Origins
by MacGeorge

Chapter Four

“She should not try to sustain this level of Ka’queha,” C’almeth said softly, her voice pitched low and vibrating at levels that incorporated disdain as well as subtle hints of concern.  “She will exhaust herself and when the real need arises, will not have the strength to deal with it.”

Dane had felt her approach and they had both watched Thalia sitting motionless at the center of the stone pillar circle, as she had for countless hours for the past many cycles.  Dane knew she had been attempting to guide the progeny they had designated as the Gatekeeper with subtlety, using little overt contact or pressure.  Any contact was an exhausting and exacting task.  To attempt it at this level of delicacy was unheard of, and the effort had begun to take its toll.  Thalia’s back was slumped with weariness and a fine sweat made her body look almost luminous in the glow cast from the ferns that lit the far corners of the room.  In an odd way, Dane thought she had never been more beautiful, her entire being devoted with single minded determination to saving them all.  She was kneeling, her smooth arms resting quietly on her thighs, palms up.  Her head was slightly bowed, her eyes closed, and her long, dark hair tumbled in glossy waves all the way to her waist.  Her golden skin was slightly paler than normal, and for someone to whom perfect, perpetual health was as certain as the rising of their ever-expanding sun, it was a disturbing change.

“Thalia’s stubborn will has been the strength and the bane of us all for thousands of fan, Meth,” Dane replied softly.  “Do not underestimate her.”

“Oh, I would never do that,” C’almeth responded, with a deliberately discordant hum of sarcasm. “We had all given up on the gate ever being opened, after so many failures.  But Thalia insisted on one last enhanced caresh, that the key wasn’t a drive for power, but a drive for protection of others.”  She made a derisive sound in the back of her throat.  “Since when did any of us worry about any but ourselves?”

“She does,” Dane replied with a slight nod towards the still, silent figure kneeling among the stones.  “And we had tried your way, more than once, only to fail.”

“That’s your ego speaking, Meth,” Dane replied with a shrug and a small wave of his hand.  “After all these fan, you still think you have some kind of hold over it... over him,” he corrected himself.

With a small gasp, Thalia straightened up, her eyes fluttering open.  Then she just folded over, collapsing inward like a bhru’fek’la with all the pressure prematurely released.  Dane glided to her side, with C’almeth close behind him.  He gently rearranged her limbs, stretching her body out on the smooth surface of well-worn stone.  Her skin was damp, the flesh slightly chilled, but still smooth to the touch.  Dane stroked her forehead and ran the back of a finger across her sharp cheekbone, then caressed a strong, dark eyebrow.  C’almeth had settled on the other side and taken Thalia’s hand, running her own long fingers over her forearm to generate a little more circulation and warmth.  After a moment, Thalia’s large, dark eyes fluttered open, and she gasped in a quick breath.

“How long?” she asked, her voice ragged with exhaustion.

“Does it matter?” C’almeth asked wryly.  “Long enough for you to wear yourself out.”

Thalia’s full mouth twisted in irritation and she closed her eyes again with a sigh.  “They perceive time so differently there, things move so quickly.  I need to monitor him constantly.”

Dane helped her slowly sit up, which made her blink rapidly at the change in position and for a moment he thought she might actually lose consciousness again, but she took a long, deep breath to steady herself.  “He is very… strong-willed and doesn’t like the killing,” Thalia reported with a frown.  “I suppose that’s my fault, since I was the one who insisted on making him disposed towards protection and compassion.  He even tried to let the last one go.  Getting him to do what is necessary to open the gate will not be easy.”

“But you promised it would,” C’almeth stated with a small note of irritated, petulant alarm.  “Our survival depends on it.”

“I promised nothing!” Thalia snapped.  “I only said that experience has proven that instilling them with an urge to violence only made them targets, and thus more likely to lose their heads before it was time.  As it is, this one became a target even before he learned to reach ka’queha, and was singled out to deal with a number of disturbances in their own world’s ka’a.”  She sighed with weariness and struggled to her feet, with Dane’s helping hand.

“As a result he is too strong, too soon, before he is really ready, before I have had time to prepare him.”  She swayed a little and Dane gripped her arm to hold her steady.

“You will do us no service by exhausting yourself,” C’almeth said sternly.

“I’ll make sure she rests,” Dane inserted, steering Thalia away from C’almeth’s hard, appraising gaze.

“See that you do,” the sharp-face woman snapped, then turned and glided soundlessly away towards her own quarters.

Dane walked Thalia slowly towards her own living area in silence for long moments, passing a few others, each of whose eyes briefly flicked over Dane’s supporting hand before studiously looking away and ignoring their presence.  There had been a time, long, long ago, when their people would greet each other formally, when clusters of them would gather for debate or celebration, when caresh – always a rare event – was a joining out of mutual respect and a desire to create something – someone – that could offer unique gifts to their people.

Now caresh was an onerous duty among people who had grown to disdain and avoid one another, and only done to increase the potential power of the opening of the Gate, releasing them all from a world that had become a barren prison, lacking the infinite variety provided by living on a growing, living, thriving planet.  Yes, they could survive until their sun finally corrupted their planet beyond even their own capacities for adaptation.  But it was hardly a life worth living, and had been so for far, far too long.

“I wonder,” Dane began softly as they finally approached the small enclave of vaulted rooms that Thalia had claimed as her own.  But he didn’t want to finish his thought.

Thalia moved into her quarters, settling onto a nearby ledge with a sigh of weariness.  “What do you wonder, Ce’dane of the Mountains?” she prompted softly.

Dane chuckled.  No one had called him that in a thousand fan.  Once, he had lived in an expansive mountain estate, his home a carefully crafted growth of ancient woods that had been bent and shaped by physical and genetic manipulation to form a warren of vaulted rooms.  Animals had moved freely there, winged creatures took up residence in its highest reaches, and Dane’s skill and artistry and patience in creating such a masterpiece was acknowledged as the greatest among their people.

Dane settled beside Thalia and pulled her bare legs into his lap.  Her feet were lean, her toes long, and he stroked them gently while he thought about his answer.  “I wonder if we are capable of truly living anymore,” he observed finally.

“But we live everyday… always,” Thalia corrected him.  “It is our gift, and our curse.”

“No,” Dane replied with a small frown.  “We stopped living when we came here, I think, to the dún.  When we could no longer see the sky, except by looking through the Gate, when the infinite variety of creatures of our world dwindled to a handful, and then only because we protected them or cultivated them as food.  Now,” he sighed, gesturing to encompass their underground prison, “we merely survive.  We have no art, no joy, no companionship.  We mostly despise one another.  If we were suddenly transported to this new world of yours, or even back to our old one, I am not sure we wouldn’t just continue the way we are, sleep-walking though all of time.  We could easily end up being a curse upon these mortal humans you seem to enjoy watching.”

“We are a great people, Ce’dane,” Thalia insisted gently.  “Think of all the knowledge, all the experience, all the wisdom we have to give them.”

Dane leaned his head back against the cool geesta cushion, letting his gaze wander up into the grey, light-and-shadow patterns of the upper reaches of the cavern.  “We have wisdom, Thalia. But do we use it?  Do we make our world, or any world, for that matter, better with all this wisdom?” he asked.  “I just don’t know if we are capable any more of doing anything truly meaningful.”

“It is because we are so limited here,” Thalia replied.  “We have retreated into ourselves, without true light, without life, we merely exist.  But if we had a challenge, a new world, a new people to get to know…”

“And what would we do there?” Dane snapped, rising and pacing back and forth.  “Their lives are so short, Thalia!  It wouldn’t even be worth our time to try to teach them anything.  By the time they had even begun to learn, they would die and all their knowledge lost.”

“Not lost,” Thalia corrected him.  “They write it down, they record their history so their progeny can learn and build on the knowledge they have created.”

Dane snorted in disdain.  “That’s hardly true knowledge.  They learn by rote, not by experience. We have no need to record history because we all lived it and remember it for ourselves!  And there are so many of them, Thalia! They are destroying their own planet!  Something would have to be done about that.  We would have to reduce it by, what, half, at least?”

“We could teach them,” Thalia insisted.  “That would be our challenge, to help them understand the consequences of what they do, to alter their environment so they could feed themselves, provide power, manage their population.”

Dane gave her a long, questioning look, slipped from under her and stood, pacing thoughtfully back and forth.  “Thalia, my dear, how many of us do you think would devote ourselves to such tasks, especially for beings who will age and die so quickly?  Have you really been deluding yourself with the notion that somehow we are going through the gate for any reason other than our own survival?  That there are any among us besides yourself that care what happens to these beings who hardly live long enough to even get to know, much less care about?”

Thalia stared back at him unflinchingly.  “I had hoped,” she said softly, “that once there, the challenge of these beings would bring us back to life.  They are intensely emotional creatures, Dane.  They live, in a way we haven’t for a very long time, perhaps ever.  Perhaps we are the ones who need to learn from them, not they from us.”

“And perhaps, D’ethalia of the T’anatha’a,” Dane replied softly, “we would only destroy them.  An ugly legacy for those of us who have believed for so very long that there are few creatures in the universe more enlightened, more knowledgeable, more wise.  But then there are also few creatures more arrogant.  I sometimes wonder if we haven’t outlived our own capacity to feel or truly learn or,” the words clogged in his mind and, no longer able to meet her quiet, challenging gaze, he turned on his heel and left.

~~~~~~~

Joe’s gaze flickered upward to the second seating level, where Methos had been skulking all evening, sitting at a small table, nursing a bottle of his better scotch.  That something was bothering the man was patently obvious.  That he didn’t want to talk about it was evidenced by the fact that he knew Joe couldn’t easily climb the steps to the upper level, so his exile was self-imposed and deliberate.

But the situation with Mac was getting out of hand, and Joe was tired of carrying the burden of worry alone.  Methos obviously knew more about what was going on than he was telling, and it was high time the old bastard started sharing what he knew.  Mac had taken three challenges in the past month, had stopped coming to the bar at all – rarely left the dojo, in fact, since it seemed more than likely he would ‘accidentally’ encounter someone out for his head.  And while the obsessive exercise and long meditations had diminished for a few weeks, last night, Mac had been at it again at an almost frenetic pace.

With a sigh of resignation, Joe grabbed his cane and went to the bottom of the stairs, focusing his attention on his feet to make sure of their placement, took another long breath, grabbed the hand rail and hauled himself up one step, laboriously finding his balance before repeating the effort.  He felt the eyes of a number of his patrons watching, but he grimly made it all the way to the third step before he spied a second set of black-clad feet one step above.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Methos asked.

“Well, if the Mohammed won’t come to the mountain,” Joe looked up with a grim smile.

“You’re no mountain, Dawson,” Methos responded softly but firmly.  “And I’m no purveyor of wisdom.  You’ll find no great insights here.  Go back to your bar.”

“Did it ever occur to you,” Joe replied, leaning forward so only Methos could hear, “that us mere mortals actually worry about you assholes, and need to know what the hell is going on?”

“Did it ever occur to you,” Methos whispered back, “that you mere mortals have no business interfering in our affairs?”  He tried to edge by Joe to leave, but Joe clamped a hand around Methos’ bicep.

“Not good enough, pal,” Joe snapped.  “You know something about what’s going on and you don’t have the right to keep Mac in the dark.”

“Are we talking about MacLeod, here, or you?”  Methos pulled away and headed to the door, but Joe stubbornly followed, grabbing his coat on the way.  He expected Methos to be pulling out of the parking lot by the time he got there, but found him standing in the parking lot, his hands stuffed into his coat pocket, looking up into the gently falling snow that had covered the cars and gravel with a white dust that somehow made the grim, industrial space look other-worldly.

Joe just waited, shivering a little as the wind picked up, swirling the snow in little whirlwinds around them.

“I’m not even sure that what I think is happening is really what is happening.”  Methos’ voice was barely loud enough to be heard over the sighing snow and wind.

Joe waited.

“It was all so long ago,” Methos finally added with a slow shake of his head as he closed his eyes, letting the snowflakes settle and melt on his face.  “I had almost succeeded in pretending it never happened.”

“It’s cold out here,” Joe finally offered into the long silence that followed.  “How about a drink to chase away the chill and you can tell me about it.”

When Methos turned towards him at last, the snowflakes dusting his hair and caught on his lashes made him look positively alien.  Or maybe it was just that hard, old look in his eyes.  “I’m not who you think I am,” he stated softly.  He didn’t seem sad or regretful, just… resigned.  “I’m not even who I think I am.” And he turned and walked away, disappearing almost immediately into darkness and cold, wet snow.

Joe stood there thinking until, if his toes had not been made of the finest plastic, they would have been frozen.  Finally, he headed back inside, grabbed his keys, left the task of closing the bar in the hands of his assistant manager and headed to Mac’s loft.  He sat outside in his car for a long time, wondering what to do.  Mac was a friend, first and foremost, but Joe was also a Watcher, and that touchy situation had brought their friendship to the breaking point more than once.  That somehow they kept patching things up in spite of that tension was a measure of MacLeod’s stubborn loyalty, as well as his willingness to constantly study and revisit his own motives and actions.  But Mac didn’t seem to be entirely himself these days, and that was a truly frightening prospect.  The man had slipped the bounds of rationality more than once in the past decade, but how many times could one person do that and still pull himself back from madness?  And was the better course of action to stay back and Watch, or to interfere, possibly incurring Mac’s potentially dangerous wrath?

The snow was piling up on the streets and sidewalks, and whatever residual heat had been left in the car was gone, making his breath fog.  He was preparing to begin the laborious process of getting out when a dark shadow suddenly appeared outside his window, making his heart stutter and his hand automatically move to the gun lying heavily in his coat pocket. The figure leaned down and Joe could make out Methos’ sharp features.  He took a deep, calming breath and rolled down the window.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Joe asked.

“Something’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been keeping watch while he was meditating, and now I can’t feel him anymore.”

“Maybe he left.  Maybe he finished and went up to the loft and it’s too far away,” Joe suggested.

“No.  That’s not what it felt like.”  Methos turned and his long legs purposefully carried him across the street and up the steps before Joe even managed to struggle out of the car.  Some mental sentinel took note of the fact that Methos easily by-passed what was, by now, a fairly sophisticated security system for entry into the dojo, and by the time Joe had made his way into the expansive room, he found Methos squatting next to MacLeod, who was in a kneeling position, his head bowed, eyes closed, hands resting on his thighs, palms up.

“Looks okay to me,” Joe whispered, not wishing to disturb Mac’s meditations.

“He’s dead,” Methos replied.  He reached out and gently pushed on Mac’s shoulder and the body slumped sideways to the floor in a heap.

“But,” Joe was suddenly out of breath, his mind groping to understand.  “But he looks fine.  Is there a wound?” Joe peered at the row of windows lining the dojo walls.  “Maybe a sniper shot him from and distance and was planning to take his head before he revived, but couldn’t get past the security system.” But Joe didn’t see any telltale bullet holes in the glass.

“No wound,” Methos said.  He rolled MacLeod onto his back, and Joe had a hard time believing Methos could be right since Mac’s admittedly pale face looked so serene and peaceful, like he was having a pleasant dream.  

“Well, what killed him, then?” Joe asked curtly as he went to the wall and switched on the dojo’s overhead lights, bathing the room in a sudden bright glare.

But Methos didn’t answer, and when Joe turned to look back, he knew Methos was right. Mac wasn’t just pale.  His face was gray, his lips slightly blue, and there was a slackness about him, some subtle essence that was missing.  Methos reached out and placed a hand on Mac’s chest, and Joe noted that Mac must have been meditating for hours, since even the sweat had dried on what must have been a soaked tee-shirt, leaving only salt-stains behind.

Joe expected Mac to revive any minute, but they waited in silence for what seemed like a long time and nothing happened.  Joe was beginning to get a very, very bad feeling about this.  “Why isn’t he coming back?” he finally had to ask.

“Because he’s not here,” Methos replied.

“Now is not the time for being enigmatic!” Joe snapped.  “What the hell is going on?  What are we supposed to do?”

“I’m not being enigmatic, damn it!” Methos snapped back, finally revealing his own tension.  “Even when we die there is some essence of us still there, but he’s just… gone.  I don’t know what to do,” he finished softly.

“Well, do something!” Joe heard himself yell.  “CPR, mouth-to-mouth, but you can’t just let him die like that!”

Methos shot him a hard look, but his lips tightened, and he, indeed, started CPR, compressing Mac’s chest with the heel of his hand rhythmically, then breathing into Mac’s mouth.  He continued that for an interminable five minutes or so, to no avail.  He was breathless with effort when he finally spoke again.

“Call 911,” Methos barked as he continued the compressions.

“What?” Joe couldn’t believe he had heard correctly.

“I said call 911!”  Methos leaned down to breathe once again into Mac’s lungs.

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