Author: Parker1947
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters. They were created once upon a time by Jason Katims and those associated with the writing staff of Roswell and before them it was the esteem creator of the Roswell High series by Melinda Metz book that captured all our attentions for over 20 years… This story is based on the television show that started in 1999 and ended way too early, in 2002. I am only borrowing the characters or creating some new ones for my own fun and using my imagination within the framework given to us by our favorite show.
Rating: Mature - (Plenty of age-appropriate sexy times in this one)
Category: CC
Characters: ALL
Synopsis: Post Ch-Ch-Changes: Liz may have walked away from Max to go to boarding school during senior year. But nothing in Vermont happened like it should have, and therefore, she stayed, graduated, and went on her way. Now it is years later, and a special occasion has brought her back to her hometown. She is unsettled in life, and especially in love. Can the rekindling with the past change that and give her the one thing she does want?
Changes from the Show: Naturally, everything was different once Liz went to Vermont. The only thing that stays the same is that Maria went to New York. But like Liz, she did not come back to their hometown to graduate. Therefore, Meta Chem did not happen. Clayton Wheeler did not go after Liz. And therefore, Michael and Maria and especially Max and Liz did not get their happily ever in Graduation, which did not happen so, the question is, will they be able too, in this story?
The title comes from an episode title of the original Roswell. Season 2. Naturally, it was bad for Max and Liz. Well, this time, I am using the title for good, and hopefully for much better results for the couple. Although a certain couple does have some angsty times to go through. Will it work out better for all involved this time around?
Let us hope so…
On this day, a decade after her life changed forever, and seven years after she walked away from true love she was returning to her hometown in a rut. She should be fabulously successful as she was approaching her thirtieth birthday. After all the big 30 was coming with alarming speed despite it still being out of her reach. She was indeed successful by any true measure of the word. To most of the world, she was a premium scientist working with the top of her field. She was even assisting a Nobel Prize winner in genetics with another potentially award worthy breakthrough, and yet she felt stuck.
She was not in love. She had not even felt in love since she that day she left Max in the lurch in in the wake of everything changing. It is not like she did not try. To her best friend’s amusement, she was dating most nights when she was not in the lab, and yet the next morning she was onto the next. She never stuck it out with anyone. Because no one could match the intensity of Max in her mind even if she never tried his body much to her annoyance and frustration before the end came.
Max.
Yes, the one who got away, or more accurately, the one who she threw away.
And yet here she was, she was returning to town single, but on the cusp of making changes in her life if she could make through this one weekend.
Which was her ex-boyfriend’s wedding.
Because her original ex. Kyle was marrying of all people Isabel. Isabel Evans. With the truth managing to find itself out into her world. It would ultimately destroy her first marriage, she and Jesse would divorce, and she would continue her education before falling in love with someone who had been pining for her since high school.
Liz knew something about pining because she had someone who she had loved and lost, who had been pining for her since third grade what a concept she muttered to herself now. But back to Isabel. Of course, they had all seen it, seen how Kyle had been pining for the unattainable girl, but Isabel had not, or she had not wanted to see it as she was convinced her first husband Jesse was the one for her. Everyone else could tell you that they knew she had been rushing in the wake of some disastrous moments in their lives. Losses that were piling up. But no one could tell Isabel anything.
Until she concluded herself that she and Jesse would not be able to make it work.
So, a mutual parting was in the cards.
With Jesse ultimately moving to Boston. Away from the chaos that Roswell brought to him. They were all thrilled for him, and Isabel most of all, and after watching him leave.
It was onto her new life.
Eventually she would come to her senses and seen Kyle in a new light. And so, they took that chance on each other. And now the wedding was this weekend. Which is what brought Liz back home. Otherwise, she would have stayed away. After all, since she had gone to Vermont to an all-girl’s boarding school, Winnaman’s Academy in the closing months of her senior year of high school.
She had not come back home.
She graduated in absentee from West Roswell and had not come home for the graduation. Instead, she had gotten a late acceptance into Harvard, who looked at what she had been able to accomplish at the boarding school and asked her to join their ranks. She did, and she grabbed at the chance, and she succeeded by any definition.
After graduation. She rocketed up the scientific ladder, and she had not looked back until now as she drove into town limits and saw the same town that she had left in those dying weeks of high school in 2002. Whistling to herself to try to distract herself from the memories that automatically popped into her memory banks.
Some of her friends at work, who were not privy to how unique her hometown was to her, even had asked her why she would come back for an ex’s wedding.
It was unusual to go an ex-boyfriend’s wedding they would tell her. Liz could agree with them. Sure, it was unusual. In most cases, she would agree because you would not catch me attending my other ex’s wedding, she would muse to herself as she drove and thought of that occasion. That one was liable to break my heart, so yeah there was little chance of that happening…
But Kyle was yes, Kyle.
Someone special to her. Someone who represented someone normal, and someone who was the same person he was before everything went haywire a decade ago. Because Kyle had stayed the same person he always was.
She changed. And she never changed back. So, she needed to be here, for her friend.
Because he was indeed a friend. Who had helped her through an extremely stressful time before she fled town? So, she was coming back to support, and to see her friend get his happily ever after.
Even if the concept of happily after's was elusive to her…
And even if Kyle marrying Isabel would make it an evitability that she would be seeing him.
The one who she threw away by walking away from him.
Max.
Yes, Max Evans. The boy she loved with her whole heart at sixteen when everything changed for them. And the eighteen-year-old she had left in a quest to get some semblance of normal to her wild existence. When she felt herself morphing into something completely different from the girl, she had been at sixteen when she felt she had the world on the tip of fingers and in the ensuing months, she watched as that same world fall from her grasp as she fell hard for the boy that changed that for her.
Someone good. Someone brave. Someone who made her want to leave normal.
But at eighteen. She had wanted normal life back. She wanted her rapidly changing world to make sense. So, she ran, which of course had been her specialty, and she had not come home.
She had not needed too.
Because her parents had come to her. Wherever she was. And from there, she would host them, and they would travel the world when she had graduated in top 5 from Harvard. An accomplishment her parents were immensely proud of her, and one that had been achieved by a lot of sweat and tears.
Tears because she was missing someone, she could have had but chose not to, but she chose to concentrate on her pursuits. Because she had not needed to come home. She wanted to show her parents the world that existed outside of Roswell. She did not even have to come home for her best friend because Maria like her had taken the chance and left for the big time at that same time.
While Liz became a trail blazer in science and traveled the world when she got the chance. Maria took New York by storm, and instead of disappointment.
Maria had found success.
Although success for her friend had come with a price, but it had been one she was willing to pay as it kept rolling through these years. Yet Liz could not help but know that Maria was very much like her, and denying the reality of her situation, and she was not ready to face what that price she had paid so long ago had really brought her…
But today, that price was waiting to be revealed, and it would be, any second now…
Of course, she could be asking the same thing of herself. But she did not have a mouth counting on her, to make sense of their lives. Because fate would never give me Max.
“Aunt Liz?” came a soft voice from the back of the room. Forcing Liz out of her thoughts as she snapped her trance as she looked at the little dirty blonde cherub in the back. So cute, and precious. Someone who made her want the world to make sense.
And who made her want one. She wondered if that was ever going to be in the cards for her future. She certainly had been trying and would try some more when this weekend was over.
Because coming back here was about closure. About putting the past where it should be, in the past. And if she did accomplish that task, then the fates might give her what she truly did want from her life.
“Yes Charlie,” came Liz snapped out of her musings as she glanced behind her as she looked for a parking slot outside of her parent’s restaurant.
“Is this Mommy’s hometown?” Charlie asked as he had woken up after falling asleep when they left their motel room. The boy had already experienced so much on this road trip and so he was used to falling asleep in the car. It did not bother him as she listened to music to pass her time on the road as her brain worked to make sense of the past. Although she had been under some form of questioning from the boy who was too smart for his own good and had been persistently asking those type of questions since they left New York. And especially since they left Las Cruces. But New York had been where she had picked up her companion for this trip, and her plus one for the wedding.
A plus one whose presence would cause people to talk. Liz could just see it now. Which is why she and Maria had fought over it. But she reminded her friend that Kyle knew the existence of the kid. So, for his nephew not to be at the wedding might make him wonder. Maria had an excuse, that she had to work. But Amy would expect to see her grandson. Even if Liz had guardianship of the boy for the duration of their adventure.
“Yes,” Liz smiled. “Mine too” she muttered as she thought of the town that looked so like the place, she had left so many years ago.
“Why did Mommy not want you to bring me?” Charlie asked.
Because she is hiding from this place Liz mused to herself but knew the answer was more complicated than that and for her friend, she would do this even if she knew Maria should be here with her son. “Your Mother does not want to be separated from you. But she knows you will want to see your grandmother?”
Amy Deluca was an awesome grandmother to a child she always had to travel to see, because Maria had an allergic reaction to coming back to Roswell. Almost like Liz, but Liz did not have secrets that were close to the surface if anyone wanted to take the time to look for them. Still, they had been preventing her from coming back.
Liz knew the same could be the said for her too because it was the heartache of knowing she had thrown away the best man for her.
The only one for her Liz muttered to herself.
Will she? Charlie Deluca asked because he was not all the sure as he looked out the window of the card and looked at the big restaurant in front of them. “What is this place?”
“A safe place and it has awesome food” Liz murmured as she got out of the car and went and opened the door and the little boy hopped out before grabbed his trusty backpack. “Are they expecting us?”
“Nope,” Liz smiled.
“So, you are going to surprise them?” Charlie asked of his favorite aunt. Someone who had been part of his life all his life, and who his mother trusted to care for him when she was working. He knew his mother did not want to be here, but Liz insisted on coming, and told his mother, she was bringing him with her. There were a lot of curses, which made Charlie curious of this place. Because he had heard of Roswell before, but now his dreams told him more, and he was now wondering if it was the answer to the happiness his mother was keeping herself from finding.
Liz also wondered as she took a deep breath, and walked through the doors, to a whole new beginning.