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The Ticket
Deslea R. Judd
Copyright 2008
DISCLAIMER: Characters not mine. Interpretation mine.
ARCHIVE: Yes, just keep my name and headers.
FANDOM: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
RATING: PG.
SPOILERS/TIMEFRAME: To Dungeons & Dragons.
CATEGORY/KEYWORDS: Sarah/Charley angst.
SUMMARY: Charley Dixon has lost his ticket.
MORE STORIES: http://fiction.deslea.com
FEEDBACK: Love the stuff. deslea@deslea.com
Charley Dixon has lost his ticket.
He knows it when his fingers fall on the slope of Sarah's neck. When they trace their way through her hair.
He didn't crumple it up and throw it away. He has a wife at home. Fidelity means something to him. But for Sarah, what they had was yesterday, and when he looks at her, eight years falls away and for him it is yesterday too.
The ticket. The ticket, Charley. Work hard. Look after your family. That's the ticket.
Does the ticket mean anything with a bleeding man from the future in the kitchen, a tin miss in the shed, and a twenty-four year old son who is sixteen? Does the ticket exist for anyone anymore?
He doesn't know her, this warrior woman. He remembers her in watercolour. Not soft, maybe, but softer. Now, she is hard and insistent, but her eyes still shine and he still knows them like a scent that never disappeared.
But the ticket, Charley.
Can you ever go back? Has anyone glimpsed this hidden world and gone back to a world of work and family and granite kitchens and honey-coloured timber floors? His sundrenched timber floor is one of the quiet joys of his life, but he can't imagine enjoying it ever again. Can't imagine feeling that he has any right to it.
He does love Michelle. Not like he loves Sarah, but he loves her. He wouldn't leave if it were as simple as that. But Sarah's world...how can he leave Sarah's terrible, horrifying, heartbreaking, cataclysmic world?
'You have to leave, Charley,' she whispers. Like she read his mind. 'You have to leave while there's still time.' But she locks up his hands in hers and presses her lips to his face. Close to his lips. So close.
'Time?' he says. 'I don't know what time is anymore.'
'It's like a river. It's always flowing. Whatever the direction.' It isn't like Sarah to be poetic. He wonders if these were her consoling words to John after they jumped.
'Can't we stay still?' he pleads, his lips brushing against her cheek. 'Just for a moment?'
She does stay still, standing silently with him there in her sad little garden, but soon there are no more moments left to them.
So he leaves her. Goes back to his life. That's the ticket.
But the more his path spills over with hers, the more he knows that time is flowing as it will. And that's when he knows that he lost the ticket after all.
END
Year of the Cat
Al Stewart & Peter Wood
On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime
She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
Like a watercolour in the rain
Don't bother asking for explanations
She'll just tell you that she came
In the year of the cat
She doesn't give you time for questions
As she locks up your arm in hers
And you follow 'till your sense of which direction
Completely disappears
By the blue tiled walls near the market stalls
There's a hidden door she leads you to
These days, she says, I feel my life
Just like a river running through
The year of the cat
Well, she looks at you so cooly
And her eyes shine like the moon in the sea
She comes in incense and patchouli
So you take her, to find what's waiting inside
The year of the cat
Well, morning comes and you're still with her
And the bus and the tourists are gone
And you've thrown away the choice and lost your ticket
So you have to stay on
But the drum-beat strains of the night remain
In the rhythm of the new-born day
You know sometime you're bound to leave her
But for now you're going to stay
In the year of the cat