DISCLAIMERS: Darius, Grayson, the nameless "Good Immortal" that Darius got the Light Quickening from, and the concepts of Immortality and Quickenings belong to Rysher Entertainment and to Panzer/Davis Productions, and not,
unfortunately, to me. I am earning no money from this.

This story was written for the Second Lyric Wheel Challenge. Thanks to Amand-r for contributing the lyrics to Jewel's "Hands."

Rated PG. Though not especially violent, it contains comments on religion that some people might find offensive.

ANOTHER MAN'S POISON


by Farquarson


It was a good two hours before sunrise on St. Martin's Day, and most of the city was still buried in sleep. Most of the buildings in Paris were swathed in winding sheets of white fog. The tents of the "armies of death"--or so they styled themselves--were all but invisible, thanks to the darkness and the mist, despite the fact that they were camped at the very gates of the city they wished to invade. All was quiet, save for the echoing footsteps of a soldier as he crept from his tent, and then began walking the two and a half miles to the Cemeterie de Saint-Denis, just outside the city proper.

The soldier, a tall, fair-haired Roman who was usually called Gratian, scowled at the thought. *Saint Denis. How appropriate. I'm going to a cemetery named after a saint who was beheaded, but didn't know enough to die, in order to meet a man who has kept his body intact, but who has, somehow, lost his head. * He shuddered--from the cold wind blowing downwind from the Seine, he
told himself--and, for the ten thousandth time, asked himself what could have caused Darius to behave so insanely at the gates of Paris three days ago. It couldn't have had anything to do with that Quickening Darius had taken just
before the madness had smote him. It surely couldn't have been caused by actual illness.

*And I know damned well that Darius isn't possessed, regardless of what the men are saying. The only demons I've ever met were human ones. *

Nevertheless, he'd had a very difficult time convincing most of the men that their commander hadn't taken leave of his senses, much less been possessed...the more so because he himself wasn't altogether convinced that Darius was still sane.
Gratian and the rest of Darius' vast army had been camped outside the gates to Paris for most of three days. Darius had ordered them to turn back and to spare the city, and so they had. But no one, least of all Gratian, was willing to disperse without knowing precisely what ailed his commander, or even where he had vanished to after he had given that order. After three days of silence, Gratian had received a message of sorts-a handful of stones, scrawled with runes, in a small leather sack. Darius, it seemed, wanted a meeting.

And that was why Gratian was striding toward a small tumbledown graveyard before the first grey light of dawn appeared in the sky.

*He must be plotting something brilliant this time. A way to conquer not only Paris, but all of France, all of Europe. * Despite Darius' bizarre behavior of late, Gratian willed himself to believe that. A world in which Darius was
incurably mad--in which his friend had retreated into a mythical land of his own making, where Gratian was less than an enemy and worse than a
stranger--well, it didn't bear thinking about

His steps slowed as he entered the graveyard, and sensed the presence of another Immortal. Swiftly, he drew his sword as his eyes flickered around the cemetery, marking exits and places of possible ambush. You couldn't fight on Holy Ground, but it was easy enough to leave Holy Ground if someone challenged you. Or so Gratian presumed. He tended to shun Holy Ground, as a rule. Cowering behind some imaginary deity because you were afraid to fight your own
battles? Ridiculous. What was the point in living forever, if you ran away from life?

"You don't need your sword," a gentle voice said from behind him. "Not here. Not against me."

Darius' voice. But flattened and tamed. All the passion and fire that had always been a part of Darius seemed to be gone. As an icicle of revulsion, confusion and fear rippled down Gratian's spine, he whirled about, sword in
hand, to face....

Darius. But not Darius, somehow. He'd seen that calm and patient look on his teacher's face many times before. But never had he seen that otherworldly serenity in the blue eyes, or the blissful half-smile.

*Mad, * thought Gratian, as nausea roiled within him. *I feared as much. *

Still, he couldn't go back to the men and say, 'Darius has gone insane because he looks too happy to be rational.' The soldiers who had fought by Darius' side in twenty or more campaigns deserved a better reason for believing in their commander's insanity than his second-in-command's say-so.

So--a test.

"When are you going to open the gates of Paris and let your armies pour in?"

Darius stared at his lieutenant with what the younger man would have sworn was simple, everyday bewilderment, as though surprised that Gratian hadn't grasped the obvious. For a moment, the younger Immortal was cheered. *He does have a
scheme to conquer Paris...something so subtle, I've missed it. *

But Darius' next words slashed open Gratian's heart.

"I will not open the gates of Paris to my armies. Not am I going to command them any longer. Disperse the men, Grayson. Tell them to go home."

Grayson--that welcome old nickname, worn down, over eight hundred years, from the correct pronunciation for his name--"GRAY-shee-un.'

But--"Disperse the men? Send them home?! Darius, have you gone mad?"

The old Darius would have snarled a curse and struck his second-in-command for even insinuating such a thing, friend or no.

This new Darius regarded him with tranquil sorrow.

Ignoring the almost irresistible impulse to smash that serene expression into nonexistence, Gratian cogitated furiously. Darius couldn't mean what he seemed to be saying. It didn't make sense. Warlord generals powerful enough to rule the earth for the next thousand years simply did not throw away battle-honed armies on a whim. Darius' words had to conceal a plan that he simply hadn't grasped yet.

He scowled in fierce concentration. Darius leaned against a tipsy tombstone, watching him.

"How are you going to persuade Hugh Capet to cede his lands in Paris to you?" inquired Gratian, after a long pause. "He's greedy, you know -- princes often are -- and he doesn't treat would-be conquerors indulgently. I suppose that you've found someone close to him who's venal enough to betray his people for gold and promises. So, what you probably want me to do is to order the armies to decamp to an easily concealed location about five or ten miles away and stay there until the Parisians -- and their ruler, Hugh Capet-become convinced that we are gone for good. Once the city settles down, and is no longer expecting us, you will send me a pre-arranged signal and kill any guards patrolling the streets near the gates, and then you and the traitor you've bought will open the city's gates. I'll send in a few special squads at first-spies, hired killers, etc. And as they do their work, more and more of our soldiers will be able to infiltrate the city with greater and greater ease, until, in a week or so, all of our people will be within the city walls. And then we will take this city, and raze it to the ground." He fired a smile of wolfish delight at his friend. "Well? Am I right?"

"I must ask you, Grayson," said Darius in a trembling voice, "not to carry out that plan. It would work, oh yes. But there would be no point. You have always preferred battle and war to the rule of conquered lands. And I-I care nothing for conquest and power. Not now."

Gratian's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Who paid you *not* to annihilate Paris? The counts of Anjou? The dukes of Normandy? They are Capet's
strongest supporters, after all."

Darius let loose an agonized groan. "No one has bribed me. Can't you simply accept that I have changed--that I am not the man you once knew?"

Fear and dizzying bewilderment swept over Gratian in a rip tide, and had to be denied. He pasted a mocking sneer on his face, and shouted at Darius in defiant anger. "And I suppose that battle and war, the men who are loyal to you and the lands you have won, the world you have known and loved for over a thousand years-all this no longer matters to you!"

He wanted to insert himself in that list. But after more than eight hundred years of friendship, he couldn't say it. Asking Darius if their friendship still mattered to him was too much like begging. And he was a Roman. Romans
did not beg.

"Well?" he repeated. "Nothing--nothing you have ever valued--matters to you now?"

Darius gazed upward to the rapidly purpling sky, and smiled a wise, fatherly smile that chilled Gratian's blood. "In the end," he said softly, "only kindness matters."

Gratian felt as if he were standing by the Seine, vainly swinging his sword at wisps of white fog. He sheathed his sword, grabbed Darius by the shoulders and shook him violently. "Darius. Listen to me. You haven't completely absorbed that Quickening you took three days ago--that's why you're saying and doing things that make no sense. Come back to the camp. Give yourself a
chance to recover. That was quite a powerful Quickening, after all."

"It was the Quickening that did it," Darius murmured abstractedly. "The priest that came out of Paris to confront me--he was so old, Grayson.
Thousands of years. Maybe more. And when I told him to move out of the way, because I would march my armies straight through him, if necessary, he said he would conquer me if he won, and God would conquer me if he lost." Darius tried to shrug, but it proved difficult with Gratian gripping his shoulders. "He was right."

"So because you took an old Immortal's Quickening, you're flinging away everything you are?" A nerve began jumping rhythmically in Gratian's face. "What," he demanded scornfully, "were you planning to do for the rest of your
life?"

The answer was swift, honest, and, to Gratian, incomprehensible: "I will get down on my knees, and I will pray."

"Wonderful!" shouted Gratian. "That should serve you very well at the Gathering!"

"God's will be done."

"Shall we leave God out of it, and stick to reality?"

"He is the only reality in my life at this time." Darius finally twisted free from Gratian's grip. "Hear me, Grayson. I am not--I cannot be--the man I was. I have changed, irrevocably, and you, as well as I, must accept that."

Gratian stared at Darius in something approaching horror. That a man's personality and will could be overwhelmed by a powerful Quickening was appalling enough. That the man would not only become a different person, but would embrace the change without even trying to remain himself--no. That was unspeakable.

"So I must leave you and my old life as a warrior," continued Darius, who seemed not to notice Gratian's revulsion. "You could come with me, you know. I'm sure that St. Cyr's Monastery would find room for both of us. But somehow"--a glint of the old Darius' humor sparkled in the blue eyes--"I think you will not."

Incarcerating himself in a monastery? Droning nasal prayers day after endless day, and through most of the night as well? Enduring fasts and penances to atone for a worldly life he could not possibly regret?

No. He couldn't. Not even if he had been a believer, which he emphatically was not. How could he worship any deity who was so cruel as to destroy a man's identity, in order to create one more adoring disciple?

But something of Darius still remained. He'd seen it in his old friend's eyes. And he would fight to restore Darius to health and sanity, if it took him the rest of eternity.

"No," he said hoarsely. "No, I will not join you in this madness. Not now, not ever."

"Then there is nothing more to be said." Darius turned to go.

"Darius..."

How could he say what he wanted to say? That an eight-hundred-year-old friendship couldn't, shouldn't be cast aside in a moment? That they had shared too many memories, dangers, ambitions and dreams for Darius to abandon him now like a filthy rag, suitable only for burning? How could a man who claimed to worship a loving and benevolent God say that their friendship no
longer mattered--that only God did?

*God doesn't need your friendship, Darius. I do.*

In a desperate attempted to salvage something from this conversation--the knowledge that Darius would regret losing some parts of his old life,
perhaps--he tried one last time. "Won't you miss...what...you're leaving behind?"

*Please. Please hear what I'm not saying.*

"I imagine so," said Darius, considering. "But I'll get over it."

A cold wind seemed to tear through the core of Gratian's being...what Darius would have called his soul.

"No," he said in a grim and desolate voice. "You will *not* get over it. And you will not forget your old life--or your old self--or me. I'll see to that. And someday, when you have wearied of cringing on your knees before a crucifix, you can take up your sword again, and come with me.

*And I will see to it that you don't forget the past, Darius. I'll slay every man and woman who prates to you of love and peace and faith. Every single one who helps keep you deluded, cowering on Holy Ground. Until you confront me, enraged, at the point of a sword. Until you are well again. Don't worry, Darius. I'll save you. In spite of yourself, I'll save you.*

Darius, his face a mask of monumental grief, simply stared at Gratian. Gratian glanced away. He couldn't bear one more sight of those God-struck eyes. Not trusting himself to say one more word--even a farewell--he hastened from the graveyard and back to the camp as, slowly and majestically, the sun began to rise.

THE END

NOTES: St. Martin of Tours was a Roman cavalry officer who turned monk, and was finally named bishop. He was the first universally popular saint, and the first canonized saint who was not a martyr. He was born (so say the hagiographies) in Hungary in 315 A.D., and died (of old age, apparently) in 400 A.D. He is the patron saint of soldiers (rather odd, since his first act as a
baptized Christian was to conscientiously object), as well as the patron of beggars, drunkards, innkeepers, equestrians, harvests, horses, new wine and tailors. His feast day-the date of this story-is November 11.

St. Denis was the first bishop of France, one of seven original missionaries sent from Rome in 90 A.D. to convert the Gauls. Legend has it that after St. Denis was beheaded in Montmartre (a neighborhood with a bad reputation), he
picked up his head and carried it six miles to the site of the cathedral that now bears his name. "The first step," the head is reported to have commented, "was the difficult one."

LINES: "In the end, only kindness matters."
"I will kneel down and I will pray."

Apologies to anyone who is offended by Grayson/Gratian's inability to accept Darius' conversion or the existence of a God that would make such a thing possible. *THIS IS NOT AN "I-HATE-DARIUS" STORY.* Quite the contrary.
Darius was an extremely good Immortal, and I still miss him, and his alter ego, Werner Stocker, very much. All the same, I couldn't help wondering how Darius' closest friend, Grayson, must have viewed the Light Quickening,
especially since he didn't seem to credit its existence as late as the twentieth century. Even Darius said that Grayson felt betrayed by his
(Darius') actions. I thought about why. This is the result.

Comments, good and bad, are welcome. Flames are not.

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