honey and sting

re-post from my lost fanfic site, for Iferion. ETA: I should mention, this story was originally written for Barb G, for a birthday. Well, it started as a story but had ideas of its own. This may have been the year she wrote *cough* a novel for my birthday (which later became a 5 book series).

A/n: Methos, before he was Methos. A wandering king. A tavern owner. Stories, sex, and beer. Kind of.

Bitter As Honey

1.

Methos flinches.

His name isn't Methos, not yet. He'll take that name in a century or five. He's known he's different, of course, that he won't die like other men (or women, for that matter, straining in the battle of childbirth against Ereshkigal's call), but one generation is much like another, here, and he has seen little to mark the time.

The man who she's just let in to the mead hall stinks of old wine and uncured pelts. She's stepped back to let him pass, wrinkling her nose at him. Methos manages to find a shadow and slouch in it, drinking his honey beer. He was looking forward to bedding the proprietess, tonight, but she clearly has other plans, from the looks of things. Women and their soft spots.

The man sits, clouds of gnats settling with him. Wordless, she places ale and bread in his grasp. He stares blankly, then slowly begins to tear and chew, washing the lumps down with the thick liquid. Methos sighs and hunches further into his slouch. It's going to be a long night.

2.

He'd smoke, if cigarettes
had been invented.
A continent away,
and ten thousand lifetimes.

No, no, not that many,
though generations waxed and waned
in length -- an old man at 30,
a young man at 75.

Methos leaned against the shadows
and watched Siduri, her belly soft
under the shadowed brute of a man,
the god-king Gilgamesh, so the other
patrons whispered,
mad, they said, with grief.

"Whom the gods would destroy" --
no, no, no Greeks yet for another age
or 3.

The god-king sleeps, the spending of
his aching cock within her sets him free,
for a time,
of memory,

and Methos, from the shadows,
watches.


3.

(Siduri)

She knows.

The man's a smoldering ash
that someone ought to stoke.

Laughing,
she calls him from the door,

and out he steps,
from curtained dark,

to lay his body on
the sleeping king
who rests upon her laughter
and her sex.

The oil is warm,
the body loose and oh,
such pillowed decadence he finds.

The grunts and moans and dreams
and sleep and shadowed grief:
The god-king's need, first,
to be received,

then penetrated
to the full measure
of his pain.

Into his body he will fall,
and seek no more
of godly fire.

Methos, meanwhile,
enjoys the fuck.

4.

Aftermath

"And that," he says, gesturing with his beer, "is how I met Gilgamesh."

Joe sits and takes it in, not falling for it, but still, a story is a story, and a good story is even better. It's a rainy night. Why not?

"You know," Joe says, after some time, "I read that Sumerian beer wasn't bitter at all. They didn't start using hops in beer till the Middle Ages."

"Course not, we brewed them sweet, long ago in days of yore."

"Days of your ass." Joe tips his glass in toast.

"It's hard to love a driven man," Methos says, later. Joe's off somewhere, cleaning up. "Gilgamesh returns to wife and child. And builds the city walls." There is a kind of sing song echo in his words.

It's an ancient twinge, ten thousand times forgotten. Neither sweet nor bitter anymore, if truth be told.

One more loneliness, to hide with all the rest.

He'll live.