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Deb waved one last time to the bartender as she left the Bonded Blade; she’d have to cut down on her visits to the Blade. She was beginning to slip into a routine, and routines could be traced. She still hadn’t developed that healthy dose of paranoia that kept most Immortals on their toes. After all, who would want someone like her?
It took a couple of tugs on her coat/cloak before the fabric would lie smoothly over her hidden sword; somehow being without it for a while required a period of readjustment. The sense of a Buzz tugged at her awareness, guiding her towards the mouth of an alley. As usual, she knew the feel of it, as individual as a fingerprint. "Cassandra? Don’t worry, it’s only me…"
There was a movement in the alley, a shadow within a shadow. It all happened with terrifying speed; in an instant she found herself pinned against a building wall, the point of a blade hooked under her chin. She couldn’t side step, couldn’t retreat, and any attempt at ducking would be hazardous to her health. A whisper from the shadows, "I taught you better than this!"
Deb sincerely wished that all Immortal lessons didn’t need to be quite so severe. She spoke quickly, the words coming out in a rush; "Yes, I know; I was careless. But the only reason I wasn’t on guard was because I knew it was you. No one can hide the feel of their Q. Except maybe Methos—"
The mere mention of that name provoked a hissing intake of breath; the sword tip jerked suddenly and Deb could feel the warmth of the first few drops of blood. "That monster; that Beast! You wanted me to go back to him. I will never go back to him." For the first time, Deb could see the other woman: her hair wild, skin pale, sweat on her brow, her green eyes almost glowing with a kind of mania. "Never again! Do you know how many times he raped me, how many times he killed me?"
Deb didn’t really fear for her life, adrenaline still coloured everything with a sense of unreality. What was truly frightening was seeing her mentor, such a strong, beautiful, self-reliant woman, reduced to such a state. She couldn’t keep the note of panic out of her voice; "Please Cass, let’s talk about this; while I still have all parts of my anatomy intact." Her eyes turned aside; she didn’t dare look into those eyes any more than she would lock gazes with a mad dog.
She thought she saw someone approaching, someone she could see but not feel. There was a sizzling sound and a smell of ozone; Cassandra crumpled to the ground. Deb gaped at the sight of Stephen, blue sparks still crackling from his stunner as he watched the limp body for movement. He looked up, surprised to see her still there, "Go on! I’ve already done more than I should; now, go, go!"
She ran blindly, sprinting for the nearest Holy Ground site. Slamming the heavy church door behind her, she leaned on it wearily. In a kind of shock, she reached up to see if she was still bleeding. Her fingers were barely spotted with red, but it was undeniable evidence that whole nightmare encounter had been real. You wanted me to go back to him. Had her innocent little jukebox experiment finally driven her teacher over the edge? She had never imagined, never tried to imagine what those years must have been like. She remembered the anguish in the witch-woman’s voice; the helpless pleading of an abused ex-slave: Do you know how many times he raped me, how many times he killed me? A quick sweep of the room revealed that the church was empty: good, Deb wasn’t sure if she could have coped with a priest or worse, a congregation, in her condition. Just as she was starting to relax, there was a pounding on the door. "Traitor!"
Deb opened the tiniest crack in the door, "Look, I made a mistake. Why don’t you come inside and we can talk about this?"
"Why don’t you come out here and we won’t have to talk!" Before Deb could shut herself in again, a sword blade was jammed into the crack as Cassandra tried to lever open the door. The fact that she was resorting to such brute force attacks said much for her state of mind. Deb knew though, that it wouldn’t take long for the witch-woman to calm down enough to try and Voice her out. Deb’s own Talents ran more toward physical than mental manipulation; nonetheless it took almost all her energy to kinetically shove her attacker away from the door.
Deb didn’t realise she had blacked out until she found herself stretched out on the cold stone floor, a potentially fatal mistake. Scrambling to her feet, she retreated into the interior to plan. Reaching into her pocket, she discovered she still had her cell phone. She looked down at the handset uncertainly, calling for help felt so much like failure. The sight of Methos would surely provoke a war and besides, he could only be contacted when he wanted to be found. She couldn’t take the ten-year lecture she’d get from MacLeod, even if she were willing to run to him for a rescue again. That only left one choice; dialling quickly, she muttered a small prayer as she counted rings. Answer; please let her answer…
She heard a perky voice; "Amanda’s phone!"
"Sheila, you have got to get out of the habit of answering other people’s cell phones." Deb paused for breath, not liking the ominous silence outside; "I don’t have time for this! I need to talk to Amanda, NOW."
Concern wiped the cheerfulness from the woman’s voice. "Where are you?"
"I’ve been cornered on Holy Ground by a green-eyed Witch and she’s gone completely off the deep end."
"Cornered? By a… Oooh! She’s right here." There was a pause as the phone was passed over and Deb quickly repeated her dilemma.
Amanda sounded shocked and amazed; "Cassandra? She’s your mentor; what in Heaven’s name did you do to her?"
Suddenly it all sounded so ridiculous, even in her own mind. "Last week, at the Blade, I sort of—well, I tried to get her and Methos back together again…."
"Get them back together? They never were together; he owned her!"
"Yeah, I’ve figured that out, now. Obviously it didn’t work; she was pretty angry at the time, but that was it. Now it looks like there was a lot more damage than I thought. It’s like she doesn’t know where she is, or when. She seems fixated on a time just after she first escaped from the Horsemen. She keeps screaming ‘I won’t go back to him, I’ll never go back!’ She needed something to lash out at, and I was the first target she saw."
There was a long deep sigh on the line, so unlike Amanda’s customary confident air. "Can’t you call the Boy Scout on this one? He knows her, and her problems, so much better than I."
Rape. "I really don’t think having a man around would be too healthy, for anyone involved." A man around: God, did Cassandra know who attacked her in the alley? Deb hoped that Stephen had sense enough to keep his head down. Bloody Hell, she wasn’t even supposed to know who her Watcher was, never mind worrying about him.
She turned her attention back to the phone; Amanda sounded as if she finally understood the severity of the situation. "Stay put, we’ll be there as soon as possible."
"We? Wait, Sheila’s not ready for this kind of thing yet!" Too late, the line was empty, as if she didn’t have enough to worry about already.
Stay put, she says, as if I have
a choice. Deb huddled in one of the pews, reviewing everything she
had learned from her mentor, all the elder woman’s considerable skills.
She knew of only two defences against a Voice attack: one was pure willpower;
the other was to not hear it at all. Not trusting her own mental state,
Deb blasted her ears with music, heart-pounding marches from a Lucas soundtrack,
until the batteries ran dry on her Discman. Even afterward, she kept the
earphones in place, just to hear the hissing white noise.
§ § §
Elsewhere, two women dropped everything (including some great bargains) to help a good friend. Sheila insisted on coming; she may not know much about Immortals yet, but she did know a thing or two about women in crisis. She gave what advice she could quickly and succinctly on the trip across town. "Victims of abuse never completely recover from their experiences; events years later can set off a fight-or-flight reaction—"
"I think this time we can narrow that down a bit, don’t you think? We’re definitely going to be dealing with Fight here."
Sheila nodded, ignoring the interruption; "All the more reason for us to be as unthreatening as possible: come in slowly, unarmed."
"We have to be non-threatening? She’s the one who’s attacking her student."
"She’s not attacking her student, not in her own mind. She’s attacking her abuser, the only way she can."
The dispute broke off before they got close, but it was never truly resolved. They made their final approach on foot; slowly, without appearing to be a danger. Against all her deepest survival instincts, Amanda threw aside her blade, far out of reach, as soon as Cassandra felt her coming. Sheila, unarmed and untrained, merely held up both empty hands in an open gesture. "We’re not here to hurt you. No one here is going to hurt you." This last was spoken more emphatically, a warning to the Watcher to stay out of sight.
Cassandra spun around, feeling the intruders trying to ambush her. She hesitated as one of them threw aside her weapon and the other seemed to surrender. A confused, almost childlike expression flickered across her face; a slow, tentative finger pointed to Amanda, "I’m not supposed to know you, yet." She turned to the unarmed woman, a fiery redhead like herself; "You I don’t know at all."
Amanda stepped forward with elaborate care, "It’s later than you think. The world has changed, and so have you. You don’t have to be a victim anymore." The redhead shot Amanda a you’re not helping glare and, surprisingly, the thief backed down.
Deb used the distraction to sneak out into the open. She slid under the entrance steps, painfully reminded of her younger days, hiding under the basement stairs while her parents argued. The same anxiety fluttered in her stomach, the shocked realisation that a loved one could be dangerous. Before she was halfway under cover, she noticed her Watcher huddled there, a pistol in one hand, a cell phone in the other. Stress gave her whisper a hissing edge; "You use either one of those, I’ll kill you myself." Without enough room to hide them both, she made for a nearby tree in a crouching sprint. On the way, she overheard the first exchange, amazed that even the Donkey could silence Amanda.
Motioning Amanda to back off, Sheila stepped forward herself, without violating the woman’s personal space. Her voice was calm, steady; "You’re right, you don’t know me. My name is Sheila Woodyard. I don’t want to hurt you; I’m a friend. I know what you’ve been through…"
"You can’t understand what HE did to me," Cassandra interrupted angrily. "No one can."
Sheila ignored the verbal attack, continuing without hesitation. "No Cass, I can’t relate to the death, to the killings. You are so right about that, but I can relate to the beatings, the forced sexual acts, the feeling of total worthlessness and shame. I know how it feels to be bruised and battered and to have to lie about how it happened. I know what it’s like not to be able to tell anyone, or do anything about it." As the words poured out, her voice rose, until, without her realising it, she was almost shouting: "I know what it is to live in constant fear of it happening again!"
With great effort, Sheila reigned in her emotions; taking a deep breath, she exhaled a slow, calming breath. "I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell, but after 6 or 7 different ‘incidents’ of my own, the anger sometimes rises to the surface faster than I can keep it in check. That is why I quit working the Crisis Lines; I was too personally involved."
Cassandra flinched at the sudden sharp tone, suppressing the reaction instantly. Anger still burned hot within her, and she had no intention of being counselled. She voice dripped sarcasm, "And I suppose you’ve got my best interests at heart." One hand waved vaguely in the direction of the church; "Just like her. You all want me to go back to HIM!"
"No Cass, that is the furthest thing from my mind. I would never send you back to the monster that did this to you! The Gods only know what I would have done to myself—what I would still try—if someone tried to do that to me." Slowly she pulled up both sleeves, revealing a precise geometric pattern of scars; marks she made into her flesh in a moment of despair, now fixed in place forever. "I gained these scars;" Cassandra’s shocked reaction was half gasp, half sigh; "for damned good reasons! I want to be your friend, someone to talk to when this hits you; someone who knows and understands. Trust me girl, if it was not for some of my own personal safety shields I built up over the years, who knows what may have happened. I also know that we are destined to have these flashbacks—that’s what’s happening to you right now—and there is no earthly way we will ever be able to combat them. Please let me be your friend and personal Sounding Board. I do want to help, in whatever way I can."
Cassandra’s wariness toward the younger Immortal was fading, but she sent a quick glare behind her. "How can I trust my secrets to you as a friend if I cannot even trust my own student? She wants to turn a nightmare into a fairy tale; she thinks everything will have a happy ending if you just try hard enough!"
Sighing, Sheila simply shrugged her shoulders. After taking another deep breath, she continued. "Cass, I understand what you are saying. It took me years to find somebody I could talk to, and even now I can’t tell him everything yet." That statement drew a gasp and a puzzled look from the witch. The words "A MALE?!?" burst from her lips; "After everything you say you’ve been through?"
"Yes, a man. But you have to realise that he’s someone who is very close to me, who went through Hell and back again with me. Now that I am what I have become, I will never be able to share with him like that again…he thinks I’m dead. Talk about ripping off a limb! Seriously, the two of us were like brother and sister, and I was never close to my own family. As for fairy tale endings; well, sometimes, for some people, it really does happen." Another shrug; "Not for Immortals, I guess, but you have to remember, she is a writer! She may have her head in the clouds—" Sheila quickly realised this was not a good time to mention the word head, but she forged ahead before Cassandra noticed; "but her heart’s in the right place."
Cassandra hesitated, that same child-like expression flashing briefly in her eyes. She sighed, "Yes, they go so quickly don’t they? We will never have anything resembling a Lifelong Friend again." It was the first sign of sympathy, or perhaps empathy, that she has shown so far.
"So true, which is why those friendships we do make now are so important." Sheila stopped, instinctively wiping away the tear that was forming; sniffing faintly, she continued her response. "I am being truly honest and earnest with you when I say I want to be your friend. You’d be able to trust me with your deepest secrets, your complaints, thoughts; as well as your life. Just ask anyone who’s ever known me. Please?"
A crooked smile tugged at a corner of her mouth, faint but genuine. "You must be new, or else you wouldn’t promise a life so quickly. But you do make sense for a Youngling. I think I like you."
Sheila returned the smile, replying, "That’s true, I am young, but I do take my friendships seriously. What do you think of us leaving here and going for a pizza or something, so we can talk in relative privacy? We can get to know each other better before diving into our sordid pasts. I know a great spot near here that uses all natural ingredients and a wholewheat crust. No additives, no preservatives!"
For the first time, Cassandra’s musical
laughter rang through the air. "As if Our Kind has any need for preservatives!"
She took a few cautious steps toward Sheila before turning around slowly.
"Thief? Dreamer? Are you two coming or not?"
§ § §
The group took over an entire corner of the pizza place for several hours, the conversation ranging from the profound to the ridiculous. Things finally seemed as close to normal as it would get, but Deb still felt there was something that needed to be done. Listening to the heart-rending stories on both sides had driven her to tears more than once. She knew that it would take a lot more than she could do to bring the two Elders together, if that ever happened at all. She needed to apologise.
She reached a hand across the table; "Teacher, mentor, friend; I hope you understand, I never wanted you to go back. I wanted you to move forward. The Horsemen cast a very long shadow, and you were never truly out from underneath it. I only wanted to see what you looked like in the light. Do you forgive me?"
Cassandra’s smile warred with the hard expression in her eyes. "You can be forgiven, you meant well. But the Last Horseman can stay in his own Hell for all I care!"
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