More of an AU that’s been going slowly, but is fun to work on.

Kronos is a warning in himself, but. His views on the world aren’t mine, and aren’t particularly kind or good for others.

AU: offshoot of Sea and Wolf
Characters: Kronos, Darius, mentions of others

“It is good to see you awake, Aurelius.” Darius watches Kronos with a wary expression as he unshoulders his pack to set it next to the ones the woman – greeted as Xanthia by Alysse, and as Rebecca by Fitzcairn – and the other man, who must be Sean, had shed.

“It is good to be alive.” Kronos shrugs, adding another piece of wood to the embers to keep the fire from dying and needing kindled once more. “And to see you once more.”

He had heard of Darius’s death, the loss of his Quickening because it was mortals who killed him – had to be mortals, for none of them would have killed on Holy Ground. If he had known who to hunt, he would have torn the fools who had killed Darius to pieces, and perhaps been satisfied for a time.

A small smile curls the corner of Darius’s mouth as he settles across the fire, pulling the packs closer to him. “You seem more settled in your own skin than the last time I saw you.” He pulls neat bundles of greenery out of the pack, some which look vaguely familiar, some which look fascinatingly strange – and not all of which are entirely green.

Kronos snorts, leaning back against the section of log which has become his seat. “I was dead.”

It is good to be alive again, and to be beyond the reach of anything any mortal might do. The stars last night had been strange indeed, even to his eyes, no familiar patterns in them at all.

That the moon which shone a broad crescent had held nothing familiar, either, and was larger than he’d ever seen, spoke even more of them being well beyond the reach of mortals, wherever they are.

“As have we all been.” Darius passes him one of the bundles of stranger greenery. “Strip the scales from that.”

It’s a task of a sort which had been left to the women when Kronos had thought himself mortal, and to slaves when the Horsemen had rode. That he’d had to do for himself between one and the other, and after he’d crawled out of the well Methos had left him in. He unties the string binding the mass of neatly aligned stems, and begins to do as Darius had instructed.

Better than being idle, when there are only the seven of them.

“All of us?” He glances to where Alysse is helping to separate other bundles into smaller ones, sitting companiably with Rebecca, the two women leaning close to each other to talk without being overheard.

Darius looks over to follow his gaze, and the small smile makes a brief return. “Even she, though she has not spoken of how or when. I thought it might have been soon after you had met your end, as you arrived together.”

Kronos doubts it had occurred as closely as Darius believes, but he had spent the time dead and crammed into the back of an irritating child’s head, with no sense of the passage of time. No way to know how long he’d been trapped there before waking here.

“She wasn’t there.” Kronos doesn’t want to speak of his death, the pain of Methos’s betrayal welling up unexpectedly, and making him want to destroy things. To have his once-brother in front of him so he could kill him over and over again. “She was safe.”