Disclaimer and Notes: This is a story I've been wanting to write for a
long time, ever since I started writing Alexa and Methos stories. As
usual, Alexa, Joe Dawson, and Adam Pierson  belong to TPTB; Jaci and
Greg are mine. This story takes place prior to "Timeless."

Kudos to the betas: Carin Lamontagne, who challenged me to write this
better than I had originally; Amand-r, whose last Lyric Wheel
restriction on "no Alexa stories" made me think this one up; and Dana
Woods, who told me what she thought of this story, and then made me
wonder if I should've added something more to make it even better.

This one is for Kelly Calhoun, my fencing partner and good friend.
Here's hoping you find a true Prince Charming next time around,
instead of one that reverted back to a frog.  :-)

Comments, green tea, Methos or Nick frus, or constructive criticism
may be sent to stonyland@bigfoot.com. My other stories can be found
at: http://www.bigfoot.com/~Stonyland.

---------------------------- 
JUST MAYBE 
by Alice in Stonyland
---------------------------- 

Seacouver February 1995
-----------------------


"I'm sorry, Alexa."

Alexa laughed bitterly at the week-old memory. "Sorry" didn't cover
it. How was she supposed to accept an apology from someone who had no
control over what her body was doing? Was she supposed to forgive the
doctor for doing his job? Forgive the lab technicians who read her
blood samples, forgive whatever it was that caused her cancer? Forgive
what? The words the doctor had spoken still tumbled through her brain
like a song she hated, but couldn't get out of her mind.

She very much wanted to scream, but she was home alone, and if she
screamed, she knew her nosy neighbors would probably think she was
being attacked or worse.

//Yeah, I'm being attacked,// she thought with bitter humor. //By my
own body.//

//Can't think about this too much,// she admonished herself. //It's
all you've been able to think of all day, and you have an interview
for that secretarial position to go to at three o'clock. Have to get
your mind together so you can answer all those stupid questions
interviewers ask and get the job.//

For some reason, that thought struck her as funny. She pictured the
interviewer asking her where she saw herself in ten years, and laughed
hysterically.

"Dead, sir!" she said aloud, and laughed harder.

Faking a different voice, she asked herself, "And what are your
short-term goals?"

She giggled as she answered, "Not dying!"

Eventually, the laughter turned to tears, and Alexa was forced to
conceal the damage with makeup. She dressed for the interview, her
confidence low, and hoped that her lone navy blue business suit would
be professional enough for the position. It didn't help that she hated
the way she looked in that suit, and came as no surprise to her when
she walked out of the interview feeling like she'd blown it.

Every interview she went on in the next few days was a repeat of the
first. Alexa was starting to get desperate. She needed a job; now that
she'd quit school, she wasn't going to have the scholarship money
coming in anymore, and rent was coming due. On top of that, she was
going to have to have something that paid well enough to cover the
medical expenses she knew she was going to incur while still being
flexible enough to allow for treatment. She had enough pride in
herself that she didn't want to go through the one of the employment
assistance programs for those with terminal illnesses; the pamphlets
her doctor had given her about them still remained stuffed at the
bottom of her purse.

Then she remembered the summer between her freshman and sophomore
years of college that she'd spent as a waitress in a pub not far from
campus. She'd earned a lot of money in a short period of time, and had
quit only because she'd wanted more time to concentrate on her
studies. Then she remembered the last time she'd gone out, intending
to have a drink there, that the place had been permanently closed.

Frowning to herself, she decided to check the classified
advertisements. Waitressing wasn't her first choice, but it was the
only way she could think of to earn cash quickly. She found several
possibilities in the newspaper, and spent most of one day making calls
and filling out applications. A few days later, two of the places
she'd been interested in called back. One of them was a blues bar
named Joe's.

She drove down to the place, noting that it didn't seem all that busy
in the afternoon. A couple of cars were parked in the lot, and the
neon sign by the front door glowed "Joe's" in hot pink. She thought
once again of how the building didn't look like much on the outside,
but how her first impression had been cemented by the music she'd
heard inside.

//Well, here goes nothing,// she told herself. She took a deep breath,
turned off the engine, and got out of her car. Slamming the door shut,
she crossed the short distance to the door and pulled it open.

The interior was reassuringly, brightly lit. Alexa's first impression
had been that while the bar wasn't a dive, it wasn't a ritzy place
either. A small stage was set up along the far wall, while the bar was
off to her right. A handful of patrons were scattered among the
tables, while a sign was draped along a stairwell, indicating that the
upper section was temporarily closed. A gray-haired, bearded man in
his fifties looked up from behind the bar at her entrance, then moved
-- awkwardly in Alexa's view -- down the bar to greet her.

"Help you with something?" he asked her.

She smiled bravely, and walked up to the bar. Her throat felt tight,
like someone had suddenly shrunk it, and her stomach felt like the
proverbial butterflies had mutated into stones with wings. "I applied
here for a job the other day," she managed, and thanked God that she
sounded normal. "My name is Alexa Bond, and someone named Joe Dawson
called me about my application?"

The man behind the bar smiled. "I'm Joe," he introduced himself. "I
own this place." He extended his hand to shake hers. It was then, as
he switched hands, that she noticed he had been leaning on a cane.

He saw her glance, and answered her unspoken question. "Vietnam," he
told her.

She nodded her understanding, and realized he might be a little more
sympathetic about her situation than the other employers she'd
interviewed with.  She didn't stop to think about it. "I have
something to tell you before I start answering any other questions,
just so you know. I have cancer."

He studied her with keen interest. "I see."

The two words were a death knell.

"I suppose," she said, trying to hide her disappointment, and failing
miserably, "you don't want to hire me now."

"On the contrary," Joe told her. "I still need a waitress, and if you
think you can handle the blues, a sometimes rowdy crowd, and standing
on your feet for hours on end, you're hired." With an ironic,
secretive smile, he added, "Doesn't matter what your mortality is."

"Well, I'm ready for anything," she told him as she breathed a sigh of
relief. //After being told I'm dying of cancer, I ought to be ready
for anything,// she thought.

The older man smiled. "Have a seat," he invited, gesturing to a nearby
bar stool.

She did as he requested, and they talked as Joe had her fill out the
necessary new hire paperwork. By the time Alexa left the bar, she had
decided that she liked Joe, and was looking forward to her shift the
following day.

**** 
Life settled into a routine; treatment during the day and work at
night, unless she was wiped out by the various treatments they tried.
Alexa quickly got to know the regular customers and her fellow
co-workers. There were six other servers, beside herself, but she got
to know one better than the others: Jaci, a woman from Puerto Rico via
the Bronx who was the senior member of the serving staff. To Alexa's
surprise, they got along quite well, and Jaci quickly became the
closest friend she had.

Spring turned to summer, and the treatments stopped. It was clear by
now that the cancer was beyond anything the doctors could do, and
Alexa had grown weary of being a lab rat. Her long hair, the color of
dark mahogany, was starting to fall out from the chemotherapy, and she
was vain enough to hate to let that go. She accepted that she was
going to die, and some part of her didn't want to spend the rest of
whatever time she had left looking sick. Her doctors protested, but
she stood firm.

Jaci was already on duty when Alexa arrived one hot July afternoon
after her weekly checkup. Alexa grabbed her order pad from the bar as
Jaci stuck a plastic tumbler under the soda dispensing hose. "How'd it
go?" Jaci asked her.

Alexa favored her friend with a cynical smile. "Oh, I'm still dying,"
she told her. "They want to run more tests, but I'm sick of needles."

Jaci shuddered. "I hate those things. Wish there was another way of
figuring out what's wrong with someone besides sticking them."

Alexa shrugged, resigned to her fate. "Anything going on that I should
know about?" she asked.

"Yeah," Jaci answered. "Joe had to take a trip to Paris, and won't be
back till next week at the earliest, so the band's playing tonight
without him, and Mike's in charge."

"Paris..." Alexa let herself dream a moment. "Sounds exciting."

Jaci set the now-full tumbler of soda on a tray and grabbed a bottle
of beer from a nearby cooler. As she did so, she revealed a trefoil
tattoo on her right wrist. Alexa didn't notice it, too lost in her
reverie.

"I've been there," Jaci told her. "It can be, if you're with the right
person."

Alexa sighed. "I'd love to see Paris."

One glance at Alexa's face told Jaci that Alexa didn't believe she'd
ever get there.

"Maybe," Jaci suggested kindly, "you'll get lucky and Prince Charming
will walk through that door, sweep you off your feet, and take you to
Paris."

Alexa laughed. "In my dreams, sure." She picked up the tray Jaci had
filled. "So what table gets this?"

Jaci nodded to a table in the corner. Her heart ached for the younger
woman, and wished she could use what she knew to help her. Not for the
first time, she cursed the secrets she held, and railed at the
futility of knowing about Immortality but not being able to have it,
or give it away. Silently, she prayed that Alexa would have the chance
to see Paris before she died.

//Maybe,// Jaci thought, //God will send Alexa someone who knows
exactly what it means to die.//

She held onto that thought a moment longer before sighing to herself
and returning her attention to her duties.

Later that night, as they closed the bar, Jaci helped Alexa stack the
chairs onto the tables. As had become their habit, they talked while
they worked, waiting until after Mike, the assistant manager, closed
the register, and then bid them goodnight, before getting into the
really personal stuff.

"I saw you flirting with that guy," Alexa observed, "the one who liked
Guinness."

Jaci looked blank for a moment. "Oh, the one who sat over in the
corner by the restrooms?" She shrugged. "He was kinda cute, but I like
redheads better."

Alexa rolled her eyes. "And how often does one walk in here?" she
asked.

Jaci grinned, unrepentant. "Oh, often enough," she said, waving her
hand before she set another chair on top of a table. "So what's your
preference?"

The other woman suddenly looked shy. "Oh, it's too corny."

Snickering, Jaci guessed, "Tall, dark, and handsome?"

"I don't know about the dark part," Alexa admitted, moving on to
another table to stack its chairs. "I mean, I've never figured that
one out. Is it supposed to be dark skin, or just dark hair? Sometimes
I can't decide what I like better."

Jaci giggled. "Who cares? Is he good in bed, does he have money, and
can he hold a conversation?"

Alexa shook her head, her long hair swaying with the movement. "I
don't care about the money, either. It just would be nice to have
someone who isn't going to run away when they find out I'm sick." Her
voice tightened with her last words.

Hearing the faint bitterness, Jaci stopped what she was doing and
looked across the room to Alexa. "Greg was a first-class jerk."

"I know," Alexa said sadly. "I just hoped...." She didn't finish the
sentence, but sighed instead, and stacked another chair. "Especially
since we'd been seeing each other a month, and I really thought he'd
understood what's happening to me, since he said he'd had a friend go
through something similar."

Alexa met Jaci's stare, and added, "You know what he told me yesterday
when I broke up with him?"

"No, you didn't tell me this," Jaci returned.

"He said that he felt sorry for me, and that he wasn't really in love
with me." Alexa threw her hands up in a gesture that conveyed her
disbelief. "I should've known better than to date any of the guys we
meet here, but --"

"I know, I know, I saw it," Jaci cut in. "He was gorgeous, and he came
more for the music than for the beer."

"So," Alexa began, "is that the case with the guy you were flirting
with earlier?"

Jaci laughed. "Don't tell me you missed the scene where Mike helped
pour him into a cab?"

"Was that what that was about? I was just coming out of the kitchen
when I saw Mike come back in from the parking lot. He didn't look
happy, but I thought it was over something else." Alexa stacked the
last chair and walked over to where Jaci was getting ready to clock
out.

"That was it," Jaci confirmed, sliding her timecard into the time card
machine and letting it punch the time.

"I'm not working tomorrow, and I know you're off until seven," Jaci
changed the subject as Alexa punched out, "so do you want to go to the
mall with me?"

Alexa frowned as she replaced her card and Jaci's in their designated
slots by the time card machine. "Sorry, but I'm kinda tired," she
refused the offer. "I need to get some sleep so I can work. I haven't
been feeling all that well this week. Maybe another time?"

Jaci bit back a sigh at Alexa's refusal, which she suspected had more
to do with the events of the past few days than her illness. She'd
been hoping to get Alexa out in hopes of preventing Alexa from getting
depressed over Greg.

"Yeah," Jaci agreed reluctantly as they headed for the door. "We'll
have to plan that."

Alexa offered her friend a pale imitation of a smile as they exited,
and Jaci pulled the automatically locking door shut behind them.

//I hope that she doesn't let Greg's behavior get to her too much,//
Jaci wished fervently as they got into their cars. //She deserves more
than what that jerk did to her.//

To Jaci's regret, however, she watched as Alexa proceeded to hide more
and more of herself away as time passed. It was beginning to look like
Alexa was merely biding her time, waiting to die, and seeing it happen
was more painful than Jaci could stand. She said as much to Alexa, who
smiled, cocked her head slightly, and shrugged.

"You don't know what it's like, Jaci, to live with this," Alexa told
her quietly one autumn afternoon. "What would you have me do, fall in
love with someone, only to have them watch me die? That's not fair to
them, and it's not fair to me. I won't do that. I tried with Greg, and
he couldn't handle it. Why should I take another chance on having my
heart broken again?"

There wasn't anything Jaci could say to that, at least, nothing that
she could say that would change Alexa's mind.


-------------------- October 1995 --------------------


"Come on," Alexa heard Jaci coax Joe as she approached the bar for her
next order, "it's almost Halloween. We *have* to decorate, or else
we'll be cursed by bad spirits."

"You don't believe in that anymore than you believe in Santa Claus,"
Joe retorted. "Besides, who ever heard of being cursed for not
decorating?"

"Well, it's no more incredible than Im--" Jaci began, then caught
sight of Alexa, and quickly changed what she was going to say.
"--Alexa being on time and dealing with that group of college students
upstairs!"

Alexa didn't understand the look the Hispanic woman exchanged with
Joe, but dismissed it quickly. After rattling off her order, she asked
Jaci, who was assistant bartender that night since Mike had called in
sick, "I'm always on time, and the students aren't that big of a deal,
so what's incredible about that?"

"Jaci wants us to decorate for Halloween," Joe explained as he and
Jaci moved to fill Alexa's order.

Alexa shrugged. "Why bother? You'll just have to take everything down
again."

"True," Joe agreed, setting two mugs of beer on Alexa's tray. "I
wasn't thinking of that one, though. I just can't stand the thought of
the bar in orange and black; they'd clash with the color scheme."

Jaci added a mixed drink, then said, "We have to have at least
something."

"Don't ask me," Alexa reminded her. "I may not be here to see it." She
picked up the tray, and went to deliver the order.

"I'm worried about her," Jaci murmured, once Alexa was out of earshot.

"Well," Joe replied, "she has a point."

"She should be living as if she will be here for Halloween," Jaci
argued. "I would be."

"I don't know about that." Joe's voice was quiet, tinged with more
than a hint of intimate knowledge with the resignation Alexa seemed to
be feeling.

Caught by the tone in his voice, Jaci glanced his way. Almost before
she could stop herself, she looked at Joe's legs, and then met his
eyes. Nothing was spoken, but she could feel the gentle admonition
nonetheless. Heat colored her cheeks. Spying a customer at the far end
of the bar, she gratefully took advantage of the distraction.

Joe sighed, knowing that as close as Jaci and Alexa had become, Alexa
hadn't told her what she'd said to him earlier, when she'd reported in
for her shift. She'd received the results of her last checkup, and the
news had offered hope at the same time it snatched that hope back. Joe
hadn't been entirely sure that Alexa was up to working her shift, but
she'd waived his offer to pay her for the shift anyway and send her
home. He sincerely hoped that her mood would be more cheerful towards
the customers than it had been towards him and Jaci.

It bothered him that neither Jaci nor he had been able to shake Alexa
from the resignation she'd carried with her for months now, a
resignation that had only been strengthened by the news of her
progress...or lack thereof. He'd tried everything he knew to get her
more interested in living, but he knew that unless that drive came
from within, there wasn't much anyone could do to motivate Alexa.

Joe was still thinking about that when someone he hadn't been
expecting to see came walking through the door. He was a tall,
pale-skinned man with black hair and an angular face, and Joe
recognized him instantly.

"Well, look who the cat dragged in," he greeted the newcomer. "If it
isn't Adam Pierson."

"Hello, Joe," Adam returned the greeting....



** Finis** 

4.17.99 stonyland@bigfoot.com