Because clearly what I needed to do today was become obsessed with a ficlet rather than do the ten thousand other things I am either being paid to do or paying other people for the privilege of doing.
However, my reaction to being swamped with stuff to do is often to find something else and do that. There are mixed results from this tendency.
Anyway:
Five things Methos knows that no one else does and the one he tells Joe1.
Methos knows about demons, despite his protestations to the contrary, but he’s hardly the only person who knows. MacLeod has personal experience with a demon, as have various other people around the world. While many people doubt these first hand accounts, some people believe them. What Methos is unique in knowing, though, is that demons feed on that belief. The best way to get rid of a demon is to disbelieve it. The problem with knowing something like that, though, is that it’s not the kind of knowledge that can be shared.
2.
Methos once met Jesus of Nazareth. Well, “met” might be overstating it a bit. He saw him from a distance, one amongst a crowd of hundreds, maybe thousands. He wasn’t the only immortal to make a pilgrimage to see the recent prophet. A lot of immortals (the smart ones) keep track of the local religions and cults because you never know where new holy ground might pop up. But religion makes people angry, so while there were other immortals who could have said if Jesus of Nazareth had a quickening or not, they’re all dead. Methos knows better than to say anything one way or the other about a religious leader.
3.
The question of how the pyramids of Egypt were built has puzzled historians and scientists for centuries--theories have ranged from pure slave labor to special mechanical devises to alien technology. It has never puzzled Methos because he was there for at least part of it. Every so often Methos looks up the most recent theory but doesn’t bother to respond to any of them. He was there, he knows how they were made, and he’s not particularly interested in getting into the academic fight where his only evidence is the eye-witness account of an immortal who’s not about to claim to be an immortal.
4.
Methos knows what manna tastes like. He’s collected recipes off and on for most of his life but never found anything else that really resembles it. Or rather, he has found many things that taste like it but since none of them taste like each other, it’s not something that can be described. It’s frustrating that taste is a sense that is so difficult to describe. After the death of his brothers, he doesn’t think there is another living person in the world who remembers the taste of manna. He’s never even been tempted to tell anyone how the Christian’s foretold Harbingers of the Apocalypse had eaten manna. But he wishes sometimes he could share the experience with someone else.
5.
Methos knows how to read “Linear B,” as it’s now called. He finds the number of people who are obsessed with translating it somewhat irritating. Explaining the language, though, would both attract unwanted attention to Adam Pierson and be kind of boring. It’s not that it’s a boring language per se, although it kind of is, it’s that there’s nothing very interesting written in it. Even those parts of his older journals are boring.
+1
There are all sorts of things that Methos has done or seen in the past and which he has stopped seeing or doing just because life moves on. He’s a modern sort of guy, but somehow it still comes like a punch to the gut when he’s researching in one of the Watcher’s archives and he hears some of the more modern era historians discussing what a giga might have looked or sounded like. Methos had played a giga for years to keep his family and friends entertained during the cold Norwegian winters. He’d taught his nephews (and one of his nieces) how to play it. He’d learned how to make them from his grandfather-in-law.
It takes the better part of a year for him to find the right supplies and remember the right techniques but in the end, he has a new giga. Joe has been commenting, only half teasingly, about his new propensity for brooding, but Methos thinks of it has a period of nostalgia.
When it’s done, he brings it into the bar. Methos avoids acting anachronisticly, it’s a dangerous tell to anyone looking for immortals, but Joe is special. Joe already knows who Methos is and he’s a musician. Joe should know what a giga looks and sounds like.
A/N: I don't actually know anything much about gigas, but they are listed on wikipedia as a Norwegian instrument that people have heard of but they only have a vague guess as to what it actually is. Probably a lyre of some sort. 
