Author's Notes: This was written in response to Rhiannon's summer challenge to write a story from a Watcher's POV.  I am using two of her original characters with her permission.  Joe Dawson does not belong to me and, although they are only mentioned in passing, neither do Duncan MacLeod and Methos.  They are the property of Davis/Panzer Productions and I only own them in my dreams.  I'm taking them out for a brisk walk and will return them undamaged.  Everyone else belongs to me.  So far, Davis/Panzer has not agreed to a trade.

Rated:  PG-13 for no more violence than you'd find in a televised episode.

Counterpoint
by Gyrfalcon

 

Seacouver

Looking at his journal, Dylan Scott reached for his beer and settled back to enjoy a quiet evening of beer, blues, and air conditioning.  He didn't mind spending the entire weekend in a tent, he'd spent most weekends that way in the past year, but the Northwest was supposed to be cool, not baking under a freak heat wave.  Add to that, the fact that his Society for Creative Anachronism persona was from the fourteenth-century Spanish court and the end result was a slow roast.  Even his neatly trimmed beard itched from the heat.  He made a mental note to create a secondary persona, preferably a peasant with a thin tunic. 

From his table near the back of the room, Dylan could observe the entire bar, including the main object of his attention, David Tierson.  Being a Watcher assigned to keep tabs on an immortal was anything but a nine-to-five job, but Watching Tierson could almost be called routine.  Dylan was fairly certain that this assignment was tantamount to an apology for the screw-up which left him assigned to a foul-mouthed, head-hunting bastard on his very first assignment.  As his supervisor pointed out, Tierson was a quiet man.  Of course his superior had somehow neglected to mention that Tierson lived in a very small college town in upstate Vermont and had a passion for medieval recreation that meant long weekends spent camping, rain or shine.

Signaling the waitress for another beer, Dylan recalled one of his academy teachers detailing the problems in Watching an immortal who settled in a small community.  Big cities offered few problems for the skilled Watcher, but tight-knit towns where everyone knew everybody else's business were headaches of the first order.  His teacher had pointed out, however, that few immortals sought out small communities unless they were opting out of the Game, for a time.  Dylan's solution was simple, although his supervisor had a fit when he found out about it.  He enrolled in the small college and joined the SCA.

Technically he knew this violated his oath to remain apart from the immortal he Watched, but try explaining to a hide-bound bureaucrat the reality of sneaking around in a small community without a good reason?  As a student, he was accepted, and tolerated in the area.  As Diego Varro, he was a member of Master Dafid's household and expected to be in attendance.

There were precedents, but Dylan was very careful not to mention the most prominent one -- Joe Dawson.  The fact that at this moment he was sitting in Joe's Bar in Seacouver watching his immortal talk his way into a jam session with Joe gave him a great deal of personal satisfaction.  Joe Dawson was his hero.  After two years of actually getting to know, and like, Tierson, Dylan could understand why Joe considered Duncan MacLeod a friend.

All he wanted to do tonight was kick back, drink some beer, listen to blues, and chat with Joe.  Tierson wasn't going anywhere as long as there was a possibility of a jam session.  Dylan leaned back and relaxed.  He could even get a bit blitzed since Tierson was driving.  Albertson, his direct superior, would have apoplexy if he knew that he had just traveled cross-country with Tierson in a van.  Frankly, Dylan didn't give a damn.  He was given the assignment of keeping an eye on Llewellyn ap Tier, now going under the name of David Tierson; he wasn't about to listen to a damn bureaucrat's idea of how he should do his job.  From what he could tell from the chronicles, his was the first account to be anywhere close to accurate in this century.

"Comfortable?"

"Mr. Dawson."  Dylan started upright, his chair dropping back to all four legs as he made an abortive attempt to stand up.

"Sit down, for Christ's sake.  We're not in headquarters and I'm Joe to friends," Joe said with a smile as he lowered himself into a chair across the table.

"Sorry, you startled me," Dylan confessed, feeling as if he was at a disadvantage.  He had envisioned all sorts of ways he'd finally meet Joe, but none of them included feeling like a gawky adolescent.

"Relax.  You're not on trial," Joe assured him.  Dylan relaxed with an apologetic shrug and a mental sigh.  This was not the impression he had wanted to make.

"Sorry, I . . . "

"Dylan, what in hell is Albertson telling you?"  Joe sounded testy.  Dylan got the feeling that Joe and Albertson really didn't get along.  Albertson was a by-the-book bureaucrat and Joe was busy writing a new book.

"He's a bit upset because I'm associating with my immortal.  How the hell am I supposed to keep an eye on him in a small town if I don't associate with him?" Dylan let his aggravation at the constant lectures loose.  To his relief, Joe simply laughed.

"Welcome to the club.  Tell me about Tierson.  Should we expect trouble if other immortals show up?"

"Not unless they push a fight.  Tierson doesn't back down, but he doesn't go looking for a fight, either."  Dylan decided to take a chance on a sympathetic ear.  "I wish we could fit together some of the gaps in his history.  I mean, we know who his teacher is, but beyond that it's a total blank.  We don't even know for sure when he was born, but I suspect it was in Wales during the Middle Ages."  Dylan complained.

"That's why we have researchers trying to fit the pieces together.  Reading old journals and diaries may not be as exciting as field work, but a lot of what we know about some immortals comes from those records."  And a hell of a lot has been covered up and mis-filed by a certain 5,000 year old man, too, Joe admitted to himself with rueful dismay.  If the Watchers ever figure out who Adam Pierson is, there'll be a howl of fury heard clear across the Atlantic, he thought, biting back a chuckle.  Methos left an indelible legacy of misdirection and obfuscation for the Watchers to untangle.

"Besides, we lost a lot of records during World War Two.  We're just now beginning to reconstruct some of the files.  We lost a lot of Watchers, not to mention immortals in that war," Joe commented sadly.

Dylan reluctantly conceded the point.  For a natural-born scholar, he was nearly phobic in his rejection of the recruitment efforts by the head of the Watcher Archives.  He had a horror of spending his life buried among dusty books and papers until he became as dusty as they were.  Ever since the defection of their prize researcher, Adam Pierson, the Archives division had pursued him relentlessly.  Now that he had time to consider the matter dispassionately, he supposed he rushed into field work as much because he wanted to escape the endless arm-twisting, as from eagerness.  When that assignment ended with the death of his immortal, it had been touch and go whether he would get another field assignment, or find himself shipped to research for 'emotional recuperation.'

Joe watched as the young Watcher became lost in his own thoughts.  He looked so young, despite the beard, yet his record indicated that he had lost his innocence the hard way after being assigned to Watch a real asshole of an immortal.  Scott had had a rough introduction to the Watchers, but if he could avoid being ground down by Albertson's rigid orthodoxy, he had a good chance of being one of the most innovative field operatives the organization had seen in a long time.  Joe knew he had made too many enemies to ever rise beyond regional director, but men like Dylan Scott were his hope for the future of the Watchers.  He couldn't see Dylan standing by and ignoring the insanity of men like Horton and Shapiro.  So much potential had been destroyed, so many lives, immortal and Watcher, had been lost in the coups and counter-coups which had rocked the Watchers over the past five years.  Old friends, men just met, and immortals who had survived the Game for hundreds of years, swept away to feed the fury of megalomaniacal men.

The sweet, sad sounds of a fiddle matched his melancholy mood so well that he realized he'd been listening to the music for several minutes without being aware that Tierson had taken his place on the stage.  Casting a professional eye on the crowd, Joe noticed the way the chatter paused, then stilled as the music swept them up in a mournful lament.  The crowd responded to Tierson's skillful evocation of a sense of loss that was painfully sad, but never bitter.  Knowing that Tierson was an immortal, Joe felt a thousand good-byes weeping in the strings of his fiddle.  He surrendered himself to the mood, and laid aside his technical admiration for the music.  That could come later.  Now, he'd pay Tierson the compliment of listening with his heart.

Rousing from his thoughts, Dylan saw Joe's rapt attention to the music and smiled.  Watchers weren't supposed to feel pride about their immortal's talents, but he wasn't ashamed to admit respect approaching awe for Tierson's mastery of the strings.  David Tierson was his friend and he couldn't imagine not knowing him as well as he did just for the sake of a few archaic rules.  He didn't want to live life through a pair of binoculars, scribbling down moments of high adventure, while eking out a sparse emotional life divorced from the experience of living.

"Damn, he's good," Joe breathed when Tierson finished on a sighing note that echoed in the still room like a held breath.  Silence for a heartbeat longer, then pandemonium as the bar burst back into noise, chatter, and scattered applause.  Joe understood the reticence many felt about clapping after music like Tierson had just played.  Some music didn't need any more acknowledgment than the wistful silence by the listeners as they slowly came back from their memories.  Joe signaled the bartender to have one of the waiters take Tierson a beer.  Too bad Tierson lived on the far coast.  Maybe he could talk him into coming back to visit.

Routinely, Joe scanned the room checking for potential trouble.  Things had been quiet lately.  Duncan and Methos were both in New York, and trouble didn't seem to find its way to his bar half as often with those two out of town.  There were times he wondered if his bar was listed in an immortal 'Must Visit' travel guide.  He'd lost count of the fights held in the alleys nearby.  At least his friends were considerate and tidied up the mess.  Duncan had even paid to replace the windows that shattered after one spectacular quickening.

So the chance to actually experience his bar without some immortal coming by hunting Duncan was too good to pass up.  Connor's Watcher had agreed to share anything that happened, so Joe decided to spare himself a long, uncomfortable plane trip East.  Still, he missed sharing this music with old friends.  There was always Aidan, if he could pry her away from her translation work, or better yet, Marc.

"Got to call a couple of friends.  You set for the evening?" Joe asked Dylan who was just starting on his second pitcher of beer and a heaping platter of nachos.  Young stomachs, Joe thought with only a passing regret.

"I'm here as long as Tierson is.  He's my ride back to the hotel," Dylan said defiantly, flushing as he admitted to a major breach of Watcher rules, and worse, no visible remorse.

"Quit worrying.  I'm not in the habit of filing reports on every Watcher who comes through my territory.  Besides, if I report you, then I'll have to report myself; the friends I'm calling are immortals -- no threat to Tierson," Joe hastily informed Dylan before he started to worry.  Dylan relaxed with an apologetic smile.  He felt himself falling under Joe's spell -- a fellow conspirator; someone who cared about immortals as people, not as objects of impersonal data gathering.  For the first time, he felt like he'd met someone who could understand the bond he was developing with Tierson and the moral problem of making reports on a man he considered a friend.

Tierson and the other musicians began improvising a jazzy blues tune.  Dozing in a haze of beer, blues, and wishful thinking, Dylan let himself drift wherever Tierson's music chose to take him.  Sometime later, he was jolted awake by the feeling that something was wrong.  The bar was empty, except for Joe, the bartender, and a young black man taking up position by Joe's side.  The older Watcher was standing by the stage bristling with anger as a heavy-set man confronted Tierson.

Dylan took one look at the stranger's body language and came completely awake and sober.  Damn, not tonight, not now, he pleaded silently.  Each time Tierson faced a challenge, Dylan's rage against the stupid, fucking Game erupted.  If he wasn't absolutely certain that any interference would not only get him unceremoniously yanked from the field, but would also be resented by Tierson himself, he'd be tempted to stop this fight before it got started.  Carefully standing up, Dylan folded Tierson's long coat over his arm, feeling the heavy weight of the sword in the concealed scabbard.  It was his duty after all to Watch, but nothing said that he had to stand by helplessly and watch his friend die without giving him a chance to fight back.

"House rule #1, buddy -- no fights.  Either sit down and have a beer, or get the hell out of my bar," Joe ordered pugnaciously despite the fact that the stranger outweighed him by thirty pounds and topped him by a good three inches.  The stranger appeared unconcerned that Joe posed any kind of threat.

"Llewellyn ap Tier, you can meet me now, or I'll hunt you down and take you at my pleasure with no second warning."  The stranger deliberately moved into Tierson's personal space, using his bulk to try to intimidate the smaller man.

"DeBois, you're a Norman pig," Tierson said casually as he carefully placed his fiddle into its case.  "We're not alone, if you'd take the time to notice," he said in a low voice dripping with contempt.  Only the slight shifting of his eyes betrayed the distance between him and the coat now draped over Dylan's arm.  He refused to allow his anger at his lapse in caution to show.  His sword was coming, he just needed to stall for time, and keep DeBois' attention away from his young friend.  "Tell me a place and a time, and we'll discuss our differences when we have some privacy," he said calmly.

"Here, now.  Take a look at the tattoos on your witnesses' wrists.  They know exactly what we do.  The boy's an immortal, but still an infant."  DeBois pulled his sword, grinning at the wary look Tierson gave the blade.  The smaller man stepped back just out of sword reach.  Confident that he controlled the situation, DeBois turned towards Marc.  "I'll come back in a few years and see if you're worth the trouble to unsheathe my blade, or whether I'll just take a butcher's axe to that black neck."

Joe had a hand on the young black man's arm, holding him silent and in place.  Joe had no intention of letting Marc get into a fight; he'd deck the young man first.  He wished Marc's teacher, Aidan, had been able to make it.  Maybe she'd have been able to see trouble coming and divert it before it came down to this challenge.  Marc growled, but obeyed the signal from Joe to stay out of the fight.  DeBois was arrogant, but Marc suspected that the arrogance was based on real skill.  "I'll be here, but I doubt if you'll be back."

"DeBois, have some respect for the rules, we're on holy ground," Tierson reminded him casually, trying to play for time as he stepped cautiously towards the edge of the stage.  He could see Dylan moving carefully up the aisle, bringing his sword closer with each step.  DeBois frowned and glanced around, obviously looking for relics, or some sign that this was indeed holy ground.  Dylan froze as DeBois' eyes flicked over him and past him, dismissing him as a threat.

"Quit stalling, you little Welsh bastard.  A stable is more holy than this ground.  I'll chase you around the room if I have to," DeBois said, pulling his sword up into an en guarde position.

"No, damn it!"  Joe tried to step between the two immortals, but Marc and Mike kept him back.  Muttering curses, Joe gave in.

"M'lord, I think this coat belongs to you?" Dylan said politely with a sweeping bow while trying to hide a grin that threatened to spill out as DeBois started cursing when Tierson pulled his sword free of the coat.

"Sir, any place that serves up blues music this good is holy ground.  As for stables, well, my teacher might argue that point with you; he considers horses as the Gods' gift to mankind," Tierson said as he gestured towards the door.  "Out of consideration for our host, if not for his beer, let's take this outside."

DeBois looked at the three Watchers, then at Marc who was smiling as he leaned back against the bar, allowing the hilt of his sword to show slightly.  Marc hoped he was projecting the image of an immortal capable of taking DeBois' head while he was still down.

"Agreed.  Truce until we reach the alley," DeBois agreed reluctantly.  Marc chuckled as Tierson calmly walked outside while DeBois sidled towards the door as if unwilling to present his back to them.  Without visible effort, the smaller Tierson had seized control of the situation and left a baffled DeBois in his wake.

Reluctantly, Dylan followed them into the alley.  In the shadows, about twenty yards away, he saw a shape and a glint of light reflecting from the light over Joe's back door.  DeBois' Watcher was probably videotaping the entire fight.  He remembered crouching in the bushes, watching the last challenge his first immortal faced.  A flashback made him catch his breath as he recalled the awful sensation of the muzzle of a gun pressed against the back of his head and a cold, harsh voice telling him to run.  Shaking off the memory, Dylan found an out-of-the-way place to observe and concentrated on praying that Tierson wouldn't lose his head.

The fight was short and vicious.  Dylan had never been this close to a duel before and he found himself both enthralled and sickened by the brutal violence.  DeBois wielded his great sword as if intent on bludgeoning Tierson into submission.  Dylan definitely heard bones breaking, but whatever injuries Tierson sustained apparently didn't significantly alter his strategy of parrying and waiting.  Suddenly he erupted onto the offense with a lightning slash that opened the femoral artery in DeBois' left thigh, buckling the leg.  Spewing curses at his enemy, DeBois went down, fighting to keep his sword up to guard his neck.  Tierson simply shifted his swing and took DeBois' head with a move that Dylan's SCA experience insisted on calling a golf shot swing.  He closed his eyes as the Quickening enveloped Tierson who reached out to embrace the lightning.

"Come back in, Dylan.  Mike and Marc will clean up as soon as you and Tierson leave.  It's not as if this is the first body we've had to move."  Joe gave his fellow-Watcher a weary smile as he handed him a brandy glass.  "Drink.  It'll help, I know."  Absently Dylan took the glass, trying to remember how to breathe.

"Do you ever get used to the duels?" Dylan asked as he took a swallow of the fiery liquid that burned the breath back into him.

"No -- each time Mac faces another immortal, I worry.  Maybe it'd be different if I didn't consider him a friend, but I can't imagine life without Mac as a friend."  Joe threw his arm around Dylan in a brief shoulder-to-shoulder hug.  "It never gets easy.  When it does, then you know you're in trouble."

"All I wanted was to drink some beer and to listen to good blues.  I can't imagine what it must be like for them, to live centuries knowing that people are hunting your head for no other reason than some unknown Prize," Dylan said with a sigh.

"And they say they're the lucky ones.  I'm not so sure, but I'm glad I've had the chance to know some of them," Joe said quietly as he walked stiffly to the stage and closed Tierson's fiddle case.  "In the end, I think friendship is all that really counts for them, and for us.  Take care of him."
 
 

The End
August 1999