"Small Packages," Highlander/Agent Carter, gen (PG)
Yeah, yeah, I know: I never post, I never write.... Both true, lately. Sorry. I think I'm finally recovering from this last half year, however. I'm writing original fic during the week, Southern Comfort on Fridays and more Southern Comfort or other fanfic on the weekend. So. Starting to do better.
Meanwhile, Escapade Con just had their 25th anniversary and put out a call for fic for an anniversary zine. I sent this. Enjoy! (And if you haven't seen Killa's HL vid for the con? Go, watch, enjoy. It's majorly happy-making!)
Small Packages is also available at the AO3 if you'd prefer to read it there. (I need to just break down and do a collection of 'women being awesome' fic, don't I?)
Small Packages
Written for the 25th Anniversary of Escapade and for Crossovers100 prompt # 77 -- trees.
The woman slipped into the courtyard warily, using more caution than even the unbarred gate should have inspired. Connor MacLeod approved.
The house had been proud once, before the village around it began to sag back into woodlands under the pressure of war, depression, and now invasion. Now it stood silent, if not entirely empty. This latest intruder paused just to the side of the gate, her red-brown clothes blending into the sunbaked wood of the post. Her gaze flicked from corner to corner, ground to roof, window to basement door, alert despite the circles under her eyes and the dried blood staining one sleeve. Her scan barely hesitated when she took in the bodies discarded on the paving stones between gate and front door, but she didn't check the full circuit behind her.
Whoever she was, she was too watchful to have missed something so obvious.
Trouble.
Connor eased back a little further into the woods around the house, careful to blend in with the trees. It cost him his view of the stranger, but left her in earshot. Of course, that meant so was he; he’d have to keep it in mind.
A few silent yards more took him back to Rachel. She was still waiting where he’d left her, hidden off to the side of a maple whose brilliant leaves would draw the eye away from her. Connor slid down to one knee and touched her shoulder for comfort and reassurance. The little girl looked up at him, blue eyes wide but silent and uncomplaining. Connor couldn't resist smiling at her, which explained everything about why he’d been smuggling them both across France in wartime. Her first family had tried to hide her from the Nazis. Connor had found her just before the Germans did and ended up her second family.
He waved Rachel farther back into the tangle of underbrush with his free hand - she didn’t flinch at the knife in his other hand - and closed his fingers around his thumb to indicate she should hide.
Rachel smiled back at him, her thin, dirty fingers signaling V for victory to some; from her it was 'bunny ears' and 'curl up and hide like one.' She did just that, the too-large, grass-stained brown coat pulled up over the dirty gold of her hair to help a little girl become a small hummock of grass and earth. Connor eased a fallen branch over her to shelter her further and slid back towards the road and the Fontaine house.
He crouched by a stone retaining wall, listening more than watching now. The woman was moving inside the courtyard, barely audible on the stone and packed earth. Someone else was walking much more noisily along the side of the road.
The newcomer wasn’t really used to the country; he’d thought visibility on the road was his main problem. It wasn’t. He was huffing for breath and accompanied by the crackle of leaves and snap of twigs. Apparently, even he could tell he was too loud. He kept slowing down, but that did no good when every bit of forest life around him kept falling silent.
Connor drifted silently away from the stone wall, timing his motions to the periodic breezes that swayed thinly-veiled oaks and the occasional fir. He had no choice but to move slowly; most of the leaves were damp and going to compost, but here and there the sun had dried some back to crispness and they'd crackle under foot if he wasn't careful.
He came to rest under an evergreen, looking out and around to actually sight his target in the late afternoon sunlight. Pursued and pursuer, hmm? The odds suggested one would be supporting the Nazis and the other would be Resistance.
It might not matter which was which. Help would be nice, but Connor would kill both of them if that was what it took to get Rachel safely out of France.
The second stranger came around a shell-stricken chestnut tree without enough care for the way his coat showed him up against his surroundings. He was sturdily built, his face broad and maybe a day away from being bearded instead of unshaven. Despite the stubble and the flattened nose, his clothes were too bright for occupied France, his skin too clean. At least he looked like he'd missed a few meals. Nowhere close to as many as everyone else in the area, however.
To have Rene Fontaine’s prize bowler on his head, still with blood on the brim, the man had to have been in the house. Most likely he’d killed the Fontaines; at best, he’d left the bodies where they lay as bait. But he hadn’t disarmed the traps left under them, either. So. Not likely Resistance.
Connor put his friends' deaths aside again and waited for the enemy agent to come into arm's reach.
It took another four minutes but eventually Connor stained the bastard's crimson coat with darker red blood, eyes narrowing as he took in the contrast. From the look of that, the man had been eating much better than Connor had managed for Rachel. Connor pulled his hand off the corpse’s mouth, his knife out of the man's kidney, and stripped off his pack.
He wasn’t all that surprised to find a German undershirt under the coat, or German military ID that matched the face of the newly deceased. Officer’s insignia, however, worried him.
He ghosted back across the road, refusing to think about what food the heavy bag might hold, and went to retrieve his new daughter.
~ ~ ~
Peggy Carter glanced quickly around the walled-off yard. When she didn't see anyone watching from the house - and really, who’d set this up? There were few good sightlines to watch the bait, much though she hated to call the dead that - she moved to the pile of corpses, checking for traps. Two grenades had been left for the merciful. If she’d been less careful disarming those, she’d have been blown apart by the larger charges of explosive they concealed.
'Stiff upper lip,' she thought, mouth and spine straightening as she raided her former contacts’ bodies for money, ammunition, or anything else of use. She took what she could of the trap munitions, too. The Fontaines would have supplied her with what they could spare if she'd made it while they were alive. Peggy tried to tell herself this was no different and settled for promising herself a good cry later, if she lived that long.
She still hadn’t found the papers she’d come for when the birds fell completely silent. The wind had fallen off, too, which allowed Peggy to hear a sound she knew too well.
That chuff of expelled air meant a man was dying in the woods along the road. The man who'd been following her for at least a mile? Maybe. But if so, who had killed him, and why?
Peggy shifted to get her back into a corner, pulled her pistol and waited. The silence stretched, thinned, sharpened to something painful, and then she heard a high-pitched squeak. It was followed, a moment later, by a baritone bellow trying to command a small girl to return. His order turned into a howl of pain, one which shifted quickly to rage and was followed by gunshots.
Peggy ignored her torn fingers, the way her muscles felt like wire strung too thin and too tight for their load, the nails that ripped as she scaled a wall theoretically too tall for such maneuvers. She dug into old wood and crumbling mortar and created handholds to go up and over. The man snarled again as Peggy crested the wall… then screamed like a pig being castrated.
Peggy didn’t care about him. What drove her to a sprint was the silence from the little girl.
Behind the abandoned household, a man lay curled on the ground in a German uniform tunic painted with blood; more blood spurted with his every panicked heartbeat. Beyond him, another German soldier was trying to catch a child whose arm was also covered in blood. As Peggy ran, he steadied his pistol to shoot her - and the girl darted forward under his hands.
Instead of shooting, he jumped to the side, clamping his legs together hastily as he did. The little girl had turned back to watch him, eyes huge in her too-thin face but teeth set in her lower lip and her jaw set stubbornly.
He screamed, landing gracelessly. He curled around his injured leg, trying to wrap a hand over the gash that ran across his calf and reappeared midway up his thigh.
Peggy tackled his arm, got control of his pistol, and shoved it into his chest as she pulled the trigger.
It didn’t kill him immediately, so she steadied her hand and pressed the barrel just right of his sternum, between ribs, before she fired again. His eyes faded from alive and inhabited to dead and vacant. Peggy rolled off him, cursing herself for wasting ammunition. The thought had barely formed when she noticed motion out of the corner of her eye: the little girl was moving to flank her.
She was small, an underfed six or seven years old, but she had a knife in one hand as long as the forearm it lay against and razor-sharp from the cuts it had put in the Germans. The thin fingers around it were white from the tight grip, but the girl’s hand was barely shaking.
Peggy started to hold her hands out… and lowered the gun to the ground instead.
The girl looked past her and was suddenly young again and horribly relieved. She darted around Peggy, staying well out of arm’s reach, and started a remarkably quiet tale. In Dutch, unfortunately. Damn.
Peggy turned slowly, her hands still out, and met a cold, contemplative stare from a killer in dark brown and tan mufti. He scooped the little girl up onto what hip he had - not on the side with his knife - and went back to looking Peggy over. The appraisal was too calculating to be sexual, but offensive nonetheless. After a long minute, the man asked in French, “How long until the moon’s dark?”
A Resistance password didn’t surprise Peggy, but she hadn’t expected it either. She answered anyway, with complete honesty above and beyond the pass phrase. “Not soon enough.”
He nodded once. “I wondered. Do you always rescue little girls?”
Peggy tilted her head to give him the glare she’d perfected years before on her brothers. “She was rescuing herself quite competently. I merely gave her a hand. She was fearless and competent when she had to be. We need more such women.”
That got a quick smile and for a moment Peggy could see why the little girl trusted him. Then he shifted the girl to a safer perch on his side - she wrapped her hands through the straps of his pack, ignoring the blood it smeared on them - and asked, “Did you find whatever you came for?”
Peggy ignored that. Her mission was not his business, possibly the more so because the intel was lost with M. Fontaine’s death. This stranger might make a good traveling companion, however. He’d kept a small girl alive and safe in occupied France; she seemed to be learning to be quite dangerous from him. Peggy factored those in, added the dictum about keeping one’s friends and enemies close, and suggested, “We could move more easily as a family.”
To Peggy’s surprise, he sought the girl’s opinion, first commenting and then asking something. The girl looked Peggy over carefully, too, from the wrecked state of Peggy’s hair to the blood coating one arm. Her right arm, just like the girl’s. She nodded finally, and her companion? Father? did the same.
“We need to clean up and get out of here. We’ll sort out routes and destinations after that.”
Peggy nodded her acceptance of both his offer and his priorities. “Agreed.” She held out her still-bloody hand. “I’m Lachance, Jeanne Lachance.”
The man shook it with a hand slightly less stained. “Smith. John Smith.” His smile bared too many teeth and they hadn’t exactly traded a blood oath, but Peggy smiled at him anyway.
It was a very straightforward lie. She could work with that.
~ ~ ~
Connor wasn’t surprised that Rachel waited until full night to ask her questions: full night, another ten miles away, and relative safety. They were bedded down on old straw covered with older blankets in a partially collapsed stone hut probably built a few centuries before Connor’s birth. Despite the small fire they’d built to cook the sausages in the German officer’s pack, the whole shelter still smelt primarily of unwashed farmers and animal droppings.
“You said they were friends,” Rachel said quietly, nibbling at her share of dinner. (The woman calling herself Lachance had only raised an eyebrow when Connor waved a hand over it and promised Rachel it was veal. All of them knew it was mostly pork, but Rachel nodded solemnly and ate it without complaint. Lachance hadn’t commented on Rachel being Jewish or Connor… not.)
Connor answered both what Rachel had said and what she meant. “They were friends, Rachel. But if we’d stayed to bury them, the Germans would know someone had been there. More soldiers might even have gotten there while we were still digging. Rene and Ghyslaine were true friends; they’d want us to go on living.”
Rachel nodded, then winced as Lachance kept working another knot out of her hair. She held still for it, though; Lachance didn’t pull her hair nearly as often as Connor still did. “But we hid the soldiers’ bodies so they won’t know we were there?” Her French needed some work, and Lachance murmured it to her again, so Rachel could repeat it with a better accent.
“Their officers will know where they were supposed to be.” Connor let some of his amusement into his voice so Rachel could relax a little. “But they won’t be sure that the soldiers went where they were supposed to be.”
His new daughter smiled at him, as close to a giggle as she’d managed yet. “Like the neighborhood boys who’d run errands and end up halfway across the village from the shops their mamas sent them to?”
Lachance said approvingly, “Exactly like that.” Rachel smiled at her, too, finished her sausage, and wiped her hands on the old blanket.
Connor waited until the comb ran smoothly through her hair to say, “You did well in the fight, Rachel. You’re still here, and that’s how you win. But how did it go?” Lachance’s head came up in reflexive protest - the name amused Connor; he doubted she was either French or fond of trusting luck - but she kept her mouth shut. Connor kept his attention primarily on Rachel, however, as he asked, “Do you want to talk about it and see what other right ways there might have been?”
Rachel said shyly, “I cut them when they didn’t expect it, and I kept the knife against my arm like you showed me.”
Connor nodded. “You did a very good job with that. I know it’s messier and harder to clean up later, but they don’t see the blade as fast when it’s against your arm. They think a blade should face forward in your hand, where it’ll show. That gives you a few seconds to get to them while they still think you’re unarmed.”
Rachel nodded. “It really worked. And then the second man had a gun, so I stayed close to him like you said I should, and I ducked when he shot at me, and I turned to see if I had to get close again after he shot.”
Lachance kept combing Rachel’s hair just to soothe her. It made Connor like the woman a little more. “You did a very good job, too,” she told Rachel. “The soldier had no idea what to do when you were inside his reach like that. Most men don’t fight like that.”
“The little ones do, Dada says,” Rachel told her and Connor grinned at her, the instinctive smile she’d drawn since they’d first met. Connor’s first family had rejected him for reviving; Rachel had accepted his survival. Her first family had tried to keep her safe; Connor was still trying.
“Some of them do, yes. So? What are the main rules?” He counted them out on his fingers with her as she said them.
Rachel recited, “Don’t let them hurt me. Don’t let me hurt me. Stop them as much as I have to, and if I have to kill them, then they shouldn’t have threatened a little girl. Don’t get fancy.” She closed her hand into a fist. “Just stay alive.” She smiled at him and gave him the rabbit ears again. “And if I can hide, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Connor leaned in and hugged her fiercely. “Good girl. You’re here; you stayed alive. You did very, very well.”
Rachel wrapped her arms around him - too thin to make him happy, but he’d try to feed her up when they got to New York - and cuddled in. “Can I sleep next to you tonight?”
“Of course. Right between me and the wall, so no one can come up on you,” Connor suggested, and Rachel nodded.
Lachance started arranging a little nest for her. “I’ll take first watch.” She shifted to English to argue it with him and won by pointing out, “You’ll hear me if I move too much on this straw, but you can’t have gotten much sleep while conveying a little girl across occupied France.”
“After I get those splinters out of your fingers, I’ll nap.” He gave her a sardonic look. “Easier with help, and it’s in my best interest for you to be able to fight if necessary.”
Rachel asked sleepily in French, “Miss Lachance? Can you show me how you do your lipstick tomorrow? I’ll help comb your hair if you like.”
That got an immediate smile. “Of course, Rachel. I’d like that. Sleep well.”
Connor rubbed her back until she went limp; if he didn’t know how small children did that even in peacetime, it would have worried him. As it was, he looked over at Lachance and said quietly, “You killed the second one for her. Thank you.”
“He was bleeding quite badly, but you’re most welcome.” She looked at him very thoughtfully and then asked, “Are those really the rules you fight by?”
Connor snorted. “You can’t win another day if you don’t live to see it. Stay alive. Then win.” He gave her his coldest smile, pleased when she didn’t back away from it. “But I follow both parts of that rule.”
“I knew about staying inside their reach, but I wouldn’t have thought of diving under the gun like that.”
Connor shrugged. “You’re bigger than she is, but you’re no Amazon. And no one expects you to dive towards the gun. It works once. You have to kill them then, because it won’t work more than twice.” He considered. “Well. Maybe three times. If they’re idiots.”
“When fighting women, many men are,” she said dryly. “Don’t get fancy?”
Apparently she wanted a free tutorial… but she was helping him keep Rachel alive, and she’d had the Resistance counterword. So he’d tell her. If she could absorb it, fine.
“Exactly. Don’t extend too far from your body, whether it’s a kick or a punch. Don’t grab for a bigger gun you don’t know how to use if you already have a pistol. If they’re right there, don’t try to knee them in the balls - they expect that from a woman. Headbutt them. You’ll give yourself a headache, but they’ll never expect it and then you can go for the balls. They’ll be unprotected at that point.”
“Where were you when they were training me?” Lachance muttered and it wasn’t entirely sarcastic. Good. She was listening.
“Not there, so it doesn’t matter,” Connor said flatly. “Keep listening. You heard her tell us the essentials. Now we extrapolate. Go for the eyes only after you’ve distracted them; everyone tries to protect their eyes. Taking them out works, but it has to be part two of the maneuver. Go for joints and destroy them if you can. Not just the knees, although those are good. Take out ankles, elbows, wrists. If they can’t run, they can’t chase you. If they can’t grab a gun or aim it, they can’t kill you.” He looked at her. “Take out throats as part three. If they can’t breathe, or can’t free a hand for fear of bleeding out, they can’t kill you.”
Connor studied her but she was still listening. He nodded. “Good. If you’re fighting for your life, there are no rules. Not past, ‘Live.’”
Lachance studied him as seriously as he was studying her, then she said quietly, “If we find shelter sooner tomorrow, can you start showing me? After you’re done working with Rachel, of course. But you’re keeping her alive. I can’t imagine you don’t have a few nasty tricks I could stand to learn, too. Hearing it and trying to imagine the moves just isn’t the same as working it into the muscles.”
Connor pulled out his knife and held it in the fire. “After Rachel’s done, yes. You’ll want this sterilized for your hands. We’ll work on kicks, stomps, and sweeps if there’s time tomorrow. Give you a little longer for your fingers to heal.”
She just nodded, all pragmatism, and dug in her pack for cleaner cloth for bandages. “That sounds perfect.”
~~~ finis ~~~
Comments, Commentary, Miscellanea:
Connor MacLeod and Rachel (later Rachel Ellenstein) are both from the movie Highlander, which will be thirty years old next year. (Now I feel old.) Connor found Rachel hidden in an old warehouse in one of the deleted scenes from the movie; that he ended up taking her back to New York is canon.
Peggy Carter, from the Captain America movies and her own TV mini-series, is still with the OSS at this point, not yet the SSR.
And Peggy’s mission? The intel was hidden inside a false lining of Rene Fontaine’s bowler hat. No one found it.
Initial beta courtesy of Dragon and SamJohnsson; cheer-leading by Devo and tarsh; later editing by Dail and Charlotte Hill. All mistakes mine and will be corrected if I hear about them. Enjoy! Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read
comments on DW
Given the new LJ 'design' decisions, please comment on DW if you can.
Meanwhile, Escapade Con just had their 25th anniversary and put out a call for fic for an anniversary zine. I sent this. Enjoy! (And if you haven't seen Killa's HL vid for the con? Go, watch, enjoy. It's majorly happy-making!)
Small Packages is also available at the AO3 if you'd prefer to read it there. (I need to just break down and do a collection of 'women being awesome' fic, don't I?)
Small Packages
Written for the 25th Anniversary of Escapade and for Crossovers100 prompt # 77 -- trees.
The woman slipped into the courtyard warily, using more caution than even the unbarred gate should have inspired. Connor MacLeod approved.
The house had been proud once, before the village around it began to sag back into woodlands under the pressure of war, depression, and now invasion. Now it stood silent, if not entirely empty. This latest intruder paused just to the side of the gate, her red-brown clothes blending into the sunbaked wood of the post. Her gaze flicked from corner to corner, ground to roof, window to basement door, alert despite the circles under her eyes and the dried blood staining one sleeve. Her scan barely hesitated when she took in the bodies discarded on the paving stones between gate and front door, but she didn't check the full circuit behind her.
Whoever she was, she was too watchful to have missed something so obvious.
Trouble.
Connor eased back a little further into the woods around the house, careful to blend in with the trees. It cost him his view of the stranger, but left her in earshot. Of course, that meant so was he; he’d have to keep it in mind.
A few silent yards more took him back to Rachel. She was still waiting where he’d left her, hidden off to the side of a maple whose brilliant leaves would draw the eye away from her. Connor slid down to one knee and touched her shoulder for comfort and reassurance. The little girl looked up at him, blue eyes wide but silent and uncomplaining. Connor couldn't resist smiling at her, which explained everything about why he’d been smuggling them both across France in wartime. Her first family had tried to hide her from the Nazis. Connor had found her just before the Germans did and ended up her second family.
He waved Rachel farther back into the tangle of underbrush with his free hand - she didn’t flinch at the knife in his other hand - and closed his fingers around his thumb to indicate she should hide.
Rachel smiled back at him, her thin, dirty fingers signaling V for victory to some; from her it was 'bunny ears' and 'curl up and hide like one.' She did just that, the too-large, grass-stained brown coat pulled up over the dirty gold of her hair to help a little girl become a small hummock of grass and earth. Connor eased a fallen branch over her to shelter her further and slid back towards the road and the Fontaine house.
He crouched by a stone retaining wall, listening more than watching now. The woman was moving inside the courtyard, barely audible on the stone and packed earth. Someone else was walking much more noisily along the side of the road.
The newcomer wasn’t really used to the country; he’d thought visibility on the road was his main problem. It wasn’t. He was huffing for breath and accompanied by the crackle of leaves and snap of twigs. Apparently, even he could tell he was too loud. He kept slowing down, but that did no good when every bit of forest life around him kept falling silent.
Connor drifted silently away from the stone wall, timing his motions to the periodic breezes that swayed thinly-veiled oaks and the occasional fir. He had no choice but to move slowly; most of the leaves were damp and going to compost, but here and there the sun had dried some back to crispness and they'd crackle under foot if he wasn't careful.
He came to rest under an evergreen, looking out and around to actually sight his target in the late afternoon sunlight. Pursued and pursuer, hmm? The odds suggested one would be supporting the Nazis and the other would be Resistance.
It might not matter which was which. Help would be nice, but Connor would kill both of them if that was what it took to get Rachel safely out of France.
The second stranger came around a shell-stricken chestnut tree without enough care for the way his coat showed him up against his surroundings. He was sturdily built, his face broad and maybe a day away from being bearded instead of unshaven. Despite the stubble and the flattened nose, his clothes were too bright for occupied France, his skin too clean. At least he looked like he'd missed a few meals. Nowhere close to as many as everyone else in the area, however.
To have Rene Fontaine’s prize bowler on his head, still with blood on the brim, the man had to have been in the house. Most likely he’d killed the Fontaines; at best, he’d left the bodies where they lay as bait. But he hadn’t disarmed the traps left under them, either. So. Not likely Resistance.
Connor put his friends' deaths aside again and waited for the enemy agent to come into arm's reach.
It took another four minutes but eventually Connor stained the bastard's crimson coat with darker red blood, eyes narrowing as he took in the contrast. From the look of that, the man had been eating much better than Connor had managed for Rachel. Connor pulled his hand off the corpse’s mouth, his knife out of the man's kidney, and stripped off his pack.
He wasn’t all that surprised to find a German undershirt under the coat, or German military ID that matched the face of the newly deceased. Officer’s insignia, however, worried him.
He ghosted back across the road, refusing to think about what food the heavy bag might hold, and went to retrieve his new daughter.
~ ~ ~
Peggy Carter glanced quickly around the walled-off yard. When she didn't see anyone watching from the house - and really, who’d set this up? There were few good sightlines to watch the bait, much though she hated to call the dead that - she moved to the pile of corpses, checking for traps. Two grenades had been left for the merciful. If she’d been less careful disarming those, she’d have been blown apart by the larger charges of explosive they concealed.
'Stiff upper lip,' she thought, mouth and spine straightening as she raided her former contacts’ bodies for money, ammunition, or anything else of use. She took what she could of the trap munitions, too. The Fontaines would have supplied her with what they could spare if she'd made it while they were alive. Peggy tried to tell herself this was no different and settled for promising herself a good cry later, if she lived that long.
She still hadn’t found the papers she’d come for when the birds fell completely silent. The wind had fallen off, too, which allowed Peggy to hear a sound she knew too well.
That chuff of expelled air meant a man was dying in the woods along the road. The man who'd been following her for at least a mile? Maybe. But if so, who had killed him, and why?
Peggy shifted to get her back into a corner, pulled her pistol and waited. The silence stretched, thinned, sharpened to something painful, and then she heard a high-pitched squeak. It was followed, a moment later, by a baritone bellow trying to command a small girl to return. His order turned into a howl of pain, one which shifted quickly to rage and was followed by gunshots.
Peggy ignored her torn fingers, the way her muscles felt like wire strung too thin and too tight for their load, the nails that ripped as she scaled a wall theoretically too tall for such maneuvers. She dug into old wood and crumbling mortar and created handholds to go up and over. The man snarled again as Peggy crested the wall… then screamed like a pig being castrated.
Peggy didn’t care about him. What drove her to a sprint was the silence from the little girl.
Behind the abandoned household, a man lay curled on the ground in a German uniform tunic painted with blood; more blood spurted with his every panicked heartbeat. Beyond him, another German soldier was trying to catch a child whose arm was also covered in blood. As Peggy ran, he steadied his pistol to shoot her - and the girl darted forward under his hands.
Instead of shooting, he jumped to the side, clamping his legs together hastily as he did. The little girl had turned back to watch him, eyes huge in her too-thin face but teeth set in her lower lip and her jaw set stubbornly.
He screamed, landing gracelessly. He curled around his injured leg, trying to wrap a hand over the gash that ran across his calf and reappeared midway up his thigh.
Peggy tackled his arm, got control of his pistol, and shoved it into his chest as she pulled the trigger.
It didn’t kill him immediately, so she steadied her hand and pressed the barrel just right of his sternum, between ribs, before she fired again. His eyes faded from alive and inhabited to dead and vacant. Peggy rolled off him, cursing herself for wasting ammunition. The thought had barely formed when she noticed motion out of the corner of her eye: the little girl was moving to flank her.
She was small, an underfed six or seven years old, but she had a knife in one hand as long as the forearm it lay against and razor-sharp from the cuts it had put in the Germans. The thin fingers around it were white from the tight grip, but the girl’s hand was barely shaking.
Peggy started to hold her hands out… and lowered the gun to the ground instead.
The girl looked past her and was suddenly young again and horribly relieved. She darted around Peggy, staying well out of arm’s reach, and started a remarkably quiet tale. In Dutch, unfortunately. Damn.
Peggy turned slowly, her hands still out, and met a cold, contemplative stare from a killer in dark brown and tan mufti. He scooped the little girl up onto what hip he had - not on the side with his knife - and went back to looking Peggy over. The appraisal was too calculating to be sexual, but offensive nonetheless. After a long minute, the man asked in French, “How long until the moon’s dark?”
A Resistance password didn’t surprise Peggy, but she hadn’t expected it either. She answered anyway, with complete honesty above and beyond the pass phrase. “Not soon enough.”
He nodded once. “I wondered. Do you always rescue little girls?”
Peggy tilted her head to give him the glare she’d perfected years before on her brothers. “She was rescuing herself quite competently. I merely gave her a hand. She was fearless and competent when she had to be. We need more such women.”
That got a quick smile and for a moment Peggy could see why the little girl trusted him. Then he shifted the girl to a safer perch on his side - she wrapped her hands through the straps of his pack, ignoring the blood it smeared on them - and asked, “Did you find whatever you came for?”
Peggy ignored that. Her mission was not his business, possibly the more so because the intel was lost with M. Fontaine’s death. This stranger might make a good traveling companion, however. He’d kept a small girl alive and safe in occupied France; she seemed to be learning to be quite dangerous from him. Peggy factored those in, added the dictum about keeping one’s friends and enemies close, and suggested, “We could move more easily as a family.”
To Peggy’s surprise, he sought the girl’s opinion, first commenting and then asking something. The girl looked Peggy over carefully, too, from the wrecked state of Peggy’s hair to the blood coating one arm. Her right arm, just like the girl’s. She nodded finally, and her companion? Father? did the same.
“We need to clean up and get out of here. We’ll sort out routes and destinations after that.”
Peggy nodded her acceptance of both his offer and his priorities. “Agreed.” She held out her still-bloody hand. “I’m Lachance, Jeanne Lachance.”
The man shook it with a hand slightly less stained. “Smith. John Smith.” His smile bared too many teeth and they hadn’t exactly traded a blood oath, but Peggy smiled at him anyway.
It was a very straightforward lie. She could work with that.
~ ~ ~
Connor wasn’t surprised that Rachel waited until full night to ask her questions: full night, another ten miles away, and relative safety. They were bedded down on old straw covered with older blankets in a partially collapsed stone hut probably built a few centuries before Connor’s birth. Despite the small fire they’d built to cook the sausages in the German officer’s pack, the whole shelter still smelt primarily of unwashed farmers and animal droppings.
“You said they were friends,” Rachel said quietly, nibbling at her share of dinner. (The woman calling herself Lachance had only raised an eyebrow when Connor waved a hand over it and promised Rachel it was veal. All of them knew it was mostly pork, but Rachel nodded solemnly and ate it without complaint. Lachance hadn’t commented on Rachel being Jewish or Connor… not.)
Connor answered both what Rachel had said and what she meant. “They were friends, Rachel. But if we’d stayed to bury them, the Germans would know someone had been there. More soldiers might even have gotten there while we were still digging. Rene and Ghyslaine were true friends; they’d want us to go on living.”
Rachel nodded, then winced as Lachance kept working another knot out of her hair. She held still for it, though; Lachance didn’t pull her hair nearly as often as Connor still did. “But we hid the soldiers’ bodies so they won’t know we were there?” Her French needed some work, and Lachance murmured it to her again, so Rachel could repeat it with a better accent.
“Their officers will know where they were supposed to be.” Connor let some of his amusement into his voice so Rachel could relax a little. “But they won’t be sure that the soldiers went where they were supposed to be.”
His new daughter smiled at him, as close to a giggle as she’d managed yet. “Like the neighborhood boys who’d run errands and end up halfway across the village from the shops their mamas sent them to?”
Lachance said approvingly, “Exactly like that.” Rachel smiled at her, too, finished her sausage, and wiped her hands on the old blanket.
Connor waited until the comb ran smoothly through her hair to say, “You did well in the fight, Rachel. You’re still here, and that’s how you win. But how did it go?” Lachance’s head came up in reflexive protest - the name amused Connor; he doubted she was either French or fond of trusting luck - but she kept her mouth shut. Connor kept his attention primarily on Rachel, however, as he asked, “Do you want to talk about it and see what other right ways there might have been?”
Rachel said shyly, “I cut them when they didn’t expect it, and I kept the knife against my arm like you showed me.”
Connor nodded. “You did a very good job with that. I know it’s messier and harder to clean up later, but they don’t see the blade as fast when it’s against your arm. They think a blade should face forward in your hand, where it’ll show. That gives you a few seconds to get to them while they still think you’re unarmed.”
Rachel nodded. “It really worked. And then the second man had a gun, so I stayed close to him like you said I should, and I ducked when he shot at me, and I turned to see if I had to get close again after he shot.”
Lachance kept combing Rachel’s hair just to soothe her. It made Connor like the woman a little more. “You did a very good job, too,” she told Rachel. “The soldier had no idea what to do when you were inside his reach like that. Most men don’t fight like that.”
“The little ones do, Dada says,” Rachel told her and Connor grinned at her, the instinctive smile she’d drawn since they’d first met. Connor’s first family had rejected him for reviving; Rachel had accepted his survival. Her first family had tried to keep her safe; Connor was still trying.
“Some of them do, yes. So? What are the main rules?” He counted them out on his fingers with her as she said them.
Rachel recited, “Don’t let them hurt me. Don’t let me hurt me. Stop them as much as I have to, and if I have to kill them, then they shouldn’t have threatened a little girl. Don’t get fancy.” She closed her hand into a fist. “Just stay alive.” She smiled at him and gave him the rabbit ears again. “And if I can hide, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Connor leaned in and hugged her fiercely. “Good girl. You’re here; you stayed alive. You did very, very well.”
Rachel wrapped her arms around him - too thin to make him happy, but he’d try to feed her up when they got to New York - and cuddled in. “Can I sleep next to you tonight?”
“Of course. Right between me and the wall, so no one can come up on you,” Connor suggested, and Rachel nodded.
Lachance started arranging a little nest for her. “I’ll take first watch.” She shifted to English to argue it with him and won by pointing out, “You’ll hear me if I move too much on this straw, but you can’t have gotten much sleep while conveying a little girl across occupied France.”
“After I get those splinters out of your fingers, I’ll nap.” He gave her a sardonic look. “Easier with help, and it’s in my best interest for you to be able to fight if necessary.”
Rachel asked sleepily in French, “Miss Lachance? Can you show me how you do your lipstick tomorrow? I’ll help comb your hair if you like.”
That got an immediate smile. “Of course, Rachel. I’d like that. Sleep well.”
Connor rubbed her back until she went limp; if he didn’t know how small children did that even in peacetime, it would have worried him. As it was, he looked over at Lachance and said quietly, “You killed the second one for her. Thank you.”
“He was bleeding quite badly, but you’re most welcome.” She looked at him very thoughtfully and then asked, “Are those really the rules you fight by?”
Connor snorted. “You can’t win another day if you don’t live to see it. Stay alive. Then win.” He gave her his coldest smile, pleased when she didn’t back away from it. “But I follow both parts of that rule.”
“I knew about staying inside their reach, but I wouldn’t have thought of diving under the gun like that.”
Connor shrugged. “You’re bigger than she is, but you’re no Amazon. And no one expects you to dive towards the gun. It works once. You have to kill them then, because it won’t work more than twice.” He considered. “Well. Maybe three times. If they’re idiots.”
“When fighting women, many men are,” she said dryly. “Don’t get fancy?”
Apparently she wanted a free tutorial… but she was helping him keep Rachel alive, and she’d had the Resistance counterword. So he’d tell her. If she could absorb it, fine.
“Exactly. Don’t extend too far from your body, whether it’s a kick or a punch. Don’t grab for a bigger gun you don’t know how to use if you already have a pistol. If they’re right there, don’t try to knee them in the balls - they expect that from a woman. Headbutt them. You’ll give yourself a headache, but they’ll never expect it and then you can go for the balls. They’ll be unprotected at that point.”
“Where were you when they were training me?” Lachance muttered and it wasn’t entirely sarcastic. Good. She was listening.
“Not there, so it doesn’t matter,” Connor said flatly. “Keep listening. You heard her tell us the essentials. Now we extrapolate. Go for the eyes only after you’ve distracted them; everyone tries to protect their eyes. Taking them out works, but it has to be part two of the maneuver. Go for joints and destroy them if you can. Not just the knees, although those are good. Take out ankles, elbows, wrists. If they can’t run, they can’t chase you. If they can’t grab a gun or aim it, they can’t kill you.” He looked at her. “Take out throats as part three. If they can’t breathe, or can’t free a hand for fear of bleeding out, they can’t kill you.”
Connor studied her but she was still listening. He nodded. “Good. If you’re fighting for your life, there are no rules. Not past, ‘Live.’”
Lachance studied him as seriously as he was studying her, then she said quietly, “If we find shelter sooner tomorrow, can you start showing me? After you’re done working with Rachel, of course. But you’re keeping her alive. I can’t imagine you don’t have a few nasty tricks I could stand to learn, too. Hearing it and trying to imagine the moves just isn’t the same as working it into the muscles.”
Connor pulled out his knife and held it in the fire. “After Rachel’s done, yes. You’ll want this sterilized for your hands. We’ll work on kicks, stomps, and sweeps if there’s time tomorrow. Give you a little longer for your fingers to heal.”
She just nodded, all pragmatism, and dug in her pack for cleaner cloth for bandages. “That sounds perfect.”
~~~ finis ~~~
Comments, Commentary, Miscellanea:
Connor MacLeod and Rachel (later Rachel Ellenstein) are both from the movie Highlander, which will be thirty years old next year. (Now I feel old.) Connor found Rachel hidden in an old warehouse in one of the deleted scenes from the movie; that he ended up taking her back to New York is canon.
Peggy Carter, from the Captain America movies and her own TV mini-series, is still with the OSS at this point, not yet the SSR.
And Peggy’s mission? The intel was hidden inside a false lining of Rene Fontaine’s bowler hat. No one found it.
Initial beta courtesy of Dragon and SamJohnsson; cheer-leading by Devo and tarsh; later editing by Dail and Charlotte Hill. All mistakes mine and will be corrected if I hear about them. Enjoy! Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read
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