He'd meant for it to be a quiet life. He really had.
Not everyone would have understood that. Joining the Army, even as a doctor, and getting deployed to a warzone, wouldn't have occurred to any normal person as anything to do with "quiet". And Afghanistan certainly wasn't quiet- mortars and IEDs, helicopters and shouts for a medic- though at night, out in the desert, it was sometimes just as quiet and still and perfect as it had been three thousand years ago. But it was so very simple. There were orders to obey, lives to save, great bleeding wounds to staunch so his fellow soldiers could be moved somewhere safe and out of the line of fire, and he hardly had to think as the days, months, years passed.
It was the most peaceful and alive he'd felt in decades, existing with a quiet, simple purpose even as adrenaline heightened his senses and steadied his hands.
His friends wouldn't have understood, even if they'd recognized him. Well, perhaps Joe would; a part of him had always resented being honorably discharged after his injuries, and that part would always belong to the battlefield, whatever demands peacetime made on it. Being a Watcher was the closest Joe could get anymore, and it certainly provided its share of adrenaline. But Mac? No. When Macleod fought, it was for a cause, for the victory. It was never for the fighting. Never for the feeling, the sheer rush of knowing you could be only moments from death, and yet you still breathed.
Methos came from a far less civilized time. He'd already been a thousand years old before the world had begun to change enough that some might live their lives without that constant struggle to survive, and even those lives had been few and far between. Being on the battlefield was like coming home, and all the more poignant for someone who had no other place to call such. His first step onto Afghani soil (in a good century and a half, at least) felt like a weight lifted off his soul. He was free, despite the demands the British Army made on his time and loyalty. He had no past, and no thought for the future. There was only the present.
It wasn't until three years later that he had any cause to regret his choice. An IED had knocked over one of two Wolfs out patrolling the outskirts of Kabul; initial reports said no soldiers had been killed, and there'd been no follow-up fire, but a soldier had been pinned by the vehicle and needed medical attention and extraction. Methos' squad was dispatched to give immediate aid, and all seemed to be going well, until a dozen insurgents surrounded them in the rubble and opened fire. Afterwards it was a blur, a dust-hazed memory of shouting and gunfire and heat up until the point an insurgent got behind the doctor and clubbed him with the butt of his gun.
When Methos woke up, he was in a dark, cramped hole in the wall, bound tightly enough that his limbs screamed and guarded by armed mujahideen. There was a foul-tasting rag in his mouth, and even with his Immortal healing his muscles were aching. There was no way of knowing how long he had been unconscious, or whether he was the only Coalition soldier who had been captured, and all of his weapons had been removed. Including the Mainz gladius he'd been carrying under his regulation jacket, which was worrying for more than one reason. Already the lack of a sword was itching at his nerves; and yet, it would be the irony of ironies if the sword they'd pulled off of him inspired a mujahid into one of their publicized beheadings. Attempting it would probably end up killing any and all participants as his Quickening raged free, but that wouldn't do Methos much good, would it?
They might have tried it in the end, but they chose to begin with torture. His healing was discovered almost immediately; where once Methos might have been mistaken for a jinni, and let go, he was now just another enemy. But even as they cut deeply into his shoulder joint, nearly severing it more than once, and thigh in order to watch him heal again and again, he was grateful for his head. Before their curiosity could be sated, he was rescued.
He had no obvious wounds, despite the copious amounts of dried and putrid blood on his uniform. Even so, the Army recognized at least the psychological effects of torture in the way any movement of his shoulder caused him agony, and how he limped badly enough to need a cane; after three years and two months in Afghanistan, Dr. John Watson was invalided back to London.
A/N: Methos, old and enduring obsession, meet new, bright obsession: BBC's Sherlock. It takes a lot of pushing and shoving to make Methos fit into John, but the idea just wouldn't go away. I suspect a fuller version will be forthcoming. Title taken from that infamous Holmes quote, "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
This took a surprising amount of research for its length, and I'm sure I still have things wrong despite trying to go light on details. One point I wanted to make sure to bring up was the dichotomy between Methos' and John's heights. Let's face it, John's short, and canon has Methos between four and six inches taller. I tend to quibble with Highlander canon over that point, though. If it's assumed that Methos is in fact somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 years old, the nutrition of that time period (agricultural, mostly) would make the average man an inch or two shorter than John's height, which depending on your source is somewhere between 5'6" and 5'8". If Methos had been born 8,000-10,000 years ago, during a time where hunting/gathering meant primarily protein diets, it's actually perfectly plausible that he could be 6 feet tall. The average height then was very close to what it is now; the switch to high-starch diets with agriculture shrunk people by an average of four inches. It's assumed in fanon that a great deal of Methos' intimidation factor as a Horseman was that he, along with Kronos, were veritable giants compared to the people they rampaged through, yet they still would have been giants during that time period at the, today, slightly short heights of 5'8".
In other words, the author finds the heights logical and complementary. Apologies for the mini-essay. Now the author needs to figure out how to deal with hair dye and Sherlock in the same flat.
Disclaimer: I own nothing pertaining to either the Highlander or the Sherlock franchises.
27 January 2011