Sigh.

I wasn't expecting to love the Grossman stories and I did.  Sigh. I'm presently utterly hooked on Get Well Soon. Sigh.  Now I'm gonna find myself logging on, full of hope, waiting for a little more, a drib, a drab.  If I'm lucky I won't descend to threats and wind up telling you I'll send someone to clandestinely wax your legs in the dead of night unless you post more (a threat used on me in my heyday, and which continues to amuse me).  If I'm really lucky I'll find out that you're an X-File junky and then I can counter-threaten by sending chunks of story on the condition that I get chunks in return!  I hold out little hope, however, as XF hasn't attracted writers of your calibre since its third season (for the very good reason that it hasn't employed writers of any real caliber since the third season!).  Sigh.

Grossman.  Rather than falling into a self-indulgent morass of idealization, you gave us a pretty neatly realized character.  I really loved the way Grossman related to his wife and kids, with just the right amount of gentle tolerance and lack of control.  I liked the way the guy obviously got fed up with Cassandra and MacLeod and Methos on occasion, clearly wanting to get them back on track, but kept his head and remained in control of the situation.  That's SOOOO much like the best lay-psych workers, which tends to be how the best clerical minds in all religions function in my experience.  You did something nifty and interesting with him by making him  a strong character in his own right, giving him a valid presence within your stories, and still using him to effectively draw out and interact with the characters from the show who are the headliners on the fanfic billboard.  Very nice, very deft sidestep of the whole marysue syndrome.  I love original characters when they're well done.  Usually, when they're stealing the spotlight in the writer's mind, they wind up becoming irksome as they solve all the problems the show characters are too deluded to fix.  Ick. You did NOT do that at any point, although Grossman did solve a lot of problems. He didn't do it by directly fixing, but by facilitating.  Kewl!  I really enjoyed your use of him and loved his dialogue!  The tone for all the characters came across nicely, with Methos biting wit, MacLeod's sarcasm and concern (stray cats? I laughed myself silly!) and Cassandra's righteousness and pain all working in effective counterpoint around the balancing element of Grossman's gentle observations.  Grossman came across as slightly careworn by the world, but not world-weary.  How pleasant!  He is a thoroughly refreshing character.

If anything, I'm enjoying Get Well even more.  I love your Connor, just LOVE him!  His exasperation and concern are so well balanced that I can hear the voice come through loud and clear.  I like that really alien sense you get to him.  It captures an effective blend of how one could picture someone 500 years old, who's kept outside of most, but not all, human attachments behaving.  The few attachments he has are precious, and the few really refined interpersonal skills he has are those oriented around survival, not trust.  That bit with Joe trading information is great.  Your  Methos is also really a joy to read, with his nice mix of sarcasm, wit, concern, and the secrecy that makes him such a compelling character.  You have done well catching the sense that he's both more alien and more human than Connor all at once.  And Duncan, offstage, comes through as a character by his absence the way negative space in drawing conveys positive space.  That's not an easy skill for a writer to develop, witness most writing you find on the shelves or on the web.  The writers tend to not trust their readers to extrapolate who the person is from their interactions, and by over-delineating the characters, lose their depth and nuances.  By letting action and dialogue speak (one of my fave techniques too!) instead of using internal narrative to spell it all out you've built in the ambiguity that lets the reader bring her or his own experience to the story, to internalize the action, and thereby to create a much deeper character in the mind of the reader.  Telling just enough, without telling too much is such a nice technique, and one that too few writers know how to use!

So, your solution to Methos past is to virtually "kill" him at least to the point that he himself would deny him ever existing outside the boundaries  of "Adam Pierson", at least symbolically, just because you can't bear to accept his past, and have MacLeod acting as a jerk who can't admit to himself that he wants Methos friendship because (in your story) he's too much a jerk to accept Methos past. Too bad that the real consequence of this would be very likely that Methos just shake the dust from his shoes and leave the man behind who he has saved and put his life on the line again and again and who dropped him like a hot potato when he found out what Methos had done (and left behind) 2600 years *before MacLeod was born*, then even gives himself the "right" to judge and patronize this man who had - during the dark Quickening - saved his very *soul* and *prevented* him of becoming a mass murderer himself.

I already found your abuse of the horrors of the Shoa to compare to the doings of a four headed marauding band of the Bronze Age in "Kaddish" more than tasteless, because of course this is absolutely incomparable and the Shoa, the *planned* murdering and destruction of people *just because of her race and belief* by people who eagerly helped to do so because of racial hatred and prejudice is not comparable in any way to even 1000 years of raiding villages, and you should know that. It was just a *convenient*, if totally incomparable, picture you used to find some way to bring up the horrors of Methos Horsemen days in a way you thought would be understandable today - and this way, it was used thoughtless and happen to be an insult to every victims of the Shoah.  And I believe you should know that, too.

As for this story:  This story finally make it clear that you obviously haven't understood anything- not about Methos or his character, not about the differences in time, not about the relationship between MacLeod and the ROG.  The simple truth is that the MacLeod of your story is not *worth* Methos friendship and concern because he is incapable to accept him and even more incapable to look over his own narrow mindset.
Not worth bothering any more.

So, while Kaddish was at least interesting, if tasteless, this story is just bad, and, in concern to Methos, completely out of character.

Sorry.