Duncan looked up when he felt the buzz and saw Vivianne stalking in,
obviously annoyed. He quietly got his sword and stepped out of the
office.
“Duncan MacLeod, I think it’s about time thee and I had a little chat.” Viv said, coming to a halt in the centre of the room as Mac walked towards her, then stopped a couple of paces away. “From the moment I got here you just haven’t given me a break. You question me, you won’t trust me, you set Rich to following me for Christ’s sake. It’s time we sorted this whole thing out. So if you can step outside a minute we can sort out just exactly who I am.”
“Why go outside? I’ll face you here.” Duncan said, bringing up his sword, sure this was the challenge he had been expecting from the moment she had first walked in.
“Oh for goodness... Right, if the only way you can think is with a sword then I bloody well will...” Viv said, pulling her sword and shoving her hair down the neck of her coat, the best way to secure it she could manage on short notice. Then she lunged for him and the fight began.
For the first few blows Viv was steaming mad and all on the offensive, cutting a few threads in Duncan’s shirt as her speed surprised him yet again, but after that she went cold and calm, then started backing off. Duncan pressed his advantage, Viv backing away, steel clashing as she parried everything he threw at her. She started to look worried, and out of breath. She was a lot more off balance than usual, and Duncan realised she smelled of alcohol and maybe even marijuana. Her sword work got sloppy, she backed up and tripped over on nothing, and Duncan disarmed her. It had only taken seconds. He raised his sword to finish it, hesitated a moment at the fear in her eyes...
“That’s why I’ll never challenge you MacLeod! You don’t have to trust me to know your own skill! You can take me apart without breaking a sweat, and we both know it.” Viv said hurriedly, a little desperately.
Duncan lowered his sword fractionally. “What do you mean, you’ll never challenge me? You just did challenge me.” he demanded.
“That’s what you heard, not what I said. Look, I know, I said it all wrong. So handcuff me or something and I’ll show you what I did mean.” Viv said quickly.
Duncan lowered his sword, still on his guard but not threatening to strike any more. “What the hell did you mean then?”
“There’s a trunk, big blue thing out next to the car. Had a devil of a time getting it down the stairs into the car at my end, I thought you could help me bring it in here. It’s full of stuff, pictures, reports, everything I’ve got from when I was a kid. You think I’m some sort of ruthless ancient cuckoo? I’m not. I’m twenty three years old, I passed five GCSEs and a first aid course in my entire life, there’s precious little documentation says I even exist, but all of it is in that trunk.” Duncan appeared doubtful, but ready to be convinced. “Look, I’ll go get it myself if you’re that dubious. Just... leave my head where it is right now, okay?”
Duncan looked at her. She certainly seemed genuine, but if this was some kind of act then she would have practised... but she didn’t make sense as either what she claimed or as an old Immortal. So... “Show me this trunk then.”
It was there just as she had said, and between them they lugged it up to Mac’s place and dumped it in front of the sofa. Viv kicked the lid open and dumped her bag next to it. She hadn’t tried to pick up her sword again. She sat in front of it and Duncan sat next to her. She definitely smelled like she had been drinking, and at the very least sitting in a very smoky room. She wasn’t exactly steady and she seemed rather out of it.
“So, if you didn’t mean to fight me, why did you pull your sword?” he asked, getting right to the point as she rummaged in the box.
“Newcastle Brown and idiocy.” She admitted. “It’s been a bad week, and a long night, and you can be such a...” in the light of his present mood she thought better of finishing that thought. “Here we are, school photos. Some years I got two, some I got none, I keep them basically so I know no one else can get hold of them. I don’t half look a sight most of the time.” she pulled out a shoe box and handed it to Mac.
He opened it and found a pile of photos, all different sizes, a bit dog eared in some cases, and one of them half way burnt, but all at least probably of the same person. Vivianne Impson, age four onwards.
“That one is St. Pukes. Or St. Luke’s I should say. Boring little middle of nowhere place in some village in Essex.” Viv told him, pointing at a group photo of a dozen five year olds in a hall with a stage at one end and some tatty gym equipment showing. “I could remember the teacher’s name if you want, but she got married after we left. She remembered me well enough to ask after me at the next place. I tend to have that effect.”
“Memorable is one word I could use to describe you.” Duncan confirmed. He flipped through the box, finding picture after picture of a skinny little girl with curly hair that got longer and more unruly in each photo. Then at about age eight the hair got very short and the little girl got rather fatter, and looked in a rather worse mood.
“Ah, now that’s one of the boarding schools they tried to lock me up in. Dad was off to France on one of his contracts, and they didn’t want to lug me along. So they got Nana to spend out on this fancy boarding school, an hour of sports a day and Latin lessons and all that. I couldn’t stand it. They actually sat me down in front of the whole school and played choo choo trains with my food until I cleared my plate once. Which, by the way, Richie had better not find out or I may reconsider the not challenging you thing.”
“Doesn’t look like they needed to worry about you being malnourished. What happened to your hair?”
“Oh, hair cuts cost extra, and all the girls got the same cut anyway. So I did my own. One of those things I got extra breakfast duty for. They had this thing where you had to get up and set the table for breakfast if you got a demerit. Well I’ve never been much of a one for mornings, unless I’ve had a twelve hour run up, so I ended up getting more demerits for being late for breakfast than anything else. By the end of the term I had so many detentions scheduled they were working out a lessons program for me.”
“You stayed there a whole term?” Duncan asked, amused.
“Term and a half, though not by my will, I can tell you. Had summer holidays at Nana’s and I thought I could sneak off and get to France rather than do the new term, but she set the cousins on me and that lot can be right pains in the butt. Just as sneaky as I was and a couple of years older. So I got carted back to boarding school, and of course they’ve got glass along the tops of the walls and all that, them being used to escapes. So I had to wait until the sponsored walk to get out. They set two teachers to watching me, but I paid some of the pre preps a month’s worth of sweets to throw tantrums all at once.” Viv grinned.
Duncan couldn’t help grinning too. He got to the next year’s photo and found one of a disgruntled looking Viv, hair getting longer but curls all gone, sat next to a boy with the same colour brown hair and blue eyes, and grinning or rather grimacing in that ‘get me out of here’ way familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a school photo.
“Who’s this?” He asked, pointing at the boy.
“What, that? Ignore it. It’s just one of them schools that thinks its cute to put the twins together in photos. There was a rather good one of him going flying once I elbowed him off the bench, but he got hold of the only copy. Next topic.” Viv said dismissively, pulling that photo and a couple others like it out of his hand and tossing them back into the trunk.
“Twins? But..”
“Like I said, next topic. Being friends with you isn’t worth talking about that shite.” she said, looking like she had a bad taste in her mouth. Duncan flipped through more photos, found the burnt one had a definite hint of another person’s arm down the edge of where it was scorched. There was definitely a story there. But for now he turned to the trunk and picked up some bits of paper at random.
“Ah, the end of term reports. Thankfully I usually left before I got those. Da used to go ballistic when he got hold of one. Don’t know why, it only says the same things the teachers said about us all year. I think it was more real or official or something in writing.”
There was the usual collection of must do betters, could do betters, punctuality is abysmal, attendance is appalling, and one from the Latin teacher that said simply ‘I Quit’. Duncan looked up at Viv, who was grinning widely. “Had to work hard at that one.” she said proudly.
He turned to the box again and found that under the folder marked ‘Awards’ it turned into a collection of random objects, mostly broken, some of them tacky little tourist souvenirs. He inspected the folder first. There was one fancy card certificate, one carefully folded photocopy, one small pink piece of paper, and two mint biscuits.
“GCSE English Lit grade B, but not language cos I didn’t do the course work. History grade C. Spanish, French and German grade A, the rest I failed outright. Sort of a spotty education.” Viv said, pointing to the card certificate. “I mean, I know the chemistry of turning household goods into things that make at least parts of you high, but they don’t exactly ask that in exams. Same with cars. I know them, inside and out, I can strip them down for parts or put them together from scratch, but I never sat an exam in it in my life. Just sort of picked it up from the cousins. And I could have done a fair essay on politics or certain bits of criminal law, but they don’t tend to ask that at GCSE, and buggered if I’d hang around any longer than necessary letting small people with small minds dictate when I had to get up and sit down. A levels were just that bit too far. So I quit, worked at the family business until my eighteenth, then did the world tour thing.”
“The biscuits?”
“Given out at boarding school number two for academic excellence. Course by then it wasn’t a surprise I was good at French, I had been wandering around more or less looking for Da for the best part of a year. Turned out he’d been back home for half of that, but I was having a good time, so it weren’t too much of a bother.”
“So this is your proof? Some school photos and a GCSE certificate?”
“Well, the photocopy is the closest thing I’ve got to a birth certificate. Not exactly solid proof, I know, but Ma sent the originals off to the tax man and we never seen hide nor hair of them since. I’ve got a passport and NI number card too, but then I have about half a dozen of them in different names so it don’t prove much. I can give you a dozen names and phone numbers of people that will vouch for me, but half of them would say I was thirty or thirteen if I asked them too, and the other half don’t actually know. You can ask any of the schools I went to, if they haven’t all retired then they’ll remember me. I’ve been described as a one girl St Trinians. If you really want, I can tell you the numbers for the olds and olders, but my parents are.. not exactly the sorts who’d make reliable witnesses, you know? And Nana died, so that leaves the great aunts and they only saw me once when I was five.” Viv sounded sincere, and apologetic. First time Mac had seen her sorry for anything. “You do believe me? Don’t you? I’ve spent so much time convincing money men I’m someone else I don’t have much of a clue how to persuade anyone I’m me.” she sighed, then realised that did not sound too good, and sat back on the sofa looking worried. “What I just don’t understand is why you think I’m any older than I say. I mean, let’s face it, it isn’t my mature attitude.”
“Just little things. Like the way you talk. Saying ‘Thee and I’ for instance.”
“The way I talk? Come on Mac, ye cannae tell me ye’ve nae heard a dialect in your life?” Viv said, slipping into a passable Scottish brogue to make her point. “Of course I can talk in perfect BBC English if I so choose.” she switched accents again to demonstrate. “But when I ain’t thinking about it I speak the way I learned, and I learned my English at my Grandma’s knee. She learned way before television evened out the accents. You know she had no trouble reading Mallory? A few hundred years old it might be but the good old Norfolk boys still talk that way. Course I moved around so much I don’t only sound Norfolk. I were born in Longdendale up in the Peak District, we lived in France for a bit before I started school, then off to Sheffield. Its hardly a surprise my accent is a bit confused, it only surprises me anyone can understand it at all.”
Mac examined the photos again. They stopped at age fifteen, but Viv hadn’t changed much since that one. Same height, just a somewhat different build. And her eyes, such a striking shade of almost reflective grey blue, matched those of the girl in all the photographs.
“Okay, I believe you. These look like you. But if you had these since the start why not show me before?”
“Why should I have? Have you any idea how weird you sounded? I walked in here to look for some place to work out. No big deal, I’ve done it in half the towns in America. But here I find a guy who tells me we’re Immortal and a whole load of people just like us are going to try and chop my head off, and by the way I’m your student now and I’ll do as you say. Excuse me for finding this just the teensiest bit dodgy. Right now, I reckon I trust you. More or less. I trust Rich, or at least I did until I caught him sneaking around after me, and he trusts you. I had planned on leaving a long time before now, but you do actually have some stuff to teach me. But I didn’t much fancy dragging out my past for you to rummage through. I mean, most of it I left behind. Some of it I don’t much like to think about. Why talk to you about it?”
“If you don’t want to talk about your past, I can understand that. But why all the secrecy now?”
“Not exactly secrecy. I just don’t talk about work when I’m not there. It’s not so strange. I get off shift and I like to relax, not go through it all again. And besides, Rich knows about my work, he’s met Marcus. It’s no big mystery.”
“So why keep me out of it all?”
“Do you invite your teachers home, or tell them to drop by your work place and tell amusing anecdotes about all the times they’ve knocked you on your arse? Sorry Mac, you seem to be an alright guy, and you aren’t bad looking or anything, it’s just you are my teacher. I never have got on well with any of them. Even subjects I liked. I mean, my first martial arts teacher, he taught us all this really important lesson first thing he got a new kid in his class. He’d stand them up in front of him with all the class watching, and he’d say ‘See this hand?’ then while they were looking he’d thump them one with the other and say ‘You didn’t see that one.’ Then he’d say it again and they would try and watch his hands, and he’d kick their feet out from under them. So then they would watch his hands and his feet and he would just grab them, pick them up and chuck them down. Knock the breath right out of them. He told all the parents it was to teach us awareness, and we learned that all right. We became very aware that he was a big bastard who did his job because he liked beating up on little kids, and we better learn what we could fast as we could to protect ourselves from bastards like that.”
“I’m not like that.”
“There have been times when you could have fooled me. I know I haven’t exactly got a rounded picture of you, seeing you over crossed swords as I usually do, but that’s my point.”
“So you want to know about me?”
“Seems like a good time for it. By my count you owe me a dozen stories.”
“I owe you stories?” Duncan laughed.
“Yeah. That’s how people get to be friends, they swap stories. Most people know this by instinct, but it seems to me you’re one of the sort that need telling.”
“So you want to be friends?” Duncan asked, smiling at her.
>>That’s not the half of what I want of you. >> Viv thought, feeling warm from that smile. “Well, let’s put it this way. I think of us being enemies and I get a little uncomfortable in the neck area, you know?”
“Okay then. Friends.” Duncan said, and held out his hand. Viv shook it, well pleased. “Now as for stories... where to begin...”
“You telling me at four hundred years you don’t have any stories?”
“Oh, just one or two. Like, there was a time after I met Rich when...” and he started telling Viv all the highlights of the past few years, rather edited to leave out any mention of the Watchers or Methos. He made sure Rich came out looking good in all of them, to make up for putting doubts in his young friend’s head. But right then Viv was much more interested in a certain muscular Scot.