Author: Parker1947
Disclaimer: I do not own Roswell, or any of these characters. They were created once upon a time by Jason Katims and before him, the creator of the original series of books Melinda Metz. This story is based on the television series that began in 1999 and ran thru 2002. This story is of my own creation, and several new characters have been created at the discretion of the story.
Category: CC
Characters: ALL
Rating: Mature (Angsty)
Established Couples: Michael and Maria…
Summary: Post Chant Down Babylon, Liz was unable to bring Max back to life with her good-bye kiss. And therefore, she’s spinning in the months ahead, as she comes to terms with the loss of Max, and the powerful memories, and powers she doesn’t even want in her life. But will a chance encounter change all that?
Author’s Note: This is extremely angsty and is mainly a Liz centric story with Maria trying to help her friend all the while it also spirals into a very different story by the end, that I didn’t even see coming when I first started it with one thought in mind and it turned into a very different creature by the end LOL. Maria is on very solid ground with Michael, which will lead them to a very special moment in the middle of the chaos that surrounds them. I was fascinated about how Liz would respond if she lost Max to what she believes is forever. We got the sense she would take it badly in “Chant Down Babylon”, but what if there was no kiss that worked. You get a sense Max would take any total loss of Liz badly, but what if she did lose him? How would she handle it? I wanted to look at the incredible love between Max and Liz and the twisty nature of the story, well, I couldn’t help myself…
It’s very short story by my standards, so hope you enjoy it!
Liz was spinning out of control. It had been 12 months since she lost the love of her life. Not the ways he believed she would one day. She always figured one day that he would leave her, and Earth behind to go back to Antar to reclaim his planet, or to rebuild it. And she had almost lost him because of that goal. But no, that is not how she had lost him. She had lost him to death.
Something so final, that not even being an alien could bring him back. No matter how much she had tried. Sure, she didn’t have the healing powers Max had, that had kept him alive in the past, but no, she had tried with one final kiss. She hoped and prayed that the sacrifice he had made when he saved her life hadn’t killed him and taken him away from her for good.
But she had been wrong. He didn’t come back… He had turned into dust, yet again. His eyes hadn’t opened. She had cried true tears and was now spinning out of control because of that. And nothing her friends could do could stop her… and how they tried.
She may have walked out on the boarding school she was attending in Vermont that day and gone home. But nothing anyone could say could break her out of the depression and sinking despair she resided in. She barely went to school, and therefore she barely made it to graduation. She had gotten into Northwestern, her backup plan when Harvard bombed out spectacularly before she had gone to Vermont in the first place. But life didn’t seem like it was worth living, and she deferred university for a year to please her parents who were now scared for their daughter.
No one knew how bad she felt, or how far gone she was sinking. Nothing they could do would pull her out. No one could know how she felt. Maria still had Michael, and they were now living together as she attended classes at Las Cruces and commuted back to Roswell and Michael’s apartment she had moved into once she did graduate.
Instead they watched Liz sink into the abyss over the loss of Max. Unable to convince her to snap out of it, and to come back to them, and to the land of living and instead they were watching their friend sink and sink.
“Keep them coming,” she stuttered as she sat at a bar, and ordered drink after drink as memories bombarded her brain, as she tried to dull the pain and yet it only kept her sinking deeper and deeper as she tried in vain to forget.
“Come on Ma’am, I have to cut you off,” came the bartender said as he focused on his paying customer and saw how under the influence she was and knew he had to step in, “It’s bar policy.”
“I am a paying customer, and I am not driving” Liz said in slurred speech. “So, keep them coming until I tell you to stop” as the bartender only shook his head but handed her a shot of vodka, and she slammed it down and went in for more…
From behind them the door opened, and someone stood in the doorway of Cow Patties, and watched and shook his head and picked up his phone and dialed a familiar number. “Yes, I am calling again” was all he said, “You know where.”
“I tried,” the bartender said as he saw the visitor approach the bar.
“I know,” Deputy Valenti said with a deep sigh as he took in the girl on the barstool. He had been a mainstay here in the months after losing his job as Sheriff. And even took a turn as a country and western singer here at the very bar, and he still roamed around to make sure nothing was out of order and he hated to see Liz, who was now becoming a regular despite her age. He didn’t bust the establishment that Liz was only nineteen, and underage. He was weeks away from getting his job back as Sheriff as Hanson was moving to California with his wife to take a position in San Diego, and the county had decided that Jim was the trusted man for the job as he had the experience.
He didn’t want to do what he was going to have to do one day soon with Liz, so he made the call he did, and watched twenty minutes later as a blonde walk through the door with a heartsick look on her face as she saw her friend pouring them down at the bar, as she nodded at Jim, who was finally dating her mother and maybe one day would be her stepfather. “Thanks for calling me,” she said as she walked to her friend.
“Take her home,” Jim advised.
“I will,” Maria sighed as she walked up to her best friend from childhood, who was now sinking into a sight that had never been her best friend.
“Come on Liz, let’s get you out of here.”
“Oh god, why did they have to call you?” Liz muttered.
“Because I am the only one who will put up with you like this,” Maria muttered because like that time in Vermont. Liz tended to lapse into a mean drunk tone when challenged, and only Maria seemed to have a knack to get her to clean up. No matter how much Jeff and Nancy tried in the early days after their daughter came home a shell of the person they had sent to Vermont.
Neither were able to tell the true reason. That Max was dead.
Even Phillip and Diane Evans weren’t told their son was dead, because that would only lead to questions. Everyone believed Max had left Liz to go off and search for his son. Yet no one truly believed it because Liz wouldn’t be the mess she descending to if it was as simple as that. Isabel hadn’t been much help in that quest to know more… as in the wake of her brother dying, and her marriage exploding over the secrets and lies that had been her life, she had tried in vain to keep her marriage to Jesse going and so they relocated to Boston when a job opening came…
So now Isabel lived in Boston.
And Liz was becoming a drunk.
“Leave me alone Ma..ria,” she slurred as she tried to bat away her best friend.
“No, you’re coming with me” Maria said as she pulled her friend from the barstool with Jim’s help, and tried to walk her out as she was too drunk not to stagger out after putting up a fight about whether to stay or go with her ride. “God Liz, you have to know I love you so why can’t you just snap out of this.”
“I don’t need to snap out of this,” Liz slurred as memories of a golden brunette flashed through her brain as she cried out inside her brain at the flashes. “I don’t have him anymore. He saved my life yet again, and he died because of me.”
“He wouldn’t want you to be this way,” Maria said. “You have to know that, right?”
“He’s dead Maria. Max is dead!” Liz slurred once they were outside the bar. “I can behave whatever way I want because I don’t have him anymore. He’s the love of my life, and the reason I am alive today, and he’s dead because he saved me…twice” she slurred as she put up two fingers. “So, why don’t you allow me to do the hell I want, okay!”
“Oh Liz,” Maria sighed as she put a drunk Liz in her car and drove back to the apartment she shared with Michael and parked and then yanked a passed-out Liz from her car and dragged her to the apartment.
Michael could only shake his head as he saw his girlfriend half carry and half drag a passed-out Liz into their apartment, and with his help, towards the coach as Liz collapsed on the coach. “Again?” he could only ask.
“Yes.” Maria nodded. “What am I going to do with her Michael?”
“Hope she cleans up,” Michael muttered. “That is all we can do for her until she wants to stop.”
“I hope so,” Maria muttered as she watched her sleep, and but knew they were battling a hopeless cause and with tears in her eyes, she hugged Michael hard and they walked into the bedroom silently, as they prayed.
And yet Liz didn’t stop as she was at the door to the bar the next night again, once the open sign was switched on, and they opened its doors and she walked to the bar and ordered her first drink.
“Keep them coming,” she told the bartender as she settled on the bar stool.
He threw some curses and vanished.