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Still on that kick. Oh, and guys? I'm never allowed to OD on Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy again. It has a tendancy to warp the way you look at the world.
Title: Beast
Rating: PG
Fandom: Highlander
Continuity: Immediately post Rev 6:8
Characters/Pairings: Methos
Summary: Methos, instinct and alcohol, by way of Douglas Adams
Wordcount: 680
Disclaimer: Still not mine
Beast
There's a lot to be said for logic. There's a lot to be said for consciously taking the world and fitting it into models of flowing, rational thought that, while they may not help in actually understanding anything, at least give the comforting impression that they do. The world being what it is, as confusing as it is ... Oh yes. There is a lot to be said for logic.
On the other hand, though, there is a lot to be said for instinct, too. There's a lot to be said for a subconscious understanding of how the world actually works, instead of merely how it should work. There's a lot to be said for superstition, suspicion, and luck. There's a lot to be said for the beast inside every man's hind-brain that harks back to ancient days when the comfort of rationality wasn't an option, and superstition on the hard edge of survival was the name of the game. There's a lot to be said for it, because that beast knows things. That beast has the world modelled in a way logic will never equal. That beast understands.
In most people, that beast is called instinct, and it's a faded thing copied out into mind after mind by racial memory, atrophied by the tidied modern world, only flaring awkwardly to life again when the savagery that lives beneath breaks through and catches people up in a swirl of war and poverty and violence and survival.
In some people, though, it flares brighter than others, and always has. In some people, it lives almost as fresh as when it was formed, all those aeons ago. And in them, in Immortals, who hark back to ever more violent times themselves ... well, there's a reason those in the know respect Immortal instincts.
But for one of them, it's something different. For one of them, who harks back so far that he's almost as old as the beast itself, it's a different thing altogether. For Methos, after five thousand years of the worst both man and nature could throw, it's something beyond, something close to pure. Indeed, it could be said that where everyone else in the world has instincts, Methos has Instincts.
And after five thousands years of getting into every kind of trouble available for a man to get into, and a few more besides, after five millennia of getting beaten and abused, shit on, spit on, married, murdered and sold, after fifty centuries of people coming at him pointy-thing-first, Methos' Instincts had settled on one sure-fire way of dealing with whatever trouble the world could throw at them.
Methos' Instincts had decided to get roaring drunk. At the first available opportunity, and every single opportunity that presented itself afterwards. And Methos' Instincts, with their unparalleled understanding of the way the world worked, had hit the nail right on the head.
So right now, in the aftermath of one of the biggest and scariest damn Quickenings he's ever taken, in the aftermath of fighting for his and everyone else's life against the three ... four ... five ... four ... people in the world who know him best and challenge him most, in the aftermath of losing every damn thing that matters to him in the current century, though hopefully not permanently ... Right now he doesn't care that the beer in his hand is his seventh inside an hour. Right now he doesn't care that his bar tab is beginning to rival the National Debt. Right now he doesn't care that complete strangers and random passers-by are looking at him with pity and/or disgust. Right now he doesn't care that he'd be hard pressed to say what a sword is, let alone use one.
Right now, he is getting shit-faced drunk, and if anyone wants to make something of it, they'll soon find out what five-thousand years worth of Instinct can do with a broken heart and the jagged end of a beer bottle.
And boys and girls? Listen to the beast in the back of your head, and trust him. That will not be pretty.
From:
no subject
*laughs* I love this fic.
Right now, he is getting shit-faced drunk, and if anyone wants to make something of it, they'll soon find out what five-thousand years worth of Instinct can do with a broken heart and the jagged end of a beer bottle.
I pity the fool who tries.
From:
no subject
*nods nods* There are times when you just don't mess with a man.