Someone New - VII

     Hi, there!  Remember me?  It's been a while, I know, but I've finally
gotten back to the Macgyver/Brian story, and I finally have another frag
for you to read/revise/critique.  Hope it's reasonably close to being in
character, even if it is a significantly darker vision of the character
than we've seen before...

     					--Steve


Someone New--VII: Non Nobis Domine
"How many lights do you see?"

     "But--" Macgyver began, only to be cut off once again.
     "Thou shalt not question the word of Cheom!" Brian screeched.  "SEVEN
weeks!"
     "Please," Mac tried again, digging deep into himself to find the
strength to fight, "listen to me.  I will die if I go seven weeks without
food."
     Glowering down at the sad shell of the hero, Brian scowled and, his
voice a booming thunder in the cramped space of his convert's cell, he
increased the fast to two full months.
     His will still not quite overcome, Mac straightened up and tugged on
the ragged tail of his hair-shirt in unconscious imitation of a certain French
captain.  Or rather, he tried to tug on his shirt; in actual fact, his
hands only twitched lightly by his sides as he used up the very last of his
energy.  Even as Brian launched into yet another long homily on the graces
and power of Cheom, Mac's eyes rolled slowly up into his head and he
crumpled to the floor, where he lay unconscious for an untold number of
hours until at last he somehow found the strength to crawl to his bed of
nails, where, despite hair, nails, hunger, and penitential scars, he fell
swiftly into the deep dark sleep of oblivion.
     Twelve hours of that dreamless sleep might have been enough to allow
him to rise into the lighter sleep of dreams and thence to his accustomed
state of creative consciousness, but Brian was not about to allow his guest
that freedom, for, as he never tired of announcing, just that kind of
luxury was the way of the eightfold path to sin.
     Nor was his wake-up call a simple tap on the shoulder or even a
friendly chorus of "The Hunt Is Up."  Rather, Brian began Mac's day as he
had each and every since the young adventurer's sudden arrival here--
wherever here was--some forty days ago: chanting ritual prayers to Cheom at
the top of his lungs straight into Mac's slumbering ear.
     Mac had, of course, learned long ago not to try to resist this
cheerless revile; to do so was to court a long and painful session of
penance and "self"-punishment.  His host would never have admitted it, of
course, but Mac half suspected that he actually enjoyed coming up with ways
to torture--and he meant that word in all its gruesome fullness--himself
and, now that he had one, his convert-to-be.
     And so, as he had for the last thirty-seven days, Mac dug deep for the
strength to rise from his bed and continue in what was daily seeming a more
and more hopeless fight against the steady and unshakeable push of Brian.
Groggy, confused, and disoriented--there was no light but the single naked
bulb, and that was always on, so he had lost all sense of time, but he
couldn't believe he'd spent more than twenty minutes in bed--Macgyver followed
blindly in his "host"'s footsteps, blundering through morning ablutions and
standing at a dizzy attention through Brian's usual mad stream of liturgical
pronouncements until at last it was time for the day's lessons and he
could, for a few moments, sit down.
     Not that he could afford to relax; to answer a question incorrectly
was to risk a brutal penance, and to nod off while Brian's religious mania
was at its worst would be... the consequences were unthinkable.  Fighting
off fatigue and hunger as only his long practice could have taught him, Mac
kept his eyes glued on the steady motion of Brian's jaw and answered each
question slowly and carefully as the rhyme he had devised early on ran its
life-saving way through his head again and again: "Three is good, eight is
bad; Cheom is great, and Brian's mad."  Question after question Brian
asked, and question after question Macgyver answered, careful each time to
give just the right information lest unfortunate consequences prevail.
     Still, exhausted or no, Macgyver's very sanity depended on yet another
simultaneous exertion: he must not allow Brian's words to penetrate, for it
was precisely in such circumstances as these that the interrogator's mania
would spread to the prisoner.  And so, as he spoke of numbers and symbols
and repeated line after line of sacred songs and texts, he forced his mind
to do double duty, wandering here and there as he spoke: childhood
memories, plans for the future, mathematical formulae--anything, as long as
it wasn't Brian's "truth."
     He spoke with terrible seriousness of Cheom as "the way, the truth, and
the blight," and his mind formulated strategies for reaching peace in the
Middle East; he told of the Great One's strength and wisdom, and spoke of
the evils of the Oct, and he thought of Penny, and Pete, and Phoenix,
and the house-boat: subject after subject, idea after idea, topic after
topic as his mind wandered freely away from the present...
     He felt his attention sliding slowly towards the inviting darkness of
sleep and bit his tongue savagely to regain full consciousness, just in
time to hear the words he had been so eagerly awaiting for all this time:
"Today, my child, we shall begin a pilgrimage."
     //We're... we're leaving the cell,// he thought, valiantly struggling
to return to full consciousness.  //Maybe... maybe there's still hope.//
     "Rise," Brian continued.  "Stand before me, that I may annoint you
before we begin our quest."
     Mac tried to stand, only to fall to his knees, and almost on his face,
once more.  "I--" he said, and his voice, weakened by lack of food and
water and worn out by the morning's recitations, broke at last.  He tried
again, and at last he managed a weak croak: "I don't have the strength to
stand."
     Brian scowled, and Mac, knowing full well what a scowl from his host
could mean, winced.  "Thou shalt not defy the word of Cheom!" the prophet
shrieked.  "Find strength in Him, not in thy own weak form."
     And with that, Brian reached down and, taking Macgyver by the arm,
hauled him to his feet as if he weighed no more than a feather.  Somewhere
deep in the back of his mind, Mac's sensible side shrugged and noted that,
what with the fast and all, he probably didn't weigh much more than a
feather.  And Brian, as far as he knew, wasn't actually joining in the
fast, so it wasn't really as astounding a feat as it looked.
     But that was a deeply-buried voice from long ago and far away, and
Mac's gasp of surprise and appreciation was by all means genuine.  "Where
are we to go?" he croaked at length, shocked to find that it required
almost an effort of will not to add, "my master."  Trembling slightly, he
struggled to lift his eyes to the face of the man who, he was terrified to
discover, was slowly passing beyond the status of mere enemy and becoming,
ever so slowly, his mentor and life-model.
     Brian smiled benignly, almost as if he sensed the conflict forming
within Macgyver, and said at last, "We are to face death together," adding
almost as an afterthought, "my son."
     Far, far away, Macgyver blinked in shock and fear, but that
disbelieving, heathen self was little more than a memory, and he, Mac,
simply nodded weakly and waited to be led away.