Disclaimer: Characters from the television series Highlander are owned by Panzer-Davis productions. I own nothing.
Written, and rejected, for the OnlyDuncanMethos Masturbation challenge. Second of two, the first one being A Little Bit of History Repeating .

Whatever may come, the World Keeps Revolving
Jay Tryfanstone
June 2003

'As for courage, Love "more than matches Ares" the god of war. It is not Ares who captured Love,
but Love who captured Ares,'

Agathon, in Walter Hamilton's translation of Plato's Symposium (Penguin 1951)
"more than matches Ares" is an internal quotation from Sophocles' Thyestes.

The man at the corner of the bar is reading. His dark head is bent, and one hand curls protectively around the pages of the battered paperback. His other hand moves slowly, meditatively, up and down the cool narrow neck of the battle of beer that stands by the book. He's reading Genet.

Duncan MacLeod had at least the vestiges of a classical education. Unlike many a ranking clan son before him, an only, precious child, he'd not gone to Paris to complete his education, but his Uncle Rabbie and his cousins had been making the trip across the Irish Sea before for years before he conjugated his first Latin verb.

He knew who Aristogiton and Harmodius were. As a boy, his heart had quickened for the star-crossed lovers. He'd been lucky, for his Uncle Rabbie was a man with a tolerence for the mores of other civilisations that sat only a little counter to elderly Father Lyell - "What, again? Say five Ave Marias, boy, I'll not ask you not to do it, for a man should never break his word..."

No guesses as to why his mind ran on a dual track of frustration and desire. He'd never thought Methos would wimp out on him. The only question had been finding the right bait, and he thought he'd had it. The opposition of chaos to order: sense to intelligence, passion to love: caught on the cross of his own paradox, Duncan MacLeod burned.

He woke too late. There was only one Immortal who could slide under his defence like a knife between the ribs, but he did not know the woman who stood fifteen feet from his bed with a gun pointed, unwavering, at his body. She had no Immortal prescence, but the lift of her head and her sturdy, lean hands on the gun said clearly that here was someone to reckon with. It was said again with her clothes. She wore leather dull and worn, skintight, and her black hair was cut short and close as a skullcap.

She said nothing, as he blinked, and brought his hands slowly from under the covers so that she could see they were empty. The gun he did not recognise, but the muzzle of it was wide and very black and pointed, not at his head, but at his crotch.

He sat up, very slowly, letting the covers fall back, and then he saw the man in the doorway. Winged in black, face tilted into the shadow, almost invisible: still Duncan's body lit with flame. He gasped with the heat of it, for he knew then that Methos had picked up the gauntlet he'd thrown down three weeks before, late one night, in a hotel room in Atlanta.

"Good evening, MacLeod," Methos said. He said it lightly, laid the words down with an edge of precision sharp as ice.

"Methos," Duncan said, and inclined his head.

The older Immortal stepped forward, letting the door swing to behind him. The way he walked was extraordinary, entirely self aware and strung with a tension Duncan could feel. The man he faced was not his friend Adam.

Then the man who had been Adam turned his head and smiled. It was the smile of a hunting tigress, entirely feral, and as he smiled he walked forward, and as he walked forward the wings of his coat spread so that Duncan could see the black webbing and the dull gleam of arnament and the slight stiffness of the fabric as it fell over steel.

"Did you really want to call me to war in such a cause, Highlander?" he asked.

"I don't walk away," Duncan said, although his heart was beating faster than he would have liked and his breath shorter.

"You might regret that," Methos said. His voice drew the words out, made of them a maleficent benediction.

"Placet," Duncan said, and bent his head in salute. When he looked up again Methos looked - and only because he had made a study of the man could he have seen it - slightly disconcerted. But the long, thin line of his lips was still compressed and the blaze of his eyes, all the hazel fled to green, was entirely alien.

Methos had come to a halt beside the other player in the game. She did not look at him as he drew one finger down the long, clean line of her jawbone and the smooth curve of her shoulder: her eyes held the Highlander in her sights.

"Let me introduce you," Methos said. "This is Melaenis. But in this day and age you can call her Shiva and she will call you Duncan. But on the whole.." He paused. "On the whole, my dear, I think I would prefer it if you said nothing at all."

For a long moment Immortal gazed at Immortal, age to youth, ice to fire. Duncan could feel his breath hitch and clamour in his throat: he was beginning to wonder if he had the strength for what must come.

"Don't worry," Methos said, lightly, clearly, "Neither of us will lay a finger on you...Stand up!"

Duncan stood. The bedclothes rushed away from him is a flurry of departing warmth and feathers: he was naked underneath, stripped bare. He was watching Methos' eyes, for he had learned long ago that..yes, the darkening, unmistakable. Then Methos looked him up and down, once, twice, not with desire but with a cool and calculating asessment, and the Highlander felt himself blush crimson under those eyes. The gun had moved with him. Odd, he had never thought Methos would kill him, but there was something about the way this woman stood so still and yet so tensed, as if she held in leash an appetite blood red and ravenous, that made him think she would kill without conpunction.

Then he remembered what he had done, so although it cost him (he could feel the ashes of his pride sift around his feet in the lost warmth of the sheets) he stood straight and proud in front of the man he had challenged.

"Oh, good," Methos said, and his voice was barely breath now, low and singing. "Oh yes. You remembered who you are, didn't you? But I will take that." He said, and his voice was harsh now. "I will take it and break it and make you forget. You'll crawl to my feet, MacLeod, and forget your pretty little playthings..Love." Methos said, and contempt clotted and ran around the words. "Love is a game for fools..."

"You are wrong," Duncan said. He could not match the other man's power, but his conviction was as strong and his honour, even here, inviolate.

He could hear the air hiss through Methos' teeth. "I want you against the wall, Highlander. Move."

The older immortal did not even watch Duncan walk to the bare wall and lean against it, glad of the cool plaster on his flushed skin and the support: Methos was running one hand, very slowly, over the cropped hair that lay like fox fur on Shiva's skull. The gun followed him all the way, and the woman's eyes.

Then Methos said simply. "You know what I want."

And he did. Without the edge of humiliation Methos expected, without the fear or the submission the other man said he wanted, that would separate sex from love. But he took it slowly, for this was the only chance he would have. He spread his legs, and felt the smooth warmth of the planks under his bare feet, the way his toes arched into the wood for grip. He tightened the muscles of his thighs and his belly, lent his head back against the wall and took the clip out of his hair, letting it fall, welcome soft warmth, onto his skin. He drew the light, he knew it, and he made of his body both supplicant and altar, display and lure. When he touched his fingertips to his skin for the first time he knew that this was something he did for both of them, for his blazing passion and for Methos' own, denied, desire. Else why this? He trailed fingernails across the fine hair of his belly and offered up sensation. See, look, how the skin reddens at a touch, rises: how it stirs under touch. Watch. I harden for you, nipples, cock: the shape of my body, the air I breath, this is for you. He touched his thumb to his nipple and gasped, and the sound of it was a prayer: when he wet his fingers and pinched the flesh red, sharp pain, it was the pain of sacrifice answered. He did not need to see the tension in Methos' body to know the other man breathed with him, felt with him: he knew.

Look, Methos. See how my cock fills for you, strains for you: when I run my fingertips up the length of it it's your touch I feel on my skin and your breath on my body. When I cry out as a thumb circles the tip, it's your hand and your mouth I fill with pleasure. When my balls tighten, they echo your body: when I touch them, it's your tongue and your teeth that hold my vulnerability safe. When I shudder, it's your hands that keep me centred, it's the sound of your voice, silent, that hallows the groans I do not disguise. This is for you.

"Beloved," Duncan says, when he comes. He comes with his hands flung back against the wall and his eyes glinting through his lashes: he will not, even now, let go. He offers it all, the rhythm of his body in extremis, the dance of his cock, the sweat and the tears and the white essence of what makes him a man.

And he is answered.

It was the moment when the world turns, and in turning, moves on. He could see it in the astonished, humbled eyes of the man who looks back at him, a reflection of self. He could see it in the passion that holds him still, afraid to move, as if moving will spill the cup of love between them... "Don't move," Duncan says, and finds the strength to walk forward. "Don't move."

He barely notices the woman turn and bow her head, to the man who had been Death, and leave. He is close enough to touch when she slips out the door. When he raises his hand to Methos' cheek the other man sighs into it, stricken: when he slides his hand into Methos' hair and holds his face steady for the first, immolating kiss he takes this convoluted soul in his hands and spreads it before the fire of his body.

"I never thought.." Methos says, broken, for his body is shaking and his eyesight blurred "I never knew you could do this.."

"Fool," Duncan says tenderly, pulling all these angular, beloved bones and skin, heart and eyes, soul, heat into the cradle of his arms. "How can I be frightened of something which is part of my own soul? Laugh with me, brother, here is your home."


Fin.