keepsmiling7 - Thank you so much for the feedback!
SmileeUk
Good on Liz keeping her cool on the surface. She learns fast from Max
Learning from the best
ps, good to know you are well & spending time in the garden. I got worried that you might be unwell due to COVID-19
Oh no, I'm fine. Even though it seems as if it's a lottery who gets really sick from it and who hardly has any symtoms, I'm not in a risk group, so I'm hoping that will "keep me safe". Thank you for your concern <3
And here is one more
And suddenly, we're skipping into the future…
From THIRTEEN:
Angry tears rolled down her cheeks, her hands fisted at her sides, as she turned to face Max. “I want her to go away! I want everything to go back to the way it was. I want my parents to stop fighting over the rebellion. I want Command back. Because then my parents would be happy. They would get their jobs back. I want you to want me! So that I can be important!”
“Your parents wouldn’t be happy about you dating Max anyway,” I interjected, which earned me a murderous glare from Courtney. “Like you said yourself: he’s a traitor. And if your parents were affiliated with Command, then I’m sure they won’t look lightly on Max. He will always be a traitor in their eyes. They can’t have their daughter fraternizing with a traitor.”
Max shrugged. “She’s right, you know. You better find yourself a 100% pure Antarian who had nothing to do with the rebellion.”
“Or,” I added, watching the anger slowly run out of Courtney, “you could find your own purpose. Make your life mean something without having to rely on boys or your parents’ wellbeing.”
“Fuck you,” she hissed under her breath.
I sighed and shrugged. “Fine.”
“Do us a favor and leave us alone,” Max said then. “This grudge of yours is not getting anywhere and you wouldn’t want to piss us off.”
“Is that a threat?” she bit.
“Not really,” Max said cooly. “But we did
kill Command.”
Courtney’s eyes darkened and her aura turned a dark threatening red color. Max gave her a slow once over. Trying to decide whether she would try something.
But she remained still, so Max started to move away. “Leave us alone, Courtney,” he repeated as he turned his back to her.
My attention was on Courtney the whole time Max was moving away from her, afraid that she would shoot him in the back or something.
Max took my hand as he came up to me in the corner of the bathroom and gave it a gentle tug. Leaning forward, his lips brushed against my warm cheek as he whispered into my ear, “Let’s go.”
Right before leaving the bathroom, I looked over my shoulder at Courtney. Standing there. Looking lost and weary, with smoldering hatred in her eyes. It was the last time I saw Courtney. At least for many years to come.
____________________________________
FOURTEEN
May, 2022
I knew he was home even before I heard his key rustle the lock. Our minds were so much in sync nowadays that I rarely paid the connection a conscious thought. It was just there. Linking our thoughts together, meshing our feelings and giving me access to Max’s alien skills whenever I might need them.
But since we left Roswell, there had not been many instances when I had to tap into his abilities.
I had left the bathroom door open and I could see myself through his eyes as he approached the door left ajar. Opening it, I felt the burn of his eyes on the side of my face as he stopped in the doorway, the warmth from this body reaching across the bathroom space and brushing against my bare arm.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “Whatcha doin’?” Even though he knew very well what I was doing. Even if he had been a regular human and hadn’t been able to read my mind every hour since the suspicion popped into my head earlier that same morning, he would have been able to recognize the pregnancy test resting on the edge of the bathroom sink.
“I need to know,” I mumbled, not taking my eyes off the blinking hourglass in the small display.
“We have been protecting ourselves,” Max said, his voice sounding unsure as he took a step into the bathroom. “And I haven’t felt a presence.”
I shook my head. “I’m tired of being this nauseous. I need to know. If it’s not a baby, I’m sick. Then there’s something wrong with me.” I glanced over at him, not hiding the anxiety shining in my eyes.
He grimaced in protest. “You’re not sick. I would have known.”
I shrugged, looking back at the blinking timer. “Then it’s a baby.”
Max took another step into the bathroom. “I would have recognized it this time. The fluttering heart. I missed it last time, but I’m more-“
The timer blipped out and was replaced by a word. The word that Max could see through my eyes. The word that interrupted his protest.
Pregnant
3+
More than 3 weeks pregnant.
The nervousness that had already been shaking my hands and increasing my heart rate was now transforming into an explosion of feelings which made cold sweat break out and dampen my forehead and the back of my neck.
Max had grown completely still, three feet from me.
I tried to talk, but my voice was dry and useless. I resorted to our mental conversation highway,
Is it correct?
Two long seconds passed in silence, which had me look away from the pregnancy test to look at his face. To read his face. To make sense of the void of emotions I was getting from him.
Bewilderment. That was the only feeling of his I could feel.
He was surprised, to put it lightly.
Meeting my eyes, he slowly licked his lips, cleared his throat and said quietly and hoarsely, “Sit down.”
I sank down on the toilet seat, not taking my eyes from him. While his mind was empty, mine was going a mile a minute. I had already been through what it would mean to be pregnant and whether we were still too young, had skipped past why Max’s alien birth control method hadn’t worked, had dived straight into wondering if the baby was alive or not (remembering the last time I had been pregnant and the test had shown positive even when the baby had been dead), and was now trekking heavily through the horrible thoughts that Max might not want this.
We had been trying to prevent it, after all.
He came to stand in front of me, nestled between my bare legs, looking down into my eyes. His hair was longer now, his bangs touching his eyebrows and casting shadows across his face, making his eyes darker in their intensity. He looked older, but in the way that a lot of men age - they only got more handsome. But if you looked closely enough, there were small wrinkles of worry around his 23-year-old eyes, testament of the years he had been forced to go along with the plans of Command’s regime and stay away from me while simultaneously be there to heal me when something went wrong at the hands of my betrothed, Sean. Some wrinkles were probably due to the alien war we had been forced to endure. Plus, there were probably some wrinkles there because of the mothers we had lost and our child that had died.
He sank down on his knees in front of me - his head becoming more level with mine - and brushed his knuckles over my cheek, removing a solitary tear. His eyes were locked with mine, barely blinking, as his hands moved down my torso to come to a rest on the lower part of my abdomen. The heat from his hand was familiar and comforting, but did nothing to still the small trembles moving through my body.
“I’ll see if I can see anything,” he spoke quietly and my throat prickled with dryness as I tried to swallow.
Without any effort on my part, I went along for the ride. It was like watching a movie. A rather odd movie with my own blood circulation and organs on display. I knew by now what everything looked like, how everything moved. I recognized the peristalsis of the intestines, the rhythmic movement of the blood inside the vessels, the flow of lymph through the lymph system, the continuous work of the smooth muscles and the normal architecture of the organs.
Since practicing my use of Max’s powers with him right before we went head to head with Command, we had continued practicing. The mayor was on the loose and we couldn’t afford to not be fully prepared.
That said, there hadn’t been an update on the mayor for the past three years and consequently, our practicing had simmered down. But we did not dare to relax fully. That would be foolish. As long as we didn’t get the news that the mayor was dead, we could not completely sit back and enjoy our relatively normal life.
The last we heard, the mayor was on Antar. The last we heard, the mayor was gathering like-minded men to fight with him. To bring a new war to Earth.
For this reason, we expected nothing less than an impending invasion until we heard otherwise.
Keeping the threat of another alien war alive in our minds, I was now as accustomed to the human (and hybrid) body as Max was. Which meant that I too recognized the silvery surface of my uterus as out of the ordinary.
What is that?
Max didn’t answer my mental question, instead focusing on moving the view around my uterus, scanning it from all sides.
It was larger too. Not the normal small pear size of a non pregnant uterus.
It’s like a cover, I continued, following his scan like I was on pins and needles.
I can’t see through it, Max told me. Which we both knew was odd. He could easily see into every organ of the body, even down to cellular level.
My trembles were simmering down. Because suddenly I just knew and told Max,
It’s a shield.
I knew, without a doubt, that the pregnancy test was correct. There was a baby in there. And the connection was shielding it just like last time. But we had no idea that it would shield the baby quite so physically.
Is the uterus covered in something? To protect it from harm? I asked, trying to ignore my heart which was trying to jump out of my body, even though the effects of my accelerated heart beat was glaringly obvious through the rapid flushing of blood through the vessels surrounding the uterus we were observing.
One might come to the conclusion that the cover was a sign that I was sick. That there was something wrong with my uterus. But I was convinced it was a sign of pregnancy. I was convinced that a fetus was being protected in there, shielded even from its parents’ eyes.
The mental image of my body blinked out as Max abruptly removed his hands with a sigh. I saw him sit back on his heels, his facial expression thoughtful as his unseeing eyes were fixed on some point behind me.
“I’m pregnant?” I whispered tentatively.
“Your blood is simmering in hCG,” Max mumbled, his eyes still staring, still not looking at me.
I looked down at my abdomen, running my hands over my flat stomach.
“There’s a baby in there?” I said, but my question was more of a statement.
His eyes shifted to mine and I got the full magnitude of the his feelings. The feelings I had been aware of for awhile, but I was so used to feeling his emotions nowadays that I rarely reflected on what he was feeling. Unless I was searching for an explanation to his behavior or something.
“There’s a baby,” he confirmed and gave a short disbelieving laugh. “There’s a baby.”
I frowned, looking down at my hands. “But how?”
Is it alive?
“I can’t tell you for sure if it’s alive,” Max answered softly. “But my logic tells me that the shield wouldn’t be up if there wasn’t anything to protect.”
“It got through the birth control,” I observed.
“Yeah,” Max said quietly, under his breath.
The connection wanted this. It was time. Knowing that the connection had an agenda for us procreating - possibly for creating pure children to fight evil - we could only assume that something was about to happen. That the mayor was not just about to go and die on his own.
Last time I fell pregnant, it was before Command started a war. Maybe I was supposed to have paired up with Max earlier. Maybe I was supposed to have fallen pregnant earlier so that our ‘offspring’ would have been able to help out in the fight. Or that our genetics at least would be carried on in our child were we to die in the battle.
But we
had died in that war and so had our baby. But while we had returned to life, she hadn’t.
Most likely, our attempts at advanced alien birth control were futile. We had been fooled to believe it was working, considering the lack of pregnancy for the past 6 years.
The connection would make it happen once it was time anyway. It hadn’t happened before because it hadn’t been time.
That’s what it felt like. That was Max’s reasoning now.
I looked up at him and took his hand, braiding our fingers together. He looked down at our interlocked hands and returned my squeeze.
“Are we okay with this? Do we want a baby?” It felt horrible to ask, considering that we had actually talked about this and both of us wanted children. But I needed to know.
He looked up from our hands and the intensity of his gaze had my heart skip a beat. “Of course I want this baby, Liz. That baby is you and me. I’ve mourned our first daughter since the day I found out that she was no longer alive and I have wished for us to get another chance since then. The only reason why we have been using birth control was to prevent us from having kids when we were not ready.”
He swallowed deeply. I watched his Adam’s apple bop.
“I wanted the alien mess to be over before we started a family. That’s my only worry. That we would be bringing a child into a world were he or she might be in danger. It’s the timing that bothers me. Not the baby. I already love this baby.” He brought our interlaced hands up to his lips and pressed a slow kiss to my knuckles. “This is our child, Liz.
Our child.” He looked up at me, his eyes turning dark and dangerous. “And I will protect our baby with my last breath.”
I slowly licked my dry lips, my cheeks wet from tears, and nodded. “I feel the same.” My voice was garbled and I cleared my throat. “I feel the same.”
How could I already be worrying about this little creature inside of me, when I hadn’t known of its existence until just a few moments ago?
“How are we going to be able to protect a baby?” I whispered, biting my bottom lip. I was thinking of how valuable that child would be to not only Max and I, but the whole alien community. The first child being ‘made’ by two parims.
Would they let us keep the baby? My thought might be ridiculous (because I would never give away my baby), but it came so quickly and instinctively that my rational mind couldn’t stop it.
He put his arms around my upper body and pulled me into a hug. His breath was hot in my ear as he told me fiercely, “I will not let anyone touch a hair on our baby’s head without our permission and
no one is taking our baby, okay? No one.”
I sniffled and nodded against his shoulder, the tears coming without stop now. I fisted his shirt in my hands. Tightly. I hadn’t felt that feeling of hopelessness for many years now. Of not being in control of my own life. But it resettled into my body now like a longtime enemy.
TBC...
Courtney Green 
Sorry, I'm not focusing on the right things here. fuckdestiny is a great password though. 
I can't believe that there are other parims, but that they aren't as powerful as Max and Liz!