by Raine Wynd
Disclaimer and Notes: Panzer/Davis owns the Highlander: the Raven characters and concepts. This takes place shortly between HL:TR: "Crime and Punishment" and "The Unknown Soldier".Thanks as always to my beta readers: Amand-r. and Molly M. Special thanks to Ann Fountain for giving me the nudge to finally write this. This is my first Raven fic.
Enjoy, and please let me know what you think of this story! Thanks!
©11/14/98; Revised for dates 12/25/98; city name changed 1/30/99
"Four in the morning
Came without a warning
Everybody's got a place to be
I got holes in my conscience
Shot with a vengeance"
— Night Ranger, "Four in the Morning"
Torago — July 1998
He wasn't sure what to think anymore. A month ago, he was a cop, a damned good one by all accounts, and life was fairly divided between black and white. He had a partner he cared about, a promising career, friends he understood. He'd known what the rules were, and his conscience had been clear. Except for the occasional job-related nightmare, he'd rarely lain awake nights pondering his life, or his need for a certain blonde's company.
Now the only thing Nick Wolfe was certain of was that his closest companion currently was a woman he'd once pursued as a master thief, a woman he'd despised because she broke the law and thought nothing about the consequences...a woman thousands of years older than him. You couldn't tell by looking at her, though. He'd yet to figure out how she managed to conceal that sword of hers in the often skintight clothes she wore.
He half-chuckled at the thought. Swords. God. If that wasn't crazy enough, he'd be hard-pressed to explain the strange light storm he'd witnessed twice now — a Quickening, Amanda had called it — let alone the fact that there were a bunch of people running around the world who couldn't stay dead by most means. Over the years on the force, he'd talked to psychics, freaks, quacks, drugged-out scum...but nothing he'd ever experienced had prepared him for the moment Amanda's path collided with his. It seemed incredible to think how one person, one event could toss him down a road he'd never considered taking before, and there was no going back now. His honor alone wouldn't let him. He had to somehow understand her, try to make sense of what happened, but in the process, he was discovering there was a lot he hadn't known, a lot of truths he'd taken for granted.
Life was life and death was death. You lived, you died. In between, you made choices about how to live...and those that violated society's rules had to pay. But what if one of society's biggest rules was that you didn't live forever? Discovering that there were exceptions to that had been a shock. It caused him to reexamine the lessons he'd learned, the history he'd been taught, the things he'd experienced. Just how much of what he'd known had been affected by Immortals? How many others had he confronted in his years on the force and been oblivious to their true nature? And what meaning was there to life when you were doomed to see nearly everyone else around you turn to dust? What purpose did his life — made sharply more finite by his newfound knowledge — have?
He didn't like feeling uncertainty, and he certainly hadn't wanted to feel sympathy for Amanda. Attraction was one thing; that he understood. It was basic need between a woman and a man, as simple and as complex as breathing.
Had it been any other woman, they'd have long satisfied the sexual tension between them. As it was, Nick was finding it increasingly difficult to justify his resistance. She was, he'd discovered, a totally unrepentant thief...but one who cared deeply about her friends. She could be thoroughly annoying, sexy, and so completely captivating, he found himself liking the very things he hated about her. He supposed she had every right to be a paradox; she'd certainly had enough time in her life to become whatever she pleased. Still, Claudia, his partner, had died for Amanda.a useless, frivolous death, not only because of (as Nick had thought at the time) a mere burglar, but because Amanda would and did go on living after she'd been shot. Claudia hadn't.
Nick had walked away from his life in the wake of Claudia's death. Nothing mattered, now that the rules, as he'd known them, had changed. He tried working for his old friend Bert, but found himself drifting away from that as well. International intrigue wasn't really his cup of coffee, especially when he wasn't privy to the details. His whole existence had been defined by the words "I'm a cop." Hell, his marriage to a debutante had failed because of it. He couldn't just hop a steamer like he did after college and wander the world; the experience had been enough the first time.
That left him sitting in his apartment, contemplating his existence — his mortal existence, he reminded himself unnecessarily — at four o'clock in the morning. How did Immortals manage it? he wondered. Surely, they had to reinvent themselves every couple of decades or so.people would notice when someone didn't age the way everyone else did. Even without that....
Nick tried to imagine how he'd react if he woke up one day to discover he was Immortal. He half-chuckled. Probably not very well, he thought. From what little Amanda had told him, he didn't suppose anyone ever did.
He sighed and tiredly rubbed his face before dragging his hands through his brown hair. He knew better than to get philosophical with himself in the wee hours of the morning. The mind tumbled wildly, and everything seemed larger than life in the time before dawn, but Nick hadn't been able to sleep. The images of his recent past haunted him like some Dickens character out of season.
The business with his first case troubled him. It was unsettling, to say the least, to discover that he'd been wrong all those years ago. The what-ifs were spinning around in his brain, maybe if he hadn't been so eager to make his bones on the case, he'd have..Done what? he wondered. He'd only known so much, and all the evidence had been so clear-cut. Or so he'd thought.
He felt like he was in a fog. Behind him lay the sunlight of the world he'd known and taken for granted. Before him stretched a road, and he was stumbling down it, trying to make sense of all the sights that suddenly appeared out of the smoky darkness, Amanda's knowing smile like a beacon along the way. Damn her.
He wasn't a cop anymore. He wasn't a completely law-abiding citizen either. What did that say about him, about his fascination for Amanda? His conscience bugged at him, but the end had been worth it, hadn't it? He'd helped Amanda break into the museum, lied to the very institution he'd once served proudly.and enjoyed it immensely. He wasn't about to tell Amanda that.
Somehow, he suspected she already knew.
With a muttered groan, he tossed off the bed sheets and threw on a pair of shorts. Maybe a few rounds with the punching bag and he'd be exhausted enough not to care.
***Finis***
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