Disclaimer
-- Once more, Duncan MacLeod, Methos, Joe Dawson, and all such wonderful characters certainly do NOT belong to me. They merely show up in my life now and again and whisper stories in my ear. Especially Methos, he loves to get me into situations of obsession that I then have to "write my way out of". I think it amuses him. But, so as to avoid any legal banter, these characters belong to people with a great deal more money and a greal many more lawyers than I (seeing as I am a poor grad student). Any other characters belong to amin (I) or are creatures of myth. So bravo to Davis & Panzer and on with the finale!....................................................................
Chapter 7 -- The Price of Atonement
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"Wait! Wait! What do you mean she's gone?" Duncan asked incredulously.
"I mean she's gone. Ertia's not here, Duncan! I woke up and she was gone!" Nadya almost shouted into the phone.
"OK, calm down. Where could she have gone?" The Scot tried to be pragmatic.
"I don't know! According to you, she could have been wandering for centuries before I found her! I have no idea..."
"All right, Nadya. Calm down!" Duncan insisted. "I'll come over to get you and we'll start looking, OK? Just stay there."
Hanging up the phone and tossing it on the couch, he grabbed his coat and hurried out the door to the Thunderbird.
Meanwhile, Nadya paced the studio, wondering where in the world Ertia could be. Finally, she picked up the phone and dialed another number...Methos' number. Something in her was still scared of him but there was no time for that now.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring
'Blast it, Methos! Pick up!'
"Hi, you've reached Adam Pierson. You know the drill."
Nadya slammed the phone down. She couldn't wait for Duncan. If both Ertia and Methos were missing, this couldn't bode well at all. Grabbing her leather jacket and scribbling a note for Mac, she hurried to her car, unaware that eyes were watching her, waiting for her.
She remembered a place where Methos sometimes hid when he needed to be alone....an old garden behind a cemetery on the west side of town. Maybe he was there; something told her that if she found him, part of her worry would be over.
.............................................................................................The gravel crunched beneath her feet as she strode down the small pathway through the garden. The sky was grey, the air cold. Cold like death. The kind of cold that seeps under your skin into your bones and makes itself at home there. She looked around as she walked.
"Adam?" She never used his name in public. "Adam, are you here?"
Just then, there was a step behind her. Turning, she found Methos standing there, half-behind a hedge.
She sighed in relief. "There you are! I was just about to..."
Nadya then saw that his Ivanhoe was in his right hand, his other holding onto something...holding onto Ertia's tiny hand.
"Ertia?"
The child shook Methos' arm as she stepped into view. "It's time, Pan."
He looked at her and then at Nadya. Releasing Ertia's hand, he began to walk towards her. Nadya saw that look...the look that frightened her, like a madness barely contained.
"A life for my life." Ertia spoke. She stood there like a little doll, arms at her side, head up to watch all.
"Methos, what are you...?" Nadya found the blade at her neck in a trice, the cold edge pressing her skin.
He meant to kill her!
"Methos...please! Methos, don't do this."
The blade pressed even closer, she could feel pain prickling along the line of the edge.
Ertia hurriedly moved closer at his seeming hesitation, her eyes reflecting the pure madness that struggled for dominance in Methos' own. "Do it! You owe me a life!" Her voice was strong now, determined, hateful!
Methos' hands shook. He could see the tears roll down Nadya's cheeks. She flinched and shut her eyes as he drew the blade back to strike!
"No."
There was the whistle of steel in the air and the sound of small body falling to the gravel.
Then it began.
Methos hurt! He hurt more than ever before. He saw what he had done, what his drunken lie had caused. He saw Palmira's death, her daughter's sacrifice and haunted Immortality. The girl who would ever be a child. A child without feeling, without love...for three thousand years. He heard the voices that had driven her, the madness.
When it was over, he was crying. Crying for her childhood lost in hopelessness and revenge, crying for her mother, crying for himself.
He fell, but arms bore him up.
Nadya said nothing. Just held him, looking straight ahead, until his sobs subsided.
That was how Duncan found them.
--------------------------------------------------------A pyre brightly burned in the night, reducing a little body to ash. Methos watched as the fragrant smoke rose up over Arcadia from a grove at the foot of the mountain known as Pan's Sanctuary.
"Here is where you should have lived and died, little one," he whispered as he poured her ashes into a small hole beneath a cypress tree, a hole he dug and filled with his own hands.
"Be at peace."
And she was.
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Though many an unsung elegy
Sleeps in the reeds our rivers hold,
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
Ah, what remains to us of thee?
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady,
Thy satyrs and their wanton play,
This modern world hath need of thee.
Excerpt from "Pan" by Oscar Wilde