TITLE: Sacred Time
AUTHOR: Innisfree
E-MAIL: milagro73@excite.com
CLASSIFICATION:  MSR, A
SUMMARY: Time expands when ghosts come to call.
RATING: PG-13
SPOILERS: TINH, all things, and a small one for 
Orison
ARCHIVE: Sure -- just e-mail me.
DISCLAIMERS: I should be so lucky. But no.

__________________________________________


When Time expands, something enters to fill the 
silence that lies in that space.  The void swells 
with a language of its own, one where words need no 
voice to carry them from one mind to another. 

As she stands in the doorway of a cold Montana motel 
room, Time pulls out around her to shelter her in 
this moment.  To give her... well, to give her time.  
Time with him.  One last time.  She stares in 
disbelief at the apparition of him, standing so 
calmly next to her window.  He isn't there, she tells 
herself.  But he is.  She would know him in the dark, 
in a dream, in another life.  She would know him even 
if she could not hear his voice or see his face.  She 
knew he was here even before she caught sight of him. 
But then, she is certain he has been with her for 
some time.  Protecting her.  Haunting her. Reminding 
her of how much she has lost.

Even from this distance of carpet inches and quantum 
miles, she can see a sadness in his eyes deeper than 
any pain he ever showed her before. The sight alone 
is enough to strip her of whatever strength she has 
left after these months of quiet agony.  

In the early years of their friendship, when he 
threatened to drown in his pain, she would bring his 
head to her shoulder.  In time, she would hold him to 
her breast.  And finally, in those precious days 
before he vanished, she took him inside her and let 
him empty his sorrow and love in that safe place.  
She has always shared his burdens along with his 
dreams.  Now, she fears the burden he has come here 
to share is the one that will break her.

His lips don't move, don't struggle to speak.  There 
is nothing to say.  He knows that, in this moment 
where Time becomes forever before it takes forever 
back, she will understand everything that can be 
understood.  He hopes that what she can understand 
will be enough.  He cannot tell her what she most 
wants to know.  He doesn't understand what he is.  He 
knows that he is not dead, but he also knows that he 
is not alive.  He thinks that, now, he exists only as 
the part of himself that can never be taken away from 
her.  

Time pulls farther out and stretches this moment as 
long as it can.  Time can be a harsh companion, but 
it has a weakness for lovers.  In this moment, she 
thinks that she would give all the time she has left 
if she could only touch him one more time.  But Time 
won't be party to this kind of bargain.  You cannot 
give away what was never yours.

He can see the fear pull at her mouth as she decides 
that he has come to say goodbye.  She doesn't 
understand that he will never say goodbye to her.  
She doesn't know what he knows... what he has known 
from the beginning.  They will always travel 
together.  They always have.  But this life... this 
particular mortal coil he is reluctant to leave.  In 
this life, they have lived a thousand other lifetimes 
and battled a thousand demons, but they had so little 
time to love.  This life is incomplete.  And while he 
knows that he will never leave her, he cannot bear to 
see her so alone.

Time begins to contract, and she thinks of all the 
things she needs to tell him.  Too many things for so 
little time.  

She wants to tell him she is angry that he left her.  
She thinks he should have known that she was not as 
strong as she wanted him to believe.  

She wants to beg him to reclaim his place at her 
side, watching her back during the day and sharing 
her passion at night.  He must know that her heart 
will wither and die in his absence.  

She wants to tell him that there is a child inside 
her, his child, waiting to be born.  She wants to ask 
him who will nurture a child whose father is dead and 
whose mother has no heart.  

She wants to scream that none of this is fair.  

But most of all, she wants to whisper that she loves 
him.  More than she has ever loved anyone, more than 
she will ever love again.  

So she promises him that she will look for him 
forever if he will just give her that one small hope.  
And if he cannot... if there is no one left to 
find... she vows that she will bide her days in 
solitude until all her days without him are done.

Time is snapping back. He can hear it, just as he can 
hear the footsteps approaching outside her door.  
Just as he hears everything she has tried to tell 
him.  He hears it because he feels it in what would 
be his heart, if he still had one.  And he has only 
one instant to leave her with something that will 
save them both.  

He is not sure how to make her understand that he 
needs her, that he has fought as long as he could 
fight and gone as far as he could go to cling to this 
life.  To this world where she waits for him, broken 
by his absence.  He cannot return.  But she can call 
him back.  He is Eurydice, and she is Orpheus.  If 
she will only believe that he is with her, her faith 
will carry him home.  This he knows.

The devil's instant is our eternity, someone told her 
once.  She knows that this instant, this instant 
which fills the last empty corner of the space that 
Time has created within this moment... this instant 
is their eternity.  An eternity where nothing can 
touch them.  Where she is his, and he is hers, and no 
one else exists.  

In the instant before Time closes in and a voice from 
behind breaks this trance, she stares into the 
pilgrim soul that stands across the room.  She is 
desperate to hear the truth he brings to her.  And 
Time is, once again, more kind that cruel. In the 
instant that Time exhales its bitter breath, 
thrusting her back into the frozen world where she 
walks without him, she hears the lilt of his long 
silent voice carried like a cry on the wind:


Never let me go.



END


Author's Notes:  Celtic belief embraces a concept 
called Sacred Time. Unlike regular "profane" time, 
which is linear, sacred time moves in a circle or a 
spiral. Sacred time celebrates life not as a journey 
toward one point or destination, but as an experience 
of being connected to everything at any given moment. 
And everything moves in an endless circle, always 
beginning and always ending. In sacred time, there 
were also powerful threshold points during the year 
(the Solstices, Halloween/Samhain) and during the day 
(dawn and dusk, for example) when the Celts believed 
that the visible and invisible worlds collided and 
the rules of everyday time were suspended. For their 
sake, I'd like to imagine that Mulder and Scully's 
brief encounter during TINH took place during a 
moment when time was more sacred than linear.