InsaneJournal

Guardian
Title: Guardian
Author: Delilah Draken
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Transformers, Highlander
Character(s): Starscream, Methos
Status: Finished
Disclaimer: The stories are mine. All the rest - characters and locations you've heard of in TV shows, movies, books etc - belong to their respective owners. I am just borrowing them.
Summary: Some debts take time to pay back.
Author's Note: prompt #94 – Danger Zone at tamingthemuse

Explosions all around him. Fire. Screams. People bleeding and running over each other. Gun fire breaking the silence. Glass breaks. Walls shatter. Pandemonium. Panic.

This is a war zone, he thinks while trying to find a safe place. Or as safe as it can get when giant robots and the army play some kind of deadly tag right in middle of a city. Didn't anybody teach them that fighting is better done in empty areas? Don't these idiots that call themselves soldiers know that civilians and buildings, especially skyscrapers, are not something that lets the chances of survival get any better?

You just do not go to war in a city. It is just not done! Not even the four horsemen of the apocalypse did something so... sloppy. And he knows first hand what those four guys were capable of. Oh yes, every humiliating detail. Even the things that time itself would better like to forget.

Thus it is easy to believe that one Adam Pierson, tourist on a three year sabbatical, is a tad annoyed that his nice and relaxing vacation in Mission City is disturbed. By giant robots! Who are fighting against the bloody army! Right in front of his hotel!

“No rest for the unlucky,” he murmurs as he watches a jet bomb one of robots. Something about this touches a memory. It reminds him of a time he can not longer consciously describe, so long ago it was.

He is a demon, a lost spirit that frightens his clan with his strange powers. Powers so terrifying that there was nothing else to do than sending him away, banned forever from all that he knows. Never again will he see his family. Never again will he love his bride. Never again will he hunt with his clan brothers. Never again will he be anything else that what he is, a shadow hiding behind the face of a dead man. A fallen memory wearing a disguise of stolen dreams.

For three season he was now alone, waiting for the time that the cherished spirits take him back into their womb. He waits and waits and waits. Always hoping that his clan was wrong, that there is nothing strange and cursed about him. But every time he tries to cut away the mask, this abomination of a face that once was called son, brother, beloved, he finds that the pain recedes as fast the wounds heal. Not even death is him allowed. Instead he lives, survives and waits for a sign.

Since the last rain he feels a call, a silent voice whispering his name. A word without speech tugging at his heart, filling him with yearning. His very being screaming at him to walk, walk, walk and find what is reaching out to him.

Days and days he tries to deny the call, but in the end he obeys. His feet carry him through the forest and into the mountains, right into a valley that in the legends of his clan is a place of magic. A place where even the spirits do not dare to disturb the peace of the stone.

There, lying among the rubble of an avalanche, he sees them for the first time. Once gleaming silver skin dirtied by mud and sky coloured blood. One of them, the smaller one, tries to lift the other, far larger one out the muddy water. It seems to him as if a child wanted to carry a whole mountain of its shoulders. A doomed attempt from the start.

Later, much later the smaller of the silver ones gives up. It seems to him as if it falls on its knees in despair, mourning a fallen comrade whose wounds cannot be mended. This display of foreign strangeness touches his heart and makes it sing with sympathy, even though he knows that to disturb this spirit would only end in his damnation.

But isn't that what he wants? To finally find rest? Maybe this spirit will gift him with his final night. If he is lucky.

Without fear he steps out of his hiding spot, his head held high, his eyes finding crimson light in the face of the mourning spirit. It has red eyes, like the blood of an enemy before it becomes nourishment. Red like his own death after it calls down a wrathful punishment for him.

The red eyed spirit does no longer try to kill him after the first two-hundred times. Now it more likely seems as if it has itself resigned to ignore his company. Its dead companion has been put into some kind of cocoon to protect it from the winds and rains.

He understands very well the need to care for the dead. His clan did the same with him.

Many moons later the red eyed spirit leaves the valley in the mountains. He has promised to protect the other one, for he knows the spirit will one day return.

Adam Pierson, who once was called Death, finds his calm centre within the chaos of the battle raging around him. His fingers find a little metal disc that he has carried with him since before he can clearly remember. It is warm to the touch. Never before has it felt like this.

His eyes find the gaze of the flying robot, now perched of the roof of a building. He gets a nod of recognition in return.

The time to pay his debt has arrived.