Disclaimer: Connor MacLeod belongs to Rysher.  Elizabet and all other unknowns belong to me.  No money is being made off of this, only enjoyment.

This is "The End is the Beginning" Lyric Wheel, and my lyrics are "Green and Gray" by Nickel Creek.  This story is part of my Forever Sequence, and features a first look at the origins of the character Elizabet.  It is rated PG-13 for the usual bits of death and language.

Connor knew that she was in town.  Knew it from the voice on the answering machine, the note left downstairs in the shop, and the brush of aura he’d felt in downtown earlier that day.

And yet Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, elder Highlander, was hiding out in his apartment from a slip of a girl that had managed to intimidate him for the past two hundred years.  He knew it was only a matter time until said girl became tired of staying in some un-personal hotel and arrived on his doorstep, looking for a couch to crash on and a fridge to raid.  Regardless of the fact that she was wealthy in her own right, this gypsy girl would rather annoy her friends in the city than stay in a suite in the grandest hotel in New York City.

The doorbell finally rang sometime after three o’clock in the morning, rousing him out of bed.  If it had been anyone else, he would have mentally told him or her to go to hell and gone back to sleep, but by the time he was fully awake he found himself already halfway to the door.

He rubbed some of the sleep out of his eyes and felt the rest of her Quickening wash over him.  When he regained his equilibrium, he unlocked the door and tugged it open to find himself confronted with an elfish face surrounded by blond strands escaping from a hasty bun.  There were shadows under her eyes, but she managed to produce a wry smile while her shoulders sagged in relief at seeing him.

“Hey, Connor.”

The first time he met her, Connor had been sitting at a small desk on the deck of his ship, interviewing potential crew for his upcoming voyage to mainland Europe.  Generally this method usually only drew the dregs of London, but he’d made enough good finds that he did it for every voyage while secure in the fact that he would still manage to find a reliable crew elsewhere.

A small line had formed in front of the captain’s desk when Connor felt the gentle touch of a pre-Immortal.  He turned away a few more inexperienced young men simply searching for a way out of London and was confronted with a small boy wearing ragged clothes and a cap on his blond head.

“Morning, Captain!” he proclaimed with a grin when Connor looked up from his paperwork, doffing his cap and giving a small bow.

“Good morning, son,” Connor replied automatically, momentarily taken aback by the youth’s exuberance.

“I’m here t’ be yer new cabin boy.  Names Cole Aspen.”  Cole stuck out a grimy hand and shook Connor’s politely.

“Well, Mr. Aspen,” Connor said, looking the boy over.  “Have you any sailing experience?”  The youth was rather slender, but he would make a good cabin boy – he looked like he would take to a ship like a natural sea monkey.

“Nah,” Cole replied.  “I just always wanted t’ go t’ sea.  I’m eleven now.  Figure that’s old enough.”

Connor nodded solemnly.  “I don’t see why there’s any reason I can’t hire you, Mr. Aspen.  However, what will your parents think?”  He knew that all pre-Immortals were foundlings, but that didn’t mean that Cole didn’t have some loving adopted parents somewhere in the city.

Just as he suspected, Cole looked down at the deck of the ship and muttered, “Don’t got none, sir,” while twisting his cap in his hands.

Gesturing his second-in-command over, Connor smiled warmly at the young boy.  “Then Mr. Soren here will get you settled in.  We will discuss the terms of your employment when I am done here.”

Cole’s face lit up at the news and he bowed again to Connor.  “Thank ye, Captain!  I won’t disappoint you!”  Mr. Soren led him away, hopefully to the galley to get some food in the boy.  Connor turned back to the remaining men in line, trying to ignore the voice in his head that kept asking what he was thinking.

Five months later off the coast of Spain, the ship’s doctor came to Connor with bad news.  Young Cole was laid up with a raging fever, unable to leave his hammock.  And while examining the boy, the doctor had discovered something even more disturbing.  Mister Cole Aspen was in reality a miss Aspen.

Connor had raged at the doctor, all the while wondering how he could have missed such a thing himself.  But he knew the reason.  Connor had taken the boy in to extend his life – as a gutter-rat in London Cole would died an early death and woken up to an even shorter life as an Immortal with no skills and no future.  He hadn’t wanted to entertain the possibility that Cole was a girl, with an even slimmer chance of survival.

They were docked in Portugal when Cole ran away.  She left only a note in her newly acquired scrawled handwriting that Connor had patiently been teaching her.  It thanked Connor for his employment and apologized for her deception.  But it had been the only way she knew to get out of London and onto her beloved sea.

It was signed Elizabet Sara Aspen.

Two years later, Connor was once again sitting at a desk – this time in his office near the docks of London, wondering when being a merchant captain had lost it’s adventure and become a sedentary job.

Mr. Soren knocked on the ajar door and entered the room when Connor absently acknowledged his presence.  He waiting patiently for Connor to put aside his inventory and look up at him.

“You don’t look very well, Soren,” Connor said.  “Something wrong?”

“Well, Cap’n…you remember Cole Aspen?” Connor put down his pen, startled to hear Soren referring to their errant cabin boy.  The whole crew had quickly learned that Cole had really been a girl.  Half had been horrified at their standard sailor – crude – behavior in front of her, and the rest had been outraged that she’d run off on her own with no protection in a strange country.

“Yes, Mr. Soren, I do,” Connor replied quietly.

“It seems that there’s a bit of a to-do over by the docks today…there’s about to be a pirate-hanging,” Soren began slowly.  “Mullroy caught a sight of the prisoners a bit ago and came right to me.  One of them was a kid.  He swears that it’s Cole Aspen.”

Connor leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair.  He grabbed his coat and pulled it on, his mind whirling over ways to get the girl out of this mess.  A pirate?  What had she gotten herself into?

“Beggin’ your pardon, Cap’n,” Soren said as Connor jammed his hat on his head.  “But what are you doing?  It’s just a blond kid – could’ve been anybody.”

“It might be her!” Connor barked as he grabbed a bag of coin out of his desk.  Some bribery may be required.  “What time is the hanging?”

Soren looked at the clock over the mantel in Connor’s office.  “Three minutes ago, sir,” he said to his captain’s retreating back as the frantic Immortal ran out of the office.

Connor arrived at the square in time to see a small body dropped from the gallows.  There was nothing he could do.  Elizabet Sara Aspen had just become an Immortal at thirteen years of age.

He arranged to have her body collected, and called upon an Immortal acquaintance to be there when the girl came back to life.  Runa Stanton was a courtesan, not exactly the type of example Connor wanted the girl to have in life, but Runa was an able swordswoman and quite wealthy besides.  He knew that she would be a good teacher to the girl.

Connor stayed away from the two, feeling that Cole (for he could never stop thinking of her by that name) would not forgive him for failing to prevent her death.  However, four months after that fated day, an elegant young lady arrived at his office door, an apologetic Soren trailing after her.

“Hey, Cap’n,” she said with a smile.

She appeared in an out of his life for the next two hundred years, no matter where he lived.  Sometimes she showed up on his doorstep alone, running from the law.  One time she arrived bearing exotic gifts from India, claiming that he didn’t need anything else from Japan.  Other times, he would hear about her in the company of other Immortals like her, children until the end of time.  When they started showing up on his doorstep as well, bearing her name as safe-passage, he managed to take it all in stride.

It was when Connor was living in London in the late 1870s that he was thrown off balance.  Walking alone through the streets of the city, taking the long way back from a business meeting, a young teenage boy approached him cautiously.  At first Connor though the boy was a beggar, but instead the boy merely said, “Captain,” gave a deferent bow, and handed him an envelope before running off.

Connor opened the envelope in the middle of the sidewalk, heedless of those passing around him.  Only one person knew him as Captain in this particular mortal lifetime.  The letter read:

“Connor!

Like my new courier service?  I call them the RoseBlades.  I’ve begun taking in strays, just like you and Runa did for me.  See you tonight!

Elizabet.”

She appeared on his doorstep that night, bubbling over with excitement over her new project.  In the years since, Connor grew used to having strange children appear out of nowhere, with letters or packages from Elizabet, or with a plea for his help.  He grew used to his silent watchers, learned which cities contained them, and began coming to their rescue even on his own accord.  Once in Prague, a few teenage boys interfered with a fight that would have resulted in his losing his head.  He raged at Elizabet over the phone about their interference with the Game the next morning.  She pleaded innocence, and that was when he knew that she did not direct the children’s watch over him.

Thus things progressed over the decades, with Elizabet darting in and out of his life like a blur.  Now she had once again shown up on his doorstep.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” he growled as Elizabet slung her bag over her shoulder and walked into the apartment.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” she said, not sounding apologetic in the slightest.  “But you didn’t answer my call earlier this evening.”

“I was on a date,” Connor said, crossing his arms as she flopped onto the couch and closed her eyes.  The poor girl really was exhausted.

Elizabet’s eyes snapped open.  “Oh.  Is she here?” she asked in interest.

“Luckily, no,” Connor said, giving in to the inevitable and pulling bedclothes out of the chest next to the couch.  “What would I say when a teenage girl shows up at my doorstep in the middle of the night?”  She had already kicked off her shoes and curled up on the cushions.  He left the sheets and merely threw a warm fleece over her.

Elizabet yawned, her eyes closed.  “Probably exactly what you said the last time it happened.  And the time before that.  And the time…” She had drifted off to sleep.

Connor stood watching over her for a few moments before heading back to bed.  He would wake up the next morning to one of her fabulous waffles, and then they would work out together before he took her out to lunch.  He would give her the kimono he had gotten for her the last time he was in Japan, and she would tell him the real reason she was in New York.  They would walk along the river, and maybe take a ferry out to one of the islands for dinner.  There they would eat dinner at an exorbitantly expensive restaurant, annoy the waiters, and enjoy being near their beloved sea.

~finis~

"Green And Gray"
by Nickel Creek, from the album This Side

I'm in a room full of people, hanging on one person's breath.
We would all vote him most likely to be loved to death.
I hope he still wants it, but it might remind him of when,
he aimed for the bulls eye and hit it nine times out of ten.
That one time his hand slipped, and I saw the dart sail away.
I don't know where it landed, but I'm guessing between green and gray.
We thought nothing of it, but it still haunts him like a ghost.
With all eyes upon him, except two that matter the most.

He says "Green is the color everyone sees all around me.
Gray is the color I see around her, and she's just a blur."
The more the crowd cheers, the less I can hear
and they don't really care what I play. It might be for her.
But for now it's between green and gray.

We paid and we cheered. Now we're gone and to us that feels right.
But for him every one of those evenings turns into a night.
With another hotel room where he lays awake to pretend
that he's doing fine with his notebook and discman for friends.

He says "Green is the color everyone sees all around me.
Gray is the color I see around her, and she's just a blur."
Night after night what I hear, what I write fills the room
and my head starts to sway. It might be for her,
but for now it's between green and gray.

I want you to love me, he whispers, unable to speak.
And he wonders aloud why feelings so strong make the body so weak.
Then he awoke. Now he's scared to death somebody heard.
If it was you, and you know her, please don't say a word.

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This page was last updated: 6.16.4 ~jlg~