by Anne
Disclaimer: The characters of Daniel Jackson, Jack O’Neill, Sam Carter, Teal’c, General Hammond, Janet Frasier, Apophis and anybody else you recognise from the SGC do not belong to me. Neither does the concept of the Stargate, SGC, and the Goa’uld and any thing else related to the series Stargate SG1. They belong to Stargate (II) Productions, Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Products.
The characters of Methos (a.k.a. Adam Pierson), Joe Dawson, Connor MacLeod and Duncan MacLeod belong to Panzer/Davis, Rysher/Gaumont Television. So do the concepts of Immortality, the Game and the Watchers.
Likewise the characters of Adam Newman, Megabyte Damon, General William Damon, Ami Jackson, Jade Weston, Kevin Wilson or any names or events linked to the Tomorrow People TV series do not belong to me either. They are the property of Roger Damon Price, Thames/Tetra and ITV Television.
“I suppose you wouldn’t believe that the rumours of my death were greatly exaggerated, would you?” Methos saw the look on O’Neill’s face and decided he wouldn’t. “ You can pick your mouth off the floor now, Jack. The look doesn’t really suit you.” It looked like the cat was out of the proverbial bag, he thought. Oh well, at least he wouldn’t have to keep the Adam Pierson act up any longer.
The historian was sitting up on one of the beds in the infirmary. Frasier had obviously just finished giving him a thorough examination. She was shaking her head in amazement. “He’s very healthy for someone who was for all intents and purposes, dead.” She was still feeling a bit shaken from the experience of seeing a man she was about to perform an autopsy on come back to life before her eyes. She had checked his life signs only a moment before she had been about to make the first incision, and there definitely hadn’t been any.
Methos did his best to look modest. “Don’t worry, I’ve heard that comment a lot over the last few millennia.”
Carter turned to O’Neill. “Colonel, the hole in his chest, it’s gone.” In fact there was no sign it had even existed. Where the gaping hole had been, was now smooth skin. She knew she hadn’t imagined it, but holes in people’s chests didn’t just disappear on their own, did they?
“I can see that, Carter. Right, Pierson, if that’s really your name. Who and what are you? I want an explanation this time, not the crap you’ve given us before. Yeah, and what’s this sword thing? I notice the other guy had one at well.”
Hammond decided to reassure the man. “ Don’t worry son, you have nothing to fear from us.”
Methos laughed. “No one has called me that for a long time. Most of my friends refer to me as the old man.”
“Exactly how old are you Adam?” asked Carter. “Ramiis called you Methos. Is that your name? He also said that you were the first of the immortals, what are immortals?”
“Whoa, slow down Carter,” said O’Neill. “I want the answers in his own words, lots of his own words, if you catch my drift.” There’s no way he’s getting out of giving me a full explanation this time around. Maybe if I’d had all the facts before, he would have never got through the Stargate with Daniel. He felt a responsibility towards the archaeologist - after all he was the soldier, Daniel wasn’t. He also still felt annoyed at being taken for a fool over the sword.
“Okay. Firstly my name isn’t Adam Pierson, it’s Methos. But I’d prefer if you’d keep calling me Adam. I’m a bit of myth among my own kind and I’d like to keep it that way. I’d like to last another five thousand years, if you don’t mind. I’ve grown rather attached to life after all these years.” He noted with satisfaction the look on the faces of the others in the room and continued, “Yes, I am five thousand years old, well that’s as far back as I can remember anyway.”
“What about this immortality bit?”
“I am immortal, that is I don’t stay dead when I die…”
“Unless someone takes your head off with a sword,” interrupted Adam. The vision that he and Megabyte had seen was now starting to make sense.
O’Neill looked at him suspiciously. “I thought you said you couldn’t read minds.”
“We can’t. When we first met ‘Adam’, Megabyte and I got some mental flashes from him.”
“That’s right,” confirmed Megabyte. “ It looked like the Middle Ages. People on horseback burning villages. I saw a sword cutting someone’s head off.” He still felt quite sickened at the thought of what he had seen.
The Horsemen always seemed to come back to haunt him, thought Methos to himself. Of all the things to pick up on, it would be that. He hadn’t been going to mention that immortals could die when you separated their head from their shoulders. He’d have to have a quiet word with the current group of Tomorrow People he decided. It didn’t pay to tell everyone all your secrets. It was always a good idea to keep some bits of information tucked away for a rainy day.
He continued Adam’s sentence, they already knew about the beheading, it wouldn’t hurt to give them the whole story on that front. “And with it takes our quickening.” He continued, seeing the puzzled looks, “our power, you’d call it our life force.”
“That is why you would not want anyone to know who you really are,” surmised Teal’c. “ If you are the oldest, your power would be truly great.”
“That’s the theory, and I’m not about to test it out. I’ve become rather attached to my head staying where it is, thank you. Anyway, I try and avoid the Game whenever I can. It’s easier to keep your head when you don’t fight.”
“This taking heads, it’s a game? Sick sort of game if you ask me.”
“Don’t blame me, Jack, I didn’t make up the rules. I just try to survive.” Methos decided to try and change the subject. He wasn’t about to give them a list of the other immortals he knew or tell them about the Watchers, the secret society of mortals that had recorded information about his kind through the centuries. He definitely didn’t want MacLeod or any of his other immortal friends involved in this. He would have enough explaining to do to Joe later without adding anyone else into the loop. Maybe this would be a good time to shift the focus of the discussion onto something else.
“So, Megabyte and Adam, how are you feeling? I haven’t come across any Tomorrow People for a long time, not since Tutankhamun.” That reminded him of something else. “How’s Daniel?”
“Fine, no thanks to you. What happened anyway? I take it that your long lost friend is an immortal as well?” I wonder how many of these so called immortals there are, thought O’Neill to himself. Maybe there’s another threat on the domestic front, one that's been here for thousands of years already, one that we didn’t know anything about. At the moment he didn’t feel as though he could trust Methos as far as he could throw him. He’d lied about who he was. How could he be certain that he could trust him now? He noticed Carter seemed absolutely fascinated with the guy; must be scientific curiosity he told himself.
Methos nodded. “We went through the Stargate, ”he explained. “Ramiis was waiting on the other side. I told Daniel to re engage the wormhole so that he could go back. He started dialling in, I think you call it, with one eye on the fight. Ramiis hasn’t changed much since the last time we fought, in the fact that he still doesn’t follow the rules. He blasted me with some kind of weapon. The same kind his Jaffa blasted me with three thousand years ago when I was recovering from his quickening.” He paused and looked suspiciously at Teal’c. These people said they could be trusted but he was finding it hard to ignore the niggling doubts that were still in his mind. He didn’t usually tell people so much detail about immortals, much less about himself. He hoped he wasn’t going to regret it later.
“Don’t worry about Teal’c, he may be a Jaffa but he’s on our side. One of the good guys,” O’Neill reassured him.
“He lent over me with his sword, ready to take my head and then I heard the Stargate opening. It must have been you people coming through. Ramiis wasn’t very impressed. The last thing I remembered before I lost consciousness was Daniel screaming. Then when I came to, I was here.”
“I don’t understand,” queried Damon. “Why didn’t he take your head, you said he was just about to when the Stargate opened?”
“My guess is that the quickening would have left him in no position to escape.” Methos saw the puzzled look on the faces of the others in the room. “A quickening, especially a powerful one, takes a lot out of you. He obviously couldn’t take that chance, luckily for me. I suppose I owe you my head. Thanks.”
Carter realised what it was that was bugging her. “Obviously the sarcophagus brought Ramiis back to life, as Daniel suggested. If you separated his head from his shoulders and took his quickening, how come he is still immortal? I know the sarcophagus can bring people back to life, we’ve had experience with that before, but reattaching a head, that seems a bit much.”
Methos agreed with her. “Something else has been bugging me as well. When I met Ramiis I didn’t feel the buzz that we usually feel from the approach of another immortal. It’s like an early warning system, a defence mechanism.” He’d noticed the quizzical look on the faces of the others in the room. At this rate, he thought, I might as well just give them the watcher’s handbook on immortals to read.
“What does this buzz feel like?” asked Adam. “I’m wondering if that’s what Megabyte and I felt when we first met you.”
“From what Tutankhamun and Neret said, it probably is, or at least something fairly similar. We decided it had something to do with my age as well, the accumulation of life energy. As an immortal gets older the storehouse of his or her, let’s call it, quickening would become quite strong. It used to really annoy them when I sneaked up behind them. Mind you, they used to make me jump when they appeared out of thin air.”
“I can relate to that one,” confirmed Damon. “I’ve lost count of the number of cups of coffee I’ve spilled over the last few years.”
“Neret, was she another Tomorrow Person?” asked Megabyte. “We’ve met the Pharaoh before, we thought he was on his own.”
Methos nodded, remembering the last conversation he and Neret had had before her death. Part of him wanted to remember that conversation, yet part of him tried to forget. He wasn’t quite ready to share those memories with anyone else; in fact he wasn't sure if he ever would be. “One day, I’ll tell you the whole story,” he promised.
Yeah right, thought O’Neill. He was sure the old guy was still only telling them as much as he thought he needed to. He noticed that since he’d stopped pretending to be Pierson, the immortal was less the quiet historian, and more what he would term ‘a sarcastic smart ass’. He wasn’t sure which one he preferred.
Close window to return to Author's Index
Return to Dryer Space