Disclaimer: I don't own Highlander, I'm just making use of the fair use exemption. Yay, fair use!
A/N: This was in response to the prompt:
Highlander, Methos, His 3,000 year old diaries have many interesting stories.
Memories, Ideas, and Joy of Life
For a thousand years, when Methos was the strategist for the Apocalypse, his journals were full of war strategies and maps.
How to infiltrate a city, how to terrorize a society, how to bait an ambush. A thousand years of war strategy focusing on a using a small four-man force to destroy armies. It was a constant joy to challenge himself and see how far he could push their limits. They achieved miracles, but there were always new limits to push, new strategies to devise, new techniques to test out…
Until the day when there wasn't.
One day Methos had sat in his tent, toying with his ink, and wasting his parchment, because he couldn't think of a new strategy. They had done everything he could think of. New strategies would all require that the opposing side act in new and interesting ways and they weren't. It took him a year to realize that he was well and truly bored.
He captured Cassandra to keep himself amused but it was only a taste of what else there was out there. She knew things about healing and herbs that he didn't know, but she had been a mere apprentice to a mere local village elder.
It was not enough.
His mind, like his journals, was empty and waiting to be filled.
When he left his brothers and their Apocalypse behind, he had feared he would miss them.
Instead, he found a dozen things to distract him, a hundred things, a thousand. Suddenly there was not enough time in the day or space on the parchment to write down all he was learning.
There was medicine and philosophy and botany and mathematics and architecture and so much more.
A thousand skills he had missed out on learning when all he did was steal the product for a thousand years. He was overwhelmed with choice. Within ten years he had filled up more journals than he had in the preceding ten centuries. They had recipes and proofs and stories and poems.
When he looks back at the journals now, it seems like they were written by two different men. The journals of the Apocalypse are straight forward and boring and he rarely goes back to review them. The journals from afterward though, spark memories and ideas each time he re-read them and inspire in him again the joy of life and discovery.