Title: Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?

Disclaimer: not my characters; title from Browning

Warnings: future!ficish

Pairings: none

Rating: PG
Wordcount: 300

Pointofview: third

Prompt: Highlander, Methos, Adam Pierson has a day job but sometimes Methos can't resist using skills that Adam doesn't have.


Adam Pierson is a thirty-four old doctor of linguistics. He's also a six year old immortal.

Adam Pierson can speak a dozen languages like they're his native English, is conversational in twenty more, and muddle his way through seven others. He can read all of the Indo-European languages with ease.

Adam Pierson is Duncan MacLeod's newest student, and he does not have MacLeod's fighting skill. He's been lucky, so far: he hasn't needed to fight. He's mediocre with a sword. If he gets in too close, he will die.

Adam Pierson's Watcher doesn't think he'll last long.

0o0

Dr. Pierson works at the British Museum. He's translating a tablet (or, trying to; the language has yet to be identified) and he was in a fight last night. His Watcher reported it: Pierson won his first challenge only by the skin of his teeth. He defeated a two-century old drifter. He's been odd this morning – short-tempered, cautious, nervous. His colleagues have asked him what's wrong; he said family troubles and threw himself into his work.

Even the most senior of Pierson's colleagues would require two lifetimes, maybe more, to translate the tablet. It is a language that died out over ten thousand years ago. It has no similarities to any language still in use.

It is, in fact, a prank played by the world's oldest man. He carved the tablet three hundred years ago and left it by the megalith called Stonehenge, just to see what the baby-archeologists would make of it. They're still scratching their heads, giving all the newbies this tablet to play with.

If Pierson actually was thirty-four, actually was six, he'd never know what this tablet said.

If he hadn't written it himself, he'd have no idea.

He just finds it humorous that the joke is still funny.