Highlander: Careful What You Wish For
The first time he slept with Methos, he’d still been a Time Agent, on vacation in Ancient Rome. Pompeii, to be exact–he’d always had a fondness for Pompeii–about fifteen years before the eruption of Vesuvius. Getting a cover there was easy–a prostitute, especially a male one, who was as good looking and healthy as Jack was, and seemed to be immune to most of the diseases rampant at the time? Always in high demand.
Jack had been a Saturnalia gift to the senator’s old friend–neither senator nor Jack had known at the time just how old.
The first time he slept with Amanda, it had been at Versailles, during the time of Louis XV. They were both after a priceless piece of jewelry owned by the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour–Amanda because it was a priceless piece of jewelry, Jack because there was something suspiciously non-terrestrial (or at least non-contemporary) about it. They’d gotten distracted by each other, however, and both failed to retrieve it. But there was a certain satisfaction still to be had in being able to say he’d had sex in the King of France’s own bed while he was at a party elsewhere in the palace.
The first time he’d slept with both of them had been in 1929 in New York, only a few weeks before the stock market crash. He’d recognized them both at a speakeasy, and had been more than a little surprised when they’d both recognized him too. If it had been just one, it could have been a coincidental run-in with a fellow Time Agent, but both was a little more unlikely. Unless they were traveling forward in time the old fashioned way–linearly. It had taken a lot of talking, a little more of his own story than he technically should be sharing, and a lot of bathtub gin, but he’d eventually found out they were both Immortal.
“You’ve got it all,” he told them later that night when they were lying tangled together in Amanda’s bed. “Me, I can visit any period in history I like, but I can’t really live there, get to know it inside and out. If someone like you ever became a Time Agent…they’d have the entire universe at their fingertips, and infinite time to explore it.”
Methos started to protest, but Amanda smacked him with a pillow. “Oh, don’t bore him with some old lecture about the Game, and how being Immortal’s not all fun and games. Especially considering you and I are the last people qualified–we’ve spent more time running away from the Game than fighting it.”
The second time he slept with both of them had been in Paris in the 1990s. He’d shot himself in front of them, watched as the wounds closed up and then dropped to his knees begging, “What the hell happened to me? Am I one of you?”
They’d had no answers to offer him–whatever he was, he wasn’t part of the Game any more than he was still part of the human race–but they had offered comfort, and he’d clung to it until morning. Then he’d gotten up before either of them and fled his own shattered hopes.