Chapter Text
III.
Nobody had accused Sacre Coeur of being anything but an orgy in kitsch. Still,
all that sugary architecture was at least consistent in its whiteness, and
consequently more relaxing to the eyes than the explosion of colours one found
in a baroque church, or in anything Greek Orthodox. It was good for meditation,
once one managed to shut out the tourists and their inevitable flashlights, and
meditation helped Cassandra keep her fragile peace of mind until she felt a
*presence* entering the church.
She didn't turn her head. Since all kinds of unlikely coincidences could
happen, there was, of course, the chance that it was someone other than Methos,
but for one thing, they were on holy ground, and for another, in the year they
had spent together she had relearned to distinguish his footsteps, something
those born into a world where such things were essential to survival like
herself did by instinct. Her hesitation to look at him had, for a change,
nothing to do with enmity. The last time they had faced each other had been over
the body of a child they had both loved and for whose death they were both to
blame. At that time, she had felt frighteningly close to him, which was as much
a reason why she left as soon as possible as her grief for Becky had been. The
past, both ancient and recent, was nearly overwhelming her when he sat down next
to her. If there had been a choice, she would have waited some more years,
inevitable as this meeting was. But the freedom of choice seemed to have
absented itself from her life for some time now. She recalled Duncan railing
against the idea of destiny and nearly smiled.
"Did you know," she said, falling into a conversation with the man next to her
as if they had parted only yesterday while still not looking at him, "that I met
your doppelgänger here once? The immortal who called himself Methos and wanted
to bring a peaceful end to the game?"
"Not you as well," he replied, with the baritone voice as casual as it had ever
been. "Sometimes I wonder how the guy managed to keep his head as long as he did
when he ran into practically every immortal on earth before."
It had been a brief encounter; Cassandra had been certain that the man could
not possibly be Methos when she heard about his message in post-war Paris with
its ruins where the ghosts of the occupation still lingered in every corner. But
she had to make absolutely sure, so she arranged a meeting.
"Through his charisma," she said, the deep, quiet tones of the stranger still
ringing in her ears. "He had the gift; with the proper teaching, he could have
developed the Voice. Even without it, he could compel the young or those
unschooled in resistance, at least for a short while. He did it quite
unconsciously, of course."
"Interesting. And logical. You didn't consider teaching him, then? I should
have thought you would have agreed with at least the basic lines of his
message."
"I will never teach anyone the Voice ever again," Cassandra answered with a
bitterness that finally made her face Methos.
He had not changed his exterior, as MacLeod and she herself had done. Somehow,
it was a relief. Oddly enough, the idea that, when all things came to an end,
Methos would stay the same pleased her. Right now, he looked a bit surprised at
her vehemence, and quickly covered it up with a sidetracking remark, an
irritating habit of his she suddenly realised she had almost missed, for it
initialised usually another round of verbal sparring that served to relieve some
of the tension between them.
"Why did you cut your hair?" he asked.
"Maybe because everyone else did?" she returned, feeling the terrible levity of
someone who had just stepped over the edge of a cliff. "You, MacLeod, your
overprotective mortal friend... even Kronos. Maybe it was time for me to join
the club."
This was disturbing, Methos thought. Cassandra's request for a meeting had only
partially surprised him; it was bound to happen, sooner or later. That she had
said it was about an urgent matter, however, *was* unexpected and made him
curious in an uncomfortable way; disasters had an unfortunate way of bringing
the two of them together, and he didn't want to think of anything that could top
Bordeaux and Ahriman. And for her to be flippant about Kronos there had to be
something deeply wrong, not just with the world or someone else, but with her as
well. Something was eating her up inside, and for a change, he didn't think it
had much to do with him. The odd spark of protectiveness he sensed was
disconcerting was well. His feelings about Cassandra were convoluted enough
without adding the quaint notion of chivalry. That was MacLeod's territory,
anyway. Yet the idea of chivalry triggered a memory in him and inspired his next
attempt to distract her from whatever catastrophe had brought her to this state
and was bound to affect him as well.
"Are you sure that was the reason?" he said, switching accents from English to
Irish as he imitated the intense, middle-aged poet whom he had heard compose
these lines: "Never shall a young man,/ Thrown into despair/ By those great
honey-coloured/ Ramparts at your ear,/ Love you for yourself alone/ And not your
auburn hair."
She recognised the Yeats quote, and the fact that he had changed the colour for
the poem to suit her. A smile tugged on her lips while she decided to enter the
spirit of the game. They would start quarrelling soon enough, as soon as she
told him about Prokne' message and the rest of it, so she might as well treasure
those last moments of peace. Eyes sparkling, Cassandra went for an Irish accent
as well and continued the poem: "But I can get a hair-dye/ And set such colour
there,/ Blond, or black, or carrot,/ That young men in despair/ May love me for
myself alone/ And not my auburn hair."
"I heard an old religious man/ But yesternight declare/ That he had found a
text to prove/ That only God, my dear,/ Could love you for yourself alone/ And
not your auburn hair", Methos finished, and abruptly stopped when recognising
what he had just done. Quoting poetry to a woman opened up all sorts of avenues
to a misunderstanding. As he fell silent, a similar awkwardness settled down on
her.
Abruptly, Cassandra said:
"They have found out about us."
It was clear that she did not mean Methos and herself. All traces of levity or
embarrassment vanished abruptly, as Methos sat up. "Who has?"
"My guess would be the Americans, but I need you to be sure." As unemotional
as possible she told him about the visions that had begun to plague her, visions
that first were only fragments but started to come together to a picture after a
time. A research facility. Extremely well equipped. Mortals experimenting on
two or three immortals. What she saw were just images; she could not hear
anything. It was the sky, the constellation of the stars that gave her the idea
that this was happening somewhere in the U.S.; having spent the greater deal of
her life watching the stars from virtually every place on earth for orientation,
for guidance and sometimes even to measure her existence, she was all too
familiar with them. Then, Prokne had added the final piece of the puzzle with
her death.
"You must understand what she did. She was older than I was, although not by
much. Once, we belonged to the same order. We never liked each other and were
always rivals back then, but I respected her, and she did the same with me. The
last time I saw her was after she had encountered Kantos. My student, whom I had
taught the Voice, against my oath, and who only used it for damage. She cursed
me then, but not in words. Prokne couldn't speak anymore. He had cut out her
tongue. Cut out her tongue and cut off her hands and let her live, for he knew
what that would do to someone like us. I offered my head to her, but she
refused. Instead, she wrote in the sands with her stumps that there would be a
time when she would demand more than my Quickening as a penance."
"And she survived like that?" Methos interrupted disbelievingly. "How?"
"I can only guess. Perhaps on holy ground, like Darius. Or, much more likely,
she let herself be entombed and was only recently found. It has happened among
us; you know that we fall unconscious, after a time, when we are buried alive
and deprived of oxygen. We only return when we can breathe again."
He thought of the method he had used when he and Kronos had parted ways more
than two thousand years ago and surpressed a shudder. For that alone, he
wouldn't have been surprised if Kronos *had* killed him when they met again.
"My best guess is that this is what happened to Prokne, and that she was found
only recently by some archeologists. And when they discovered what she was, she
was turned over to whomever this research facility belongs to. The American
government, the military, or perhaps someone private, someone rich enough to
finance all of this. In any case, it wasn't that organisation you used to belong
to. None of the people I saw had one of these tattoos. And they didn't stop with
Prokne. They found a few others, and now they have proof. Somehow, Prokne found
a way to kill herself. How she did this I can only guess as well, but she was
not killed by one of us, for then she could have never done what she did. Her
Quickening was released without being caught by someone else, and she used this,
the final explosion of all her Powers, to sent me a message."
"Which was?" Cassandra glanced at him, ready for the scepticism she expected.
Yet his expression remained carefully neutral.
"That the time to fulfil my oath and repay my debt had come, that I had to stop
this. Stop the mortals from knowing about us and using us."
"Go on."
"You know what will happen if they are not stopped. They are not bound by any
oath to keep our secret. They will start to hunt us, for research, as weapons,
since we make the perfect soldiers, it will leak out to other nations, and soon
everyone will want to have their immortals."
"Probably. If it is true. Forgive me for asking, but do you have any proof
beside your visions and that final telepathic message?"
"With everything that happened in the last years," Cassandra said, feeling
relieved her accustomed anger towards Methos finally returned full-force, "one
would expect you to have something more in store when confronted with visions
than just patronising remarks."
"What happened were exceptions. They did not disprove the rule. And the fact
is, I have encountered much more frauds and emotionally overcharged mystics
than..."
"I," Cassandra interrupted icily, "am *not* 'emotionally overcharged'."
"Of course you aren't," Methos replied smoothly. "You are the most rational of
beings, and always were."
She wanted to slap him, but that would have just proven his point. So she
limited herself to sarcasm.
"That's where you come in, being the supremely rational and unsurpassed mind
that you are. I need you to find this research facility for me, through computer
hacking. If you can't find it, not the slightest proof something like this
exists, then I won't bother you anymore. If you do find a trace, you have to
help me with the next step as well."
He could have commented on the easiness with which she assumed he would help
her at all, but he didn't.
"Which is?"
Casssandra took a deep breath. "We have to go there, destroy the facility and
every available piece of data on immortals. And not just data stored in
technical devices. I have to mindwipe every single person there, including those
immortals who are still alive, for who knows, they might be willing to
cooperate, hoping to win the Game that way. And to risk a Quickening being
observed would be counterproductive, to put it mildly, so we can't kill them.
Their eyes locked. "We could kill the mortals," Methos said, intentionally
summing up Death the Horseman for her. If she was serious about this, she had to
know what could be in store. "It is easier than a mindwipe, and safer."
Cassandra's gaze never wavered. "We probably will have to kill some. I know
that. But it must be our very last resort. I'll do what I can to save their
lives first."
"Very commendable. Still, allowing this possibility means you wouldn't want
MacLeod to participate, and neither you nor I can trust another immortal as
back-up. So let me get this straight. You want me to find a secret research
facility which may not exist at all, then the two of us are to take it single-
handedly, reduce it to ashes and the staff to amnesia, if not to total
oblivion."
"We can do it," Cassandra said coldly. "You planned more difficult raids for
Kronos, didn't you? Considering the waste you could cause with two psychopaths
and a simpleton for a millennium, this single enterprise should be child's
play."
"Thank you. Your confidence in me is truly inspiring. Why do I get the feeling
that this still isn't all you expect of me?"
The mask of cold anger and determination shattered. Suddenly, she looked
absurdly young and vulnerable with her shoulder-length hair and her short dress.
It reminded him of that ridiculous sack-like thing she had worn when he had
collected her dead body as his spoils of war, and the expression of hurt
innocence on her not yet revived face. He hated these unwanted memory flashes.
Cassandra had not been the first nor the last slave he had taken, only the first
immortal one, but it still didn't explain why he remembered so much of that
short period between her first death and her running away from the camp. After
all, it had not been much more than a year, a grain of sand in the desert of his
five millennia. Why remember Cassandra at all, before she had come back into his
life with a vengeance that day in Seacouver? There had, literary, been hundreds
like her. But he had remembered her, had known her at once when she stepped out
of the elevator in MacLeod's loft, without the tiniest bit of doubt. As she had
known him.
"It isn't," she said, and turned away from him. For a moment, he had the
impression that she shivered, but then it was gone. "I don't think you truly
understand what I meant when I said I would have to mindwipe them. When I use
the Voice for a simple command, a single order, it is mostly easy for me, not
very exhausting, except if what I command goes totally against somebody's
nature. For example, if I ordered someone to kill himself, I would have to stay
until the deed is done, but I could do it. If, however, I order someone to
forget something, the order pales after enough time passes. Decades in some
cases, but still, it happens, and if I did just that to the personnel, we would
be right where we started, only some years later. Some connected memory will
always survive which will eventually trigger the blocked one. To be really sure,
I have to take every single memory away these people possess. They will be like
newborn children afterwards, will have to learn everything again. And their
original memory will never, ever return."
For the first time since she had known him, either in the ancient past or in
the present, he looked awestruck. Had the circumstances been different, it would
have amused her, since the expression was so unlike him. As it was, she barely
registered it.
"You can do something like this?"
"Yes. I did it twice. There were centuries between both cases. Both times, it
was just one person, and I needed months to recover. Since I had, in essence,
destroyed their old personality, I returned to them on a regular basis during
their lifetimes; they were my responsibility. Neither of them ever remembered a
single thing about their pasts. But they were alive."
She broke off. Now, it came. Steeling herself, Cassandra stared at the candles
burning in front of the numerous small altars of Sacre Coeur.
"There was an immortal who tried to do this to a whole tribe. He succeeded, but
he lost his own mind in the process. He became a lunatic, using his powers worse
than even Kantos would do, years later. Prokne and I had to kill him, and we
barely managed it together."
Suddenly, she felt his hand grasping her wrist, hard enough to hurt.
"No," he said harshly.
Obviously, he had guessed what she was going to ask of him. Well, even when her
hatred for him had been at its fiercest, she had never doubted his intelligence.
"You have to do it," she replied, turning to him. "Ever since I came into my
power and understood completely what I was, this is what I have been most afraid
of. Not dying. Not even falling into your hands again. Going mad and becoming
what you were. I can save all of us by mindwiping these mortals, Methos, and I
will, but if I lose my own mind through doing this, you have to kill me before I
damage anyone else."
"No," Methos said, barely audible through clenched teeth, seeing MacLeod
kneeling before O'Rourke again, kneeling before himself two years previously,
asking to be killed. "Martyrs make me sick," he went on, pulling her close
enough to feel her breath on his face. "So do suicides. I have really, really
had enough of both. If you want to die, do it on your own."
Abruptly, he released her. She did not move away. Her furious hiss matched his
own.
"I - do - not - want - to - die. But I won't become a travesty of myself, and
betray all I lived for, either. And you owe it to me, do you understand, Death,
you owe it to me! You took away everything from me, everything but my soul, and
now you will help me to keep it!"
In the silence that followed, she became conscious of all those mortals moving
around, shuffling hither and thither, cameras hanging around their necks,
obliviously chattering. Being alive. The ever-present incense reminded her of
both of one of her mortal husbands who used to become sick when inhaling it and
of the days in the temple many years previously when she and the others used to
rub it on their skins. Both were gone, temple and husband, and somehow it was
not surprising that he who had been at the beginning of her existence as an
immortal should be there at the end of it. Somehow, she had always known that if
she died, it would be through him.
"Damn you," he said, drawing back but making no move to stand up. There was
defeat and acceptance in his voice, and continuing anger. She surprised herself
by reaching out to touch him, as she had done when Becky had died.
"Promise me you will do it if it becomes necessary," she murmured, "and I
promise you I will do everything to avoid it."
The anger changed to sadness, as he returned her touch for a moment before he
rose. "I promise."