There was MacLeod kneeling in shock and pain. There was Richie, all of his immortality spent in three years. And there was Joe, sobbing in his arms. There was supposedly a demon loose in the world, and MacLeod, the only man who could defeat him, the man Methos pegged to win the game, was about to offer him his head.

"Take it." There the man was, holding out his sword.

"I will not." Nor would he. MacLeod would have to live with this. As Methos held Joe close to him, he watched MacLeod drop the katana and leave, carrying Richie's glove and muttering in what Methos assumed was a Native American language.

He'd deal with the body later. He'd had millenia of practice taking care of beheaded bodies. He had a living man to worry about now.

"Come on, Joe. I'll take you home." He led him out of the warehouse to his own car. Joe leaned heavily on his cane on the way. For the first time since Methos had met him, Joe looked crippled and old. Not his Joe! Not . . .

He waited until Joe settled himself in the front seat and they drove back to Methos' apartment in silence. When Joe looked at him in surprise, he shrugged.

He parked and sprinted up the stairs to his door. By the time Joe had caught up, he'd gotten most of the books and papers off the sofa. He let Joe sit and fetched a couple of beers from the refrigerator.

"Silly Yanks and cold beer." He handed a bottle to Joe, and fell bonelessly next to him.

"Thanks, Adam." They opened the bottles, but Joe just held his. "Oh, God, Adam . . . Methos . . . he was only a kid."

"I know." He snaked an arm around Joe, who didn't lean into it but didn't shrug it away.

"He was Immortal. He had centuries ahead of him. Who knows what he would have been."

Methos was silent for a moment. The words he was going to say would not bring comfort, but they were the truth. Joe wanted truth. He always had. "He would have been the same daredevil kid. He might have traded in his motorcycle for a rocket ship or even a starship if he could have kept his head that long, but he never would have been able to stay anywhere long enough to change. And that would have lost him his head anyway."

"I don't understand."

"Oh, Joe. You've read the same Chronicles I have. Immortals rarely advance beyond where they were when they were first killed. Look at MacLeod. Four hundred years ago, he was a stuffy, moralistic man dedicated to his Clan above all else. He's added some polish - he can read, he can use a computer and he's the best figher I have ever known, and I know them all, but he's the same. Or Amanda, or Kronos. Immortals almost never change who they are any more than they age."

"You changed." Joe looked at him with serious eyes. "You were a Horseman. You murdered and pillaged your way through the known world, but you changed."

Methos smiled ruefully. "I don't remember who I was when I first died. I barely remember my first Quickening. I became a Horseman not just because I enjoyed what I did, or just because Kronos was my lover, but because I wanted power for a change."

"He was your lover?"

"Yeah. One of my best, in fact. Surprisingly generous in the bedroll. The Horsemen ruled the world, and Kronos ruled the Horsemen, but I ruled Kronos. He did as I planned, because my plans, the plans of a man already two thousand years old, always worked."

"Why, then . . . ?"

"I got sick of it all, and I left. I snuck away in the night so I wouldn't have to fight my so-called brothers. He who fights and runs away, you know. I made myself over to what I wanted to be, and did it again and again and again. I had the time and I took it. And I wanted to change enough to work at it. Most Immortals have neither the time nor the desire. Most Immortals are like Richie, you know. They get killed early, earlier than if they'd lived a normal human lifespan. Some are like Duncan and Amanda, with centuries to their names. Only a few of us live more than a thousand years. You know that."

Joe nodded. "I wanted Richie to be different. Hell, even if he wouldn't have grown, he would have loved flying a rocketship or a starship." His face crumpled in tears. Methos put down his beer and held him close. He kissed him a time or two, just as an old lover should. Joe leaned into Methos' chest as he sobbed.

"It's all right, Joe. Just let it happen."

"How do you manage it?"

"Manage what?"

"Losing people? Everyone you've ever met, ever loved . . . even killing them if you had to."

"You manage. It hurts, but the hurt goes away, mostly. It's either that or being afraid to love at all." He looked into Joe's eyes, and smiled gently.

"I've lost so many people in my own life, and I'm only in my fifties. How . . . I don't understand how . . . "

"You survive, Joe. That's all you can do. You love and you mourn and you go on. You get up the next day and you go on. Sometimes, you have to drag yourself out of bed or even out of a bottle, but you go on. You strap on your sword and live another day. Otherwise, you might as well put your head on the block." He took a big slug of beer.

Joe shook his head, but took a sip of his own. "Methos . . . is Richie still with us? Still in Duncan?"

"I don't know. I've had more quickenings than I could count. I don't remember most of them clearly, but some will never leave me. I have some memories I never lived, and some skills I never learned, although I do practice them."

"And there was that dark quickening of Duncan's. He was taken over by someone else." Joe looked hopeful.

"No, Joe. That was Duncan. The evil he'd absorbed in that quickening made him bury his morality and his control, but it was Duncan. If anything, he was even more of a prig when I put them back." He shook his head. "In all probability, Richie's gone. The ones that stay are the old ones, the ones who have had hundreds of kills or who have lived centuries, or who first died after having had lives. Richie . . . was none of these. He's in your heart, Joe. Let him be there."

"He's gone forever?"

Methos nodded. He thought Joe was going to cry again, but Joe didn't. Instead he stared at his bottle.

"If I were a religious man, I'd wonder if it were possible for Immortals to go to heaven."

"I don't know if we even have souls, Joe, or if the quickening is all we are." Methos closed his eyes.

"Immortals love. Immortals create art and beauty. They must have souls." Methos smiled at that. He felt Joe touch his hair. "Adam . . . I'm surprised you even believe in a soul."

"I don't have to believe. I know. I've seen the same souls over and over again throughout my life."

Joe sat up straight. "Reincarnation?"

"Yeah." He smiled. "It did take a thousand years or so, but eventually I figured it out. I kept meeting friends in the bodies of strangers. But only mortal friends, never Immortals. When we die, we die forever, unless some piece of us stays with the one who took our heads. Duncan likes to say 'see you in Hell' when he kills, but there is no Hell for our kind. Maybe we don't need it."

Joe kissed him softly on the cheek. "No hell. No heaven, either."

"Only what we make for ourselves." Methos turned his face to meet Joe's lips with his own. It had been months since they'd last touched like that, and Methos found himself drowning in the taste. One moment of sanity caused him to pull away.

"Joseph, are you certain this is what you want now?"

"Yeah. I need to make a little heaven after today's hell. How about you?"

For an answer, Methos kissed him again, and led him to his bed. There they made love gently and thoroughly, giving each other the pleasure and human contact they each needed to accept the horrors of the day: the death of a young man with the universe ahead of him and the agony of the man who had killed him by mistake.

As he lay spent in Joe's strong arms, Methos felt again a connection he'd known many times in the past.

He looked into his lover's eyes. "You're one of those souls, you know . . . I knew you at once."

Joe stroked Methos' hair. "You did? How . . . ?"

"I knew. And when I first looked in your eyes, I was certain. Always gentle, always warm and welcoming, always an artist, and always unable to sit back and not help someone else. The first time I was certain, I was in Athens, working for a nobleman's family. His mother was a typical Athenian wealthy widow. She never had to do more than spin yarn and have children." Methos could feel himself drifting in time.

"Petaera was in her thirties, which was old for that time. She was already a grandmother, and she was never pretty by anyone's standards. But she had warm, dark eyes and her tapestry work was among the most beautiful I've seen. I was a free man working as a tutor to the children, so I was permitted to meet her. And I was always happy with her, even if she did prattle on about the servants and the children and whatever other gossip she found. She saw everything, and that's how she filled her idle days.

"There was a plague of what I think was cholera. I did what I could, which wasn't much. I wanted to take her with me when I left, but she wouldn't go. Her son and his family were dead, and she'd turned the family house into a hospital, tending slave, freedman, commoner and noble alike with those same hands trained to uselessness. When she, too, became ill, they in turn tended her until she died. I loved Petaera. I never touched her hand. I kept one of her tapestries with me for years, but things fade. . . ."

Joe said nothing. He just held Methos tighter.

"I found her . . . you . . . again and again throughout the millenia. Sometimes we were strangers who passed in the street, many times we were friends, or lovers. Once . . . once, Joseph, I married a woman abandoned by her husband, a woman with her own children, who could make clay live under her hands. I lived with her for twenty years as husband and wife. I raised her children with her. And I buried Martha under an apple tree in Oxford."

"You're crying, Methos." He was. He wiped his face while Joe wrapped him in his arms.

"As I said, it fades, but it never goes away. She had Petaera's soul, and Scunius', and you have hers, but you are all different people, shaped by events in your lives."

"I can't . . . Methos, is this the only one? Is it the only . . . soul you've seen return?"

"I knocked about Oxford in the eighties. Took some classes. Martha's grave is gone. I met a student there, an American boy. He had one of those faces where none of the features look quite right - pouty lower lip, big nose, and strange eyes - but together they were beautiful. He was reading Psychology, I remember, and he'd just broken up with a real bitch. He was brilliant, too. Never forgot anything. And I knew who he was right away. He had the eyes of an old soul, one which had been and done so many things.

"I knew him . . . I'd seen those eyes in a little girl taken as the spoils of war, in a woman with bruises on her face because she dared to learn, in an endlessly curious little boy who shied away from grown men. I'd seen them on nuns and priests and monks. And on men who thrived on killing others - your century did not invent serial killers. Someone had given this soul a lifetime of pain, but it wasn't always strong enough to bear it. I could sense his hidden rage when he spoke about his missing sister. I hope he found a source of strength. I couldn't be it."

And thus I was yet another betrayal in his life. Fox, I'm sorry.

"It's all right, Methos. You can't save all of them. Even MacLeod knows that."

I kissed him again. "Sometimes, I need the saving. Joe . . . this is the wrong time and the wrong place, but I love you . . . all of you as you are." I got out of bed and began to dress.

"Methos? Where are you going?"

"I have to take care of the body. I won't be gone long."

He paled but nodded. "I'll be here for you when you return." He took a deep breath. "I love you, Methos. Me, Joe Dawson, I love you."

As I left the apartment, I smiled.
 

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