(no subject)
Happy birthday to me! And since I requested crossover fic, I feel I ought to offer something up on my own behalf--a hobbit birthday-present, if you will. nestra reminded me that this was on my hard drive, and someone else--cgb?--that there is no fandom that can't be improved by a crossover with Highlander.
I should warn that this is entirely self-indulgent, untitled and without beta. And the cameo by Death in part 2 is purely a fluke. Part three (to be posted later, really) has humor and Rambaldi.
Untitled Alias/HL crossover
Author: vanzetti
1.
The worst part of Adam Pierson's morning was not the cold Paris rain dripping into his office on the top floor of a decrepit Sorbonne faculty building. Nor was it the bright-eyed little man who turned up in his office, or even the manuscript the little man unrolled on his work-table.
"I'm told you can identify this script, Dr. Pierson."
Adam stared down his nose at the parchment. A fragment of something larger: he could see notation in Italian running down one side, referring perhaps to some lost diagram. "Akkadian cuneiform," he said. "Reproduced in pen-and-ink, of course, rather than on the original clay tablet."
"Really?" the little man said. "Surely Akkadian wasn't understood during the fifteenth century?"
"The fifteenth century A.D.? Certainly not." Years in French academia provided the precise degree of horrified disparagement necessary in this instance. "Were you told that this manuscript dated from the fifteenth century? I'm afraid, Monsieur Sloane, that you have been sold a fake."
"A fake," Sloane murmured. "In that case, I'm sorry to have wasted your time." He didn't sound sorry. "But I don't suppose that you could tell me what it says? Merely for curiosity's sake, of course."
"If you like." He frowned at the parchment and read, "It appears to be a version of Ishtar's decent to the underworld. 'If you do not open the door, that I may enter, I will smash the door and break the bolt; I will smash the doorposts and remove the doors. I will make the dead rise up to eat the living, that the dead will be more numerous than the living.' Self-explanatory, I should think."
"'I will make the dead rise up to eat the living,'" Sloane repeated. "Thank you for your patience." He looked far too cheerful for a man who'd just learned that his no-doubt expensive fifteenth century manuscript was a forgery.
Bloody Rambaldi. Methos should never have taught him Akkadian in the first place.
2.
The last time Methos had had anything to do with Rambaldi's legacy, it had been the preserve of cloistered academics and eccentric aristocrats, which explained his failure to take any unusual precautions on the way home for lunch.
He came back to life with the taste of dirt and blood and plastic in his mouth, kicked out reflexively and felt himself struggling against some restraint. A tight, dark place, the first moment of terror--buried alive, god, no, not again--allayed by the rattle and growl of the engine and the bumps of the road beneath tires. He was in a car. In the trunk of a car and, as far as he could tell, wrapped in a tarp. He wriggled against its bounds, and felt something hard sliding across it. A case of some kind, and something smaller.
Could it be? He wasn't tied up. They must have meant to kill him. And of course no one ever worried about leaving the guns in the trunk along with the corpse.
Disentangling himself from the tarp was slow and awkward. He controlled his breathing--the tarp would suffocate him if he wasn't careful. At one point, before his arms were free, the car stopped for a long time and he froze, convinced that they were about to come around the back and haul him out. But then they began to move again, and to pick up speed. They were on an autoroute, he guessed. Good. Another fifteen minutes of dedicated wriggling had him out of the tarp; after that it was no trouble to open the case with the guns in it and arrange the tarp over his body.
The idiots did most of the work for him, driving the car to a secluded spot with a nice little lake to dump the body in. Methos listened for voices and counted footsteps: two, or not, he thought, three. Three men. Then up went the hood of the trunk and one of them pulled off the tarp--no time to let his eyes adjust to daylight, he let his ears guide them and killed the first two as they stood gaping over him. One more, then. He lifted himself, slow and careful, up out of the trunk--then dropped back as a bullet clipped the side of the car.
His eyes were barely open: just enough to see the play of light and shadow. He could here the rush of traffic on the autoroute, somewhere nearby, and the lap of water in the lake. A crow called. And there: rustle of clothing and a footfall. He levered himself up and turned, one shot, a gasping cry, and that was all. Just the car, the lake, and the dead bodies. Not enough tarp to go around, either.
tbc
And Rez--thanks for the present! I'm off to read!
I should warn that this is entirely self-indulgent, untitled and without beta. And the cameo by Death in part 2 is purely a fluke. Part three (to be posted later, really) has humor and Rambaldi.
Untitled Alias/HL crossover
Author: vanzetti
1.
The worst part of Adam Pierson's morning was not the cold Paris rain dripping into his office on the top floor of a decrepit Sorbonne faculty building. Nor was it the bright-eyed little man who turned up in his office, or even the manuscript the little man unrolled on his work-table.
"I'm told you can identify this script, Dr. Pierson."
Adam stared down his nose at the parchment. A fragment of something larger: he could see notation in Italian running down one side, referring perhaps to some lost diagram. "Akkadian cuneiform," he said. "Reproduced in pen-and-ink, of course, rather than on the original clay tablet."
"Really?" the little man said. "Surely Akkadian wasn't understood during the fifteenth century?"
"The fifteenth century A.D.? Certainly not." Years in French academia provided the precise degree of horrified disparagement necessary in this instance. "Were you told that this manuscript dated from the fifteenth century? I'm afraid, Monsieur Sloane, that you have been sold a fake."
"A fake," Sloane murmured. "In that case, I'm sorry to have wasted your time." He didn't sound sorry. "But I don't suppose that you could tell me what it says? Merely for curiosity's sake, of course."
"If you like." He frowned at the parchment and read, "It appears to be a version of Ishtar's decent to the underworld. 'If you do not open the door, that I may enter, I will smash the door and break the bolt; I will smash the doorposts and remove the doors. I will make the dead rise up to eat the living, that the dead will be more numerous than the living.' Self-explanatory, I should think."
"'I will make the dead rise up to eat the living,'" Sloane repeated. "Thank you for your patience." He looked far too cheerful for a man who'd just learned that his no-doubt expensive fifteenth century manuscript was a forgery.
Bloody Rambaldi. Methos should never have taught him Akkadian in the first place.
2.
The last time Methos had had anything to do with Rambaldi's legacy, it had been the preserve of cloistered academics and eccentric aristocrats, which explained his failure to take any unusual precautions on the way home for lunch.
He came back to life with the taste of dirt and blood and plastic in his mouth, kicked out reflexively and felt himself struggling against some restraint. A tight, dark place, the first moment of terror--buried alive, god, no, not again--allayed by the rattle and growl of the engine and the bumps of the road beneath tires. He was in a car. In the trunk of a car and, as far as he could tell, wrapped in a tarp. He wriggled against its bounds, and felt something hard sliding across it. A case of some kind, and something smaller.
Could it be? He wasn't tied up. They must have meant to kill him. And of course no one ever worried about leaving the guns in the trunk along with the corpse.
Disentangling himself from the tarp was slow and awkward. He controlled his breathing--the tarp would suffocate him if he wasn't careful. At one point, before his arms were free, the car stopped for a long time and he froze, convinced that they were about to come around the back and haul him out. But then they began to move again, and to pick up speed. They were on an autoroute, he guessed. Good. Another fifteen minutes of dedicated wriggling had him out of the tarp; after that it was no trouble to open the case with the guns in it and arrange the tarp over his body.
The idiots did most of the work for him, driving the car to a secluded spot with a nice little lake to dump the body in. Methos listened for voices and counted footsteps: two, or not, he thought, three. Three men. Then up went the hood of the trunk and one of them pulled off the tarp--no time to let his eyes adjust to daylight, he let his ears guide them and killed the first two as they stood gaping over him. One more, then. He lifted himself, slow and careful, up out of the trunk--then dropped back as a bullet clipped the side of the car.
His eyes were barely open: just enough to see the play of light and shadow. He could here the rush of traffic on the autoroute, somewhere nearby, and the lap of water in the lake. A crow called. And there: rustle of clothing and a footfall. He levered himself up and turned, one shot, a gasping cry, and that was all. Just the car, the lake, and the dead bodies. Not enough tarp to go around, either.
tbc
And Rez--thanks for the present! I'm off to read!