HL ficlet: "Darwinism", PG, Methos, gen
Dec. 21st, 2009 02:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ishafelSummary: Immortality is about evolution.
Methos teaches high school biology in rural Alabama for a year, standing in front of an ancient chalkboard, showing grainy film strips, using ancient dissection equipment. He likes it. The kids are handpicked, the best of the area, bright and resolutely determined on a better future. He buys notebooks and graph paper and microscope slides with his meager salary when the county can't or won't pay for equipment.
He reads to them from Mendel, Darwin. He charts dominant and recessive genes for them, and he drives them to the science fair in Tuscaloosa, to the only SAT exam in their part of the state. He writes their college recommendations, he holds their hands when they get pregnant, he makes sure they understand that football doesn't equal future.
He's an amazing teacher, the one they remember when they're fifty, the one some of them become teachers and doctors and biologists because of. He loves them, and they love him back-- but that's never been the reason he doesn't take students.
He doesn't teach Immortals often. Not one a generation. Not even one a century. If he's asked, he says it's because it's too much of an investment, for too little return.
It isn't true. It's time consuming, but no one has more time than an immortal. It's frustrating, but Methos's patience is inexhaustible. It's heartbreaking, often, but Methos knows better than to lose his heart.
He trains horses for three years in Spain, at the famous school. He is the youngest master in their history, or at least the most quickly promoted: after a year, when the other candidates are just being allowed stirrups, before they ever hold a rein, the riders admit they have nothing to teach him, and promote him to their ranks.
The white horses have big, plain heads, thick necks, sturdy bodies, short legs. They have kind eyes and willing natures, and a grace that cannot be learned, only inherited. They recognize Methos's mastery, and they dance for him as they do not dance for the mortals.
The other riders learn from him when they can, but he has no words for this, no way of explaining something he has done almost since he can remember. He is too good for them, and they are not entirely sorry to see him go.
He is a professor more often than he can remember. Ethnobiology, cultural anthropology, semiotics, history, classics, mathematics. He spends a few semesters, a few years, a decade once or twice, at the greatest universities and the smallest colleges. He publishes, but never enough to satisfy, never enough that they offer him tenure. But his lectures are well attended, always, and sometimes the students come purely for the power of his voice.
He is a fencing master in nineteenth century Vienna, and the nobles send him their sons, to learn the arts of war. He makes swordsmen of them, but more than that he makes soldiers of them, and he sends them away to die when he is done, and more of them survive than ought.
In medieval Britain he makes swords. In fourteenth century China, gunpowder. He takes apprentices, and they rise to journeymen, and often they go on to be better than their teacher. He is gone by then, to a different town, a different province, a different country.
He joins a monastery in Ireland after Patrick's triumph, and he teaches men who can barely read their names the art of letters, the beauty of words. He celebrates their Masses and he prays to their God, and he finds no peace in either, but they venerate him as a saint when they think he is dead.
He has disciples, sometimes, and cults. He drills troops. He instructs young women in coquetry, and peasants in irrigation techniques, and he spends ten years on a pillar in the desert, not speaking, with men and women in rags at his feet.
He takes immortal students, but only rarely, and he makes them beg for the privilege, makes them follow half-starved, shoes worn to holes, patient and desperate and relentless: he makes them earn it.
His students are not famous, or renowned. They are not queens, kingmakers, swamis. They take students of their own more rarely still. They do not hunt. They do not play the Game. They are craftsmen, but not too gifted. Mechanics. Architects. Farmers. Teachers. They live in obscurity, and if they die, they die in obscurity.
There is a language so old that even Methos has forgotten it, and in that language Methos means Teacher.
Methos teaches high school biology in rural Alabama for a year, standing in front of an ancient chalkboard, showing grainy film strips, using ancient dissection equipment. He likes it. The kids are handpicked, the best of the area, bright and resolutely determined on a better future. He buys notebooks and graph paper and microscope slides with his meager salary when the county can't or won't pay for equipment.
He reads to them from Mendel, Darwin. He charts dominant and recessive genes for them, and he drives them to the science fair in Tuscaloosa, to the only SAT exam in their part of the state. He writes their college recommendations, he holds their hands when they get pregnant, he makes sure they understand that football doesn't equal future.
He's an amazing teacher, the one they remember when they're fifty, the one some of them become teachers and doctors and biologists because of. He loves them, and they love him back-- but that's never been the reason he doesn't take students.
He doesn't teach Immortals often. Not one a generation. Not even one a century. If he's asked, he says it's because it's too much of an investment, for too little return.
It isn't true. It's time consuming, but no one has more time than an immortal. It's frustrating, but Methos's patience is inexhaustible. It's heartbreaking, often, but Methos knows better than to lose his heart.
He trains horses for three years in Spain, at the famous school. He is the youngest master in their history, or at least the most quickly promoted: after a year, when the other candidates are just being allowed stirrups, before they ever hold a rein, the riders admit they have nothing to teach him, and promote him to their ranks.
The white horses have big, plain heads, thick necks, sturdy bodies, short legs. They have kind eyes and willing natures, and a grace that cannot be learned, only inherited. They recognize Methos's mastery, and they dance for him as they do not dance for the mortals.
The other riders learn from him when they can, but he has no words for this, no way of explaining something he has done almost since he can remember. He is too good for them, and they are not entirely sorry to see him go.
He is a professor more often than he can remember. Ethnobiology, cultural anthropology, semiotics, history, classics, mathematics. He spends a few semesters, a few years, a decade once or twice, at the greatest universities and the smallest colleges. He publishes, but never enough to satisfy, never enough that they offer him tenure. But his lectures are well attended, always, and sometimes the students come purely for the power of his voice.
He is a fencing master in nineteenth century Vienna, and the nobles send him their sons, to learn the arts of war. He makes swordsmen of them, but more than that he makes soldiers of them, and he sends them away to die when he is done, and more of them survive than ought.
In medieval Britain he makes swords. In fourteenth century China, gunpowder. He takes apprentices, and they rise to journeymen, and often they go on to be better than their teacher. He is gone by then, to a different town, a different province, a different country.
He joins a monastery in Ireland after Patrick's triumph, and he teaches men who can barely read their names the art of letters, the beauty of words. He celebrates their Masses and he prays to their God, and he finds no peace in either, but they venerate him as a saint when they think he is dead.
He has disciples, sometimes, and cults. He drills troops. He instructs young women in coquetry, and peasants in irrigation techniques, and he spends ten years on a pillar in the desert, not speaking, with men and women in rags at his feet.
He takes immortal students, but only rarely, and he makes them beg for the privilege, makes them follow half-starved, shoes worn to holes, patient and desperate and relentless: he makes them earn it.
His students are not famous, or renowned. They are not queens, kingmakers, swamis. They take students of their own more rarely still. They do not hunt. They do not play the Game. They are craftsmen, but not too gifted. Mechanics. Architects. Farmers. Teachers. They live in obscurity, and if they die, they die in obscurity.
There is a language so old that even Methos has forgotten it, and in that language Methos means Teacher.
