Methos watches him with the deep, unwavering attention the man would have probably found disturbing had he noticed, but he doesn't see him. Methos has become even better at remaining unnoticed as time went on. In a world where technology had increasingly erased privacy, it had been a matter of survival. He has always been good at survival.
He has also always been good at adapting, better than most of his friends and enemies have ever known. He smiles sadly when he thinks of Cassandra. Cassandra had not known exactly, but she had guessed. She had feared. She had been scared of what he could do because she had always thought him a monster, and maybe she had been more right than she herself had known. Methos looks away from the man for a second. Cassandra had died trying to rescue someone who had not wanted to be rescued. It had been a meaningless death. She would not have listened to him had he warned her to let it go, of course. She would have listened to no one, but to him least of all. He had been cruel to her, but he had loved her. As much as he was capable of loving someone back then. He had loved her, and later, he had pitied her. It was a sad thing to be unable to let the past go, especially if you grew as old as they had grown old.
If he had carried every slight with him through the centuries, he would have never survived. As she, indeed, had not. Methos had learned to observe. To stay on the outside. He let the person he was in this moment interact with others, but he never gave himself fully. It was better this way.
He could fall in love with this beautiful creature in front of him, he thinks. At least for a brief time, until the universe swallowed him like it swallowed everything. He remembers another man he once loved, and smiles. Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod had been 439 years old when he had decided to fight in a war even immortals couldn't win. He had raged at Methos when he had told him that he would do what he was best at – run away and hide. The irony was that Duncan had never questioned why Methos had stayed close to him in the first place. Maybe he had just assumed that Methos had found a conscience; that he had decided to fight on the right side because it was the right thing to do.
"You are a stupid man", Amanda had once told him. "He will never see you that way. He will never even consider that you see him that way."
She had been right, of course. In Duncan's sixteenth century mind, sex between men was inconceivable, at least when he himself was concerned.
Methos' much older mind, which had lived through countless ages where no one had had ridiculous thoughts like that, and some in which sex between men was the only natural and decent thing a mentor and his apprentice could do, had watched the emergence of this mindset with a mixture of horror and pity. He had never foreseen that it would one day become so inconvenient for himself. But he had never actually told Duncan what he felt. He had been scared to lose his friendship. And then he had lost him completely, as one more victim in a senseless war, where even his quickening had been lost.
There can be only one. A rumor that had started when Methos had already been old. An excuse, he suspected then, invented by an immortal that wanted to take the powers of others for himself and still claim to be just. Methos does not remember how many immortals he has killed in his long life, but he estimates that even then it had been more than Duncan or the lunatic Kell had killed. There had once been a time when he had been a hunter, and just because he had decided to hide for more than a thousand years after that, that didn't mean that he had never killed immortals. They tended to find him. Even if he had killed only one every ten years or so, simple math said he had killed more than these children could ever hope to kill in their brief lives.
They really thought it made them powerful. He had watched them and wondered why they had needed this belief so much. Maybe the thought of fighting in a war had helped them to survive and had given them purpose. There is no game now. There has not been a game in a long time. Maybe he is the only one left now, he thinks. It does not really matter. There are stranger things in this world now, and he is just an odd, old thing. A remnant.
Methos does not know how many immortals survived the war, but he knows they were few, and the ones who had survived were old ones. They were the ones who had been smart enough to hide beneath the ice and in the ocean's depth. The ones who had known that they were not human, and had not thought in human terms.
When he had come back, the world had changed.
They do not remember it now, how it was before. It is a myth to them, like dragons and gods had been myths back then.
The man he has been observing rises, full of arrogant confidence. The guards around him move swiftly, a unit of protection Methos knows he does not really need.
Part of him thinks it is foolish to do this. He has not risked this much in a very long time. Another part feels excited. Immortality would be so boring, if all you would ever do was survive. He has not survived millennia by being a coward. No matter how much it sometimes looked that way.
"I do not see you," the man says, when Methos bows to him, in the high voice of the boy's body he inhabits. "You must be one of Siona's descendants."
"I have come to offer you my service," Methos says. He does not answer the unasked question, which is an answer in itself.
The man frowns, confused. Methos likes that look on him. It is the first time he has seen it and he feels absurdly proud. It must be hard to be confused, for one such as him.
"Your service for what?" he asks.
"I wish to teach you something you have not yet learned."
The frown increases as he studies him. "Who are you?"
"Someone older than you are."
The man laughs, but then he suddenly stops and considers him more seriously. He tries to see him, Methos thinks, amused. Tries to see his past and his future, all the different paths not taken.
"Therein lies madness," he says.
The man blinks.
"You think there is something I have not yet learned?" he asks, amused. "Who are you that you dare to take on such challenge?"
"Who are you?"
"Leon. But you know this."
Methos smiles. "Really? Because that is not what I know. I think you are a man who has never learned to live."
"Maybe I have lived too long", the man says. The guards around him shift uneasily. They know what he is, and yet it scares them to see these old eyes in the face of a child. Once, people called it abomination. That has been – not forgotten, no, but changed in the centuries that followed. Until even that was myth. Methos has walked through the desert once. He had wondered what he would see, if he would see anything. It had taught him that to him, the spice of the desert is like the scent of spring flowers, sweet, but meaningless. He had emerged from the desert with his eyes clear, feeling young and very foolish.
When he closes his eyes, he knows that he lies when he claims not to know the ones he killed. They are all there, and the ones they killed, and the ones they killed. They have always been there, just behind his eyes. He also knows what he really mourns when he thinks of the way Duncan died. When people invented a name for this kind of awareness, and means to change themselves, he thought them foolish. He is not so sure now, after all that has happened. Maybe it is him who has always been wrong. Maybe, if he had not decided to disbelieve, things could have been different a long time ago.
"You are nothing but a child," he says, although he knows very well that this man is anything but. "You just don't know it. Let me teach you."
The man walks closer, looks into his eyes with a deep concentration. The body is maybe ten years old.
"When did you plan to die again?" Methos whispers. "Sacrifice yourself, again? There is a different path."
"I have not seen it."
"You would not, if you will walk it with me." They can teach each other, he thinks. He hopes.
At first, the man hesitates, but then he slowly offers him his hand. "Tell me your name, teacher."
Methos takes the ghola child's hand, wondering, briefly, if he has just changed another path of the universe.
"Hello, Leto, son of Paul. My name is Methos."