"The Three Deaths Of Sam Westing." (Highlander/The Westing Game) G
Title: The Three Deaths Of Sam Westing. (On Archive Of Our Own)
Author:
lannamichaels
Fandoms: Highlander: The Series, The Westing Game
Rating: G
A/N: Thanks, dream!Lanna! Although to be scrupulously honest, this was not, in fact, the fic I was writing in that dream. Warning for character death.
Summary: Oh, beautiful.
1.
Windy Windkloppel died badly.
He lost so much to become Sam Westing. It had always been a role he played; in another life, Berthe used to tell him, he'd've become an actor. Maybe he'd've liked that better.
And then she'd sacrificed their daughter to her ambitions, after he'd sacrificed everything else to his ambitions. She'd left him. He'd divorced her. He'd lost everything, again.
He still had Westingtown. He still had Sam Westing. He still had everything but what he'd lost.
Sam Westing died in a car crash. Windy Windkloppel died earlier.
Both of them died badly.
2.
Windy and Sidney Sikes crawled their way back together. Windy had been hurt much worse than Sidney had been, but Sidney took much longer to recover. Only one of them was now Immortal.
As the coroner, Sidney knew all about Immortals, and he'd been Windy's doctor for decades. Their closeness was expected. Their closeness wasn't suspicious. Together, they recovered, encased in Windy's bereft mansion. Windy wrote Sidney's reports for his mysterious superiors and Sidney helped Windy learn what he needed to know. Windy had always played games; Sidney told him about one that he couldn't escape now. The stakes were high, but they were as high as the game Windy had been born into. To lose the game was to die.
Windy got a new name; Sidney helped with that, too.
Sidney was writing poetry about him now, along with a chronicle. The capitalist at dusk, Sidney mused at him. They played pool in the afternoons. Julian Eastman attended to the business of Sam Westing's life's work. Windy was learning a new life.
Violet never had this chance.
What would it have been like, Windy had sometimes wondered, if Violet had been like him instead of like Berthe? If Violet had had a head on her shoulders to match his? He'd never have made a daughter of his get married to some politician. No, she was Berthe's daughter, a daughter for connections; she was Windy's daughter, a daughter for poverty. She wanted to be a teacher. She had no dreams or ambitions. Sam Westing's daughter would have been an industrial heiress. She wasn't the daughter he wanted. She was the daughter he lost. He'd blamed Berthe for it; Berthe had blamed herself. That agreement had driven Berthe from him. What would Berthe make of him now, her dead divorced husband still wandering around?
He couldn't have more children now. He had another chance at life, but not that kind. Sidney had brushed over that detail like he assumed it wouldn't matter to Windy, and it didn't, not too much. Windy'd never put too much stock in bloodlines. He knew he came from nothing and no one. His relatives contacted him every few years to ask for money; sometimes he sent it, mostly he ignored them. They could have done what he did. They could have dug their way into prosperity, no matter what they had to crawl through.
And he'd crawled all the way through and come out on the other side, clutching the truest prize of them all: Life.
Forever.
"You always were an actor," Berthe's voice accused him in his head and he nodded in acknowledgment. That was what would help him the most now. Windy Windkloppel was an actor.
Windy Windkloppel knew how to be someone else.
3.
Windy drank poison, timed for maximum theatrical impact, to scare his heirs, for one final laugh, to see Berthe's face as she recognized him and realized what he'd done to himself.
Windy drank poison, timed for maximum theatrical impact, to comfort Turtle, for one final laugh, to have the death he had prophesized for himself.
Sammy Windsman left the next morning with the movers he'd scheduled a week ago. He'd been laying the make-up on with a heavy hand these past few years; he hadn't recognized himself this morning. He'd aged back to a new man, staring at himself, touching his cheeks, thinking, is this me? Is this an impostor? Who stares back at me, when I stare at him?
An actor. Sammy Windsman was an actor. Sammy Windsman was mid-forties. Sammy Windsman was looking for a new path through life. Sammy Windsman was going to take the world by storm.
Sammy Windsman had thirty million dollars in untouchable accounts that not even Turtle knew about. Windy'd been dirt poor before. The one thing he wouldn't be again was that.
4.
He stood at the edge of the millennium. Him, a man born in 1913. A man born to die before age twenty, spat out by America, but it wasn't, he wasn't. His life could have happened nowhere else. Nowhere else could have made Sam Westing.
He celebrated the millennium on the shores of the Atlantic, braced against the cold, feeling it in his bones, and singing in his heart was the siren song: America! America!
If he had never died, he never would have stood here. If he had never died, he never could have left. He would have clung to Sam Westing and to Julian Eastman. He had only left because he couldn't hold back Turtle anymore. He wouldn't hold back Turtle anymore. He'd finally had a daughter of his own. An industrial heiress, a woman strong enough to shoulder a town, a capitalist in his mold. She stood as a vanguard of the future. He had gotten out of her way.
From the shores of Lake Michigan, where he had built himself and bought a name. To the Atlantic, where the new era found him, a different name for a different life. There was one more horizon left to search out.
Sea to shining sea.
5.
Windy Windkloppel died badly.
His sword clattered somewhere in the distance as it hit the ground and it was not the Fourth of July. His Quickening would be the fireworks, but for no celebration, no patriotism, no parade.
On his knees, he lifted his chin toward the spacious skies, dawn peaking in at the edges. It all went through his head from the beginning. His parents. The company. The town. Berthe. Violet.
Turtle.
He'd done well, hadn't he? He'd played the cruel game created for him from birth and he'd won it. He'd crafted a much kinder game and found someone who could win it. Turtle Wexler was his greatest invention. She would outlive him now, as great inventions should.
I'm coming, Berthe, he thought. Violet. Sidney. I'm coming.
Only Berthe would ever have mourned Windy Windkloppel. He had been a penniless boy scrambling to make his fortune, desperate not to die alone and forgotten. Sam Westing had mercifully disposed of him long ago. No one would forget Sam Westing. Westingtown had thrown two funerals for him.
No one would ever care how Windy Windkloppel died.
The sword arced in the air. "There can be only one."
Windy smiled. "No," he said. "There were a lot more of me than that."
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1197211.html.