"Not a very pretty sight, am I, Methos?" Louise asked.
Methos was rendered speechless by the sight before him, and he didn't know how to answer her.
With her blackened hand Louise reached out to him and placed her hand on his cheek, and he immediately drew back before he had even realized what he'd done.
"I'd expected as much," she told him, "Both your brother and I have gone to much trouble over the years ensuring nobody ever found out about my…little problem. Immortals have hard enough lives as it is when people find out their abnormalities…I really didn't need this to interfere with things as well."
From the tips of her fingers to just below her elbow, the skin on her arm was as black as if she'd just crawled out from a pack of charcoal briquettes. In all actuality there was nothing about the sight that was so horrifying, but he knew that this was something Louise had carried around for a long time and was something she would carry around for the rest of her life.
"How…" Methos started to get out, recovering from the brief shock, "Did that happen?"
Louise drew in a breath and let out a huff and answered, "That's a long story."
The year was 1868 and Kronos and Louise were two of over forty people on a steamboat heading to New Orleans. Before boarding the ship, each had spent almost two solid hours laughing at how the other was dressed. Kronos, Louise had said half a dozen times, looked like a cheap lawyer in his suit, and Louise, Kronos had remarked, looked two steps away from becoming a nun in her ankle length dress with the high stiff collar and the stiff petticoat and corset underneath and the straw hat with a tall purple feather she wore to go with it.
"Remind me again how I ever let you talk me into this," Louise said as they walked past the other passengers on the main deck.
"You were the one who wanted to go to Louisiana," Kronos reminded her.
"Yes but I never said one word about going on a steamboat," Louise replied. She stopped walking after him and hit him with her purse, "Just why did we have to make the trip on a steamboat?"
"Because," Kronos replied, "It's faster than trying to travel 200 miles in a rowboat."
He started on ahead of her again, Louise pulled up her skirt and swung her foot forth and kicked him in the seat. He stopped and turned around and warned her about what would happen if she did that one more time.
"Next time," she told him, "I say we take a hot air balloon."
Kronos started to laugh, "You don't want to go in a boat but you want to become part of a big kite? Now that's funny."
"So's your face," Louise picked up her long skirt again and kicked him even harder, "Start moving."
Before he could object, she pressed her hands into his back and started pushing him past everybody until they were close to falling off the boat and into the water.
"Quit pushing me!" Kronos told her, "I can walk on my own."
Two more steps, one over the railing, and he would've gone off the edge of the ship and into the river.
"So keep walking straight ahead until you hear the big splash," Louise said.
"Knock it off," Kronos warned her, "Why are you in such a bad mood anyway?"
"Hmm, let's see, my genius husband manages to blow our cover so we have to get out of state to avoid another lynch mob. Then, he moves us into the only house in the whole damn town that the cyclone decides to chew up and spit out. Then, just when we get relocated to a nice place, he decides to jerk me out of bed in the middle of the night to make a 20 mile trip down to the docks to get aboard this God forsaken toy boat. I hope the sharks eat it and we can go home, I don't care if we don't see Mardi Gras, I don't care if we never see Louisiana, I don't care if I never go anywhere with you again. I just want to go home and go back to my own bed and forget that this past month ever happened."
Louise turned around and started walking away.
"Where do you think you're going?" Kronos asked.
"I'm going to go see what the captain's up to on this floating asylum," she sneered in response as she continued walking.
Kronos didn't always know when to take a hint but he knew when to leave worse off enough alone. He knew Louise would calm down after a while and behave herself. For the moment he'd leave her alone and let her wander around the boat and cool off. She did have a point though; the events of the past month were enough to put anybody in a bad mood. He had hoped that by getting them out of the area and going someplace of interest to them, that things would start to look up for them. But it seemed every time one wrong thing ended, something else happened before things got better.
But this time, Kronos knew nothing could happen. They were on the water, they were a good two miles from shore already, and if the lawmen back home wanted to make comparisons on past robberies and murders and made a connection, they had absolutely no way of finding out where he and Louise had disappeared off to. Yes, for the first time in a long time it looked as though nothing could possibly go wrong.
He leaned against the deck's railing and watched the scenery pass by. As much running as they had had to do over the last few years just to survive, it was refreshing to leave now just to relax. Gradually the sky turned colors and the sun started to set and before Kronos realized it, six hours had gone by, and he decided he'd given his wife enough time to calm down. As crowded as the boat was, he neither saw nor felt her anywhere nearby, and he walked into well over a dozen people trying to find her. Finally, he just stopped and asked the person in front of him, "Have you seen my wife?"
"How's that?" a man asked.
"My wife, have you seen her? She's wearing a long purple dress and a feathered hat."
The man looked around and told him, "Yes, I saw her a little while ago."
"Where was she?"
"She was…on the boiler deck."
"The boiler deck?" Kronos repeated.
"Yes."
He couldn't figure out for the life of him why his wife would want to go to the boiler…unless she found somebody up there who had a bottle with them. So he headed to the boiler and was about to laugh at the whole trip they'd had so far when something happened.
Kronos heard the rumble and explosion before he saw anything, and he was knocked off his feet. He heard people screaming, and no sooner had he turned off from his side, he was hit in the back by something hot. He tore off his jacket and started moving, not exactly sure what had happened but knew he couldn't just stand there waiting to find out. He soon got his answer in discovering that the boiler had exploded, and there was hot coal and metal flying everywhere, hitting a lot of people who were all panicking and trying to jump off the boat.
From somewhere deep in the boiler room he heard Louise scream louder than she ever had in all the years Kronos had known her. He ran directly for the boiler room and kept his head down to avoid much contact with anything that went flying. He stepped into the room that was simultaneously blackened by the smoke and lit up by the flames and he was sickened as he was forced to make his way over all the dead bodies of the crew, and their severed limbs that had been blown off from their bodies during the initial explosion. As he carefully made his way further into the room and passed two disembodied heads, he forced himself not to consider the idea of the same thing happening to his wife. He knew she was still alive, not from her Quickening as he could hardly feel it at all anymore, but because he could still hear her screaming…and those high shrieks of pain and fear would be something else to haunt him the rest of his life.
He called out to her and found her half buried under a pile of rubble that had been part of the boiler. Enduring severe burns and having his own skin come off as he grabbed at the scalding hot pieces of metal, he drove it all from his mind and relentlessly threw everything aside and swooped his burnt wife up in his arms and got them both out of the boiler room before another explosion had a chance to occur. They had to get off the boat before it sank, which he knew wouldn't be long.
Everything was quiet. Louise was somewhere between being asleep and awake. Everything was calm again. All was quiet, except her husband who was somewhere nearby, somewhat quietly praying. That got Louise's attention because in all the years she had known him, praying was one thing he never did. She opened her eyes and saw him sitting on a chair next to the bed, and when he saw she was awake, he stood up and his eyes got wide. Louise slowly looked around the room and saw that they were back in their home. Somehow Kronos had managed to get them 70 miles back the way they had come, and apparently without anybody getting in their way.
"Louise, how are you feeling?" he asked.
She stretched herself out and realized she was in bed and she didn't have any clothes on and was only covered by the blankets.
"I'm fine," she said, "What happened?"
"The boiler exploded…everybody in the room when it happened died. Several others did too, the boat sank after 10 minutes and most of them drowned," Kronos explained.
"How did we get back?" she asked.
"It wasn't easy," he told her, "Are you sure you're alright?"
"Yes, I'm fine," she insisted, "Kronos, I want to thank you for coming in there and pulling me out. I saw…I saw…" she was starting to lose her calm composure, "The men who were shoveling coal into it when it exploded…it tore their heads right off their bodies…I hadn't seen anything so horrible in a long time."
Kronos sat down on the bed beside her and with a shaking hand, stroked through her hair and he said to her, "Try to calm down."
Louise tried to sit up and that's when she realized that something was wrong with her left arm, it felt heavy, as if the blood circulation had been cut off.
"What's going on here?" she asked as with her right arm she started to draw the covers back, "What's, what…" her eyes widened as she saw the lower half of her left arm completely blackened, and her hand balled into a permanent fist, "Oh my God!"
After the next two hours of continual screaming and crying at what had happened to her, Louise was told that she had been like that ever since they got off the boat. Kronos had torn off the sleeve of her dress to find out what was the matter with her arm and had been horrified at what he had found.
"Oh God," she cried as she tried lifting her arm, but only from the elbow up, "It's like dead weight…that's all it is," she told him, "I can't move it at all! What good am I going to be now?"
"You remember a few thousand years ago when rulers used to cut off people's toes and they couldn't walk anymore as a result of it?" Louise asked Methos, "Because that's the way their bodies were made to balance the weight so they could stand tall and walk?"
Methos nodded, "I remember."
"I never had anything like that happen to me, but I'd gone through my whole life getting equal work out of both my hands and the day I couldn't use one of them anymore, then I truly knew what it was like to have your whole body thrown off balance. I couldn't do anything anymore after that, I couldn't work, I couldn't even dress myself. Your brother had to do it all for me, if you can believe that."
That surprised Methos. He knew from much experience in the Bronze Age that Kronos could be unusually patient at the damnedest times but he never knew his brother could last through something like that.
"For how long?" Methos asked.
"It was 12 years before I could even move a muscle in my arm at all…never mind how long it took to get back to doing routine things…I'd never seen anything like it before in my life. Kronos had to tend to the horses, keep the house, cook the meals and he had to dress me and bathe me every damn day because I couldn't do anything. It took several years, but I've gotten past that…this however," she held out her arm, "I'm afraid is going to be with me until I die. In all the years I've been like this, we tried everything to get the color out…one time your genius brother even tried scrubbing it with kerosene," she laughed, "But all to no avail. I've had this as a reminder of what happened that night for over 100 years, and it is not any lighter than it was when it first happened. You know…things like this just don't happen to an Immortal, none that I ever knew anyway…and your brother, the logical one," she scoffed, "He always assumed it had to do with the contact with the burning metal and coal for all the time it took for him to pull me out…but I don't know that I ever really believed it. For a long time I thought about the possibility that maybe I had to wear it everyday as punishment for something that I did in a previous lifetime…and you know, for it to still be like this even now, I don't know if I wasn't right with that idea."
"Surely you don't really think that," Methos started to say.
"I don't know what to think anymore…all I know is that I've done a lot of awful stuff in my life. Nothing that can compare to what your brother's done mind you, but it's not always the rabid dog that gets shot."
"Louise…"
She looked up and to the window. Methos turned to see what she was looking at. The sun was starting to rise.
"I better get back upstairs," she said, "Kronos is going to be waking up soon and he'll wonder where I've gone."
She stood up, collected her gloves and headed for the stairs, leaving Methos standing in the middle of the room wide eyed and not quite sure what had just happened.
Methos didn't go back up to his room after that, nor did he try and go to sleep. He sat in the living room and watched the sun come up for the morning, feeling still somewhat in shock over what Louise had told him. One on hand he felt as if he should tell Kronos that he knew, so they didn't have to go through the charade of hiding Louise's deformity, but he also knew that what Louise had told him that night was in the strictest of confidence because she had needed to know she could trust him before she said anything. So what was he going to do now?
When the sun cast a blinding glare into the whole room and Methos felt ready to collapse from mental fatigue, he heard somebody coming down the stairs.
"Well now," Kronos said as he looked at his brother, "If you don't look like something the cat spit up this morning. What's the matter with you?"
Methos yawned and replied, "Just tired…" he closed his eyes for a minute and blinked a couple times like a bright light had just come on, "I didn't sleep too well last night."
"You look more than just tired," Kronos told him as he leered in and was practically cheek to cheek with Methos, "Are you feeling alright?"
"I've just got a lot on my mind," Methos answered.
Kronos chuckled and said, "You always had that problem."
"Where's Louise?" Methos asked.
"In bed…she must be having some dream, she was asleep before I was last night and she's still asleep now."
Methos nodded in agreement, not saying anything and not quite sure what to think of everything.
Kronos looked over and saw Caspian still passed out on the couch and asked, "What happened to him?"
Methos looked over to Caspian and back to Kronos and said, "You could say he had too much to drink."
"He looks like it, and you," he added, "Look like the living dead. Go upstairs and fix yourself up."
Methos pulled himself to his feet and left the living room. He started up the stairs to the second floor and when he reached the top, he didn't go over to his own room right away but instead headed over to Kronos and Louise's room. He opened the door and saw she was still in bed asleep; her gloves discarded on the nightstand and she had the covers drawn up to cover her almost completely. Methos said nothing and left the room, closing the door behind him.
And what was he going to do now? He couldn't let anyone know that he knew what she had told him; he especially couldn't let Kronos know that he knew. And then, why not? he wondered. What harm could possibly come from him knowing? But then again he had to remember this was Kronos they were dealing with and he was not the most logical person in the world. It seemed, he supposed, that he wouldn't be finding out anymore about what was going on, until Kronos was asleep that night.
Louise turned on her side and slowly opened her eyes. She saw the figure of a man move out of the doorway and disappear. Her eyes opened wider. The man was gone. She didn't get a good look at who it was but she was guessing it had to have been Silas because it was a large man. Her first instinct was to get up and find out what was going on, but she was too tired to do that. Instead she lay back down and closed her eyes. What seemed like a minute later, she heard somebody talking to her. She opened her eyes again and saw Kronos standing over her.
"How're you feeling?" he asked.
"I'm alright," she replied, "Who's with you?"
He looked around the room and turned back to her, "Nobody, it's just me."
"But I thought…" she turned to the window and noticed that the sun had moved from the position it was in when she woke up the last time.
"That must've been some dream you were having to sleep as late as you did," Kronos said.
"Oh yes, some dream," she repeated, "Felt like I'd slept for over a hundred years. Kronos."
"What?"
"I think one of your brothers may be onto me," she said as she got up, "I think they're close to figuring out who I am."
"Methos?"
"No, Silas…he was here earlier watching me, and when I woke up, he disappeared."
Kronos tried to think why his brother would do that, and he couldn't find an answer.
"Even if he was, would it be so horrible if they found out?" Kronos asked.
"Hmm, I don't know, would it be so horrible if they found out about this?" Louise pulled her left arm up from under the sheets.
"Louise, we've been over this before," he replied.
"We have gone through a lot of trouble for over a hundred years to make sure nobody else ever found out about this," she said as she threw the covers back, "And I'm getting damn tired of it. This is your own family, if they can't know about it…well why can't they? Do you know something that I don't?"
"Of course not."
"Then why can't we tell them?" Louise asked, "We've gone so long not able to tell anybody, and it's getting old. At least they'd understand."
"Maybe," Kronos replied.
"What do you mean maybe?"
"They understand things that are within reason, they understand this," Kronos pointed to his scar, "Because I got it before my first death, that," he pointed to her arm, "How would you ever begin to explain that occurring some 4,000 years after becoming Immortal?"
"I can't explain it," Louise answered as she stood up and looked him dead in the eyes, "Neither can you, that's been the whole point of it…but just because we can't explain it doesn't mean I have to take it to my grave like a buried scandal. Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
She was quiet for a minute and then she answered, "Somebody's lifting the latch on Pandora's box."
Neither said anything for a minute. Kronos wasn't sure what to do and Louise was getting tired of this argument they had almost every day.
She went over to the closet and said, "I'll get dressed and be down soon, you go on ahead."
Kronos said nothing and just nodded as he turned and headed for the door.
Louise waited until he was downstairs, then she changed out of her nightgown and into a black shirt and jeans. She looked around the room for a minute as she considered her options on what to do next.
The afternoon passed with little occurring; everybody mostly kept to themselves, of course it was all for different reasons. Methos did it to make sure that Kronos would never catch on to what happened last night. He wasn't sure yet what was going on but he could already tell that they didn't need Kronos finding out that anymore people knew about what had happened to Louise than already did. Fortunately the night before, Caspian had been too drunk and in too dead a sleep to be aware of anything, so Methos was the only person who had to maintain his cover.
The day seemed to drag on for everybody in particular but Methos thought he would go crazy until night came and Louise told him the rest. What she had already explained was certainly nothing he had ever seen or heard of before in as long as he had lived. He had known several people who had been caught in steamboat explosions, some made it and some didn't, but no matter how horrible anybody ever turned out, there was nothing that seemed to match what had happened to Louise.
His mind kept going back to what she had said about not being able to move her arm or do anything for herself for 12 years, and he couldn't believe it. He knew that his brother was one of the most unusual people who ever lived, and every time he turned around, Kronos was somebody different; usually though he was a man of little patience who caused a lot of trouble if he didn't get his way. Of course there was another side to him; one that Methos for the longest time saw only in the rarest of occasions where he could be very patient and sympathetic.
All the same, he couldn't very well see if something similar to what happened to Louise had happened to him, his brother being anywhere near as helpful. But he had to remind himself, there had been an absence between the two of them for a good deal of time and he didn't know what Kronos went through at that time. All he knew was that when they finally crossed paths again, Kronos was or appeared to be at least, a changed man. Changed being the operative word; he really never did find out what happened to Kronos for all the years that they never saw each other, but it seemed Kronos was no longer the man he used to be. Though Methos worried, that Kronos was not as changed as he thought and that it wouldn't take much to revert him back to the way he once was.
From a distance he spent a better part of the day watching the two. They didn't show it very well outwardly but Methos could tell how much each meant to the other. If something were to happen to either one, the surviving one would be torn apart with grief. In his own time, Methos had done a lot of things, and he had also learned a lot, but despite it all he never considered himself to be a smart man, or a brave one. Those were two things he definitely was not and he knew this. That was one area where he wasn't sure whether he envied Kronos or not. Methos never had the courage to marry another Immortal; it was painful enough losing those who only lived a few years, and even if the day didn't come one would try for the other's head, there were the rest of the Immortals in the world to worry about coming their way.
The fact that Kronos and his wife had lasted well over 100 years despite apparently going through a lot of pain on both their parts, Methos wondered if maybe it was time he reconsidered where he stood on that decision.
The day finally turned to night and it seemed that Louise and Kronos wouldn't be going their separate ways for a while. They went on to bed shortly before midnight, and Caspian and Methos did the same, once again each with their backs to each other.
Caspian woke up in the night and found that the other side of the bed was empty. On the other side of the bedroom wall was the bathroom and he could hear the shower running. Damn but his brother sure picked the strangest times to take a bath. He got out of bed and left the room and opened the bathroom door. The room was filled with steam and he could hardly see anything. He made his way over to the shower, asked Methos what the hell he was doing, and pulled back the curtain. Only it wasn't Methos he came face to face with.
Louise turned around when the curtain was jerked away and she slipped and fell, bashing her left arm against the marble tub, and she screamed. Kronos came barging into the room and he started screaming at Caspian to get out. He did, and as the door slammed behind him, he ran into Methos.
"Where the hell have you been?" he demanded to know.
"Downstairs getting a drink, what did you do now?" Methos asked.
The door opened and Kronos came out carrying a semiconscious Louise wrapped up in a robe and took her back into their room and slammed the door behind him.
"Trust me," Caspian said, "You don't want to know."
In the bedroom, Kronos laid Louise down on the bed and carefully removed the robe. Her body was twisted in a painful manner all to avoid any pressure being put on her arm.
"What happened?" Kronos asked.
She only moaned in response. He put his hand on her arm and she immediately screamed at the top of her lungs and started kicking him; he quickly pulled away from her. Louise lay spread out on the bed as she was for a while before she was able to move herself voluntarily. With her right hand she pulled herself up and turned herself over and climbed to the top of the bed and leaned the top half of her body over the brass headboard and breathed heavily for a few minutes.
"Are you alright?" Kronos asked.
She said nothing in response and only continued her labored breathing, as if she had just come out of an air-tight room. When Kronos wasn't expecting it, she pulled herself up and turned around and started yelling at him.
"WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ABOUT?" she demanded to know, "Nobody in this house has enough damn sense to knock on a bloody door anymore?! That brother of yours," she hissed, "If he ever comes near me again, one more time, I'm going to rip his head off with my bare hands and spit down his neck!"
"You and every other woman he's ever known," Kronos couldn't stop himself from responding.
Louise howled as she pulled herself up off of the bed and went over to the dresser and started putting on her clothes for the night. Kronos tried to help her with that but she slapped his hands away.
"I don't need any help," she insisted, "I'm not a bloody child."
"Of course not, Louise."
"Go back to bed, Kronos."
He did, and after a minute he realized he was still the only one in bed. "What about you?" he asked.
"I'm going downstairs for a drink, I'll be up soon," she told him as she started for the door.
Kronos pushed back the covers and got out of bed, "I'll come too."
"WILL YOU GET OFF MY BACK!?" Louise exploded as she turned back around to face him. Her outburst was so sudden and so loud that Kronos actually jumped back. "WE'RE NOT NUNS," she told him, "WE DON'T HAVE TO DO EVERY DAMN THING TOGETHER! NOW GO BACK TO BED!"
He did, and when the door slammed and she had gone, he was left feeling like he'd just survived a bomb going off.
Methos hadn't really gone to sleep that night; he just lay in bed and stared at the ceiling in the dark and waited. He didn't know what he was waiting for; nothing he supposed, but he had the idea that Louise was going to be up to telling more of her story that night. He'd waited and waited and nothing happened; the entire house was quiet as the dead. At some point in the night he realized, he must have fallen asleep because while he didn't feel another quickening, he felt the presence of somebody else in the room. He opened his eyes and shot up in bed and he didn't see anybody, but he could have sworn that… He looked over to the other side of the bed and saw that Caspian was still asleep. But then again, the way he slept lately you couldn't wake him up if you set off an air raid siren right next to his ear.
He wasn't sure if anything had actually happened, but he had an idea and he was going to act on it. Pushing back the covers, he quietly slipped out of bed and made his way in the dark over to the door and stepped out of the room. Careful not to trip or fall over the banister, he cautiously made his way to the stairwell and started down. He could see that the first floor was dark as well; all but one room. There was a dim light on in the living room. Methos reached the bottom of the stairs and with his heart rising into his mouth, stepped through the dining room and into the living room and found Louise in her nightgown seated on one of the chairs.
"Well," she said, "You're back."
"I had an idea you wanted to see me," Methos explained as he sat down across from her.
"Bright boy," she said, "So, where do I begin tonight?"