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Cassandra stretched out on a bench and looked up through the shielding glass at Jupiter, huge and heavy in the sky. She felt oddly as though she were looking at the sun as she might see it in millions of years, if she lived millions of years. I might, she thought. I could.
She stiffened as the nerve-jarring feel of Immortal presence washed over her. Rare, to run into another Immortal out here--they seemed to cling to Earth like burrs. Immortals abhor a vacuum, she'd told a student, once.
She swung her legs to the ground and drew her sword, feeling its weight in her hand.
A tall, male Immortal, his face vaguely familiar, stood just inside the entrance to the park. "Have you come to kill me, Cassandra?" he said.
She studied him, holding her blade before her. He had dark hair, and his skin was bloodlessly pale even in Jupiter's light. He walked towards her, and she noticed that he held no weapon
"I know you," she said, never taking her eyes off him. "I--know you. Don't I?"
His eyebrows flickered upwards. "Yes," he said, and he seemed puzzled.
She frowned. "You--I argued with Duncan MacLeod about you. Three thousand years ago. I remember--" She broke off, and her heart leaped in her chest. She knew this man's face from nightmares, knew that she feared him. Why did she not know why?
His lips parted, but he said nothing; his body was so still that she wondered if he was breathing at all.
"I hated you," she said, and gritted her teeth. "You're a monster. Or so I thought."
He smiled, and in the flash of his bared teeth she knew fear. She had seen that killer's smile before--
She swallowed hard.
Gently, he said, "Cassandra. It may be that you've forgotten everything before you took your first head. It's what happened to me. I think it happens to us all, if we live long enough."
Cassandra stepped away from him, lifting her chin. This man is a liar, her gut insisted, but yet his words felt true. "Why should I believe you?"
He opened his hands, letting the fingers spider outwards, the folds of his coat hanging loosely at his sides. She wondered how many weapons he had in that coat; there was certainly no environmental need for it, here under the domes. "Because I gave you your first death," he said. "Or--was there for it, if I did not kill you myself. I confess, it was so long ago that I scarcely remember it myself."
Her breath caught in her throat; this, too, felt true.
His eyes crinkled at the corners, and for a moment he looked unthreatening. Young. She'd had lovers who looked like him many times--tall mortal men, dark-haired, hazel-eyed.
She wondered if they had all been replays of this man.
Her murderer.
Or, looked at another way, the man who had given her over five thousand years of life--that she remembered, at any rate.
She lowered her blade. "Tell me," she said. "What was I, when you killed me?"
He shrugged. "A healer's apprentice, I believe. I didn't pay much attention." He smiled at her again, and again, she felt fear knot her stomach.
Liar, something inside her whispered. Killer.
"Tell me," she said, forcing that voice to silence in her gut, wanting nothing more than to hear tales of a world long gone, gone even from her memory. "Please. You're old enough--you must be old enough. Tell me what my world was like."
He stepped forward, into shadow; his voice echoed like an angel's in the dark. "The world was very old, even then," he said. "Old, and empty, and there was nothing but the desert of my rage." His eyes glinted from the shadow. "To you, I suppose, it was still young and lovely, but I remember only the blood."
She closed her eyes, and suddenly his hand gripped her shoulder and his mouth was hard on hers; his body was lean and strong against her. "Live, girl," he said, as he released her, as he found her eyes with his. He kissed her again, more gently, and whispered "Live" into her open mouth.
And then he was gone, and she watched him walk away. As he reached the exit, she called after him, "Your name! I don't remember your name!"
He did not turn or answer, and the door slid shut behind him. She stood there and listened to the fading ghost of his Quickening, then glanced up at the shielding glass. Jupiter looked down at her, like a great eye, red and malevolent.
"I'm going back to Earth," she told it, and scrubbed one hand over her lips. Earth was where she'd come from; Earth would have the answers. On Earth, she could find her memories, find out who the hell he was, that son of a bitch--she'd find him out, and come back and--
--and the world was old, he'd said.
The world.
She herself.
She took a deep breath and lay back down on the bench; stared Jupiter straight in the face. "You don't scare me, old god," she said, aiming a finger at it. "You're dead. You don't scare me."
The End