Rodney McKay is MacGyver's son.

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Immortal Purity Test

Somebody makes an internet purity test based on what they've heard in an Immortal drinking game similar to "I Never" (last one to die of alcohol poisoning wins). It's posted on a forum used by Immortals (the FAQ claims they're "roleplayers" who meet IRL. There are a few members who have no idea that Immortals are real and not just pretend; they're usually easy to spot, but one guy is mortal and nobody else knows it), including Amanda and Methos. They're amused enough by it that they're having fun with it in the bar, and manage to drag Richie and Joe into it (both of them are very pure), and a reluctant Duncan (he's done more, but he's still pretty pure). Amanda isn't as unpure as you'd think, and Methos is down at like 2% plus a decimal because there are just that many items. Duncan says there must not be anybody who's 0% pure, but Methos says he knows somebody.

Sample items:
been burned at the stake
had a slave
been a slave
successfully pretended to be the opposite sex
used the opposite sex as a long-term identity

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Idea: Mime Army

The Mime Army. Think about it.

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A form of magic which is entirely dependent on tattoos, hidden in the real world.

All ideas are free for the taking.

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.

FRC + Psych

Tim and Bernard from the FRC series go to Santa Barbara to promote Bernard's latest book, which he leaned heavily on Tim and Dick to get realistic since it's about a detective. Lassiter heavily fangirls him because it's realistic.

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Science, and Other Cults

Atlantis is abandoned/lost/destroyed, and the expedition members return to Earth. Since few of them have strong ties to Earth, or people or places on it, they're mostly at a loss for what to do, and they can't all stay at the SGC. They end up moving to a small town/rural area, where they just buy a large tract of land and build their own buildings on it, built to their specifications for doing the jobs they want to do. And then they clash with the locals, especially the school(s) because they had kids while they were in Atlantis: their kids know it all already, they get in fights with the town kids, the adults send whoever's available to any sort of thing the school needs parents at rather than sending the parents of the relevent kids like they're supposed to. And the military who stayed in the military stop by when they have leave, and occasionally official-looking people come by, and the locals are totally baffled. They think it's a cult for a number of reasons.

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Echo of a Silenced Sound

Summary: It doesn't matter so much that you're a clone if the original isn't around.

AU from Fragile Balance. For whatever reason, by the end of the episode mini!Jack exists but original Jack doesn't. Either mini!Jack stays at the SGC, or SG-1 stays in contact with him.

All ideas are free for the taking.

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.

In Defense of Fanfiction

There are a lot of people out there who dislike fanfiction- for some of them it goes way beyond dislike and into hate, but that's true of anything which is heavily debated. I even understand their reasoning. When characters live in your head, there's always the feel that they're yours, like some part of you that it feels wrong for somebody else to control the actions of- and that includes settings and worlds, because the setting is as much of a character as the actual characters, as any worldbuilder can tell you. In a way, it is stealing to use something which, as many writers will tell you, is like a part of their soul, even if the original character remains where she started out. It's cheating to take these premade characters and world and just use them, without creating them from scratch or basing them off of people and places you know.

But, honestly, if that's how you really feel about it, don't watch any movie sequels, or watch any episodes of TV not written by the original creator, or movies based on books, or read non-independent comics, because what do you think they are? Yes, they're firmly in the "legally allowed" category, but they hit all of the points that are usually made by people who are anti-fanfiction except for the "it takes money away from the creator" argument- which I have never seen evidence of (and in my experience, getting more involved in a fandom- such as by writing and reading fanfiction- makes me more likely to spend money to buy things related to that fandom).

I've occasionally seen people argue that fanfiction is all badly written. This argument holds at least some water- if you go to the wrong places first, your first impression of fanfiction will be awful: mangled grammar, spelling so awful you know it wasn't even run through a spell checker, and a plotline which both proceeds too quickly and makes no sense, while the only familiar thing about the characters is their names (and sometimes not even that, if they're arbitrarily given nicknames or aliases, or spelled differently each time). We've all seen fics like these unless we stick firmly to the rec lists. The thing is, that's to be expected. It's the internet; if you've been on it for any length of time you know that it's full of people who can't make themselves understood in the written word and delude themselves into thinking they can. It happens in real life, too; the only place it isn't expected is in professional media, and that's mostly selection bias. If you write something and want to publish it on the internet, there's nothing stopping you from doing it unless you a) don't have access to a computer or the internet and can't get them, or b) are under 13 years old and refuse to lie about it. There are probably ways to circumvent those conditions, too: mail a letter and have somebody else and have them post it. Have your mom or your over-13 friend post it. Professional media, on the other hand, have to pay significant amounts of money to provide the media to their audience- printing costs, production costs, salaries, advertisement costs…the list goes on. So they don't take a chance on anything they think might be a flop; as it is, most of the books out there are read 'em and forget 'em books, and most movies you watch once and promptly stop caring about without even telling others to watch them.

Most fanfiction is like that, too- middle of the road, enjoyable while you read it but nothing spectacular. It's relatively easy to learn how to write well, to not break the rules or, if you do break them, to break the right ones. However, it doesn't seem to be possible to teach how to write spectacularly: most of the writing advice I've seen is lists of "don't do that"s, but good writing doesn't have anything wrong with it to be pointed out as not working. Writing spectacularly is more doing things right than not doing things wrong, and that can't be taught. And it's not like professional fiction has a greater percentage which has been awesomely written- out of 16 years of reading everything I could get my hands on, ultimately I can count the books I couldn't live without on one hand, with fingers left over. Since September of 2008 (6 months) I've read 1,180 fics and put 11 of them on the "can't live without" list, which is a better percentage than I have with professional fiction.

As a corollary to the "badly written" argument, there's the ever-popular "it's all smut" argument. And, yeah, there is a lot of smut, but where isn't there a lot of smut? There are even romantic subplots in some action movies. There are major romantic plots in Disney movies. If you don't want romantic plots, move to a convent or something, because they're everywhere. Fanfiction has a lot more R and NC-17 stories, or their equivalent in non-MPAA ratings, simply because there's nobody telling the writers that they can't include them. A lot of fanfiction writers and readers start out reading romance novels (the other major section they come from is science fiction/fantasy, which is a strange combination if you don't take into consideration that those two genres are treated much the same way by readers of mainstream fanfiction as is fanfiction), so they want a strong romantic plot which leads to more than a kiss. And in some fandoms it's hard to find any fic which doesn't have any romance or sex in it, but most fandoms strongly favor headers which tell you things like title, fandom, summary, warnings, ratings, and pairing. I have yet to see a book that does you that courtesy; the back cover might read like a gen story about a caribou psychologist or something, and then halfway through turn into a story about him falling in love with the mountie who rescued him from a bear, and if you wanted to keep reading about caribou psychology and can't stand romance you're out of luck. My personal ratio is skewed heavily towards reading gen, even though most of the fandoms I read are fairly slash-heavy.

I like the "stealing characters and settings" argument best of all of them, but a lot of what I read isn't just blindly grabbing the characters and/or settings and running with it. I've seen some amazing worldbuilding done for fanfiction- things that would have had no place in the original media, whether because of an emphasis on minor or unshown characters, or because they're counter to the overall theme of the piece, or because of length limitations. Stargate SG-1 wouldn't have an episode about their librarian doing completely ordinary librarian things. The Chronicles of Narnia couldn't have Edmund being Narnia's spymaster. Highlander couldn't show what will happen in the distant future. If they live for long enough, TV series can show an alternate reality or two, but they can't show what happens after- or before- that for the alternate reality. They can't show what happens to every minor character. They can't have things which break the status quo too much- even in the middle of terrible wars, most of the good guys will stay alive and named characters won't die in groups; the main love interests will rarely get married; when major things happen, it's always in a way that the characters are able to get involved. And people read media differently- not only does it have themes and symbolism the creator might or might not have been thinking about, but two people can read or watch the same thing and see it differently; for any given instance two people can take it in and between them believe three different and mutually exclusive readings of it, but you don't necessarily know what anybody else is thinking about it because everybody thinks differently. Fanfiction sometimes shows those differences in thought, and readings of the material that obviously aren't true, but would be interesting (or heartbreaking, or disturbing) if they were. Occasionally, fanfiction reads as more canon than canon, and you wonder how it can possibly not be.

So really, I can understand why some people don't like fanfiction, but if you're not the creator of either the original or the fanfiction, why rain on everybody else's parade? It doesn't involve you, and most people do respect your wishes to not distribute fanfiction if you are the creator.

Awakening

Wake up, bleary-eyed, to the incessant beep of your alarm clock going off too early after the late-night stakeout you'd been on the night before. Groan and turn the noisy thing off, rolling out of bed and gaining momentum with the somewhat dubious ease of years of experience with too little sleep. Wish, for an instant, to return to the days before alarm clocks were popularized.

Abandon that foolish thought as you step into your nice refreshing shower. Once again thank God for the invention of indoor plumbing and the water heater.

Pull on your clothes with a smile at being allowed to wear pants- you'd learned how to fight in even the most cumbersome skirts out of necessity, but it's so much easier when you can wear pants.

Head outside to get the newspaper, your only source of news from yesterday since you'd been on the stakeout during the news last night. Pause to see the beauty of sunlight striking the dew on the grass; although you have seen tens of thousands of scenes like it, your teacher had managed to instill a sense of wonder at nature's beauty in you. Consider being a photographer in your next lifetime; this life might have just begun, but it's never too early to make plans- the unexpected has a tendency of happening, especially to your "family".

Shake the dew off of the plastic bag covering your newspaper as you take it inside. Peel the bag off and drop it in the trash can, dropping the paper on the table without a second glance on your way to getting out the Rice Krispies.

Prepare your cereal the way you like it: with more sugar than most people like and less than your teacher uses on it, and still more than a little crisp.

Unfold the newspaper and freeze, your cereal going soggy as you stare at the headline: "Immortals Among Us".

Wonder how long it will take before you're told to arrest yourself for existing.

Baby

Methos walked away from his former apartment, his diary securely in the bag slung over his shoulder. "Adam Sloane" had died in public, so it was a little risky to go back to his former residence to retrieve even that, but he wasn't willing to lose one of his diaries over so little risk. Of course, it was still risk, so he'd made sure to use a more discreet entrance – thus why he was walking down an alley.

He froze in mid-step as he heard a sound that didn't belong in an alley, because what person leaves a baby in an alley? Hoping he was mistaken – though he knew that the millennia of experience he had with sounds made it unlikely – he walked over to the dumpster the sound was coming from next to and looked down. There, lying on top of the mounds of garbage which had been piled next to the dumpster, in a blanket and gnawing on what looked like an opened letter, was a baby.

Dried and crusted blood was all over the baby's face, presumably having originally come from the scabbed injury on its forehead. Fortunately he didn't see any fresh blood. Methos couldn't smell anything over the smell of the trash, but he was willing to bet that its diaper was soiled as well, since it had obviously been left untended since it was left here, and probably before that, if the caretaker's pattern had held true.

Looking at the baby lying in the trash, Methos knew the child wouldn't be missed, and even though they couldn't reproduce Immortals still felt the desire to have children. With the experience of dozens of lifetimes of childcare, he scooped the baby up.

"Hey there, little one, I'm your new Daddy."

Watching the Watchers

It had always amused Xander that so few Immortals knew about the Watchers. How hard was it to notice somebody watching you, especially since they had the handy Watchers' symbol somewhere on their person – usually in plain sight - to make them easy to find? Sure, most of the smart Watchers watched from a distance as much as possible, but a lot of Watchers weren't smart, and even the smartest couldn't always Watch from afar.

Occasionally Xander somehow picked up a Watcher. Sometimes it was baffling how they knew he was an Immortal, with as few heads as he'd taken and how little he interacted with other Immortals, but they found him somehow. He checked the Watchers' archives occasionally out of curiosity, and none of his identities had been linked. Half of the time, they thought he was a new Immortal, which amused him. When Methos had been a Watcher, he'd pointed him towards the Chronicles of his past lives, which had set him off muttering obscenities in languages Xander pretended not to know.

Amusingly, though, a few of his lives in the period after he'd been sent back in time had been linked to his first life. The Watchers knew that Alexander Lavelle Harris was an Immortal and when he had been born. They just didn't know how long he had lived.

The New Linguist

Jack grinned as he heard the sound of Daniel's voice. If he was back from recruiting that Pierson guy he could be a good distraction from Jack's mounds of paperwork since Carter had already kicked him out of her office. And if the Buzz was anything to judge on, Daniel had succeeded in his mission. Jack just hoped the new recruit wasn't a headhunter.

He rounded the corner, words of greeting on his lips, but they died when he saw who was with him. "What are you doing here?" he asked, rudely because he was so stunned.

"Jack!" Daniel snapped. "Sorry, Dr. Thomas, Jack's a little…"

"We know each other from a while back," 'Dr. Thomas' waved off the attempted apology, then answered Jack's question. "Dr. Jackson just hired me."

"Hired you?" Jack asked in confusion. "I thought the only position you had open was for a linguist, Daniel."

"It was," Daniel replied. "Dr. Thomas knows more languages than I do."

Jack turned to 'Dr. Thomas'. "I thought you said you'd never be a linguist."

"Yeah, because I'd have to take courses to teach me languages I already know," 'Dr. Thomas' said. "My doctorate's in women's studies. Dr. Jackson wouldn't even have glanced at me if Adam hadn't recommended me so I'd stop bumming his couch."

Jack could feel a headache coming on, which he hadn't even known was possible for Immortals. "Women's studies? Why?"

The other man shrugged. "Seemed like the thing to do. Is us working together going to be a problem?"

Jack shook his head. "Just bad memories." 'Dr. Thomas' nodded in understanding. "Hey, why don't you come over to my house for dinner? We can catch up with each other's lives."

"Sure," 'Dr. Thomas' said. "I gotta stop by my house and feed the cats first though."

"You still have those menaces?" Jack asked, a horrified expression on his face.

He rolled his eye. "Not the same ones. They don't live that long, you know."

"I don't care," Jack said emphatically. "Your tigers are not invited to dinner."

"Tigers?" Daniel asked, breaking into the conversation they'd started to think of as semi-private.

Norms

It was strange to come back to Earth after a year or two of living in Atlantis. Not because Earth had changed, but because they were.

People on Earth lived in large communities – whether cities or even small towns, all but the smallest of them was larger than most Pegasus communities. But although they lived in large communities, they were very detached from other people in comparison to the natives of Pegasus. Pegasus communities were all intertwined, through trade and sheltering with other civilizations, often even merging several of them together after bad cullings – it was a bad idea to not make as many friends in the galaxy as you could when any day your entire civilization might be struck down by Wraith or disease or famine, making you depend on others to survive. And in Pegasus, it was far more common to see as many generations as were still living all living in the same house, with their spouses and children and parents and random relatives and friends thrown into the mix, in direct contrast with many Earth societies' living patterns.

It would be foreign to all but the most far-flung traders and Runners from Pegasus to walk into a marketplace and know no person there; much less one which they visited regularly. But on Earth, it was normal to do that, to be entirely alone in even the largest crowd in the most familiar settings.

Of course, all but the largest communities in the Pegasus Galaxy – the Genii and the Atlanteans – would, on their own, be smaller in population than even a small movie theater.

Instincts

It took him a while to get used to being around humans again. Not that it was so long in his no-longer-new sense of time, but compared to the lives of the human lifespans surrounding him it was.

It had been far easier to adapt to living on his own, a solitary hunter in the wilderness. There hadn't been very many long spans of time in which to think, and if he spent a while singing every song he could remember or arguing with friends he wished he could hallucinate so he'd have company, the animals weren't going to care except for about how noise meant he was probably easy prey.

When he had returned to civilization, if it could truly be called civilization when language was still a relatively new thing, he'd found it hard to act according to even the skimpy social norms that they had had at the time. His usual behaviors had been trained into him over millions of years, and it was hard to break habits even when they weren't so firmly established. So he was sure they spoke of him behind his back as the twitchy (because how could he not be twitchy when there were a million things around him that were just wrong to his learned instincts?) weird (he could live with this description; he'd been weird his whole life, even if for most of it there wasn't anybody to call him it) guy. That description, obviously, didn't make anybody truly happy to have him around, but if there was one thing he'd learned in his millennia of life, it was how to hunt, and hunting was of major importance if they wanted to live.

By the time things got a little more organized (and he'd traveled around a bit, because somebody not aging was a bit suspicious, especially with such short lifespans as people had) he'd managed to retrain himself to be less twitchy and weird and blend in a bit more. He could hide his weirdness entirely if he wanted to, although that was always boring. He'd always be twitchy, because his hunting instincts weren't the kind of thing he could get rid of, even if he wanted to. But it was useful to know when somebody or something came up behind him, or on his blind side, even if it made him more likely to draw weapons when startled.

He wasn't startled often anymore; the solitude had honed and trained his senses enough that most of the time he could tell exactly what was going on around him without more of a clue than a slight noise.

Loss

It wasn't the first time, and he doubted it would be the last. He'd known when he had adopted her that one day she would die, and when she'd been Called he'd known that her time had been even shorter. But when he outlived everyone around him, even the other Immortals, by as much as he did, the only thing that really mattered to him was how she had died.

Old age would have been the best possibility, of course, even though old age in this day and age was nothing like what he'd used to think of as old age – living to 85 was rare, not an average in this time. An accident, not deliberate on anyone's part, would have been acceptable too, or an illness. Once she was Called he knew that she would likely die at the hands or paws or teeth of a demon or vampire. He wasn't happy with it, but he couldn't protect her forever, only make sure she lived for as long as she could.

There were a lot of ways that he would have considered acceptable for her to die, even if he wouldn't have been happy about them – what kind of a father could be happy at his daughter's death, no matter the cause? But this? This worthless death at the sword of an Immortal who wanted to force him into the Game? That would never be acceptable.

And while he might have forgotten how to lean on someone enough that his life changed completely when he lost them, he had never forgotten how to fight.

Age

If there was one thing Immortals were blessed with it was a good memory. Their long lives were split between being a blessing and a curse, but their memory was all blessing. No Immortal would forget their lost loves, or their first kiss, for long; something in them seemed to reset their memory when it became damaged, even if it took longer to heal than any other injury.

Xander remembered, with all the clarity that one remembers repetitive tasks, every day of his extremely long life, from his first memory through the rest of his first life, and on through the millions of years he had lived. He remembered the yellow crayon incident and Buffy coming to town and hunting in the jungle, the desert, the forest, the plains.

What he didn't remember was being young. He didn't remember what it had felt like to live in a world where he wasn't the oldest person – possibly the oldest being – alive. He didn't remember what it was like to be inexperienced, or naïve, or bad at fighting. He knew he had been all those things, once, but he didn't remember what it was like.

The Past

"Of course he's made mistakes," Xander passionately told Cassandra. "He's human in all but life span, just like the rest of us, and humans make mistakes."

"It wasn't a mistake," she spat. "They were the Four Horsemen, and he was the worst of them. He kept me captive after they slaughtered my village. That's not a mistake that can be laughed off like you're trying to do."

"And?" he asked. "We're none of us innocents, and especially not those of us who have lived longer than kids like MacLeod who haven't had their idealism destroyed yet. So he went a little insane for a while; so what? You live as long as we do, and it happens sooner or later. Human minds, and human coping methods, aren't designed for living for so long when those around you die. The only difference between his breakdown and mine, or yours, or anybody else's, is that he had the resources to lay waste to the world – and people who wanted to do the same thing at his side."

"And that excuses it?" she asked incredulously. "You weren't there! You didn't see how bad it was, or how long it lasted."

"No, I wasn't there!" he roared back. "I was following behind, doing what I could for the survivors and burying the bodies! You think I don't know what it was like? There have been far worse things than the Four Horsemen on Earth, and I've lived through a lot of them. So don't you tell me that I don't know what it was like, because I know! And if you can't see that Methos isn't that person now then you're the blindest person I know."

Houseguests

"I don't get it," Duncan said, watching Alex's antics. "Why is he so…" he trailed off, unable to think of a word.

"Most Immortals have at least one period of strangeness – maybe even insanity – if they live long enough," Joe said.

Methos snorted. "Alex hit that period before I met him, and he hasn't returned to sanity yet."

"When did you two meet?" Joe asked, including Alex as he walked over to them. He was excited to be learning new information about the usually taciturn Methos's life, even if the Immortal would probably kill him if he included it in his report to the Watchers.

"Bronze age," Alex said, as if he hadn't just told them that he was one of the oldest living immortals. "At least, I assume it was the bronze age, what with all the bronze weapons." Methos nodded in agreement, taking a swig of his beer.

"Bronze age?" Duncan asked. "Isn't that when…" He trailed off, unsure of whether Alex knew about the Four Horsemen.

Methos got a horrified expression on his face and started drinking faster, which Duncan assumed was either because of the memories or because he'd almost let the secret slip, until Alex spoke. "Technically speaking, but we met before he had his little teenage rebellion." Duncan and Joe both choked and had reason to be glad they hadn't been drinking at that moment so nothing came out of their noses. Apparently bored with the subject, Alex changed the subject. "So, you've got a spare room or a couch or something, right?"

"Yes," Methos said resignedly. "I suppose you want my spare room?"

"It's not like I can find anywhere else with a yard on such short notice," Alex told him.

"A yard? Why would you want a…" Horrified realization dawned on Methos's face. "No! I am not going to have your…Hell-cats in my house! I had enough of them the last time I saw you."

"Hey! What did I tell you about calling them Hell-cats?" Alex snarled, slamming a previously-unnoticed knife point-first into the table in front of Methos.

"Fine, I won't call them…" He didn't finish the sentence when he saw Xander's eye narrow. "But they can't come in the house, and that's final."

"Okay," Alex said, suddenly cheerful again. "I planned for them to stay in the yard anyway." He walked off whistling, vanishing the knife through some sleight of hand. When the door closed behind him, the only sign that he had ever been there were a deep gouge in the table and Methos, still groaning over having fallen for that.

Pets

Xander had never planned to get a pet. With the life he'd led, when would he take care of it? Pets needed to be played with and cuddled and everything, and he was usually too busy to do that in between saving the world, hunting demons, working so he'd have money, and real life. And then he'd been flung into the past, and if he'd wanted a pet then what was he going to do? Adopt a velociraptor?

But if he remembered right, dinosaurs (which he'd had the joy of meeting) became extinct something like 65 million years before what he used to consider the present day, and humans were relatively new in the grand scheme of things, like having been around less than a million years new. He hadn't ever imagined he'd consider a million years old new, but living as long as he had had a way of putting things into perspective. And being alone for that long would make anyone feel lonely.

So when he saw an animal that looked something like a cat, in the way some of the animals now looked something like what their descendents would look like – he could see hints of them, but for the most part they just like completely different animals because it was so far in the past – he made overtures to it. Unless he had to deal with demons he was good enough that he always had enough food for himself and some left over to try to make friends by sharing it. And when the "cat" had kittens, he made overtures to them. And to their kittens as well.

It wasn't easy to make friends; these were no domesticated cats, or even feral cats; these were wild cats, and he had never expected to win them over in one generation. But if there was one thing he had, it was time, and with as much time as he had, he had learned to have patience. With every generation he was allowed a hair closer without being attacked. With each subsequent generation the cats were friendlier, even if they never acted like house cats.

And over the years he watched over his cats, keeping them safe from the demons which were a threat to every living being. He saw them change, so minutely with each generation that only by thinking back did he realize the changes that evolution had wrought. They interbred with a few of the more neutral demons, expanding their intelligence further than he'd thought possible and cementing their loyalty to him.

Xander no longer had pets, he had friends, even if they walked on four legs and couldn't speak any human language.

Phone Home

Xander sighed unhappily as he hung up the satellite phone. Willow and Buffy were obviously starting off on one of their 'special girl' kicks again, where they tried to make him quit because they thought he was too normal to be risking his life.

So he'd gotten into a few scrapes in Africa; so what? They'd all gotten into more, and worse, in Sunnydale without even trying, and Africa was a dangerous country in parts. Parts he had to go to because the Slayers he had to find were in war zones. And it wasn't like they even believed him when he told them about the tigers which sometimes followed him; it had been all "Tigers don't live in Africa" and "are you sure you don't mean lions?"

Sometimes he wondered if they'd stop trying to make him quit if he told them his secret, but most of the time he thought that they wouldn't, although they might think he was a demon.

Linguistics?

"I'm back!" Methos called.

"Really?" Xander asked. "That was fast. I thought you'd take the opportunity to run away. Who's your friend?"

"Daniel Jackson," Methos said, and waited to see if Xander recognized the name. He'd always had the strangest ability to at least know of the widest variety of people Methos could imagine.

"The Egyptologist and linguist, or a different one?" Xander asked, right on schedule.

"That's me," Daniel said. "Can I ask, how do you know the name?"

Xander shrugged. "I visited Chicago a few years back and got in a bar brawl with Steven Raynor, who has a huge grudge at you by the way. Your landing pads theory sounds like fun, and don't worry, I took everything he said with a grain of salt."

"That's good…" Daniel said, obviously trying to put Xander into a category in his mind. It was impossible, though; Methos, who had been around long enough that he could easily categorize every person he met in his mental system, still hadn't been able to put Xander in a category with anybody else. "And you're Alex Thomas, right? Linguist?"

Xander burst out laughing. "Adam told you that?" he asked between peals of laughter.

"Not in so many words," Daniel said, looking back and forth between the two in confusion. "I told him I was recruiting for our language department, and he recommended you instead."

"Well, yeah," Xander said. "But because I can do the work, not because of what my degree's in. I'm a doctor of women's studies, not linguistics."

When Daniel stared at Methos like he was crazy, he responded defensively. "What? It's not like I was in contact with him while he was getting his degree. And he knows more languages than both of us combined, and counting the overlapping languages twice."

Xander snorted. "Like that's hard."

"I speak twenty-seven languages," Daniel protested.

Xander shrugged. "I speak more."

Recruitment

Daniel knocked on the door and was surprised when it was yanked open almost immediately. He opened his mouth to say something, but Adam was faster than he was.

"Daniel!" the man exclaimed too loudly. "I forgot you asked if I wanted to go to lunch. I'll just grab my coat."

"Actually, I-" Daniel started, but Adam clamped a hand over his mouth and motioned for Daniel to be silent.

"I'll see you later, Alex!" Adam called back through the door moments before he slammed it behind him and dragged Daniel back to his car. His voice slightly hushed, he spoke to Daniel again. "I don't care why you're here, but thank you so much for saving me."

"Saving you?" Daniel asked in confusion, his vivid imagination enhanced by his time at the SGC conjuring scenarios Adam might have needed to be saved from.

"Nothing too major," Adam reassured him, "just the houseguest from Hell."

"Relative?" Daniel asked, unable to imagine another reason he'd let somebody stay when he didn't like them.

"No," Adam said, "but he's the closest thing I have to one. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to him – I don't think I would have lived this long without him – but the man is completely insane."

"Oh?" Daniel asked. "Oh, any preference for food, since I'm apparently taking you out?" he asked as an aside.

"There, actually," Adam said, pointing. "Parking's up ahead, though."

He pointed out where the parking was, and as they were walking to the restaurant Daniel asked, "So, how is your – friend? You never said a name – how is he insane? Literally, or figuratively?"

"Alex Thomas," Adam told him. "And hell if I know. He's functional, even if I get the urge to kill him, so it doesn't really matter which. I doubt even a psychiatrist could tell even if he didn't snow them."

They paused to get their names on the list and a beeper to call them, and then Daniel launched into another question. "So if you call him insane and he hasn't been diagnosed you've got to have a reason, right?"

Adam smirked at him. "Oh, the stories I could tell you about Alex. You wouldn't even believe what he gets into."

"Oh? Like what?" Daniel asked, all innocent curiosity.

"Hmmm," Adam said, selecting a story to tell. "I guess the most relevant is the one that made me start avoiding him."

"You avoid him but you let him stay in your house?" Daniel asked.

"Oh, Alex is like a hurricane. You can't stop him when he wants to do something, the only thing you can do is minimize damage." Their beeper went off and they were led to their table, and Adam took up the story where he had left off. "One time, Alex decided that it would be a good idea to circumnavigate the world."

"I assume you don't mean in a plane or anything," Daniel said.

Adam snorted. "I wish. No, we were in an accurate recreation of a ship from sometime before Christ."

Daniel pushed up his glasses and stared at Adam. "You what?"

Adam nodded. "If you ever get the urge, don't. Although that actually wasn't the experience that made me hate boats. But we were doing the whole thing very authentically, so when we landed in South America we stocked up on chocolate as well as everything else, and until it ran out I was stuck on a boat which was nowhere near large enough. Alex on chocolate is a scary thing to behold."

Daniel laughed. "I'll bet," he said. "So, did you make it? Where did you start from?"

"We started from Northern Africa – I don't remember the country, but somewhere in there. And we did make it, although the boat only made it to India before we had to make our way back by land, so I'm not sure if you'd count that as making it."

"Wow," Daniel said. "That far in a ship that wasn't even made for it? I'm amazed. How much of a crew did you have?"

"Just me and him," Adam said, "which only made it worse."

Daniel chuckled. "I can imagine. I can see why you're so exasperated with him."

"And you don't know the half of it," Adam told him. Just then, their food arrived. "Fast service today." He waited for the waiters to clear away, and then asked, "so, what brings you here, since I assume it wasn't Alex stories?"

"A job offer, actually," Daniel told him.

"You got a job offer?" Adam asked him. "After your talk I wasn't sure you'd be able to."

"Well, yes," Daniel said. "Actually, I got one right after I gave the talk. Literally, I was walking out after the talk and got it."

"Really?" Adam asked. "You never told me."

"I guess we haven't really been keeping in contact," Daniel said. "My job's been keeping me busy. But that wasn't what I meant, actually. I have a job offer for you."

"You're hiring?" Adam asked.

"Well, not me personally," Daniel said. "I'm head of the language department, but the whole thing is under the Air Force."

"I don't deal with the military," Adam said with finality. "And in case you hadn't noticed, I'm not precisely an American citizen."

"Hey, it's not entirely American anymore," Daniel defended. "And it's not like you'd have to go on missions. You haven't even listened to my pitch!"

"What's there to listen to?" Adam asked. "My specialty's dead languages. I don't know modern languages like you do, and I like working with dead languages."

"It is dead languages, dialects of them I'd never seen before, and it's nothing like anything else you'll ever do," Daniel said.

"I still don't work with the military," Adam said. "If you want somebody, take Alex. Get him out of my hair for a few years."

"Can he do the work?" Daniel asked. "Can he pass a background check for Top Secret clearance?"

"He's fluent in more languages than I've even heard of, much less speak," Adam told him. "As for security clearance, no clue. Like I said, I've been avoiding him. For all I know he might already have one." He let Daniel get the check and call one of the people from his job on his cell phone on their way back to the car. Daniel wasn't off the phone by the time they got to the car, so Adam took the keys and drove them back.

"They'll call me back with a preliminary yes or no in a few minutes," Daniel said. "Where are we going?"

"My place," Adam said. "If you're going to have to work with him, you might as well find out if you can stand him before you hire him."

Obstacles

"Dr. Thomas," General Landry said. "Would you like to go to Atlantis?"

"Of course," Xander said. "It's the city of the Ancients, why wouldn't I want to go?"

"Good!" the general said. "The Daedalus is leaving in three weeks. Can you be ready by then?"

"No, I can't leave," Xander protested. "I have to take care of my cats."

"Can't you ask a friend to take care of them?"

"Ah, no, because that would be illegal. When I say cats I'm not talking Felis catus, I'm talking a subspecies of Panthera tigris." General Landry stared blankly at him. "Panthera tigris, you know, tigers?"

"Why do you own tigers?" he asked slowly.

"Because I do," Xander said without any further explanation. "It's legal for me to own them and take them with me wherever I go as long as I'm not violating the health code or mistreating them, but the rule against pets going to Atlantis has nothing to do with their species, so I can't go."

"Shouldn't they be in a zoo? Or the wild?"

Xander's voice was flat. "I'm not putting my babies in animal prison. And I had some poaching problems on my land, which is why they're in America."

General Landry sighed. "I suppose I can your point of view, but Atlantis really needs someone who can read Ancient as fluently as you can. Are you sure you won't reconsider?"

39 days later, in addition to the usual scientists and soldiers, the Daedalus also beamed down five tigers: two adults and three cubs.