Five Ways Burn Notice and Highlander Never Crossed, and One Way They Did
Disclaimers: Not mine, no moneys made. I just couldn't resist. Madeline, Sam, Nate, Fiona, and Michael all belong to Burn Notice; Darius, Annie Devlin, Rich, Duncan, Benny Carbassa/'Luccesi', and Hugh Fitzcairn are ll from Highlander. Beta and cheerleading by Alyss, Devo, Dragon, Merewyn, and tarsh -- mistakes mine. Sorry.
Rated: PG at most.
Five Ways Burn Notice and Highlander Never Crossed...
Foxtrot
1968
Crossover prompt # 23 -- lovers
"Ooh, fresh meat." Madeline Blythe looked over her best friend's shoulder, smiling in a way that would have gotten her a scolding from Sister Mary Agnes at school. "Not a teenager, not back from 'Nam, and he can dance."
Kitty turned and stared so blatantly that Madeline kicked her ankle. "Hey! And ooh, look at him… great shoulders."
"Who was looking that high?" Madeline grinned at Kitty, voice a little loud to carry over the dance hall music. "Great butt on him."
The song ended before they finished their drinks. When the guy walked directly to them, leaving his dance partner smiling foolishly after him, Kitty blushed and Madeline damn near did. "It is entirely wrong that such lovely ladies should be standing on the edge of a dance unpartnered. If you will allow me to right this wrong--" and he bowed, which made Kitty giggle and Madeline grin so widely it hurt -- "I should be glad to dance with you. My name is Hugh Fitzcairn, Fitz to all my friends."
"And you're very friendly," Madeline said, laughing with him. "Go ahead, Kitty, you love this song."
"You don't mind?" Kitty asked, already wrapping her hand around Fitz's forearm.
"I'll save you the next dance," Fitz promised.
Madeline just smiled at him. "And maybe even the smoke break?"
Fitz put his free hand over his chest. "Ah, a woman after my own heart. Among other things, if I’m lucky." Kitty tried to look indignant and only looked shocked; Madeline snickered. Fitz grinned at her and said, "Well, I meant my pipe tobacco, but we can discuss it then, lovely lady."
Honing Edges
1980
Crossover prompt # 78 -- sea
The sun beat down on the forge, a steady golden light that would burn white by noon. The charcoal glowed deep orange as Sunda Kastagir pulled out the knife he was shaping and slapped it onto the anvil. A few sparks flew out, and he twitched back to let them drop to the packed dirt under his feet instead of the leather apron around his waist or his bare skin.
The tongs in his left hand controlled the red-hot metal's placement on the anvil. The hammer in his right hand struck at the metal in the age-old pattern of an ironsmith: ta-tink, ta-tink, ta-tink. One strike very light to be sure of the placement and the second, stronger one right after it onto the same place. Iron was too precious to be mishandled, and gold even more so, although Sunda used smaller tools for that.
Sunda hammered the nascent blade flat, twisted and folded it over itself, then hammered it flat again. It had sixty-four folds, give or take a few, before the metal cooled so much he had to put it back in the coals. Sunda stepped onto the bellows as he went and pumped more air into the coals, then buried the blade in the heat. Once it was back in, he pulled out the mower blade he was remaking for a customer. It was glowing nicely, almost too hot; he nodded, planning to shorten his alternation times, and went back to work.
The sun was directly overhead, hammering heat down and humidity up, when the stranger stepped into the shadows of the forge.
Sunda looked up from his honing wheel and asked curiously, "Can I help you?"
The man was young, mid-twenties at most, with short dark hair, alert intelligent eyes, a mouth used to smiling, and a face almost but not quite too long, with a dimpled chin. He'd be handsome in a few years but for now he was almost pretty. That must be a nuisance.
His accent proclaimed him American. "I heard you make the best knives around. Do you?"
Sunda just chuckled and kept putting an edge on the mower blade; the song of the steel against stone was almost right now. "Come in, pull up a stump. They make fine chairs, and they're too big for a fire, so no one's tempted to borrow them. Why do you need one of my knives?"
He pulled a stump over casually, heedless of the weight, which Sunda had expected. Wide shoulders, trim waist, a certain way of standing at rest…all of it screamed active service military to him, and not one who expected to be working a desk. The stranger settled onto the stump and stretched out his legs, using the change in position to take a longer look around the forge. "Isn't this all a little old-fashioned? I mean, can't you get electrical wheels to drive those stones? And a fan instead of those bellows."
Sunda chuckled. "You can, certainly, but I've been standing in front of the anvil all morning. Sitting and pedaling this lets me stretch my legs and control the speed of the stone. And if a typhoon knocks out power again, I can still get back to work quickly." He glanced up and saw the man watching, fascinated. Sunda looked back to his work rather than undo it all now. "You still haven't said. Why do you need one of my knives?"
He'd spotted a locked rack of blades; his hand started to lift for them before he pulled it back down. "Does it matter?"
Sunda forgave him the bravado for the open interest in learning new and useful skills. He laughed instead of getting upset. "Of course it does. You want a blade that will do what you need without being destroyed by the job. You don't take a paring knife to a war zone; you don't take a blade breaker to a kitchen." He turned the mower blade again and mentioned, "And I'll need to see your hands and arms, to make sure it's the right width and length and weight for you."
"The right width?" He leaned forward, fascinated now. "Danny said you were a genius with blades."
Sunda cocked his head a little to hear the steel better and pulled the blade away when the metal finally slid to the right note. "Ah, there we go." He put the blade down on the stucco wall and turned to his stranger, amused. "Danny. A wiry man who comes to your shoulder, very short white hair, a dry sense of humor, and bought a boot knife from me five weeks or so ago?"
"That's him all right." The guy shrugged, smiled, and held out a hand. "I'm Sam. Sam Axe."
Sunda chuckled and shook hands, then probed the palm and wrist with his fingers to check for strength and size. "You'll want an alias before you're done, Sam, seeing as that sounds like one. I'm Sunda." He nodded, thoughtful, then handed over a stick. "Hold this, hmm?"
Sunda watched the way his hand closed around it, nodded, took the stick back. "Here, grip." He extended his hand and grinned. "Bone-crushing unnecessary, you understand."
Sam did push it, but he grinned back when Sunda met him strength for strength. "A good challenge, you know?"
"Some of them are," Sunda agreed. "So. One of the military mixes of martial arts, I think, and of course pistol and some kind of stick. Are you wanting a night killing blade, or a slightly more mixed use?"
Sam was staring at him suspiciously now, but he wasn't trying to yank his hand back yet. "How do you know that?"
Sunda glanced at him, surprised, then laughed. "Haven't you read your Holmes, man? You're American by the voice, but you're in shape, your hair's much shorter than is fashionable this decade, and you stand like you've done too much time at attention and parade rest. So, military. As for the rest?"
Sunda pointed to various calluses and cuts on Sam's hand as he explained. "Here's where you've built up calluses stick fighting -- see how it curves around when you tighten your hand? This callus on the outside of your hand is almost always karate knife hand, but these along the webbing mean you practice gripping and throwing, too. And this," and he tapped a stain along the thumb nail, "is gun oil."
Sunda released his hand and added, "And you have very alert eyes. You can't hide the hands and most people can't read them, but you need to take up sunglasses or practice looking friendly and confused. Do you want a knife or not?"
"Jesus. Danny didn't warn me to have extra coffee before talking to you.... So do hands ever lie?" Sam was still staring at his own hands, flexing them and turning them over.
"Of course they do," Sunda told him, amused. "But not often. Consider the work involved in gaining faked calluses? And it's too damn hot for coffee, but I have some sodas. The cans are even unopened if you're feeling paranoid." Sam paused, then grinned, and Sunda laughed again and told him, "You'll do."
"I need practice looking harmless?" Sam just grinned at him. "I'd say I'm not the only one."
"What makes you think I need to practice?" Sunda asked as he hauled a string bag up from its resting place down the well. He pulled out two cans. "Here."
Sam took one. "You know, telling me not to be paranoid just about guarantees I will? Okay, so you spend all day hammering things, pedaling other things, and doing everything a harder way. It would take a nut to jump you -- or a gun."
Sunda nodded. "Yes, it would. But you're forgetting one thing and you might not know the other. I'm the local smith. I fix broken locks, holed saucepans, warped door hinges, children's bikes and adult's tools. No one wants me dead; I'm too useful. And smiths take on some of the nature of their elements: hard to burn, hard to shape, and hammered strong. No one wants to take on a smith, Sam." He grinned in a flash of teeth. "And then there's the legends that say smiths know magic."
Sam grinned back, as cheerful as Sunda himself. Selling a knife that might keep this one alive would be no hardship at all. "Do you?"
"I know how to make boom-boom. Close enough." Sunda stood up and started looking through the knives he'd made without knowing whose they'd be. "You can try some after we sort out whether any of my current stock will suit you."
Sam bought a knife by the end of the day -- before the end of the small cask of boom-boom, for that matter. He always maintained that the blade was worth the hangover.
Hell Won't Freeze Over In Miami
?
crossover prompt #34 -- not enough
Nate leaned back and took another swig of his imported beer.
Why not? He hadn't paid for it, and it looked like the only return he was going to get from this meeting. 'Benny Luccesi' -- probably not his real name; this guy might fit into a Broadway mob, but he'd never make it in the real thing -- was still talking fast, hands moving faster. Nate had learned a long time ago that sentences that started 'Honestly' weren't honest at all.
Michael might say Nate never learned but it didn't take a spy to turn down this 'investment opportunity.'
Amateur Night
1995
crossover prompt #50 -- spade
Ask any spy -- if you can find one to ask, a real one instead of a poser -- and they'll tell you that the first thing you learn is that it's not like James Bond. At all.
Spycraft is dirty and dull, hard work alternating with excruciating boredom, and (Fiona aside) there aren't glamorous women every time you turn around, or enemies with cats, fancy torture devices, or pet alligators. All right, I take that back. I did know about one sadistic bastard who had pet alligators, but we shot him with extreme prejudice, and threw grenades in the alligator pit; they'd developed a taste for human flesh, according to the number of handlers the guy was going through.
Spycraft does, however, require you to know how to wear a tuxedo as well as a mechanic's coverall, to know how to repair cars and play poker, roulette, and baccarat, and for the same reasons: Anyone can decide to gamble, and anyone can have car trouble. And some days you really need to know how to check your own car for bombs, or increase your pocket money. Never try that at the casinos, though; the odds are always in their favor and I don't mean just the bouncers.
Garages and repair shops are good for drops when you've had time to prepare. When you've stashed the intel in the right place, and the right form, and your agent on the inside knows it's coming. It's easier to catch a man making a drop there, if you've caught on to what's going on or turned the agent working there, but that's the price for having a stable site. Casinos are better for short-notice drops; like so many other vices, gambling can be a matter of impulse. If you don't have a dealer there -- and planting one can require passing a security check, as well as the certainty of being photographed or recorded -- then you have to have a picture or description of your pigeon and some ingenuity to make sure you get next to them at some point in the night.
Ingenuity I can manage.
All I needed to do at Casino Montcouer was play a few rounds of this and that while drinking less than it looked like, and wait. My contact was an older German lady with a fondness for baccarat, gin fizzes, and old-fashioned moonstone and garnet jewelry. She hadn't shown up yet when the worst amateur night I'd seen in years started playing out in front of me.
First there was the guy in the Ferrari. A bright red Ferrari, the better to set off his tuxedo, and short-cropped hair with sideburns that went out in the seventies. The Ferrari got my attention first. He also didn't even think of tipping the valet, which was all wrong for someone who could afford that car. And, finally, his mannerisms in the tux when he remembered to play his part differed completely from his body language when anything distracted him.
He was either a novice crook casing the place or some kid playing James Bond in a casino to impress a would-be girlfriend.
Then the other amateurs showed up: the new waiter who wasn't going to last a week and apparently didn't care, and the blonde in the black dress who clearly knew the casino and its owner, but hadn't had the money for even the low stakes roulette table. The waiter could have been more obvious in pointing out 'Bond' to her, but it would have needed actual placards held up in the air. She was every bit as bad, having decided this guy would do for… whatever they were up.
'Bond' -- it'll do better than Richard Redstone, which also wasn't his name -- was damn fool enough to take the drink she offered him without noticing that he hadn't ordered drinks, she hadn't signaled for them either, and his was a different color than hers with the light shining through both. She got him out the front door with minimal difficulty, and the waiter vanished.
I have no idea who they thought Redstone was. He might have been an American millionaire, they're a variable breed, but I doubt it. I heard, later, that she was the granddaughter of one of the original partners in the casino, a local baron. No one knew who the waiter was, or cared that he'd quit on no notice, because he'd been that little help to begin with.
All I can say is that if that was a kidnapping… it was amateur hour all the way. And I wondered now and then, when I needed something different to think about, if the girl and her assistant were as incompetent with pharmaceuticals as they were with communications. I hope not, but I don't know. I collected the information from my dead drop later that night. I just hope that idiot 'Bond' didn't end up dropping dead himself.
Girls With Guns. And Bombs
2008
crossover prompt #24 -- family
The nightclub had fallen silent until afternoon and the loft was as dark as that part of Miami ever got, barring power outages. Fiona lay on the bed, grateful for the extra warmth of Michael's hand over the worst bruised rib, and said quietly, "I never told you how I won the arguments with my brothers, did I?"
Michael didn't tense in any muscle she could feel, but his voice was too scrupulously level. He probably had that blank smile on his face, and that raised eyebrow that meant he was trying to figure out how to evade a conversation which might include emotions. "Which arguments, Fi?"
"The ones about whether I was going to learn to use guns and bombs and help with the cause," Fiona said. "Don't be deliberately dense, Michael. I know you better than that."
Michael sighed, thinking she didn't hear it. "Fine. The arguments about you going on the IRA raids." He sounded a little more interested when he said, "No, actually, you didn't."
"Not just going on the raids, but being useful on them above and beyond distracting gullible men. It's all right, Michael, I won't ask you to trade me stories of your mentors. I just wanted to tell you about Annie."
"Annie." A passing car's wheels whined on the street; they both fell silent to be sure it kept going.
Fiona nodded, her hair whispering against the pillow with the motion. "Annie Devlin. When I was ten, I came home and there was a woman arguing with my father. She was shorter, and lighter, and meaner than he was, and she didn't give a damn what he thought about a woman's proper place was. When they couldn't come to an agreement--"
"At the top of their lungs?" Michael suggested.
"Oh, yes. I could hear as soon as I came in the front door, and they were in the kitchen. She slammed the door on the way out while my father was still asking the saints to save him from stubborn women. Rattled half the pictures on the wall." Fiona smiled a little in the night.
"Yeah. I'm thinking the saints had other business to take care of." Michael mostly blocked her elbow and didn't mention Fi's hiss of breath when her ribs protested the move. He put his hand back over the bruise, fingertips flexing gently around the edges. His voice was almost as gentle when he said, "Come on, Fi. Your father didn't want to be protected from you."
"No. No, he didn't. He just didn't want me to take after Annie. She had a grand eye for a plan, but the devil's own temper." Fiona fell silent, her eyes closed as she remembered hours of weapons practice and bomb specs, plans and fallbacks and torrents of anger, some of it as deep as her own. Remembered a woman she'd looked up to, and the news article saying she'd jumped to her death across the sea rather than be locked away for life. After her husband had died, that was.
Michael waited for the end of the story. Waited until he felt Fi's muscles quit twitching and her breathing even out. He smiled a little and pulled the sheet up over her and wrapped back around her, careful of her bruises and his. Her hand slid under the pillow to her gun and she sighed and sagged further against him. Michael kissed her shoulder gently. She could tell him more later, or not.
& One Way They Did
Sanctuary
1991
crossover prompt #17 -- brown
There are a lot of things they don't tell you about being a spy. They tell you to compartmentalize, and if you don't understand that, then you're probably in the wrong profession. They teach you to shoot, to strike, to slip lies through cracks in people's egos, and to run only when you don't care who sees you. They tell you ways to endure pain, fatigue, boredom.
I thought I was going to need those skills when I woke up in a small stone room on a hard cot. Natural light was coming in from a gap about two feet wide that was about fifteen feet up one wall. It was the only light in the room, but my head already hurt enough to put red and yellow halos around my vision. I reached for my head to see how bad it was.
The second time I woke up, I was still in the stone room, but I smelled honey and wax and fresh chopped something, sort of like cut grass and sort of not. There were blankets on me, but the air on my face and arm was cold, stone cold. There was a soft, flickering light above me and a man in priest's robes sitting on a chair next to me.
He nodded to me when I opened my eyes and kept sponging my arm with something warm and wet.
"Don't try to move yet. The broken arm is cleanly set and should heal well, but this gash in your shoulder is trying to get infected." He had a gentle, reasonable voice, more soothing than any nurse I'd ever had. Definitely including my mother.
That didn't change the fact that I had no idea where I was, how I'd gotten there, or who he was. "Where am I?"
He smiled. "This is, appropriately enough, what the British call a priest's hole."
"I'm supposed to believe you're a priest." Oddly enough, I did believe him on that. "And I'm not in Britain."
"No, you're in Paris. I apologize for looking in your pack, but I prefer not to take chances with head injuries and you have two sizeable lumps. Your novel was in English, so I tried that instead of French." He put the rag down and said, "I'm Father Darius. You are in a hidden room of my church, in case whoever shot you is still following you. Now, shall I bring you a chamber pot, or would you like an arm up?"
"The arm, definitely." The room tried to spin again, but Darius braced me upright without tearing or jarring anything that hurt. My head hurt even more, but nothing but time was going to help there.
Darius gave me a few seconds to say otherwise, then he helped me through what must have been his bedroom to his bathroom, gave me an illusion of privacy, then helped me back to the bed. I was shaking like a leaf by then, covered in cold sweat, and very worried about what would happen if my unknown shooter came back just now.
"Food first or sponge bath first?" Darius asked. "Your pack is under the bed. I'm willing to help you get your gun now that you're conscious and coherent. Although I will remind you that this is a small room with stone walls. Ricochets would be a very real problem."
I couldn't help staring at him. "You're going to arm me. Are you sure you're a priest?"
"I would prefer you not use it, I admit. But I would also prefer that you not be murdered while under my care." He studied me thoughtfully, smiled a little, and nodded. "Dinner first, then. Here." He knelt, pulled my pack out from under the cot, and handed it over. He pulled the blankets around me, too. Then, having armed me, he turned his back on me.
Not what I expected from a man who moved that easily in those priest's robes, but it did match his voice and behavior. Personally, I blame my confusion on the concussion and formative years at Catholic schools. But my body still knew what it was doing. It made my shoulder burn but the gun was loaded by the time Darius brought back chicken soup of all things. It even tasted like homemade soup made by someone who could cook.
My hand started shaking before I finished. Darius put his book down and offered, "Shall I?"
"Yeah." It was several bites before I could make myself say, "Thank you."
He just nodded and said, "You're welcome." He managed to make it sound like he sheltered wounded spies regularly and didn't mind any of this. Maybe he didn't.
I was asleep again before he'd finished telling me where everything was. I woke up again to brighter daylight, voices coming in through the air/light gap, and a more crowded room.
There was a note next to the bed; it turned out to be sitting on a small stack of books, which were on top of a cooler. The note simply said, 'There's food in the cooler. The chamber pot is under the foot of the bed; the water in the pitcher is clean and there's soap by the basin. I'll be by to check on you when I'm sure it's safe to come out. Use the flashlight by the bed if you need more light. Darius.'
The chamber pot had a lid, thank God, and I wasn't pissing any blood. The water by the basin wasn't freezing cold yet and I could stand up long enough to splash my face with some of it today. The black eye was bad enough now; it was going to be spectacular in another day. The arm hurt, but I could still use the hand and nothing was numb. My shoulder… was tender but down to dark pink instead of the red I'd noticed last night. Not all of that red had been the heat of Darius' poultices, either.
There was yogurt which, to my surprise, was pretty good. Thicker than anything I'd had in the States, not as thick as some of the stuff in Turkey, and it tasted like honey and vanilla instead of fruit; it was good, anyway, and my stomach quit threatening to mutiny. Darius had left a recycled milk bottle in the cooler, too, full of some brown-green stuff that looked like cold tea, if you swept the tealeaves up off the floor first anyway. I told myself I wasn't desperate enough to drink it. A sip later confirmed that.
The books he'd left were… confusing. A good translation of A Book of Five Rings, a copy of Art of War with annotations in every bit of free space (and in six different handwritings by the time I hit page five), and a very odd book about a possible apocalypse called Good Omens. It was a strange assortment to have easily available and while parishes could be hotbeds of political infighting, the priests didn't usually buy books on strategy to cope with it.
The books beat counting the stones in the wall, however, and it was a choice of deciding if some of the notes in Art of War were in Darius' handwriting or play 'guess the herbs plastered on my shoulder.' I spent the day napping, reading, and eating yogurt; it beat my usual lack of recovery time and options.
Darius let me into his room later that night. The official reason was better light to examine my arm and less chance of giving away that little hidey-hole with light in places it shouldn't be. The real reason, I think, was my cabin fever. The chess board had some old pieces on it, the wood smoothed down with use and stained rather than painted. There was a game in progress and it looked like white was getting his ass kicked as hard as I had.
Darius considered something, probably me, and asked, "Do you play?"
I shrugged, carefully. "Sometimes."
He nodded, wrote out the board layout, and reset the pieces. It took twenty minutes for me to realize I was in trouble. It took another twenty for me to realize how much trouble. I'd already decided that yes, some of those notes were his (and some of the sneakiest ones at that); this just confirmed it.
That was how the next couple days went while he gathered news from his parishioners and kept me hidden because of some strangers staying with Mme. Guerin and M. Perreault. The fourth day he brought me old clothes, nothing new and nothing that would stand out in the district. He loaded my pack with the last few days' newspapers, a paper-wrapped sandwich, and a battered tin full of the herb tea I'd actually started to kind of like (with, at the bottom, the ingredients and proportions). Then he walked me out the front door, and told me to come back when I had more sins piled up as he always liked an interesting confession.
It took me two minutes to realize the locals wouldn't ask him anything after he'd brought the confessional into that discussion. It took me two hours to realize he'd kept the newspapers away from me as deliberately as he'd saved them for when I was stronger.
It was two days after I'd finished the mission before I could see past the practicalities of what Darius had done into the background that had to lie behind him. How had he known to return my gun so I'd sleep, to keep the news for me but not to give it to me before I could afford to start planning? I didn't know who he'd worked for before he signed on with the Church, but he'd handled me too smoothly to be a stranger to violence himself.
It was two more weeks before I started realizing how many other things he'd taught me about strategy and tactics in those few days, above and beyond things like 'know your terrain' and 'cultivate your locals' and the importance of nutrient rich food that goes down easily. He'd taught me useful herbs and medical techniques, about sneaking pawns through while the named pieces are making distractions, about resting my mind like any of my muscles. And he'd done all of it with the tightly-controlled strength of personality he hid under that cassock as smoothly as he hid the physical strength that kept me from adding to my injuries the first night I was there.
The thing that took longest to see was how much he'd changed my eyes. I was starting to notice who was injured, who needed help, who held a hand out… sometimes even when they were holding it out to me. It's a dangerous thing for spies to see, but I can't seem to stop.
If I live long enough to retire, I may know how much of it to thank him for.
Time will tell.
~ ~ ~ finis ~ ~ ~
Comments, Commentary, & Miscellanea:
In order: yup, that's Madeline Westen as a teenager. And Hugh Fitzcairn, played by Roger Daltrey (yes, of the Who), is God's gift to women and a glorious flirt. Really.
Sunda Kastagir was in the first Highlander movie, was a friend of Connor MacLeod's and fought for Gen. Washington at Valley Forge with him. He's also a maker of 'boom-boom' which seems to be white lightning in some shape or variety. Sam Axe, of course, is a young Navy SEAL at this point. That Sunda's a weapons-smith is my personal canon and your mileage may vary.
Benny Carbassa, a.k.a. Luccesi here, is a two-bit former gambler and gangster, prone to making deals that do not work as intended. He's from the HL 3rd season episode "Vendetta." Nate is of course Nate Westen, who's prone to getting involved in business opportunities that should really be avoided.
Casino Montcouer is in fact the name of the casino in "The Ransom of Richard Redstone." That's Richie Ryan getting drugged by the two amateur kidnappers and it is, in fact, a damn good thing they kidnapped him and not someone else: those idiots gave some who weighed maybe 180 pounds the dose for a horse -- 800 pounds at least. Gods preserve us from amateurs, as Michael Westen didn't quite put it.
Annie Devlin was with, and led an IRA gang in the HL 2nd season episode "An Eye for an Eye." Her husband was killed when Richie and Duncan interfered with a plan; Annie threw herself out a window rather than be locked up for too much of an immortal's life. Fiona Glenanne was an IRA bomber and is still in good standing with them, if doing other things in Miami these days.
Father Darius was from HL, is sorely missed, and was notorious for herbal teas that actually worked. (Including an herbal antibiotic he was using at Waterloo, herbal teas that reputedly tasted foul, and made his own wines and brandies, including metheglyn and mead.) He was also, for a few hundred years, one of the best generals in the world and sacked Paris in the 400s. Michael is, of course, the lead character in Burn Notice, and very carefully did not give Darius his name. And yes, Good Omens was published in 1990; Darius could and probably did have a copy by 1991.
And one of these days, I still want to let Fiona meet Amanda. This didn't turn out to be that piece -- sorry!
And now off to wrap presents and bake round 2 of the seasonal goodies. I hope you've enjoyed the midwinter's presents.
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