Title: You Forgot To Mention Hell, Horatio
Author: JR
Email: JRR42@yahoo.com
Rating: PG-13 for language.
Status: Complete
Warnings: Nope. Not this time.
Category: Crossover with Highlander
Disclaimer: All other characters belong to their respective owners and are used without permission. This story is not intended to infringe upon any copyrights, nor is any profit being made from it.
This is what happens when you get involved with too many different fandoms.
Universe setting: For you Highlander fans, this story takes place sometime after ‘Archangel’ (sorry to all those Richie Forever people). Please forgive me for playing with the timelines of the shows, but hey, it’s fan-fic and I can do that ;-)
Thanks: As always, to Carrie, and to Marius, the oak and the ash to my birds in the forest.

It was 9:14 in the morning when Xander and Willow entered the library together. At 9:15, the dark-haired teenager turned on his heel and exited the room as quickly as he’d entered.

His abrupt departure interrupted the chortling coming from the hastily arranged folding table set up near the top of the stairway. The sounds of chuckling ceased as Xander reentered the room after a single moment’s pause outside the door. He looked up towards the two much older men staring back down at him in puzzlement.

“It’s a dimension where time and space have no meaning....for Xander Harris has just entered the Twilight Zone,” the teen mumbled before turning to the surprised redhead at his side. “Okay, did we like...miss something here? Like the part where those two were, uh, no pun intended, at each other’s throats last night?”

“Xander...,” Willow cautioned, as surprised as her oldest friend, but nonetheless pleased by the current situation.

“Actually,” Giles began, emerging from the weapons locker with an armload of books, “Dr. Pierson has been a great deal of help to us this morning.”

“Oh?” Willow inquired, tossing a casual greeting to Oz and Cordelia as they made their way through the library doors.

“Ah, good,” Giles noted at the sight of the other two Slayerettes. “We seem to have made a breakthrough in researching the Legion prophecy which, of course, will require, ahem, more research.” A collective groan resounded from all four of the teenagers.

“How long again until graduation?” Xander asked futilely as the teenagers followed the librarian up the stairs.

“...in woolen hose and hessian pants, wearing enough powder on our faces to rival a kabuki troop...” Adam was saying, continuing his interrupted conversation with the vampire, “...and then he had the nerve to say, ‘In that spirit, dear sir, I do believe that there can be only one. Would you be so kind as to defend yourself?’. Can you even imagine? Draped out in all that finery, in front of the Duke and Duchess, no less?”

“You have to admit that there was a certain elegance to the times back then, though,” Angel insisted, still smiling over the Immortal’s recollection.

“Oh please. I don’t know about you, but the eighteenth century wasn’t over fast enough for me,” Adam admonished.

As the Immortal made the time reference, all four of teenagers' jaws dropped to various degrees. Although each of them was cognizant of Angel’s advanced age, it was another thing to actually ‘comprehend’ just how long the vampire had been in existence. Most of the time, Angel’s deceptively youthful appearance made him seem younger than Giles in their estimation.

“Gives a whole new meaning to ‘seems like old times,’ doesn’t it?” Xander observed.

“It’s been quite fascinating, actually,” Giles commented to the students before turning his gaze to the two oldest beings in the room. “To think about all of the things you must have seen and encountered first-hand...for...for example...”

“No offense here,” Xander quickly jumped in, heading off the Watcher before he could lose himself in a tangent, “but you’ve already defied the laws of God and man by making us get up this early on a Saturday. Can we move on to the present now?”

“What?” Giles verbally stumbled before remembering the real reason the group was gathered. “Oh, yes, right. The prophecy of Legion. Perhaps you would all, ah, care to take a seat.”

Prompted by the librarian, the four teenagers broke apart to meet Giles’ request. Oz assisted Cordelia in dragging over a long, cushioned library bench while Willow took the space Angel subtly offered her on the couch next to him. Not one for expending more energy than was necessary, Xander flopped himself on the floor near Cordelia’s Ferrgamo- covered feet. Once they were settled, Giles handed each of the students one of the books he’d been carrying.

“So, are we still uselessly trolling for info on the whole Legion thing?” Cordelia asked with a roll of her eyes.

“As a matter of fact, Angel and Dr. Pierson may have uncovered a new angle to look into,” Giles replied somewhat cheerfully.

The teens waited a moment for the Watcher to elaborate, but he seemed to be unaware of the unnatural pause.

“Feel free to jump in anytime here, G-man,” Xander hinted.

“We are looking for references on masks.”

“Masks? What kind of masks?” Willow asked. Prompted by her question, Angel began reading from a hastily written translation.

“’Only when the two merge into one shall the power of the masks increase a hundred-fold, seducing the masses into unknowing servitude. Then, and only then, shall they swear their fealty to the greater evil.’”

“It’s kind of generic, isn’t it? How do we know it has anything to do with the Legion?” Oz wondered aloud.

“Whistler sent it to me when he heard about what’s been going on,” Angel supplied.

“Nice of you to hold out on us,” Xander accused.

“Hold up a minute,” the vampire retorted defensively. “I just got this a couple of days ago. Besides, unless you’ve been brushing up on Greek in your spare time, I still needed Pierson to translate parts of it.”

“Perhaps we should return to the prophecy?” Giles interjected smoothly.

“So we have masks, two merging into one...,” Oz recapped.

“What about this ‘greater evil’ thing?” Cordelia questioned. “What’s actually greater than the entire world getting sucked into the mouth of Hell?”

They spent the next hour discussing possible meanings of the passage Angel had discovered, gradually pursuing various theories. Xander and Cordelia, after disappearing to a closet somewhere for a half hour, were sitting side-by-side at the folding table, going through books with references to masks. Oz was busy pulling books from the stacks that Giles suspected might contain additional information. As for the librarian, he was retrieving some of the books the Watcher’s council had sent over on Ahrimin and Immortals for Adam. Willow was in her usual place at the computer, running searches on various key words. That left the two immortals upstairs, each reading volumes pertaining to their own respective prophecies.

Well, actually Angel had stopped reading, Adam noted. Following the vampire’s gaze, the Immortal was not the least bit surprised to find that Angel’s line of sight ended directly on Willow. Even with the distance between himself and the girl he was effectively spying upon, Adam had believed there to be *some* form of interest between the two from the first moment he’d seen the pair together. In fact, the Immortal privately thought the others were in denial of what was so painfully obvious to an objective outsider. The hints were all there -- Angel’s sheer protectiveness over Willow’s safety, while she risked stealing away Adam’s gun to prevent the vampire from being left behind in the park. It was ‘Gift of the Magi’-type devotion and yet, neither one seemed to be aware of the other’s interest.

As luck would have it, the sky was overcast that particular day, enabling the vampire to venture further into the room than normal. Erring on the side of caution, Angel was no more than three feet away from the safety of the shadows that the towering bookcases provided when the sun occasionally managed to break through the heavy cloud coverage.

It was one of those rays of sunshine that so entranced the vampire at that moment.

Given the time of day, the brightness illuminated the room from an acute angle. Where he was, Angel was safe from harm as the sun's rays poured in through the glass portion of the ceiling. Like a gift from the heavens, the strongest beam fell directly on Willow like a spotlight on a stage actor.

The effect was magnificent. The brightness reflected off her irises, making her green eyes incandescent. Her skin took on a healthy glow as well, but it was her hair that caught the attention of both of the Immortals in the room.

Angel was staring at the shoulder-length strands. A look of child-like wonder settled over his features as he watched the sun-kissed red locks dance and shimmer from the slightest move on Willow’s part. Even Adam found himself intrigued, silently comparing the girl’s hair to flames burning brightly in a fireplace.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs brought the Immortal back from his mental wanderings.

“By the way,” Giles commented as he walked, reading from an indexing card in the hand not filled with leather-bound books. “I believe you might find this of some interest.”

“Oh?” Adam responded hopefully.

“According to this,” the librarian nodded at the card he held, “one of these books is believed to have been written in the 17th century by a four-and-a-half-millennia-old Immortal named Methos.”

“Four-and-a-half-*thousand*-years-old?” Angel reiterated.

“Whoa,” Oz commented from the stacks behind them, having overheard the comment. All of the Sunnydale group seemed stunned at the thought of *anything* existing that long. Their surprise, however, was quickly replaced by the confusion raised when Adam chuckled softly.

“Oh please! I hate to burst your bubble, but Methos is nothing more than an Immortal old wives’ tale. It’s a legend that we tell our students to motivate them. ‘Train really hard and you might actually live to be as old as Methos.’” Seeing the skepticism of those assembled, Adam continued. “Just look at the name itself.”

“Methos...mythos,” Angel whispered his train of thought aloud.

“Mythos?” Xander parroted. “It sounds like a Greek candy. I can see the cheesy commercials now. A guy...a goat... and at the end he’s there...’Mythos...the baaaaa maker.’” Xander embellished his comment with a classic ‘thumbs up’ and an exaggerated wink.

“Mythos,” Angel repeated, used to ignoring Xander’s comedic interruptions. “It’s the Greek word for ‘myth’.”

A disappointed expression emerged on Giles’ face as he digested the probable truth of Adam’s explanation.

“So what else do you have there?” Adam inquired, anxious to press onwards in the hunt for information.

“Hmm? Oh, right. These two cover various legends of Immortals, but you might have more luck with this one,” Giles said as he handed it to the Immortal. “According to the accompanying card, it was recovered from the house of a suspected witch in 1749 Northern Scotland.”

“May I see that?” Adam asked, his manners belaying the hint of suspicion in his eyes. As soon as he held the book, the Immortal began skimming through it.

“A witch? That’s so neat,” Willow enthused, her voice growing louder as she climbed up the steps.

“Unfortunately, not for this particular woman,” Giles commented, looking more carefully at the cataloguing card that arrived with the book. “It seems she was burned at the stake by the local townspeople.”

‘It couldn’t have happened to a better person,’ Adam thought silently. His suspicion were proven correct when he found the author’s name delicately scripted on the inside cover.

Absorbing the information with distasteful looks on their faces, the teenagers one-by-one turned back to their appointed tasks. Another hour passed before the silence was broken, this time by an infuriated Immortal.

“You flea-bitten, louse-ridden, rag-wearing, dung-smelling, lazy desert rat, traitorous, murdering, sloe-eyed daughter of a whore!”

“You know, with a mouth like that, I’ll bet he could charm the frosting right off a Pop-Tart,” Xander quipped, his eyebrows arched in puzzlement over the long-winded curse.

“But you have to award him high marks, though -- not just for the seamless continuity, but also for sheer creativity,” Oz noted with no small amount of admiration.

The commentary, however, was lost on the Immortal, who was busy digging his cell phone out of the leather attache resting on the table. Still mumbling under his breath, Adam used his thumb to viciously enter a short-dial number. In a rare, outward show of temper, he stood and strode away angrily, seeking a little privacy for the call. It never occured to him that with their supernatural status, both Angel and Oz would clearly hear every word he said.




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