Summary: As if being an Immortal isn't difficult enough.
There have been places and centuries when the color of his skin mattered not at all. A continent and a thousand years at a time, sometimes. North America, at the end of the twentieth century, is not one of them. Methos could go somewhere else. There are parts of Africa where his skin would go completely unremarked.
Uncomfortable parts. Methos likes air conditioning, running water, antibiotics. He has seen enough starvation and disease for a thousand lifetimes. He wants peace and freedom and books, not poverty and revolution and guns, and a little intolerance is generally worth the price.
Methos has sat at Prester John's right hand. He has carried frankincense to a king born in a stable. He has conquered Asia Minor. He has been a slave captured in war, and a citizen, and briefly, an emperor. And on this continent he has worked in fields, served as a conductor on a railroad without a train, sat in the back of buses, integrated schools. He had thought he was done with fighting.
There are battles that require pens and not swords, clean and educated and articulate soldiers and not madmen with painted faces. But men die in this kind of war, too. A public bullet in the back is a risk he isn't willing to take.
Instead he gets a tattoo that barely shows against his skin, and a job in an enclave of middle-aged white researchers, and he begins to rewrite history. The one thing they never tell you about Jesus: he was a Jew, and he looked like a Jew. Cornelius Agrippa was the son of a Dutchwoman and a Moorish pirate. Jeanne d'Arc was a woman. Cicero was a lover of men. The history of Immortals has been edited, carefully, by white men. Methos remembers. One of the Horsemen of Revelations had skin the color of dark chocolate. Methos was there.
In this century, the average lifespan for non-white, non-male immortals is less than a third that of white immortals. They simply don't blend as well, and being a black man carrying a sword is enough to get you killed anywhere in the world. But it hasn't always been this way, and it won't be this way forever. Methos keeps his head down-- the better to keep it attached-- but that doesn't mean he isn't fighting.
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