Another Chance for Happiness
Category: Max and Liz
Rating: Suitable for ages 13 and over
Summary: A twist on “The End of the World”. A somewhat pessimistic view of the future. But who really knows what the future holds? ;-) It takes place sometime after “Wipe Out!“
Spoilers: The End of the World
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A knock on the window woke Max Evans up. He groaned. “Michael,” he thought. He rolled over and looked at the clock: 3:26. He sighed.
Michael really had the worst timing. Max was having that dream again. The good one about Liz. The one where she was still with him. Before Tess came along. Before Liz left him at the cave. Before she and Kyle…
Max pushed the thought away and walked to the window. Bad timing or not, he was glad Michael was knocking on his window in the middle of the night again. Things between him and Michael had been strained lately, to say the least. They really needed a good talk.
He moved the curtains to the side and stopped. For a moment, he was unsure what do to. It wasn’t Michael standing outside his window; it was Liz.
Maybe it was a new twist to his dream.
She motioned for him to open the window. He came back to his senses and did just that.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
He didn’t say anything. His mouth felt too dry to talk, so he just moved aside.
Liz climbed in through the window, only lit by the light of the full moon.
“Max, I really need to talk to you. This will seem a bit weird but please hear me out.”
“Ok,” he said. He turned his desk light on and turned back to Liz. Now that he was looking at her in the light, he noticed something. She looked… different.
“Liz…” he started. “You look…” He didn’t dare say it out loud, but “older” was the word. That was not necessarily a good thing to say to a woman, or so he had heard.
“I know, Max. I’m not the Liz you know. Just bear with me here, ok? Fourteen years ago… no wait, to you it would only be a few weeks… anyway, the night that you came and sang to me, a future version of you also paid me a visit.”
“What?”
“The granilith. We can use it as a time machine. You came to me that night because there’s something you thought we needed…” she stopped. Max was shaking his head, holding his hand up.
“Wait a minute. Time out. I think I need to sit down here.” He fell more than he sat back down on the bed. “The granilith is a time machine?”
“It’s one of the things it can do, yes.”
“Ok, well, that answers that question…” And it brings a ton more, but he figured that could wait. “And you used it to be here, tonight?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“So you’re from the future.”
“Fourteen years,” she smiled.
For the first time that night, he took a really good look at her. My God, he thought, and to think I believed there couldn’t be a more beautiful creature on this planet than Liz Parker. Her little girl looks had gone, erased by the years and all that she had been through. In lieu of the pretty 17-year old he was so madly in love with stood a gorgeous woman. His heart skipped a beat. He forced himself to concentrate on what she was saying. There’d be time for his fantasies later.
“… taking this rather well. I was freaking out and thought he was a shape shifter,” she finished.
“I’m sorry, could you start at the beginning? I’m kinda confused.”
She sat down on the bed next to him.
“The night that you came and sang at my window, a future version of you came to warn the past version of me of what would happen if I didn’t help him change the future.”
“What’s that?”
“In the year 2014, Earth is taken over by our enemies. In the original history, we were destroyed. That’s why you came for my help.” She hesitated, not sure of how much to actually tell him. He was looking at her expectantly.
“You see, you coming to sing for me started something in me that helped getting us back together.” She caught a look in his eyes that seemed to say “I knew it”. She smiled, but her smile soon vanished. “But it drove Tess away. Max, the one from the future, believed that she was crucial to our survival, that she made the unit complete. So he asked for my help to make sure she didn’t feel left out, to make sure she stayed in Roswell, so you could all work together getting rid of the other aliens.”
“But I don’t understand… we killed them. We destroyed their harvest in Copper Summit.”
“That was just the beginning, Max. I’m sorry. It’s not over.”
Max took a deep breath. “Ok… “ He suddenly felt very tired. When would it be over?
Liz put a hand on his shoulder. It sent a chill down his spine. He looked at her. She quickly took her hand away.
“Anyway, Max believed that you were the key to Tess feeling included in our circle of friends. And as much as I hate to admit it, he was right. That’s why I tried to set you up with her. And that’s why I pretended to… ”
She fell silent. Max looked at her, waiting for her to continue. Then he understood. His face lit up and he smiled, the biggest, brightest smile ever.
Liz couldn’t help but laugh. God, that smile on Max’s face felt good. Max hadn’t smiled at her like that in so long. He hadn’t smiled at her like that in fourteen years.
Max felt just about ready to burst with happiness. He would have started a little dance of joy on the bed right now if he had dared. He blushed slightly; Jeez, I’m officially insane, he thought.
But he needed to hear her say it: “So you and Kyle…”
“Was also a set up to get you to turn away from me," she finished. “And it worked. Boy, did it ever.” Her laughter died, and his smile disappeared.
“What happened?” he asked, concerned.
She hesitated. How much of it could she actually tell him?
“You never trusted me again… You never looked at me the same way again… I had betrayed you, and I couldn’t even tell you why, because… “
“I’m the one who asked you to do it,” he finished in her place.
“Yeah.”
“Liz, I’m so, so sorry," he started to apologize. She stopped him.
“Don’t start apologizing for something you haven’t even done yet,” she smiled sadly. “But please help me change it.”
“Sure. Just tell me what to do.”
She couldn’t help but smile at Max’s eagerness. He really had never stopped loving her.
“I never told anyone about you travelling back from the future to break us up. If you tell me… I mean Liz… you know what I mean… if you tell her about me being here tonight, she’ll know you’re not making it up.”
“Ok, I’ll tell her. Then what do I tell her?”
“You tell her… I don’t know, just let your heart do the talking. Whatever you’ll say, it will surely sweep me off my feet.” She smiled again.
Max was already getting dressed and was almost out the window when she stopped him.
“Max, whatever happens between us in the future, remember one thing, ok?”
He turned to look at her. She put her hand on his cheek. “We are stronger as a team. Don’t drive Tess away. Patch things up with Michael. Even if we get together, don’t neglect the others. You are the leader for a reason, you know.”
“There’s something else you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” he asked gently.
“Yes," she admitted. “And I’m not going to tell you. You can’t know too much about the future.”
He nodded, and started to leave again.
“Oh, and if it comes up, you can tell her it wasn’t in your back pocket. It’s in your wallet.”
Max looked confused for a moment, then turned bright red when he realized what she was referring to. “How do you know… um…what…” he mumbled.
She smirked and answered “You told me. Before I came here.”
Max couldn’t help but wonder how the subject came up. He thought about asking, but decided not to.
“Thank you,” he told Liz before heading out the window.
No, thank YOU, Liz thought. She sat on the bed. She felt a little bad for not telling him everything. But then again, how could she tell him?
While she waited for the end of this particular version of herself, she looked back on what her life had been for the last fourteen years.
Their plan of turning Max away from her had worked so well, it still hurt just to think about it. She never had a chance to tell him about what didn’t happen between her and Kyle. She had to watch him get closer to Tess everyday. With the tensions with Michael and Isabel, Tess was the only one he could turn to. It was killing her to watch that. So she moved away from all of them. When the offer came again to go live with her aunt in Florida, she took it gratefully. Soon after that she moved to Massachusetts to attend Harvard, and met Jordan.
Jordan…He was nice enough, and she was very fond of him. But he always had to compete with someone who wasn’t there. Someone he had never even met. She never told him about Max. How do you tell the man who wants to marry you that he’ll always only be second best? They had tried, Jordan and her, and had failed miserably. By the time their marriage ended, rumours of a possible space invasion were all over the papers. She knew it was time to go back to Roswell and make peace with Max.
It had taken her a long time to find him. And when she did, it was almost too late. He had been mortally wounded in the latest battle. But he had still found the strength to sit up and smile at her when she walked in.
Liz shuddered at the memory. She looked at the clock by Max’s bedside. 4:19. It was almost dawn. Max was probably knocking on her window right about now. She had no doubt the younger Liz would listen to what Max had to say. She had came very close to telling him the truth a few days after the whole town had disappeared. Tess had walked in the Crashdown right at that moment, followed by Kyle, and Max’s expression had turned somber. Liz had taken it as a sign to keep her mouth shut, and she had never really talked to Max ever again after that.
Until last week. When Max smiled at her, she broke down. She started babbling and told him everything, about how he came back from the future, about Tess, about Kyle, about why she ran away to Florida, about how she had never stopped loving him.
She told him what happened in the original history. The night of Gomez. The wedding in Vegas. How it had driven Tess away. How Isabel and Michael had died. How they had thought it best that Max come back and change the future. How they had sacrificed their happiness for the survival of the planet. It felt good to finally be able to share all of that with him, to not be the only one who had to live with the memories of what never was.
And he told her what had happened to him in the last fourteen years. How he never believed she was telling him the truth about her and Kyle. How he made things better with Michael, Tess and Isabel. How that didn’t change a thing. How he had come to the realisation that it didn’t matter if he was alone, or if they were all working together, they just were not strong enough to hold off the invasion. It was the one thing she couldn’t bring herself to tell the young and hopeful 17-year old Max.
No matter what Max Evans did, Earth would still be taken over in the not-too-distant future.
Then Max had died in her arms. He told her he loved her one last time. Before she could answer, he was no longer there.
She hadn’t wasted any time. She had sought out and found that Serena Max had told her about, and got her to tell her how to work the granilith to come back in time. She knew it was selfish. But if they were all going to die anyway, she’d rather spend the last (or next) fourteen years with Max.
She had sacrificed everything once, and it turned out to be for nothing. This time, she was going to put herself and Max first. And who knows, maybe that’s how things were meant to be. Maybe Max needed her to be there with him, along with Tess and Michael and Isabel, in order to make things work.
She suddenly started to feel dizzy. She held up her hand and was not really surprised when she saw right through it. She smiled. It was working. Before she disappeared, new memories came flooding back to her
*Max knocking at her window at 4 in the morning telling her she had come back from the future to explain about her and Kyle*
*The senior prom and how gorgeous Max looked in his rented tux*
*A birthday party for Tess where they actually made peace and became friends*
*A dance under the stars*
*A Gomez concert*
*The first night they shared a bed and got very little sleep*
*The expression on Max’s face when they found out…
And Liz disappeared.
The end
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