E-mail: kelworth@chriskweb.net
Rating: MATURE
Disclaimer: I have no rights over the characters and situations of Roswell, this is a not-for-profit creative outlet so please don't sue me. :]
Synopsis: A broad-strokes picture of what the gang's future SHOULD have been more like after the junior prom.
Author's note: This is something different that I'm trying, so bear with me. Will almost certainly be leaving a lot of blanks to be filled in, but I hope that some of you like the tale.
"It was at a party," Max muttered. He was sitting on a bench in the West Roswell High corridor, not far away from the gymnasium where the junior prom was going on. He had come out here to sulk, and Tess Harding had joined him... to try to cheer him up, or commiserate with him - he wasn't sure which. "Late at night." He sighed. "And you..." He couldn't go any further.
After a long few seconds' pause, Tess shifted slightly, putting her right hand on his back, just as in his memory. "I... I leaned in," she mouthed, with a voice even more choked up than his had been. She WAS leaning, the satin of her blue prom dress touching Max's tuxedo, and somehow that made him feel very uncomfortable. "And-- and whispered in your ear." She bent her head, blonde bangs brushing against his nose ever so lightly, and then backed away.
Max looked up at her, confused, grieved... and reached up a hand towards her head tentatively. He wouldn't have continued the gesture if she didn't nod encouragingly, ever so slightly, His thumb grazed the side of her face, his fingers cupping her jaw as the thumb brushes away an invisible, but wet, fraction of a tear. "...And then you touched my cheek," she finished in a hollow whisper, trembling with feeling.
He stroked her cheek again, looking into her blue eyes, and then their heads were moving towards each other. Were they really going to do this?? "And then we just..." he muttered, and their lips slowly drifted together.
Unseen by both of them, Liz walked around the corner just in time to see the final hesitation, and Max and Tess' lips meet. Disbelieving, she watched as Max tenderly, nervously kissed the girl she hated, backed away in fright, then turned and ran out of the school.
After only a few seconds, Max pulled away. The kiss had been sweet, and precious... and as thin as tissue paper.
"This isn't real, Tess," he forced himself to say out loud.
She looked up at him, those crystal eyes pleading... but also asking. "We're just going through the motions, acting out something that happened a long, long time ago," he said softly. "There isn't any true feeling of love there. It's been an article of faith to you that you loved me since before you met me, and that makes it hollow."
"I knew you for years, on another w..." she started, and Max cut her off,, shifting sideways on the bench away from her.
"You knew *Zan*... or Ava knew Zan. I'm not Zan, and you aren't Ava. They were where we came from... and it's important to know where we came from. But they're not the same as us -- how could they be?? We have new genes... we have a new upbringing. All of that can't help but change us."
"And... and what if I, Tess... fell in love with you, Max -- since I came to Roswell? What if that's completely replaced the crush I had on a guy that I didn't even know??" Tess mumbled back, blushing fiercely.
Max paused, weighing this before he answered. "I'm not sure... I'm not convinced, that it's possible, because I never really let you in, Tess. And... as much as you mean to me as a friend, as part of my extended family... I'm not sure that I *can* let you in."
"Because of Liz??" Tess almost hissed the name.
"No," Max shook his head. "I still love Liz, but I'm going to try to let her go... that's what she wants me to do now. But -- I can't let you into my heart just because you want so badly to be there, Tess." He looked into her eyes, trying to convey what he was saying. "That isn't how love works. You've been trying to get in there... to replace Liz... for so long, I'm not sure if I could ever trust you absolutely. I'm sorry."
Tess opened her mouth for another snarky comeback... but somehow it didn't come. "I understand."
Max stood up and forced a smile. "Wanna go raid the refreshments table??"
"I'll be there in just a second."
And there, in the school hallway, Tess let Max go. Just a little bit. Just to start with. It was the hardest thing that she'd ever done.
************
Alex got out of his car, hurried up the front walk of the Evans house, and knocked on the door. The familiar face of Isabel Evans answered.
"Uh... yeah? What is it -- Whitman??"
"Umm..." This was not what Alex had expected. "You told me to come by and pick you up at a quarter to seven. The big first day of summer party, out at Wilkes point..."
"Oh, oh right..." Iz replied. "Sorry, I've had a last minute change of plans, why don't you go on without me??"
Alex felt his face go pale. "What... what kind of change of plans?"
Isabel grinned in a way that Alex was quite sure he didn't like, though he wasn't sure why. "You know... *alien* stuff. Nothing that you need to go poking your curious head into, though," she disclaimed quickly.
Feeling totally disoriented and rejected, something prompted Alex to make one more try. "Are you going to be able to make it up to the Point later?"
"We'll see, but somehow I doubt it. Now go on with you and have a great time- I've got to get myself ready." She all but shooed him out the door and closed it behind him. Alex stared at the door for more than a minute, and then, with nothing else to do... he got back into his car and drove up to Wilkes point, parking his car on the edge of the growing crowd of vehicles from other partiers.
About an hour later, he was sitting with his back to a tall rock face, about halfway up the peak, nursing a plastic glass of fruit punch morosely. That's where he was when Maria spotted him.
"What, no Isabel?"
"Does it look like she's here??" Alex muttered grumpily.
"What, did she bail on you too?"
Alex nodded by reflex, and then his brain processed the 'too.' "What... did Michael make some flimsy excuse too?"
"Do you SEE him here?" Maria cracked. But Alex didn't smile. "Do you think there's something going on?"
"I dunno, the rest of our merry troupe is all here," Maria reported. "Tess is avoiding Kyle, Max is avoiding Tess, and Liz is avoiding Max."
"Fun," Alex drawled. "You wanna try the bungees??"
"There is no way in Czechoslovakia that you are getting me to jump off a cliff," Maria warned.
"We'll see," Alex said, hiding a smile.
************
"Hey, what are you three looking so sour about??" Tess asked.
Maria and Alex had shared their worries with Liz after a week, and she had dropped by to visit Michael and confirmed that he was behaving very strangely, but didn't have any suggestions as to a course of action.
Alex looked around the Crashdown dining room - it was totally empty except for the three of them sitting at the table, and Tess, standing next to it. "We're worried about Michael and Isabel... they've been blowing us off all week and acting really weird." He braced himself for some snarky remark from Tess about the aliens versus humans thing.
But it didn't come. "You know, I think you might be right," she said, sitting down next to Maria (where there wasn't really room to sit, therefore obliging Maria to scoot over and make room for her.) "Spill - wat have you noticed, specifically."
Alex and Maria looked over at Liz, who nodded slightly, so the three of them started to recount the oddities they'd noticed. Three quarters of the way through the list, Tess cut them off completely.
"We may not have much time. I think Max was going with them up to the Maideckizne rocks... we've got to roll!!"
Somewhat uncertainly, they followed her over to the Jetta.
************
Liz peered up the rocky path, and she was pretty sure that she could see three figures up right about where the entrance to the Pod Chamber would be. The time for being cautious had run out. Tess had briefed them all about her suspicions on the long drive out past the Puhlman ranch. "MAX!!!" she yelled out.
"LIZ?? IS THAT YOU??" came the reply from Max.
"YEAH. DON'T GO INSIDE!!" she yelled back.
"UHH... WHY NOT??"
Liz turned around to look at Maria, who shrugged her helplessness at coming up with a decent answer to that question. "I CAN'T TELL YOU!" Vehemently she waved at the others behind her to climb faster, even though she already knew that all four of them were mounting the path as quickly as they possibly could... and probably faster than was advisable, except that these were desperate circumstances.
There was a long pause from up above, and then Michael's voice came down. "WE DON'T HAVE TIME FOR GAMES, LIZ. TESS IS THERE WITH YOU, RIGHT??"
Liz shushed Alex from answering... at this stage the longer that they could stall for time, the better. "WELL, IS SHE??" Michael prompted again, and Liz realized that if they didn't answer soon, *they* might convince Max to let them in regardless.
But she waited another fifteen seconds, climbing hard, before stopping and hollering "YES, SHE IS."
"THEN SHE CAN LET YOU IN WHEN YOU GUYS GET HERE, AND WE'LL TALK INSIDE. WE'RE GOING IN NOW."
"MAX..." she called again, and he interrupted her, speaking a little less loudly, since they'd closed a fair bit of the distance by now.
"Liz, I don't understand what's going on," he told her. He was very close to the entrance now, close enough that if... if either of them realized, they could probably slam his palm into the right place. But neither of them were that close to Max - Michael and Isabel were glaring balefully at the party of four still making its way up the rock.
There was nothing for it but to say it straight out now. "They aren't Michael and Isabel, Max!! They're the dupes!!!"
Isabel... no, that really *was* Lonnie -- snarled at them, and Rath charged towards Max... but Max shielded just in time, and Michael bounced almost ludicrously off the rippling wall of green energy.
Lonnie... (she still looked like Isabel -- well, the slightly preppy clothes, the long blonde hair, and undecorated skin, though the expression on her face was most un-Isabel-like...) anyway, she swept a cold hard glance across the four of them, and then hopped down the path a little ways, focusing on Liz. Tess took a step towards Liz and in front of her, shielding Liz from Lonnie's hostility.
Lonnie looked back at Rath and considered. Lacking any convenient opening to take the human kids hostage, (and Tess seemed to be willing to protect them,) they were a loose cannon that would probably work in the favor of their little friends, and against Lonnie's side.
Max was good with his powers, and Nicholas had told her how Tess had mysteriously wiped out the Copper Summit contigent of Skins, with Nick himself only surviving by shielding himself and using a mindwarp of nothingness to cover his escape. So...
She gestured to Rath, and he reluctantly hurried across the little flat space to join her.
Lonnie grabbed Rath's hand and jumped off the side of the rock, a sheer stone face that went straight down for eighty feet before running into some craggy stones that ranged up about seven feet from the desert floor.
Liz gasped in... well, not quite horror -- when she saw the two of them drop off the path. More like shock and surprise, really. She did have enough presence of mind to rush to the side of the path, where she could get a good look down just in time to see...
With about twenty feet to go before landing and making a yucky mess of themselves, the two falling bodies suddenly began to decelerate quite remarkably in midair. At least one of them was using alien power, Liz realized. PUSHING down against the ground or the cliff face in order to fall less quickly - a pretty clever application. Probably Lonnie had thought of it.
Already they had landed on the rocks - not smoothly but probably with no more jar than an ordinary person would get leaping down off a seven-foot fence... and were running for the Jeep, which Max had for some reason parked closer to directly underneath the pod chamber than the beginning of the path up.
Certainly no pursuit could catch up to them before they got to it... well, maybe if either Max or Tess or both imitated the trick of jumping off the cliff, but without practice they would be likely to hurt themselves badly, and Lonnie and Rath STILL had a head start to the wheels.
"What if Rath takes the Jeep, and Lonnie continues on to steal the Jetta??" Alex asked, looking over Liz's shoulder.
"She won't," Tess said hopefully. "They need to get out of here as soon as possible, and she won't be sure that one of us isn't charging right down the path, in which case we'd get to the Jetta at about the same time. Lonnie's trying to avoid a confrontation."
"Maybe some of us should be charging back down the path for real, just in case she's too dumb to be bluffed?" Maria asked.
"No need," Liz pointed out. Sure enough, both of them were getting into the Jeep and driving away. "They probably want to make sure that Michael and Isabel are secure, to keep us from getting the advantage of numbers over them." The thought brought a smile to her face - hopefully when it came to that, the dupes had already been outsmarted.
"What about Michael and Isabel?" Max asked. He was heading down the path towards them, a worried look on his face. "If those two are Lonnie and Rath, where are *my* brother and sister??"
"Hopefully Kyle and mister Valenti are finding that out right now," Maria told him. "We had a notion, and called them to check on it, while leaving Roswell to come here. I'll check on that now," she muttered, pulling out her cell phone. It was one of those weird little coincidences that while there was generally no decent cell phone service out this far into the desert, up here just outside the pod chamber they were high enough and in the right position to get a clear signal from one particular transponder.
"It's ringing," she said after a few seconds, then continued to wait. "No answer," she said after eight rings. "Kyle isn't picking up."
"Try the land line," Tess prompted. "555-1214"
"There's no way the phone's still hooked up there," Alex protested.
"If Lonnie and Rath were using it as a secret base, they may have reactivated the line," Liz realized. "That isn't hard, with your guys' powers, right?" Max nodded slightly, then turned as the expression on Maria's face indicated that someone had picked up.
************
"Damn, Kyle, but it's good to see you!!" were the first words out of Michael's mouth when the gag was removed. "How did you guys find us??"
"Liz called us," Jim Valenti said as he ungagged Isabel and started to untie her.
"It was..." Isabel started.
"It was Rath and Lonnie, your evil twins," Kyle filled in.
Michael turned to Kyle... coughed unexpectedly on a thread from the gag, and stared at the human teenager. "You never even met them... did you??"
"Nah, but Tess was full of horror stories once she got back from New York," Kyle said with a smile. "There's one thing I've been wondering about though."
"And what's that??" Isabel asked. Michael thought he knew what was coming.
"Well... you guys are aliens. You can reshape and transform just about anything into anything that uses the same molecules... right?? You can even unlock doors with a wave of your hand and blast through solid walls with energy blasts if you feel the need, and you can move objects just by thinking about them. So... how was it that they were able to leave you guys tied up down here, unguarded, and you couldn't free yourselves??"
"They were always watching us at the beginning," Isabel explained, with a scowl on her face. "But... there was something in the water they gave us, I think -- it was drugged. Once that kicked in --" She looked over at Michael, who nodded. "Our powers went away."
"Oh," Jim muttered, the implications of this settling in. "So... you're still..."
"Dosed up to the gills and as helpless as a human," Michael confirmed. "Which isn't THAT helpless, but the four of us are going to want to make ourselves scarce before the gruesome twosome get back."
"You... you said that Liz called you," Isabel broke in. "Why didn't she come herself?? Does anybody know what our body snatchers are up to??"
"Everybody's out past Puhlman ranch, your pod cave or whatever," Kyle explained.
"Pod chamber," Michael corrected absently.
"They... and by they I mean Liz, Alex, Maria, and Tess, who we got our information from," Jim began. "They think that Lonnie and Rath were trying to trick Max into letting them into the pod chamber and... and from there getting access to the... the grannelik?"
This time, neither of them corrected him. Isabel didn't feel too comfortable with ANYONE knowing much about the granolith... even Kyle and his father, who had mostly proven that they could be trusted. And even so small a detail as how to pronounce its name correctly. Plus, there was something else she was worried about. "How would Rath and Lonnie have known that the granolith was behind the pod chamber."
"Tess said that they tried to get into her brain, in New York, just before Max found her and took her home," Michael remembered out loud.
"It's just supposition that that's what they were after," Kyle pointed out. "But Tess thought it was a very good idea to keep them out of the pod chamber - especially if they might recognize the granolith and/or know anything that they can do with it."
All of a sudden a telephone rang. Kyle's hand went to his jacket pocket... and a look of confusion crossed his face as he realized that there wasn't a cell phone there. Jim turned his head around as the ringing came, and crossed the basement of Ed Harding's house to pick up a dusty looking black receiver up. "Hello?" He smiled over at the others. "It's Maria."
"Are Max and Tess there with her??" Michael asked immediately, getting up... and almost stumbling again, since his legs were not used to working after so many days of captivity.
Jim nodded at him, and as Michael got close Jim told whoever was on the other end that he was putting Michael on, and handed him the telephone. "Hello?" he said into the mouthpiece.
"Hey, Michael??" Max's voice came a little faintly. "I'm here on the line with Maria, and we're out here on the rock with Tess, Liz, and Alex." Michael smiled as he pictured the two of them putting their heads together to use a tiny little cell phone at the same time. "Everything's fine over here, and it's great to hear your voice. How's Isabel??"
"Probably pretty sore and cranky, just like me, but at least she's untied and de-gagged," Michael reported. "But here's the bad news -- Rath and Lonnie were using some kind of drug on us that suppressed our powers, and it hasn't nearly worn off yet."
There was a gasp from Maria and a pause from Max, as presumably he rapidly attempted to integrate this little fact into his seat-of-the-pants strategy. "Okay, well... the important thing for you guys is to stay safe and well out of THEIR way until you're back at full strength. They only just left here a few minutes ago... in MY Jeep... so you should have plenty of time to make good your getaway. Go somewhere that NO-ONE would think of looking for you."
Michael smiled. "I know just the place. What about you guys??"
There was a little discussion off the phone that he couldn't hear. "Until you and Isabel can report that you're back in action, I was thinking that we'd be guarding the gate over here. We can't afford to risk Lonnie and Rath doubling back and getting in - there's no way of telling if their handprints can open the chamber or not."
Michael thought furiously. A thought occurred to him, but he knew that it would take a long time to explain it and they really needed to get on the move. At that point Kyle made the decision easier by walking into view, carrying his cell phone, which presumably he had gone and found while Michael had been on the regular telephone. "I'll call you back, Maxwell. Maria's cell number, right??"
"Yeah, but..."
"One minute." he replaced the receiver and headed over to where Isabel was still sitting, helping her tactfully to her feet. "We're getting out of here. S D's." Iz frowned a moment, then nodded in recognition. Michael held out his hand for Kyle's cell phone, took it when he pushed it slightly in my direction, and dialled while Isabel gestured for Jim to follow us back up out of the basement.
"Okay, Maxwell," he said as soon as the phone picked up. "I have an idea about securing the pod chamber door without tying up valuable conflict-capable personnel waiting up there."
"Uhh... okay, go ahead," Max answered.
"In the front of the pod chamber, inside 'The Box', there should be two of those little pentagon devices. The... whatsitcalled... tritium resonator or whatever."
"Yeah..." Max agreed. "The one we took from Brody's things at the UFO centre and..."
"And the one that was in Congresswoman Whittaker's office after she died," Michael confirmed. "I want you to go in and get them. One of them can be set with the indicator for the jagged lightning bolt icon. That's the proximity charge setting - it'll go off if anyone alien approaches it. Better have a human being set it off with the rest of you at safe distance... and hide it somewhere very close to the chamber door."
"So... that'll take away Lonnie or Rath's powers if they come near it," Max said. By now they were upstairs, and everyone else seemed to be searching the premises quickly for anything that might be useful - such as information on Rath and Lonnie's plans or the supply of power supression drug. Michael just stood there and concentrated on the conversation with Max.
"More than that. It will shut down the chamber door completely for about four and a half hours," Michael told him, remembering the time that Maria and he had been experimenting with those devices and had gotten themselves sealed inside the pod chamber for a long, terrifying evening. "Using the other pentagon, set on the glyph with the two big dots, the short line, and the curved arc, you should be able to detect if the first one at the pod chamber gets set off - as long as you stay within ninety miles of it or so."
"This is good," Max agreed. "Where should we go once all this is set up??"
I considered. "Probably go to your parents' place. I'll be shutting Kyle's cell phone down so that Rath and Lonnie can't try to call us and track the signal through the cell network, but if everything's all right we'll be checking in with you in..." I looked at my watch, It wasn't there of course; Rath had taken it off before he tied me up. There was a clock on the wall though, and I'd check with one of the others after I hung up the phone. "In two hours??"
"Sounds good. See ya man." And Max hung up.
About ten minutes later the four of them were standing in the hallway of a run-down apartment building, waiting for someone behind the door of unit 18 to answer the knock.
"Hello??" He pulled the door open and looked at the four of them without any apparent interest.
"Hey, I know this is a big imposition, but we really need a place to sit tight for a while where no one's likely to look for us," Michael told him.
Shawn DeLuca shrugged, thought a moment, and then stepped aside, letting them into his new apartment. "Come on in."
TO BE CONTINUED...
Author's note again: Okay, just in case it isn't clear, this fic is hopefully going to be covering a lot of different storylines spread over a matter of years... I've gotten slightly bogged down in the Rath/Lonnie thing at the moment, but don't expect to spend too much more time with them.
Well, here ya go, hehe