Subject: [OTL]: A Handful Of Time 
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 04:01:48 -0800
From: "Amanda Sichter." <wolf@ozdocs.net.au>

It's amazing what a quiet day at work leads to. This one's for Acetal -
because it was the power he said he wanted at Auscon and the idea niggled
and eventually this one turned up.

Disclaimer: The TCP concept began with Kielle and either Laersyn or Phil
Foster (sorry, I've never quite worked out which one it was). The underlying
universe is Marvel's.

A Handul Of Time

Time flows over the skin like a breeze.

Ever since I can remember I have felt the flow of time whispering over my
skin. When I was young it was soft and fresh, like a sea-breeze on a cool
day. It grows warmer each year and faster until now it glides over my skin,
brisk and almost warm.

I can feel it on others, too, feel time whispering around them, a pattern
of lives passing each other. Cool eddies around babies, a centred point
between the warmth of adult parents, the sere desert breath of the elderly
where time runs fast, so fast, hot and dry as it runs faster and faster
until it runs

Out.

Time whispers between all things. An adult mayfly runs through time so
quickly that they feel like the breath of the sun. An avenue of sequoias
wear time lightly, a cool green place where time is soft and slow and
barely matters at all. I can't even walk into old cathedrals, built to last
for millenia, where time is so slow it feels arctic.

When I was younger it never occurred to me that other people couldn't feel
the breath of time. It wasn't until I mentioned it one day, innocent then,
that I discovered that other people couldn't feel what I felt. I discovered
other things as well that day - like what I was called. Mutie, they said,
and worse names, horrid things that tore and stung inside me worse than the
blows aimed at me. Words can never hurt me, isn't that the saying? What
crap. Words can rip you apart more effectively than any stick or stone.

Mutants aren't allowed to stay young and innocent for long.

Since then, I've never told anyone about my powers. I didn't tell my
parents and we moved soon after that, leaving behind anyone who knew my
little secret. There isn't a soul that I've spoken to about my power.

So there's no-one who knows about how it has changed lately.

The colours came first. Accompanying the cool breeze of babies was a hint
of blue-green, the lime-green of teenagers, yellow with adults, red for
great-grandparents. Threads of time, the breeze I had always felt just the
touch of the threads that wove between people and animals and trees and the
earth and even, faintly, the black, black lines of the universe's clock.

Then came the pattern. There aren't words for it, what I can see. It's like
trying to explain colours to someone who's been blind from birth. But there
is a pattern, a warp and weft of time that runs through the whole universe,
that links everything within the weave of it, great skeins of time that
only I can see.

The pattern of time fascinates me. I'm sure my parents think I'm on drugs.
Doing my homework, talking to them, it doesn't seem all that important when
you compare it to watching the earth walk through time. I can sit and gaze
for hours, watching the pattern flex as people move within it, watching the
brilliant red of a mosquito buzzing through the cool green trees at dusk,
tracing - almost touching - the black, black lines that are the loom of the
universe on which the pattern is woven.

Almost touching.

Until today.

Today I reached out and I held out my hand and my power and I gathered a
skein of the black, black threads of the universe and pulled and

I

Stopped

Time.

I'm holding them still, in my hands, those threads and I am the only thing
that is moving in all the world. All the universe I would imagine. The
clock has stopped and I'm the only one that can let the hands tick forward
again.

I will. I promise. As soon as I've worked out what I want to do. I can go
anywhere, do anything. All I have to do is pluck the right thread, pull the
right vehicle out of time and it can take me anywhere in a frozen moment.

I can step out of time and into the world, unstoppable, unfindable, and .

I can step out of time and teach a teenage bully why he shouldn't have
messed with a mutant kid.

I can step out of time and save that baby from a burning building.

I can step out of time and be waiting inside the bank vault when the
time-locks open to let me out.

I can step out of time and stop Magneto from killing one more human,
threatening one more world by killing him dead.

I hold the reins of the world in my hand. I can do anything I want, be
anything I want. The ultimate hero. The ultimate villain. I don't know
which one I want to be.

Tell me, what would you choose?

The End