Happy Holidays, ithidrial!
Title: Gifts
Author: phyrry, aka I Didn't Fall For This Yesterday. Why Would I Today?
Written for: ithidrial
Characters/Pairings: Methos/OFC, Matthew McCormick.
Rating: G
Warnings: AU, gen.
Author's Notes: Thanks to Amand-r for beta reading! Characters from Highlander, skewed as they may be, belong to Panzer-Davis Productions; the narrator and all grammatical irregularities (and there are quite a few) are entirely my fault. Suggested musical accompaniment: Asphalt (Tome II) from Optometry by DJ Spooky for the first half, Rosemary from the same album for the second.
Summary: This is the way the Gathering ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
Gifts
Immortality is illegal these days.
In this country law enforcement's harshest along the east coast. As you drive farther and farther west people cease to care about the laws. One man's terrorism is another man's civic activism. These days it's hard not to be a criminal.
Back east, the attitude is 'shoot first, ask questions later'.
Out here in the west, shooting first is still valuable, but only the feds ask questions. Your average Josephine knows the value in keeping her trap shut and her eyes open.
Ben tells me that once upon a time there was a group of humans dedicating to watching Immortals, keeping their histories. They got sloppy. They got caught. They got taken out, and their information was disseminated at the World Summit.
Remarkably enough (or perhaps not), the truth of Immortality never made it into the news. Ignorance may not be bliss, but we sure do swim in a lot of it anyway.
First they caught a few, the famous ones, the easy targets. They caught them and dissected them and once they discovered that it can't be transferred or imbued, they killed them. Immortal tissue was studied until its quantifiable differences with normal human flesh were understood, and then those differences were publicized as a mutation scare. It's illegal to harbor a known tainted; it's a death sentence to be one. There is no cure, the posters proclaim proudly; turn yourself in, the government will take care of you and keep you from hurting anyone else. Ben says they do it by beheading.
All of this began before I was born, of course; things have been this way for several decades. People are used to it. What with the World Summit declaring a universal pogrom, getting out of the country isn't going to help. Everywhere you go the laws are the same. The first year of the pogrom, there were over a thousand 'cleansings' of Immortals worldwide; over the last decade there has been one.
Ben says he is one of the very last; he can feel it in his bones. He says he hasn't sensed a pre-Immortal in decades.
There's a test the police run whenever you renew your citizenship license or the associated certifications. You have to endure it to get on an airplane, to leave one country for another, and even whenever a cop stops you for a broken taillight. It's a simple test; just a lancet on a spring, just enough to make you bleed. On most Immortals it's enough to force the lightning.
Ben explained how he gets past the test to me once, when he was very drunk. He learned a long time ago how to play tricks with the lightning in his flesh, how to increase or decrease its power and effectiveness. For major injuries - for death - he cannot stop it, but for minor ones - a scratch, a stab, a slice across the hand - he can, if he exerts himself, hold off the lightning for hours. Usually by then we are safely out of custody.
Today we are not.
Today we are in separate white interrogation rooms in the San Quentin Federal Complex and Ben is under suspicion of practicing unlicensed medicine. Which he does, of course; but it would be unfortunate to admit that. Immortals are not the only enemies of the state.
He is careful never to carry his supplies with him; he has a sort of drop system with the various anarchist colonies scattered across the western wastes, out in the places where no one sane would want to live. He tells them what he needs and they hide it in tiny caches, a ragged cardboard box under the curb here, a plastic jar in a hollow tree there. Refrigeratables are hell but that's only to be expected.
I've always wondered why the government cracks down so hard on unofficial medical care. Perhaps it's because pills are the backbone of the black market; perhaps it's because the pharmaceutical corps have lots of money to lobby with. Miracles are available to the very rich, but most people are unable to afford treatment for diseases as simple and everyday as cancer. Thus, the thriving indenture system.
The door cracks open as I go through our options and the consequences in my head. I'm sweating; they keep it warm in here, the lights painfully bright, and I was dressed for early December at high altitude. I don't take off my jacket; every layer between them and me is a good thing.
In steps a man dressed in a nice suit, early thirties, nondescript, with a friendly face. The worst sort. I lock down my anxieties - not entirely, part of projecting innocence is keeping just the right balance of fear and certainty - and attempt to remain calm. I've made it through worse. Ben has made it through millenia of worse.
"How can I help you?"
The agent sits down across the narrow table from me, his hands steepled in front of him. "First of all, Emily - I can call you Emily?" His voice is rich and smooth and tangy with Georgian sophistication, Rhett Butler in a suit. He probably doesn't give a damn, either.
"Certainly." Always wise to go along with the little things. They'll be pulling out the heat lamps soon enough.
"Thank you." He smiles briefly. "I've spoken with the detective in charge of your case and he agrees with me that it would be counterproductive to pursue charges given the current political atmosphere."
"Really. That's very nice of you." Elections are coming up in January and the National Rationalist Party is running a strong campaign as it is. I never thought NaRPa'd be useful for anything, but Ben's got friends in the group who're ready and willing to raise hell. Even for real people, it looks like. Funny.
"Indeed." He watches my eyes as they flit to the unblinking camera eye behind him, watching, always watching. "You don't need to worry about them; we are unobserved."
"I hope you'll pardon me if I don't quite believe that." Of course I don't; how ridiculous.
"Believe what you like." He props one ankle up on his knee and lowers his hands, a strangely casual pose in this setting. "I assure you, footage of this meeting would not be an advantage to either of us should certain topics of mutual interest happen to arise in the natural course of conversation."
Suddenly it clicks. "My god," I whisper. "You're like Ben."
"We may, perhaps, be distant cousins on my mother's side," he murmurs with an amused nod. I look back and forth, peering at the one-way mirrors on either side of us. He tips his head. "You have a question?"
"How do you do it?" I whisper back. "How do you keep the secret?"
"The same way Ben does. I learned the technique from my... mother. The chain stretches back two more generations that I know of." He sighs. "I tried to teach it to my kids," and he stresses the word ever so carefully, "but none of them learned it, unfortunately." He leans up closer, his voice soft, his lips barely moving. "Ben is the head of the line, you might say."
I nod, trying very hard to conceal my sudden shaking.
"Speaking of which," and his voice is suddenly a normal volume again. He glances down at his clipboard, then watches my face carefully as he asks his next question. "What is your relationship to Benjamin Schaefer, ma'am?"
"He's my husband," I bite out hurriedly, and then expand upon. "My common law husband."
"Yes," the agent agrees in a laconic tone, "it says in your files that you both avoid government registry whenever you can. Why is that, I wonder?"
"I see no reason to go asking for trouble," I reply dully.
"And your family has had a lot of trouble, more than most," he says, his voice soft and dangerous. "Father executed for treasonous publishing, mother dead after serving five years of a thirty-year civil disobedience sentence in Haversmith Penitentiary, brother indentured out to ViVaCo as a test subject to pay for his asthma meds." He smirks. "And you with no record of illness. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were tainted."
"Cut me and I bleed red," I tell him, "not lightning."
"Oh, I'm quite aware of that, Missus Schaefer," he says in that amused Southern drawl. He stands and turns to leave.
"Was that --" I swallow down the frog in my throat. "Was that all you had to ask, Agent?"
"That was all I wanted to ask you, ma'am. Most of my questions were for your... husband."
The metal door slams shut behind him. I sit and focus on my breathing and try not to worry.
- ~ - ~ -
They release me two hours later. I walk silently between two uniformed guards to the lobby; Ben is standing there, paler than normal, his face rigid with determination and a seething, subtle anger. Neither of us speak until we are safely in my reliable old Camaro and out the gate. I drive, I always drive; it lessens the chance a random pull-over will reveal his secrets. Caution may be cheap, but it pays great dividends.
"We're settling it tonight," Ben murmurs into the cold breeze at last as we head back towards town. "Permanently."
- ~ - ~ -
They meet at midnight in a particularly desolate patch out in the middle of the desert, surrounded by yucca and juniper and shadows thrown by the icy moon. I carry my taser in my pocket, just in case, my hand clenched tightly around it, my own security blanket. The government man pulls his sword from the trunk of his car; Ben has his in his coat already, and draws it with a soft shing. I drove especially carefully on the way here. Carrying a sword is much like wearing a big signboard on your chest that screams 'Tainted! Behead me!'
The fight itself is short.
"I am Matthew of Salisbury," the agent announces, "and there can be only one."
"I'm fed up with this," Ben says testily. "There can be only one, and it's not going to be you."
"You may be surprised," the agent - Matthew - ripostes, and then they are on one another.
It's a beautiful art, battle between Immortals. The dodges, the clash of blades, the twirls and parries and just-missed swipes and stabs.
Matthew is good.
Ben is not as good. For the most part he restrains himself to dodging backwards, parrying, and ducking underneath as Matthew's sword comes swinging past. Ben is out of practice. Matthew seems encouraged by the realization; he redoubles his attack. But there is one very important fact he is forgetting.
Ben cheats.
He pulls a dagger from his coat and, as he parries Matthew's next blow with the heavy broadsword he has kept safely hidden for as long as I've known him, he stabs him right in the chest. "But -- the rules --" Matthew gurgles as he drops to his knees. His sword lands on the dirt with a soft thump.
"Rule one: don't lose your head." And Matthew's is gone in a backhanded sweep of that battered medieval blade. It bounces off into the parched waste, leaving a splatter-trail of blood leading away into the darkness. Mist begins to flow from the decapitated corpse and twines up around Ben. He braces himself and holds his sword high, steel shining in the light of the pale gibbous moon.
The lightning comes. It strikes again and again, first driving Ben to his knees and then wrapping him in a cocoon of glowing electricity. The winds pick up and twist about him, and the air itself begins to shimmer, at first just a little near the electric surge that used to be my husband, then stretching and growing in intensity til everything I can see seems set aglow. I stare at a yucca, its pulsing lifeforce plainly visible in the swirl of energy which emanates from Ben's twitching form, and I consider that this might be the end of the world, or perhaps its beginning.
Five minutes later, perhaps ten, and it stops. Mostly. I run to help Ben up as he struggles to his feet. Electricity crawls across his skin, and as he holds me tightly to him it flickers across mine too. It tickles. "It's all right," he says at last, breathing in great gulps of air as if his lungs had been pounded flat, "everything's going to be all right." He looks down his long nose at Matthew's corpse and shakes his head. "Kids these days, I tell you."
"What rules was he talking about?" I ask, my curiosity strong. In all of his stories over the years I've known him, Ben has never mentioned a code of conduct between Immortals to me.
"The ones he thought might save his ass," Ben replies darkly. "Oddly enough, they didn't." He lets go of me gently and I back away as he bends and retrieves his sword. He wearily stabs it back into the sheath in his coat lining and turns. The sand glows gently where he steps, and takes a long time to fade away.
"Does that -- does that normally happen?" I ask, my voice quivering just a little.
"Does what normally happen, Emily?" he asks with a long-suffering sigh. I point to his feet. He stares down at them with bemusement; the sand beneath him pulses with light.
"Well," he says at last. "That's different."
I arch a brow in acknowledgement of his mastery of the obvious.
- ~ - ~ -
We head further into the desert. The Camaro is full of gas, the moon is bright and lopsided, and there's the beheaded corpse of a Fed out there behind us. Good times.
Up ahead looms the shoe tree, a lone dead cottonwood standing on the bank of a long-dry riverbed. When I was very young, Pa told me that teenagers used to drive out here after graduation and throw a pair of old shoes up into the branches while they made their wishes for the future; now it lingers as a skeleton of happier times.
"Stop the car."
I brake, and the Camaro shrieks to a halt in the middle of the road. Ben smiles slightly, an apology glinting in his eyes.
"Not quite like that, Em. Pull over, I want to see the tree."
I eye him warily. "It's dead."
"Humor me."
I pull over and shut off the engine but leave the lights on. Ben hops out without bothering to open the door first and saunters towards the tree, his shabby black coat soaking up the light like a sponge. "C'mon," he calls out to me with a toss of his head, "I need moral support."
"Rubbish," I shout back, and then I smile and follow him. For a long couple of minutes he just stands next to the trunk and stares up into the branches. The chill one o'clock winds are ruffling the weather-beaten shoes; they sway like ghosts, their silhouettes cast in sharp relief by the headlights.
"Make a wish," he says at long last. He reaches out to touch the dry, flaking bark.
"You need to toss some shoes first," I tell him, and then I bite my tongue as the winds pick up and the shoe tree begins to glow a pale silvery color like the moon behind us. Ben just stands there, staring at his fingers and the dirty grey wood they rest upon as the branches above ripple and warp.
There has been a lot of weirdness tonight and I have done my best to stay calm through it, but when the tree starts to make crackling sounds I back away quickly. Ben will recover easily from a limb or two falling on his head. I won't.
And then he turns and looks at me, a flash of lightning flickering in his eyes, and simultaneously a thousand thousand buds unfold and the sad old shoes disappear underneath layer upon layer of dark green heart-shaped leaves.
Ben lifts his hand. The glow fades but the leaves and life within remain. I hear a trickle of water; the ground near the newly supple treetrunk shines dark and glossy with moisture that slowly seeps into the riverbed.
"What do you want for Christmas?" he asks as he walks back to the car, his smile slow and sure in the bright light, a shower of fluffy white cotton drifting lazily around us.
"Peace on earth," I reply automatically, a knee-jerk reaction to the age-old question. It's one thing you don't have to worry about fitting in the Camaro's tiny trunk.
"In a week? No, you'll have to wait until next year," he says with a quirky grin, his teeth shining. "How about a case of beer instead?"
"You'll drink it all. Throw in a full ham dinner and it's a deal." I look away from the tree and get into the car. "As long as it's somewhere else, preferably over a couple of state lines."
"You may have a point." He sits on the side of the car and swings those long legs over the passenger side door. "How do you feel about Seacouver?"
"Middling to anxious. Why?" The engine purrs to life as he slides down into the vinyl seat. I pull back onto the empty road.
"I want you to meet an old friend of mine. You'll like him." Ben pauses and fiddles with his seatbelt. "We'll need to get a shovel first, though."
"What?" I cut him off as he opens his mouth. "Scratch that, I don't want to know."
He leans back with a smirk, a bit of confirmation for my suspicions. "Probably for the best."
"Only you would make your wife dig up a cadaver for Christmas." I accelerate, the engine revving cheerfully in fourth gear as I take us through the well-banked curves leading west towards civilization, towards the coast, towards the interstate north. Ahead of us a single meteor streaks across the cloudless night sky.
I make a wish.
Author: phyrry, aka I Didn't Fall For This Yesterday. Why Would I Today?
Written for: ithidrial
Characters/Pairings: Methos/OFC, Matthew McCormick.
Rating: G
Warnings: AU, gen.
Author's Notes: Thanks to Amand-r for beta reading! Characters from Highlander, skewed as they may be, belong to Panzer-Davis Productions; the narrator and all grammatical irregularities (and there are quite a few) are entirely my fault. Suggested musical accompaniment: Asphalt (Tome II) from Optometry by DJ Spooky for the first half, Rosemary from the same album for the second.
Summary: This is the way the Gathering ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
Gifts
Immortality is illegal these days.
In this country law enforcement's harshest along the east coast. As you drive farther and farther west people cease to care about the laws. One man's terrorism is another man's civic activism. These days it's hard not to be a criminal.
Back east, the attitude is 'shoot first, ask questions later'.
Out here in the west, shooting first is still valuable, but only the feds ask questions. Your average Josephine knows the value in keeping her trap shut and her eyes open.
Ben tells me that once upon a time there was a group of humans dedicating to watching Immortals, keeping their histories. They got sloppy. They got caught. They got taken out, and their information was disseminated at the World Summit.
Remarkably enough (or perhaps not), the truth of Immortality never made it into the news. Ignorance may not be bliss, but we sure do swim in a lot of it anyway.
First they caught a few, the famous ones, the easy targets. They caught them and dissected them and once they discovered that it can't be transferred or imbued, they killed them. Immortal tissue was studied until its quantifiable differences with normal human flesh were understood, and then those differences were publicized as a mutation scare. It's illegal to harbor a known tainted; it's a death sentence to be one. There is no cure, the posters proclaim proudly; turn yourself in, the government will take care of you and keep you from hurting anyone else. Ben says they do it by beheading.
All of this began before I was born, of course; things have been this way for several decades. People are used to it. What with the World Summit declaring a universal pogrom, getting out of the country isn't going to help. Everywhere you go the laws are the same. The first year of the pogrom, there were over a thousand 'cleansings' of Immortals worldwide; over the last decade there has been one.
Ben says he is one of the very last; he can feel it in his bones. He says he hasn't sensed a pre-Immortal in decades.
There's a test the police run whenever you renew your citizenship license or the associated certifications. You have to endure it to get on an airplane, to leave one country for another, and even whenever a cop stops you for a broken taillight. It's a simple test; just a lancet on a spring, just enough to make you bleed. On most Immortals it's enough to force the lightning.
Ben explained how he gets past the test to me once, when he was very drunk. He learned a long time ago how to play tricks with the lightning in his flesh, how to increase or decrease its power and effectiveness. For major injuries - for death - he cannot stop it, but for minor ones - a scratch, a stab, a slice across the hand - he can, if he exerts himself, hold off the lightning for hours. Usually by then we are safely out of custody.
Today we are not.
Today we are in separate white interrogation rooms in the San Quentin Federal Complex and Ben is under suspicion of practicing unlicensed medicine. Which he does, of course; but it would be unfortunate to admit that. Immortals are not the only enemies of the state.
He is careful never to carry his supplies with him; he has a sort of drop system with the various anarchist colonies scattered across the western wastes, out in the places where no one sane would want to live. He tells them what he needs and they hide it in tiny caches, a ragged cardboard box under the curb here, a plastic jar in a hollow tree there. Refrigeratables are hell but that's only to be expected.
I've always wondered why the government cracks down so hard on unofficial medical care. Perhaps it's because pills are the backbone of the black market; perhaps it's because the pharmaceutical corps have lots of money to lobby with. Miracles are available to the very rich, but most people are unable to afford treatment for diseases as simple and everyday as cancer. Thus, the thriving indenture system.
The door cracks open as I go through our options and the consequences in my head. I'm sweating; they keep it warm in here, the lights painfully bright, and I was dressed for early December at high altitude. I don't take off my jacket; every layer between them and me is a good thing.
In steps a man dressed in a nice suit, early thirties, nondescript, with a friendly face. The worst sort. I lock down my anxieties - not entirely, part of projecting innocence is keeping just the right balance of fear and certainty - and attempt to remain calm. I've made it through worse. Ben has made it through millenia of worse.
"How can I help you?"
The agent sits down across the narrow table from me, his hands steepled in front of him. "First of all, Emily - I can call you Emily?" His voice is rich and smooth and tangy with Georgian sophistication, Rhett Butler in a suit. He probably doesn't give a damn, either.
"Certainly." Always wise to go along with the little things. They'll be pulling out the heat lamps soon enough.
"Thank you." He smiles briefly. "I've spoken with the detective in charge of your case and he agrees with me that it would be counterproductive to pursue charges given the current political atmosphere."
"Really. That's very nice of you." Elections are coming up in January and the National Rationalist Party is running a strong campaign as it is. I never thought NaRPa'd be useful for anything, but Ben's got friends in the group who're ready and willing to raise hell. Even for real people, it looks like. Funny.
"Indeed." He watches my eyes as they flit to the unblinking camera eye behind him, watching, always watching. "You don't need to worry about them; we are unobserved."
"I hope you'll pardon me if I don't quite believe that." Of course I don't; how ridiculous.
"Believe what you like." He props one ankle up on his knee and lowers his hands, a strangely casual pose in this setting. "I assure you, footage of this meeting would not be an advantage to either of us should certain topics of mutual interest happen to arise in the natural course of conversation."
Suddenly it clicks. "My god," I whisper. "You're like Ben."
"We may, perhaps, be distant cousins on my mother's side," he murmurs with an amused nod. I look back and forth, peering at the one-way mirrors on either side of us. He tips his head. "You have a question?"
"How do you do it?" I whisper back. "How do you keep the secret?"
"The same way Ben does. I learned the technique from my... mother. The chain stretches back two more generations that I know of." He sighs. "I tried to teach it to my kids," and he stresses the word ever so carefully, "but none of them learned it, unfortunately." He leans up closer, his voice soft, his lips barely moving. "Ben is the head of the line, you might say."
I nod, trying very hard to conceal my sudden shaking.
"Speaking of which," and his voice is suddenly a normal volume again. He glances down at his clipboard, then watches my face carefully as he asks his next question. "What is your relationship to Benjamin Schaefer, ma'am?"
"He's my husband," I bite out hurriedly, and then expand upon. "My common law husband."
"Yes," the agent agrees in a laconic tone, "it says in your files that you both avoid government registry whenever you can. Why is that, I wonder?"
"I see no reason to go asking for trouble," I reply dully.
"And your family has had a lot of trouble, more than most," he says, his voice soft and dangerous. "Father executed for treasonous publishing, mother dead after serving five years of a thirty-year civil disobedience sentence in Haversmith Penitentiary, brother indentured out to ViVaCo as a test subject to pay for his asthma meds." He smirks. "And you with no record of illness. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were tainted."
"Cut me and I bleed red," I tell him, "not lightning."
"Oh, I'm quite aware of that, Missus Schaefer," he says in that amused Southern drawl. He stands and turns to leave.
"Was that --" I swallow down the frog in my throat. "Was that all you had to ask, Agent?"
"That was all I wanted to ask you, ma'am. Most of my questions were for your... husband."
The metal door slams shut behind him. I sit and focus on my breathing and try not to worry.
- ~ - ~ -
They release me two hours later. I walk silently between two uniformed guards to the lobby; Ben is standing there, paler than normal, his face rigid with determination and a seething, subtle anger. Neither of us speak until we are safely in my reliable old Camaro and out the gate. I drive, I always drive; it lessens the chance a random pull-over will reveal his secrets. Caution may be cheap, but it pays great dividends.
"We're settling it tonight," Ben murmurs into the cold breeze at last as we head back towards town. "Permanently."
- ~ - ~ -
They meet at midnight in a particularly desolate patch out in the middle of the desert, surrounded by yucca and juniper and shadows thrown by the icy moon. I carry my taser in my pocket, just in case, my hand clenched tightly around it, my own security blanket. The government man pulls his sword from the trunk of his car; Ben has his in his coat already, and draws it with a soft shing. I drove especially carefully on the way here. Carrying a sword is much like wearing a big signboard on your chest that screams 'Tainted! Behead me!'
The fight itself is short.
"I am Matthew of Salisbury," the agent announces, "and there can be only one."
"I'm fed up with this," Ben says testily. "There can be only one, and it's not going to be you."
"You may be surprised," the agent - Matthew - ripostes, and then they are on one another.
It's a beautiful art, battle between Immortals. The dodges, the clash of blades, the twirls and parries and just-missed swipes and stabs.
Matthew is good.
Ben is not as good. For the most part he restrains himself to dodging backwards, parrying, and ducking underneath as Matthew's sword comes swinging past. Ben is out of practice. Matthew seems encouraged by the realization; he redoubles his attack. But there is one very important fact he is forgetting.
Ben cheats.
He pulls a dagger from his coat and, as he parries Matthew's next blow with the heavy broadsword he has kept safely hidden for as long as I've known him, he stabs him right in the chest. "But -- the rules --" Matthew gurgles as he drops to his knees. His sword lands on the dirt with a soft thump.
"Rule one: don't lose your head." And Matthew's is gone in a backhanded sweep of that battered medieval blade. It bounces off into the parched waste, leaving a splatter-trail of blood leading away into the darkness. Mist begins to flow from the decapitated corpse and twines up around Ben. He braces himself and holds his sword high, steel shining in the light of the pale gibbous moon.
The lightning comes. It strikes again and again, first driving Ben to his knees and then wrapping him in a cocoon of glowing electricity. The winds pick up and twist about him, and the air itself begins to shimmer, at first just a little near the electric surge that used to be my husband, then stretching and growing in intensity til everything I can see seems set aglow. I stare at a yucca, its pulsing lifeforce plainly visible in the swirl of energy which emanates from Ben's twitching form, and I consider that this might be the end of the world, or perhaps its beginning.
Five minutes later, perhaps ten, and it stops. Mostly. I run to help Ben up as he struggles to his feet. Electricity crawls across his skin, and as he holds me tightly to him it flickers across mine too. It tickles. "It's all right," he says at last, breathing in great gulps of air as if his lungs had been pounded flat, "everything's going to be all right." He looks down his long nose at Matthew's corpse and shakes his head. "Kids these days, I tell you."
"What rules was he talking about?" I ask, my curiosity strong. In all of his stories over the years I've known him, Ben has never mentioned a code of conduct between Immortals to me.
"The ones he thought might save his ass," Ben replies darkly. "Oddly enough, they didn't." He lets go of me gently and I back away as he bends and retrieves his sword. He wearily stabs it back into the sheath in his coat lining and turns. The sand glows gently where he steps, and takes a long time to fade away.
"Does that -- does that normally happen?" I ask, my voice quivering just a little.
"Does what normally happen, Emily?" he asks with a long-suffering sigh. I point to his feet. He stares down at them with bemusement; the sand beneath him pulses with light.
"Well," he says at last. "That's different."
I arch a brow in acknowledgement of his mastery of the obvious.
- ~ - ~ -
We head further into the desert. The Camaro is full of gas, the moon is bright and lopsided, and there's the beheaded corpse of a Fed out there behind us. Good times.
Up ahead looms the shoe tree, a lone dead cottonwood standing on the bank of a long-dry riverbed. When I was very young, Pa told me that teenagers used to drive out here after graduation and throw a pair of old shoes up into the branches while they made their wishes for the future; now it lingers as a skeleton of happier times.
"Stop the car."
I brake, and the Camaro shrieks to a halt in the middle of the road. Ben smiles slightly, an apology glinting in his eyes.
"Not quite like that, Em. Pull over, I want to see the tree."
I eye him warily. "It's dead."
"Humor me."
I pull over and shut off the engine but leave the lights on. Ben hops out without bothering to open the door first and saunters towards the tree, his shabby black coat soaking up the light like a sponge. "C'mon," he calls out to me with a toss of his head, "I need moral support."
"Rubbish," I shout back, and then I smile and follow him. For a long couple of minutes he just stands next to the trunk and stares up into the branches. The chill one o'clock winds are ruffling the weather-beaten shoes; they sway like ghosts, their silhouettes cast in sharp relief by the headlights.
"Make a wish," he says at long last. He reaches out to touch the dry, flaking bark.
"You need to toss some shoes first," I tell him, and then I bite my tongue as the winds pick up and the shoe tree begins to glow a pale silvery color like the moon behind us. Ben just stands there, staring at his fingers and the dirty grey wood they rest upon as the branches above ripple and warp.
There has been a lot of weirdness tonight and I have done my best to stay calm through it, but when the tree starts to make crackling sounds I back away quickly. Ben will recover easily from a limb or two falling on his head. I won't.
And then he turns and looks at me, a flash of lightning flickering in his eyes, and simultaneously a thousand thousand buds unfold and the sad old shoes disappear underneath layer upon layer of dark green heart-shaped leaves.
Ben lifts his hand. The glow fades but the leaves and life within remain. I hear a trickle of water; the ground near the newly supple treetrunk shines dark and glossy with moisture that slowly seeps into the riverbed.
"What do you want for Christmas?" he asks as he walks back to the car, his smile slow and sure in the bright light, a shower of fluffy white cotton drifting lazily around us.
"Peace on earth," I reply automatically, a knee-jerk reaction to the age-old question. It's one thing you don't have to worry about fitting in the Camaro's tiny trunk.
"In a week? No, you'll have to wait until next year," he says with a quirky grin, his teeth shining. "How about a case of beer instead?"
"You'll drink it all. Throw in a full ham dinner and it's a deal." I look away from the tree and get into the car. "As long as it's somewhere else, preferably over a couple of state lines."
"You may have a point." He sits on the side of the car and swings those long legs over the passenger side door. "How do you feel about Seacouver?"
"Middling to anxious. Why?" The engine purrs to life as he slides down into the vinyl seat. I pull back onto the empty road.
"I want you to meet an old friend of mine. You'll like him." Ben pauses and fiddles with his seatbelt. "We'll need to get a shovel first, though."
"What?" I cut him off as he opens his mouth. "Scratch that, I don't want to know."
He leans back with a smirk, a bit of confirmation for my suspicions. "Probably for the best."
"Only you would make your wife dig up a cadaver for Christmas." I accelerate, the engine revving cheerfully in fourth gear as I take us through the well-banked curves leading west towards civilization, towards the coast, towards the interstate north. Ahead of us a single meteor streaks across the cloudless night sky.
I make a wish.