بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

Stardate 1021.1 AJ (After Judgment)

It was a strange conception to still hold, time, a relic from bygone ages. When neither death nor loss held sway, time tended to lose its meaning. Every second was a gift being opened, a gift without fear of loss or taint. But creatures of schedules and frames of reference humans still were, so even in eternity he liked to keep track of how long it had been. 

Judgment was by far the most harrowing moment of his existence he'd ever known. To call it a 'moment', as if it were a trifle amidst the endless eons now spread before him...seemed somewhat of an understatement. The Day itself encompassed more millennia than he dared count. Such consuming fear, such pounding of the earth, the sky, the cavity inside his chest. Were he not surrounded by the mercy of his Lord, the mere recollection would cause him to tremble. But that was what saved him then, that was what kept hold of him still. The mercy of his Rabb. Of his past life, his flaws were not blind to him, his mistakes and shortcomings often strikingly apparent. If he had been let go of for a microsecond, for the fraction of the blinking of an eye, then he'd reduce himself to dust and vanish in a puff of self-destructed smoke. But Allah kept him. Despite the logic of it he could not fathom, despite the purposes that escaped him, despite the density of the struggle past which he could not see. He was kept. A simple, straightforward notion. But, by his Lord's grace, it sufficed. 

And in this sufficiency is where he found his match. How to describe in words what transcended speech? It could not be done. Approximations had to be found for the glance that became a series of gazes held, for the touch that became a shower of sparks cascading through every inch of his being. A mirror for him in her, a mirror for her in him, each themselves in the other always seeing, not for a love of self or a thing self-defeating, but of a hope brought eternally close, of what they themselves had always been seeking.