"Where's the witch?"

"Louise," Methos replied, "Is upstairs in the tub. I'm warning you now, when she comes down, behave yourself."

"What for?" Caspian asked.

"Because I promised Kronos while he was gone, nothing bad would happen around here, and," Methos grabbed Caspian tightly by his collar to make a point, "If anything does happen, I'll have no problem letting Kronos know who was responsible. Do you understand?"

"Perfectly," Caspian grumbled as he pulled away from him.

They heard a door open upstairs, which was quickly followed by Louise's bellowing as she came down the stairs wearing only in a black towel from the bathroom and her black gloves.

"Well that was certainly unwinding," she said as she stood across the room from the two men, "Now, where's that bottle you were telling me about?"

"In the kitchen," Methos said, "Follow me." Before he took a step forward, he reached over and shoved Caspian ahead of him, "You go first."

"So where's Silas?" Louise asked as she looked out the window as they passed into the kitchen, "I haven't seen him around lately."

"That's because he's being smart and hiding out in the back yard," Caspian said.

Methos kicked him and replied, "He prefers to keep busy."

"That much is bloody obvious," Louise said, "It seems every time you turn around he's heading in a different direction to do something else."

"Most of which being bringing a whole damn zoo into this house," Caspian noted.

"Oh come on, Caspian, it's not that bad," Methos said.

"Is it?" Louise asked, "As you can probably imagine, your brother didn't bother filling me in on the details."

"Well," Methos started to explain, "Silas isn't much of a…that is he…uh…you might say he prefers the company of animals to most people."

"Doesn't everybody?" Louise asked.

"And as long as we've been living out here," Caspian grunted, "We've had some 500 four legged bastards come through this house."

"Don't pay any attention to him," Methos told her, "He's just mad because most of them wind up in bed with him."

"Well," Louise glanced over at Caspian and said, "I can see why, he does bear some resemblance to the vampire bats in the Amazon. Have you been to the Amazon?"

"Not anytime soon," Methos replied as he took a bottle of whiskey out from underneath the sink.

"Consider yourself lucky, that genius brother of yours thought we should go on a trip and see South America…well, that was a big mistake," Louise said, "The first boat we took into the river had a hole in it and sank like a stone with us in it. The next one we took got us out of Colombia and we hit a sandbar coming into Ecuador and we capsized and lost half our supplies."

"Oh that's too bad," Caspian dryly commented.

Louise ignored him and turned back to Methos, "That wasn't the worst part, oh no, then things had to go from bad to worse, and the sharks came."

"Sharks?" Methos asked as he took a swig of the alcohol and passed the bottle to her.

"Oh yes, you didn't know they had them there, did you? Well, a whole pack of them was coming our way and they were biting into everything in their way…and I tell you that is why I don't believe in evolution. These are creatures that exist for hundreds of millions of years and still their brains are the literal size of a peanut. Had we a radio with us we could've overloaded the suckers' brains with a hard rock station. Well…six hours later we finally lose the sharks and set on our way again, and you'd think the worst would be over."

"You'd certainly hope so," Methos nodded in agreement.

Louise took a large swig from the bottle and wiped her wrist across her mouth and passed the bottle to Caspian before she answered.

"No, it gets better," she replied, a large knowing hardened grin on her face as she calmly explained, "Before we can cross into Peru, a 12 pound stingray decides it's tired of the river and gets the bright idea to jump out of the water and pay a visit to my husband's lap…needless to say we capsized again afterwards."

That had been enough to draw a snort out of Caspian, along with some of the whiskey he'd drank.

"By the time we got to Brazil," Louise continued, "We were both dead tired and just fell to the ground and fell asleep. We were rudely awakened six hours later in the dead of night when a 25 foot, 100 pound anaconda decided to cuddle up between us." Louise herself was having trouble keeping a straight face by this time, "And when we got home, I told your brother if he even suggested going back there ever again, I'd take his head myself. Thus far he's made plenty mention of Egypt, Europe, Mexico and Central America, but not one word about the Amazon."

The sun was starting to go down when Kronos finally returned. As soon as he stepped in the front door he called to Louise and Methos but got no response. He wandered into the living room and found a rather unusual sight laid out before him. Methos, Louise and Caspian were all passed out, Louise draped over the arms of a chair, Methos lying on his back on the floor and Caspian sprawled out on the couch like a corpse in a casket. Each to their own looked so ridiculous, Kronos didn't know where to start, but he decided to see how much his dearest brother could recall. He placed his foot on Methos' stomach and pressed down a couple of times, and it got his attention. Methos slowly opened his eyes and looked up at his brother and a tired and goofy smile formed on his face.

"So," he said, "You're back."

"What happened here?" Kronos asked, gesturing to the other two unconscious people in the room.

Methos pulled himself up and leaned on his elbows as he looked around and saw Louise and Caspian. He laid back down as he answered, "You might saw we had a bit much to drink."

"Did everything go alright?"

"Well we managed to get through the afternoon without anybody dying if that's what you mean," Methos said, "And your wife," he started to laugh, "She's quite the storyteller, I must say."

The look on Kronos' face made it obvious he didn't know what Methos was talking about but he already knew it wasn't good.

"Exactly when was it you two took that little trip down the Amazon River?"

The expression changed on Kronos' face into something unreadable.

"Six hour fight with sharks, a 12 pound stingray, 25 foot anaconda, you really know how to plan a vacation, don't you, brother?" Methos asked.

"She told you about that."

Methos nodded.

"As long as I've been gone, I hate to think what else she must've told you," Kronos said.

"Oh she had plenty to say…I really think we're going to get along just fine," Methos told him, "I don't know why you didn't bring her up here before now for us to meet."

"I seem to be getting that from all sides today," Kronos said as he went over to Louise and shook her to wake her up.

"Huh?" Methos asked.

"Nothing."

Kronos was only half asleep that night as he lay beside Louise in bed. For the past half hour he had been turning on one side and then the other, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. Unfortunately it wasn't getting him anywhere and he had a good idea this was going to be another night of insomnia. Without turning over he knew that Louise was asleep and had been for almost an hour, he was thankful for that much. He reached over to her side of the bed and rested his hand on her shoulder; subconsciously she must've felt it because she craned her neck and nuzzled her head against it.

When he had returned home that afternoon, Louise wasn't talking to him, which oddly enough was worse than when she yelled and threw things at him. After about an hour she had come out of it though and things seemed to be back to normal. One thing he was thankful for, Louise wasn't the type of woman who tried to use guilt on a person. It wouldn't have worked anyway but he appreciated the fact she didn't waste her time trying with it. Of course, Louise had always insisted there were only two groups of people that had any holding in the way of guilt and she didn't fit into either category. Looking back now, Kronos realized the day hadn't been pure hell but it certainly did come close a few times. In fact it was getting to the point where Kronos could almost swear things couldn't get much worse than…

"YEOUCH!"

Kronos sprang up in bed when he felt two sets of teeth bite into his hand. He looked to the side and saw Louise grinning in her sleep as she chewed the flesh between her teeth, like a dog with an old ham bone. Kronos lifted her head up and pulled his hand away and tried to wake her up. He pressed down on her collarbone a few times but it didn't wake her up. Then he started shaking her to try and get her attention, but all he got from that was two feet kicking him in the gut and knocking him out of bed and onto the floor.

As he climbed back into bed, the only thing he could think of was that must have been some dream Louise was having, and hell if he was going to wake her up because then neither of them would be getting any sleep. The two of them had already spent far too many sleepless nights together with nothing to show for it except two blown tempers time and again. Sometimes Kronos wondered how exactly fate had decided to stick him with a woman who was just as stubborn as he was. Oh he was sure it was punishment for something he'd done in a past life, but exactly what it was he didn't know and he was too tired to think about it now.

Another half hour passed and he still wasn't able to sleep. So he got up and slipped out of the room without waking his wife, and made his way down the hall to Methos' room to see if he was still up. He pushed the door open and was met with complete darkness and that was all that he was met with. Methos wasn't in his room and his bed hadn't been slept in. Kronos left the room and tried to think where his brother might be at this time of night, especially being as far away from civilization as they were. Then he got an idea and he went down to Caspian's room and went in. The room was dark but the dim light from the moon and the stars shone in through the window, revealing two figures, Methos and Caspian, asleep in the bed, side by side.

Kronos had to laugh. Ordinarily paranoia was Methos' strongpoint but it seemed to be rubbing off on Caspian now. He still swore up and down that Louise had come into his room and knocked him out, which was one of the craziest things Kronos had ever heard in his life. He walked over to the bed and in the dim light saw his brothers. The two had their backs turned to each other and Kronos could guess they had gone to sleep under less than pleasant circumstances. Thinking back, it was often very rare that Methos and Caspian ever slept together. Caspian was a loner by nature for most of his existence and that had been a hard habit to break when the four of them joined together. He rode in a pack but he'd raise all hell if anybody tried to get in bed with him at night. Methos had been a loner for most of his early life as well, but not so much by nature as by circumstance. Methos longed for human contact but always got pushed away, or chased out by people who wanted him dead, or he left in the middle of the night to escape whoever had been his owner at the time.

Looking back on it all now, it did seem a bit unusual that given the lives they had led until the four of them met, they were able to become what they were. However if there was one thing that Kronos in all his time had known, it was that the greatest men and the greatest soldiers were made, never born. If destiny had any role in determining what people became, it certainly never bothered to make itself known in that fact. Nobody he had ever known had been born destined for anything great that they became, that was only a result of trial and error and rebellion. Most people he had known who made something of themselves and became a holy terror to anybody they crossed paths with, were not brought up to be that way but rather it was their own choosing that made them what they were.

That was one thing he admired in his brothers, they all had come from nothing but four painful, shattered lives of bondage and pain, to become the most feared band of men the world had ever known. And then it came to him that that, he supposed, was also what he admired in his wife. When they first knew her, she was an unknown woman from an unknown life who became a slave. And after she left…he never really found out what happened immediately after she left them, but for more than a hundred years he had gotten a good idea of what she had become.

When the world was different and the rules were different, when most women were raised only to be married off, work 14 hours a day on some God forsaken land and bear damn near a dozen kids each and then die, Louise, or whatever identity she had gone by in those times, made her way through the world alone and on top by her own ruling. Of course there was a very simple reason for that, she was a smart woman, too smart once he thought about it. When he thought of all the times that they were both nearly killed because of an idea she had come up with…and he had to laugh because in retrospect it almost seemed that he had married a mirror image of himself. There was a whole world of difference between when he got them in trouble and when she did. When one of his plans went awry, they were faced with a lynch mob. But whenever one of Louise's plans went south, they nearly got blown up.

As he thought about it though, he wondered exactly how different things would have been had she stayed with them instead of taking off in the middle of the night. While it was a question that had plagued him for thousands of years, he never brought himself to ask Louise just why she left. He decided that whatever her reason was, he didn't want to know. It was then that he decided it was probably not the brightest idea he had to leave her alone, so he pulled the covers up on Methos and patted his head as if he were a dog, and quietly slipped out of their room and back to his own.

He picked up a glass of water from the nightstand and took a drink. Back in the pitch dark of their room he had much more trouble seeing things but he was still able to make out that Louise was still asleep and hadn't moved an inch. As Kronos crawled back into bed he thought about how he didn't know what Louise did to sleep every night undisturbed but he was thankful she did. He was thankful one of them did anyway, but he personally couldn't remember the last time he slept through a whole night. Something always either kept him awake or woke him up in the middle of the night, and more times than not he didn't know what the cause of it all was. Oh he could guess, live 4,000 years without a conscience and it's bound to find its way back to you eventually. But, he noted, whatever was bothering him certainly didn't feel like a conscience eating away at him. For as long as it had been keeping him awake at night, he had never found out what it was, and he certainly didn't think he was going to get any further tonight. So he just lay beside his wife and stared up at the ceiling for what seemed like an eternity until sleep finally took him.

As the clock struck two in the morning, Methos and Caspian more or less quietly made their way down the stairs and into the kitchen.

"Quit stepping on my foot," Methos said.

"If I could see where I'm going, I would," Caspian replied.

"Shut up."

Methos stopped in the doorway and Caspian walked into him.

"And you quit doing that!" Caspian demanded.

"Oh be quiet," Methos told him, "You want to wake everybody up?"

"Why not? We already are," he responded.

"Shut up."

Methos made his way over to the sink and pulled a bottle out from the cupboard underneath it and set it on the table.

"Remind me again," Caspian said, "Why since you can't sleep, I had to get out of bed."

"Remember you said you weren't going to be alone tonight incase Louise came back into your room? That's all I need, I come down here for five minutes, I come back up and you're screaming your head off that I left you alone and Louise brained you again."

The light came on in the kitchen and Louise stood in the doorway, dressed in her nightgown and her gloves. "You think you've got it hard? Try resting peacefully knowing you're sharing a house with Sawney Beane's brother-in-law," she said as she gestured to Caspian.

"I thought you were asleep," Methos said.

"I was, but my bat radar picked up on a gin bottle about to be uncorked, so get some glasses and put it on the rocks," she told him.

"Where's Kronos?" Caspian asked.

"In bed asleep," she answered, "Right now you couldn't wake him up if you lit a roll of firecrackers and stuffed them down his boxers. So I thought this would be a perfect opportunity for the three of us to get further acquainted with one another."

"Speak for yourself," Caspian responded.

Methos kicked him in reply as he poured three glasses for them.

"So what did you want to know?" Methos asked.

"Well I told you plenty about my marriage to your brother, I'd imagine a man who's lived 5,000 years and was married 68 times would have a few stories of his own to tell," Louise said, "Unlike my husband, I get tired of hearing myself talk. So now, let's hear a little about your life."

"This could take a while," Methos told her.

"So what? We've got four hours before the sun comes up," she replied.

"Well then," Methos said as he handed her a glass, "I suggest we move to the living room where it's not quite so cramped."

"And bring the bottle," she told him, "I have an idea if we're going to be listening to your life story for long, we're all going to need a few drinks to get through it."

Methos spent the next three hours telling Louise about the last 50 years of his life and the last three women that he was married to. For most of it, Louise responded by laughing like a hyena, and Methos guessed it had more to do with the booze they were drinking since he didn't think anything he'd said had been that funny. As the clock struck the hour, Methos realized how late it had gotten and he looked over to the couch and saw Caspian passed out in a very crooked position. Methos realized that for most of the evening it had just been he and Louise engaged in the conversation, and he suddenly couldn't remember when it was that Caspian had finally shut up and gone to sleep, but now Methos couldn't wake him up for anything.

"Let the drowned rat sleep," Louise said, "It's much more pleasant when he's not talking."

Methos couldn't argue with that.

"You know, Methos," Louise said, "This really hasn't been too bad of a visit, do you think?"

"No," he shook his head.

"Though the other day when we first got here you sure looked like you were expecting the trip to be a real nightmare," she commented.

Methos laughed and replied, "Well you know, knowing my brother as well as I do, whenever he tells me he's met somebody, I always have to wonder."

"He doesn't find a lot of keepers, does he?" Louise asked.

"No," Methos laughed, "Not usually."

"I figured as much, to be honest I'm surprised we've lasted as long as we have," she said.

"Exactly how long has it been for the two of you?" Methos asked.

"Oh well, let's see…this is the sixth of June so…about 128 years I'd say," she told him, "Did he ever tell you how we met?"

"No."

"No, I thought not…well, I was working in a saloon at the time in Texas…I used to be a dancer, you know…not too bad a one either. Anyway, he came in one night and…do you know what he was doing at the time?"

"I don't think he said anything about that period of time," Methos said.

"Same old stuff for your brother, robbery, murder, all the good stuff…he had just come from a bank robbery and one very angry and persistent lynch mob. He came in for a drink and we met, and considering I was making half my living entertaining men for the night, you could say we had something of an instant attraction."

"He wanted sex, you wanted the money," Methos guessed.

"Yes…maybe…he was so tired he couldn't do anything that night, I think he was just looking for a place to spend the night more than anything, I was just a bonus."

"Figures."

"Not quite…you see my way of business wasn't what you'd expect. A man would ask for me, he'd come up to my room, I'd have him chase me around the room, he'd pin me, I'd hit him over the head and he'd be out cold for the night. Come morning, he owed me ten bucks with absolutely no recollection of what happened the night before, so he didn't know he didn't get anything."

"And with Kronos it was the same thing," Methos said.

"Except he remembered the next morning, but he paid me anyway…that was how we met, and that night we blew town and headed out to California to get married."

"My brother the romantic," Methos dryly replied.

"Well the marriage was his idea, I think he was joking at the time though…but considering everything we haven't done too badly for ourselves in all the time we've been married, I don't think," Louise told him, "I've enjoyed it anyway."

"I'm sure he feels the same way about it," Methos said.

"I wonder sometimes," Louise said, "You know, Methos, I like you. From the minute I met you I just knew that the two of us were going to get along just fine. I think I can trust you."

That wasn't something Methos had been expecting to hear, and now he was suspicious. "With what?" he asked.

"Well you probably gathered when we first got here that we haven't quite told you guys everything," Louise said, "Your brother and I have been carrying around a secret for a long time and…well I'm plain sick of it. But, I needed to know that I could trust you before I told you anything…and I guess this as good a time as any to start explaining."

With no further words, Louise reached her left arm over to her right elbow and started peeling down the long black glove. Methos watched in morbid curiosity to see what this whole thing was about. She pulled the glove completely off, revealing her right arm that looked normal. Then Louise reached with her right hand to her left elbow and started to pull down the other glove. She took a slower approach in pulling this one off than she had the other, and it was in great shock and horror that Methos saw why. When she pulled off the left glove and held her arm out for him to see, the flesh on her arm from right below the elbow all the way down to her fingertips was entirely charcoal black.