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Note: Everything up to "Sexual Healing" has happened, but without Maria. This takes place between that episode and "Crazy". Songs: "Little Heaven" by Toad the Wet Sprocket (from "In Light Syrup" and also the movie soundtrack, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") and "Slingshots" by Morley ("Felicity" soundtrack).
I hate him. I hate the fact that he thinks he knows who I am, that he thinks my life here is stupid (and normally I’d agree with him but I refuse to now just on principal). I hate his stupid hair and his infuriating smirk. I hate the way he roped me into this, convinced me to go with him, convinced me into leaving my little shit town for his, just because his friend was having dreams about me, just because it was my destiny, just because I was an alien. I am an alien. And he’s taking me to Roswell, New Mexico. It doesn’t get any more ludicrous than this. *~*~* The first time I saw him was at work. I worked at a Starbucks (insert cringe here), against my better judgement, not to mention my morals, but we needed the money. Everyday the same people would come in - yuppies in suits trying to decide between a mochachino, or a frappachino (both of which fall under the general category of crappachino), or kids from my high school would pull up outside, tumbling out of their jeep Cherokees in hordes, laughing, having fun. I was jealous of them. They all looked straight out of a gap add or maybe a Noxema commercial – this is what happy, healthy, normal teenagers look like. I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t one of the popular kids whose transcripts were overflowing with activities and clubs and awards, I wasn’t one of the drama kids, I wasn’t one of the "science geeks" – I was just me. Maria. Weird Maria with no friends, and a bar hopping mother who was rarely there. A part of me was just waiting for an excuse to leave, and then there it was in the form of a scruffy guy with gravity defying hair outside the window looking in, his eyes scanning the interior of the coffee shop, scanning the faces of the customers and then settling on mine. Our eyes met and I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think. I didn’t know what I was feeling, why I felt like I’d seen him before, why I felt like I knew what his voice sounded like, what his touch felt like. He stepped inside almost warily, his hands shoved into his pockets, shoulders hunched, careful not to touch the décor or brush up against any of the customers crowding around the ridiculously small tables and thin counters. He came up to the register and just stared at me. I stared back until Brittany Bitch Boss, came up behind me and rammed an elbow into my back. I stuttered a "can I help you" tearing my eyes away long enough to send said Bitch Boss a glare, and when I looked back at him he was blinking at the charts over my head looking completely baffled. "Umm I’ll have a coffee…?" I smiled at that. "What kind?" "Uh…the regular kind I guess…you know the kind made with coffee beans, and lots of caffeine." I stared at him. He was still confused. It looked like his fists were going to come bursting out of the bottoms of his pockets at any moment. I gave him a reassuring smile and told him I’d take care of it. I felt his eyes on my back the whole time I was making the coffee, and it was exciting. I’d never been looked at by a boy before – not in the way I could feel him looking at me. I started wondering if I would see him at school, if he would be in any of my classes. If he would sit down next to me during lunch and ask me out. If. If. If. I turned around and smiled. He blinked at me and handed me three crumpled dollar bills. I let my fingers brush his as I took the money and something happened. It was as if a thousand electric charges were shooting up my arm and into my brain, and once they were there they exploded into pictures – two faces I felt like I should know, an impossibly endless sky overflowing with millions of white stars, golden sand decorated with strange terra cotta colored designs that were just on the edge of my understanding, a jagged rock formation piercing the cloudless blinding blue sky. I dropped the money, yanking my hand back as though I’d been burned. He blinked at me again, then carefully reached out and took the coffee from my other hand, careful not to touch me. He hesitantly backed away from the counter, nodding to himself, and turned and walked away. *~*~* I didn’t sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes I saw him there – but not as I saw him in the coffee shop. I saw him in a desert with two others I didn’t but did recognize, holding hands and staring up at that electric blue sky at a cluster of stars arranged in a "V". And then I started having these flashes – memory flashes of things I had spent most of my life trying to forget about. Like the fire in second grade. After that had happened I had pictured everything that had happened that afternoon in my mind – the fire itself, the screaming, the blare of the fire alarm, the looks of horror and fear thrown at me, the questions I didn’t have answers for, everything - and then I had pictured a metal box around it, locking it in. I flung it into what I pictured was the abyss of my mind hoping never to remember it again, and I hadn’t until now. The memory wasn’t as fuzzy as it should have been considering I hadn’t thought of it in nine years. I was sitting by myself in the corner of the classroom next to the bookshelf that held all the books for "free reading hour". I had gotten into a fight with Pam Prendergast. She had been saying stuff about my mom and I. How we were trailer trash and a whole other bunch of stuff I had always secretly worried might be true. Still I couldn’t just take it. I couldn’t just let her say all those nasty things and not do anything. I mean who did she think she was? God, and with a name like Prendergast you’d think she wouldn’t be so high and mighty. At any rate I slapped her and got sent to the "time out" corner strategically positioned next to the bookshelf to insure further torture. I always thought it was cruel and unnecessary to have "time out" right next to a stack of books and not be allowed to touch them no matter how bored (and as a result repentant) you got. I was so angry that I had been the one forced to apologize, that I had been the one that had to spend "free reading hour", the only part of school I actually enjoyed, sitting alone, bookless. And then I started imagining the books with little poofs of smoke coming out from their middle pages, followed by long slender flames that licked their way from inside out until they covered the cover. One by one, down the line of books on the shelves – poof…flame…poof…flame…poof…flame. I thought I was imagining it - that it was just some twisted bitter fantasy I was having where if I couldn’t enjoy the books no one else could either. And then the fire alarm went off, and the kids in my class started screaming and running. All I could think was "so much for all those fire drills". I sat there as the fire left the bookcase and started traveling up the side of the wall, until my teacher Mrs. Kendall, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out of the classroom, screaming "Where did you get matches?! Why did you do that?!" I didn’t say a word, but in my head I was screaming "I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it!". The sprinkler system went off and stopped the fire before it got out of control. I was sent to a psychiatrist, and never said a word about the fire. I couldn’t remember what had happened. By the time I was in that man’s office and he was asking me all those questions about my "anger", I had already locked the memory in a metal box and sent it hurling into the abyss with all the other weird/bad things I’d ever done. But now, all of a sudden, just because I’d touched some strange guy with hair that I don’t even want to start discussing, I was remembering all this…stuff. Like the time I got freaked out during a thunder storm and made all the lights in the house turn on without touching them, or the time I broke my mom’s favorite coffee cup and wished to God I could just wave my hand over it and fix it. I was so desperate I actually did wave my hand over it. And when I opened my eyes it was in one piece again. Metal box, abyss. *~*~* The second time I saw him was at school. There I was a day ago dreaming of him sitting down beside me at my lunch table and asking me out, and there he was (okay so he didn’t ask me out – at last not with the intentions I had been hoping for). I had just tossed a handful of cinnamon candy hearts into my mouth (I wonder if you can o.d. on those. If so I’ll probably be the first to do it – I am sooooo addicted) and he plopped down beside me, each leg on either side of the bench, an elbow grinding itself nervously into the wooden graffitied table. "Hi." "Hi." "We have to talk." "I don’t know you." "Yeah you do. And I know you. You don’t have to pretend you’re not…you don’t have to pretend with me. I know what you are." He scanned the crowd making sure no one was listening, then turned back to me. His eyes were brown, with little flecks of amber in them. "I’m like you." Pause. "What do you mean you’re "like me"?" he frowned, scanned. "I’m y’know not from around here…" "Well duh, I know that – I would have seen you before. Marathon’s not exactly a big town." He was silent for a moment, looking into my eyes in that unnerving way he had that made me feel completely exposed, vulnerable. Naked. "Stop messing with me." "Stop messing with me!" I growled starting to get mad. I was disappointed that he was turning out to be a jerk after all. "You can’t not know…" "And you can’t be any creepier. Leave me alone okay?" He was making me nervous. I couldn’t look at him without seeing that odd star formation, without feeling desert sand under my bare feet, without feeling warm hands in each of mine... He was staring at me again. "The visions are real. What you saw when we touched…The stars – that’s the Aries constellation, the rock, it’s just outside of Roswell at a place called Puhlman Ranch, and those people..." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled picture and showed it to me. He pointed at the girl, "Isabel", and then the boy, "Max". He watched my face as he said Max’s name, like I was supposed to smack my head "I should have had a V8" style and exclaim "Right, Max. Sorry. I’m being flip. I do that when I get nervous. They were the same people I saw out in the desert with weird-hair boy in my dream. I didn’t know what to say. "What’s your name?" He blinked at me. He does that a lot. "Michael." "I’m Maria." *~*~* He said he was coming at eight. He said he knew where I lived. I was still trying to decide whether or not I would let him into the house if he actually did show up. He scared me. His intensity scared me – the fact that he just expected me to say yes, just expected me to climb onto the back of his motorcycle and ride off with him, leaving everything - my life, my mother - behind. I…I couldn’t just leave her. Despite the occasional screaming matches about how she wasn’t satisfied with what I was doing with my life and I wasn’t satisfied with what she was doing with hers, we actually, for the most, part got along with each other really well (when she was sober anyway). I mean she’s my mom. I love her…and she needs me. She’s been walked out on all her life – first my father, then boyfriend after boyfriend. It would kill her if I did it too. But the visions…the stars had a name. The rock was a real place. They had names. Isabel, Max. Michael. And they tasted familiar, the sounds of them on my tongue. How was this happening…how was I seeing all these things, these people I swore I never knew existed before…how was I remembering events from my childhood, events that I had locked up and hid so deep inside me…how was I seriously considering leaving my home, my mom…for…for what? A guy? Is that what it all boiled down to? A feeling that I belonged where he was, that I knew him, that some part of me needed him, wanted him more than anything I have ever wanted or needed my entire life… This was nuts. I just met this guy – had barely said more than ten sentences to him… I couldn’t go with him when he asked me. I couldn’t. My mother followed a guy and looked what happened to her – a single mom at sixteen, barely able to sustain a job and pay rent, cut off from all her friends and family in Roswell. "…the rock, it’s just outside of Roswell…" Roswell. My mother was born there. That’s where she met my father. I shivered. This was getting too weird. Psychotic even. I decided I was going crazy. That made more sense. "Hey." I shrieked and threw the teddy bear I had been cradling to my chest at him. It bounced harmlessly off his shoulder and onto the floor. "Sorry." He didn’t sound sorry. "How’d you get in here?!" "I used the door…" "But I locked it…" A shrug, a narrowing of the eyes, and his hand scratching the back of his head. "Yeah, I unlocked it." "Waitaminit you broke into my house?" "You knew I was coming!" he argued. "So use the doorbell like a normal person!" He smirked suddenly and that just made me angrier. "What’s so funny?" "I’m not a normal person and neither are you. That’s the whole point of this, so grab your bag or whatever the hell you wanna take with you and lets get outta here – not too much stuff though, we’ll be on a bike." "You think I’m just going to leave with you?" "You said you’d meet me tonight!" ""Meeting" and "leaving" do not mean the same thing – look it up!" I tossed the mini dictionary from my desk onto the bed next to him and he glared at me. "Why else do you think I wanted to meet you? What, you thought I was asking you out on a date or sumthin’? Don’t flatter yourself." "You are such a jerk!" "You’re an alien." Huh? No. Yes. Waitaminit. "What?!" He shook his head, confused. "How the hell can you not know this? Didn’t you realize something was…different…about you when you started getting your powers?" I took a deep breath, and swallowed. How did he know…No. This was not happening. I wouldn’t let it. "What powers..." He came towards me slowly and I backed away until the chair at my desk pressed against the small of my back, and I had nowhere else to go. He stopped an inch away from me, so close I could feel his breath, light against my cheek, and reached out and took my hand. I intended to yank it away, to push him away but I couldn’t move. The second his skin was against mine, those sparks that I’d felt the first time I’d touched him came flooding through my body, and then the flashes started – the fire – the lights – the coffee cup – the cat with the broken leg I’d healed behind the Starbucks when I had been taking out the trash a few months ago. "Those powers…"he whispered and dropped my hand. "How did you do that? How are you making me remember?!" "Because you have to remember. It’s important. We all have to be together now. All the dreams we’ve been having…all the visions…they’ve been leading us to you. I have to bring you back – because you’re one of us." My mind was spinning, swirling with stars and sand, strange designs, and fires, lightening, shards of glass, Isabel, Max, him, him, him. "What are you doing to me…" I murmured as he took my face in his hands and closed his eyes. "I’m showing you who you are…" I felt a strange warmth coming from his hands, sinking into my skin where he was touching me. The sparks were gentler now, not as insistent, urging me to open my eyes and see what he was trying to show me instead of forcing me. I saw him and the two others. So young, maybe seven years old, their skins slick and shiny, strands like gossamer hanging from their arms and legs, their hair. They were in a cave, it was dark and cold. They were confused, scared, but they had each other so they knew they would be alright. He showed me the dark haired boy, Max, touching something, a large rounded…thing… a pod …a pod…it shone in the darkness of the cave like a jewel. There were three other pods, but they were different from the one Max was touching – they had lost their luster once they had been opened. They came from the pods. Max. Isabel. Michael. They were…born from them. Max rubbed some of the gossamer away and looked inside of the one that hadn’t opened yet. There was a little girl there inside of it, a girl with gold hair, sleeping like a blond snow white in her glass coffin… It’s you… No…no it can’t be… Don’t deny this…don’t deny what you are… I saw Michael bring his hand up against the cave wall, saw him press it against the silver handprint, and there was a noise, a loud scary noise of rock scraping against rock, and then there was the sun pushing its way into the cave and blinding them. Michael left the cave first and after a moment Isabel and Max followed. Suddenly I was in the desert, surrounded by those designs that I almost understood. I was standing in front of one – four boxes with a lima bean design in them, connected in an "x" to each other. I was standing beside Max, could feel his hand in mine, but I was across from Michael, and I was looking into his eyes. The others disappeared. The map disappeared and it was just us, alone in the desert under the black sky filled with more stars than I ever thought possible. We were facing each other. I reached out to him, he reached out to me, our fingertips just grazed each other and…and it was over. I could feel him pulling away from me almost frantically. I could feel his confusion, his worry. He stepped away from me, and I felt the loss of warmth so acutely it almost brought tears to my eyes. "Get your stuff together" he said thickly and then turned and left me alone in my room. *~*~* I looked down at my hand. It was a human hand. The skin wasn’t silver or green, there were five fingers on each one, I could see the pale blue veins stretching over my wrists, could see the tendon, could feel the bones of my knuckles. It was my mother’s hand. This was a human hand. I looked into the mirror. I looked human. I looked like every other teenage girl in Marathon, Texas…I just…I just didn’t know if I felt like one anymore. He had done something to me… I felt…different…like I had just woken up from a long fitful sleep. I felt refreshed, alive. Wide awake. And it pissed me off. As if my life wasn’t complicated enough, as if I didn’t have enough insecurities already without worrying if I was some other freaking life form all together. But I couldn’t be an alien. I couldn’t. Aliens don’t exist except in Hollywood and deluded little tourist traps like Roswell, New Mexico. I went outside to where he was waiting, leaning against his motorcycle, his arms crossed over his chest and told him just that. The rest of what happened is kind of a blur. I was screaming at him, and he yelled back, I tried to run back into the house and he grabbed my arm and dropped it as soon as the sparky things started up again. I started to leave again, but he stopped me with his eyes. They were begging me to come with him. I knew then I couldn’t say no. Whether it was my destiny or just him that was making me start to believe I’m not sure. It doesn’t really matter right now. I’m leaving with him. Tonight. I broke away from his gaze and ran into the house. I went to my room and quickly shoved some clean clothes into my backpack, and grabbed my savings from under my mattress. I thought about leaving a note for my mom, but what could I say? "Just found out I’m an alien – goin’ to Roswell – love ‘Ria"? I don’t think so. It would be a while before she noticed I was gone anyway. We sometimes went for days without seeing each because her hours were so messed up. Besides this wasn’t permanent – my little vacation with porcupine head. Maybe I’d be back before she even knew I was gone. I ran outside and climbed onto the back of his bike, wrapping my arms around his waist. He didn’t say a word and neither did I. *~*~* I suppose I’ve always felt a little different – like maybe I was always walking a little faster or slower than everyone else – I don’t know – out of synch anyway. I thought it was normal to feel not normal, to feel out of place, like I don’t belong. I never expected this, never really believed it was true – that I didn’t belong. But at the same time, if I’m honest with myself I can’t say I’m surprised. Yeah I screamed at him, told him he was nuts – but it was the human thing to do, and I wanted to be human so that’s what I did. It pissed him off…but then he’s always pissed off. I hate him. I hate the fact that he thinks he knows who I am, that he thinks my life here is stupid (and normally I’d agree with him but I refuse to now just on principal). I hate his stupid hair and his infuriating smirk. I hate the way he roped me into this, convinced me to go with him, convinced me into leaving my little shit town for his, just because his friend was having dreams about me, just because it was my destiny, just because I was an alien. I am an alien. And he’s taking me to Roswell, New Mexico. *~*~* What would you do if someone told you you were an alien? Seriously, how would you react? Would you roll your eyes and say "look who’s talking"? Would you laugh and ignore it? Would you be offended? Freaked out? Would you run? Would you jump onto the back of a motorcycle and bury your face against a leather jacket and try not to cry because you were so happy and so frightened and so confused all at the same time? If someone would have asked me before I think I might’ve chosen the first one, but there I was, speeding through the night, passing by all the meaningless little shops and restaurants I’d ever been to, speeding past the high school, the elementary school, the pre school and the daycare center. When I saw the pre school I was knocked back into my senses. I couldn’t have been the girl in the unopened pod. I wasn’t adopted. I didn’t come into this world, seven years old. I had been a baby, I had been a toddler, I had gone to that pre school, and I had the pictures at home to prove it. I was disappointed. This was all a big mistake. He must have felt me tense. He turned his head slightly to yell, "What’s wrong?" I didn’t want to tell him. What the hell’s wrong with me? I didn’t want to tell him that I wasn’t the one he was looking for. I shook my head, and he turned his attention back to the road, satisfied. My heart was pounding in my chest. He was going to find out sooner or later. When we got to Roswell the other two – they might know. What if they took one look at me and knew and killed me for knowing about them… What if Michael knew? What if he realized his mistake and was just looking for the right time and place to do it… He pulled off to the side of the road suddenly and stopped the bike. We were so far away from the town, nothing but trees alongside the road, no diners no gas stations, no people for miles. I could run and hide in the woods if I had to - maybe he wouldn’t be able to find me in the dark…oh my god can aliens see in the dark…? I was on the verge of having a heart attack. "Why…why are we stopping…?" He got off the bike and motioned to me to do the same. I just sat there trying to decide if I could figure out how to start the damn thing and get away, when he rolled his eyes and sighed, looking at his watch. "It’s midnight. We’re still pretty far away and I don’t feel like an pulling an all-nighter okay?" "We’re sleeping out here?" "I’m gonna sleep - you can do whatever the hell you want except leave so get off the bike so I can haul it into the woods." I slid off the seat, mentally crossing my fingers that all he wanted to do was sleep and not make me disappear or melt or whatever it is aliens did. I followed him past the trees, wrapping my arms around myself. I was not a nature girl by any means, and I was not looking forward to all the mosquito bites I’d have to put up with in the morning. It’s funny how that’s what was worrying me the most at the moment. A second ago I was worrying about getting my mind melted by an alien, and now all I was thinking was "why didn’t he tell me we’d be camping? I would have brought "Off!" or some other bug-getter-offer product. I can’t stand camping. I want to go home. I want to go home, I want to go home. I’m already getting bitten – I can feel it…" "Do you have any bug spray?" I asked hopefully. "No I don’t have any bug spray." "We’re gonna get eaten alive out here!" "So deal with it." "I could if I had some bug spray!" "God are you always like this?" "Like what?" "Such a…" "A what?" "A princess…" Princess? Princess? "What about you?" I said as he stopped rolling the bike and leaned it against a tree. "Are you always such a…" "A what?" "A…buttmunch?" Okay, definitely not one of my finer moments in the insult department. "Very mature." "You started it!" He unstrapped a sleeping bag from the back of the bike and tossed it onto the ground. "Yeah this is gonna be fun…" he mumbled to himself, and I eyed the sleeping bag suspiciously. "What’s that for?" "Umm I dunno, sleeping maybe?" he unrolled it then looked up at me from where he was squatting on the ground. "I bet you expect me to do the guy thing and suffer the cold hard ground for you huh?" "You’re not going to?" He sighed again, like he was making some huge personal sacrifice and unzipped it, flung it open, and motioned for me to get in. I did because I didn’t know what else to do and I was afraid he’d change his mind. "Are you going to start a fire?" "Yes I’m going to start a fire." "Look buddy, lay off the attitude." I growled struggling with the zipper. He leaned over and did it up for me, then paused, staring into my eyes in a way that reminded me of that weird desert vision I’d had where it was just the two of us alone and… "Princess." He murmured and turned away from me to clear a space on the ground to build up a fire. "Buttmunch." I mumbled, pulling the material up over my ears. I watched as he gathered some wood and stones for the fire. I watched him carefully arrange the stones in a circle and start to build up the wood and sticks into a mini log cabin. He was so exact about it, making sure the sticks made a perfect square. It made me smile. "Stop looking at me" "I’m not looking at you." I said, still staring at his back. "Yeah, you are." I thought about telling him I wasn’t the girl in the pod. That I wasn’t an alien. That I was just a human that could sometimes do…stuff. I couldn’t explain why I had those visions, why I felt so close to complete strangers, why I felt compelled to follow him wherever he wanted to take me. I should tell him. I should let him know he’s wasting his time with me. He turned around suddenly to catch me staring at him. The moonlight filtering through the leaves touched his face and I felt that pull I’d felt the first time I’d seen him. I’d never felt that about anyone, never felt that connected and so alive when I had my arms around his waist and my body pressed against his back. I wanted to be that girl. I wanted to be that lost alien because it explained so much, it explained what I felt about this boy, why I felt drawn to him even though for the most part all he’d done was scare me and piss me off. It explained why I had always felt so alone and so out of place. It explained why I had always been able to do weird things like fix broken coffee cups without touching them. "What’s the matter with you?" I was going to lie. He’d figure it out on his own soon enough, and if he didn’t Max or Isabel would. Until then I was going to go along with it because as confused as I’d been since I met him, this was the first time I felt complete, the first time I felt like I belonged, and as selfish as it sounds I wasn’t letting go of that until I had to. "Nothing…it’s just a lot to take in y’know?" "Yeah…" "So…how did you find me?" "Nasedo." "What’s a nasedo?" "He’s one of us…he’s uh from where we’re from. He wasn’t born here on earth. We’ve been lookin’ for him for years and then he just…he just showed up one day and said there was another one of us out there and that we had to find you so we could all be together again. He knew where you lived and…Max knew what you looked like so…" "How come it was you?" "What?" "How come you came and got me and that Nasedo guy didn’t?" He looked sad for a moment as he turned away from me, then angrily threw another stick into the pit, almost knocking over the log cabin he’d spent so much time making perfect. "Because he disappeared. Again. I came because it doesn’t matter if I leave town for a few days. Max and Isabel would be missed. "But what about your parents?" "I don’t have any." "I mean your fost-" "Emancipation." "Oh." Sore spot. "Yeah so what about your parents?" He sounded so defensive. "What about them?" "They’re gonna be looking for you right?" "Well yeah…I mean I figure I’ve got at least two days before my mom knows I’m gone…after that I don’t know what she’ll do. Call the cops probably and say I’ve been kidnapped. She’d never believe I’d run away." "You’re close with her." He sounded like he disapproved. Who the hell did he think he was? "Sometimes." "What about your "dad"?" "I dunno. He left when I was a –" God, I had almost said "baby". "Ah…younger. He left me and my mom a long time ago." Silence. "Two days huh?" "Yeah. At least." "That’s not good enough. You’re gonna have to call and tell her your not coming home for awhile." I started to object (y’know to be convincing) but he cut me off. "Just until we’ve got this all figured out. Maybe once the four of us are all together Nasedo’ll come back and tell us what the hell’s going on." He turned back to the fire and held his hand over it. "What are you doing?" "Tryin’ to start the stupid fire." He lifted his hand and ran it once through his hair, frustrated, "Shit. I can’t…Do you have any matches or a lighter or something?" "No…" He turned to look at me all pissed off because I wasn’t a smoker, and then blinked, like he was remembering something. He got to his feet. "C’mere." "What – why?" "You can do it – start it up." "What are you talking about?" "C’mon, it’s cold. Just pretend they’re a stack a’ books." He said impatiently nodding at the sticks. "You saw that…" "Yeah I saw it now start up the fire before I freeze to death…Some of us don’t have sleeping bags to keep warm you know." "I can’t just…make that happen…I don’t know how I did it before." He sighed and plopped down on the ground annoyed. "Then what good are you?" "Y’know what? Bite me spaceboy. You’re the one that dragged me out here in the first place. I don’t owe you any favors." He was quiet, then after a moment said. "This is really uncomfortable." "Now who’s a princess?" "My vote still goes with the chick who stole my sleeping bag. You can’t even see the stars from here" he said suddenly. He sounded disappointed. "When you camp in the desert you can see the stars", he explained. "They’re everywhere." "I’ve never been to the desert, not for real anyway." "Yes you have, you just don’t remember." I swear to God he is incapable of not arguing with everything I say. We were quiet for awhile until a memory hit me – not one of the bad ones, but one I couldn’t believe I had ever forgotten because it had been so important to me at the time. I didn’t realize I had wanted to tell him about it until I heard myself saying quietly, "I went to a summer camp when I was eleven. I hated every minute of it except…there was this one night where our counselor took us on a kitchen raid, and the mess hall was at the end of this huge field of grass, and walking back it…it was just amazing…All there was was the ground and the stars…I’d never seen so many stars…It was like there was hardly any sky at all…" My eyes started to burn when I remembered how I fell to my knees, and just cried and cried and cried at the beauty of it. My heart had felt so full. I had felt so free. "I felt so alive…like I was a part of something bigger…like I could reach out and touch them all if I tried hard enough…" I remembered aching inside because I couldn’t reach them, and I had! kept feeling that way even when my mom had finally come to take me home. The first night back I had stayed up all night staring out of my window, wondering why I still felt so far away from everything when I was where I was supposed to be, when I was home with my mom. "It’s like that in the desert", he said softly. "You’ll see." "Do you…do that a lot?" "What?" "Sleep under the stars…" "I used to." "What made you stop?" "I finally had a place to come home to at night." "You didn’t before…?" I felt him squirm uncomfortably in the darkness next to me. "No." We were silent for a while, listening to each other breathe, listening to the gentle whisper of the leaves sliding against each other in the wind. I unzipped the bag enough for me to get my arm out and pointed up to the sky between us where I thought I saw a few flickers of light. "There’s some." I whispered. "Where?" "Right there…" "I don’t see anything…" "You calling me a liar?" "Where are you looking?" Exasperated, I grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and pulled him closer to me. I pointed again. "There." I said softly. "Okay, yeah I see them." I brought down my hand and pulled the sleeping bag material up over it again. "My arm is so cold" I commented. "Imagine how I feel." I felt him shiver beside me and felt guilty. It was his sleeping bag after all. "Fine", I sighed. Big baby. "Fine what?" I unzipped the bag and held it open. "Just get in. I know you’ve been dying for me to offer." "Don’t-" "Flatter myself, I know. Just get in here before I change my mind." I scooted over as far as I could and turned my back on him as he crawled inside and slowly pulled up the zipper. There was barely enough room for two people to fit once he zipped it up all the way, and our backs were snugly pressed against each other. "You better not be a kicker…" "Same goes for you pally" *~*~* I dreamt of the stars and the sand, the rock jutting out into the sky pointing at the Aries constellation. I dreamt of a dark haired boy. I dreamt of his kisses, his hands. And it was unsettling. Not in the way the other visions had been – those didn’t make me feel so sad and…trapped. I felt like I belonged in them, like they were natural – this one felt forced even though I was responding to him, even though I was kissing him back, touching him back. I couldn’t control myself. It was scary. It wasn’t me. I felt like I was playing a part I didn’t necessarily choose. The vision wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. I didn’t know Max. How could I see him like that? The vision was not real. I woke up, my face pressed against the inside material of the sleeping bag, slick with condensation from my breath. I don’t know why I kept calling it a vision. It wasn’t. It was just a dream. It was just a dream. My stomach grumbled and I closed my eyes, determined to fall asleep and stay asleep without being woken up by anymore…sex stuff – dreams or visions. Michael shifted slightly behind me. Yeah. Good luck with that one Maria. I closed my eyes even tighter and told myself that the thing with Max was a fluke. That it didn’t mean anything. That it was probably a result of having nothing but a handi-snack, half a can of Dr. Pepper, and a couple of cinnamon tic tacs for dinner. It didn’t mean anything. I finally fell asleep again, murmuring that to myself over and over again until the words lost their meaning. *~*~* I dreamt of the stars and the sand, the rock jutting out into the sky pointing at the Aries constellation. And when I saw the dark haired boy again, felt his kisses on my neck, his hands pressed against my back, I closed my eyes and begged my body to wake up again and stop feeling for him. But I couldn’t wake up this time. I still felt his lips, his body against mine…but suddenly they felt different. I opened my eyes and Max was gone. Michael was there, staring down at me with his dark, dark eyes, the stars shining over his shoulder. He reached out, his fingers touching the side of my face in a gentle caress. I kissed his hand, I lifted my face to his. I kissed him and could feel his fear. Could feel him choose to ignore it as I wrapped my arms around him and all there was was us... *~*~* I woke up feeling warm and safe. I woke up with Michael’s arm around my waist, and his lips against the back of my neck, in my hair. A lock of his had fallen across my cheek. He must have turned around in the night. I couldn’t breathe. The sparks were running up and down my body in comforting little waves that made my heart pound. How was he not feeling this? I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep as I felt him move behind me and his breath on my cheek as he lifted his head. He carefully took his hand from my hip and slowly turned around, trying not to wake me. The zipper unzipped and the sleeping bag rustled as he got out and paused before closing it up again. I laid there for a few minutes more, wanting to get up but afraid to. I was embarrassed and I knew he probably would be too. My face was warm and my heart was still racing. I couldn’t face him all strung out like this. He had strong arms. They felt good around me. I liked the way his lips felt against my shoulder, and the way my body had curled into his like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like we actually could stand each other, like we liked each other. Like we were lovers. Oh please. I was not about to get all moony over this guy just because he accidentally put his arms around me and held me all night…and… And he doesn’t even like me. He’s a jerk. No – he’s not a jerk - he’s a buttmunch. This was established last night. Okay now I was irritated. Good. I was now in a much better position to handle him and his attitude. I resolutely pulled down the zipper and crawled out of the bag. He looked up briefly, then went back to messing with the bike. "You didn’t have to pretend you were sleeping." He mumbled. "You could have just woken me up. I would have let you out." "I was sleeping." "No you weren’t." He turned around and ran a hand through his already tousled hair and kicked at the rumpled sleeping bag. "Look, you were having a bad dream okay and that’s why I…" he trailed off with a shrug and picked up the bag. "What dream…?" Oh my God. The dream. I had almost forgotten… He didn’t know what it was about…please don’t let him know what it was about. He started to shove the bag into it’s sleeve, not looking at me, focusing all of his attention on attaching it back onto the bike once it was all the way in and the drawstrings were tightly pulled shut. I could feel my face getting hotter and hotter. He knew. He knew I had dreamt about Max. I bet you could die from embarrassment. I bet it’s happened before. I be- "You were being kinda noisy" Oh my God. "How…how was I noisy…?" He shrugged. "I dunno you just…you sounded upset…so I tried to wake you up but you just kept on whimpering and kicking me…you seemed to calm down when I…held you. So that’s why I…" He trailed off with another shrug. "Thanks…" I whispered. "Do you…remember what it was about?’ "Huh? No…no I don’t remember…" Yes I did. Max. Me and Max. My knees felt shaky. I wanted to sit down. I suddenly remembered that I had dreamt about Michael too last night. Was it because he had touched me? I watched him get on the bike. He turned to look at me expectantly. I met his eyes and I felt like I was going to crumple into a heap of embarrassment all over again. It’s…strange…seeing someone you just dreamt about – especially if you’ve dreamt about them in that way…like they can take one look at you and know everything… I stared at my hands. I couldn’t look at those eyes anymore, not without thinking about… "Are you getting on or not?" I bit my lip and carefully climbed onto the back of the bike. He paused for a second then sighed impatiently. "You’re gonna have to hold on if you don’t want to fall off." I hesitantly put my arms around his waist. I didn’t feel the sparks or get any flashes, so I relaxed a little bit against him. He started up the bike and drove slowly through the path we had made last night. When we reached the road, he sped up until we were going so fast the trees were just two blurred stripes on either side of us. I buried my face into his back as the wind tore past, trying not to think about how warm his skin was against mine when there were no barriers like the leather jacket, his T-shirt, my T-shirt, my jacket between us. I bit my lip. This was bad. This was very bad. *~*~* We stopped after a while for gas and breakfast. I sat at a booth in a little diner next to the gas station near the window watching him fill up. He squinted into the sun as the wind that hadn’t let up since we’d started our little road trip pushed his hair briefly across his forehead before the strands up righted themselves again. I smiled. It figured his hair would be just as stubborn as he was. What was I doing here? Roswell was less than two hours away. He would know soon, and it would all be over. I refused to feel bad about lying to him because technically I wasn’t exactly lying (see this is me trying to ease my guilt)…I just…wasn’t admitting to the whole "I’m-not-really-the-missing-alien-I-just-think-you’re-really-hot-and-don’t-never-want-to-see-you-again-cuz-you-make-me-feel-sparks-whenever-you-accidently-touch-me" thingy. I looked out the window again and took a sip of my hot chocolate. I was being such a hormonally challenged teenager right now. I was actually checking out his butt. It was nice. Oh my God – when did I turn into a guy? See what going 24 hours on nothing but tic tacs and Dr. Pepper, and very little sleep do to you? It turns you into a horndog, that’s what it does… Mmmm corndog…that would be sooo goood right now… I flagged down one of the waitresses and pretended not to be disappointed when she told me lunch wouldn’t be served for another hour, and ordered a plate of french toast instead – two plates, two knives and two forks. I was sitting there trying to decide whether or not I should just tell him or wait and let him figure it out when he slid into the seat across from me and nodded at my cup. "Almost done?’ "No. I ordered food." "Are you kidding?" "What, do you have issues with food that doesn’t come out of a vending machine? I’m starving – you should be too." "Fine. Just be quick." The waitress came and I pushed one of the toasts onto the second plate and slid it over to him. "What’s this?" "Food." "I spent the last bit of my cash on gas." I rolled my eyes. "I’m paying. God, just eat and stop giving me such a hard time. It’s too early." "It’s 11:00" "On a Saturday – that’s too early." I took a bite out of mine then remembered I still had some cinnamon hearts in my bag. I took them out and sprinkled them on top of the toast, watching them sink under the syrup. Yum. "What is it with you and those things?" I shrugged. "Cinnamon hearts – sweet and spicy." He smiled at me. Smiled – wow, didn’t think he was capable… He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bottle of Tabasco sauce and started sprinkling it onto his plate. He looked up and caught my eye, then smirked at my horrified expression. "Sweet and spicy" he said. He reached over and poured some onto my toast. I stared at it as it mixed itself in with the brown maple syrup. It looked disgusting. Smelled good though… I took a bite. Fabulous – I’m like drooling here. I picked up the little bag of cinnamon hearts and tossed a handful onto his plate. I am seriously completely surprised at my lack of shock that I'm sitting here having breakfast with an alien. I mean, I've always been pretty open minded - with a mother like mine you have to be, but this was just too bizarre. What struck me as even more bizarre was that I had actually believed that I was one too (but again, with a mother like mine...). He took a bite and I heard the soft crunch of one of the hearts being bit into. I grinned at him. "Good huh?" The corner of his mouth slowly slid up in a half smile. "Maybe" "You’re so annoying." "I try." "Tell me about Isabel and uh, Max…I mean what are they like? How did you guys find each other?" he was quiet for a moment, chewing, thinking, and said finally. "They’re perfect." "Perfect." "Yeah. Izzy’s beautiful. People think she’s cold, an ice princess – they’re intimidated by what she looks like, but she’s not like that at all. She’ll mother you to death if you let her. She’s strong. She’s…" he shrugged and took another bite. "I dunno she’s Isabel. She takes care of us, keeps me grounded." "Are you two close…?" He frowned and stabbed his fork into a piece of toast. "Yeah…she’s like my sister…" He sounded unsure of that, and my heart tightened, which was stupid. I wasn’t jealous. I had no right to be. "What about Max?" I tried not to blush as I remembered my stupid dream again. "He’s smart. He always does the right thing. He’s like incapable of making mistakes…he’s…He’s good. You’ll like him." "What about you?" "What about me what?" "What are you like?" He blinked at me, then turned his head to squint out the window, like he was just making sure the bike was still there. "I’m the fuck up." I laughed. "No you’re not." "Oh yeah? Wait - you’ll see. We’ll get back to Roswell, something shitty’ll happen and it will invariably be my fault." I shook my head at him amazed. He didn’t sound bitter or angry. He sounded tired, like he had accepted his role long ago and there was nothing he could do to change it. "You’re not a fuck up." "Yeah how do you know?" "I’m a very good judge of character. I mean aside from your sense of fashion, your lack of organizational skills-" I scratched at a mosquito bite on my forearm pointedly "- and your seemingly unnatural urge to bug the hell out of me, no pun intended, you’re not so bad. Read Chicken Soup for the Soul or something and throw out your copy of "Rebel Without a Cause" and you’ll feel better." He shook his head at me. I think he was trying not to smile. "You’re nuts." "Thank you." I paused then said quietly. "You’re not a fuck up. I wouldn’t have left with you if you were." He smirked. "You just don’t know me yet." "I know you." We sat there for what seemed like hours, gazing at each other over our Tobasco soaked, cinnamon heart coated, breakfast, feeling the sparks even though we weren’t touching (unless you count his shoe that brushed up against mine for a moment under the table), even though it was probably only a minute before a voice I knew ruined it all. "Maria Deluca what are you doing here?" I tore my eyes away from Michael’s and recognized Steven Wilkie – one of my mom’s many exes and the Sheriff of Marathon. Shit. What was he doing here? Marathon was hours away. "Sheriff! What are you doing here?!" "I believe that was my question." "Uh…nothin’ – y’know just hanging out with my friend. Havin’ breakfast" he glanced down at my plate. "Interesting. Pretty far from home Maria." "Yeah no kidding" I forced a laugh as he looked over at Michael. He just sat there staring at me. "Your mom know you’re here?" "Yeah, yeah of course she knows." Okay I said that way to quickly. God I’m usually a much better liar than this. If only he would stop staring at me… "I think I better take you home…" I felt Michael tense across from me and lightly kicked him under the table when I felt him start to get up. The last thing we needed was to make Wilkie angry. "Yeah, okay. Let me just say goodbye to my friend and I’ll meet you outside." He gave Michael another once over before tipping his hat at me in agreement and leaving the diner. Michael stood and grabbed my arm dragging me out of the booth, towards the back of the diner where the bathroom hallway was. "We’ll try and leave through the kitchen-" "No." ""No"? What the hell do you mean "No"?" I took a deep breath. I had no choice but to tell him now. It was the perfect opportunity, right? I don’t know, maybe it was fate that the Sheriff showed up. Maybe fate just decided to give my "destiny" with the aliens the finger. I don’t know. I felt like I was going to cry. "Listen," I said quietly taking a deep breath. "I’m just gonna go home with him -" he tried to interrupt but I cut him off. "I’m not her. I’m not who you’re looking for. I can’t be. I was born Michael, I was a baby. I didn’t come out of a…a pod. I’ve never been to the desert. Ever. I…I’m not who you want…" I finished in a near whisper, and finally raised my eyes to look at him. He looked…shocked. And then he looked like he didn’t believe me. "No" he said grabbing my arm. "That’s impossible. You have to be one of us. Nasedo and Max both-" "They were wrong." "No." he gripped my arm a little tighter, pulling me in closer. "No, I wouldn’t have felt – you wouldn’t have seen the visions…" "Maybe you forced them on me did you ever think of tha-" "You wouldn’t have powers-" "Look Michael", I said breaking away from him "I don’t know – maybe I’m telekinetic or psychic or something – I don’t know what I am, but I am not an…an alien." I stepped back trying not to cry in front of him. "I’m not like you. I have a mother. A mother that carried me inside of her for nine months. I was a baby, I was a toddler I didn’t come from the stars. You made a mistake." He reached for me again, and I knew if he caught me he wouldn’t let go – he would drag me kicking and screaming to the bike if he had to. And I would let him. I moved out of his way and said as nastily as I could, "You said it yourself didn’t you? You’re a fuck up and something shitty has happened – you made a big mistake. It just wasn’t in Roswell." I turned and walked away and didn’t look back. I hated myself. I had let him believe…I had let this drag on for too long. It was my fault it had ended like this. I hated what I had said to him...I just…I just had to make sure he wouldn’t come after me again. I had to make him hate me. I was about to push open the door when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Michael swung me around until I was facing him. His eyes were cold. "If you tell anyone about this I will find you..." "I won’t tell…" I whispered. "I’m sorry…" I turned and ran outside to the police car where Sheriff Wilkie was already in the driver seat on the verge of leaning on the horn. I pushed the tears off my cheeks before he saw them and climbed in. I didn’t look back. *~*~* When I got home, I was somehow able to convince Steven not to walk me to the door. I knew he wanted to – he still likes my mom (despite the fact that the only reason she went out with him at all was to get out of paying some speeding tickets), but I didn’t want him to tell her where I’d been and that would have definitely come up. One of the reasons she broke up with him in the first place (aside from the fact the citations had been erased from her driving record) was because he seemed to feel the need (probably because he was the Sheriff) to point out what he thought were her mistakes in raising me. You do not do that with a single parent – especially my mother. He would have told her it wasn’t a good idea for me to be so far from home with a boy (which was a "duh" anyway), and then she’d ask where I was and with what boy and I would be doubly busted – one for showing Sheriff Steve that he was partly right in thinking my mother neglected me, and two for going off with! a stranger in the first place. So I got him to let me go alone after feeding him some story about how Michael’s sister was a friend of mine from summer camp and she was in the hospital and wanted to see me. Her brother was just driving me back home when he showed up, and rather than inconveniencing Michael by making him go out of his way I gratefully accepted his generous ride home. He seemed to believe it. Like I even care anymore. I stumbled up the steps to my house and waved at the Sheriff once before unlocking the door and stepping inside. She wasn’t even home yet. All the lights were off. Good. I didn’t want to see her, I didn’t want to see anybody. I just wanted to lock myself in my room and cry. I felt completely drained, mentally and physically drained. I collapsed onto my bed and stared up at my ceiling, at the little glow stars stuck up there. It made me think of last night, lying beside him in the darkness, and then waking up with his arms around me. I was never going to see him again. I was never going to meet Max and Isabel or even that Nasedo guy. I was never going to be with Michael in the desert. He hated me. I hated myself because I was just a normal ordinary girl that had been either lucky or unlucky enough to have had 48 hours of something extraordinary. *~*~* My mom came home around eight thirty, and guess what? She had run into Steve at her acupuncturist. Steve thinks acupuncture is ridiculous and used to bug my mom about having it done, so what the hell was he doing there? Trying to earn some brownie points with her by ratting on me? Bastard. If I was an alien three guesses to whose brain I’d melt first. I was just lying there in the dark on my bed trying to sleep but scared to because I thought if I had to face another one of those dreams with either Max or Michael I’d go completely irrevocably mental, when my mom burst in like the drama queen she is (now you know where I get it from) and said "I saw Steve today – he said he found you six hours away in a diner eating strange food with a juvenile delinquent. Maria-" big dramatic pause here"are you on drugs? " I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. I wanted to remind her that she, up until I was ten, had grown her own pot under our back porch because she claimed it was "therapeutic". Wonder what Sheriff Steve would have thought of that. "Mom I’m not on drugs. He’s not a juvenile delinquent, and it was more like five hours away." She started talking at me like she always does when she’s upset or confused or not getting the response she wants from me, about everything I (or any one else on this planet) have ever done that embarrassed her or made her angry or disappointed, so as usual I went into my Charlie Brown mode where everything she says turns into "wha whu wha" with an occasional "Maria" making it through the Angry Mom Filter. She always takes my irresponsible actions so personally, and I always try to get her to chalk it up to the fact that I’m a teenager but she never goes for that because apparently, I have an "old soul" and should know better. I don’t even bother to defend myself or make excuses any more. She paused to breathe and I yelled at the ceiling. "Yes! I smoked up! I had sex on the back of a motorcycle with a juvenile delinquent and then we found a diner and did it on the counter between the register and the lemon meringue pie!" That shut her up for about half a minute. "That’s not funny Maria", she said and turned slamming my door shut behind her. I wasn’t worried at her departure. I was grateful. At least she’d leave me alone for a couple days – y’know to make sure I knew she was really angry with me. By Thursday we’d be watching "Friends", giggling and pretending we’d never had a fight at all. Usually I’d be lying here making myself sick with guilt that I had made her think she was a bad mother, that she had raised a child dumb enough to repeat her mistakes, but I wasn’t. I was trying to figure out how to create a metal box big enough to encase everything I’d seen and felt the last two days starting from the moment our eyes met through the window to the moment I’d turned my back on him at the diner. I could get its sides up, could get them to trap everything inside – I just couldn’t get the lid shut. I rolled over onto my side staring out of my open window. It was getting dark. The stars were just beginning to show themselves. I wondered if he was looking at them too. *~*~* It’s been almost two months since I last saw him. I’ve tried not to think about him. I’ve tried not to wonder if he found who he was looking for, if he and she and Max and Isabel were out in the desert somewhere celebrating or phoning home or waiting for Nasedo. Since then I’ve had a total of five dreams. Four were of Max and one was of him. I don’t remember the Max ones very well (I’ve probably blocked them out of my memory as best as I could) except that they were similar to the first one I’d had. The one of Michael had been different. The colors hadn’t been as bright, the contrasts in them not as extreme, and I had been able to hear – in the desert with Max there was always silence. I felt different, more in control. I was making the conscious decision to walk up those steps and push open the door. It was dark inside. It was a small apartment, the walls were blurry and there was a vague outline of a kitchen counter to my right, and a brown couch to my left with a sheet hung over a window. The early morning sun shone through it making the light purple patterns glow. There was music softly playing somewhere, and he was standing in the room alone. He turned to look at me, surprised and not surprised, as the front door gently clicked shut behind me. He came to me slowly. I could feel what he was feeling, his confusion, his fear, his worry. I could feel him want to touch me. Opened my eyes, the fire had come He stopped a breath away from me and we could see the sparks now like little Fourth of July sparklers between us all around us lighting up the room Not for the end of days, not for the faithless ones not for vision understood burns because it has to burn change'll happen whether we are still or moving He reached out to me first Breathe in waves of doubt His hands cupping my face Bitter in your mouth Tilting it up for a kiss You will exhale cinnamon clouds I couldn’t breath and we held each other I felt like I was falling even as he lifted me up I could hear him whisper my name could feel the warmth of his bare skin against mine and I closed my eyes as the sparks floated lazily through the air like fireflies When it is quiet and still I can feel older here Change what I can and pray the hope will not disappear when we are not denying anything nothing is an enemy delicately balancing the perfect world My fingers were in his hair and his were tracing delicate circles on my back as he kissed a line of fire from one shoulder to the other Ride these waves of doubt The gentle glide of our tongues against each other as he lifted his lips from the hollow of my throat and brought them to mine Bitter in your mouth I held him so close I didn’t know where his body ended and mine began You will exhale cinnamon clouds ooh little heaven, little heaven ooh little heaven, little heaven We knelt down on the floor facing each other and I pulled his shirt off over his head He slid the straps of my top off of my shoulders and I wasn’t afraid I wasn’t self conscious because I knew this was a dream and in my dreams he thought I was beautiful As beautiful as I thought he was We sank down to the floor his body deliciously heavy on top of mine Riding waves of doubt I let him touch me Turns me inside out I let him love me And I will exhale a primal shout and I loved him Ooh little heaven, little heaven Ooh little heaven, little heaven I understand the fire will come… ooh little heaven, little heaven not for the strength of will or passion of anyone… ooh little heaven, little heaven I understand the fire will come… ooh little heaven, little heaven not for the end of days not for the faithless ones… I awoke trembling, still feeling him. My room was empty and cold, filled with the soft sound of my breathing. It had felt so real. I had heard him breathe, had heard his heart racing beneath my fingers, had felt every touch, every kiss, the gentle pressure of his body against mine in the darkness lit by stars of fire raining down from the ceiling. I held my shaking hands to my face and tried to forget. *~*~* About a week after I had dreamt about Michael my mother got a phone call. We had been hanging out on a Thursday night having our usual Must See TV date eating takeout and arguing whether or not Goran Visnjic was sexier that George Clooney (me for yes, and she for no) - basically having a nice moment of normalcy when the phone rang. I picked it up and handed it to her without answering since no one ever calls me and when she paused to listen after saying hello her face paled. "Hi mom." My grandmother hasn’t called us since I was a baby. I’ve never met her. I don’t even know what her voice sounds like. Mom got up from the couch almost spilling a carton of noodles and went to her bedroom. She shut the door quietly behind her. I was tempted to run into the kitchen and listen in on the phone in there. Grandma Elizabeth was calling from Roswell. What were the chances? My stomach twisted in anticipation – maybe fate and destiny didn’t hate me after all. Maybe my grandma had forgiven my mom for running away and getting pregnant at sixteen, maybe she wanted us to visit. Maybe she wanted to see me. I’ve always been curious about what my grandparents were like since mom never talked about them. Maybe we would visit and I would see Michael. Maybe he would forget he hated me for a minute and introduce me to Max and Isabel. Maybe he would smile at me and tell me that they hadn’t found the missing alien and that as long as I was around I might as well fill in for her. My mom came back into the room, her knuckles pressed against her lips, holding the cordless to her chest. I felt all my excitement at the prospect of seeing him again disappear. Something bad had happened. She sat down next to me, her eyes wet. "Mom…?" "Your grandpa’s sick honey – he’s been sick for a while and your grandma can’t take care of him by herself anymore. She wants us to come up and help until she can get him into a home." I watched as she took a deep shaky breath and put my arms around her, holding her as she finally let herself cry. I didn’t know what to say. "It’ll be okay mom" was all I could come up with. "Is it okay Maria? Will you be really mad at me if we leave here and live with them for a while?" I bit my lip, my eyes tearing up. My mom never cries. I knew this was important to her. "Whatever you want to do mom…" "Are you sure…honey won’t you miss your friends…?" "What friends?" That just made her cry harder and I felt guilty. "I was kidding mom…" I said forcing a laugh and hugging her a little tighter. "I have friends…we can write each other and visit – it’s not a big deal." "You’ll have to go to a new school…" "Mom. It’s okay. I don’t mind. I’ve always wanted to meet Grandma and Grandpa. Besides…" I said trying to make her smile "Now I can quit working at the Starbucks." "Yuck." She murmured smiling crookedly. "Yuck." I agreed resting my forehead against hers. *~*~* I walked along the sidewalk not really sure where I was going. I just had to get out of the house. It was too tense in there. Grandma seemed nice enough, but we both could tell she was still upset with mom (God I hope nothing like that ever happens between us. I mean we fight all the time, but we always forgive each other) and Grandpa didn’t recognize her. He kept calling me Amy and asking me who my "friend" was. She’s trying to pretend like it doesn’t bother her, that she understands it’s because he’s not well but I hear her at night in the bathroom, crying and running the sink to cover it up. My mom’s not a sad person, it’s not in her nature to be…so it’s…it’s just really hard seeing her like this and not being able to help. We’re going to get our own house or at least an apartment near my grandparent’s. Mom’s going to take over grandma’s shop that sells alien souvenirs and other touristy stuff, and I’m looking for a job around town – if you can even call it that. There’s not much here. I keep expecting a pack of tumbleweeds to come rolling down the street at any moment. It’s still pretty early though - I guess people just aren’t out and about yet. I approached the UFO Center and briefly thought about stopping in and checking if they had anything available, then decided against it when I peeked in the window and made out a life size diorama of a surgeon cutting into a prone alien body strapped down on a gurney. I shivered and backed away from it. There was a café across the street though that looked kinda cool. It had half a spaceship sticking out of it. The Crashdown Café. I smiled at it. I don’t think there is any chance I’ll ever be able to get a job around here that doesn’t have something to do with aliens. I crossed the street and saw that there was a sign in the window with a little alien drawn on it wearing an apron and holding a tray of food. It said "Waitress Needed". Waitress found. I pushed open the door and took the sign from the window. The place was pretty empty, with a few customers scattered around at tables and booths, and the only employee I could identify was sitting at the counter leaning over a textbook. I went up to her holding onto the sign and said, "Hi, are you still looking for a waitress?" The girl looked up from her textbook and smiled. "Yes! That sign has been up for ages and no one’s come by yet. I’m Liz." She held out her hand and I shook it a little surprised at how professional she was. She seemed to be the same age as me. "My dad owns the place – he’s out now but you can fill out an application in the back if you want…" "Sounds great." I followed her behind the counter into a little room just off the kitchen. "Are you new in town?" she asked as she dug around in a filing cabinet looking for the paper. "Yeah – my mom and I just moved here to be with my grandparents – Elizabeth and George Deluca?" "Oh the Deluca’s!" Liz smiled and pulled out the paper. "I know your grandma – she used to come in every once in a while with your grandpa – they really like our Will Smith Burgers. How are they doing?" She blew lightly on the paper and sneezed at the cloud of dust. "We don’t get a lot of applicants" she explained laughing as she handed it to me. I grinned and took it from her. "My grandma’s alright – grandpa’s not doing too well though." Her face clouded and the corner of her lip drooped down slightly. "I’m sorry to hear that." She said honestly "I’m sure he’s glad you’re here though." I smiled thinking of the way his eyes had lit up when we walked in. He didn’t know I was his granddaughter, but it made him happy thinking he was seeing my mom. "Yeah." *~*~* Liz had left me alone in the back room to fill out the application. I was actually getting excited about working there. I had asked her how she liked it and she said it was pretty cool and that the only drawback was the uniforms. I laughed and told her I thought the apron and antennas were cute. Liz seemed really nice. Maybe we’d end up being friends. I allowed myself to fantasize briefly about hanging out at the mall or studying or eating ice cream and gossiping about boys like I’d always wanted to do with a girlfriend back in Marathon. Maybe I could ask her about Michael, Max and Isabel. Maybe she knew them. Maybe they were friends. *~*~* When I was done and went back out to the café the place was packed. I caught Liz’s eye as she went by with a tray of dirty dishes and said, "Don’t you have anyone helping you today?" "Well Agnes is supposed to, but she’s kind of the reason we put up the sign for help in the first place. She takes these like never-ending breaks and a lot of them so usually it’s just me and sometimes my friend Alex helps out when things get busy like this…" "I could start now" I offered "I mean I know your dad’s not here to check this out" I said waving my application, "but it looks like you could use some help." "Are you sure wouldn’t mind?" "I’ve got nothing else to do - besides, you’re swamped" Liz flashed me a grateful smile and told me she’d get me an apron and an order book as soon as she dropped off the dishes. *~*~* The lunch shift was horrendous. Things finally slowed down around two thirty and Liz went to the storage room to make sure we had enough chicken filets left for the rest of the week. I was wiping down the counter after some obnoxious kid had knocked over his shake when someone sat down in front of me. I looked up into a pair of bright blue eyes. There was a dark haired guy sitting in front of me balancing a menu on the palm of his hand and smiling at me. "Hi" he said, "You’re new aren’t you?" I smiled back. "Yeah, I just started today." "Cool – I’m Alex, I’m a friend of Liz’s" he held out his hand and I shook it. "Maria," I said. He was cute. "You’ll probably see me a lot around here – I live off this food…" "Can I get you anything?" "Suuuure…I’ll have a orange soda." I nodded and gave the counter a final swipe before grabbing a cup and filling it at the soda machine. "Are you looking for Liz?" "Yeah I have to ask her a question – we have this huge geography test on Monday, and Liz is pretty good with that stuff." I set the soda down in front of him. "She’s in the back doing some inventory, but she’ll be out again in a minute." "I can wait." he said taking a sip. "So did you just move here?" "Yeah – my mom and I – we have family here." "Well, welcome to Roswell. What do you think so far? Pretty boring huh?" I laughed. "I’m from Marathon which is a lot like Roswell – just less alien stuff. So I guess I feel like I know the place already…" "Really? You’re from Marathon?" He sounded surprised. "Yup." "Cool – hey do you sing?" I laughed at his abrupt change of subject. "In the shower and when I’m alone in my car with the radio – why?" "I’m in this band…" he said pulling out a rumpled flier from his pocket. "…called The Whits – My last name’s Whitman, so it’s Wits with a "Wh"…" "Cute." I said and he grinned. "Yeah I thought so. Our lead singer got mono so we’re looking for a replacement so if you’re interested in auditioning for us let me know. See I’m trying to start an alternative-garage-band movement in Roswell…" I listened as he explained why this was an earth shattering idea, laughing, and finding myself agreeing with him. Alex was really cool. I really think I’m going to like living here. "Hey Alex" Liz came up beside me behind the counter. "You’ve met Maria?" "Yup – was just explaining to her how cool it would be if Roswell became the next Seattle…" "Has he asked you to audition for him yet?" Liz grinned turning to me, "I think he’s getting desperate – he asked me yesterday, and he knows I can’t sing…" "I’m leaving no stone unturned…" he agreed. "Oh Liz, I have to ask you a question about that geography test we have on Monday…" Liz frowned at him a moment smiling and he gave her a pointed look, "I have a question about Czechoslovakia…" Liz’s eyes widened a fraction. "Oh, yeah, sure." She turned to me "Maria thank you so much for helping me out today, but you can go home if you want – my dad’ll be here for the dinner shift and things’ll be pretty slow till then anyway. I’ll give you my number and we can figure out your hours and stuff tonight or you can just come by early tomorrow and we’ll get all organized – I’ll probably even be able to scrounge up one of these lovely green smock things for you by then!" She smiled brightly but it looked a little strained. "Okay," I said, "Sounds good – I’ll just go in back and get my stuff…" I left the counter and went back into the employee lounge. That was really weird. I’d just been told in not so many words to get lost. I decided not to take it personally – they just had something important to talk about. I was about to push open the door when I heard Alex say, "So Isabel isn’t pregnant…" "Oh thank God…" "Yeah, Nasedo dream walked and told her it was only to uh "set things in motion" to get them to see how things are supposed to be…" "How is she…?" "Well she’s relieved…but she said Michael seemed…sad…" Michael? Michael and Isabel. "Sad?" "Yeah…in the dream…she said she’d never seen him that happy…" "Alex…Michael is not in love with Isabel…and Isabel…she cares for you…she told you that didn’t she?" "Yeah…but…what if Nasedo is telling the truth? What if all this is just a part of their destinies and we…we have nothing to do with them…?" "I don’t believe that Alex." They were both quiet for a moment. I felt so guilty for eavesdropping but I couldn’t help it. I don’t think I could have moved away from the door if I wanted to. I was frozen. "What about Max? Has he been having any more dreams?" "Every once in a while he’ll have one…and I’m not jealous or anything…I mean we don’t even know if this girl is really real or if Nasedo is just trying to keep Max and I apart…Michael didn’t find her where Nasedo said she was…Max loves me and I love him – nothing’s going to change that, not Nasedo, not some girl that may or may not exist…You choose your own destiny – I really believe that. I’ll always choose Max…and I think…I think he’ll choose me…" I couldn’t listen to this anymore. I pushed open the door trying to look as not guilty and clueless as possible as I buttoned up my jacket. "I had the hardest time figuring out where your bathroom is…" I laughed. "I kept walking into closets and storage rooms." "Oh yeah…" Liz giggled, a little breathlessly. Her soft brown eyes were shining. "I forgot to tell you it’s down that weird little hallway…" I smiled at her. "Well, I guess I better get going…see you tomorrow…?" "Yup, and if you come by earlier we can have breakfast together? We make the best Flying Saucer pancakes in New Mexico…" "Sounds great…" "Nice meetin’ ya Maria" Alex grinned "I’ll probably see you here tomorrow." I laughed. "Nice to meet you too…" I waved and pushed open the door of the café and stumbled down the sidewalk, feeling sick. Isabel had a pregnancy scare…with Michael…they had had sex…they were together…"like a sister" my ass…This is stupid…I can’t be jealous…I’ve no right to be…Michael hates me…why can’t I forget about him…God I only knew him for two days…why can’t I forget…why do I want to see him so bad…why did I have that dream…that amazing dream that felt so real…that made me feel understood…wanted…loved…it was just a dream…just a stupid dream like the stupid Max dreams…they don’t mean anything- "Oh my God…" I rammed into someone coming down the sidewalk, and the impact sent both of us tumbling to the ground. I opened my eyes to see who I was lying on top of. I was staring into his eyes. Beautiful endless brown eyes that widened when they met mine. I couldn’t breathe. It was him. It was really him. Max. I scrambled to my feet backing away from him. I almost tripped over my purse and he caught me. His fingers were wrapped around my wrist and his bare skin on mine was all it took. A rush of images – images from the dreams that I had tried to block out - came rushing over me, making me dizzy. We jumped away from each other and I knew by the shocked look in his eyes that he had seen them too. We were both shaken. We were both shaking. "It’s you…" God, I was not about to go through this again. I opened my mouth to deny what he was thinking, but I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t just scream "I’m not an alien!" and run away from him. I couldn’t deny that I had had the same dreams he had had. I couldn’t deny that I felt connected when he touched me and that some part of me was screaming "yes" and another "no" just as loudly. I leaned towards him so no one would hear, and I knew he wanted to run just as much as I did. "I’m not her…I’m not. It’s impossible." I started to back away again, and when he reached out to stop me, I ran. *~*~* I didn’t stop running until I got to my grandparent’s house. I went around to the back and collapsed in a trembling heap on the porch steps. I knew I would run into one of them sooner or later. I knew Max would know my face if it was true what Michael had said about him dreaming about me. I just didn’t know that that would happen if he touched me - that I would see his dreams, would see that they were the same as mine, that I would feel what I felt, what he felt during them…lust colored by revulsion and the desperate knowledge that we couldn’t control ourselves. *~*~* I didn’t meet Liz for breakfast the next morning. She had called last night, and we had worked out the hours then. I didn’t want to go back to the Crashdown any sooner than I had too since I’m pretty sure that’s where Max had been heading when we had "run" into each other. It would be pointless to quit the job (even though I know I’ll see them there since they’re obviously friends with Liz and Alex). If I didn’t see them at the Crashdown I’d see them at school anyway. It was unavoidable. I was nervous about seeing Max again, and the more I thought about it I was scared of seeing Michael. There were so many questions…my head was spinning with them and I couldn’t think straight. It didn’t make any sense that Max and I were dreaming about each other, that Nasedo had given Michael my address…that Nasedo even knew anything about me… I didn’t know the answers to those questions they’d be asking the next time I saw them. The only thing I did know was that I was not one of them. I was not an alien, and the only reason I was in Roswell was because my grandmother needed my mom and I – not because destiny and fate had conspired, not because the stars wanted it. Not because I wanted it. *~*~* I was almost done with the dinner shift when they walked into the Crashdown. Max, Isabel and Michael. I felt them before I saw them. The air changed. It became electric. I gave my last table their check, and caught Liz’s arm as she was on her way to their table. "Do you mind if I leave a little early? My shift’s up in five minutes but I don’t have the car tonight and I hate walking home when it’s so dark…" Lame excuse I know, but Liz just smiled and patted my hand. "No problem. I’ll see you tomorrow…" I all but ran to the lounge to change out of my uniform. I had felt Michael staring at me the whole time I had been talking to Liz, and I felt his eyes follow me now as I made my way to the back of the café. I untied my apron and threw it into my locker and quickly started unbuttoning my uniform. I kicked out of it and jammed it in along with the apron and antennas. It would be wrinkled as hell tomorrow but I had to get out of here. I squirmed into my jeans and had just zipped them up when I heard the door swing open. Pleasebelizpleasebelizpleasebeliz "What the hell are you doing here?" Shit. Where the fuck was my shirt? "Getting dressed…" I said trying to keep my voice steady as I finally found my T-shirt and pulled it on over my head. I turned around to face him, and realized as soon as I did that it was a bad idea. He was standing in front of the door with his hands in his pockets glaring at me. He didn’t sound as angry as I thought he would. And his eyes…oh my God…those eyes that had looked at me like I was the only thing in the world, those eyes that had memorized every inch of my body before tracing it with his fingers in my dream…they were studying me like he wanted to take me apart to see how I worked. I swallowed as I felt my knees start to tremble. He looked away from me suddenly and squinted out of the diamond shaped window into the café. "They don’t know that I found you before in Marathon. I lied to them. You better do the same tonight." "Tonight?" I was having trouble breathing. "Yeah. We’re going to the desert - all of us. We’re meeting Nasedo there." "Michael…I told you…I’m not one of you…" He came further into the room, not stopping until he was inches away from me, and when I stepped back my shoulder blades were pressing against Liz’s locker. He had me trapped just like he had in my room that first night when he made me see them in the cave. "Have you ever asked your mom about your dad? Where he came from? Who he was?" What the hell? "Michael-" I began warningly. "Maybe you should", he cut me off. His eyes were so cold. "Get your stuff and let’s go." "No." "No?" "Who the hell do you think you are ordering me around like this? I’m not in Roswell because of you or Max or Isabel or Nasedo. I’m here because I have to be – because I have a family that needs me – so you can just knock off all this intimidation crap – I don’t want to have anything to do with you or anyone else involved with you. I’m not a fucking alien. I am a fucking waitress and I am done with my shift. I am going home!" He was really scaring me – this whole mess was really scaring me…I can’t believe I had spent so much time thinking about this moment, thinking about him… I tried to step around him but he blocked me. "I let you go home before. I’m not doing it again. I can’t…Maria…" I’ve never heard him say my name before. "Nothing bad will happen to you – I promise…we’re just trying to figure this all out. Nasedo’s coming back tonight, because of you…whether you’re one of us or not you’re involved and there’s nothing any of us can do about it so please…just stop arguing with me for once…and just come with me." I stared into his eyes and they pleaded with mine. He looked as scared as I was. Why can’t I say "no"? Why can’t I ever say "no" to him? *~*~* And so I was back almost to where I had started, clinging to his back as the wind whipped by, pressing my cheek against his leather shoulder, close to tears and screaming at him even though I knew he’d never be able to hear me over the roar of the engine. We were going to the desert. I would have laughed if I were sure it wouldn’t come out as a sob. I was finally going to the desert with Michael and it wasn’t going to be what I had dreamed of – staring up at the stars with him like we had done in the woods, marveling at how many there were, how close they seemed just like that one night years ago when I had paused in the middle of an empty field gazing at the sky, my fear of being caught out of my cabin past curfew forgotten. We pulled off from the main road and sped down something that looked a little better than a dirt path. I squinted over his shoulder and could see the rock looming before us. We were at that ranch he had told me about. He stopped the bike and got off. "They’re not here yet…" he turned his back on me, like he couldn’t even stand to look me in the eye anymore. "Max probably wanted to find out if you did anything to Liz…" "Did anything? Why would he think I’d do anything to her? I like Liz…" "He thinks Nasedo sent you. He thinks the reason you’re here is to fuck up his relationship with her. He thinks you’re making him have those dreams." I stared at him, gaping at him. What the hell was this? I’m the bad guy now? "Really? And does Max realize the world does not revolve around him and his girlfriend?" he smirked and kicked at a stone on the ground. "He told you about the dreams…" I said softly, "…what he was doing with me in them…" he looked up at me then, his face unreadable, and his eyes so dark, as dark as the night sky. "Yeah he did. But none of that shit matters anyway – he doesn’t want you. He doesn’t love you. He never will. He wants Liz and they belong together no matter what you say. There’s nothing you can do about it." I got off the bike and stalked up to him, getting in his face like he was always getting in mine. "What makes you think I want to do anything about it?! Did it ever occur to you that I don’t want to be dreaming about him anymore than he does about me? I hate this just as much as he does and I understand even less of what’s happening than he does! Don’t you think this is scary for me? I know you couldn’t care less that I go to sleep at night fucking terrified that I’m not going to be able to control myself that I’m going to wake up feeling like I’ve just…like I’ve…you don’t know what it’s like okay?! If anybody is doing anything to anybody making them have these dreams, it’s not me! I can’t do shit like that because for the thousandth time I AM NOT ONE OF YOU!" "STOP SAYING THAT! STOP LYING! YOU KNOW JUST AS WELL AS I DO WHAT YOU ARE!" "AND WHAT MAKES YOU SO SURE I KNOW?!" "YOU STAYED WITH ME! YOU…you let a person you’d never seen before drag you out of your house and take you to another state…either some part of you knew the truth or you were just lying to me the whole time about everything…" "Maybe I was! No – you know what? There’s no "maybe" – I was lying to you. I realized that it wasn’t true the second we left Marathon!" "Then why didn’t you tell me then?! Why did you spend the night with me? Why did you let me take you…Why would you lie?" I stared at him, breathing hard, blinking back tears, pissed at myself for almost crying in front of him, thinking, because I wanted to be with you… "What about you?" I said instead. "What about me?" "You don’t think I’m like you. You don’t believe that I belong here anymore than I do…" "You don’t know what you’re talking about…" "Michael if you really believed, you never would have let me leave with the Sheriff – no matter what I believed, not matter what I said…you wouldn’t have let me go…" "I knew you were one of us. I know you are…" "Then why didn’t you come back for me…?" I whispered. "Why did you let me go…" He stared at me, silent. I felt like I was dying inside, gasping for air, for answers, for all this to be over. For my life to go back to what it had been even though it had been pretty shitty - I at least knew who I was in Marathon, I at least knew what I felt was real. He took a deep breath, opened his mouth to speak, and then shut it when a jeep came roaring down the path and pulled up next to the bike. It was Max and Isabel. I watched them climb out of the jeep and make their way over to where Michael and I stood beside each other. He stepped away from me and I tried not to care. Isabel is beautiful…more than beautiful – she’s stunning. I watched her pull her long bond hair into a ponytail as she walked confidently toward us, feeling completely intimidated even though she hadn’t said a word yet. Max followed her, his mouth set in a determined line, his brown eyes hard. I was beginning to feel cornered. "This’s Maria" Michael mumbled at them jerking a thumb in my direction. They stared at me. I stared at them. "I’msorryIknockedyouoveryesterday." I said to Max and he blinked at me. "It’s okay…", he said quietly. "I wasn’t paying attention…I should have been looking where I was going…" "Me too…" I whispered and took a deep breath. "Look I don’t know what’s going on…I…I don’t know why I’ve dreamt about you…I haven’t done it on purpose…and I’m not…I’m not making you dream about me…I can’t do that kind of stuff…I’m just a normal boring teenager…I’m… just a human…" "That can’t be." Isabel said. "Nasedo specifically said your name…he…he doesn’t want us to have any involvement with humans…why would he want us to contact you if you weren’t like us?" "I don’t know…I don’t know how he even knows who I am…Look, I told – what’s your name again?" Michael blinked at me "Michael." "I told Michael that I couldn’t be like you guys because I have a mother. I was born, I was a baby – I didn’t come out of some pod seven years old…" "How did you know about the pods?" Max asked and Michael answered before I could. "I told her about them. I told her who Nasedo is on the way over here…" "Where is he anyway?" Isabel murmured biting her lip and scanning the desert. "What about your dad?" Max turned to me. "I don’t know him. He left when I was a baby." "Maybe…" "What? He was an alien? No." I said feeling sick. That couldn’t be possible because that would make me…that would make me a walking National Enquirer headline…it would make me a fucking hybrid…a freak… "No that’s impossible." "Why is it impossible?" Michael spoke up finally, and I wanted to hit him for pushing it. "Because it is…" I was actually crying now because it was starting to become a possibility, the only explanation. I could barely see Isabel coming towards me and jumped when I felt her hand on my shoulder. "Nasedo will explain all this…" she said softly trying to comfort me, "That’s why he wanted us all here tonight…at least that’s what he told me when he dream walked last night…Maybe you’re right Maria, maybe you’re not like us…but…I can’t deny the fact that I feel like I know you…" "I felt like that too." Michael said and crossed his arms across his chest defensively when we looked at him. "At the Crashdown, when I was trying to get her here." "There’s definitely something about you that’s familiar…" Max said quietly. "The same thing that made us all recognize Nasedo when he showed himself. We all knew that we were connected to him somehow. We all felt it…I think we’re all feeling it now." "Do you feel like you know us?" Isabel said softly. "Yes…"I whispered, pushing the tears off my face. What was I going to do? Lie? That’s how everything got started – I lied to Michael by not telling him right away that I wasn’t an alien. And we were lying even now about not having met each other before tonight. I was sick of lying I wasn’t going to do it anymore. "I feel like I know you…all of you…" "Do you have any powers? I mean can you do stuff?" "Sometimes…I…um in second grade I accidentally started a fire without any matches or anything…I just thought about it and then it was happening…" Isabel’s eyes widened fractionally, and Max stepped in a little closer. "What else?" he asked. "I fixed a broken cup once without touching it…and another time there was this cat…it was limping, and when I touched it it was okay…I don’t know…stuff like that I guess…" "Does your mom know you can do those things?" I shook my head. "No…it’s not like it happens a lot…No one knows. Who wants to be different in a small town?" Isabel smiled softly, she looked a little sad. "Tell us about it." *~*~* We waited for over an hour and he never came. Michael was angry. Isabel and Max just looked worried. "I don’t think he’s coming…" "Big surprise." Michael cut in and Max took a deep breath. "It’s getting late…We should probably just go home and wait until he tries to contact us again…" "That’s all we ever do…Wait for him…wait for him to come and tell us what we’re doing here, wait for him to tell us what she’s doing here…We’ve met with him twice and he hasn’t told us jack shit…" "Michael…" "What? You two aren’t sick of this? Maybe he doesn’t know anything…I mean, he shows up, tells us he’s one of us, then disappears. He shows up again months later and tells us to find her, then disappears…What is that all about? He’s setting something up Maxwell…" "So what are you saying Michael?" Isabel cut in "You don’t trust him anymore?" "I’m not saying that…" "Because we have to trust him, we don’t really have a choice…" "I know that…" "Then what are you saying? " "I’m saying I’m sick of not knowing. I’m sick of waiting – I’ve been waiting my whole life for something and the more I think about it, the more I wait, the more I’m starting to think I’m never going to find it." "There’s nothing we can do until he decides to show himself. We might as well just go home…" Michael kicked at the ground frustrated and got onto his bike as Max and Isabel climbed into the jeep. He stared at me and I climbed on and hooked my arms around his waist. I could feel the anger and disappointment rolling off of him in waves. I knew he wasn’t angry at me. I knew he was just frustrated. He waited until Max and Isabel had driven away before turning around to look at me. "Thanks…for not telling them that I found you in Marathon…" I stared down at my hands. He was too close for me to meet his eyes. "Sure…" "And I know this is weird…I know you’re scared. And I’m sorry okay…for yelling and stuff…" "I’m sorry too." He was quiet for a moment and I could feel him looking at me. "I’ll drive you home. I just have to stop at my place and get some stuff first." *~*~* I followed him up the stairs to his apartment. I told him I had to use his bathroom, but really I was just curious. I wanted to see where he lived, what his place was like. It was only fair – he had wandered around in my house like it was nobody’s business. Mostly though I just didn’t want to sit outside in the dark all alone, because then I would start thinking and I was desperately trying not to think. I didn’t want to think about the possibility that my dad was…not human. He unlocked the door and the second I stepped inside I felt…strange. Like I’d been here before even though I knew that was impossible. I followed him through the living room and down a little hall. He gestured to the left at the bathroom and went into the other room across from it. I closed the door behind me and took a deep breath trying to get rid of that nagging feeling. I stared into the mirror. I was a mess. I looked…haunted. I ran my fingers through my hair trying to stop it from sticking up all over the place like his always did. He didn’t have a comb in here. Why wasn’t I surprised. I took a deep breath and opened the door. I heard him rummaging around in the other room and his muffled curses. I decided I’d just wait for him in the living room and continued on down the hall. The first thing I saw was the window. Or rather, I saw what was over the window. It was a tapestry with light purple designs on it that glowed just a little bit from the street lamp outside. I had a flash suddenly of what it looked like with the sun shining through it. I could see the purple designs so bright and vibrant, I could see little sparkles swimming in front of it lighting up the parts of the room the sunlight couldn’t reach. I knew what that looked like because I’d seen it before. I’d seen it in my dream…that amazing dream… "What’s wrong?" "Huh? What?" "You were like hyperventilating…" "I was…I was looking at that…" I pointed at the window, my hand shaking just a little. "Oh yeah. Isabel." "She gave it to you?" "Yeah." Oh. "So what are you?" "What am I." "Yeah, you and Isabel." I was not looking at the window anymore. I was looking at the couch. I knew that too. I swallowed thickly. I knew that that couch would be there, and I knew that if I looked across the room there’d be a counter and that it would separate the kitchen from the living room. I forced myself to keep talking. It’s this bizarre habit I have where whenever I’m starting to freak out I just start talking and talking and asking questions even though I don’t want to know the answers to what I’m asking. "Are you two together?" Case in point. I was now looking at the floor in front of the door. I knew what that carpet would feel like under my skin, my back. "No." "No?" "No." "Oh. Because I thought, you know, you guys were worried about her being pregnant." "Where’d you hear about that?" "I umm overheard Liz and Alex the other day…so you two had sex huh?" Shut up Maria, just shut up. He was silent, and when I finally looked up at him away from the floor he was staring at me, frowning. "No…we didn’t…do that. We dreamt we did it and we didn’t know…we thought…but she wasn’t. It doesn’t work like that with us. Probably one of the only times Nasedo has told us something helpful…" "No kidding." I forced a laugh and then said quietly "Dreams suck." "Yeah…" I looked into his eyes, wondering if he knew…"Not all of them though…" "Yeah…" I whispered. "Michael?" "Yeah?" "You didn’t answer my question before…" "What question?" "If you…if you really thought I was like you…why did you let me go…?" "Well you didn’t answer my question either…" "Which one?" "Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t like me before I dragged you all over the place…" "I asked you first." "So?" "So answer my question and I’ll answer yours." He took a deep breath and started unfolding the sleeping bag he was holding and then started refolding it again. "The dreams." "The dreams." "Yeah the ones Max was having about you and the ones I knew you were having about him…They’re like the ones Isabel and I were having about each other…" "Were?" "…Are…stop interrupting." "Okay." "…" "Sorry." "Anyway when uh Nasedo told us she couldn’t get pregnant from a dream…he told us that the dreams were just supposed to ah…guide us or whatever…I dunno…they were trying to tell us that we’re supposed to be with each other. But Isabel and I don’t feel that way about each other." He said quickly. "I figured that that’s what was happening with Max’s dreams…that they were saying that you two were meant to be together…" He was trying to get around giving me a straight answer, and I wasn’t about to let that happen. "Michael if you believed that why did you let me go?" He held the sleeping bag to his chest and swallowed. He wouldn’t look at me. "Because I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want you to be with him. I thought if I let you go and…pretended like I’d never seen you…everything would go back to the way it was – Max with Liz, Isabel with Alex…and you not with him." "Michael…" "Yeah, so I answered your stupid question. Your turn – Why’d you lie?" I closed my eyes for a moment thinking about what he said, trying to keep my breathing steady, my heart under control, my knees from shaking. I opened my eyes and noticed a tape player sitting on the counter behind him. I slowly walked toward it, toward him. "I lied to you…" "Why…" I touched the play button on the tape player. I pressed down. I knew what song would be there. It would be our song. "Because I wanted to be with you." I looked at him. His lips parted with a sudden intake of breath. "That was real…?" "You tell me…" "I didn’t do it…not on purpose…I’m sorry…I-" I brought a finger to his lips, silencing him. "I probably helped you out a little…" Opened my eyes, the fire had come I reached for him first, because I knew he was scared. I touched his face and he let me slide my fingers into his crazy hair. Not for the end of days, not for the faithless ones When my hands cupped his face I felt the sparks again. I didn’t need to see them, I knew they were there. Not for vision understood burns because it has to burn change'll happen whether we are still or moving He slowly leaned down, stopping a breath away from a kiss, his bottom lip just brushing my upper lip. Breathe in waves of doubt His fingers gently tilting up my chin Bitter in your mouth He kissed me and it was better than a dream. It was real. You will exhale cinnamon clouds When it is quiet and still I can feel older here Change what I can and pray the hope will not disappear when we are not denying anything nothing is an enemy delicately balancing the perfect world Ride these waves of doubt Bitter in your mouth You will exhale cinnamon clouds ooh little heaven, little heaven ooh little heaven, little heaven Riding waves of doubt Turns me inside out And I will exhale a primal shout We fell into each other. There was no more fear, no more worry. I had come for him. He was here for me. We trembled in each other’s arms, and he touched me, his eyes found mine and nothing needed to be said. We understood each other in a way that went beyond words. I touched him, I held him. I loved him and he whispered my name. Ooh little heaven, little heaven Ooh little heaven, little heaven I understand the fire will come… ooh little heaven, little heaven not for the strength of will or passion of anyone… ooh little heaven, little heaven I understand the fire will come… ooh little heaven, little heaven not for the end of days not for the faithless ones… *~*~* We were lying on the floor together tangled up in the sleeping bag we had shared in the woods. He was sleeping, and I felt his chest rise and fall under my cheek. Looking at him like this…vulnerable…trusting me enough to fall asleep in my arms…I knew he’d never trusted anyone like this before…enough to give himself, to show himself for who he really was. He was beautiful. I lifted my head and kissed the underside of his jaw. He smiled softly and rolled onto his stomach, an arm sneaking around my waist and pulling me closer. He opened his eyes. "I slept…" he sounded surprised, and I laughed, brushing his hair off his forehead. "Don’t you usually?" "No." "What, after sex or just in general?" He was blushing…After what we just did he was getting all embarrassed on me… "Sometimes I have nightmares." "Sometimes?" "All the time." "What about…?" He was quiet and I immediately regretted asking him. I ran my hand through his hair and said softly, "It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me…" "You just…you don’t need to hear that stuff…I don’t want to give it to you…I want to give you what’s good…" He echoed my caresses, his finger lightly tracing my ear. "I didn’t have one last night…and I didn’t have one when we were out in the woods…" "You slept *then*? That was so uncomfortable…" "Tell me about it. You promised you weren’t a kicker…" he pretended to glare at me then said quietly, "I think it was because you were there. I…um I thought about you a lot…y’know after…I couldn’t stop thinking…I went camping a couple weeks ago and it wasn’t the same. I spent the whole night looking up at the sky and…missing you next to me. I couldn’t understand why I felt like that. I barely knew you. It was two days…less than that…" I smiled hearing him say what I had thought so many times myself. "I know…I felt like that too." "Everything reminded me of you…I even made Isabel make me a tape of that song because it reminded me of you. I mean all I have are Metallica CDs y’know and I love them but all I wanted to do was listen to that song…" We were quiet for a while, looking at each other, touching each other. I was amazed at how good he felt under my hands, my lips, amazed at the contented noises he made as I ran my fingers up and down his back and kissed the back of his neck. I noticed that there was a shadow on his shoulder that didn’t make sense, and I leaned over him to get a better look. It was a tattoo. It was a star. I smiled at it. "Where did this come from…" "Birthday present." "Birthday present. From who?" "Hank." "Who’s Hank?" "He was my foster father." "Your foster father gave you a tattoo for your birthday?" "Yeah. It wasn’t really my birthday though. I dunno…for some reason he thought it was and he came back to the trailer and hauled me off to the tattoo place and he told me to pick something before he kicked my ass so I did." "Michael…" "No…It’s not a big deal…forget about it." Not a big deal? "Forget about it?! He forced you-" "I can get rid of it if I want to, or, you know, Max can…I’m not good at that stuff but I never asked him. It kinda grew on me. I don’t mind it…" I looked at him amazed at the lack of emotion in his eyes even though I knew he was remembering what Hank had done to him, and I knew it had hurt then - I could feel it in his body, the muscles were tense under his skin. Maybe he had metal boxes that he put bad memories in too. "It’s over. I’m fine." "Michael…" "I don’t want to talk about it anymore." "Okay…" I whispered and he pulled me down, closer to him, and buried his face in my neck. I kissed the curve of his shoulder, feeling his pulse against my lips. I wasn’t going to push him. He didn’t want to talk about it. I changed the subject because I knew it was what he wanted, "Michael…do you believe in destiny?" "If you’re asking me if I think you’re destined to be with Max – God, no – you’d end up killing him because he wouldn’t fight back with you…" he joked, and I smirked into his shoulder then said, "Seriously though…do you?" "I don’t know…" he mumbled, "I don’t…I don’t like the idea of my life being planned out without any say so from me…" "Yeah…you’re right…" I didn’t like that idea much either. Destiny…I’d always thought it was a kind of romantic concept in a way…but I guess only as long as it coincided with what I wanted…. "So do you?" "I don’t know…maybe I mean fate? I don’t know…I just can’t help wondering if some things are meant to be…like me being here in Roswell…No matter how much I thought of you…wanted you…I don’t think I would have gotten here if it wasn’t for my grandmother calling us. She and my mom haven’t spoken to each other in years. She wouldn’t accept a phone call or a Christmas card, let alone help from us, and then…she called…and here I am. With you…"He had been kissing my neck before and he stopped. "What is it?" He pulled back slightly and sat up, turning his back on me. He was quiet for a moment, thinking, and then said carefully, "What if this isn’t our destiny? I mean if there is a destiny." "What do you mean…?" "What if you post-phoned it by not coming with me that day like you said – that even though you did that you still got here eventually…what if we’re doing that again? What if we’re doing it now by doing this…" "By doing what?" "By being together…what if Max is who you’re supposed to be with…what if I’m supposed to be with Isabel and we’re just delaying the inevitable…" "I thought you didn’t like the idea of destiny planning out your life." "Just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist…that it hasn’t already decided -" "Do you want to be with Isabel?" "No…" "Then it’s not your destiny." "How do you know?" I stared at him. "What are you really saying with all this?" "I’m not saying anything…I’m just considering all the possibilities. Besides, you brought it up." "No – I brought up destiny or fate or whatever the hell it is bringing me here to you not to Max. Michael…you don’t think…you don’t think I’m supposed to be with you…" "You dreamt about him…" "I dreamt about you…" He looked at me. I could see him shutting down. "That was my fault." "Listen you idiot I dreamt dreamt about you! Rock, desert, stars, freaky red designs on the sand, the whole thing." "If we were meant to be together how come I didn’t have one about you." I stared at him stunned. I hadn’t thought… "You didn’t?" "No. I didn’t." I swallowed. "I don’t care." "The dreams mean something – why else would we all have them?" "Michael we still don’t even know if I’m like you guys…" "Would you stop saying that. You know you are, I know you are, we all know you are. It’s impossible for you not to be. There is no way in hell you could have seen what you saw – the map, the constellation, the rock - all of it, if you weren’t, so stop deluding yourself! Why are you so afraid to admit it to yourself – why are you afraid to be an alien?" "Michael if I am I’m still not! I’m only half! Half human, half alien! I’m a freak is what I am – I’m not an alien, I’m not a human being, I’m a thing. How am I supposed to admit that to myself?! That I don’t belong with you or with them…" I kicked off the sleeping bag that was tangled around my legs and reached for my clothes. I wasn’t going to cry. I was too sad and too angry to do anything but yank on my shirt and search for my pants. I picked his up and threw them at him. Mine were underneath. I put them on. He wasn’t saying a word. I wasn’t looking at him. "Maria…" I ignored him and picked up my jacket. He grabbed my ankle when I walked past him. I looked down. He was holding the ring out to me – the ring he had given me last night after we had made love. He had wordlessly taken it off his finger, and gently took my hand in his, then stared into my eyes as he slipped it onto mine. It had fallen off a second later because it didn’t fit, not even on my thumb, but we had just laughed and tried it again. When it had fallen off the third time we had left it where it lay between us and he had reached for me, murmuring into my ear that he’d fix it later, before covering my body with his once again. He held it out to me now. I don’t know if he really wanted me to take it. After what he’d said…he hadn’t denied my accusation about him not believing we were supposed to be with each other. How could he expect me to take it…how could I take it… If he didn’t believe in us how could I? "If you don’t believe we’re supposed to be together…if you think you belong with Isabel and me with Max…why did we do this? Why did we…make love? Or was it just sex to you…" "No, Maria…it wasn’t just…" "Every time I had a dream about you I could feel how worried you were, how scared you were about wanting me. Why did you feel that way?" he wouldn’t answer me. "It was because you thought this was wrong wasn’t it? You thought we were wrong together and you slept with me anyway…" I laughed bitterly. "I don’t know what to do with that…" "Maria…" he said it again, still holding out the ring, and I looked him straight in the eye. "It doesn’t fit." I tried to walk away, but he wouldn’t let go. "We’ll make it fit." "Give it to Isabel." His fingers slid away from my ankle, and I walked away. *~*~* I walked home in the rain I hadn’t realized was falling until I was completely soaked and shivering. I was almost grateful for it – it made it easier to pretend I wasn’t crying. It was early, maybe five in the morning. I was going to be in trouble if she had noticed I was gone all night, and facing my mom’s questions was just more than I could handle right now. I snuck in through the back of the house and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw her curled up on the couch fast asleep. That meant she had gotten home late last night and had decided to camp out on the couch instead of waking me since we were sharing a room. She’s done that at least twice since we’ve been here. She still had her clothes on from her date last night. I went to my room and took off my clothes. I pulled on my mom’s kimono and went to the bathroom down the hall and turned on the shower. I stared at myself in the mirror as steam began to cloud my reflection, and took off the kimono. I was glowing. Delica! te swaths of sliver were swept across my bare skin in feathery fingerprints, over my shoulders, breasts, stomach, and hips. They were his touches. Go away I closed my eyes, concentrating, and when I opened them again they were gone. *~*~* When I was done in the shower I went back to my room and laid down on the bed. My throat hurt, and my eyes were still burning. I missed him. I wish he would have come after me, followed me out in the rain…we could have had a Breakfast At Tiffany’s moment…gazing at each other through the downpour, then holding each other and kissing all the hurt, the doubts, the fears away. Too bad this is real life and if you want the kind of love they have in the movies you have to pay $7.50 for it and experience it second hand. Too bad this is real life and you don’t always get your Prince Charming (even when he isn’t a prince and isn’t exactly charming). Real life is just cruel enough where the one you fall in love with is an alien who’s scruffy and moody and sexy and beautiful with a soul full of stars and a heart that won’t let itself be happy… Real life is cruel enough where the one you’re in love with isn’t in love with you. "’Ria? What are you doing up so early?" My mom wandered in from the hall and slumped down tiredly in the butterfly chair across from the bed. I shrugged still lying on my back. "I couldn’t stay asleep so I decided to just get up and get it over with…" I lied, "So what did you do last night?" I could hear her try and smile even though I knew she was suffering a major hangover. She must have really liked this guy. "I went out for drinks with Jim Valenti." "How do I know that name?" "He’s the Sheriff…" "Another one? What is it with you and cops?" She giggled then groaned and pressed her hands to her forehead. "It’s funny…I actually had a really big crush on him when I was a kid…I almost got up the nerve to ask him out once…" I sat up and looked at her. The idea of my mom being nervous around a guy is astounding - She’s beautiful, and I’ve seen pictures of her when she was my age. A part of me was always so jealous of how cool and confident she always looked. She could have had anyone she wanted in high school – she *still* could. Jim Valenti must really be something if she had to "get up the nerve". "Why didn’t you?" "Ask him out?" "Yeah?" "I met your father." Oh. "Oh." "What did you do last night?" "Nothing special." I whispered. "Mom?" "Hmmm?" "What was he like?" "Who? Jim?" "No…dad…" She was quiet for a moment. I guess she was surprised. I’ve never asked her about him before. I always assumed it would upset her and so I made up what he was like in my head for myself when I was a kid. He was tall, blond (because my hair had to come from somewhere), and he was smart. He liked to sing and play the guitar. He would have taught me. He liked his coffee black with a lot of sugar, and he had a weakness for anything cinnamon. He liked to go camping, he loved the stars. And he loved my mother. It was all bullshit. I knew it even when I was thinking that stuff, making it all up. I looked at her again. She didn’t seem upset, she was thinking. "I don’t really remember that much." She said finally. "What do you mean you don’t remember?" "Well…his name was Nick. I knew him for a week. We had sex and when I found out I was pregnant he convinced me to run away with him. That’s pretty much it. Oh, that and he wouldn’t let me go to the hospital when I was in labor…bastard…after I had you he left." "That’s it?" "That’s it." "You didn’t…love each other? Not even a little?" "Honey we barely knew each other…the whole thing was just weird…" I shivered. "How was it weird?" "I don’t know…the way he made me feel. The second our eyes met I wanted him. I didn’t care about anything else, and when he left…nothing. I didn’t feel anything for him. I was pissed that he left for your sake, not mine…then I got over it. He probably wouldn’t have been a good father. There was something so cold about him, even when we were together. I looked at you and I loved you, and I knew I would be fine – that we both would be fine as long as we were together. We didn’t need him. We still don’t. If I can survive having a baby when I was one I can survive anything, and if you can survive me as your mother than you’ll do just fine too." I smiled at her and then stopped when I remembered what she had said. "What do you mean he wouldn’t let you go to the hospital?" "He wouldn’t let me leave the friggin’ cabin we were staying at. At first I was pissed off – y’know obviously since if we didn’t get to the hospital I didn’t get any drugs to make it easier, but he just *looked* at me and I found myself saying okay even though on the inside I felt like ripping his head off." She shrugged. "Like I said – weird." "Yeah…" I whispered. *~*~* No hospital. Of course he wouldn’t want a hospital. He didn’t know what I would look like. If I would look human or…not. How would he know if I was human on the inside? I’ve never had to go to the hospital. I’ve never been sick. Ever. Did he make that happen so I would never have to set foot into a hospital? So no one would ever have the opportunity to see if I *was* different on the inside? It made sense. I wasn’t human. I couldn’t have been, unless all of this was one huge ridiculous coincidence and I think we’ve already established I don’t believe in those. I wandered down the halls of West Roswell high weirded out by the fact that after everything I’ve been through, after everything I’ve learned about myself I still had to deal with a new school. After my weekend the last thing I needed to deal with were teachers who forced you to stand in front of a class and introduce yourself like anyone really cared one way or another where you were from and what brought you to Roswell to a bunch of catatonic students at eight a.m. on a Monday morning. I couldn’t find anything, I didn’t recognize anybody, and all I could think about was the fact that I was most likely part alien, and that I had lost my virginity to a boy I’d technically known for less than a week, which meant I’d beaten my mother’s record for fastest-losing-of-virginity-to-a-near-stranger. It’s such a stupid phrase anyway. I didn’t lose my virginity – I know exactly where it went. A door beside me opened suddenly and I felt warm fingers wrap themselves around my wrist and pull me inside a dark room. I knew who it was before I saw him. The familiar sparks I felt where his fingers were told me. He didn’t let go once the door clicked shut behind us and the loud buzz of the hallway dimmed to a soft murmur. I raised my head to look him in the eye determined to show him that I didn’t care about anything that had ever happened between us, determined to show him that I hadn’t thought a bit about what we had done, what we had said or not said to each other. His fingers loosened their grip around my wrist and moved up my arm until his hand rested on my shoulder, slipping under the collar of my shirt, his thumb gently sliding back and forth along my collarbone. His eyes were dark like I remembered from last night or maybe it was just the shadows from the small cramped room he had dragged me into. He stared at me, his mouth opening and closing several times in that way he had that meant he had something to say but didn’t know where to start. He stepped in closer owning up to the fact that he does what he means instead of saying it. He lowered his head slowly, giving me a chance to push him away, continuing the stroking of my collarbone, before traveling up my neck and cupping the side of my face. So slowly he was giving me every opportunity to get away and I think he knew I wouldn’t take it. I was aching to be kissed by him and he was aching to give me what I wanted. His lips brushed mine, then were a slow crush that stole my breath and urged me to open my mouth against his. I did and his hands were against my back, pressing my body tightly against his as my fingers tangled themselves in his wild hair. He kissed me breathless and! held me up as my knees threatened to give out on me. And then I remembered that he didn’t really want this, that deep down inside he didn’t believe it was right, meant to be. I pulled away and he let me go, realizing that he had made a mistake. I didn’t know what to say to him except, "I’m half alien." He nodded after a moment, and tried to reach out to me again. He touched the collar of my shirt, traced the edge of it and I didn’t pull away because I suppose some part of me is emotionally masochistic and likes to torture myself. "You walked out on me yesterday…" "You didn’t really give me a choice." It was either stay and feel like "the other woman" or leave and retain some self-respect. "I thought that that was the reason you left – because you believe there are choices." "I do. I left because you chose Isabel." His hand dropped away from me and shoved itself frustrated into his pocket. "I didn’t choose Isabel! I didn’t fucking choose her when we were…together…and I’m not fucking choosing her now." "Then say it." "Say what?" "Say "If I found out that I’m supposed to be with Isabel, I’d choose you anyway."" He stared at me his throat working furiously as he tried to keep down the truth I did but didn’t want to hear. "You didn’t come after me when I left…" I said quietly. "I didn’t think you wanted me too." "I did then." I turned away from him and opened the door. "I don’t now." I stepped outside and let it shut behind me, refusing to cry and ignoring the pain in my chest that threatened to tear it open. Across the hall was Liz. She was staring at the door behind me and I glanced back at it. It said "Eraser Room" on a little plaque beneath the window. I looked back at her, now confused on top of everything else, and her eyes met mine. She looked horrified by me, and I realized that Max had told her. He had told her I was an evil meddling half-breed that had come to Roswell to steal her love away from her. I turned and ran down the hall blinded by the tears that I couldn’t hold back anymore. *~*~* I ran into the bathroom and turned on the water faucet, grateful that no one was around, and wet a paper towel. I held it to my eyes and the door swung open. "Hey…" Liz. She had followed me. I took a deep breath and tossed the towel away, facing her reflection in the mirror in front of me. "Max told you who I am?" "He said…he said you’re like them…and that you’ve been dreaming about each other…" "He told you it doesn’t mean anything right?" She nodded slowly. "That’s what he said but-" "No Liz, please no "buts"…We aren’t having the dreams on purpose. I didn’t come to Roswell for Max, to tear you two apart. I could never even do that if I wanted to. I don’t know Max…I don’t feel those kinds of feelings for him…even in the dreams…It all feels so forced…please Liz you have to believe me…" "I believe you Maria…I do…and I believe Max when he says he can’t control what’s happening and that you two aren’t…aren’t…together…but they do mean something…they have too…" She paused and stepped in a little closer to me. "Did you know that Max saved my life?" I shook my head. I’ve barely spoken to Max. "He healed me. I was shot and he healed me. I was dying. We’ve all been through so much with each other since that day in September, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that everything means something…especially visions no matter how unwanted they are. Max and I…we have something special. We love each other, and nothing will ever change that…but when I saw you leave the eraser room…I thought…I thought you and Max…" she laughed shakily "I realized that some part of me knew that I couldn’t stand in the way of this if you two are meant to be…it would be selfish…no matter how much I love him…" I felt tears spring to my eyes again as I watched Liz trying not to cry and I reached out to her and we hugged each other in the empty girl’s room. Why is everyone willing to put their hearts aside? Why are they willing to let go what they feel is right for something no one wants? Maybe I’m just selfish. I don’t know. Liz stepped back and pushed her hair out of her eyes and smiled crookedly. "I want us to be friends Liz…I really like you and Alex…I don’t want you to think that I want all this…" "I know you don’t", she said softly. "Whatever happens, none of it is your fault – we all believe that, even Max. I was surprised that it was Michael you were in there with…I hope he wasn’t trying to intimidate you…he can be pretty…um intense…" "Tell me about it…" *~*~* Liz and I both had the same lunch period and she led me outside onto the grass where she and everyone else usually ate. I was nervous. My hand clenched around the brown paper bag I was holding that held the lunch I wasn’t going to eat as they came into view. Alex, Isabel, and Max. No Michael. Okay maybe I could manage to choke down something without him around making me dizzy. But then again Max was there and I didn’t know if that weird vertigo thing would happen if I looked at him or if that only happened when we touched, in which case I wouldn’t have to worry because we were never going to touch, ever. Ever, ever, ever. I sat down across from Isabel and she smiled at me. Liz sat down beside Max and I looked at him. There was no question about how he felt about her. He wasn’t the type to let destiny stand in his way, and I felt bad for feeling jealous of Liz. Max looked up from her and caught my eye. He nodded and gave me a little half smile, and I felt the knot in my stomach loosen considerably as Alex began to good-naturedly harass me about auditioning for his band again. I know I’m probably jinxing myself by thinking this, but maybe everything will be okay. They weren’t ignoring me, they weren’t being hostile. They were being nice. Welcoming. I felt…accepted almost. I opened my lunch bag and took out my strawberry yogurt and a packet of sugar. Isabel gasped as I started pouring it in and mixing the two together, and I blushed as I realized she probably thought it was totally disgusting. I looked up at her and saw that she had yogurt too, and lying beside it were two empty sugar packets. "I love that too!" I grinned at her and took out a handful of the cinnamon hearts and handed them to her. "Try it with these…they’re my favorite…" She took them and sprinkled them into the yogurt, shaking her head, smiling, and took a bite. Alex laughed at the expression on her face. " You have got to try this Max…after Alex!" She lunged at him, and he fell back still laughing. I laughed myself, watching Isabel pin down Alex effortlessly, even though it was pretty obvious he wanted to be caught and had probably helped her out. I turned back to Max and Liz. He had his chin resting on the top of her head, and they were both grinning. I smiled at them and held my yogurt out to Max. He picked up a spoon and took a bite, and I saw the first real smile I’d ever seen from him (well the first one directed at me anyway). "That is really good…" I laughed. "Sweet and Spicy." I said, and he smiled again wrapping his arms around Liz as she snuggled contentedly against him. "Sweet and Spicy." He echoed and we all laughed as Alex moaned that Isabel was trying to give him diabetes as she attacked him again with a spoon heaping with pink sugary yogurt. They had something just as special as Max and Liz did. Alex made Isabel remember that it was okay to have fun every once in a while, that it was okay to let her guard down, and she...she just made him glow. I've never seen anybody being force fed cinnamon/strawberry yogurt with extra sugar looking that happy. *~*~* We’ve gotten good at faking normalcy. To everyone on the outside we just look like a group of friends going through the motions of being teenagers. We hang out together, we study together, we eat lunch together. We avoid the desert. We don’t bring up Nasedo or the dreams. We don’t even acknowledge when we have them, but we can always tell. The one of us who has lain awake all night looks tired, haggard. Scared. Max comes in with dark circles under his eyes and Isabel comes in with her hair uncombed and no make-up. Most of the time I’ll throw on whatever clothes are closest to the bed and ditch the make-up thing too. I don’t know about Michael. I rarely see him, which is an amazing feat considering he works at the Crashdown too. The only conversation I’ve had with him since our little run-in in the eraser room almost three weeks ago occurred there. We were arguing over an order I still maintain he messed up, but it was obvious we weren’t fighting about whether the customer wanted a Will Smith or a Sigourney Weaver. We were arguing because we were frustrated. Because I think we missed each other. And it was dangerous to do that, to argue, because, fighting, as bizarre as it sounds, is our version of foreplay and the madder we got at each other the more I wanted to grab him and do it between a plate of Kielbasa and the deep fryer. If Liz hadn’t have walked in… But she did. And we haven’t been alone together since. We haven’t spoken to each other since. Everyone blamed it on him not trusting me – because I was new, or because he was angry that Nasedo still had not shown himself. No one knew the truth, that we were avoiding each other because we wanted each other too much. Because he was trying to prepare for the day when it became official, when Nasedo flat out told us that he and Isabel, myself and Max, were supposed to be together and any chance we might have had would be lost forever because he wasn’t brave enough or stupid enough to tell destiny and Nasedo to go to hell. Aside from my non-relationship with Michael everything else was great. Max and I were finally starting to feel comfortable around each other. Liz and Isabel became the sisters I’d never had and had always longed for, and Alex and I completely bonded one day after school when he drove me home and discovered I knew all the words to Boston’s "More Than a Feeling", and was more than willing to scream sing it along with him. Even my mom was happy. Things with Jim were going well, and my grandfather’s condition seemed fairly stable. Even grandma seemed to be lightening up. Still…I couldn’t forget about Michael and what I felt for him and it was making me miserable. No matter how wonderful everything else was, there was always that yearning, and on top of that no matter how much we all tried not to think about it, the dreams were still hanging over all of us like a storm cloud threatening to burst open and wash everything away. *~*~* I flopped down on the couch in the employee lounge. Liz and I had made a study date tonight for this horrible English test we have on Friday and I was really early. She wasn’t done for another half an hour. I laid down on the couch and closed my eyes figuring I might as well take a nap since last night I had had a Max dream and hadn’t slept very well afterwards. It was the first one in a while though. At least they were getting more sporadic. I squirmed my way into a more comfortable position and closed my eyes. I don’t know how long I slept before it happened. I had a dream but it wasn’t of Max. Everything was silver, black, gray, white, jagged and cold. There was a shadow in the shape of a man, watching me as I watched black and white pictures flash through the sky of the colorless desert. I saw what Michael and Isabel dreamt about. I saw a baby, I saw them happy, I saw them in love. I saw Max and myself in the same way, and I tried to force myself to wake up. The shadow reached out to me to stop me from leaving and when he touched me I saw something else. I saw the inside of a white room from the perspective of someone lying on their back. I tried to move and found I was strapped down. There were people in masks hovering over me, waving sharp things over my body that blurred as the vision moved on to something else. I was no longer being held down. I was holding something, someone. A little girl with blond curls soaked with blood. She was dead. The image blurred again and I saw my! mother at sixteen, sitting with a group of her friends in the bed of a pick up, hooting at a police car as it drove past. She looked at me, coolly giving me a once over, then looked away. After a second she looked back. Stared. Smiled. The shadow man yanked his hand away from mine. He was angry. I wasn’t supposed to have seen all that. "Puhlman Ranch. Midnight." He growled at me in a voice thick with annoyance and barely concealed surprise that I had seen something he had been trying to keep hidden. He stalked off into the silver desert and when he disappeared into the horizon all that was left of the cold colorless dream was sucked into his retreating back and I shook myself awake rather than face the black hole he had left behind. *~*~* I tore myself out of the dream with a gasp and nearly fell off the couch and into Michael who was kneeling beside it. He stared down at me, concern etched across his features, and he reached out to brush my hair out of my eyes either forgetting or ignoring our unspoken rule that we weren’t supposed to touch each other. "Are you okay?…You were having a-" "Nightmare." I whispered and sat up. A wave of dizziness hit me and I slid off the couch and into his arms. "You’re shaking…" he murmured and held me tighter. My heart was racing, I couldn’t breathe. All the things I had felt in the dream, all the terror, the pain, the anger, came flooding through me and I didn’t know how to stop it. I was sobbing, I felt like I was going to be sick. "God…what was it…?" I pulled away from him, feeling the tide of borrowed emotions pull back and recede until I was okay, until I was myself again. I wiped the tears from my eyes, still practically lying in his lap. I took a deep breath and started to get to my feet. He helped me and I took my hand back as soon as we were both up before the sparks became too much to ignore. "What happened to you? What did you see?" I shook my head. I didn’t know how to describe it. I needed to be alone to think about it, to sort it all out so I lied. "Nothing." "Bull shit. That was not nothing." He stepped in closer, trapping me like always so I was forced to deal with him. "It was a dream okay? But it was…different. There weren’t any colors and it was so cold…there was a man…a shadow. He said to go to the Ranch at Midnight." He frowned at me and I shivered, still chilled. "It was Nasedo wasn’t it?" I whispered, and after a moment he nodded. "He’s never dream walked with anyone but Isabel before…she said that it’s…strange when he does. Empty, cold." I nodded and whispered a shaky "yes". He stared at me, still so close. I reached out to him. I put my arms around him because the dream had scared me, because the parts of it I hadn’t told him about terrified me and I needed someone. I needed to pretend everything would be okay. I would have wanted the same from anyone right now. Michael just happened to be the only one here. I’m such a liar. Love me when nobody else can see Touch my soul, then treat me like I am a stranger This is not the way I want to feel… Should have known a love this strong Would bring some danger… But if it's all in my head I'll find a way to make it end It's magic… And it's tragic Slingshots, whisper, my teardrops, an answer What am I to you? "He showed me what you and Isabel dream about…he showed me the baby…" he stiffened but I didn’t let go. "You looked so happy…" I murmured into his chest, hoping he realized it wasn't an accusation, as he buried his face in the curve of my neck. Slingshots, you forgot, my kisses, don't miss this What am I to you? "I hate this…" he whispered. "I hate pretending that I don’t see you…that I don’t…" "I know…I hate it too." Shame - how you got me Ripping words off my lips to keep from asking I fall when you call… Press my ear against the phone to hear your lips move I guess it's all in my head And in time I’ll make amends It's magic… "What do you want?" …but it's so tragic "I want you to hold me…" I want you so bad "I can do that…" What's wrong with me baby "I want you to kiss me…" I want you so bad A kiss slow and deep everything I needed, his breathless whisper, "I can do that too…",my last request, "I want you to say it…" and him pulling back like I knew he would. What's wrong with you baby? "It’s not that simple…" I swallowed painfully and nodded, thinking, It should be. Love me when nobody else can see Touch my soul and treat me like a stranger This is not the way I like to feel I should have known a love this strong would bring some danger Slingshots, whisper, my teardrops, an answer What am I to you? Slingshots, you forgot, my kisses, don't miss this What am I to you? Slingshots, you forgot, my kisses, don't miss this What am I to you? "We should call the others. He wants us to be there in an hour." Beads fall from a delicate string My love is too strong to want you in the way we've been taught to take I reached out and clicked off the radio as Michael picked up the phone and dialed Max and Isabel’s number. He listened for a moment, silently, looking at me. He hung up. "They aren’t there…" "Try Is’s cell phone." He dialed again. I couldn’t stop shaking. He had to reach them. We couldn’t meet Nasedo by ourselves. He’d be angry if we did and I had no desire to see this guy pissed. I breathed a sigh of relief when he got through. "Hey…Nasedo paid Maria a visit. Did he dream walk you too? No she’s not okay, she’s freaked …Midnight…yeah. I know. Do you think we should…? Well we don’t know what this is about, you really want to put them in danger? Isabel I’m not…" he sighed and ran a hand through his hair frustrated. "Fine. Whatever you want, just get here. We don’t have much time. Yeah, I’ll tell Liz." He hung up, and leaned against the wall folding his arms in front of his chest. "He contacted her too a few minutes ago. She was just on her way to pick up Max from Alex’s. She wants to bring him…and Max wants to bring Liz." I nodded. And we were both quiet until he stepped away from the wall, towards me. "We’re not finished." "With what?" "Talking. I didn’t get to tell you what I mea-" The door swung open and Liz came in untying her apron. She smiled at Michael "Hey I thought you went home…" She frowned at the expression on his face and followed his gaze to mine. "What happened?" "Nasedo." He said. "He wants us to meet him in less than an hour. Max and Isabel and Alex should be here soon." Liz nodded, her jaw set, and hung her apron up on the hook. She took her jacket out of her locker and pulled it on. The look on her face said that she had been expecting this, waiting for it. Too bad I had conveniently forgotten that just because Nasedo skipped out on us the last time didn’t mean he wouldn’t want a rematch. I wasn’t prepared at all. Before I hadn’t been scared of meeting him. I’d been kind of excited, curious. But after seeing what I wasn’t supposed to see…I wanted to run and hide. "Are you okay Maria?" "Yeah…I’m fine…I want this too be over with." Liz sat down beside me on the couch. "Me too", she murmured. Michael went to the door and looked out the window into the café, looking for the jeep out front and said gruffly, "Yeah well I have a feeling it will be. Tonight." *~*~* We locked up the café and waited out front, standing there in a tense silence. Liz and I nervously kicked at each other’s shoes while Michael stared sullenly at the ground. His head shot up the second we heard the screech of the jeep’s tires around the corner. Isabel pulled up in front of us and got out. "We need more than one car to fit everybody…" she looked at me. "Did you bring yours?" I nodded and she motioned for Michael and Liz to get into the jeep. "I’ll go with you so you don’t get lost". We took off in a jog across the street as Max started up the jeep again and sped off down Main Street. *~*~* I followed Max’s headlights down the dark highway and glanced over at Isabel who had her knuckles pressed against her lips. She caught my eye and tried to smile. "Are you okay?" she asked. "Everyone keeps asking me that…" "Well…they know how weird it is…someone coming into your head…especially Nasedo. When he does it it just feels different…you know he’s there and there’s nothing you can do with about it. Usually dream walking’s pretty cool, and if you’re with the right person it can be…nice…" I could tell she was blushing even in the darkness of the car. I bit my lip and decided to just ask her. I had nothing to lose. Michael was already pretty much gone anyway. "Isabel do you love Michael?" "Yes. He’s my brother…" "No…I mean are you…are you in love with him…? Because it…it just seems like you and Alex…" Isabel turned slightly in her seat to look at me, and I kept completely focused on the road and the steady glow of the headlights. "Nasedo showed you our dreams didn’t he? Me and Michael together?" "Yeah…" "He showed me yours too…" "Oh…" "I know how you feel about them Maria and I know how Max feels about them. Michael and I don’t want this either…I mean at least you and Max don’t consider yourselves to be related…It’s different for Michael and I…it’s like…borderline incest or something…" she laughed breathlessly and I said tentatively, "Are you sure Michael feels the way you do? I mean…I saw him…with you and the baby and he looked so happy…" "I think that’s because a part of him wants that…I mean not necessarily a baby, and not with me…but a family…a real family. Max and I have never really been enough for him…and I understand that even though it’s hard not to feel hurt…He’s…Michael’s had a hard life…he’s had to go through shit no one should ever have to deal with, and it’s made him…afraid to open up to people. And he’s so goddamned pig-headed…it took him forever to let us help…He’s afraid that showing how he feels, showing when he’s hurt makes him weak, vulnerable, leaves him open to people taking advantage of him. I think he just needs to feel safe and accepted. Loved. Not that he’d ever admit it to anybody… And we’ve tried to give him those things…and I think it’s helped make things a little better…but it doesn’t seem to be enough…He still feels so alone…" Isabel took a deep breath and brushed a tear away from her cheek. "He’s always been so obsessed with finding out why we’re here…where we’ve come from…! even when we were kids…the three of us would camp out in the desert and just lay there…he used to cry when he thought we were all asleep…but I always heard him. The one time I reached out to him, and he let me hold him…he said that there had to be something out there for him that was more than this…more than Roswell and Hank…something better…he’s been looking for that something all his life…" "What about you?" I asked softly and she took another deep breath to steady herself. "I like my life. I love my brothers, Liz. And I’m…I’m falling in love with Alex…and I don’t want to let that go…I think that scares me more than anything else…losing him when I’ve just found him…" I reached over and found her hand. I squeezed it comfortingly and she answered with one of her own. "I know what you mean…" I let go of her hand and licked away the tear that had settled at the corner of my mouth. "I know you do." I looked at her and she smiled. "I dream walked Michael to find out what he had against you…why he was so cold…and…uh he wasn’t there…in the dream…" I blushed, and she caught it. "Don’t worry…it wasn’t an icky boy sex dream…it was sweet…you two were lying on the sand, staring up at the stars. He was holding your hand…I never knew Michael could be so sweet…He was happy there Maria. He was happy with you. Do you…do you care about him…?" "So much…" I whispered, my throat threatening to close up. "I thought so…You guys are terrific actors - we all thought you hated each other…" "No one else knows do they?" "No, no. Michael doesn’t even know I know. I don’t really make it a habit to go into his head, so he’d never suspect. He’d be pissed if he found out." "I won’t tell." "Thanks." "Isabel?" "Yeah?" "Does Alex know how you feel?" "He will. No matter what happens tonight he will." *~*~* I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe I thought he would drop out of the sky, or come walking up to us from the depths of the midnight desert. I don’t know – something dramatic. I did not expect him to pull up next to the jeep in a dusty brown Chevy that looked older than all of us put together. We had fallen into place when we arrived. Liz stood beside Max, their hands together, fingers entwined, and Isabel immediately went to Alex who put his arm around her. Michael and I were left standing beside each other, but not too close, when we heard the car. A man got out. He looked like he was in his late thirties, early forties, and he was balding and wearing a suit. He looked unassuming, like anyone you’d pass on the street and not give a second thought to. He looked…boring actually. He took one look at us and shook his head, his lips pressed together in a tight line of annoyance/disappointment. He looked like my third grade science teacher when Kody Dempster and Joe Smalley tried to make a pyramid out of beakers. I almost laughed, but the look in his eyes chilled me to the bone and I took another step towards Michael as he passed by me. "This is unacceptable. They don’t belong here." He waved a hand at Liz and Alex like the gesture could just wipe them away. He swept a hard gaze over the group, lingering a moment on me before turning back to Max and Isabel. "I’ve told you before how things are meant to be – how they will be. Now I don’t care what happens to them, but if you did you would let them go." "You keep telling us how things are meant to be, but you won’t tell us why…" Max frowned. "Children," he sighed condescendingly and I felt Michael bristle beside me, "You’ve had the dreams – all of you. They should be self-explanatory. This," He sent us a vision of the squares connected by an "x" with the strange lima bean designs inside of the boxes, and us standing in our "destined" places beside it, and then it was gone. "- is right. This," another hand fling at Liz and Alex, " - is wrong. Accept it and we can move on." "Yeah, on to what?" Michael said stepping forward. "You actually gonna tell us something useful this time? Like who we are, and where we come from? Or are you just gonna send us on another scavenger hunt and disappear?" "It’s not my job to tell you those things. My only job is to keep the four of you together and keep you safe." "Safe?!" Michael exploded. "Where the hell were you when Valenti was on our asses all that time?" Valenti? Jim Valenti? "Or when Hank was beating the shit out of me just for being there! Where the fuck were you!" "You took care of those problems yourselves. I had to protect you from Pierce. When I "disappeared" as you put it, I was attempting to lead Pierce away from you all. He was getting too close. I knew you could handle the Sheriff." A sigh and a rolling of the eyes. "It’s not that I don’t care Michael, in fact I dealt with your foster father personally." Michael stared at him and Isabel frowned. "Who the hell is Pierce?" "You don’t need to know right now. I’m taking care of him." "If he’s a threat to us you should tell us-" Max argued and Nasedo cut him off. "The only thing you need to know about Pierce is that he is dangerous and if you want to survive him you need me. You all need to trust me that I know what is best." "And you’re saying it’s "best" if we paired up like in the dreams." "Yes, Max that is a part of it." "Why is it so important?" "For one, you were meant to be together – you were designed to be together. Your subconscious knows this. Where else do you think the dreams were coming from?" "I thought they might be coming from you actually." Isabel answered looking him straight in the eye. "Afraid not my dear. And secondly, it’s a matter of biology. You four are different from those two – different in a way that cannot be overcome by what you children believe is "love"." "Wait a second." I said, speaking up. "I’m only half "different". I’m not a perfect biological match for Max…" "There are exceptions…" "Why? Why are there exceptions?" He stared at me and I asked the question again in my head, instinctively knowing to push at him with my mind. I saw the flashes again. The ones from the dreamwalk he had been trying to keep hidden. I saw a blond haired girl lying in his arms lost in an eternal sleep and I saw my mother. I saw him watching my mother. I saw him *pick* her because she was wearing a necklace with a star pendant that caught the light when she turned her head to look at him. "What did you look like to her?" I whispered. "What are you talking about?" his eyes narrowed. I think he knew I was on to him, that I knew what he had done, who he was. "Show me what you looked like when you called yourself "Nick". I want to see you. I want to see if I look like you looked." "Maria…" Michael said softly and Isabel and Max stared at me. "What are you saying Maria?" I heard Liz ask me in a quiet voice, but they knew. They knew what I was saying. "You’re my father." I whispered and he glared at me. "Of course…" Isabel whispered. "Why did you choose her?" It couldn’t have just been her taste in jewelry. "She was easy." He snapped, and I flinched. "Why did you do it?" Max stepped up. "I thought we weren’t supposed to have any "contact" of that kind with humans…You obviously did, so we know it’s not impossible to be with them…to live with them, to love-" "I did not love her. I did not live with her-" "No, you used her and then you walked away when you discovered I could pass for human." I was trying not to cry, but it hurt. Finding out that I was an experiment of sorts. That, and I guess I had wanted to believe that even if my father didn’t love me, he had at least loved my mother. This thing didn’t love anybody. He was so cold. Even as angry as he was right now with us challenging him, making him tell us things he had never intended to tell us, he was as cold as ice. "Why didn’t you take me with you?" Not that I wanted him to have. I was just curious. He rolled his eyes. "I didn’t need you yet." Oh. Well fuck you then. "What about the pod?" Isabel said suddenly. "In the chamber there were four pods…" "There was a girl. A little blond girl…" Max murmured. "That you left behind. She was found. She was killed. Dissected. They caught me when I tried to retrieve her. I was foolish then. I didn’t understand all that I could do yet. I was not able to perform my duty in her case. I am able to now for you all." "The girl – the fourth alien died…and you needed a replacement." I said quietly, finally understanding. "You figured half would be better than not at all huh?" I stared at him. He looked bored with the whole thing. Annoyed (since that seemed to be his natural disposition) and bored. "You made me dream of Max. You made Max dream of me. He wouldn’t have on his own because…because if what you’re saying is true…his "soulmate" or whatever the hell you want to call it is dead. "Destiny" was altered and you tried to fix it by getting my mother pregnant and filling the missing space with me. Max and I are not destined for each other…" "Are you finished?" he sighed. "No I’m not finished! I dreamt of him once" I said gesturing towards Michael, and ignoring the surprised looks from everyone but Isabel and Nasedo "Was that real or did you make me have that one too?" "I couldn’t have you with him because they couldn’t be together. We don’t do that on our planet either." Nasedo growled wrinkling his nose in distaste at the idea of Max and Isabel. "Wait…" I said realizing something. "I was born before any of them were…before they came out of the pods…before they left anybody…before she was killed. How did you know I would be…needed to take her place?" Nasedo took a deep breath and said with forced patience, "She was born too early. She came out of the chamber and left it alone, without me coming for her and without you three to protect her. Of course she wouldn’t survive on her own. The only reason you three did was because you drew your strength from each other – that and the fact that you were ready, grown. She was not ready to be born. She was not meant to be released. She was weak. If I had known to be there she would have been fine. I could have returned her to her place with the three of you, to continue her growth, but she was captured. I found your mother just in case I needed a replacement, and then I attempted to retrieve her. If I were able to do so I would have found you and disposed of you." "But we saw her in the pod chamber when we were "born"..." "I made you see her Max." "You still haven’t told us why we’re here." Michael said, his voice deadly calm, as he came up beside me and carefully placed a hand against my back where no one could see trying to give me support, comfort from the harshness of his admission that he would have killed me without a second thought. "We know there were originally four of us. One was killed and you…brought Maria into the picture to fill the space. Why did that need to be done? What purpose is there to a pair up? If you could just randomly fill it with anyone it must not be that important. If you would just tell us why we’re here and why we have to be together maybe we wouldn’t be fighting you so damn hard." "It’s not my pla-" "Not your place to tell us, right. You know what I think Nasedo? I think you’re full of shit. I think you don’t know any more about why we’re here than we do, and Maria is just your attempt to cover your ass. I think you made up this four square bullshit to keep us isolated, to keep us from caring about humans because you don’t…" Nasedo shook his head. "You’ll find out soon enough," was all he said before turning away, but I stepped in front of him before he reached the car. "You made us have those dreams didn’t you?" He tried to step around me and I held up a hand warningly, because I knew now. I understood. "All I have to do is touch you to know the truth…Shit, I don’t even have to do that do I? I’m connected to you and you hate that don’t you? You hate that you can’t hide the truth from me…" He smiled tightly, denying nothing, and stepped around me, getting into the car. "Daughter." "Father." It was so very civil, this cold acknowledgement. I closed my eyes as he drove away and asked my question once again like I had before, pushing with my mind and waiting. "Shit." I heard Michael curse behind me and I turned around. They were standing in a half circle before me. Neither Max and Liz nor Alex and Isabel had left each other’s sides, and Michael stood behind me staring at the brown Chevy’s disappearing headlights through the cloud of dust he had left behind. "We still don’t know for sure if he’s making us have those dreams…and we still don’t know why the we’re here…just more questions…more fucking doubts!" he kicked angrily at the ground, and I put my hand on his arm after finally receiving a reluctant answer. "He’s making us have the dreams…because he honestly believes that we are supposed to be…paired up…" "How do you know…?" Isabel whispered, taking Alex’s hand. I stared at their fingers how easily they found each other and just held on. I didn’t know how to explain it…how I knew that if I wanted to know what he knew all I had to do was ask and push, forcing the question until he had no choice but to answer. "When he dream walked me…to tell me about tonight…he touched me and I saw her…the little girl and I saw my mother. He opened some kind of connection between us when he touched me…I think it’s because I’m his…his daughter. I don’t think he can keep things from me…not if I want to know…" "Why are we here?" I shook my head at Max. "All I saw were two stones…they both had this mark on them…like this…" I traced the design in the sand with my shoe and Max and Isabel looked at each other. "The orb…" "What orb?" "Liz and I…we found one a few weeks ago buried out in the desert…" Max blushed as Liz smiled at him, and stepped in a little closer to him. "But we only found one…" "There’s another one…you need both of them to…" to I don’t know. Do something important. "To what?" I sighed. "I don’t know. I asked him why you three are here and all he sent me was an image of the two "orbs"…" "Does he know where the other one is?" I shook my head. "I didn’t ask…I don’t…I don’t think I’ll be able to get him to answer me…I think…I think it only works if he’s near me…I can’t really feel him now. Before, since after the dream…I felt kind of weird inside…kind of cold…I don’t feel like that now…I feel okay. I didn’t really notice I felt any different until now…now that the feeling’s gone. I think…I know he’ll be back. He’s just angry now…" "Tough shit. We’re the ones who should be angry." "There’s nothing we can do now Michael…" Max and Liz walked over to the jeep and after a moment Isabel and Alex followed them. "We have to find the second orb. We’ll study the one we have tomorrow. Maybe it will tell us where to find it…maybe the rocks Riverdog gave us can help too…other than that…I don’t know…" Michael nodded, seemingly satisfied with waiting till tomorrow to go any further. Isabel ran over to me and gave me a hug before getting into the jeep beside Alex and said quietly, "You know you have us right? You’ll always have us no matter what Maria…" "I know Is." I hugged her back and Liz put her arms around me after I returned Alex's small smile and said, "If you need anything Maria...if you want to talk about...about anything just call me okay? Anytime you need me I'm here for you..." "Thanks Liz..." I whispered and Max came to me and rested a hand lightly on my shoulder. I nodded at him and he gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze before joining the others in the car. I silently watched the jeep drive away leaving me alone with him. "I’m sorry…" he said after a quiet moment and I turned to look at him. "I’m sorry about what he said…about the way he is…" "It’s okay…" I shrugged, "It’s not like I expected if I ever did find my…father that he’d actually be in my life…in my mom’s life…that he’d actually be a father…I’ve never really missed not having one…my mom…My mom is amazing…and you…I mean all of you – Max, Isabel, Liz and Alex…you…I don’t need Nasedo to feel complete. You guys are my family…I don’t need him…I don’t…" I couldn’t hold back my tears anymore. I was tired of pretending I didn't care what Nasedo thought of me, how he regarded me as a barely acceptable replacement to the real thing, how he used my mother, how he manipulated me, all of us, and Michael held me as I cried, stroking my hair, and whispering in my ear that I had them, that everything would be alright because they would always be there. He would always be there. *~*~* I stared out the window as he drove my car down the dusty road back to Roswell. My fingers traced the moon outside and when I pressed them to my lips to stop the shaky breath that threatened more tears, I found they retained the coolness of the glass, and leaned my burning forehead against the window. It’s amazing. All of this is amazing – who Max, Isabel and Michael are – who I am. Who Nasedo is. I’m not sorry for anything that’s happened. Because I’m here. I’m here in Roswell with people I care about and who care about me. It makes it worthwhile. Really. I’m not angry at Nasedo anymore. He is who he is. He did what he felt he had to do. It’s pointless being pissed off and it’s even more pointless being hurt by it. Still it’s hard not to feel. My relationship with Michael is testament to that. No matter how many times I try to turn myself off it’s there. The yearning, the desire, the love, the anger, the disappointment, the fear. I could say it’s the human side of me that feels these things but I know that’s not true. I’ve witnessed these emotions in Max, Isabel, Michael, even Nasedo, and it makes me wonder if aliens are as "different" from humans as Nasedo believes. I turned my head to look at him in the darkness, studied his profile as he stared out the window. A muscle in his cheek clenched as he swallowed uncomfortably under my scrutiny. I wonder how things will be between us now. If he’ll be uncomfortable around me, if we’ll continue our little charade, dancing around our emotions. I wonder if what we’ve learned tonight means anything at all to him. The fact that Nasedo was the one who sent us the dreams. Or maybe that doesn’t matter. Nasedo believed what he did so strongly that he violated us – the ones he was sworn to protect. Maybe Michael believed there was some validity to the idea since Nasedo had gone so far to make us believe we were meant to be paired off. Or maybe he just didn’t want me anymore. He stopped the car in front of his apartment building and turned to me. "Can you come up for a minute…?" he said softly, his voice coloring in the silence that had stretched on for so long between us. "Yes…" I followed him up the stairs just like last time, trying not to remember, trying not to feel. I didn’t know what he wanted. Probably to make it official. Nothing was going to happen between us ever again. He closed the door quietly behind me and I stood there in the middle of the room, taking it all in. It was neater than last time, like he had made an attempt to clean. The sleeping bag we had shared twice was not in a tangled heap on the floor. It was draped over the arm of the sofa. Maybe he hadn’t been sleeping much either. I sat down at the kitchen counter waiting for him to work up the nerve to tell me whatever it was he was going to tell me, and noticed there were spoons on the counter. Five of them were pretty mangled, like they had been melted, their stems gently twisting and frozen in a permanent drip. The two closest to me were untouched, but they were much smaller than the others, and identical. Yes, this was the work of an insomniac. Melting spoons. I had to ask, if only to break that awful silence that was creeping in again. "What’s with the spoons?" "I uh…I wanted it to be perfect…" "What?" "This…" he held out his hand to me, and lying in his palm was the ring. He stepped in a little closer and lifted my hand from my lap, carefully slipping it onto my finger and watching me for a sign that he should stop. It fit. It fit perfectly. I looked up at him, speechless, and he shrugged, running a hand through his wild hair embarrassed. "I was um…trying that romantic thing out…y’know cause girls like that sort of thing…" "You made me a ring out of a spoon?" He blinked at me and frowned. "No…I made it out of half of mine. I just had to practice first so I wouldn’t mess it up. I wanted…I wanted it to be perfect." I stared at him and he stared at the floor. I took his hand in mine and pressed our palms together, ring over ring. Together they were the same width it used to be. "So…do you like it…?" he looked up when I didn’t answer and I kissed him. I put all my love into it, all my heart, trying to give him what he had put into the ring, and the sparks crackled into life again, dancing over our skin and tangling with our breath. "I can’t believe you did this…" I whispered against his lips between kisses, "This is so…" "Romantic?" he asked hopefully, and I breathed a "Yes" in his ear as he held me. "Well good. Y’know cause that’s what I was going for…" he pulled away slightly and brushed my hair away from my eyes, gazing into them before saying quietly. "I want you to know that I did this before tonight. Before we found out that Nasedo forced the dreams on us…I want you to know that I did…I did choose you. I was going to tell you tonight…" "I thought you…I thought you said it wasn’t that simple…" "It’s not…It’s not as simple as just saying it. I had to believe it, and I did…but I didn’t think you did. I looked into your eyes and I saw you waiting for me. I saw you waiting for me to let you down…I thought…if I showed you…if I showed you that you were the one I wanted, the one I’ve always wanted by fixing this…maybe you’d believe it…so I was going to give this to you…but I chickened out because I was afraid it wasn’t enough…" he wiped a tear away from my cheek with his thumb and said gently "You had every reason to doubt me…" "No…" I whispered, "No I didn’t…I should have known what you meant when you gave this to me the first time…I should have believed you then…" "It doesn’t matter…you believe me now right?" I nodded and he smiled, resting his head on my shoulder as I ran my fingers through his hair. "So it’s alright then…? If I love you?" I laughed breathlessly and pulled back to look at him and traced the line of his jaw, marveling at him, at all of this. "Only if I can love you too…" "Deal." "I was going to anyway…" "Me too…" he kissed me again and breathed against my lips, "Princess…" "Buttmunch…" I answered and covered his mouth with mine as his fingers danced up and down my spine in an endless caress that made me tremble in his arms like I always did and always would. It didn’t matter what Nasedo thought or what anyone else thought. I decided I didn’t believe in destiny. I believed in us. *~*~* I’ve always felt a little different – like maybe I was always walking a little faster or slower than everyone else – I don’t know – out of synch anyway. I thought it was normal to feel not normal, to feel out of place, like I don’t belong. I never expected this, never really believed it was true – that I *do* belong. In Roswell. With Max and Isabel, Alex and Liz. With Michael. I love him. I love the fact that he knows who I am, and loves me anyway. I love his crazy hair that’s as stubborn and wild as he is and his infuriating smirk that melts into a smile when I kiss him. I love the way he roped me into this, convinced me to go with him, convinced me into leaving my little shit town for his, because I found everything I’ve ever wanted here. A family. Friends. Acceptance. Love. Whatever happens now will happen because of the choices we and everyone around us makes. Our destiny is what we make it, and I know we’ll be fine, because we’ll face it together with our arms around each other and our souls full of stars and love. THE END |