Several years had passed since the incident in Bordeaux and the last time Cassandra had seen Duncan MacLeod. Since then she had moved and started a new life, forced to be content with three out of the four Horsemen dead.
The truth was that she wasn't content with it. Methos had been the very worst of them and she felt spite now for Duncan and his act of mercy. Kronos and the others were dead, that was a start but something in her gut still churned at the idea that she had let the man who had enslaved her go.
Ancient memories of sand and pain came to her when she thought of it and now the burning shame of what she had not done joined them.
She'd failed, ultimately and Duncan had stayed her hand in the end.
She had not sworn to him however. She'd made no oaths nor promises. If she ever saw Methos again she'd take his head. She'd finish what she'd almost started and put the past to last at rest.
Duncan of course she understood, he was noble in a way men had never really been. It was one of the things that made him so endearing to her. He probably couldn't understand. There was no redemption in the world. People were still accountable for their actions years later, no matter how many years passed that didn't change.
The lives lost and their ways of living were forgotten but they had still been here. They'd still been men and women struck down by the sword of a man still breathing.
He had changed since then. He was a coward now, ultimately. He hadn't stood up to Kronos for all of his bluster. A changed man. She didn't believe it or care. People could change but it didn't erase their crimes and he couldn't vanish his, not while she was still alive to remember it.
The far off past rang in her ears.
Now in the modern world with it's electric lights and pavements she had moved on from modeling. She'd gravitated into design and management. The life of a model was short lived and not something she could maintain even without aging. Photographs were noticeable but it at least kept her preoccupied.
She had relocated to Rome and was living a fairly stylish life, complete with parties and socializing. Schmoozing really in her field. It was easy to pretend but she never once forgot what she was. She was a healer first and foremost and she was someone with several millennia of memories. This was only one venture in her long life.
She had some mortal friends now and things were uncomplicated for her. She was stung by Duncan's insistence at sparing Methos and was giving him his space. She wasn't done with him but she could stand to put a few decades between Bordeaux and seeing his face again.
It did not naturally occur to her that she would see Methos again so soon and her own reaction was not as she expected either.
She'd felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up first- the first tell tale sign of an immortal and she'd readied herself, sword hidden under her coat.
Rome saw it's fair share of immortals passing through. An ancient city attracted them. Some reminiscing, some trying to capture what they missed.
This could be nothing.
She turned to her left and scanned the crowd. She was outside of a church and a café, brick street beneath her feet showing years of feet and passers by.
No one there.
She turned to her left and the hair on her neck stood up again.
There, near the door of the church a man was looking at her, eyes wide. Their eyes locked and her blood ran cold, fury filling her guts.
Methos.
She made a move and he copied, backing up against the doors to the church. No, she wasn't going to let that happen and made a run for him, swiping at his coat as he slipped inside the dark church.
"You coward!" She shouted.
He was already several paces away, eyes still wide and wary. "Cassandra I didn't come here looking for you-" He started but she had her sword out, rage filling her as she remembered being made to spare him.
"Duncan isn't here for you this time." She said, swinging at him.
He jumped back, knocking into a row of candles and making them clatter to the floor. "Cassandra we're on holy ground." He said, waving a hand.
She narrowed her eyes, heart hammering in her chest. This wasn't fair. This was so cosmically- comically unfair. "Then face me outside." She snarled.
He backed behind another rack of candles, shaking his head. "No." He said quietly. "I'm not going to do that."
She was so angry. After all of these years. . . after everything he had done he had retreated into being a coward. It was pathetic. It was insulting. He knew what he was, she knew what he was and yet he dared to pretend.
"What are you doing here?" She snarled, sword still out.
His chest was rising and falling rapidly. "Leaving, I think." He said.
She pointed her sword at him, not giving up. "The minute you step out of this church your head is mine."
He licked his lips. "Cassandra you spared me once-"
"I did it for Duncan but I made no promise that you would live. You may have convinced him but I know the truth. Perhaps you were always a coward, hiding behind your sword and Kronos. . ." She could have spat.
He raised his hands slightly. "You and I both know we haven't lived this long by taking every fight we're offered."
She could have decapitated him there. "You and I have not survived the same way."
Something flickered through his eyes. "After so long?" He asked. "You really believe that?"
And she wanted to hurt him. How dare he? How dare he at all? "You're pathetic." She snapped. "You were always pathetic. Taking what you couldn't get."
He looked actually sad then and lowered his hands. "Cassandra. . . I can't make up for what I did to you and there's no apologizing for it but I'm not going to let you kill me." He sounded almost sorry and it humiliated her.
He turned and sank into a chair, hands in his lap and looked at her. "It's your move." He said.
She remembered dark tents and camp fire smoke, bruises that healed but never left, degradation and pain. . . so much pain. He'd come across time and space to humiliate her once more.
"Kill me and break the rules or let me go but I'm not going to fight you."
She stowed her sword and in a vicious act slapped him, the sound of it reverberating off of the walls.
His head snapped to the side but he had a strange look in his eyes again, something she had seen only a few times in the ancinet past, perhaps something that had come to him in the years after she'd fled. Whatever it was it was worthless. He was a murderer and a rapist and the closest thing to a monster that had ever walked the earth. He wasn't stupid like the other three had been, he was smart and it made him so much worse. Silas and Caspian had been idiots, morons content to play in death and Kronos. . . for all of his plotting he had never had the brains to lead properly. This man had had the vision. This had been the man who had lead the way. This man had called himself Death and now tried to hide among the innocent. Pretended his pain had ever mattered.
"Cassandra for what it's worth, I am sorry." he said, lowering his head, perhaps trying to calm her fists.
"It's worth nothing." She whispered, hand stinging slightly. "Nothing you say is worth anything to me and it never will be."
He leaned back, throat slightly exposed and she had the initial interpretation that he was mocking her but she held herself back. "I wouldn't imagine it would." He said.
She hated this. this false calm, this false penitence. She hated it. He couldn't have made up for what he'd done if he'd taken his own head. If he'd offered it to her on a plate. There was nothing you could do to make up for that. Rape and slaughter. They'd been common then but they'd been common because a few men like him had made it common. They had put that evil into the world and now this one thought he could escape it.
"Whatever you did to Duncan. . ." She said quietly.
"You're the one with the power of suggestion. I'm just a guy."
"Most men are. It doesn't stop them from being monsters." She said harshly.
He inclined his head slightly. So he agreed. It didn't make any difference. She still hated him.
She still remembered what he'd done.
"I didn't make MacLeod do anything." He said, looking up at her, giving her the power. she hated that he thought he could give that to her. That he could give her anything.
"You lied to him. Even now he can't imagine what you are. He doesn't have it in him."
"Probably but you let me live."
"I did it for him. Because he asked me to." She said, she needed him to know that there was no mercy. That it had not been an act of forgiveness. That it never would be. He had spared her life once but it counted for nothing. They weren't equal and they never could be.
She remembered the misplaced tears after his friends had died. He'd wept for monsters because he was one.
"I have no words for you that mean anything." He said quietly. "Cassandra. . . I'm not getting out of this chair. You should go home. I'll leave Rome tonight if you want but I'm not moving."
She felt impotent now. He was making her impotent. Just another cruelty of his. Just one more humiliation.
He was smart. He knew what he was doing to her.
"And when we meet again?" She asked. "What then? You hide behind Kronos and then MacLeod and now a God you don't believe in. You're hiding now as whatever MacLeod thought was worth sparing. When I meet you, will you be hiding then?"
He narrowed his eyes. "Cassandra do you consider yourself the same woman you were when I had you in chains?"
"When you had me on my back and knees?" She retorted. He wasn't getting off lightly. There were no exits from what he had done. "I am what she became. What I became."
He nodded. "But you're not her. You said so yourself. I don't ask for forgiveness, I don't think there'd be any point and I don't think you'd give it to me but I recommend you give this up. If you kill me, it won't change anything."
She stared at him. Perhaps he wasn't as smart as she had always given him credit for being. "I don't need to change the past." She said. "But I'd like a future without you in it."
He sighed wearily and looked around, arms crossed now. "I won't fight you." He said.
"Then you'll die."
If not here then the next time. He'd run out of holy ground and good men. He was already out of bad men to hide behind.
He nodded. "Maybe."
She wanted to hit him again. He was too calm, it was infuriating.
She grabbed a fist full of his hair, a savage motion she had been on the receiving end of so many times and jerked his head around, only for him to comply with sickening submission. He had to be mocking her.
"You manipulated the whole thing, Duncan. . . Kronos. . . the rest. . ."
He stared at her, she remembered that look. That was the expression he made when he was weighing his options, when he was thinking hard. When he was trying to be clever. She resented it now. "Some things." He whispered. "But now we're both alive."
"I don't owe you for that. I spared your life just the same."
He nodded. "You did. Let it rest, Cassandra. It does neither of us any good. This game. . ."
"A game?" She repeated. "Is that what it all is to you?"
He seemed almost sad again and she twisted her fist in his hair, trying to make it hurt. Wanting to control something in the wretched situation. She hated how powerless she felt even here. He made her powerless.
There was a pause and she looked down at him, the power was hers and yet she felt as if she had none of it. He had the power now. He always had. That was his game. That was how he had survived. He'd never been the best fighter. Not even them.
He had cowed to Kronos without a moments hesitation. It was pathetic. He was pathetic and to think that he had once held such power over her made her mouth run sour and her insides turn cold.
She had never let herself be humbled so far again. Perhaps he had. The idea possessed some appeal. Thinking that someone had done to him what he had done to her. . . It would have been fitting but it didn't absolve him. Even if that person had been Kronos. He had to know that. He's been alive too long not to.
They both had. The ancient world had turned to ash around their ankles and yet they were still here, memories of ancient stars and forgotten languages that even the most diligent scholar would never again master. . . They were remnants of the archaic. Of something older than the people and buildings they passed on the street.
Her people had had no written word of their own. Such things hadn't been needed so long ago. Survival had been the currency of life and though it had not amounted to much, it needn't have been like that at all. He always had made it so. He and his people. Kronos and Silas and Caspian. Mounted in horseback and draped in cloaks they had made the world what it was. Made me and women afraid. It needn't have been like that.
He was guilty and no amount of suffering or years of removal would change that. Penance and atonement had been useless in the ancient world. Only deeds had mattered and his were etched into her memory. They could and would not be forgotten.
Methos sighed, the small sound echoing as her slap had done. A foreign god was watching. He hung lifeless and moored above them while his mother wept.
She felt only fire.
"Despite what you might think, I wish you peace." He said.
"And do you have it?" She asked, voice biting. "Peace?"
A ghost of a smile. "Do any of us?"
She realized that she had let go of his hair and didn't remember when she had done it.
He was watching her with a timeless look, so similar to the one she'd known in the past and yet so different too. He was tempered now, even she couldn't deny it.
But so what? He was still guilty. She was still here. As long as the two of them both lived there would be someone that remembered. The past would never really die.
She didn't want this now. She was neutered and halted. She couldn't take his head on holy ground and yet again she knew she would walk away, leaving him intact.
He knew it too but he didn't gloat. He'd never been one for that. Gloating men let their guards down.
"Perhaps next time I won't be so lucky." He whispered.
She could only hope. This man. . . This monster would run out of hiding places eventually and when he did he would be her's.
She tightened her belt and wrapped her coat around herself, stepping back a few feet. "That would be ideal." She breathed.
How many times has he evaded her now? Escaped her blade?
He nodded as if he agreed with her but stayed firmly seated. She was going to have to leave first.
What did this world see in him that made it so ready to forgive? Did the suffering of victims count for nothing because it's man had convinced the world he'd changed?
She turned slightly. "Watch your head, Methos. I will come for you one day."
He nodded. "I have no doubt of that." He said, looking almost sad.
She hated him. She hated his guilt and his sorrow. It was worth less to her than the ashes of camp fires a thousand years extinguished.
She forced her feet away from the murdered God and the man who had once ruled her like one. From her ancient call to revenge.
She had waited this long. She could wait a few more years. They neither of them had any plans of death. He would be here waiting when she came again for his head.
Her heels clicked against old stone and anger under her feet and she had to force herself not to look back at the unassuming figure still sitting with his hands in his lap like some mediative saint.
She heard him last as he stood up the fallen candles and righted the only sign that they had been there.
Outside the sun broke overhead with the swing of a door and she remembered suns of a ages past.
What she left in the dark of the church behind her was rotten and decayed. A life nearly forgotten and unimaginable by the people that filled the streets around her. Their normal, pedantic lives. . .
Her own modern one. . . And him who showed her the past every time she looked at him.
Him who had taken all she had and ushered her into this immortal life without ever once telling her what she was or how to live in it.
She would not quell the fire inside of her. A million or more years of swirling ash couldn't smother it and the truth was that she did not want to. She didn't want to forgive. There were some things in the world that should not be forgiven and if Duncan wanted to be noble and forgive them anyway then that was his choice but no man, animal or god had the right to ask her to forgive.
Back in the church Methos looked up at the lingering Christ and eyed him warily. He had managed to escape one more tricky situation with his head still connected to his shoulders and despite his long years a tremor ran through him.
Cassandra might again one day be a problem and with as many regrets as he had, he doubted one more would break the camel's back. If he ended up taking her head it would be regrettable but nothing he couldn't live with.
He put a hand to his own throat and then the back of his head and sighed, exhaling shakily. Staring down a blade just never became easy. Funny how that was. Some things were just set in stone and steel.
Once upon a time, a very long time ago they had even been written in bronze.
