As the small starship dropped out of warp, the human male sat at the main controls looked solemnly outof the forward viewscreen at the planet they now orbited, as well as the small group of other vessels hanging nearby. "The Gathering," he murmured to himself, his voice fluttering with anxiety. Almost seven thousand years he had lived, born and reared in that patch of land on Earth called - or once called - Egypt. He had been a monarch, an explorer, in a particularly dark phase a vicious brigand and a figure of terror to the simple peoples of that lost world. He had been a lover too, as he wa a lover now.
"Methos?" At the speaking of his name, he turned to look at the woman sitting next to him.
"T'Pir," he breathed, reaching out with his hand and caressing the fine features of his wife's face, silently marveling at even the subtle beauty of her exotically pointed ears. By all the gods he had never known, how he loved her! Her lineage stretched all the way back to the distant past of the planet once called Vulcan, but which was now Ni'Var. For centuries her people had fascinated him, ever since their species had first touched across the stars, beginning humanity's tentative steps into a wider realm. He had been born far earlier than T'Plana-Hath or Surak, yet what had been ancient knowledge deeply cemented through countless generations to them had been refreshingly new to him, and eagerly devoured. One aspect of them that was particularly intriguing was that they possessed their own form of immortality. In some circumstances, when of one of their kind was on the verge of death, they could, via a method of combined telepathic and physical contact, transfer their entire life's worth of memories and personality into the mind of another, who would then deposit this katra, as it was known, into a waiting recepticle to be preserved indefinitely, in effect living on. Not the same kind of immortality known by Methos, of course, though he was aware of at least one Vulcan, long ago now, whose body had died and then revived...
T'Pir's voice was strained as she spoke to him, and her eyes showed the first signs of tears. "I cannot pretend to understand this...and...I hate that you are doing it." Not for her was the old Vulcan way of submerging emotion, a fact for which Methos, though he had some admiration for the Vulcan mental disciplines, was grateful.
"For so long," Methos said to her, "I haven't been the bravest of Immortals. I can fight, but...I've preferred to run and hide. The Game, the Prize...I didn't really care; I just wanted to live and experience as much as I could before I no longer had a head. But...not anymore, T'Pir. Your people have pon farr; mine have the Gathering. Both are ultimately unavoidable. That planet down there...I have to go, like those already there." T'Pir was crying freely now as she reached out to him with her hand, and their fingertips touched so tenderly in that ancient Vulcan custom of lovers. Then their lips crashed together...