Chapter 10: The Meeting of Methos and Crichton
Joe's Bar turns out to be kind of nice, with live performers on a small stage in the corner. Joe himself usually plays at least one set a night of the blues, and from what John can tell he's pretty good. John hasn't heard much music since the last time he was on Earth; he's never been sure if the dearth of music in the Uncharted Territories is the result of the crowd he hangs out with, the things he does, or just a general lack of music outside of entertainment venues. Maybe in the Uncharted Territories people just don't listen to music outside of bars, although that seems odd to him. Anyway, even the worst of the music isn't bad enough to make him wince, even listening to it for the whole night, although it isn't really his kind of music.
John really wishes he'd been to more of this type of bars in the Uncharted Territories; somehow he doubts that, even if this bar was on another planet, it would be the sort of place where he would be tricked into marrying a princess. Or the type of place where the girls would be drugged and then almost killed to make some sort of designer drug. Or any of a number of other things that had happened to them in a bar.
Then again… he thinks, feeling the Buzz of a new Immortal approaching. His eye was already twitching from Mac's presence in the bar, although fortunately the Buzz seems to fade into the background after a few minutes (the same does most emphatically not go for the eye twitch. He's hoping he ca learn to control it, somehow, or that it's just because he's new at this whole Immortal thing and will go away after a while, because it was annoying enough the first time it had happened, with the beacon, and having it happen every time he's near a Immortal, for the rest of his possibly very long existence would go beyond annoying to…what was beyond annoying? Aggravating, perhaps, but even that doesn't do it justice when he suspects it would (or will) eventually make him want to kill someone or something, or at the very least cause a lot of property damage.
He doesn't know why he keeps subconsciously expecting Immortals to look different from everybody else, because he looks normal (except, perhaps, for the clothes he'd had before the shopping trip today, but that's all fixed now), and Mac looks normal, and even Morgan had looked normal before she'd unexpectedly become a foot shorter (Now? Not so much); but he does, and so he's somewhat surprised when the Immortal who walks in the door looks completely normal, except perhaps for the way his eyes immediately sweep the room, pausing shortly on Mac and for longer on him. John notices that reaction because he's watching the newcomer just as closely, and because he knows that after the years of expecting danger from any person he's in the room with who isn't someone he trusts, he does the same thing when he enters a bar. Mac, for all he seems blithe and almost dismissive of the threat that any Immortal poses him, and especially that of any mortal, does the same thing when he enters a room, even one devoid of any Immortals, sizing up all of the possible threats. Unless they have military, and combat, experience, nobody else ever notices it. John knows he'd picked the habit up in part from Aeryn. Without a doubt Mac and this immortal picked up their automatic caution the hard way, through years, centuries, of being in potential danger at any turn. He wonders if they're as paranoid as he is, these days, or less, or more. And if they'd started out that way. If he lives for four hundred years how paranoid will he be?
If he lives for four hundred years will he have found a way home in all that time, or will home (which seems an ephemeral concept to immortals, who, at least on Earth, have to pack up and move and take up new lives entirely every few decades, even if they take the utmost of care "aging" themselves) not be there by the time he finds his way back? Will Aeryn and D'Argo and whoever the baby grows up to be leave Moya before he returns? Will he even want to return, by the time he finally gets the chance to, or will his current dream fall by the wayside like his dream to return to Earth had? It scares him to think that his goals could change that much, but he knows it's possible; how many times in his life have his goals changed? How many times have they changed to something he hadn't expected to want? He hadn't wanted to be an astronaut when he was a kid, not after the way his dad had always missed everything in his life, but at some point it had become his goal. It would have been absurd to have wanted to return to Earth before he had even left, to have wanted to win Aeryn's heart before he'd met her, to have so many of the goals he's had in the past few years before he'd flown Farscape.
It scares him to think about living for so long, to think about outliving everybody in his family (although perhaps not everybody he loves, or even everybody he loves at this moment; of all the things he'd thought to ask, the lifespans of everybody else is not one of them. What point, when he'd be dead before any of them unless some accident befell them?). He'd been the short lived one, the weak one, the one with his senses dulled to nearly nothing, the one from a backwards planet before its First Contact who'd been baffled by the esoteric technology of a door. Now he's the one who, if he's at all lucky, will outlive everybody. Who will live to see them all die, like all too many of his friends and allies before them (he isn't entirely certain he can classify the other John, or Crais, as friends, but he's sure they were at the very least allies at the end). Lucky? Surviving whatever Challenges he's forced to fight wouldn't be lucky, it would be a curse. But he has a mission, at least for the moment, and he's far too used to doing whatever it takes to remain alive to just drop his sword at the next Challenge, or even to not do his best in the training Mac's giving him.
The newly arrived immortal seems to be considering turning around and leaving right away, like he's afraid John's going to suddenly Challenge him in the middle of one of Joe's sets, in front of all these people, but Mac waves at him and calls him over to his table; obviously they're friends, or at least on friendly-ish terms. John still isn't certain if it's even possible to be actual friends with another immortal, given that they're "supposed" to try to whack each other's heads off. But then again, he considers Rygel a friend even though Sparky tried to sell him to the Peacekeepers, and probably more that he neither knows about nor wants to know about. Maybe it is possible to be friends with somebody you know you can never entirely trust. And then there's Harvey, of course…
"I resemble that remark," Harvey says in black and white, looking like one of the Three Stooges, and promptly slips on a black and white banana peel. "What have I ever done that wasn't in your best interests?"
John glares at him. "Don't tell me you've forgotten about killing Aeryn already," he growls.
Mac and the newly arrived Immortal are having some sort of a discussion that has the stranger looking exasperated; he watches it from the corner of his eye as he gets drinks for the customers, who seem to have all decided to get refills at once. Gradually, the Immortal relaxes, or at least untenses a little bit, and heads over to the bar.
"Beer," he says in an accent that might be from some long-dead civilization, or a result of spending so much time traveling the world that his accent was a hodge-podge of other accents. It sounds British, though, or something in that area; John isn't one of those people who can pinpoint a person's nationality by their accent.
"Any preference?" John asks.
"No," the Immortal replies, so John fills a glass with Budweiser, wondering if the Immortal will try to strike up a conversation with him. He doesn't care one way or another, except for the fact that, as one of Mac's friends, he's likely to see this Immortal again.
He hands the beer to the Immortal and notices something on his wrist. "Hey, you have the same tattoo Joe does."
"Yeah," the Immortal says. "So?"
"We can get tattoos?" John asks. "I mean, with the healing…"
"I had to do it myself," the Immortal replies. "Wouldn't want the tattoo artist to see it healing. Removal's a lot easier than it is for mortals, though, but more painful."
John thinks about it and winces. With Immortals' ability to heal immediately without scarring, the fastest and easiest but far from least painful method of tattoo removal is doubtless just cutting off the skin the tattoo's on. I could do that if I had to, he thinks. To save myself? To save Aeryn or D'Argo or the baby? Yeah, I could do that. Someday, I might have to. Next time it might be me deliberately injuring myself to get free and save everybody, not Zhaan. I hope it never comes to that, but given my luck it will.
The Immortal goes back to Mac's table, and bar traffic increases once again.
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