The road tugs at your feet:  cold, wet, sucking mud like spring nights hunting for a lost ewe about to have her lamb, ruts under your soles like the roads into the West when you left New York the first time to cross the Plains.  The smell isn't clean mountain mud, however.  Rotting flesh cloys the air, clogs your throat with its sick-sweet scent.  In the air the copper tang of blood rides above the rot, with the choking taste of wood ash and smoke riding underneath that.  The whole mélange smells like nothing so much as the trenches of the Great War.  The only thing missing is the maggots.

That thought might explain the taste in your mouth.

There's no sky overhead, only fog high enough to masquerade as clouds, reflecting back light from the town ahead of you.  The wind whips along the clouds, lashing them until rain seems imminent without quite arriving, and the mud feels like it'll wrap your feet in ice if you pause.  Bare-limbed trees line the road, lashing your skin when you try to turn aside, leaving blood to lie cold along your skin, black in the deep grey of coming night.

Even without the wind and the trees and the freezing mud, you'd keep moving.  You're walking fast, not quite running from some last remnant of pride that isn't enough to keep you warm, because you know they're out there.  They're waiting for the sun to go down completely (and you don't have to think about that; you already know) and then... then you'd better be faster than they are, or you're going to add to that smell of rot and blood.

Death by fire would be better than that, and against that small, long-held phobia the rasp of moving bones lays a vote and the hiss of furry, leathery wings in the woods seconds it.  Other people have ghosts in their towns (never their houses), skeletons in their closets (never bones in their attics), but you... you have ghosts behind you, skeletons following you, staggering, rotting bodies limping along behind.

Dead, all of them, but not in peace, and not resting.  The moon's not up yet, not even behind those godforsaken clouds.  God's forsaken this whole place, let the devil paint it in grey and black and the deep blue of bruises, the grey of exhaustion, red in shades that are too wrong to be anything but dried blood...

You made your bed, and you're lying in it, aren't you, Duncan?

Sowed your wild oats without thinking about the moon or the seasons, planted wheat in summer, corn in winter, and thought you'd get something fit to eat?  You've sewn the wind, and you're reaping the whirlwind, the lashing, chilling, hunting, hounding wind that blows you ahead, blows them along behind, and all your sins are out to find you.

Wash away sins in the blood of the lamb, but there's no lamb here, and you're as like to be hung for a sheep.  The noose sways and creaks in the wind, casts its shadow ahead of you on the road.  Crows ride the breeze, perch along the tree limb, bracket the gallows rope like bookends or braces, and that sound, that coarse, hoarse quork, is the sound of brave men turned to scavengers' meat on a hundred battlefields, far too many of them in Scotland.

Deeds you've done can't be undone.  The embalmers can fasten a head back on shoulders but silk stitches rot almost as fast as the flesh around them, and the soul begs for freedom from behind eyes sagging within the sockets.  The past will come and find you, will come and eat your future as you ate theirs, will tell its tales in the beating of your telltale heart.

They're going to come, going to follow you, bound to you by your bloody hand as your shadow is bound to you by the light.  Limping or clattering, rot or tallow, green as ichor, red as blood, black as char, white as bone -- they're yours, Duncan MacLeod, every last damning one of them.  Your past.  Your sins.  Your dead.

Their shadows rise only shoulder-high -- their shoulders, not yours.  Their hands are ragged shreds, clawing the wind as the wind tears you.  Their clothes are wisps as the clouds above are shreds against the trees.  Their voices are the cries of the carrion birds, the rasp and creak of wind-tossed trunks and branches, the crack of ice sheets breaking under your bare feet as you fight for one more yard, one more stride, one more piece of freedom that you'll never manage while your own deeds drag you down into this foul-smelling frozen muck that you made.

The sun is setting, and the dead are following you.  Your dead are following you, missing heads and hands and holding their guts and throats and hearts in place, some of them, as they stagger along.

Your arms tighten around you at the sight, at the gut-punch memory of Tessa's blood-soaked body in the street, at the rending, remembered wound of Fitz's gaping, exposed throat and spine, at the still-seeping hole in your heart that was Little Deer's body lying in the ruins of the village.

Your dead.  Your arms.  Your hands that protected them, hounded them, hated them, loved them, killed them -- your hands and those fucking lines, of long life, and many loves, and so many crosses and breaks that even a gypsy fortune teller who loved wine more than song could tell you'd never marry.

Your hands.

(your feet have stopped, and the ice is settling around them as the cold climbs your legs and the wind cuts into your flesh to lay ice crystals in your bones)

Your arms.

(the sun's gone, and the moon is rising behind you, full and foul, green as marsh lights, green as rotting logs, green as pus rising thick from a limb that will have to be amputated)

Your dead.

(and they're still coming, shedding cold that numbs you to their fate, to your coming fate, bone rasping on bone, flesh thudding on mud with a slip and a slap and a squelch and a squick that might be mud and might be rot, spirit drifting despite the winds with a crackle and hiss that might be the hairs on your arms and might be sparks and why are your arms and legs still bleeding, Duncan, what's wrong with this picture, other than all of it)

Your fate.

And you turn and face it, and them, ice cracking around your feet and cutting into your calves as you do.  There's not a face there you don't remember, even if you never had names for some of them.  Every face, every hand, every shade of hair and slant of eye, every curve of breast and line of muscled thigh under leather or tartan:  all of them yours, out of your life, your memories, your heart.

And you shudder, and throw your head back for one last roar of defiance to break the ice around your legs, one last cry as you go down fighting, and only then realize that the blood on your arms comes from your throat, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, and there's no air to your mouth to make the sound, only the mocking whistle of the wind through your mouth, chilling your lips before it tumbles back out to bubble the blood on your collarbone--

--where your sweat is pooling, cold as the barge rocking in the Seine, where the unreliable furnace has, once again, gone out.

You don't curse as you stagger up to kick the heater into motion, wrapped in down against the ice burning you from the inside out.

You don't let yourself wish, even momentarily, that you could tell Darius or Sean about this one.

You don't let your hand rise to your throat.

Above all, you don't sleep again.

Just in case.

~ ~ ~ finis ~ ~ ~

There is now a sequel, or perhaps antidote, to this: Therapeutic.

Comments, Commentary, & Miscellanea:

Memento (Mori) -- Remember (you must die)  Supposedly this was the warning given to conquering heroes in Rome.  I've always suspected they wanted to knock the guy telling them this off the processional chariot, but that might just be me.  It still fit as the title for this.

No, I don't know where this came from, but it was written to a background of "Raining Blood" by Tori Amos, "Stripped" by Depeche Mode, and "Dogma" by KMFDM, among other such music.  The music came after the starting section, unfortunately.

Lyrics provided by Alice in Stonyland.  I hope this wasn't what you expected, chica.  Don't know that I could have asked for a better song to play with, however.

Lines used, or just mutated over, marked with an *.

Feedback greatly appreciated, whether by email or at my LiveJournal.

Background graphic courtesy of Boogie Jack.