5000 years is a long time to live. A lot of lifetimes. And a lot of things happen in such a span of time. Empires rise and fall—Eqypt, Greece, Rome; he'd seen them all. Wars, famine, plague; he'd seen the worsrt of life on Earth... and the best. Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, he had talked to them, learned from them, became a better man. A man would change many times over the course of such a long lifetime, from evil to good or vice versa. He knew. He had changed.
He could barely remember anything from the first 2000 years of his life, he couldn't even remember exactly how old he was. But the events of circa 3000 years ago he could remember clearly. That was when he rode with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. '...behold a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, and by the beasts of the earth'.* He rose a pale horse, and he was Death. He killed and raped and pillaged along with the others, and he liked it. There was no reason for any of it, except that they were addicted to the power and fear their actions inspired.
But after a thousand years of killing and raping and pillaging he grew tired of it. He was different from the others. He wasn't crazy, and he was no longer addicted to the thrill of the kill; he wanted more. He wanted to learn, he wanted to grow, he wanted to leave the Horsemen. Only Kronos would not let him. Kronos would never let him leave. They were the Four Horsemen, and they wouild be forever. Kronos would kill him before he let him leave. Logically, Methos knew that he could challenge Kronos and quite possibly beat him; but he could not do it. Mentally, he could not kill Kronos. They were brothers, in arms, in blood, in everything but name. And as much as he knew he needed to, he just could not behead him. In the end, all he could do was drop Kronos into a pit, and arrange for him to be fed.
Centuries passed. Methos spent the years studying and surviving. Occasionally he was challenged and fought, taking the Quickenings of those who challenged him; but mostly he just lived, fading into the background and passing through life, taking on new personas and never staying in one place too long. But he still had a thirst to learn, always reading and researching. And as he learned and grew he became a better person, and he came to genuinely regret the deeds of his past—and the darker aspects of his nature. For while he no longer killed indiscriminately, or sought to fight (though he did keep up his skills in case he was challenged) he still got a certain... satisfaction from a well-deserved kill. He didn't like that feeling, he thought that he should be above such a barbaric thing as taking pleasure from killing; but he could not deny that it was there, surfacing whenever he had to kill. And sometimes one had to kill, you could not get around that fact. Accepting it as part of human nature, he passed this lesson on along with everything else he'd learned whenever he took on a student. Of course, passing on such lessons did not necessarily mean that the students took them to heart, but that's another story.
His tendency to stay out of the way and be inconspicuous meant that as the years went by, he passed into legend and got less and less challenges. The stories of Methos, the oldest living Immortal, became a myth. This meant that when he learned of the Watchers he was able to join them, the perfect cover. Using the name Adam Pierson, they had no idea who he was, and eventually he was assigned to put together the Methos Chronicles. He had a good chuckle over the irony of that, being assigned to his own Chronicle.
As being considered a myth meant no challenges he spent quite a number of years living uneventfully. Until the Immortal Kales cames along, determined to take the head of the oldest living Immortal. That was when he met Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, a 400-year-old Immortal with a high moral centre, born and bred in the age of chivalry. It was MacLeod who dispatched Kales, a good thing because while Methos was a capable fighter, he was not in the league of Kales, and if he had to die, he would rather someone like MacLeod get his knowledge and power rather than Kales. MacLeod became a good friend after that, but the moral high ground on which he stood meant that Methos could not divulge his past. There were things there that MacLeod would never understand or tolerate—even after his Dark Quickening.
Past and present could not stay separate however, as time soon proved. A blast from his dark past resurfaced in the form of Cassandra, an Immortal who had first died in a raid by the Four Horsemen. He had taken a liking to her, and kept her as his slave, using her lack of knowledge about Immortals to 'tame' her, killing her again and again. Now she was a friend of MacLeod's, and was enlisting his help in locating Kronos for revenge for what the Horsemen did to her and her people. MacLeod's moral centre led him to help her, not only because she had been wronged but also becayse he'd had a run in with Kronos in the past himself. When she saw Methos in the dojo she demanded he draw his sword. He didn;t even recognise her at first, but she knew him. And a confused MacLeod was caught in the middle.
Meanwhile, Kronos had caught up with him, and Methos found himself back in the same position he was in over 2000 years before when he tried to leave the Horsemen. Kronos had a hold over him, and no matter how he tried telling him he had changed, the savage Immortal would not believe it. He was offered a simple choice by Kronos: rejoin him as one of the Four Horsemen—or die. Methos had no choice; he wanted to life, so it was "Welcome back, brother."
He thought he could coast along, biding his time until he could find a way to stop Kronos. It wasn't easy, trying to save MacLeod and Cassandra when Kronos wanted them dead, yet still appear on Kronos' side; yet somehow he managed it. It was a delicate balance, appeasing Kronos yet trying to covertly help MacLeod, knowing that the Highlander would have no qualms in doing what he could not—kill Kronos. The only problem was the presence of Cassandra. He knew MacLeod would not challenge him if he didn't give him a reason to—he probably wouldn't talk to him again, but his experience with his Dark Quickening so (relatively) recently behind him meant he would not challenge over wrongs so far into the past. But Cassandra was another matter. She had a valid reason for wanting his head, and apparantly she would not even consider the possibility that he had changed. To her, he was the same monster he was 3000 years before, and he knew she would kill him if she ever got the chance.
And, regretably, his attempt at a balance led to Cassandra being captured. While he was warning MacLeod about the bomb with the virus, Kronos took the opportunity to grab Cassandra while she was unguarded, and Methos had to pretend that that was his plan. While he knew that Cassandra's capture would lead MacLeod to them, it was not a tactic he would have used. He had enough regrets concerning Cassandra already.
He tried talking to her, but she was implacable. He even mentioned the Stockholm Syndrome, so named because of an incident in the 1970's when Patty Hearst was kidnapped and had grown to rely on her captors so much that she had been indoctrinated into their cause. The concept of the Stockholm Syndrome had been around for far longer than that, however. It applied to Cassandra's situation three millenia before. Of course, when he brought the subject up she hotly denied that she had ever loved him; but he never meant to suggest she had. He knew that she thought she loved him, but she didn't know any better and she relied on him for everything. And for a while things were good between them. It might have been borne from his 'taming' of her, but there was genuine tenderness there, a fondness. Thereby making his next betrayal of her all the more worse... his inability to protect her from Kronos. Was it any wonder that she refused to believe he had changed?
His attempt at balancing between appeasing Kronos and trying to help MacLeod wasn't convincing her either—she just saw it as a saddistic playing with MacLeod on his part. Especially when it looked as though the Highlander would be killed by the double team of Silas and Caspian—MacLeod defeats one in a challenge and the other would take his head when weakened by the Quickening. But the Highlander survived, and when he turned up to challenge Kronos Methos finally showed his hand by challenging Silas to stop him from killing Cassandra.
While he had not been able to bring himself to challenge Kronos, when it came right down to it with his life on the line, Methos found that he could fight and defeat Silas. And ironically, Silas was the only one of the Horsemen that he had genuinely liked, finding something paradoxically gentle in the Immortal's savage nature. But it was Silas' life or his, and he wanted to live; so he took his 'friend's' head and his Quickening. With MacLeod defeating Kronos, he was the last of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It was over.
Almost. With three of the Four Horsemen dead, Cassandra had wanted to make it a clean sweep. And she had no qualms about taking his head while he was weakened from the Quickening. In her mind, she was ridding the world of a great evil. She would have done it too; had MacLeod not told her to stop. She was incredulous, in disbelief that her friend would want him to live; but MacLeod was immovable, and she backed down.
It was over. He had succeeded in making it through a difficult situation with his head intact. But at what cost? His friendship with MacLeod would never be the same, even if he was able to regain the Highlander's trust. and what of Dawson and Richie? Would they be able to accept and move past the fact that he had such a dark and evil past? Would they all be able to get through this with friendships intact?
Methos realised that the delicate balance he had been maintaining had not just been about trying to help MacLeod while appeasing Kronos, or even keeping his integrity while keeping his head (literally) amongst the Horsemen. It was a balance he had been maintaining for longer than that, a balance within himself. A balance between the dark side of his nature, the part that revelled in killing and acts of destruction; and with the conscience and rationality he had developed over the centuries. The delicate balance between light and dark that takes place within everyone. A balance brought to the fore when he was face to face with Kronos again. And, in hindsight, part of the reason he could not kill Kronos was because of this balance. Because part of that balance was recognising within himself his past sins and his worth as he had changed; and if he judged that Kronos was evil enough to be killed he would have to judge himself the same way. For his sins were just as grievous as Kronos'; and if the other Immortal deserved to die, so did he.
His life would always be about maintaining that balance. Now and forever.
* Revelation 6:8 (from the King James Bible)
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