Disclaimer: Recognizable Highlander characters aren't mine. Aidan is. No money made; no infringement intended. And don't ask me how precisely, but Dayspring is responsible for this somehow.  I was rereading "Save the Last Dance For Me" and it made me think about the different POVs on double quickenings.  In this case, Connor's.  This takes place during Sirocco.
Rated:  R, I suppose.  You'll know why when you get there.

"They never understand, you see."  That opening attack cut across Connor's nerves in lightning-charged heat and the thunder rumbling behind it suggested, "They don't think the way we do."

He'd heard that purring, persuasive tone before, when Owain Rhys-Tewdor had tried to twist him against his own blood-kin, the student of his heart and clan and the sister of his teacher's doing and his heart's own wish.  Connor shook the words off, scornful of such a predictable attack and heard the Welshman's voice again, sliding into him as smoothly as the man's blades had.  He sounded reasonable, sensible, gently lulling.  "You can't expect a woman to understand--"

"Pig spit," the Highlander growled, or thought he did.  It was almost impossible to hear anything in the constant crack and boom of a quickening, and this one held more power and more malice than he'd felt since the Kurgan finally lost.  Connor's perception of time was slowing though, as it sometimes did when there were too many immortals around and he desperately needed to be able to think in the sliding instants between seconds.  It let him brace against the strikes, reset his mental balance as needed, but it let him anticipate, too....

Aidan stood alongside him, her shoulder pressed against his -- he could feel that even through the bone-rattling, skin-searing strikes of the doubled quickening, and some part of him knew that there was good reason she stood to his right, but he couldn't remember it just now.  Far, far more important that he hold steady against the words and insinuations burning through his mind; Connor couldn't remember why that was so necessary, either, but it was.  He thought that and heard someone accuse him of witchcraft.  He thrust Dougal's too familiar accusation away, and heard someone else accuse him of treachery.  Betraying his own, though, Connor had never done; he knew that down to his soul, and his shields firmed again.

The attacks shifted, as if sensing that words weren't sufficient.  Memories of random cruelty flamed through his mind, then:  visions of men cut down in battle, houses set afire during raids, a horse shot down for lack of a clear shot at the rider.  The poor beast screamed in Connor's mind, blood pouring down that black-haired throat.  And again that purring Welsh voice probed at him in the quickening, hunting for weak spots in his armor.  "Always the weaker sex.  Unpredictable, unreliable, treacherous--"

Connor shuddered under a double bolt, felt the body beside him shift and moved without thought to stand warm back to warm back; solid muscle and bone, flesh of his flesh, pressed against him, giving him something to brace against that meant no harm.  In that brief respite, the space of a hastily drawn breath against the screams torn from both of them with pain and rage, the Highlander heard laughter.

It rose up in his mind:  a warm, rich sound, familiar from his earliest days in the Game, and accompanied by a deep, whiskey-rich voice.  "Foolish sheep-eater, you're not going to fall for that, are you?  Come, Connor, I taught the both of you better than that.  Don't look at that one," and a familiar, dark-tanned hand reached over his shoulder to wipe an ugly battlefield away from his vision.  Ramirez' voice also slid through him, sardonic, abrasive, comforting.  "Look at this."

This time, the power rolled into him from behind, and it sang across his skin in a bracing rush like a plunge into the loch after plowing all day.  It slid through his bones, into his mind, and for a moment his sight blurred and all he could see was... Methos standing beside and slightly ahead of him/her, wearing a pale green tunic and a plain longsword on his belt, sun-reddened hair braided back from his face and secured by copper.  Presence rang deep bell-tones through his skin, across his thoughts, in a glorious clamor of sound linked unmistakably to the dark-skinned figure in front of him.  Ramesen, Methos had named him, and Ramirez Connor knew him, and laughed in his own mind to see the man at last look truly Egyptian.

He wore a short, cotton skirt, barely long enough to cover his privates and thin enough that Christ only knew why he'd bothered.  He'd shaved his head, although not lately from the grey and black stubble on scalp and cheeks both.  A copper ring gleamed in one ear, and amulets hung around his neck on leather thongs, in lapis and bronze, tiger-eye and faience.  The shortsword and dagger hanging from his leather belt were masterpieces of form and function.  And he was laughing uproariously about something.  Connor had forgotten the sheer joy of hearing him like that.

Power startled him, searing across his skin unexpectedly, tainted with insinuations.  "No, they never play fair, do they?  Of course, neither do some of the men."

The words yanked the sight of Ramirez away and replaced it with one of Johannes' memories instead:  all low-German profanities and the reek of blood and recent death.  Snow fell through the steam of the battlefield onto the bodies, and the cold from the cobblestones ate through the soles of his boots and into the small bones of his feet.  Immortal presence seared through the hot-iron taste of a killing rage, shuddered his attention away from the mound of dead around him and the blood dripping from his blade into the sodden muck at his feet.  He had just time to look up and see Damien in an oddly familiar uniform before some bastard's bullets ripped into him, throwing him back and down, cursing through the blood in his lungs as he faded....

"No!"  The raging word erupted from both of them, Aidan's clear voice blending into his own rasp.

Ramirez reached out again, calling, "You were a blacksmith, Conchobar.  If you want a link with your sister, man, you'd better forge it yourself before they do it for you with things you'd not want!"

"Not with that pot-metal," Connor growled, and somehow he... reached for what he needed and threw his own memory to Aidan.  A favorite, that one, and he'd have etched it into his mind with or without immortal memory, Connor knew.  But he let himself remember being young and happy, richly loved by his Heather and just relaxing from a bout of lovemaking with her when Ramirez jumped his horse over the both of them.  How the old haggis had kept him from feeling another immortal that day had been a question he'd always wanted to ask, but Ramirez had died before Connor could get the answer....

Even in the crack and spark of ozone-rich lightning, he could almost hear Aidan's laughter, almost see her own image of hammering iron and steel together, white-hot, red-hot, finer and finer layers constantly woven together for strength, and flexibility, and its ability to hold an edge just so.  She'd told him once that she'd been a smith; he'd been amused by the similarity between them, and not thought of it since.  Her image fit the two of them perfectly, however -- his edges and her resilience -- and Connor set his own stamp on it, showing her the folding techniques Nakano had taught him.  He'd have sworn later that he did see her hand bring down the hammer.  Whether he did or not, the next lightning strike didn't come from the clouds, but arced off the woman beside him.

Cool, comfortable grass under their feet and the feel of a fine mist coming off the clouds as she/he ran, barefoot, to collect the treasured mirror.  Time and more than time to be learning to read the wind through the stones; she/he was tall for her age and still growing, and his/her Sight was growing, too....  Shouts of surprise and welcome from the other children tugged her head up to see the tall, pale man leading a pony into the village.  He wore a leather apron over his tunic, hallmark of a traveling smith, and had cross-strapped leather along his calves to protect him from the overgrowth in the forest.  She thought he was only a wandering blacksmith, until her vision blurred with so many sights she couldn't sort them all.  From the first she'd known Methos' arrival would turn her world upside down, and for the first time, from sheer fright, Aidan tried not to See something.  Connor felt her rueful knowledge that it had even worked... for a while.

Images and memories continued to rain down upon them, and Connor felt her strike back somehow, blocking the worst of it with her own strength of will.  It struck him as a storm or volcanic eruption, all ash, and hail, and torrential winds:  burning, bruising, choking, overwhelming.  He heard voices beyond the storm, encouraging and worried alike, but had no time or energy to reach for the meanings of those words when he was drowning in other languages and knowledges.

Connor felt his throat and tongue trying to shape a phrase he didn't know, recognized a word as Welsh, and shoved the skill away and down, locking it into a pigeonhole in an old technique Ramirez had taught him.  That inspired the Highlander to take his memories of training with Ramirez -- being dumped unceremoniously in the loch, or reduced to exhaustion by a man who looked twice or three times his age -- and trade them to Aidan.  She laughed within his mind even as she shunted... something... to one side and threw back impressions of her own:  studying a pattern Ramirez had traced in the sand until she could feel her own presence, could taste the way it changed with her each heartbeat, each breath, the subtlest shift of her own mood....

"And what has she ever brought you but grief, Highlander?"  A memory/image of his own face, locked with pain and a refusal to make any sound, rammed through them both, and Connor relived his rape from both sides for an interminably long moment as Johannes' quickening probed for a weak spot.

He heard the hiss of fury from behind him, and then Aidan forced her own memory over Johannes' cruelty.  She showed Connor another man's face instead, rapt with some ecstasy too sharp to be purely physical.  Her Sight bloomed within her/him, driven by a need to host the Mother for this one night and barely restrained by physical sensation as her/his body yielded for the first time to a sweet invasion.  The pleasure began to build between them, joy and energy to be given to the fields --  

Her quickening welled up, seeking some place to lodge within him, and still the strikes came from without as well.  Connor felt some wall in himself begin to shift and give way under the pressures.  It trickled away from him in grains, in small showers of pebbles and larger chunks of black basalt and silver-grey granite, until he realized that what lay behind it.  His memories.  His skills, earned with his own labor and sweat and sometimes headaches as he tried to master one more language, one more chapter of the blasted calculus....  His, all of it, and some of it he was more proud of than other parts, but all of it had made him what he was now, the proud moments and the embarrassing alike.

Ramirez laughed in his mind, showing him an image of a dammed-up lake pressing restlessly at its bounds, water lapping the bank and eroding away the top to spring out into the air in dozens of fine, misting trails.  All the peacock said softly, however, was, "Trust her, Conchobar.  Edana can swim."

Connor chuckled then and let it go, feeling it explode out and away from him much like the water had erupted from a concrete dam he'd once blown up for the Resistance.  White fog hazed around him, misting like water evaporating in its long downward arc from the top of some falls.  Memories and skills ran down him, away from him, into Edana, and left him feeling oddly light, his shields gone for once.  His self-image, though, had been profoundly influenced by Ramirez, even in the short time they'd had together; Owain's memories struck at him, thinking him defenseless, only to find that granite does not fear lightning, and that Connor was a true child of his native Highlands.

He was grateful for that strength a moment later.  Water may pour away, but ripples always roll back.  Connor knew that, and still the press of Aidan's quickening staggered him, shaped as it was from light and fire and pouring down around him like moonlight, or moonshine to make even a Scot drunk.  His own memories and skills filled him again, dropping into place in the torrential downpour of images and sensations as his hand curved to hold a spindle, his mouth shaped the name of a lover she'd last kissed a thousand years ago and more, and a foot rub he'd never received eased the ache left by Johannes' memories of winter in the Italian Alps.  He let it roll over him, around him, soft and easy as fog wreathing the Highlands, and set himself to accepting it.

Aidan encompassed him for that moment, her own joys and pains, small victories and remembered humiliations, sheeting across him like floodwater across rock.  Some of it, the more alien parts, ran across and were gone -- water sliding along granite to return to her as rainbow refractions.  More of it slid into him, light-sheened water seeping into the earth of his image of the Highlands, pooling in crevices to reflect the sun and moon later, to freeze and expand and open him to things he didn't yet know that he held.  Somehow, that part of her would always be with him now... and some part of his own granite stubbornness now lay deeply rooted in her, a solid base on which her fire could burn.

Connor felt that welcome heat, felt Aidan's perception of herself as a blaze constantly burning, constantly moving and changing with the wind and her fuel.  He threw her his own image of himself as the loch below his and Heather's cottage:  the way it had reflected the day, hidden its secrets, expanded in good times and contracted in bad, always changing with the waters that fed it and the images it reflected, but always itself, too, and always shaped and strengthened by the granite around it.  They steadied each other, then, her fire reflected in his water, and no image of Johannes' or Owain's making did they allow into that mirror-bright surface.

He dropped Owain in that lake as Ramirez chuckled appreciatively in the back of his mind; the surface might as well have been ice a yard thick for all it would let the Welshman up.  Connor let Owain's presence drown in midnight blue depths and grimly watched the ripples fade from sight as Aidan's fire leapt up to devour Johannes, blue-white flames leaving nothing but ashes drifting away on the thermals...

...and felt dirt and rocks under his knees, his breath laboring in his lungs as Aidan leaned against his back, too tired to straighten up and just heavy enough to balance Connor as he, too, pressed into that comforting flesh.  He ached, his wrist a torment to him as the extra energy surged into his healing, and a line of discomfort down his shoulder startled him; the pain felt familiar, but the source of the pain was wrong....

"Are you all right?" Aidan asked him, and he didn't know for a moment if he'd heard the words or just her worry, overlaying his own sensations like tracing paper over a text.

Connor chuckled as he felt her start trying to sort out whose pain was whose.  "The shoulder's yours."  She shifted, partly from stiffness, partly in response to his desire to see what she'd done to that shoulder, and the movement felt wrong to him. Oh.  Her center of gravity is lower.

Aidan felt his startlement, and then Connor moved and felt her reaction that yes, his center was too high... and they both began to laugh, from pleasure, and relief, and the odd, building joy of not being alone anymore.

And if there's a price for that --  

Aidan finished the thought for him firmly,  -- then we'll pay it.  When it comes due.  For now, though --  

 -- we quit worrying the others, he agreed and they set about learning how to be separate beings, or as close as they would ever manage again.  Later would be soon enough to explore this, when a quickening didn't fire their nerves, when pain didn't distract them, when lovers wouldn't worry over whip-sawed sentences.

Later.
 

~ ~ ~ finis 3/24/01 ~ ~ ~

visitors have wandered through since 5/19/01
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