Faith

Methos had no memory of his first life, beyond vague impressions which were more feelings then memories, but he remembered the Gods, and he remembered that while he had never been the firmest believer in them, neither had he been the most skeptical.

So he sang to the Gods at sunup and sundown, trying to hold on to the few memories of his first lifetime that he remembered. Despite his teacher's assurances that he'd never forget anything again, he couldn't shake the feeling that if he'd lost his memory once it could happen again, if he didn't hold them tight. By his teacher's body language he knew he wasn't a believer, but he never said anything aloud.

"A lot of the Gods were or are Immortals," he told Methos around the fire one night five winters after he'd taken him in as a student. "You combine somebody with powers like ours, or magic, or anything outside of the realm of easy understanding, with people who don't have them, and you get one of two reactions most of the time: fear or awe. And either of those can turn into worship or a mob trying to kill you. We're only human. A lot of us were perfectly willing to be worshipped."

"Lyara? Soldash?" Methos asked. He wasn't sure he wanted to know, but he couldn't keep himself from asking. He clung to his faith as one of the few things remaining from his first life, not because he was convinced of the existence of the Gods, but because it was one of the few familiar things in a world that already seemed unrecognizable from time and travel.

"I don't know every Immortal, or every God," his teacher replied. "Anyway, I figure it's better to believe in Gods that don't exist than to not believe in Gods that do exist. You never know when a God's passing themself off as an Immortal."

"Inar?" slipped past Methos's lips before he could stop it. He felt the strongest connection to Inar of all the Gods. If his teacher picked that one to discredit… Methos held his breath.

"Inar?" his teacher said, a strange expression on his face. "I haven't gone by that in centuries. People are worshipping me?" He sounded disturbed. "I'm not a God."

Methos looked at him and thought. Inar was the God of hunting and knowledge and the kind of luck that kept you alive when you should have died. His teacher wasn't anything like how he'd imagined Inar to be.

He never said a word about it, but from that moment onward he had faith like he'd never felt before.

To Uncover What Is Hidden

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5574114/1/To_Uncover_What_Is_Hidden

Comforting

When he thought about it, Methos found it a comfort.

No matter how many times you died, there was always that lingering fear that next time it would be permanent, that there was some magic number of temporary deaths to be reached and then, poof! You were dead for good. So really, it was a comfort for him to know that there was somebody around who was so much older than he was, that had died so many more deaths than he had.

It was the same role he played for the younger Immortals: somebody who was always older than them, older than they could hope to survive even with the best of luck. Old enough to make them feel young, even when the mortals around them had the lifespans of mayflies.

To Live For

He'd long since discarded the idea of ever being normal; he was fairly certain that threshold had been reached well before his first death, and the time travel hadn't helped it any. He wasn't even sure if he could act normal; too many things had passed from habit into reflex for him to change his behavior anything other than slowly.

Somehow, he'd held out this hope that once humans were around everything would be all right, that he'd be able to fit in and live a normal life or ten. But that wasn't how it happened. He'd spent so much time pinning his hopes on the first humans he saw that the reality fell far short of his expectations. They were better than the demons, but the world was a rougher place than it had been in his first lifetime, even if the conflicts were smaller in scale.

Even after all this time, he wasn't sure if he even wanted to live to the time of his first life. What did he have there? Friends who were scattered across the globe and still managed to wish him gone, who he'd worked through all his emotions toward until they were as minimal as his emotions toward strangers. What did he have in this time? Not enough to live for, and that was unlikely to change any time soon.

Sometimes, the only thing keeping him sane was his students. Teaching them to the best of his ability was something to live for, and they were young enough to still be enthusiastic about the world, in whatever way they were enthusiastic.

He had a lot of students over the years; he travelled around enough to run into a lot of pre-Immortals and new Immortals, and he taught all of them who were the slightest bit receptive. Some of them were cheerful. Some of them were angry. Some of them were determined. But they were all enthusiastic about something, and that was something he could live for, seeing and fanning the fire in their eyes.

In a Funk

Some days, it was hard to get out of bed, much less muster any enthusiasm about doing the same monotonous thing for centuries if he was lucky, hours if he wasn't…although there were days when he thought the luck of those options was the opposite. Days when there was nothing new, nobody to live for. Nobody to put on a cheerful face for.

It was always worse when he died. No matter how much the others swore they felt normal when they woke up, he was always chilled, a bone-deep chill from his body temperature dropping as he spent time as a corpse and made him want to just stay dead when he came back to life. It never went away quickly, either, always lingering and making him lethargic and disinterested in anything, even trying to act normally as he did under any other circumstances.

He was surprised, every time he broke out of his post-revival funk, that he hadn't been killed for good. It was what every Immortal wanted, an unresisting Immortal at their mercy, right? But then, chaos had always dogged his steps, so maybe he shouldn't be so surprised when the unlikeliest things happened around him.

Bests and Worsts

Every year the Atlantis expedition held a vote for the bests and worsts: best culture encountered, worst alien life form, best Pegasus food. Although there was no requirement to vote for bests and worsts that they'd encountered in that year, most of the winners were encountered in the year they were voted for.

The first year, the Ancient Baby Machine won Worst Technology.

Every subsequent year, it won Best Technology.

The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Men

Atlantis had originally been planned so that it could become a colony, if contact wasn't reestablished...technically. But nobody had planned for a massive baby boom only nine months in. Most of the expedition members were from small families and, if they had been married in the past, they were now divorced. None of them had children that they had raised. So, few of them were prepared to have children, especially when they learned about them so late in the term. The expedition contained a few people who had more experience than babysitting as teenagers, but that wasn't enough when literally every member of the expedition was about to become a parent for the first time.

Even with extensive planning sessions- suddenly they had to set up child care that ran 28/6 and accounted for crises and missions and the fact that any one of them could die unexpectedly, the universe being what it was- the first few months were nothing less than chaos as everybody got used to their new children and dealt with the usual crises with a predictable lack of sleep.

Just when things were calming down, they found out that the Wraith were coming to attack Atlantis.

Murphy

Xander didn't allow himself to hope for a better life this time around. Despite the fact that all indications pointed to his parents being good parents (and by that point, he'd dealt with enough parents to know the good ones from the bad), or perhaps because of it, he didn't allow himself the slightest glimmer of hope. Because in his experience, Murphy's Law always applied, and if something went right it was just a setup to make the sucker punch hurt that much worse.

He didn't allow himself to hope. Maybe that's why it hurt so much when the inevitable happened.

Forced Meditations

He doesn't think he's ever experienced something quite so boring as being in the body of an infant. He can't do anything, and for somebody who hadn't voluntarily slowed down since he was in high school that was possibly the worst thing that could happen to him. He'd been unable to move once, a few years before he'd died and been reincarnated, but it hadn't been like this. Then, everybody had known he was still in the shell of his body, for all that it couldn't move, and had made a point to come by and keep him from being too bored, even if he wasn't always precisely entertained. He'd had the papers read to him on a regular basis, public news as well as Saucy news; and books, some of which he wouldn't have read on his own (really, just because Faith was learning Python thanks to the urgings of somebody-or-other in MagiTech didn't mean she had to share). He'd gotten occasional music from his personal music collection, so it wasn't anything horrible. He'd gotten constant updates on the usual crises- because when wasn't there a crisis?

And even though the news and updates-on-crises made Xander realize that he really needed someone competent to be his second in command, ready to take over at a moment's notice, and he was horrified at not being able to do a thing about any of the crises, and certain people took entirely too much pleasure at him being a captive audience, at least they realized he was in there, that he was aware and sane and not used to dealing with boredom. Nobody realized those things about babies.

It was going to be a long, boring time until he was mobile again, and he had nothing to do during it but think.

Lost in Translation

Watchers' Latin was possibly the only language ever spoken that had such an extensive magical vocabulary. It had been the lingua franca of the magical community for centuries at the least; nearly every legitimate magical book was written in Watchers' Latin. And if the people who needed the vocabulary would only be talking about it in that much depth with other people who knew Watchers' Latin, what use would they have for translating calormagia (the feeling of being near magic) or frigusmagia (the feeling of not being near magic) or any of hundreds of words used by magic users when talking shop?

Amateurs and Professionals

Over the course of his first life, Xander had become something of a connoisseur of magic. He'd seen it all; from the first fumbling efforts to float a pencil to the false impressiveness of flashy spells to the true mastery of minimum effort for maximum effect. He'd seen witches study theory for years before they tried their first spell. He'd seen scholars do things that whole covens working together couldn't, because they knew theory well enough to change one minor thing and set off a chain reaction. They'd been called the Philosophers, after Archimedes and his saying "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world."

Compared to them, no person in the wizarding world was more than a rank amateur, skilled enough to dazzle those who hadn't seen anything more impressive than sleight of hand but unimpressive to those who knew what real skill looked like.

Family

Family on Earth wasn't anything like family on Atlantis. On Atlantis, family was biological family and team family and work family, and those-who-risk-their-lives-for-you family, so she could claim all of Atlantis as family, and the Athosians and those Satedans who were still living as distant family. On Earth, though, family was only biological family, culled to merely blood relations, and those connections thinned until blood was like water in comparison to what family meant on Atlantis.