Disclaimer: I don't own the characters of Roswell
Couples/Category: No pairings are really critical to the story, but hints of gazer-ness and sweet candy. It's a short 'what if' fic.
Rating: Teen.
Summary: Max's attempt to heal Alex after the car crash doesn't quite fail... but all of Alex's friends have to come together to help guide him out of a gray area between death and life.
"He'll need to use his power, to open the doors..."
And sure enough, Max Evans' hand rested over the lock at the back of the coroner's office van for what seemed a long moment, before he pulled both doors open wide, waited a few seconds, then climbed inside and pulled them shut again behind him. It was a long, silent pause, as if the entire world was holding its breath, before any of them so much as moved. One of Maria's hands hands was spread slantwise across her mouth and the lower part of her face, in a mannerism that showed the extreme anxiety she was feeling. Finally, as if to fight off the oppression of silence, Isabel choked out a continuation of her retelling of the plan.
"He'll take a deep breath, put his hand on his chest -- and bring him back to life." Somehow none of them really believed it could be that easy, but there was no way anybody could say not to try for Alex's sake.
Maria bent her head forward to rest her chin on Liz's shoulder, overcome with the tension of waiting, and Liz wrapped one arm around her taller friend's neck in an oddly angled hug, trying to lend as much emotional support as she could.
"And Alex will sit up suddenly," Isabel continued, "and Max will jump back -- and the whole van will shake a little." Invisibly, faint tears were stinging at the corner of her eyes, but no matter how many people were staring intently at that black van, willing it to shudder with all of their hearts, it remained quite still. Kyle's head drooped, overcome with doubt. "The whole... the whole van will *shake*," Izzy repeated, as if the vehicle were an ill-prepared actor who had forgotten his cue line.
Then the van did quaver a little, and the doors opened again, but soon it became clear that the motion had only been from Max's moving inside, and that he was alone. No tall lanky boy with ears jutting out at the sides of his head followed. But he seemed excited, and Isabel allowed herself to wonder if Alex couldn't stand up and walk so quickly after being healed. Was it possible that he was now lying in the van, alive?? She hurried forward to meet Max as quickly as possible, heedless of the plan, which called for all of them to hang back in the shadows as much as possible, to avoid calling any unusual attention to the van or the situation. "Did you..." She couldn't finish the question.
Max shook his head, and her heart sank. But the breathless words that he panted out after a second made her spirits rebound, if only slightly. "Won't... won't be as easy as I thought, Izzy."
She tried to make sense of that. "But... but you think that there's a way??" There HAD to be some way. "What... what do you need, how do we do it then??"
Max looked around, and gestured the rest of the group closer. "The first thing we need is time -- time to talk about a lot of deep and important stuff, without anyone interrupting, or taking his body away to do space knows what with it. I've bought us that time already on the biological end... his body isn't decaying or losing viability or anything like that. But to go any further..." Liz, Maria, and Kyle had come near by this point, but Michael and Tess were still hanging back, and Max gestured to his oldest male compadre more imperatively. Michael stepped near a little uncertainly. "We need to take the van with us, I think. You okay being the wheel man??"
Michael stared at him in shock. "Steal the coroner's van??"
Max nodded, full of confidence on this one point at least. "Yeah. The keys are in there. We need to keep Alex safe, and moving him into another car could be tricky. This way, they might not think it was him we were after." At this point, it seemed to occur to him how what he was asking might sound... to drive away with Alex in an official county vehicle. "If you've got a problem with it, man, then..."
He didn't have to finish that thought. "No, I think I'm your guy. Just wanted to make sure."
"Alright." Max tossed a key ring at Kyle. "Think you can grab the Jeep, man? Just follow Tess... I think we should head up to the pod chamber for this. Isabel, Maria, Liz... you're in the back with me??"
"Just try and stop us," Maria said, grabbing at Liz's hand. Liz and Isabel nodded their agreement fiercely. The other two girls couldn't possibly understand what was going on any more than Isabel did, but they had heard enough to see that Max had the beginnings of a plan, of something that could save Alex... and apparently he needed their help or approval with it. Isabel knew that there could hardly be anything she couldn't do, anything she wouldn't agree to, to make sure that he'd be all right.
As Kyle and Tess hurried off to where the respective cars had been parked, (except for the Jetta, which would be okay remaining in the area,) Max led the rest of them off towards the back door to the town hall, from which Jim Valenti emerged to find out what the heck was going on. Max explained quite tersely to him about how they needed more time with Alex, and how they were going to take the van.
He blanched for a bit, but didn't argue. "I might be able to buy you a little time. There's a young medical student working for the C.O. who's off tonight -- Terry Ryan, and he's got the same build and hair color as Michael. If I tell them that I saw Terry getting into the van, they might think that he had official business for it or was borrowing it for a personal emergency, not realizing that there was a body in the back. That should keep Hanson from tearing out of here after you on red alert."
Max nodded. "Thanks. That should help, yeah." With a quick wave, he headed back into the van, the girls following him and Michael getting into the drivers' seat. One of the Coroners' attendants rushed out of the door past Jim just as they were pulling out of the parking lot, screaming something that couldn't quite be heard over the motor and gesturing quite emphatically.
As Michael turned onto the main road north, Isabel faced Max down. "Alright, what's going on here?? You said it would be harder than you thought, but obviously you have some sort of plan. Start talking *now.* I can't wait until we're all up at the pod chamber for details."
"Umm, alright, okay," Max agreed. "I'm not quite sure how to start, but... we all suspected that it would be harder to bring back somebody who was medically dead... dead for, what, for ten minutes at least or more, compared to healing somebody alive, or saving someone at the point of death, like I did for Liz and for Kyle." Isabel nodded. "Some things were actually easier than I thought they would be... fighting back rigor mortis and nervous... calcification, or whatever the right term for it is. In the loosest possible meaning of the term, I think I might even have Alex alive again... he's breathing now, at least, and his heart is beating." Isabel's breath caught in surprise, and she noticed Maria squeal a little and grab onto Liz hopefully.
But Liz's face showed much more caution and even a bit of fatalistic pessimism. "Yeah, that's life in a way, Max, but not much of a life in terms of quality. What about brain activity?? Is Alex brain-dead now??"
"Ummm..." Max shuffled across the back of the van towards Liz, and then looked down and blushed, as if remembering that she might not be too comfortable being close to him considering how things had worked out at the prom. But after looking down for a second, she nodded, and Max took that as an encouraging sign, slowly reaching out and taking her hand. "I guess that's one way to put it. Alex's brain is completely normal and healthy in structure now, as nearly as I can tell. But the electrical and neural activity that mark a healthy brain is... extremely low at best, right now. I hope we can remedy that, together. But there's more going on, and I need to figure out some way to explain it to you guys."
"Take your time," Isabel insisted. "I understand that this is important. If you haven't got it figured out by the time we make Puhlman ranch, we can continue on inside the Chamber."
"Yeah, thanks," Max told her, and sank into a moderately deep pensive look for a while. There was no way to see the road except for a small opening up into the front of the van, and Isabel couldn't see very well through it from where she was. But they had to be past the city limits by now... maybe well past them. It was a little hard to judge time too well, with all of this other stuff going on.
"When I was connected to... to Alex," Max started, "after I'd fixed up the most pressing immediate problems, I started to sense something. What-- what doctors..." He frowned, reconsidered for a long moment, and started again. "What doctors can detect with EEGs and MRIs and all kinds of other complicated machines and as yet have only vague theories to understand, my... my gifts allow me to sense much more clearly, and sometimes to understand better. I think I got to understand something when I was trying to heal Alex."
There was a long-ish pause, and Maria's voice came softly. Tenderly offering a cue, if Max wanted to take it. "What did it show you, Max??"
He groaned. "It's... it's so hard to find the words. What is life? What is death??" After a few seconds, he turned to look at the girls. "If any of you can come up with an answer to either question, it might help me figure out what I need to say."
"Umm, okay," Liz muttered softly. "Death is... is the cessation of life, in a cell, an organ, or a living creature. For mammals, like humans -- well, everything stops. The heart stops beating, the brain stops sending nervous signals, the blood stops flowing and individual cells starve for lack of fresh food and oxygen. Generally considered to be irreversible, as in, if an organism can come back from a state of inactivity, that state does not meet the textbook definition of death. I guess that's something we're going to settle for ourselves tonight."
"Okay, that's good as a starting point, thanks Liz," Max muttered. "Death is when everything stops. There are all kinds of things that are going on inside a living person, just to keep them living. Not just obvious things like the heart beating, lungs breathing, blood flowing, nervous signals in the brain. A human body is a mass of incredibly complicated interdependences... the blood itself, for example, is a complicated soup of dissolved salts, suspended organic molecules, tiny cells, nutrients, all kinds of other things, and it has to be kept rigidly within certain parameters. Glands are always producing hormones and other vital substances that are required for use elsewhere. Certain autonomous muscles have to be active for all kinds of reasons... and not just active, but operating according to their own very specific requirements. Waste products have to be, erm, cleaned up before they poison living tissue. Immune response has to be always performing at top capacity, or very nearly, just to keep viruses and bacteria all around us from running amok."
"And the brain and nervous system themselves... that's a machine, a system thousands or millions of times more complicated than any computer than human beings have put together out of silicon chips and conductors and memory transistors and what-have-you. An incredible system of electrical impulses and chemical reactions that..."
Isabel interrupted him. "I think I see what you're trying to say. You've got Alex's body in running order, more or less. But you have no notion how to get all of these interdependent processes running together, well enough for him to really LIVE."
Max nodded, and Liz smiled sadly at him. "It's... this is an odd analogy maybe, but his body is like a candle. It's all ready to get going, but that doesn't change the fact that the wick has been snuffed out. Nothing within that closed system makes the candle capable of spontaneously bursting into flame, no matter how physically ready to burn it is." He laughed hollowly. "And I don't know how to strike a new spark."
Maria blurted it out. "But you don't need to!! You can light a candle from another, that's already burning. We're alive... can you... could you, I mean, use one of our flames to light Alex again?? Or is that incredibly naive to suggest??"
Max turned to look at her. "No. It's not naive. I had the same idea. I even tried to use my own 'spark' as it were, to let that spread to Alex. But it didn't work, possibly because when my powers are active, they block off my own energy from affecting him in that way... or something like that. There are several possible reasons. But I have hopes that I might be able to do better with... with someone else as the 'donor flame.'"
Liz thought about that for a second. "It should probably be someone human, actually... not trying to shut you out as such, Isabel, because I know that you'd love to be able to be the one to do this for him... but a hybrid body might work in different ways than Alex's would, so trying to use yours as his candle model..."
"As far as that goes, you're not quite human anymore, Liz," Maria said. "He and I were the last ones left who were unaltered Homo sapiens, because Max..." And then she trailed off, a new factor occuring to her.
"If Liz and Kyle have been 'changed' because I saved their lives, then Alex will be too, by the time that I'm through with them," Max said, seeing it. "Because he was further gone than either of them. Maybe that alteration, making his body not quite human, has happened already when I connected to it and prepared it."
"But... but Ava made it sound like it was a gradual thing," Isabel pointed out. "Not like Liz changed all of a sudden when you healed her, but that it was something she'd be growing into over the next few years. Liz has had over a year and a half to change since you saved her life, and Kyle nearly a year. Maybe Maria would be a better match for Alex *right now*. We can't mess this up."
Max spread his hands. "Well, I'm not sure how to pick the right way to go, I admit. It seems tempting to go the second way... to guess that the people whose lives were already saved, because we were here, will be the ones who can help save Alex. But that might just be something that appeals to my sense of the fitness of things, not the actual circumsances of the situation."
"We're... we're slowing down," Liz noticed. "Are we up at the pod chamber already?"
Max looked around, but here in the back of the van there wasn't any easy way to see outside. Frustrated, he made a familiar gesture with his hand and a partition that could normally only be controlled from the driver's seat rolled down. He saw Michael's face, and a bit of a familiar rocky skyline. "Coming up towards the hill, at least." Obviously they couldn't drive any cars up to the Pod Chamber itself, because the path was too narrow - and because even if they could, leaving vehicles parked there might serve to draw attention.
"Tess and Kyle are right behind us," Maria pointed out, peering through the little back window in the back door of the van.
"Okay," Max agreed. "We'll have to be very careful bringing Alex up the path."
"No-one's around," Isabel pointed out. "We can probably levitate him... if we can keep careful enough control over our powers. I think that might be less risky than doing it the human way."
Max considered that. "Yeah, I think it's worth a try at least. If we can't balance the power well enough to keep him floating steadily, then it shouldn't be hard to figure that out before he gets hurt any more."
And that was what they did. With all four young hybrids using their powers, they were able to carry Alex qute gently through midair... if ever one of their levels of lift or thrust wavered, the other three were able to compensate immediately. Up at the top of the path, Max let the other three keep him hovering while he opened up the door.
Then, as Alex lay on the pod chamber floor, (but NOT quite in the same spot where Nasedo had died - everybody quietly made sure of that,) the four of them who had been talking in the back of the coroner's van brought Michael, Tess, and Kyle up to speed on Max's plan.
"Well, I have to admit, the first thing that passes through my mind," Kyle said slowly, "is -- did Alex really die? Did his spirit, his soul, move on to some kind of afterlife, and if so, is it right to bring him back? Would all of him even COME back??"
"I... I have to believe that no matter who or what creates and guides our souls, it's smart enough to send them back if the body and brain are whole," Liz said. "As far as whether it's right for us to decide that Alex should live and not die..." She let a short sob out of nowhere and bowed her head. "Maybe this makes me a hypocrite, in light of what I told you at Christmas, Max, but I don't care. For a guy like Alex to be killed in a car crash with his whole life ahead of him..." Liz's chest heaved again, and Maria crossed over to embrace her silently, wrapping a supportive arm around her old friend's shoulders. "If *that*, if Alex's death was part of anybody's grand master plan, then I want no part of it, and I'd take my chances with black magic or what-the-hell-ever could bring him back."
"Maybe... maybe it's part of the Divine plan that you guys are here, now," Maria said softly. "Like Max was there to save Liz when she got shot, and how Michael and Liz and me helped him cure the Christmas children."
There was an awkward silence, and Kyle shuffled his feet, leaning against the chamber wall. "Okay... I'll accept that reasoning, I guess." It was obvious that Alex's death had shaken him nearly as much as anybody, even if the two boys hadn't known each other terribly well.
"Are there any other objections or concerns?" Max asked. "We've got some time."
"Okay, well, speaking of souls," Michael put in. "Suppose you do the spark donation routine, and pick Maria as donor, just for the sake of argument. Is there *any* possibility that she'll lose something, some part of herself that can't be recovered. A fragment of her soul, whatever that is, or her essence. And, in a similar vein, should we be at all worried about Alex coming back, but not being himself as much as before, because there's some of Maria, or Liz or whoever else is the donor, stuck in there with him."
"I... I don't think so," Max said. "I don't really know what souls are, but I'm *not* going to be trying to transfer anything psychic or spiritual in this operation - in fact, since you mention it, I'll try like hell to avoid it. I don't think any of us are particularly eager to get Alex back if that's the price... if it's not really HIM that wakes up." He looked around for nods of agreement... it took a while to get any from Liz, but eventually even she agreed. Isabel, though her eyes were tearing up, had been one of the first, and she had even muttered quiet words of agreement.
"A bit of a computer analogy, which seems appropriate considering Alex's talents in that direction," Isabel whispered. "All that you need, and intent, to copy over is the boot-up instructions for Alex's body, which everybody, or at least everybody on the same version, has the same kind of. What made Alex unique is his higher-level softare -- that made up his personality, his character, his memories... and those are safe in his hard drive."
"Pretty... pretty much." Max took a deep breath. "There might be some damage there... oxygen loss in the brain from when he wasn't breathing. I've tried to repair that as well as I can, and may have to do more... but I *won't* repair any of that with donation."
"Oooh," Liz took a deep breath. "Okay, let's talk about the damage, though. What if you can't fix it? What if it's worse than you thought??" She sighed. "I... I want Alex back like anything, but as you said... if he's not -- not 'right' within certain criteria, then it's worse than nothing. And I'm not sure where the line is, but bringing him back with major brain damage might be on the other side of it." She shuddered.
"I... I wish I could say for sure," Max whispered hauntedly. "I can get a sense of the damage, and make a guess at how much more repairs can be made once the rest of his body's firing on all cylinders. But I'm less sure what it all *means* until we can get him to wake up." He looked at Liz. "I... I really believe that there's only a slim chance that he... that he'll face any kind of serious impairment. I don't think I could bear to do this if I wasn't nearly sure."
"Oh... okay," Liz managed to choke out. "I'd have appreciated certainties, of course, but sometimes life doesn't work that way. I'd rather roll the dice than... than not even try."
"Yeah," Maria muttered. "I'm... I'm kind of overwhelmed by all of the uncertainties and dangers, but I still feel like it's better to take our best shot, for Alex's sake, than to just -- just go back to town and bury him."
"Or..." Isabel gulped loudly, and everyone else turned to look at her. "I mean... they wouldn't -- they wouldn't bury him like this, now that he's breathing again, would they?"
"Prob... probably not, for a while at least," Max answered slowly. "If he was discovered by the authorities like this, they'd take him to the hospital, and hook him up to life support that would do most of what I'm doing now, keeping his heart beating and his lungs drawing breath. And... and his parents would probably let him lie like that for a while, hoping against hope that he'd come out of it on his own..."
"That's not an answer," Michael insisted. "If... if we can't agree to bring him back tonight, then we... we'll need to put him back, the same way that Max found him."
"You're talking about killing him again!" Maria flared. "Well, half-killing anyway, since he's not all the way alive now. But..."
"Come on, you two, the last thing we need right now is an argument," Isabel said. "Umm... but I have to say I'm not sure what the next thing we need is."
"One more call... does anybody have an objection to going ahead with the candle procedure?" Tess asked, the first time she'd spoken since they'd left on the drive.
"Well, we'd still need to decide on who," Max said softly.
"Aside from that?" Isabel asked.
There was a long silence, where nobody spoke up. "Okay. Max... is there any way that you can tell, the same way you knew what needed to be done with Alex, who'd be the best donor flame? Maybe you could connect to Kyle and Maria, and Liz, and see if any of them seems more compatible with what needs to be done for Alex."
"Umm... it's worth a try... if all three of them will agree to the contact, that is."
"Of course," Maria nearly shouted, and Liz nodded.
After a second, Kyle shrugged. "If you think it would help, then go ahead, by all means." After a long pause, he apparently decided he had to defend his reaction. "I... I'll do whatever I can to help Alex, but I'm not wild about getting touched with alien powers. I've never made any secret about that. This doesn't sound exactly like it's directly helping Alex, just a little bit of makework to delay because nobody wants to make a clear decision. But if you girls want to go through with the test, then I won't object."
"Alright," Max said, and stepped up to Kyle first. "Just relax and look in my eyes." Kyle did, and Max touched his arm, holding the pose for maybe fifteen seconds before moving on to Maria, and then finally Liz.
"So... come on, could you tell anything?" Isabel asked as Max stood facing away from all of them, deep in thought. "Sorry, I didn't mean to rush you... just getting very anxious by this point."
"No, it's okay," he told her. "I was stalling, I think." He took a deep breath. "Not completely sure, but based on the best interpretation I could make of what I saw... Maria looks like the best match."
"Oh, okay," Liz mumbled. "There it is, I guess."
"Not doubting you," Michael spoke up, "but would connecting to Alex again make the interpretation clearer?"
But Max shook his head. "I've been connecting to him nearly constantly for over an hour. I'm about as familiar with his system, and his requirements, as I could ever possibly be."
"Alright, then what happens next, in terms of logistics?" Isabel asked. "Do... do you need Maria to lie down next to Alex or something??"
Max looked at Maria, as if searching her eyes for any tiny signal that she wanted to back out... he saw fear there, but also courage and determination, and love for her old friend. "Yeah... yeah, that sounds good. Not too close to him, maybe four feet away. Umm... just far enough away that someone could walk between them carefully." Maria sat down on the floor near where Alex was, and when Max nodded, she stretched her feet out in front of her and laid her back and head down flat.
"Michael, Isabel?" Max asked next. "I... I'd like the two of you to try and monitor what's going on, as best you can. Take... take healing stones, just in case they might be helpful. Liz, you take one too - you'll be backing me up, if that's okay."
"Okay?" For a second Liz seemed about to laugh at the question. "Hell yeah, I've got your back." She smiled fiercely while taking an amber crystal out of the box.
"What... what about Kyle and me, Max?" Tess asked softly, her voice calm and slightly distant. "We... um, well, I want to help too if I can."
Max looked at her, and his mouth quirked slightly. "Umm... I d-- actually, maybe you can help just by staying in reserve. Not committing yourselves to anything, watching the entire operation. I don't know exactly what's going to happen, once we get started."
"All... all right," Kyle replied, and Tess nodded. Since there were two healing stones left, they each took one, and tried to stay out of the way while still being able to see what was happening.
Max knelt down and took a deep breath, feeling as if there would probably never be a more important or complex occasion to use his alien powers. First he reached out, connected to Maria, and examined the living processes of her body in as much detail as he possibly could without interfering. This was something that he'd never had to do before... he'd fixed localized problems, and even some wider-area ones, but never tried to grasp the way a human body operated as a totality. The little nuances of tissue interactions, bloodstream chemistry maintenance, etcetera kept coming and coming until he despaired of ever remembering them all. Worse still, if he had to DO all of that at once, there was no way he could ever work quickly enough, even with his powers, to succeed, to bring Alex back into the world they walked through.
But maybe... maybe it didn't have to be all at once. Perhaps certain basic levels of 'the flame' could be struck first, which would sustain themselves long enough to feed higher levels, and so on, and so on. Even on those lowest levels, the flame wouldn't burn forever without feed-forward interaction from the higher reaches, but maybe... just maybe, if he was quick enough?
So, what was the lowest level? Nervous activity? A stronger heartbeat, more regular breathing? Better hormone balances? Waste extraction?? In a brilliant, if suspicious intuitive flash, Max realized that thinking in those clinical, medical terms might be counterproductive. What he needed to do was just get in tune with Alex's body on a more primal level, to determine what it needed without naming those things, without thinking about them with human words, or any words at all.
He wasn't really sure that this approach would work, but it seemed better than any other alternative. Taking a deep breath, he connected with Alex, examining his near-death state in such a total, all-encompassing way that Max felt as if he was approaching death himself. Once he had as much information as he could hold, when he could feel it brimming through his body and mind and soul, he let a part of his attention turn to Maria and start to draw from her what Alex needed.
Michael's cry was the first clue that something had already gone wrong, and that in itself immediately paid off for the decision to have Maria watched over by her boyfriend during the process. Climbing slightly out of his primal state of mind, Max was able to see part of his mistake. He had drawn too strongly from Maria's 'flame', from her life processes, eager to begin work on Alex, and had neglected to take into account that he needed to feed from his donor slowly, so as to not blow out or stifle the flame of her own life.
But it was a mistake that he would not make twice... (once was more than enough!) and as Max stopped drawing from Maria entirely for a long moment, waiting ten seconds, twenty... he couldn't detect that he had really hurt her. Starting to 'pull' from so many of her life processes at the same time had been shocking, maybe painful, but he had been stopped before doing any kind of permanent damage. Sighing internally, Max returned to the job at hand, knowing that he couldn't afford any more stupid blunders like that.
Once more, sense what Alex needed. Pull it from Maria's system, but slowly... slowly enough that she could sustain it, and bear it. On one level, Max didn't think that he was actually taking energy or vitality out of Maria's body, just information... but as Heisenberg had discovered, to take information, on such a deep level, was unavoidably to make changes. You could not perceive fully the position of something small without altering its velocity, and vice versa, and there were many small, tiny things inside any living body, whose smallness was fundamental to their living properties. Life *was* quantum.
From another perspective, Max was starting to wonder if the life energy he was working with, the 'spark' was something that did have an existence in itself, aside from its status as order and information... something that Maria could produce more of, but only if not too much of it was taken away. Something, maybe, that every drop of was somehow precious, in a way that Max couldn't really understand... that had been so grievously lost when Alex's car collided with another, and that Maria would not regenerate precisely as she had lost... that she could not donate precisely as ALEX had lost. For an instant, Max froze in the middle of what he was doing, looking for the sign of what they had all talked of... that they were doing something that went flatly against the laws of life and death, that Alex, if he came back at all, would come back definitely *wrong.*
But... but it didn't seem so to him. Alex would not be precisely as he was, nor would Maria, once this work was done... if it WAS done, and maybe, for her, even if it wasn't. But that didn't seem to be a great shame or loss... it might even serve as the source of a meaningful bond between the two of them. Max returned to work, fanning up the flame in Alex's body, bringing it closer back to full life.
He was able to *feel*, somehow, Isabel's rising hope as she felt Alex's spark grow within him... and then those same hopes flagged as Max ran out of new spark to add into his system, and what was there started to fade and tremble as he went back to slowly, so slowly, draw more out of Maria. But it didn't fade too far before he was able to start building it brighter again.
And then, suddenly, disaster struck. Max's own reserves suddenly were running low... he hadn't realized how much energy he'd need for this kind of a healing, and it wasn't nearly done. He watched, stricken, as he metaphysically 'dropped' some spark, seing it go out... such precious stuff, taken from Maria and not adding to Alex's budding store. If Max's own power reserves crashed... how long would any flame remain burning in Alex? How long before his heart and lungs stopped, returning him once again to death's door??
But he wasn't alone with his burden, and help came as suddenly as the mishap had arrived. Energy... balance energy, came streaming into Max from one source, then two more... Liz had seen what needed to be done, and had called on Kyle and Tess to help. Isabel was doing a similar trick with her own healing stone and Alex... the balance energy that the stones worked with wasn't the same thing as 'spark', and couldn't really subsittute for it... but by flooding Alex's body with her energy, Isabel was able to keep Alex's spark from dying away as quickly as it would otherwise.
Max just took a deep breath, and returned to his job, not even sparing the attention to attempt to send a thanks back to the people who were supporting him... he couldn't speak aloud without ruining his concentration entirely, and trying to communicate with them using alien powers over the energy streams would be like trying to shout through gale-force winds. They knew how much gratitude he had in his heart... didn't they? Well, if not, he'd tell them after it was all done.
There were a few more rounds of drawing from Maria and pouring into Alex, relatively uneventful. Something... something went wrong with Alex when the process was nearly complete, he and Isabel both seeing it at once. For a second, they both panicked, and if they had given themselves over to the fear, would have lost him. But Max smoothly switched modes, examining Alex's body as if in the diagnostic phase of a typical healing, for he was close enough to full life for his life signs to make sense in terms of that.
That showed Max what had been wrong... some of the blood vessels in Alex's lungs had not been repaired sufficiently, and were straining, about to burst with the full flow of blood he had been directing through them. It was easy enough to repair once he knew the problem, and... and that was it!!
Alex opened his eyes, looked around the pod chamber, and settled on Isabel, kneeling with his head on her lap. "What... what happened?"
Max took just a second to check that Maria was okay, and to rouse her out of a snoozy state that she had slipped into during the process. Her eyes opened too, alive with joy when she saw Alex's face.
"Ummm..." Max shook his head. "I'm not sure where to start."
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I'm not sure if this is 'to be continued' or 'the end' at the moment.
