History had proven it, several times over, that if you take everything away from the enemy they will lose. You take their food, their weapons, their land, their homes, their families and you take anything that they might deem important, then they will lose. Scorched earth.

Sometimes the worst of ideas is what you have to go with and Stiles was the only one who was willing to say the words out loud. “If you want any of us to make it out of this alive, then this is all we have left.”

Derek shook his head. “This is wrong. This isn’t how you win a war.”

Stiles looked from face to face of each of the pack members. Their bodies marred with bruises, scars and wounds that would take far too long to heal. There had to be one person who gave up their soul, in a sense, in order to protect the rest. If no one else was willing to do it then Stiles would.

“It isn’t how you win a war.” Stiles responded before he grabbed up the maps on the table top, neatly folded them up, grabbed his bag and headed for the door. He ignored the sputters of protest from his pack members. He turned to face them with a grim smile on his face. “We’re fated to repeat history but this time we have the choice as to what part of history we repeat.”

It takes them almost two weeks to get bored. It takes another couple of days for them to figure out the source of the dissatisfied feeling. Sophie lays on the bed in their beautiful Paris hotel and sighs heavily. She is surrounded by clothes that Nate insisted she buy legally (with their dirty money, she doesn't understand his principles sometimes). They are enjoying the first peace and quiet they have had in months, after the whirlwind wedding and European tour of a honeymoon. They have been wandering through the Louvre without planning to take anything off the walls, and Nate actually carried her over the threshold the first night they were here. It should be perfect.

"How do you think they're doing?" Sophie asks.

Nate is half-heartedly watching TV, playing Jeopardy in French and winning, even though he isn't great with tenses. "Who?" he says, even though she knows he knows who she means.

She sighs and takes the bait. "Parker, Hardison, and Eliot, of course!"

He flips the channel over. "I don't see anything on the news, I'd say that's a good sign."

"Don't pretend like you aren't concerned," Sophie says, pouting, and Nate waves his hand dismissively.

"Concerned? Parker can handle it. She's going to be better than me in a couple years," he says, and she can hear the pride that he tries to hide in his voice.

"She's nearly there already," Sophie says, just to rile him, and they have the kind of pleasant, lazy argument that often seems to occur on Sunday afternoons. It ends predictably in pleasant, lazy sex, and when they're done, Nate curls up around her and rests his head on her shoulder. She can tell he's drifting off to sleep.

He yawns. "We can call them later," he says. "It's only six a.m. in Portland right now, they're asleep or haven't made it to bed yet."

"If you want," Sophie says, smiling, and she lets herself doze off into pleasant dreams.

Methos wasn't certain how old he was.

This had nothing to do with his memory--lies to MacLeod aside, he recalled perfectly what life had been like before he'd taken his first head--and everything to do with calendars. Even Immortals tended to forget that the current calendar hadn't always been the norm.

Take his journals. Yes, he'd been scribbling them almost since writing was invented...but when had he begun? He could recall writing on papyrus during the season of Inundation in a small village in what would later be Upper Egypt. However, that had been long before the pharaohs, before Upper Egypt's first king, Scorpion, and even before the Sothic calendar. And even afterwards--well, he hadn't been counting the decades (or had it been centuries?) that he spent with the Horsemen.

More to the point, calendars changed. How was he supposed to explain a date like "in the season of Kīt Šatti, on the nineteenth day of Araḫ Ṭebētum"? It had been a perfectly cromulent way--thank you, Simpsons--of describing a precise date in Old Babylon, but it didn't translate well. "Winter, sometime around mid-December or mid-January" was the best modern approximation he could make, at least off the cuff. The Tibetan calendar, the Attic calendar, the Coligny calendar of Gaul's Celts, the calendar of ancient Albion, the Florentine calendar of the Middle Ages, calendars with nine or ten days in a week...there had been so many. It was almost impossible to calculate time in an unbroken stream.

More important, however, was the fact that no one, not even the brightest Watchers, seemed to have spotted.

His journals had begun about the time that people had started recording things in written language: cuneiform, hieroglyphics, pictograms. He'd been an adult Immortal then, and while he didn't recall every journal entry he'd made over the course of a very long lifetime, he had been younger and brasher then. He doubted if he'd concealed that fact.

Which, if you followed that thought to its logical conclusion--and why the hell hadn't anyone?--meant that he'd been born before writing existed.

There had been no way to count the years when he was born. No one had thought in terms of things like "years." There had been Before, the Future (always a dangerous time, filled with teeth and claws and cold that killed), and Now.

How long ago had that been? Forty thousand years? Fifty thousand? Two hundred thousand?