Incarnations of Immortality
By The Bear!
Disclaimer: See Prologue
Nick’s Loft
Mulder and Scully pulled away
suddenly at Nick’s teasing admonishment and Natalie’s sudden gasp.
They both turned toward the two descending the stairs with blood dripping
from their fangs and their necks, as neither had taken the time to close the
other’s wounds.
To say that Nick and Nat were
surprised was and understatement. Nick
was embarrassed at having interrupted such a private moment.
Natalie, being a newborn- unable to control herself- felt her own fangs
drop and saw everything through a green/gold haze as the pheromones of vampire
sex pervaded the room.
Fortunately, Nick recovered
quickly enough to restrain Natalie from doing anything to embarrass herself.
He quickly advised Dana through their link to calm herself and Mulder
down.
Mulder felt Dana’s chagrin at
being caught in a compromising position by her ‘father’.
He was unable to keep himself from chortling at the ridiculousness of the
situation. [Sorry, Scully,] he
thought as he began to laugh out loud.
Mulder’s humor overwhelmed
her own embarrassment and Scully dissolved into laughter as well.
[I’ll get you for this, Mulder!] she thought to him as she said,
“Sorry Nick. We didn’t hear you
coming down.”
Nick felt Natalie calm down as
the tension was broken and chuckled himself.
“I guess I’m not used to having to worry about catching my daughter
making out with her boyfriend in my living room,” he teased.
“I’ll make sure to walk loudly next time, so you hear me coming.”
Natalie, now fully recovered,
laughed out loud at that, while Mulder smirked and Scully ducked her head in
embarrassment.
“Were those fangs I saw,
Mulder?” Nick asked, looking at the rapidly healing bite on Scully’s neck.
Mulder smiled, showing off his
new orthodonture, while he unabashedly reached over to the side of Scully’s
neck and wiped up the blood on two fingers and then licked them clean.
Scully melted at the tenderness
of Mulder’s gesture, and copied it.
Nick repeated his earlier
admonition, “Alright you two, take it upstairs!” as he and Natalie continued
their descent.
Scully smiled warmly at her
‘father’ and said, “It’s not my fault, Nick!
We were just talking and Mulder went and proposed to me.
I can hardly be held responsible for my subsequent actions!”
The delight on her face was unmistakable.
[I love you so much!] Mulder
thought to her, letting his internal joy wash over her in radiant waves.
[I love you too] she replied.
[But I’m still going to make you pay for this!]
[Hurt me, G-woman!] he thought
back, only half-teasingly.
“Enough Mulder,” she said
as she turned her attention to Natalie, noticing the change.
“Natalie! It worked!” she
said joyfully. She leapt up and over
the couch and flew over to Natalie, wrapping her arms around her.
Mulder was laughing again, as
was Nick. Natalie was hugging Scully
back, feeling a little of her through their joint link with Nick.
Mulder, ever the perverse, said
“You know, Nick, when all is said and done, I’ll have a sister-in-law who is
married to my father-in-law.”
Everyone laughed at that, and
Scully said, “I don’t care what you say Mulder, we are *not* moving into a
trailer park!”
After the laughter had died
down, Nick went to the fridge and grabbed another bottle of Raven reserve label
and two more glasses. He sat down in
the chair and Natalie took up residence on his lap.
Nick poured each of them a glass as Mulder and Scully returned to the
couch. “I see your choice of
beverage has changed, Mulder,” he said, gesturing to the two glasses on the
coffee table.
“Well, it’s no Scully
special, but it is pretty tasty,” he answered, picking up his glass and
sipping.
Natalie had been listening
raptly to the sound of Mulder’s heartbeat when it occurred to her that she
shouldn’t be hearing a heartbeat at all. “Mulder!
Why is your heart beating?” she demanded.
“I can’t answer that,
Natalie,” he said. “I have no
idea what is going on with me.” He
sat back and wrapped his arm around Scully, pulling her close.
“Whatever it is, I know I like it,” he said, hugging her tightly to
him.
“It would be interesting to
do some tests,” Natalie began. “Just
to see how advanced the vampire factor is.”
“You don’t feel like a
vampire, Mulder,” Nick added, reaching out to him with his enhanced senses.
“You also don’t feel like any human I’ve ever met.”
“That’s normal.
I’ve never fit in well,” Mulder said, self-deprecatingly.
“I can still feel you though, Natalie,” he said.
Natalie looked stunned.
Scully looked at her and then back at Mulder, “What do you mean,
Mulder?” she asked, concerned.
“The immortal buzzing,” he
answered. “It feels the same today
as it did yesterday.”
“How is that possible?”
Natalie whispered, afraid that somehow she would still have to get involved in
this whole ‘Game’ thing. She
really didn’t want to do that, didn’t see herself as a swordfighter.
“I don’t know.
It’s supposed to kick in when you die for the first time.
At least that’s what you got from the Watchers, isn’t it Scully?”
he asked.
Scully no longer held any of
Perone’s memories, but she remembered everything she had discussed or spoken
regarding them. “That’s what
they thought, anyway,” she answered. “I
don’t know how complete their knowledge is,” she added.
Nick had been thinking quietly.
He said, “You know- we don’t completely die.”
Mulder leaned forward, as
though he didn’t hear him correctly, “What?”
“If the heart completely
stops, the person cannot be brought across,” he said quietly, remembering
Alyssa, whom he thought he had loved. Whom
he had killed when he tried to bring her across.
“It is a matter of timing, and it isn’t the easiest skill in the
world to master.”
Mulder leaned back, muttering
“she didn’t die…”
Scully and Natalie were
remembering their transformations- each so recent as to be crystal clear in
their minds.
Nick continued, “We reach the
crossroads of life and death. We are
offered a choice; to go forward or back. If
we go forward, into the light, death takes us.
The spirit is gone and the body is dead.
If we go back, we are as you see. Undead…
Vampire,” he finished with a smile, being deliberately melodramatic.
“How is the choice
offered?” Mulder asked, genuinely curious.
He and Scully hadn’t discussed this.
Suddenly struck that his question might be inappropriate, he quickly
added, “Is it OK to ask that? Is
this something that isn’t discussed?”
Nick smiled again at that.
“Actually it isn’t usually discussed, just because it is a relatively
constant experience among vampires, and of course we don’t normally discuss
anything about ourselves with mortals.”
Scully looked at Nick and
Natalie, sensing Nat’s reticence. “It
was like a vast dry plain- featureless in all directions.
At first there was nothing around me at all.
Then I turned around and saw…” she paused remembering the intensity
of emotion when she saw her sister.
Mulder, sensing the combination
of sorrow and joy in her, reached up and gently stroked the side of her face.
[What did you see, Scully?]
“ I saw my sister.
I saw Melissa,” she started. “I
was so happy to see her!”
Mulder stroked her hair as she
burrowed her face against his neck, tears falling onto his collar.
[You tell them, Mulder.] she silently pleaded, unable to speak for a
moment.
Mulder felt torn by the guilt
he sensed from her. Especially when
he felt that he was the one who was guilty. He
wiped an errant tear from his own eye- clear not bloody- and explained, “Those
who we have been working to expose, they had someone in Scully’s apartment…
Melissa went there to see Scully. They
were waiting for Scully, but they killed her sister by mistake.”
“I tried to tell her how
sorry I was…” Scully began again, sobbing into Mulder’s shoulder and neck.
“Surely she didn’t blame
you?” Natalie asked, feeling Scully’s guilt through Nick’s link.
Scully looked up, wiping her
eyes, and answered, “No. She told
me I couldn’t blame myself, or let Mulder blame himself either.”
Regaining her composure, she continued, “She offered me the choice- go
with her or back to Mulder. Of
course, you know which I chose,” she smiled and pulled Mulder’s face to her
own for a kiss. [There was no
choice. I could never leave you,
Mulder,] she thought to him.
“I wasn’t offered a
choice,” Natalie said softly.
“What!?” Nick practically
shouted.
“What happened?” Mulder and
Scully chanted in unison, both filled with overwhelming curiosity- Mulder, given
Nick’s reaction- and Scully, given her own experience.
“I went to the place you
described, Dana. But there was no
door. I looked around and finally
shouted ‘Anybody around?’ Suddenly
there was this…” Natalie paused for several seconds, her brow wrinkling in
concentration. “I can’t remember
anything about it except that it told me that I wasn’t supposed to be there.
‘Your kind don’t come this way,’ it told me.
Then I woke up to the taste of Nick’s blood in my mouth.”
Nick just sat there staring at
Natalie, his jaw agape. He
couldn’t formulate any words to say.
“I take it that that isn’t
supposed to happen?” Mulder asked gently.
“NO!” Nick exhorted.
“I’ve never…” he trailed off, shaking his head.
“I didn’t need a choice,
Nick.” Natalie said soothingly.
“I knew what I wanted. And,
I got it!” she said fiercely, capturing his mouth in a searing kiss.
“Wow,” Mulder said.
“We’ve taken the paranormal to new heights, Scully!” he said
excitedly.
For once, she was on exactly
the same train of thought when it came to ‘work’ as Mulder was, “An X-File
within an X-File,” she said.
“X2!” Mulder
agreed, laughing. [Scary,
G-Woman…] he began thinking to her.
Scully finished the thought,
[operating on the same wavelength, G-Man!]
Natalie interrupted their
tête-à-tête, “What do you mean by that?
What’s an X-File?” she asked, bewildered by their exchange.
Mulder and Scully looked at
each other for a moment before Scully answered, “Our division in the FBI is
sort of on the fringe- we investigate anything that ‘conventional’
investigation is ill-equipped to deal with.”
“Paranormal, occult,
extraterrestrial… Any
‘inexplicable’ phenomena that ‘conventional’ investigators wouldn’t
touch with a ten foot pole,” Mulder continued.
Scully joined in again,
“These investigations are filed under X, because they don’t fit into any of
the usual categories.”
Mulder finished, “Thus,
X-Files.”
Nick asked, “What did you
mean by an X-File within an X-File?”
Scully and Mulder looked at
each other again for a moment before responding.
Scully said, “If things like vampires and immortals are
‘paranormal’ to general society…” she began, “Then Natalie is in a
‘paranormal’ category above the general paranormal society.”
“You’re in a class by
yourself, Sister-in-law. Or, is that
stepmother-in-law?” Mulder joked. Turning
to Scully, he asked, “Which do you think?”
Natalie interrupted, “Just
Natalie, will be perfectly fine, thank you very much Fox,” she began, shaking
her finger at him. “And I think
you land squarely in the ‘superparanormal’ right along with me!”
Scully and Nick both laughed
out loud. Scully said, “She’s
got you there, Mulder!”
“Alright, Alright.
No need to take my name in vain, Just Natalie,” he teased, eliciting
another mock-scowl from Nat.
“We need to go see LaCroix
again tonight,” Nick said to them all. “I
need to introduce him to his newest granddaughter and I’m sure he will be
interested in your latest trick, Mulder.”
“Ok, when?” Scully asked.
“Why, Dana, did you have
plans for this evening?” Nick asked.
“Tentative plans,” she
answered evasively.
Nick looked at Mulder, but he
seemed just as surprised as anyone else.
“Are we going somewhere,
Scully?” Mulder asked aloud.
“I want to go somewhere,
Mulder. I want you to come with me,
but I would understand if you didn’t,” she said cryptically.
[There isn’t anyplace on this
earth I wouldn’t go, if I knew you wanted me there with you, Scully,] he
thought to her. [Even your brother
Bill’s] he thought, eliciting a half smile from her.
[You know that, don’t you?]
“Yes, Mulder.
I know that,” she answered his unspoken question, cupping his cheek in
her palm. She turned to Nick,
who’s own questions were pushing at her through their link.
“I want to go to Mass, Nick.”
Nick read her determination
through the link, and tried to gently dissuade her, “Dana, Crosses and Holy
Water are no laughing matter. You
could be seriously injured.”
”Nick, you’re still
thinking as though we were among the damned,” she said, shaking her head
sadly. “That is a bad habit you
need to break.” When she saw that
he was about to protest, she reached into her shirt and pulled out the chain
around her neck. “Look Nick.
I’ve been wearing this the whole time,” she said, showing him the
tiny gold cross on the chain.
“I knew it!” Natalie said.
“I always knew vampires weren’t inherently evil,” she said as she
reached out to touch the cross Dana was holding.
Nick had to restrain himself
from grabbing Natalie’s hand. He
watched with wide-eyed anticipation while she reached for the cross, grasped it
unflinchingly and turned to smile at him. “Maybe
the vampire in us brings our spirit closer to the surface.
The evil in your spirit was burned by the cross, Nick” Natalie said in
quiet wonder. “But you aren’t
evil anymore. You can be
forgiven,” she trailed off into a quiet whisper as Nick reached out to touch
the cross.
Blood tears streamed down
Nick’s face as he hesitantly touched, then grasped the gold cross hanging from
the hands of his daughters. All he
felt was the smooth metal surface. “Thank
you” he whispered to God. The God
he had thought to be forever separated from.
“Meet us at the Raven by
Scully impulsively snuck a
quick kiss on Nick’s cheek before dragging Mulder toward the elevator door.
“Dana!” Nick said before
they closed the door behind them. “You
might try
========== X-FILES ==========
FOREVER KNIGHT ==========
HIGHLANDER ==========
“Nick, surely you know by
now- we aren’t evil! I don’t
feel evil. I don’t feel any less
good than I did yesterday,” Natalie tried to reassure him.
“Nat, you haven’t done the
things that I have done in my life,” he began.
“I know, I know,” he said, overriding her attempted protests, “I
know in my mind that I am not beyond forgiveness.”
Tears began to well up in his eyes, “But I feel such guilt inside me,
Nat. I feel so awful for the
horrible things that I have done. And,
I remember them so clearly… It’s
hard to tell myself that that is all in the past- long ago and far away.
I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Natalie felt the depth of her
master’s pain and remorse and was herself moved to tears.
“Nick, you can never undo what you have done.
No matter how you live your life, you can’t make up for the sins of the
past; none of us can. You can only
go forward, living now as you might wish you always had.”
She stroked his cheek and softly kissed his lips, then added, “you
can’t earn forgiveness, Nick. Only
accept it when it is offered.”
Nick smiled at his beloved,
feeling through their link the depths of her love for him.
“Thank you Natalie. I am so
glad that you and Dana were brought across in an age when it isn’t necessary
to hunt to live,” he said with a serious look on his face.
“However- it will still take training before you’re ready for the
general populace. And, the fastest
way to accomplish this is…”
Natalie interrupted, “Dana
told me. She said it would be
strange and confusing, but I’m ready. As
ready as I can get anyway,” she finished hesitantly.
Nick smiled and said, “Good.
Then there is no reason to wait.” With
that he scooped her into his arms and unhesitatingly drove his fangs into the
smooth column of her neck.
As the maelstrom of images
assaulted her, her last independent thought was, “she wasn’t kidding!”
========== X-FILES ==========
FOREVER KNIGHT ==========
HIGHLANDER ==========
MacLeod came back to life as he
usually did, gasping for air and having little idea where he was and what had
happened. This brief moment of
confusion was compounded by the fact that he seemed to have a dead body laying
on top of his own. While this was
not the first time he had experienced that particularly unnerving situation,
this was the first time that he and the body were both naked and apparently in
the midst of sexual congress. All of
that passed through his awareness in the barest of moments before memories began
flooding back. He began to relax as
he realized that she wasn’t dead, she was just a vampire.
That thought struck him as being surreal, even for him, and he began to
chuckle.
Janette woke to the sudden
sound of a wildly beating heart right below her ear, swiftly followed by the
vibration of laughter across her entire body.
She opened her eyes to look into those of her fair Duncan, whom she had
known for less than twenty-four hours. “It
feels like I have always known him,” she thought incongruously.
Aloud she asked, “What has amused you so, Mon Coeur?”
An enormous smile broke out on
MacLeod’s face had when he saw Janette’s eyes open.
He reached up to stroke her face with the backs of his fingers as he
delighted in her mere presence. It
was almost as if he had to convince himself that she was real.
“Mon Ange,” he began, as she leaned into his caress.
“For a moment when I came to, I wondered how I had ended up with a dead
body on top of me; then my memories came back and my next thought was,
‘She’s not dead, she’s just a vampire,’ and that thought struck me as
being bizarre.”
“Some believe that we are
dead,” Janette began. “That we
are evil spirits animating the bodies of the dead,” she said, only half in
jest. It was not always easy to go
through life (or unlife) knowing that most of those around you would be
horrified to know what you really were- a monster.
She didn’t often concern herself with what mortals thought of her- but
rejection was an unpleasant facet of her life that had been with her since she
had been mortal herself.
“Balderdash!” MacLeod
interjected. “That’s pure
nonsense,” he said, tucking his fingers below her chin and lifting her face
until her eyes met his. “As
someone who has just gotten to know you rather intimately, I can assure anyone
that you are the furthest thing from dead- and you’re certainly not evil!”
Janette averted her gaze from
MacLeod’s, “Yes, but I have done many terrible things in my life,
“We both have things in our
past that we regret, Janette,” MacLeod consoled.
“Regrets won’t change history. We
can only control what we will do, not what we have done.”
She laid her head back down on
his chest and said, “I never used to think of these things- worry about them,
or feel guilty for my crimes.”
“What changed that?”
MacLeod asked as he stroked her back with one hand and ran his fingers through
her hair with the other.
Janette rubbed her face along
Mac’s chest, luxuriating in the warmth, the masculinity of his skin.
She began to tell the tale of Robert McDonagh.
How she had fallen in love, how she had drank from him over time-
lessening the vampire in her, and how he had been murdered before her eyes.
She told him how she had seemingly regained her mortality with his death.
“It didn’t last?” Mac
asked as she paused in her story.
“I don’t know if it would
have been permanent or not,” she answered.
“I was brought back across some months later,” she said, pausing
again as the memories of those events played out in her mind once again.
MacLeod caught impressions of a
fire- a house on fire. “It must be
from the blood sharing,” he thought. It
wasn’t a memory of his own, he was almost certain.
“Janette… a burning house? Why
am I seeing that particular memory?” he asked.
“Yes, you must have caught
that out of the bloodkiss,” she answered.
She resumed her caress as she continued the story, “I had tracked
Robert’s killers back to
“Why is that funny?” Mac
asked, bewildered.
“Nicolas has been trying to
‘regain his mortality’ for the last century.
He thinks it is the only way he can ‘atone for his sins,’ yet he
would not allow me to keep the mortality he himself desired so,” she answered.
“Such behavior is so like him. He
wants to grow old and die, despite the wishes of his family, but selfishly would
not allow me the same.”
“Oh, chéri,” Janette
reached up and placed a kiss on his chin. “I
blame Nicolas, but the choice was mine in the end.
I didn’t have to come back. I
do much better as a vampire than I would have ever done as a mortal.”
She snuggled into his chest once again and hugged him tightly to her.
“Besides, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss this,” she said, planting
a cool kiss on his chest.
Mac hugged her tightly and
kissed the top of her head. “What
do you mean you didn’t have to come back?” he asked, curious about how one
became a vampire.
Janette smiled at the thought
of discussing this particular subject. “Trying
to find out all of our secrets?” she teased.
“Naturellement, mon ange,”
he teased back.
“Well, when one is brought
across, one goes to the crossroad of life and death.
There is a doorway and a doorkeeper.
One is offered the choice- to go through the door into whatever lies
beyond, or to go back. Heed one’s
master’s call and return to this world as a vampire,” she said.
Mac mulled this over for a bit,
then asked, “So… Nick is your master?”
Janette just nodded her head,
wondering how that might make him feel; that she must call another man Master.
“What was he to you before
that?” he asked, sensing a mishmash of confused feelings and remembering
snippets of Nick in period dress over a long time.
“Brother… lover…
husband…” she began. “He has
been all of those things to me in the last eight hundred years.
LaCroix brought him across at my urging early in the thirteenth century.
The three of us traveled together on and off for six centuries,” she
said, remembering good and bad times. “We
were man and wife for 97 years before I left him.”
Mac wisely chose to leave that
discussion for another time. “You
said he has been trying to become mortal again?” he asked, trying to lead the
discussion in a different direction.
“Yes.
It infuriates LaCroix. They
have terrible fights about it, and Nicolas has spent a great deal of time
running from him. LaCroix always
finds him sooner or later,” she whispered.
MacLeod frowned slightly,
remembering the events of Wednesday night. “They
seemed to get along well enough when I met them,” he said.
Nick’s daughter and lover were with him, and LaCroix seemed quite
genial towards them. He seemed
especially, I don’t know, proud I guess, of Dana.”
Though their discussion was
seemingly placid, their caresses had grown bolder and more stimulating.
Janette could feel the life returning to Mac’s member as it stiffened
along side of her thigh. She was
licking and sucking at his chest, and his hands were wandering over her ass,
stimulating a rise in her own desire.
“Hmm, chéri.
Can we discuss this later? I
would rather apply myself to another pursuit at the moment.” She said between
licks and kisses.
Grasping her ass and sliding
her up his body till their faces were aligned, Mac answered, “Anything Milady
wishes.”
Their lips met in a searing
kiss, and Mac suddenly rolled them both over and broke the kiss.
His mouth moved to her breasts and one hand moved down to find the cool
wetness at the intersection of her thighs.
Janette arched her back at the
lovely sensation of Mac suckling her breast and gently dipping into the moisture
collecting between her legs. She ran
her hands through his thick, luxurious hair, delighting in his ministrations.
Mac began to move down from her
delightful breasts when he felt her hands clutch in his hair and make as if to
pull him back up. He looked up into
her eyes with a question written on his face.
Janette looked down at her
lover and said, “It’s blood,” gesturing with her chin at his hand buried
between her thighs.
Mac looked down at his bloody
hand and back up at his lover’s face. Seeing
the ashamed look he asked, “This is normal?”
“It’s the only body fluid
we have,” she explained with some embarrassment.
Mac smiled and placed a kiss on
her soft abdomen, “Then don’t worry about it.”
Janette sighed with relief at
the smile on her love’s face. She
raised her hands to her own breasts as the feel of her lover’s tongue began to
drive her wild.
Mac worked on her for several
minutes, stroking the roof of her vagina while licking and suckling her
clitoris. He heard the fabric
ripping as Janette’s nails tore through the sheets she had began to grip.
He heard her begin to pant, “Oh! Oh!
Oh
The link, while not as intense
as the previous one was sufficient for MacLeod to spend himself onto the foot of
the bed as he felt her orgasm through her blood.
“Oh, no!” he thought. He
was highly embarrassed- he felt like an adolescent boy. He slowly kissed his way
back up Janette’s porcelain white body- turned slightly pink with a fine sheen
of blood-sweat. He would have been
concerned about that as well but for her earlier comment. Nevertheless
he was still feeling sheepish as he kissed his way to her mouth.
Janette calmed back down from
the delightful orgasm Mac had given her, opening her eyes to meet his down
turned gaze. She imagined that she
knew the cause, having encountered such before when coupling with a mortal.
She knew that no words would be appropriate, and that she would just have
to work to inspire a ‘return to attention’ on his part.
“I’m sorry, that hasn’t
happened in a long…” he began.
Janette silenced him with a
kiss and rolled him onto his back before she began to take a trip down his body
as he had done for her. She was sure
that she could evoke a response by the time she got there.
She needn’t have worried
about that. Mac was ready for the
next bout before she made it past his throat.
He was embarrassed because he had made a mess of the bed spread, not
because he was down for the count. Rapid
response was one of the many benefits of immortality after all.
Janette was delighted to find
that her journey didn’t require the languor she might have thought.
She briefly toyed with his nipples, and ran her fangs along the muscles
of his abdomen before arriving at her destination.
She grasped him below the balls, encircling them along with his cock-
pulling the sack taught and smooth. She
laved the taught skin for a few moments before placing small kisses along the
entire shaft of his member. Each
sucking kiss left a mark as she moved toward the head- which by this time was so
engorged as to be almost purple in color.
The remnants of MacLeod’s
premature expenditure slowly oozed from the tip as she worked her way up.
She looked up at his eyes, which were fixed unwavering on her actions,
and made one long, sensuous lick, cleaning the shaft and head.
She watched him stare at her tongue as she slowly brought this offering
into her mouth and swallowed with apparent relish.
MacLeod’s eyes rolled up in
his head as he let loose a low, guttural moan.
He would have exploded right then if not for her grip at the root of his
cock. The sensations that followed
as she took him in her mouth and bobbed her head up and down on him, sucking
voraciously, were sweet agony. His
ardent moans and groans were torn from his lungs as though against his will, as
the feelings of pleasure were nearly painful in their intensity.
He began to plead with her, hoarsely begging her to let him cum.
When she finally released him, his orgasm was so explosive that he
didn’t even feel the sting of her fangs. It
if it weren’t for the sudden awareness of the link, he would have never
noticed anything beyond pulsing waves of his orgasm and the sensations she
elicited as she gulped down both fluids with abandon.
“Sweet Jesus in Heaven,
woman. If I weren’t immortal I
think you would be the death of me!” he rasped.
The look on Janette’s face as
she sinuously crawled back up to him was the look any woman gets when she has
reduced her lover to a whimpering pile of spent flesh; smiling satisfaction.
“Hmm. You like that?” she
asked, coyly.
“If you aren’t an angel
straight out of heaven, you’ll certainly do till one comes along,” he
answered with a smile.
Janette laughed delightedly.
“I don’t think angels do that,
“I don’t know, I’m pretty
sure I just saw God,” he replied. Then
he became serious and looked deep into her eyes, “I have never felt for anyone
the love I feel for you Janette dúCharme.”
He reached to her and took her face gently in his hands, “You are the
most incredible woman I have ever met. You
are more wonderful than I could have ever conceived.
I feel like I have found what was missing in my life- as clichéd as that
might sound it is nevertheless the truth.”
Janette felt a tear slip from
her eye as the feelings welled up inside her- feelings that she had never
imagined she could experience. “I
think that I would stay with you forever, if you would let me, Duncan.”
She didn’t know where these words were coming from, and frankly it was
scaring her a little. She had never
felt more vulnerable in her life than at the moment she spoke those words.
MacLeod had always fallen for
strong, beautiful women. His
enemies, and even some of his friends would say it was his biggest weakness.
He knew with certainty, however, that he had never felt like this before
in his life. Not once in four
hundred years had he felt this strongly. His
own eyes were moist as he said, “Forever would be a fine starting point,
lass.” He saw the warring of hope
and doubt in her eyes and added, “Here, now.
See for yourself,” as he tipped his head back and bared his throat to
her.
Touched by his gesture, she
pulled herself tightly to him and gently pierced the flesh of his throat over a
major vein and began to suck strongly, thinking, “I love you Duncan MacLeod.
It shouldn’t be possible, but I love you more than I could have ever
imagined.”
Though Janette might have been
able to stop, if his life were at stake,
========== X-FILES ==========
FOREVER KNIGHT ==========
HIGHLANDER ==========
As Scully sat through the
ritual of Mass, she felt herself become more centered and focused.
The comfortable familiarity of this service reminded her of her youth,
her family, and of growing up. No
matter how often they moved, or where they moved to, Roman Catholic Mass was
virtually identical wherever they went. She
felt closer to her family and to God when she sat in a cathedral and listened to
the priests’ solemn intonations from the Word of God.
As she sat, she allowed her
mind to ponder the events and actions of the last week.
She never in her life imagined that she could have been on such an
emotional roller coaster ride. The
last seven days contained more joy and sorrow, peace and torment, laughter and
tears than her entire puberty. “Things
are certainly on the right track now. Thank
you God for that!” she thought.
She was feeling slightly
anxious about going into the confessional. She
wanted absolution for the lives she had taken.
She was penitent for that night- even though she felt they more than
deserved death, she also truly believed that it was not her place to judge and
carry out sentence on such people. She
didn’t feel bad that she had killed them though, she didn’t feel guilt or
remorse over their deaths- she just wished that she hadn’t been the one to do
it. She was sure that that didn’t
make very much sense; she was wondering how to tell the priest without confusing
him or revealing her vampirism. Maybe
she would see if she could whammy him, and then if she could, she would just
remove the knowledge from him after she had made her confession and received her
penance.
Scully thought about God.
Not long ago her faith had been faltering, but some of their more recent
cases and events had led her back to her foundering faith- and had strengthened
rather than weakened it. She
couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Nick to have gone for
centuries feeling separated and alone- cut off from God and beyond forgiveness.
“It must have been truly horrible- beyond imagining,” she thought
with a shiver. It’s no wonder he
was so angsty all the time, as Natalie described him.
“Wanting to be good, to atone; but feeling like the sins of the past
couldn’t be forgiven,” she thought. That
had obviously made it impossible to forgive himself, and so he had beaten
himself up for every little slip or fall- feeling worse for every mistake and
discounting every success. She
prayed to God that he would give Nick the strength to accept forgiveness.
========== X-FILES ==========
FOREVER KNIGHT ==========
HIGHLANDER ==========
Mulder sat through the service
as quietly, mentally and physically, as he could.
He didn’t want to disturb Scully as she got whatever it was she got out
of this. He might not have come to
grips with the existence of God in his own mind, but he wouldn’t do anything
to inhibit Scully’s faith. So, he
closed his eyes and focused on her impressions of this service.
He experienced her emotions and
listened to her inner discussions and prayers.
He listened to her thoughts about Nick, and even though he only caught
the emotions and a few word-thoughts, he marveled at the self-loathing that Nick
apparently felt. He could
sympathize, even though Mulder hadn’t spent eight hundred years ruining lives
and causing deaths, he knew what it was to see the pain that his actions caused
others; especially those that he cared about, those he loved.
Mulder knew from Scully’s
mental re-hashing of her conversation with Natalie that Nick’s guilt had
driven a wedge between them on many occasions.
That his tendency to blame himself for everything that went wrong
contributed to her own despair. She
loved him and ached for the pain he felt. Even
though she was willing to forgive him- or more to the point, felt that his life
now was so removed from the harm he had brought about in the past that
forgiveness wasn’t even necessary. Nick’s
refusal to accept her love and mercy had been a constant source of pain for
Natalie.
Mulder found himself
sympathizing with both of them- yet he was still in such denial about his
personal feelings of unreasonable guilt that he didn’t make the correlation to
his own attitudes and behaviors. He
watched as Scully stood up at the end of the service and walked toward the
confessional booths.
========== X-FILES ==========
FOREVER KNIGHT ==========
HIGHLANDER ==========
Following the thoughts of his
newest childé, Vachon added aloud, “I couldn’t picture you doing this with
your dad!”
Vachon tipped his head back and
groaned as he approached climax.
Vachon took her other hand and
licked her fingers clean as they enjoyed the afterglow.
He hugged her lithe, responsive body tightly to his own and gently, but
thoroughly kissed her; two thoughts flowing to her through their link- ‘I love
you so much!; and, don’t ever stop doing that to me!’
“Much!” he sighed.
Vachon could feel his
daughter’s disquiet and reassured her, “You don’t have to kill anyone
tonight, Trace. Trust me.”
“Of course I trust you,
Vachon. I’m just nervous- I’ve
never done this before.”
“Shh, Trace.
We aren’t hunting innocents,” Vachon reassured her, hearing the
undercurrent of
The sounds of a low-voiced
conversation carried by the wind attracted both of their attention and they
drifted over to the vicinity from which it seemed to originate.
========== X-FILES ==========
FOREVER KNIGHT ==========
HIGHLANDER ==========
Jimmy and Tony were having a
familiar argument; which one of them would be the first.
The concept of taking turns was entirely foreign to them.
“I saw her!” was Jimmy’s
final salvo.
“Yeah, but I grabbed her!”
was Tony’s swift riposte.
Stunned by his adversary’s
skillful repartee, Jimmy could aught but surrender, “Bite me!” he grumbled.
The object of their debate was
a homeless woman that they had grabbed for the purpose of an evening’s
entertainment. Jimmy and Tony were
brothers, in their early forties, who had been in and out of prison for thirty
of those years. After their last 6
year stretch they had not changed their criminal ways, but rather they had
settled on targets that were less likely to be missed.
Their ideas of entertainment were torture and rape.
They had never done a stand for murder, but only because they had been
lucky. They had been in and out for
assault and rape many times each.
Tracy and Vachon had landed not
far from the two brothers and had listened to their argument.
Vachon had witnessed this scene a thousand times in his life.
Vachon turned to his childé
and said; “Now make him forget.”
“I can’t, Vachon,” she
began.
He interrupted her, “You’ve
done this before, Trace…”
“No Vachon,”
“
“I’ve killed before,
Vachon... four times in the line of duty. I
never had a single nightmare and I never felt the slightest guilt.”
With that she spun Tony around gripped him around his neck. Whispering
harshly in his half-conscious ear, “you like to hurt women, do you?
When you wake up in hell, remember who sent you there!”
Then she snapped his neck like a rotted branch.
The woman on the ground jerked
and whimpered at the sound, still terrified and disorientated.
Vachon silenced the gibbering Jimmy with a single stare and waited to see
what
As the woman left
“No.
You didn’t lose control. You
made a conscious decision; one I agree with.
You handled the woman fine… I
think you’re ready to be around mortals again.”
Then he smiled and added, “Though I wouldn’t want to be a criminal
who meets you in a dark alley.”
To Jimmy it felt as though his
brain and heart were caught in a vice. He
heard this woman screaming in his head so loudly that he thought his ears were
going to explode from the inside out. The
pain was incredible- a thousand times worse than anything he’d ever felt
before.
Vachon had never witnessed
anything like this. He had killed
for food, and for fun. Of course he
had killed in battle as well, but he had never used the whammy to kill someone
before. Never had he killed with
such deliberate intent to punish. Jimmy’s
eyes and ears began to bleed, and then his heart just stopped.
All the breath exhaled out of his body and he collapsed on the ground,
dead.
Vachon sensed the exhaustion in
his Childé and offered his throat, “Drink,
When she broke away she said,
“Lets get rid of these and go to the Raven!”
She was looking forward to being there as a vampire for the first time.
“We’ll dump the bodies in
the lake. Then we’ll go home and
make sure you feed well,” Vachon started.
When he saw her disappointment he finished with “Maybe after that you
can convince me to take you out.”
“I have full confidence in
you Querida,” Vachon said as he reached down and grabbed the body of the late
Jimmy Jackson.
========== X-FILES ==========
FOREVER KNIGHT ==========
HIGHLANDER ==========
Methos thought this was
probably the worst in the series of dive bars that he had been to already
tonight. Looking for that bastard
Froag was taking a great deal more time than he had anticipated.
He knew from reading the watcher chronicles about him that Froag tended
to spend his free time in dark clubs and bars looking for women, or dive bars
looking for fights. Methos was
hitting as many of each as he could, knowing that Froag wasn’t much of a bar
hopper and tended to stay in one place until he found one of his goals- sex or
violence.
As far as anyone knew, Froag
hadn’t left town. The good news
was that his watcher hadn’t found him yet, meaning Methos wouldn’t have to
worry about being seen. The bad
news, of course, was that his watcher hadn’t found him yet, which meant that
he couldn’t use that source to track him down.
Methos spent the time while he
waited thinking about these vampires. They
had come as a serious shock to his worldview.
He really thought he had seen it all, and now he wondered if he really
knew anything about anything at all. Now
that he had seen a few of them he noticed that they seemed to be everywhere.
He was pretty sure he saw one in here tonight.
It was the stillness. When
they weren’t actually in motion, it was like they were mannequins- they were
absolutely unmoving. It was like
looking at an eerily accurate carving, a moment in time encapsulated and on
display in the midst of the kinetic frenzy around them.
He wondered how Mulder had
managed to take out Williams like that. Was
he something more than immortal? Had
his girlfriend been able to turn him into a vampire too?
It had happened outside a diner, just minutes after sunset.
Surely Mulder couldn’t be in that place, at that time if he were a
vampire. How had he torn off
someone’s head barehanded? Heads
were pretty firmly attached. Even a
blow from a sharp sword, if not landed at just the right speed and angle,
wasn’t enough to guarantee decapitation. He
remembered quite a few embarrassing moments early in his life where he thought
he had made the killing blow only to watch his sword get stuck part way through.
The human body was at once marvelously resilient and fragile.
The most horrendous damage could heal, yet sometimes the least little
blow could kill.
He would head to the Raven
Sunday night with a few questions on his mind.
========== X-FILES ==========
FOREVER KNIGHT ==========
HIGHLANDER ==========
Scully walked over to the confessional with a
strangely light-headed feeling. She
hadn’t been to confession in a while; with work as hectic as it had been
lately, she hadn’t been to Mass in about four months.
She recognized father Rochefort from Nick’s parting mental shot as they
left the loft earlier in the evening. She
wondered if she should ask him to forgive her for putting the whammy on him.
“Is it a sin to whammy a priest?” she asked herself.
“Better than putting his life at risk I suppose,” she rationalized.
She paused just before entering, “No, I’d better
ask.” She decided that she could
hardly expect absolution if she went into this with less than pure intentions.
========== X-FILES ==========
FOREVER KNIGHT ==========
HIGHLANDER ==========
Father Rochefort was properly shocked.
“She is coming into the confessional!?” his mind shouted at him,
incredulous. He had seen her in the
congregation during the Mass and had actually stopped breathing for a moment.
As soon as he had recovered his breath he had immediately given thanks to
God that Father Gianninni was giving the service that night.
He was sure he would have been unable to continue.
A vampire in the church! Sitting
through Mass! He was waiting for the
flames to erupt at any moment. When
they didn’t he thought surely he must be wrong, but he had never been wrong
about this before. Even that
homicide detective that had managed to pass an entire day within these walls had
obviously been a vampire. At the
time that had shocked him as well, but that one had shown signs of serious
weakness at the profusion of holy symbols and relics in the cathedral.
Nevertheless, the shock had transmuted into
fascination with this little vampire and her companion who had decided to attend
service in his church tonight. The
companion was definitely more uncomfortable than the woman, yet he didn’t seem
to be a vampire. “Too alive,”
was how Rochefort thought of him. He
fidgeted and moved, and breathed too much to be a vampire, whereas she had that
preternatural stillness that was one obvious indicator of vampirism.
Even a yoga master in silent meditation had some animation; an eyelash
twitch, the slight rise and fall of the chest in breath.
The beating of the heart and the pulse of blood through the body carried
a subtle sense of vitality to a person, no matter how still they tried to be.
But vampires, they could be so still that they might
as well be carved from living quartz. Like
a DVD on pause, they seemed to occupy a moment outside of time, and one could be
forgiven for thinking that they were indeed as dead as the legends claimed-
until they chose to move. They had a
fascinating sinuousness to their movement that went beyond feline.
This one had sat through the service like that.
Her movement startled him every time the congregation went to their
knees. She went from stillness to
motion with mechanical suddenness and smoothness.
She definitely knew the routine of the Mass; unlike her companion who was
caught by surprise at every ritual motion. All
of these thoughts rushed through Father Rochefort’s head in an instant as
Scully stood at the confessional, entered and sat down.
Scully sat down and paused for a moment before
speaking, still not sure exactly how she was going to say this.
She noticed that the priest’s heart was beating rapidly and she could
smell the adrenaline coursing through his veins.
She turned to look at him through the screen and saw that he was afraid.
She didn’t understand why, “Surely he doesn’t know what I am,”
she thought. Nick had taught her
that mortals were not allowed to know about vampires, that the enforcers forbade
that knowledge and mortals who couldn’t be whammied were brought across or
killed.
Rochefort felt the icy grip of panic inside as the vampire just sat there staring at him in that absolute stillness they had. The church did not accept the existence of vampires, but those within the church who had encountered them knew the truth. The old priest who had introduced the truth to Father Rochefort had assured him that the church would always provide sanctuary against such creatures. And, even when the vampire who had inexplicably taken a job as a police officer had entered this cathedral- against everything his mentor had said was impossible, Rochefort had felt no fear. The vampire-detective was so weakened by