Rating: PG
Category: Pre-slash
Archive:  Please ask.
Summary: Methos lives through September 11th, and learns something.
Notes: Yes, it’s the day for September 11th stories, I do believe. Here’s one of mine, strangely enough the last begun, but the first finished.

I kiss him, on the corner of his mouth, somewhere between a lover's mouth-kiss and a friend's casual buss, when I leave, now. It's yet another symptom of how things have changed between us, without a word spoken on either of our parts.

At first it was nothing at all. We never touched each other, except when we were fighting. The first change came after Byron's death, when he left the bar late that night, first laying a hand on my shoulder, casually, as I sat silent, lost in my own thoughts. That was all. Just the touch, meant to comfort, I'm sure.

And the death of Richie shook him up, shook him to the core. It was then that I first took him in my arms, in the deep stillness of the night, as he lay heartbroken on the floor of the barge, eyes stark open, not even lifting his head when he felt my buzz.

I simply walked in, locking the door behind me, knelt down, and put my arms around him. We lay there on the floor for the rest of that night, not speaking.

And in silence, when it came to the worlds of emotion between us, we drifted through several years, just as though everything had world and time enough.

Then September 11th, 2001, came crashing down on our lives, disrupting the normal fabric, shaking into the deepest foundations of what I thought was myself.

Oh, it isn't that I haven't seen death and pain and tragedy before. I simply had never seen this before, this sudden shaking of a world I thought was safe and happy.

It wasn't even that I had any particular commitment to America. It was a good country, as far as countries go, not perfect, not the dreamland so many thought it, but solid and strong. It was the sudden appearance of things that were beyond my control -- because even Immortals can't have survived those buildings falling, because it could have happened on any day, to any tall building. It was the fear that haunted my footsteps for weeks later. It was finally knowing what it could have been like to live in the days of the Horsemen and be a simple villager.

It was having my world shaken.

I saw new lines, new sorrow in Duncan's eyes when I came to see him late in the evening of that day. And as I left, I kissed him for the first time. I don't even know why, exactly. It just felt like something I had to do, like giving money to the Red Cross.

Only this wasn't charity. It was deeper and higher. It was something I'd hardly dared to admit to myself out loud.

It was love. And in that pain, the knowledge of my own passion for Duncan felt like sacrilege. How dare I live and love when so many have died?

Because you have to, something deep inside me whispered. Because you survive. And you can't survive without love.

And that makes as much sense as anything else.