SUMMARY: A chance meeting leads Tara away from her routine. A tragic event sends Heidi away from her family home and to Minnesota. This is their story.

A/N: In Xena fandom, there is a term to describe the reason the show touches me as deeply as it does: Romantic Friendship. There are way too many misconceptions about Romantic Friendship…and it is way too hard to describe in abstract words…but it is a beautiful thing for itself. This is the picture my imagination paints for me.

DEDICATION: To my family. You know who you are. And to my XOC family. Always in my heart.

I'd like to thank Dreamer98 / SkyPie, Pandora10, and Wlfeyes for the encouragement and all the good suggestions. Special thanks to LadyRowanD for the brilliant beta-reading job. You caught things that would have been invisible to me. Thanks, all, for the compliments, encouragement, and for being such good friends.

Shadows

by Alicia

I'm following close
Because the hour's getting late
And this world is not my home
I'm just passing through this place
…When will I see the shadows fade away?
…I'm not looking back

--James and Rebecca Caggegi

Prologue: Shadow Children

It's stupid to sneak away from the youth group before the main rally. All the leaders expect you to be a pain in the ass and not want to be there, so they watch you with eagle eyes until you're in the auditorium. But once in the auditorium, all you need to do is hide behind the taller kids until one of the leaders spots you there, then drift to another leader's group and back toward the exit, then slip out the stage doors.

I was at McDonalds. The remains of my ice cream cone stuck to the corner of my orange tray. I pulled the rest of the paper placemat away. Someone had left a pencil in the plastic seat beside me. I used it to doodle on the placemat. I hadn't wanted ice cream. I'd wanted a cheeseburger, but I'd only had a crumpled dollar from my coat pocket. Mom hadn't seen the need to send money with me to the Dawson McAllister youth rally, since the group would feed and take care of me.

I wasn't an average Christian teen rebel. I actually wasn't a Christian at all, but my mother didn't know that and neither did anyone else in my church. No one but me knew that I thought of the world in such practical terms. Definitely no one knew that I wanted to be an accountant and that I believed in science over religion. My mother didn't know that I hated church youth rallies. Everyone else expected me to, at least until the Saturday night sessions when everyone hugged and cried and decided they were glad they'd come.

I didn't just hate church youth rallies for the way that I was bored out of my mind. During my first rally, there had been a moment when I'd wanted to feel what everyone else was feeling, while my rational mind screamed at me the whole time that my feelings were nonsense. I hated that feeling more than anything else. And then there had been those rare moments when the speaker had started to make sense, and I was painfully aware that my own sanity was a veil over something deeper, when I had to cling all the harder to that sanity inside my head or lose who I was. I hated those feelings, too.

So after that I always ran away. And there I was, in McDonalds, doing math on a placemat rather than singing songs with all my so-called friends. I idly started running business figures for the soft-serve ice cream…

Damn, the singing from across the street was loud enough to hear over the kids in the playland.

"Damn," I said out loud, feeling very pleased with myself.

My cell phone rang. I didn't need to look at it to know that it was my mother. She'd pulled this at the past four conferences, calling when I was supposed to be in rally to make sure I didn't answer. She even caught me skipping out once by calling my cell phone.

I ignored the phone, and crossed the street. I slipped back into line just in time as the group headed back to the hotel for "breakout session" Bible Study. I hid behind the taller kids, just like I had when I'd slipped out of line two hours earlier. I could fool Bert, the head youth leader. He thought the two older girls I always hid behind were my friends. He also thought they had crushes on him. I glanced at Bert and whispered to them as he passed us. One of the girls elbowed me hard in the ribs and gave me a "knock it off" glare, but Bert seemed fooled.

Good. Now if only I could convince two different group leaders I was in their breakout session and hide back in my sleeping bag for the night, I thought I might actually enjoy this trip to Minneapolis.

I lived in Brainerd, Minnesota. It was just me and my mom, although the Brainerd Evangelical Free Church was a huge part of our lives. Every summer she sent me to a week of Bible Camp, and every winter she sent me to District Free Church Youth Conferences. This year was special because Dawson McAllister had come to Minneapolis. Whoever the heck he was supposed to be. I always smiled and nodded when Mom talked about church. I had memorized all the right things to say so she'd leave me alone. Of course I wanted to go hear Dawson McAllister speak, I'd said.

Someone much shorter than I was brushed by me from a different line. It was hard to keep her in focus, since she was doing the same thing I was in trying to avoid the adults, but she didn't look like she was headed to one of the hotel rooms. Hmm. Another teen rebel. I had to stay behind Meghan's head, or Linda, my own room leader, might notice where I was. I edged a little closer to Bert and away from Linda. Long black hair brushed my cheek, and the same girl ducked right under my head and out into the hallway. She moved off to the left in the opposite direction of the general crowd. I made a careful mental note of the direction. Then I caught Bert's eye and glanced toward the nearby ladies' room. He nodded. I slipped behind Meghan, through the bathroom line, and off in the same direction the other girl had gone, through the crowds. She was fast but I was faster. The crowds cleared as I ran, and the side hall she'd gone through was long enough that I saw which door she went through on the end before she had a chance to vanish.

I'd thought she might have been one of the youth leaders' kids, but I decided that wasn't true when I caught up a bit. Her face was kind of thin, like mine, and she couldn't really have been that much younger than my sixteen years. She was tiny. Graceful, with waist-length black hair and a stride like a dancer.

She ran as if something was chasing her – something that only she could see.

I followed unnoticed all the way to the end of the corridor. I wasn't coordinated, and I couldn't phase through things like my hero, Kitty Pryde, but I don't think she heard any of the noise I was making. The door opened to another corridor, and the other girl was almost to the end. She ran faster. I called to her, but she didn't react. I sprinted after her and burst through the passage at the end of the hallway, into a deserted common room.

Most hotels had common rooms on the landings. In this hotel at the moment, all of the ordinary common rooms were full of noisy teenagers singing praise songs (and occasional teenage boys changing the lyrics to said praise songs). This was the first hotel that I'd ever seen that had an empty common room tucked far away like this.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness inside this new little room. It couldn't have been that much bigger than my own bedroom, a tiny attic room above a staircase in a Minnesota farmhouse. It was shaped differently than my room, though. High and square, with one couch and two chairs. It was empty except for the girl I'd followed. All of the hotel guests not affiliated with the conference were hiding in their rooms, or staying at other hotels.

While I had been pounding down the hallway before, the girl I had chased had taken all the cushions off the couch and chairs, and made them into a makeshift altar. She was praying with low, unintelligible words while she clicked a string of beads in her hands.

It was not the first time I had walked in on somebody praying. My youth group friends, Bert, my mom, had all had their private devotions that I'd occasionally stumbled upon. I'd always been repulsed by a subtle artificiality I couldn't name. Usually I had just left the room. Once I had asked my mom to explain her prayer to me, and she had looked at me as if I had dropped in from another planet for asking the question. So she made me say the Lord's Prayer three times.

There was nothing artificial about this prayer, at this time. It was as if there was a battle raging around the solitary, bowed dark head. I saw the room, and I saw the other girl, but I also saw a kind of daydream of a field of angels and demons. She had dropped her sword. It was a beautiful picture, but it frightened me. It was the same as the intensity I'd noticed in moments before, where my own rationality was just a mask over a kind of reality that was deeper than the deepest ocean, only more intense even than that.

I grabbed a cushion, then slowly knelt beside her.

She didn't notice me. The beads slipped through her fingers in the same regular rhythm. Click, click, hiss, formless word, click. "Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy. Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy."

"You can stop now," I finally whispered. I used my very best Christian high schooler talk. "I think God heard you."

Her face turned toward me, and I got my first good look. The beads still slid through her fingers. But her eyes met mine. They were huge and dark, and hidden behind black hair. Her skin was smooth and dark. There were tracks of dried tears on her cheeks. She looked as if she was about to say something, but no words came out.

I waited and then whispered. "What is it?"

She turned away and rose from the cushion.

The daydream faded as she did it, and we were alone in the room.

I abandoned pretenses. "Okay, so I don't know if there is a God to hear you or not, but what is it? You didn't look like you should be alone," I babbled. I knew I'd intruded. I didn't care. I'd also just seen something real that I didn't understand, and I was still afraid enough that I didn't know if I was making any sense. But the other girl's pain called to me through my own fear.

"I am not…" her voice was part wonder, part exhaustion, all ragged edges. She fell back to the cushion.

I slipped an arm around her shoulders, then lifted her away from the couch cushion so she sat leaning on me instead. She cried as if she'd just lost a battle. Or won one. I wasn't sure.

It had to have been past one in the morning, and my legs were starting to cramp. Into the dark, I whispered, "Do you think we can find our way back to the group?"

"Probably not." She hesitated, then laughed. It sounded good.

I laughed, too. "I haven't the foggiest idea where we are. Do you think they'll look for us?"

"Probably not."

Hmm, I was going to have to miss the breakout session after all. What a shame. I slowly pulled away from the other girl and inspected the couch. "It's not big enough to sleep on. Let's just arrange the cushions on the floor."

She helped me quietly, then lay down at the very left side of the cushion pile. I kept to the right. The little room was quiet, and I wondered if I could sleep. Then I heard soft words again, and the battle daydream was back, and I started to tremble. I reached over and gently pulled on the other girl's shoulder until she turned. We faced the battle of the night guarding each other's backs.

"Are you an angel?" was the last thing I heard, but sleep took me before I could reply.

I woke alone. I was cold and in big trouble. A scowling Bert, who'd been up all night searching the hotel for me, informed me that he would advise my mother to ground me for a month. Mom grounded me for two months, locked the computer for the rest of my junior year, and turned off my phone.

When I could sneak Internet time at school, I pulled up the list of all the different churches who'd sent groups to Dawson McAllister Live. There were a couple of hundred. I wrote each youth pastor the same email: "I'm looking for a friend I made at Dawson McAllister. She's small and has long black hair. Please tell her a girl named Tara from Brainerd prayed with her and give her my phone number."

Two years later, with no calls, I got desperate enough to visit some of the surrounding churches during youth group time. But the stranger had vanished. Maybe it was she who had been the angel.