Title: This Is Your Time
Send feedback to: hmpf1998@gmx.net
Rating: gen (This is harmless.)
Keywords: Life. ;-)
Characters: Methos, Alexa, some dimly remembered or passing original 
characters. 
Summary: Alexa is dead. Methos is alive -very much so.
 
My personal special disclaimer: I feel like I might have stolen
phrases I used in this from other people's fan fiction involuntarily.
(Maybe this is just me and my complexes, though.) I'm a bit of a
language kleptomaniac. I read a lot, both fanfiction and 'real books',
and I have a good memory for language things. Bits and pieces of stuff
I read will often 'stick' to my memory, to then re-emerge like
original thoughts at some other time. I often feel like something I
say or write is not really my own idea, and sometimes I manage to
identify the true author. And sometimes I don't. So, if you think you
recognize anything in here and have any idea where I might have
'stolen' it from, please inform me about it, and I will try and change
it. (Or do I just feel this way because I'm using such bad clichés?
lol)

The other disclaimer: Don't own Methos, don't own Alexa...

A thousand thanks to my English teachers, err, beta readers, Verin and
Canadian Girl, who sliced my run-on sentences in two, shifted my
commas, and weeded out clichés. I've learned a lot about style from
them!

Go here for All About Hmpf: 
http://www.crosswinds.net/~hmpf1998/shortcuts.htm
Go here for this story in HTML format: 
http://www.crosswinds.net/~hmpf1998/time.htm
 
************************************************

This Is Your Time
by Hmpf
 

Dear Adam,

there is so much I would still like to tell you - too much for words
to tell.

Fading away might not be the greatest way to go, but I assumed it
would be the least painful. Deliberately, I'd been retreating from
life step by step, withdrawing behind a self-built wall. Seeing you
opened a door in that wall, just a crack but enough to lead me back to
life. You helped me to open that door all the way -- you took my hand
and led me out into the vast open spaces I had almost forgotten
existed. I thank you for that. Having to leave doesn’t hurt as much
now that I have had that, and you, in my life.

It seems ironic that it should have been you who reacquainted me with
life. You, the great cynic, the detached jaded one who claims he has
seen it all... How can you love the world so deeply and be so weary of
it at the same time?

I've been watching you. I'm watching you all the time.

I love you, more than anything. More than my life, for all its poor
worth.

I don't know you. I'm in love with a stranger.

Who are you, Adam? I doubt that you know yourself... Sometimes, when I
look at you, I believe I see an old, old man, and I wonder what has
happened to you. I know you won't tell me. I wouldn't even know how to
ask. I feel this is something you can't talk about. Not because it is
a secret, but because it is something that cannot be expressed by
words, only felt and understood - or maybe not understood.

When you are with me, though, your guard is down. Then you are just
there, just you. All present, as I am. And I know that you need me as
much as I need you, maybe more.

In these moments, I am afraid for you.

Please, Adam, promise me that you will be alive when I'm gone. Live,
live every moment. - Remember me, but *live*.

Alexa

*****

The colours of the world were so much more intense than they usually
appeared to him, the sky so much brighter than any sky before, the
clouds whiter than white. The coffee he drank standing up at the
counter of a small bistro was a miracle. Alexa was dead.

And the loss seemed so much more intense than any other loss before.

Love had left him real in a real world -- had left him raw, open, and
defenceless. It was only for a short time, as he very well knew, but
for this short period he was real, free to feel, free to mourn.

Like falling in love, grieving was different, yet the same, every
time. The sharp pain, like love, pervaded everything. Like love,
grieving pulled away the veil of the all-too-familiar from the world
and remade everything in its own image. It reminded him how
extraordinary it was that he was still alive. It reminded him of all
the things he had lost. He had, after thousands of years, come to
accept grief almost with a kind of gratefulness, for like loving it
diminished, for a short while, the distance that separated him from
the present. Then, when he could not bear the painful immediacy of
life any longer, he would step out of time again and withdraw to some
sort of refuge. He would live a reclusive life for decades or
centuries, until he would grow restless once more. Then he would wait,
wait for someone, something to draw him out of his ivory tower and
back into life.

Grieving, painfully aware, wretched yet also elated, he recalled
Alexa's face, every drawn line of it in the last stages of her
illness, its beauty when they'd first met, each line he would forget
all too soon, every expression that would so soon be lost.

Alexa, asleep in bed beside him, her hair spread and tangled all over
her pillow, peaceful, childlike, her soft breath --

Alexa strolling through the streets of mediterranean villages and
cities with him, enthusiastic and exhausted in Athens, marvelling at
its millennia of history, and him not daring to tell her he'd been
there all these millennia ago, disguising his own memories as
make-believe --

Her hand in his, small and surprisingly strong, until the illness
began to drain that strength --

A stifling pain rose in his chest, and for a moment he could not
breathe. He put a fifty Franc note on the coffee stained counter and
left hastily, without waiting for the change. Outside, he leaned back
against a wall and didn't even try to stop the tears. It was a
beautiful day, the autumn sun unusually warm, blinding him. Alexa's
face, her hair, her body stood indelible in his mind. Then others
appeared, countless women and men, their faces and bodies mingling in
his memory, the loves of a long life...

*****

A long time ago.

He had been young, but felt old already. Too old to truly live, too
old to be a part of the world surrounding him. He had stepped back and
watched life from a distance, an immutable rock in the swift river of
time and change. Or so he had believed.

He had been wandering for years, straying farther and farther from the
centres of civilization with their kings, diplomats, wars, and
policies, things he had long since given up on keeping track of. He
had grown tired of city life after living in the great cities of the
world for hundreds of years. He had started to dream of the steppes
and deserts, the mountains and the great woods, and the simplest life
one could live -- living off the land, living with the land. Far from
the cities, he found that life had not changed all that much. People
tilled the ground the same way he remembered from the last time he had
been a farmer. They were born and grew up and married the same way.
They lived out their short lives as they always had.

He moved from village to village, never staying longer than a year. He
helped with the crops for a bed at night and a bowl of soup. He lived
with nomadic tribes, feeling strangely at home sleeping at a camp
fire, indistinctly aware of a buried pain he dared not dig for. He
lived in remote mountain valleys that disappeared under thick layers
of snow in the winter; he lived on the plains and by the sea. Time
passed him by without leaving a trace. People passed him by without
touching him.

Then one day a girl had smiled at him in a way that challenged him to
reappraise her. He had seen her every day since he had arrived in this
little backward village in the High Atlas, where people still used
stone tools instead of metal ones mostly. She was a short, round faced
girl, almost a child still. Nothing special, to be sure. But her smile
was different that day, and he found he could not look away -- she
would not let him look away. In her eyes, he saw the deep joy of
living. He also saw that she had chosen her man, and nothing would
change her mind.

Maani, wife #15.

When he told her of the things he remembered that everyone else had
forgotten, of the way everything changed, yet stayed the same, she
heard what he was trying to tell her. She put her hand on his mouth
and bid him be silent.

"This is my time. You were born in another time, long ago," she told
him. "I want to share this time of mine with you. I give it to you.
Can you feel it? This is your time. This day, this moment. Any moment.
It is yours."

He had stayed with her all her life. She lived a long time, for a
mortal, and died a frail old woman in his arms. "Look at the world.
Don't you see how everything is glad to be alive?" she said.

_This is *your* time. *This* is your time. Any time is your time._

Others had come to take her place. All unique, all different, but they
all had had the same message for him.

*****

"Monsieur? Monsieur?!" A young Beur woman was standing in front of him
with a worried expression on her face. A round face of North African
complexion, with kind brown eyes, and hair hidden under a headscarf.
For a moment, she looked like Maani. "Vous avez besoin d'aide?" she
asked, frowning.

He forced a smile, blinking the tears away. "Non... Non. Je vais bien.
Merci." He smiled again, this time more successfully.

"Vous etes sur?" She was still worried; crying in public was unusual
at best, in most cultures.

"Oui. Merci bien." He was looking for a handkerchief. She handed him a
paper tissue. He thanked her once more and wiped his face while she
watched him with keen eyes.

When he was done, she cocked her head and said: "Allez à la maison et
dormez, monsieur. Tout sera mieux demain," with a smile that was
ranged half- way between coquettish and maternal.

He couldn't help but laugh. " I doubt that" he said, in Arabic, "but,
inshallah, I will be all right."

Her eyes grew large and round at hearing him speak her language. "I
thought you were French," she said.

He looked at her. "Look around," he wanted to tell her. "This is an
extraordinary day. Every day is an extraordinary day. You have a lot
of extraordinary days before you yet. Don't let life pass you by." But
then he saw her eyes, and understood that she did not need to be told.
Suddenly, he was happy.

"In fact, I'm British," he said, "but I've lived down there for quite
a while."

"Leyla! -- Leyla!!!" Another girl's voice, this one clearly irritated.
They both turned, and Methos saw the caller, a girl of maybe eighteen
years who stood on the sidewalk across the narrow street. "Leyla! Aunt
Malika will get angry if we don't turn up at four!"

The girl, Leyla, grimaced, and muttered "older sister" apologetically.
"Alors, salaam Monsieur." She turned to go, then turned back and
handed him her packet of paper tissues. "Here. You keep these," she
said, in Arabic. He watched her walk down the street with her sister
berating her, probably for flirting with a stranger, until they turned
the corner and disappeared from his view... He looked at the packet of
paper tissues he was still holding in his hand like an unexpected
gift. Then he tucked it away into his coat pocket.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

***NOTES***

Sorry for the French, I couldn't help it. Used to know French some
five years ago, but I've forgotten most of it. But I felt that Methos
in Paris would have to speak some French ;-).

This is what it's supposed to mean:

Leyla: Do you need help?
Methos: No... No, I'm okay. Thanks.
Leyla: Are you sure?
Methos: Yes. Thank you very much.
Leyla: Go home and sleep, monsieur. Everything will be better
tomorrow.

***SOME EXPLANATIONS***

Beur: French term for children of immigrants from Arab countries born
and raised in France.
alors: well
salaam: peace; Arabic greeting
inshallah: hopefully/if God wants it or something :-)

This was written for the Millennial Lyric Wheel. The Lyrics were sent
to me by Erchomenos. As I'm not a religious person, I ignored the
religious connotations.

THIS IS YOUR TIME
Michael W. Smith

It was a test we could all hope to pass
But none of us would want to take
Faced with the choice to deny God and live
For her there was one choice to make

This was her time
This was her dance
She lived every moment
Left nothing to chance
She swam in the sea
Drank of the deep
Embraced the mystery
Of all she could be
This was her time

Though you are mourning, and grieving your loss
Death died a long time ago
Swallowed in life, so her life carries on
Still, it's so hard to let go

This was her time
This was her dance
She lived every moment
Left nothing to chance
She swam in the sea
Drank of the deep
Embraced the mystery
Of all she could be
What if tomorrow
What if today
Faced with the question
Oh, what would you say

This is your time
This is your dance
Live every moment
Leave nothing to chance
Swim in the sea
Drink of the deep
And fall on the mercy
And hear yourself praying
Won't you save me