think you've seen it all, they come up with something new.

"You see every shred of medical evidence, every photo, every x-ray, every single finding in the autopsy report, you call forth the paramedics who were on the scene. These are men who specialize in horrifying disasters, they deal with third degree burn victims, explosion victims, car crash victims, plane crash victims, attack dog mauling victims, they've seen it all…you get them on the stand and they can't testify to what they saw without breaking down sobbing all over again, you blow up every single photographic detail for the whole jury, and every idiot and his brother in the city who fill up the gallery as every single break, fracture, shatter, cut, burn, bruise, hematoma, infection, blunt force trauma, every last detail is recalled. The jury can't stop crying, the spectators are getting sick, and all the while…this bastard responsible for it all, is sitting at the table across from you, looking all smug because he just knows his defense slug is going to get him off. And if not, then he sits there looking all horrified because he doesn't know how it happened, he doesn't know why the child died after having half their bones broken and every square inch of their body beaten purple. And even worse, the ones who don't understand what the big deal is, why is everybody attacking them when they are the one being inconvenienced. With every single shred of this evidence entered into fact, there shouldn't be any way in hell that they could ever walk on the murder charge."

"And he did," Caspian made an educated guess.

"No way," Torchy shook her head, "Not a chance in hell, not in my court, I got a conviction on every dead child case I ever took. I made sure there wasn't one doubt left in any of the jurors' minds about who did it and that there wasn't one chance in ten million that it could be an accident or unintentional." There was a slight pause as she collected herself, before she started in again, "But this guy, I had an Immortal on trial for beating a 5-year-old to death, and I got a conviction, 25-to-life, how the hell did he get out in only five years? And what in the hell would make an Immortal kill a kid like that?" She started to calm down again and she sighed and added, "But like I said, what the hell would you understand about any of it?"

She took the other half of the bottle of whiskey from Caspian and told him, "I'm going to bed, I'm too depressed to stay conscious."

Caspian stood aside and waited until she left the room, then called after her, "That's the same thing you said on our wedding night!" But there was no response. Now that it was just him in the room, he started to think.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Torchy opened the chamber of her gun poured another round of bullets into it, snapped the chamber shut, drew the hammer back and started firing again. Early that morning she'd gone out behind the house with a couple guns, as many boxes of ammo as she could carry, and dragged out a crate of the empty whiskey and scotch bottles they'd accumulated over the last few months but hadn't bothered to throw away, and was using them for target practice.

When the bottles ran out after the first couple boxes of ammo, she hung up a large picture she'd had made of the current D.A. of their jurisdiction, a man she had no respect for when she knew him back in law school, and had downgraded from even that when he actually got into office that year and she got to see his work in action. Right now she was intent on eliminating every last inch of his photographic body with however many bullets it took, so far he was doing a good impression of Swiss cheese, but it wasn't good enough where she was concerned. She took a break just long enough to take a drink from one of the few remaining beer bottles of two six-packs she'd also brought out, and when it was empty she tossed it into the air and fired at it, shattering the bottle to a thousand pieces.

An approaching quickening made her lower her gun momentarily and turn back and she saw Caspian heading out towards her.

"Bring anymore bottles for target practice?" she asked, her first words of the day towards him.

"No," he answered simply.

"Then go away," she told him, and turned her attention back to her current target, and started putting a new round of holes into the picture.

Caspian pulled out something from under his arm and told her, "I thought you'd want to see the morning paper."

Torchy set her gun down momentarily and asked as she took the newspaper from him, "Why? New York bringing back capital punishment?"

"No," he told her, "That guy we ran into on the bridge last night, he didn't get released, he escaped."

Torchy skimmed over the front page story about the breakout and read under her breath, "Killed 2 guards and a prison dog during the escape…" she looked up at her husband and commented, "This guy was something out of a Wes Craven movie or something. Not that I'm not glad he's dead, but a lot of time and resources are going to be wasted trying to find him because people are still going to believe he's out there on the loose somewhere, and they'll never try dragging the river. And if he managed to escape, how long before the others try it too? Or worse, actually get paroled?"

"You know what your problem is?" Caspian asked her.

"Obviously not," she responded.

"You're thinking too much like a prosecutor."

"I am a prosecutor," she said.

"You were, you quit, remember?"

"Why did I quit?" Torchy asked herself as she sat down on the ground, "I was good at what I did. I know, in the grand scheme of it all, you don't make any difference, you put one murderous bastard away, 10 more will crawl out of the woodwork, but I took these bastards, and I made sure they would never be able to do it to anyone else. And the looks on their faces when the verdicts came back, every single time, they were so sure they'd get off because of their charming looks, their family money, their high social status, their flirting with the jurors, their lawyers, and when the jury still said 'guilty'…that was worth all those years of law school, every time it was worth it. I had one of the highest conviction rates in the district, I never took a case I wasn't positive I could get a conviction on. That made me very unpopular with people who thought I wasn't trying hard enough on their cases or just didn't care on others, but I never took a weak case. Do you know what trials are, Caspian?" She tilted her head back to look at him and she told him, "Chess, they're chess games, you have to have all your moves planned out, you have to know how the other side is going to play, and you need only move enough, to give the other guy enough leeway to hang himself with his own moves, then you come in for the kill. Every single case I had, I examined it from a hundred different ways so I would know every single thing the defense might try, every single question they would ask my witnesses, and I made sure they were blindsided. Sure, I had to let them see everything I had, but I decided when enough was enough, generally liked to keep a couple spare witnesses up my sleeve, then at trial claim that I just obtained them. Rule #2 of law school, right behind 'always win the case regardless of the truth' is 'never ask a question you don't know the answer to', well, that sure forced their hands more than a few times and they had to, made them look stupid beyond repair with the jury. I was terrific at what I did, and to this date, all the bastards I got convicted are still in lockup, least of all those who weren't already killed in prison."

"But it was always those battered kid cases that undid me. I could handle any case where it's one adult against another or a whole pack against one, or a whole pack against another pack, adults are easy, you can be hard against them. But kids…nobody could ever get used to seeing those little broken bodies day in and day out knowing they never had a chance. If I hadn't become Immortal, I'd probably be dead by now. After the first dead kid case I tried, that's when I really started hitting the whiskey and tequila daily, by the last case I tried my liver was probably already entering its final stages and I just didn't know it. I never managed to actually get drunk off of it, just a little buzzed out of my skull, but I was still able to do my job, and it was the only way to get through those trials without running over to the defense's table and," she leaped to her feet and locked her hands around Caspian's throat, "Choking the life out of those bastards, and their attorneys, every last one of them." She let go of him and the ancient Immortal took a step back, gasping for air.

"Must've been good whiskey," he remarked.

Torchy ran her hands through her butchered hair and said, "I always swore if any of them ever got off…I'd track them down and kill them, slowly, painfully, so that they'd have some idea what they put their victims through."

"And you said you remember who they all are?" Caspian asked.

"Oh yeah," she answered, "Every last one of them, if any of them ever get a meeting with the parole board, I'm going to be there. But now that I'm not working for the court anymore, and especially with this new D.A. who's always only too happy to make bad plea deals…there're going to be a lot more of them walking."

"I told you before," Caspian said to her, "You're thinking too much like a prosecutor."

"What's the alternative?" she asked.

"Start thinking like an Immortal," he told her.

Torchy shrugged her shoulders, not getting it, but she knew something was awry when she saw the sneering smirk on Caspian's face.

"I have an idea," he said.

"That's always been a dangerous sentiment," she said, "The question is for who?"

In times of despair when Torchy needed to clear her head, she commonly did three things: drank, used her guns for target practice, and when those failed, she went out on her motorcycle and took it through the backwoods and the wide open spaces. Since becoming Immortal she'd come to completely disregard the risks associated with it and now rode as freely as she cared; over the course of her life she'd already burnt out two Hondas, one Yamaha, one Triumph and was currently on her second Harley. She raced through the barren dirt land at 120 miles an hour with barely a thought in her mind.

The problem with driving so fast is that it was often difficult to see any sudden and unexpected obstacles in your path. Case in point, out of nowhere, the front tire on Torchy's motorcycle collided with something concealed in the dirt, both she and the bike became airborne though she soared further in the air over the motorcycle which promptly hit the ground and skidded on a flat piece of the land several feet before coming to an abrupt stop, whereas Torchy hit the ground rolling down a hill and didn't stop until she reached the bottom, in which time she knew she had broken both her legs, three ribs, one arm, her entire spinal column, and her neck. The pain was instantaneous and great, were it possible she would've died from the shock of the pain alone. As such, she was waiting either for death to take momentarily, or for her body to begin its healing process, but neither happened, for she didn't know how long. When you're in constant and excruciating agony, every second is an eternity, which made it difficult for Torchy to actually determine how much time had actually passed, but she knew it was far longer than a normal healing process should've taken.

Another quickening was present, she moved her eyes and saw Caspian making his way down the hill. She tried to talk, to ask him what the hell was going on, but she couldn't get any coherent words to come out. The insane Immortal knelt down beside her and just watched her as she suffered in agony for an indeterminate amount of time, until finally she felt the electric surge coursing through her, felt her bones start to knit back into place and back into one piece. It took several minutes for all the damage to be erased, but finally Torchy felt her body snap back into one piece again, she was whole once again.

"You ought to know better than to go speeding around at 120 miles top speed in these areas," Caspian told her, "You haven't been Immortal long enough to master that yet."

"What happened?" Torchy asked as she got up, "Why did it take so long? Why didn't I just die?"

He looked at her and answered solemnly, "Because you are an abnormality in the world of Immortals."

Torchy did a double take and asked him, "Let me get this straight, there is a sub-species of humans running around who live thousands of years and cut each other's heads off, and I'm the abnormality around here?"

"In a word, yes," Caspian told her, "You are what's known as a lingerer."

"A what?"

"Every thousand years there's a handful of Immortals who for unknown reasons don't heal as fast as usual. You can actually be on the point of death, but you won't die, and your body will take its sweet time in repairing itself. It's very rare, nobody but the true ancient Immortals even know about it anymore," he told her.

"You mean this is going to happen every time I wipe out?" Torchy asked.

"Depending on how injured you get, yes."

"Well that sucks," she replied.

"It also makes you an easier target for other Immortals," Caspian told her.

He watched the expression on her face as this news sunk in for her.

"I suppose," he added, sounding annoyed by the idea, "That it means I'm going to have to keep a closer eye on you than usual."

She looked at him curiously and inquired, "What, you, a conscious?"

"No," he answered, "I just don't need you haunting me the rest of my days if you lose your head."

Torchy laughed, then asked him, "So what'd you find out?"

Caspian reached inside his jacket and pulled out a file and told her, "Something I think you'll be interested in seeing."

When she worked as a prosecutor, half of Torchy's after-hours work in nabbing defendants and witnesses attempting to flee the jurisdiction, was the chase, the other half was the wait. She preferred the chase but the fact remained the wait was a vital part to any job, and it wasn't for everyone, half the time she was sure it wasn't for her either, but she did it. And here she was, out in the cold night air, in the middle of the city's nightlife, waiting again. Waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and…pay dirt. By the street's lights, she was able to make out the face of the man she was waiting for. She waited until he passed her by, and she turned around and followed him. Actually tailing people wasn't something she'd had much opportunity to make into one of her strong suits, but so far so good, he never turned around, based on how he moved, nothing implied that he even suspected anybody was watching him. What was one more face in a crowd of a hundred?

She followed the man for six blocks, as he cut across traffic and got away from the crowds and onto an empty street, perfect. Torchy picked up speed and ran after the man until she just about caught up with him, and to cement it all, she called to him, "Michael Dobson!"

The man turned around at the mention of his name.

"Who're you?" he asked.

She stalked up to him and said only, "I know who you are." She faced him and said bluntly, "You're the guy that just got away with killing your 3-year-old daughter."

"Hey, that wasn't my fault," he said defensively.

"Of course not, you were…temporarily insane," Torchy replied, slipping one hand into her pocket and pulling out a knife, "Temporary insanity is the best variety, it can come and go as you wish."

The man started to inch back as he saw the knife and he asked her, "What're you doing with that? Put that away."

"Put what away?" she asked as she advanced towards him, "Do you see a knife here? Are you mad my dear 'rehabilitated' man?"

Dobson turned to run, but saw a man walking up towards him from the alley down the street.

"What is this? What's going on?" he wanted to know, not knowing who to look to.

"You should've just pled guilty," Torchy told him, "You would've been safer in prison despite being the bottom of the inmate food chain. Instead you played the jury like a fiddle so you could escape the consequences, so that instead of rotting behind bars for the next 50 years, you could one day claim 'rehabilitation' and leave the asylum, and resume life as a free man. Well you're very free out here now, Mr. Dobson…free to die."

Caspian came up behind Dobson and locked his hands around the man's throat and forced him to the ground. Torchy stood where she was and watched as, after a brief and futile struggle, Dobson was dead.

"Back to the bridge," she said.

Later that night after they got back to the house, Torchy was sprawled on the living room floor upside-down watching a late night airing of 'Incident on a Dark Street', a movie she'd seen on TV growing up in the 70s. 15 years later she still knew all the ins and outs of it.

"Before you open your mouth, before you say one word, you check the facts of the case: backwards, forwards, up, down, sideways, inside-out, every way you can figure out. Before you stand up and say you represent the United States government, you make sure every damn word that comes out of your mouth is fact."

And that's exactly what she'd done. Before she'd ever decided to attend law school, she knew exactly what she'd do, and what she would not do is ever sink to any other lawyer's level of fabricating stories to cause doubt of innocence as the defense spun tales to cast doubt of guilt. She dug deep enough to make sure the facts did that for her. Every single case she took on, she knew she'd get a conviction. Circumstantial evidence cases were marginally harder than ones with actual solid, concrete evidence.

Jurors might not be as brainless as the national stereotype about them, but they still preferred having all the pieces of the puzzles laid right out before them, and for someone else to put the pieces together, so they didn't have to. When they had to actually think to connect the pieces, then it was a safe bet for trouble. And when that was the case, the only thing to do was make sure they see how guilty the defendant actually is, instead of how innocent his own lawyer makes him look with the smoothed back hair, the clean cut face with the baby blue eyes, and the $300 fine suits. No, instead she dragged out the hospital photos of the people he got into bar fights with, brought in the witnesses who could testify to the disheveled, wild eye, raving drunk who punched holes in walls and threatened the people around him. The ones who could actually testify when the defendant made a remark about already killing someone and therefore knowing they were not a problem to him anymore. Oh, the defense always tried to object, to destroy credibility, every single trick in the book to cast doubt on everybody else, but she'd always been ready for that, and always made sure that by the end of it, she could make the defendant look good for kidnapping the Lindbergh baby as sure as he looked good for rape or a homicide. But in the end, she was finally starting to wonder, had any of it, or even all of it, even been worth it?

"What're you doing?"

She looked up and away from the TV and saw Caspian standing in the entryway to the living room looking at her like she was the insane one. She returned her gaze towards the TV screen and answered, "Do you believe in meditation?"

"No."

"Neither do I, this is my alternative," she told him.

That was the end of their conversation until an hour later after the movie ended. Finally Torchy gave in, shut off the TV, and went upstairs to their bedroom, Caspian wasn't there; when he finally came up half an hour later, Torchy was folded up on her side of the bed, looking straight ahead at the wall, or perhaps rather through it, but her eyes were not registering with anything actually in the room, even when he stepped directly in front of her gaze. He looked her up and down inquisitively and finally asked her, "Are you alright?"

"No," she answered, and finally looked at him, "But I guess I'll get used to that, eh?"

Caspian knew why Methos had arranged for the two of them to be married, because this woman was certifiably crazy: she drank like a fish, flat out refused to get in any elevator on the basis that malfunctioning doors had been known to decapitate and she wasn't about to die like that, she never shut up about her 'glory' days as DDA, anytime she felt a need to win an argument she obtained that victory by threatening to undress, to say nothing of the latest discovery he'd made about her in that she for reasons he couldn't even begin to imagine, firmly believed that Josef Mengele was still alive and out there somewhere and she intended to find him and send him straight to hell herself. But even that, all of that, would be an improvement over this latest behavior of hers. Ever since this whole thing started, he'd made a few attempts to get a rise out of her, get some response, all so far to no avail, he decided this time to take a direct approach and put all his weight into sitting on her feet.

"Get off of me!" she told him and pushed him off, and onto the floor.

He got up, unfazed, and told her, "Maybe you forget how long I worked at that court, maybe you forgot how you always made sure your witnesses always showed up like clockwork, that they never came up missing before you got them on the stand."

"I forget nothing," Torchy replied, "I remember, before you I threatened plenty other bailiffs to sit on my star witnesses to guarantee they'd be in court first thing to testify. It wasn't hard to figure out, find out which court officers had no families, nobody to go home to on the night or over the weekend, have them stay with the witnesses until zero hour, I never lost a single witness that way. I told you before, I was good at what I did."

"I know," he finally said after a minute, "I know you were, I wouldn't have been assigned to your case if you weren't."

She looked at him with a vexed expression on her face.

"At the hospital, we send out informants to high risk areas where a pre-Immortal could meet with a sudden, violent death and become Immortal at any time, the sooner we can move in and take them out before anybody gets too close to the body, the better chance we have of preserving that pesky little detail that they have crossed over into Immortality. A pre-Immortal lawyer, naturally you'd have enemies, but you especially were a high risk because you were the only actual moral lawyer in the court. That made you a threat to plenty of people and put you at the top of the priority list. An incompetent lawyer, we wouldn't have had to keep our eyes on, but as you said, you were good at what you did, that's what made you dangerous, that's why I was there, we knew it was just a matter of time before you pissed off the wrong person and got yourself killed, everybody at the hospital was just surprised it didn't happen years before."

"So was I," Torchy replied, "I prosecute the worst of the worst, and I wind up getting killed by a damn coward who wiped out his whole family that's how much of a coward he was. How's that for fate? You know why I decided to become a lawyer, Caspian?"

"Why does anyone? There's a trick question if ever there was one," he remarked.

"I wanted the high profile cases, the ones nobody else wanted to touch, the courts are always backed up that some cases don't get taken before a judge for a year, and why? Because there aren't enough lawyers to divide between all the cases, and the priority cases keep getting pushed back so these overpaid lizards in bad suits can keep marching misdemeanors before the courts, shorter trials, quicker convictions and acquittals, status quo, but then the prisons get so crowded from all these punks getting hit with drug charges that they let the more violent prisoners out to do it again before they're even tried for the first time. I had no problem taking on the next Charles Manson, the next Berkowitz, organized crime, mob bosses, I'd take on all of them gladly, I didn't want the minor drug busts, I didn't want the indecent exposures, shoplifters, petty thieves, drunk drivers; this city's crawling with a larger share of the scum of the earth than should be allowable, somebody had to take them all on, and I was willing to do it, and I did…"

Caspian merely nodded in answer.

"Now so far," she told him, "They're all slowly rotting in their cells…but one of these days, they are going to get out, aren't they?"

"It's always a possibility," he replied.

"And…then what?" she asked, "We start the whole process up again? Arrest them again, arraign them again, try them again, indict them again, then they can get out again, and we start all over again."

"Or," Caspian offered, "There's always the bridge." He looked at her and said, "I told you before it's time you stopped thinking like a prosecutor and started thinking like an Immortal, you'll live longer that way."

"And…they won't," she replied.

"Now you're starting to get it," he told her.

Torchy slowly nodded, "Maybe so."