Cassandra sighed as she settled in her seat. Just because she decided to continue to allow Methos to survive didn't mean that she wanted to be anywhere near him. Putting a continent or two between them seemed to be a good idea. She'd wanted to see Australia for a while anyways.

The original reason she had let Methos go had been Duncan. She didn't want to see the sadness and disappointment that would be in the eyes of the man who in some ways she still considered to be the boy she had met in the woods so long ago if she had killed a man he called friend after he had begged her not to.

The reason she didn't go back and kill Methos the instant Duncan's back was turned was almost funny really. She'd been going back to the hotel to grab her stuff when a stray thought suddenly changed her entire perspective on a man she had spent almost her entire life hating and fearing.

The entire thought was thus: Wasn't Patty Hearst arrested after helping her captors rob a bank?

In the dark hours of her captivity by a group of marauding bandits who had become through legend the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, before the Highland child whose true test is yet to come had come to rescue her, Methos had been there. He had sat outside her concrete and steel cage apologizing and trying to explain how her "feelings for him because he didn't protect her from Kronos" weren't her fault and how she'd been suffering from Stockholm syndrome "Like Patty Hearst" while they had been together.

It had been many hours after that interesting and unintentionally revealing conversation that she had realized that the poor bastard had been projecting. After the stray thought had come to her, she realized that the example Methos had used - though rather famous - hadn't really fit her and her actions in that camp she had been held captive in so long ago.

Patty Hearst had been found fighting alongside her captors, aiding them in their cause.

Being able to see glimpses of the past as well as the future, she had watched over a period of two days as the man who called himself Methos had gone from a rather peaceful fellow who had wandered from camp to camp and village to village listening to the tales the elders had to tell around the fireside or near the hearth to Kronos' captive to Kronos' advisor to Kronos' "brother" to the man who had rode for a thousand years from camp to camp and village to village murdering their inhabitants and taking anything and everything he wanted at the moment alongside Kronos - who he eventually forgot that he had once hated - Caspian, and Silas.

It was as she watched the past of a man who valued his survival above all else that she realized that Methos was a far more pathetic creature than she was. Killing him almost wouldn't really be worth her time, and - unfortunately - it seemed that the man who would have done just about anything and everything and had alredy done a great many unsavory things to keep his miserable hide intact before he had met Duncan Macleod still had a small role to play in the coming future. She no longer hated and feared the once mighty Methos, she pitied him.

As she settled back to take a nap to shorten what was going to be a rather long flight, she smiled. Her gift had told her that Methos would much rather be hated than pitied. It was such a pity that there was nothing he could do about it though.