Only Human

Disclaimer and Notes: Panzer/Davis owns the Highlander characters; I just play in their universe for fun.

This is an outtake from the Code of Silence Trilogy; originally intended for a Lyric Wheel, but discarded in favor of something else I've long since forgotten.

Only Human

By Raine Wynd

There were things I didn't want to see. Maybe that made me an ostrich, but when I got this assignment, I thought it was going to be, oh hell, I don't know. Being a Watcher in the field wasn't exactly all they made it out to be in training. Sometimes it was worse. Sometimes, you had to wonder if Horton wasn't too far off the mark when he called Immortals abominations. I was in training then; I heard him recruiting someone once, and Horton scared me. I didn't believe him, and then I got assigned one of the lunatics for my first assignment. Thank God that one didn't last long; any longer, and I think I might've been more swayed to believe Horton had a point. As it was, if I'd been a hell of lot more gullible, maybe I would've seen him as my savior... but that's a different story altogether, and this is supposed to be an official Chronicle, not an essay on why one Michael Wetherly, Watcher from Michigan, almost got caught in the rhetoric of one obsessed man. I'm not a Hunter, a Horton follower, or anything like that; I'm just a guy with an unusual job and a wish that my first assignment had been this good.

You see, assignments could be hell, either because they were boring, or because they were too much action, or simply because they were never quite everything you expected. It all depended on who your immortal was, though I'll admit that the kind of person your boss was played into that as well. My first field supervisor had watched more than her share of bad immortals, and I'm pretty sure Horton had gotten to her. I never saw her after my second week in the field, and when I went to report in that my assignment had gotten whacked, I was told never to inquire after her again… unless I shared her point of view. I was quick to assure my new supervisor that hell, no, I didn't think all immortals were evil.

So yeah, sometimes, you got lucky, and got assigned to someone decent, like Nick Wolfe.

I wasn't his first Watcher; a Frenchwoman named Monique Le Due had that honor, but she'd broken her Oath, helping him break out of jail. She would never be a field agent again, and until recently, I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to risk death by a Tribunal-ordered firing squad by revealing themselves to their immortal that way.

Granted, I'd heard the gossip about how Joe Dawson was a friend of Duncan MacLeod and Amanda and Richie Ryan, how deep that friendship ran. There was even a new course included at the training academy about the pros and cons of that kind of relationship – but still, discretion was strongly advised. In any case, I'd already graduated from the academy, and wasn't willing to give up a few weeks of my life to go back. Not when I had an immortal to Watch.

I'd always believed that being a good Watcher meant keeping your distance. Less personal risk that way, for one thing, though it did make it a lot harder to shadow your subject when you couldn't always coincidentally cross their path or invite them over for coffee. I thought I was better off that way.

There was a time when I would've said that Nick would always be one of the good guys. Now, I'm not so sure. Why that continues to surprise me when he's been hanging around one of the oldest immortals is beyond me; the old ones are notoriously devious. Hell, they've had to be. And Amanda was one of the oldest living immortals, and that's no small feat for a woman, either. If I had to wager a guess, not knowing what I know, I'd have to say that Amanda caught Nick, and good.

I don't think I have to go on about how he loves her. Joe Dawson apparently saw it when he met Nick as pre-Immortal; Nick would've died trying to avenge what he perceived to be her ultimate death, and he nearly did. Monique's written pages about how Nick and Amanda patched up things after he came back to Paris — how happy they both seemed. Reading over what Monique wrote, it's clear to me that she was sure they would reunite soon, despite all that Nick said about needing space away from Amanda and MacLeod and his lover.

I wasn't all that certain. Maybe it was my own uncertainty about love in general that made me doubt it. Perhaps if I'd been there to witness that reunion in Paris, I might've been more inclined. I don't know. All I knew of Nick was what was written in his Chronicle, and what had been written in Amanda's. I had to believe that he cared about her deeply enough to keep her secret — and knew her well enough to keep her at what a sane man would call a safe distance. Yet he came back, forgave her for killing him the all-important first time, and appeared, at least to Monique and Joe, whose corroborating entries in three Chronicles (Nick's, Amanda's, and MacLeod's), to still love her deeply.

As for me, I'd watched Nick for a few weeks, long enough to know he was a man who wasn't prone to sudden anger. Whatever impatience he might've had as a pre-immortal had been tempered, no doubt by his teacher's influence. (There's an entry in Connor MacLeod's Chronicle about Nick that says Connor had Nick mediating for hours on the roof in the dead of winter, supposedly because Nick had wanted to rush out and do something rash.) I was even starting to admire Nick's ability to elude the police — and word has it that when the Mountie's on a case, you'd better know how to run and hide your tracks. I wasn't surprised that Nick knew how to do that — he'd been a cop, after all, and so knew the methods.

So when that fight came with Amanda, it shocked me. I still don't know how he managed to not take her head; a lesser swordsman couldn't have done it. If that's what training with Connor MacLeod teaches you, then by God I'm glad that he doesn't take on many students, and that he's one of the good guys. After that, Nick taking Ryder Howlings seemed almost anti-climatic, and I have to admit, I might've gotten my report messed up in my shock.? I mean, one minute, I see Amanda fighting Nick like she meant to kill him, the next, there's all that damned weird lightning and things exploding and I have to think about how to get the farthest away from all that electricity and still see what's going on. I've heard what normal lightning does to people; I don't ever want to find out what Quickening lightning does to someone who isn't immortal.? Probably leave a charred, smoking corpse or something.

I stared into Nick's eyes tonight and saw a killer there. He wouldn't hurt me to get the info on Amanda's whereabouts, but he wasn't afraid of that darkness. Maybe I was just deluding myself into thinking that it was only the bad ones that had that look. Maybe I was just hoping that two immortals who loved each other could stay together, like the Valincourts. I don't think I'll see Nick and Amanda together again any time soon. It's a shame, but I can't say I'd forgive her either. I'm not so sure I would if I were in Nick's shoes.? Guess that just means that he's just a man and everything he does will be all right in the end.

?12.12.00, 3.13.02 Raine Wynd Comments welcome!

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