artist Methos

AU where Methos is, and always has been, an artist. He doesn’t do it for money most of the time, or even do anything large scale. Of course he tries out different types of art and techniques over time, but mostly he illustrates his journals (it’s probably how they got started, long before diaries were a thing—he started out doing cave paintings and then transitioned to using papyrus, paper, etc.

So it turns out Joe was a pre-Immortal, but he’s just died his first death. And he and Duncan think he’s not going to last long because balance and footwork are kind of important in a fight. But Methos is like “great! Now that you’re immortal they’ll grow back!” And then they do, eventually, and they all live (happily ever after).

The way pre-Immortal babies happen is this: when an Immortal and another Immortal come together and their Quickenings interact with each other–not just the Buzz, but serious fighting or maybe a teacher-student relationship . . . maybe some other instances too–the baby is conceived. Some amount of time later (how much time?) there’s a new pre-immortal in the same general area.

. . . somebody notices that there are a ton of pre-immortals in Seacouver and Paris.

Methos and writing–he learns how to write; nobody uses writing for more than catalogs of goods at the time. which is useful when you’re a court scribe, but not so much when you’re a lone immortal. Methos pushes the boundaries of what is conceptually possible with writing by using it as a terse travelogue/guide to immortals–nobody else has yet even considered the possibility, but those are the things he wants to remember. Later, he records other things, and eventually invents the diary millenia before the rest of the world does.

A virus was extremely efficient in wiping out the mortals. Now the Immortals are faced with figuring out how to deal with each other when they’re the only ones left. Will they be able to stop the Game? Will they go mad in isolation? Or will they finally figure out how to coexist peacefully?

Something kills off everybody on a human colony world, and only the Immortals survive. The colony is written off by the Federation or whoever. The local flora and fauna are extremely dangerous, even to immortals, and living on the planet is a struggle with so few people; they can’t afford to play the Game, so that becomes their biggest law, punishable by exile which, at the very least, will be a miserable experience, and will probably get them killed for good and their Quickening lost. So for the first time ever, Immortals build a society. And the most amazing thing is that pre-Immortal babies are still found. For the first time, they have entire Immortal families with children (though by and large, it’s very ‘it takes a village’). When they agree that something needs to be done, they all work together like a well-oiled machine. The problem is getting them to agree that something needs to be done, since they’re all very independent.

And then contact is reestablished.

Methos has his own system of writing that he uses in his journals. Not code per se; he uses all words from real languages. But he’s built his own phonetic alphabet, starting with the oldest alphabet he learned and built on from there because he needed more sounds to convey words from other languages. He also got lazy over time as long as he could still read what he wrote, so the letters that originally started out looking like one thing now look completely different. It’s very streamlined to write; he can do it as quickly as he can understand what’s being said, without losing a single syllable. He became enamored of punctuation when it was invented, and his alphabet has emotion markers including one for sarcasm.

Methos gets a redo of the past…decade, maybe? Not his whole life or even a significant portion of it, but far enough back that it’s before he met Duncan. It could be either a new experience for him or he’s had time hiccup on him before. Either way, there are things that are going to happen in the next few years that he can’t just ignore: Hunters, Kronos, the Watchers’ files getting digitized, etc. But how does he handle it? What does he choose to change or keep the same? What does he try to avoid getting involved in and in what does he accept his participation as inevitable?

I’m imagining a version where Methos convinces Darius he’s not safe in the church (and his Quickening would be lost!!!), so Darius leaves and they spend a night/weekend drinking/partying (after ditching the Watchers), possibly with Fitz as well. And then Darius goes off and does something different with his life, throwing the Watchers into confusion.

Duncan never realized that “Adam Pierson” was Methos, and Methos wasn’t about to tell him. Obviously, that changes some things.