Chapter Text
V.
Being a mother, Cassandra discovered, or rather rediscovered, had its drawbacks. Oh,
she didn't regret her decision. She couldn't have lived with herself if Becky simply
had been dumped into the next orphanage run by the state, and it provided her infinite
satisfaction to see the girl step by step recapturing life, the joy of life, and a
childhood. But it had been so long since her last adoption that she had almost
forgotten the never-ending worries, from small things like lost shoes to large
anxieties like Becky running precariously close to the edge of a cliff. Not to mention
the never-ending questions, once Becky had overcome her shyness and accepted her as a
friend. Unfortunately, she had accepted Methos as well.
"Isn't Adam here yet?" or "Look what Adam has brought me" were common phrases day in,
day out. Cassandra gritted her teeth, told herself it wouldn't do any good to give
Betty an inkling of her true feelings towards "Adam" since it would only make the girl
unhappy, and that would come soon enough. An additional side effect of caring for
Becky was that there were rare occasions for sword fights, since they obviously
couldn't practice with Becky around, and she couldn't leave Becky alone, not when the
girl still woke each night screaming with terror. Cassandra's own nightmares, oddly
enough, had vanished. In the pure spirit of scientific investigation, she asked Methos
and was told the same, which she believed since he had no reason to lie about it. In
any case, having no nightmares didn't mean quiet nights. In the beginning, she kept
Becky with her, and later, she always took care to leave the door between the guest
room, which had been converted to Becky's room, and her own bedroom wide open. It made
it easier for Becky to fall asleep, but it didn't keep the nightmares away.
Cassandra found herself teaching Becky age-old riddles and verses against the darkness
and all kinds of danger. Oddly enough, something the Minoans had used to calm the sea
worked best for Becky. Soon, the girl could recite the conjuration from memory and
made Methos write it down on the fine, white paper he used for his notes. He had a
laptop, too, but his regular trips to the local shop for all kinds of writing utensils
and the slowly gathering files in his room where Rachel could see them ensured that
his cover as a researcher was never questioned by anyone. Now Becky's room was
plastered with an old Minoan sea poem written in Roman and Greek letters as well as in
hieroglyphs, though Cassandra could not read the latter. When she had visited Egypt
for the first time, the Ptolemaians had been in charge, soon to be disposed by the
Romans, and hieroglyphs were already a forgotten art.
Seeing the poem gave her an idea. There *were* things he knew that she didn't, and she
might as well take him up on his teaching offer. Besides, it gave him something useful
to do instead of insinuating himself with the locals and cozying up poor Rachel.
Becky insisted she wanted to learn the "picture-writing" as well, and so they
sometimes sat around Cassandra's large table or on the floor of Betty's room, drawing
pictograms that were invented millennia ago. To Cassandra, the most astonishing thing
was that the domesticity of the situation didn't make her choke. But as often as she
found herself actually enjoying it, the reminder of the last time she had fallen into
this trap chilled her at once and restored her much-needed caution. Oh, he was good in
showing interest, amusing himself with teaching and even questioning her about her own
knowledge. But as soon as you began to believe things had changed, a brutal reminder
of reality was due, anything from a slap in the face to being handed over to the next
barbarian. Never, ever again.
About two months had passed when Becky had grown confident enough to befriend Rachel,
who suggested she could babysit now and then "so you can have some time on your own".
Cassandra didn't like the implication of that phrase, or rather, the way Rachel said
it; Rachel seemed to have some odd ideas about Methos and herself, and Cassandra had a
very good idea where they had come from. Unfortunately, there was not much she could
do about this, either. It was as good a cover as any for his regular visits, and she
could hardly tell Rachel the truth. Even though Rachel had accepted Duncan as
something out of a legend, he had never confided about his immortality, let alone
about the rest of the immortals. And Cassandra was too old and wise to involve an
innocent mortal in the game, which invariably happened if you told them, just because
she had been set up by a master of lies.
So Rachel stayed with Becky now and then, and Cassandra and Methos started practising
in the old cemetery, newly restored after Kanwulf's vandalising. The first fight,
carefully planned on her part, gave her the immense satisfaction of seeing the
smugness wiped from his face. In the beginning, she let herself be disarmed easily,
though she had to repress the terrible fear she felt when his sword touched her
throat. Then, after he had grown relaxed and overconfident around her, she used a
move--taught to her eons ago by a gladiator who had been freed from his contract
through a friend of hers--and had him flat on his back. His expression was priceless.
"And this," Cassandra said as gently as she could, "is how it's done, pony-boy."
Later she thought that perhaps it would have been better to let him continue with his
underestimation of her, but then she recalled his face again. It had been worth it. In
any case, afterwards the sword practice grew in intensity, though she suspected he
held back moves of his own.
Most immortals were in love with the sword, but she had never been. It was the
instrument of all their deaths: that would have been enough to cause her dislike, but
the first time she had ever seen swords had been the day when her father and all her
people were slaughtered by them. It had taken her a long time to outgrow her hatred of
the weapon and accept the simple necessity of it. Fortunately, most immortals could be
disarmed by the Voice. She had not taken a head for a long, long while, but she
recalled the sensation as if it had been yesterday, the invasion of mind and body, an
ecstatic agony one despised and yet also craved.
She wondered whether, if she had taken Methos' head directly after he had taken
Silas', and, from what she had watched, a part of Kronos' quickening as well when the
spiral formed between him and MacLeod, she could have survived with her sanity intact.
The idea of being possessed by three of the four horsemen horrified her. But she was
reasonably sure she could manage to integrate Methos' quickening now, if she had to.
He had obviously managed to deal with Silas and Kronos without falling into a Dark
Quickening. It was one of the reasons why she was so certain that the changes in
Methos could only be superficial, at best: he must have an incredibly stable sense of
self to survive as long as he had done, when most immortals either snapped or grew
suicidal, an unchanging core.
"Do you remember a time before the swords?" she asked him once during their evening
walks, which they took when neither was in the mood for swordplay. What she actually
meant was a time before the Game, for she had her suspicions about the Game. If it had
already existed by the time she became an immortal, what had kept the Horsemen from
killing each other? But then again, together they were more powerful and effective
than any of them could have been alone. It might just have been enough to outweigh the
lure of the Prize.
Methos, however, decided to take her literally. "Barely. Flintstone before Bronze
before Iron. I told you, I remember taking my first head. Believe me, there is a
reason. Ever tried to behead someone with a flintstone axe? It's messy, to say the
least."
"I should have known you would have found a way to kill before it became easy to do
so, Death," she answered, but there was more sadness than heat in her reply, and so he
swallowed another sarcasm, keeping, instead, to memories.
"Strange, but I can recall the change from bronze to iron much more clearly, and it
was less important than from flintstone to bronze. I thought it was a fad, first.
Bronze was so much more reliable."
"Adamas," she murmured, recalling the Greek name for the unruly metal. She, too,
remembered a time when iron had been used mostly for jewelry, not for weapons. But
now, in retrospect, it seemed that all too soon people had found out that they could
kill each other much more effectively using iron. Every new invention sooner or later
ended up as a weapon. It was a depressing cycle. Thinking of new inventions and
deadly weapons brought something else to mind.
"What became of the virus?" she asked, suddenly startled that she had never thought of
this before.
In the moonlight, his sharp features had the eerie, cold hardness she always
associated with his pensive mood. It used to change into either a sudden, brutal
lashing out or a deep withdrawing, when he would not talk with her for days, just
communicating through gestures if he wanted her to do something.
"A little late, aren't we?" he replied, proving the maliciousness was still there, and
covering it up at once with a deceptively mild: "Don't worry. I destroyed the damned
thing without bringing it into contact with air or water. It wasn't easy, especially
the bottle Kronos had installed at the water supply, but it gave me something to do
instead of dwelling on your graciously allowing me to live."
"Oh, I could think of several other subjects that might have diverted you," Cassandra
retorted coldly. " Such as what would have happened if Kronos had defeated Duncan.
Thousands would have died before anyone could have stopped him, but then, that would
have been nothing new for you. I guess the only thing you would have cared about is
how to explain to Kronos that there were only the two of you left."
"The three of us. Let me remind you that you, my dear, stayed around, instead of
getting the hell out of there. If Kronos had won, you would have had two heads to
choose from, and I grant you probably would have killed one of us. I flatter myself I
would have been at the top of your list, but that would have left you with Kronos,
which would have left him with taking your head after you had taken mine and having
his brain completely destroyed by all those quickenings. And then, yes, thousands
would have died."
She wondered. Would she have been too distraught, too bent on revenge to realise that
killing one horseman would mean death by the hands of the other? That then, there
would be no one left to warn the world? She didn't like to think so.
"Not much of a plan," she said aloud, inadvertently using the same words as Kronos
had, which nearly caused Methos to flinch. "You gambled on two victories and one....
weakness."
Now that she had sparred with him, she knew Silas, with all his brute force, hadn't
had much of a chance of killing him, especially after the shock of seeing his
favourite brother turning against him, as he turned against anyone who trusted him.
She couldn't spare much pity for Silas, though. He would have killed her without a
second thought. His was a simple nature: there were the four horsemen, there were
their pets, and then there was the rest of the world, theirs for the taking. He had
never been gleefully cruel like Kronos or Caspian, but neither had he shown mercy to
anything with two legs. To be butchered without added viciousness was still to be
butchered. Still, she had never hated him as much as the rest of them and would not
have bothered to pursue him if he had been on his own. Chances were that Silas without
Methos or Kronos would have withdrawn from the world again.
Kronos, though, was another matter. Kronos and Duncan were equally matched. He could
have won. As a matter of fact, he could have won by default much sooner, if Silas and
Caspian had succeeded in their mission. Methos certainly wouldn't have stopped him,
she thought, and said so aloud.
"Are you sure?"
"How can I not be? When you thought Duncan had died, your resolution amounted to
'Let's keep Kronos happy, be a good little slave again'. You would have gone on
planning his mass murders for him, doing what he wanted, keeping him happy, just as
you always did."
He stopped. They weren't far from her cottage now; she knew every tree, every bush and
even the earth sang its calm song of safety and sacred ground to her, but his voice,
deep and drawling as he had not used it in this century before, at least not towards
her, laid her nerves bare, with the precision of a scalpel.
"What exactly are we talking about, Cassandra? What is it you really want to know?
Whether I would have saved the world, or whether you still would have lost a
competition with Kronos?"
"You bastard!"
He saw her hand coming, but didn't move. Because the moon was full and, rare for this
climate, there were no clouds, and because he was very fair-skinned, she could
actually see the marks her hand left before the immortal healing reasserted itself. It
had not been a stage slap; she had used her fist. They stood and stared at each other,
while the pain in her knuckles, too, faded within seconds. She could hear their
elaborate breathing.
"I'm sorry," he finally said, sounding for once neither flippant nor insulting, but
sincere. Yet he left it open what exactly he was apologising for.
"It's easy to be sorry afterwards," she answered tonelessly, as she turned away from
him and went back to her cottage.