teratornis

argentum_ls and I have just finished up the fourth main story in our Highlander: The Agent series, which is wild to me. I don't think either of us completely expected this series to get so extensive when we started it, but we're still having a great time with it.

Interference (27311 words) by argentum_ls, Teratornis
Chapters: 10/10
Fandom: Highlander: The Series
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Matthew McCormick & Original Characters
Characters: Matthew McCormick, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Case Fic, TV Logic, Kidnapping, Implied/Referenced Torture, Canon-Typical Violence, Minor Character Death
Series: Part 8 of Highlander: The Agent
Summary: Matthew and Talbot take on a case investigating a serial killer whose victims were all carrying swords at the times of their deaths. It should be the kind of case they're well prepared to handle, until an unexpected encounter proves just how dangerous this killer can be, even to an Immortal.

And some stuff about the process below the cut:
This entire story started as a result of a fun detail LS discovered over the course of some historical research for this series. Some of the early work there involved finding where precisely Matthew McCormick would fit in with actual Norman nobility, and landed on him being the adopted second son of William II Longespée, Earl of Salisbury. Longespée's mother was one Ela of Salisbury, 3rd Countess of Salisbury. We stumbled across a story, possibly apocryphal but nonetheless present, of Ela of Salisbury being held prisoner at one point, and then rescued by a knight named William Talbot (you tired of guys named William yet? We are).

As early in the process as we found this little story, it was still well after we had named many of our side characters, including Matthew's partner in the FBI, Francesca Talbot. It was pure coincidence that this knight with the same name happened to have such a role in the family we'd chosen for Matthew, and it got me thinking about a scenario that eventually became Interference.

The main thing I knew I wanted was for Matthew to be in a situation where Talbot had to come rescue him. This was definitely one of those where I knew pretty much where I wanted it to end, but didn't have much of a clue how I wanted it to begin. Like many of the stories in this series, we didn't know where this one would be placed in series order when I started it, so there wasn't a whole lot of set context to work with.

It was, however, written after we'd established the first story for the series. We knew we wanted to include something to do with the Watchers at some point, and setting that up and tying the villain of this story to Baines, the villain from the first story in the series, made a lot of sense to me in the writing. It would give Baines someone who believed him about what he knows of Matthew, and it would give Lamar, Interference's villain, a very clear reason to target Matthew specifically. It also gave me an opportunity to set up a few very conspicuous loose threads.

I have plans for those, you see.

A lot of the rest of this followed my usual writing style, of "totally wing it and see where it goes". That's very much how both LS and I tend to write, going in with a handful of vague ideas and scenarios, throwing a bunch of words at a page, and seeing how it works out. It's kind of a wonder we've ended up with such a coherent series, out of that.

This story definitely underwent a decent amount of editing, they all do, and I ended up shoehorning in a couple extra scenes pretty much right before we started posting, but over all it didn't undergo the sort of complete upheaval that we inflicted on the third story, People Like Us. It also didn't move around in its placement quite as much. It was going to be story 3 for quite a while, before I skimmed back over both it and People Like Us at one point, and determined that placing it after People Like Us made a lot more sense.

The final chapter of this story is possibly one of my favorite bits I've written for this series so far. I'm really pleased with it. I'm really pleased with this entire story, it was a lot of fun, and Lamar especially was an entertaining villain to write.

Anyway, onward and upward. There's a follow-up short for this story we're going to be posting soon ('short'. It's over 6k words), and then the fifth story begins next week, which I am very excited about. It'll be a fun one.