Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 62 Pg 22 - 12 / 29 [COMPLETE]

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Misha
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Re: Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 39 Pg 21 - 1/

Post by Misha »

Hey guys! Here it is: the last of the batch. I'll be back in a couple of months with hopefully a lot of chapters and the ending 8)

begonia, Frank knows about John. It was showed in the videos :wink:




Journal Entry #19, August 10th, 2011


I'm not sure what is worse: if before when I had no idea what was going on with Max and his life, and he would disappear for weeks on end; or now, when I know exactly what's going on with his life, and I might still not see him for weeks on end.

I don't know what to do. I keep running tests, keep getting busy with work. But at some point Alex will have to leave, and so will John. We're just tight with anticipation. Even if my counter-drug works, it will be months before Max is free. I'm pretty sure if this is a failure, if we can't get Max out of there soon, something drastic will have to happen.

I just wish I knew what.


Chapter Forty
The Other Side



"Yeah, I wasn't aware of a few things with the contract," John said to his cellphone on her office, talking to his wife. "I'll settle things down here, dine with a few people, miss the hell out of you," he added with a mischievous smile in his voice. Whoever Mrs. Herschel was, she was one lucky woman.

"Yes, yes, I won't forget that. Just promise me you won't chew out your new assistant's head. It's not his fault if he doesn't understand your over-complex mind." This time, his tone seemed to indicate he was serious. "No, no. I'm not letting myself starve, 'mom'. What is it with women thinking we men cannot hunt down and kill our own food? Half of me is a caveman, remember?"

There it was again, that grin that Liz yearned to see in Max. How can they share their genes and yet be so different? Heck, they even had the same childhood for what they've told me.

The eternal dilemma of nurture versus nature was at the back of her mind when John said I love you on the phone with a tenderness that spoke of an equally yearning for being home. Liz sighed.

"When was the last time you guys were together?" she asked when he came out. Outside, everyone was enjoying a late summer day except them. It was already 8:00 p.m. and they were perpetually at her lab.

"I think a month now," he said, thoughtful. "Well, more like 1 month, 6 days and 19 hours, that sort of thing," he said sheepishly. She smiled.

"You must love her so much," she said, the romantic in her surfacing in a rather embarrassing way.

John nodded with a grin, absently reheating his coffee with a wave of his hand. Looking at hers, he did the same.

"Thank you."

"Sure. I do this all the time for her. She loves to stay late at her lab. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm nothing more than a glorified microwave," he said with a laugh.

"So… You just told her? Just like that?"

"Not exactly… The first time they gave me the drug I was 17. I hated it. Samuel hated it, too."

"That's Summers, right? The guy Max doesn't like?"

"The one and only. It wasn't his idea, mind you. They argued I had access to classified information and was a national security threat just by existing. So they wanted me on a leash, and I quietly rebelled against it the second I could. And for the next four years I tried to adapt, failed, and escaped."

"Summers didn't know?"

"That I hated it? Yes. We had long talks about how to go around it. That I wanted to escape? Never. I wasn't an idiot. Instead, I took my desire to be free to the closest university I could fine. I was highly advanced in chemistry, so it wasn't out of my reach. But, I wasn't a student, so I had to fake a lot of ID's, and break-in to a few labs to get the equipment and the tests done."

"That's why you were stealing from her, right?"

"Yeah... She caught me getting creative with the lab equipment she was using for her own research. She... let's just say her softer side is very, very buried deep down."

"What did she do?"

"She called the campus police. I was out before they arrived, but after that day, she was always on the lookout for me, and I for her. She was the reason why I delayed my escaping a whole year, actually, until I heard they were going to get Max out of his pod. It became clear in that moment that I was staring at my window of opportunity. Either I left that day, or I was stuck there for the rest of my life. I had about three months to get ready, so I couldn't care less if she caught me at the lab. I was running out of time, and I could always outrun and outsmart the guards."

"Sounds exciting," Liz joked.

"It was rather stupid. I should have talked to her that first time, but…" John shrugged. "Anyway, when she caught me again, I was actually going through the first stages of withdrawal. I needed to see my blood reacting, as close as I could to my next dose. I think I scared her really badly that time. I left, of course, but my blood stayed there. She—She had a lot of questions the next time. I was running out of time and willing to take on any help. We talked, we planned, we worked together. Two months later, I was a free man."

"Two months?" Liz whispered, stuck in that part of the story. "She discovered the counter-drug in two months?" Talk about feeling incompetent.

"Hey, Parker. It was a different drug, and, no offense, she does have a brilliant mind."

"She doesn't know what you're doing here," Liz stated with a raised eyebrow.

"Let's just say that I still want to be married when all of this ends."

"Ha! Yes! I told him she didn't know!" Liz exclaimed, feeling the rush of victory.

"What are we talking about here?"

"Oh, sorry. Max said that you might be lying about having a wife. I told him you were probably doing this behind her back."

John winced. "You do realize that neither scenario speaks well of me, right?"

"Well, aren't you? I mean, doing this without your wife knowing?"

"Touché. She risked a lot to get me to safety. We were so young, but despite that little communication problem, we weren't stupid. She left the physics department and changed majors into biology so we could get a clue about me. As her research went deeper, she started applying it to other problems. She's pretty amazing with puzzles, and she found a lot of missing pieces on my biochemistry."

Liz nodded, her mind filling with notes of her own research on Max. The possibilities of where she could go with that were endless. "She's incredible," she sighed, wishing she could meet her.

"You're not so shabby yourself, doctor" John said, saluting her with his coffee mug. She blushed. "It takes a special kind of courage to deal with Max, I'd say."

She smiled. "I—I don't think there goes a day that I don't ask myself why I didn't turn him away, you know? He showed up, all arrogance and with danger written all over his body... but then he had to do that with his blood."

"Do what?"

"Stabbed himself with a needle. And he said, 'if you're interested on what you see, I'll come back again.'"

"You could've not looked," he said with a smirk.

"Yeah. Because that's what scientist do: they don't look. Anyway, every single doctor in the world would give his right arm to see what I saw under that microscope."

"Most of them would have called the police, or the FBI. Someone. You were looking at non-human blood cells, and you kept it all to yourself. As I said, courage."

Liz bit her lower lip. "Maybe. I don't know. It sounded like I would get into a lot of trouble if I went public with it. But... you gotta admit, it would have been some story."

"Morning edition: Aliens among us! Hot guy with blood sample trashes millennia of preconceptions. Doctor says she couldn't keep the truth from the world anymore."

"Who couldn't keep the truth anymore?" Alex asked, coming into the lab with a late take-out. John grinned. "Your friend here, in an alternative universe."

"Oh, I like to play, too!" Alex said, settling the bag on the counter. "I like the one where I hack into top branches of national security to spy on alien experiments. Oh wait, I already do that…"

Liz threw him a pen and he expertly dodged it. He hadn't been a master dodge ball player for nothing.

"How did you find out about Max?" Liz asked, as the three of them dove for the containers and sodas.

"The internet," he said nonchalantly, producing his ever present Tabasco bottle. Is that, like, another one of his alien powers? she mused. "Well, okay, not exactly. Through the years I've been placing flags around specific files. I could never find anything about Max specifically, but I found some of my own time there. And about four months ago, one of those flags went on. It was the first time I knew for sure Max was still alive. Still where I left him, too. That was one of the best days of my life."

"Wait, who triggered the flag?" Alex asked, serving himself a generous portion of Chinese food.

"A hacker who worked on a mission with Max. It took me a while to track him down, find the connection. He didn't get far, no one ever does with those files, but it was enough for me to know where I had to look."

"Talk about lucky." Alex said.

"Luck was finding this girl," John said, looking at Liz. "I started looking at facilities which could be useful, and found out a few labs in the area. When I saw what Liz here had been ordering, the equipment and the information, I suspected maybe Max had had the same idea I had twenty years ago: find a way out of the drug. But to be honest, I didn't know I would find Max's partner in crime around the corner."

Liz smiled while eating. "I never asked Max why he chose me. I mean, yeah, he told me I had the credentials and obviously I have the equipment, but... you know, why me?"

"He's a warm blooded male, Liz," John said with all certainty, "You're not exactly hard to look at."

This time, she threw a pen at him, and John received it right on his chest.

"I seriously doubt Max would place his future, his secret, and my life in jeopardy just because he thought I was pretty."

Maria's voice came somewhere at the back of her mind: don't be so sure, girl. The guy has a point.

"You can ask him the next time he comes around. Hopefully on our way out of that place forever." John started to eat his food, pouring even more tabasco on it. Honestly, at some point it had stopped being gross and now was just a John thing.

"You know," Liz said, opening her Lipton tea, "If I did my job right, I'm never really going to see Max again. Maggs has my notes, she can take it from there or develop her own drug."

Sadness invaded her. Everything had happened so fast she had barely shaken hands with him and said good-bye. But what if that had been the last time she'd ever see him?

"You will tell us if you escape right?" she asked, suddenly needing reassurances that she would get to know Max's fate. "Max was very adamant that he would disappear one day and that I shouldn't worry about it. But," she paused, unsure of how to phrase her feelings, "he's my friend."

"I'll make him let you know," John said, toasting with his Cherry Coke, "or get my wife to do it. She can be crazy scary when it comes to that kind of thing."

"It's a promise," Liz said, looking straight at John.

She toasted with her own bottle and took a sip. John stared at her, or rather at her hand.

"What happened to your fingers?" he asked, getting a closer look by leaning on the table.

"Oh?" Liz asked, placing the bottle on the table and extending them. A dozen thin cuts aggravated both of her hands, a souvenir of Max's exploding test tubes yesterday. "It's nothing. They look worse than they actually are."

"It looks as if a cat had gone twelve rounds with you," Alex said, taking a look at her hands, too.

"Did Max say anything to you?" John asked, extending his hand so Liz could place hers in his.

"It wasn't his fault. He didn't even notice, really. I didn't notice until later. It's nothing, really."

John took an even closer look, and then his hand glowed faintly. Warmth spread on her fingers, and the slight sting of the cuts went away.

"Do you know if he knows he can heal?" John asked, motioning with his hand for her to give him her other hand. She did, gladly.

"I... no... It didn't come up. I mean, we talked about how he doesn't get sick. And it threw me off for a while that his body would compensate for secondary effects so fast. But—no."

"I don't get the sense Max is one to share," Alex pointed out, while Liz examined her newly healed hands.

"I guess it's possible. My gosh, this brother of mine is going to be the death of me…"

"Don't say that!" Liz said, suddenly feeling very protective.

"She's got a point," Alex interjected. "Saying that is akin to saying 'what's the worst that can happen'. You just know it's going to happen and it's not going to be pretty.

John smiled at that. "I love hanging with you two. Sci-fi savvy people are just the coolest to hang out when you're a walking, talking part of a sci-fi movie." John toasted. He could toast for just any reason, really, but it was infectious.

"John?"

"Hm?"

"Who else knows about you? I mean, besides your wife?"

"No one. No one outside the classified, for-your-eyes-only crap, of course. My wife found out and kept her mouth shut, thank God. There's never been a reason to tell anyone else. I don't get sick, so doctors are out of the equation."

"You'd never been to a hospital?"

"No. And I don't intent to start anytime soon."

"I bet she's awesome," Alex said, nodding. "How many people find about aliens and marry them?"

John grin at that, and toasted with Alex. "You're one hell of a smart guy." He got thoughtful then. "It's not always easy. We do have questions, all the time. I'm always looking over my shoulder, and I've done everything I can to ensure no one would trace me back to her if I'm ever captured back. But we have our ups and downs. I like that she knows who I am, but carrying this secret... it can be annoying sometimes."

For once, Liz could see the closest thing to a dark cloud over John's head, and it did not become him.

"How did you learn how to heal?" she asked out of the blue, eager to change subjects.

"Motorbike accident. I lost control of the bike on our way to our honeymoon. I panicked, largely because she panicked. I didn't know how to help her, and she didn't know how to keep me calm. Nowadays we find it funny, but right that instant… She said maybe if I concentrated at a molecular level, as in changing the molecular structure of things, it might happen. And it did. For the longest time we thought that was the basis of my 'healing' her, but with practice, I got further along. Now I can do it both ways. For some things, like a broken bone, molecular changing is far less energy consuming. But something like cancer would wipe me out cold for a whole day."

"Would be great if you could heal Max like that," Alex absently said, taking a big bite out of his food.

Liz's eyes went round, and as she turned to look at John, he was already shaking his head. "I can't cure addiction. Wounds, some diseases, sure. Addiction is beyond my skills."

"Have you ever tried?"

"I've tried similar things. I've had about 15 years of practicing and devising new ways to challenge me. It would sure be handy, though. Don't worry, Liz, your drug will work. Max will be free. Now, Alex, is there any dessert in this order, or am I going to have to pour sugar all over this?"

Don't worry, he says. If only it were that easy.
"There's addiction, and there's Roswell!"
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begonia9508
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Re: Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 40 Pg 22 - 1/

Post by begonia9508 »

Hey guys! Here it is: the last of the batch. I'll be back in a couple of months with hopefully a lot of chapters and the ending 8)


Hey Misha, are you kidding or it is serious? :shock: Because I will certainly suffer withdrawal for this story! :? :? :( :? :wink: And what do you meant, when you talked being back in about a couple of months?... Because they are 12 in one year but that, you already know! :lol: :lol:

So I will wait patiently and sometimes, let you remember I wish for more! :wink:

Anyway, loved John's talk with his friends Liz and Alex! I really loved how he could talk so easily and honestly about his alieness and the life with his wife, which must be not easy if the FBI is behind them... They can always change country... :roll:

So Misha, I am going to grin and bear it until next time! :? :wink:

EVE :mrgreen:
- Les jouissances de l'esprit sont faites pour calmer les orages du coeur!
- On reconnaît le bonheur au bruit qu'il fait quand il s'en va!
- L'amour vous rend aveugle et le mariage vous redonne la vue!
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Re: Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 40 Pg 22 - 1/

Post by keepsmiling7 »

It's sad to think about possible failure......and what might happen then.
Seventeen and the first drug.......that's awful.
So John said it took special courage to deal with Max.....
But I agree, Max doesn't appear to be the kind to share.

What do you mean......you'll be back in a couple of months....??
You leave me wondering if Liz will find success and will Max be free??
Thanks
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Re: Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 40 Pg 22 - 1/

Post by SmileeUk »

Oh my! Just caught up! Great story!!!

Max has the new drug & I can't wait to see how soon he can escape from that hell hole. Hopefully Mag can help him to escape. She is like a mother hen to me :mrgreen:

Frank is suspecious & I just hope he will help Max to escape.

John's wife is so mysterious. I still want to read more about her :wink:

It feels like a few months have passed & can you come back to update this story already :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
:lol: :lol: :lol:

I really cannot wait umtil the next instalment :wink: :wink: :wink:
~~~~~~ ###### Smiling is a Gift ###### ~~~~~~
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Re: Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 40 Pg 22 - 1/

Post by clueless »

Just love reading this!
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Re: Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 40 Pg 22 - 1/

Post by HBGO »

Just found this story and love it! I enjoy the story line you have created. I think it is quite unique.
But time has changed nothing at all -
you're still the only one that feels like home.
I've tried cutting the ropes and
I let you go but you're still the only one
that feels like home.

Missy Higgins
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Re: Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 40 Pg 22 - 1/

Post by mela3 »

This story is so amazing. I can't believe I just found it. I'm fascinated.
I like lots of things, but there are three things I like most: love, love... and love

- La Dolce Vita
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Re: Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 40 Pg 22 - 1/

Post by SmileeUk »

Just a friendly little bump :mrgreen: :mrgreen: :mrgreen:
~~~~~~ ###### Smiling is a Gift ###### ~~~~~~
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Re: Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 40 Pg 5 - 1/4

Post by dreamon »

I miss reading this.
I have a few dreamer challenges in mind if you are looking for ideas so pm me!
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Re: Of Journals & Journeys (AU M/L, YTEEN) Ch. 40 Pg 5 - 1/4

Post by begonia9508 »

Hey Misha!

Isn't it it the time for a new part? I think so...

EVE :mrgreen:
- Les jouissances de l'esprit sont faites pour calmer les orages du coeur!
- On reconnaît le bonheur au bruit qu'il fait quand il s'en va!
- L'amour vous rend aveugle et le mariage vous redonne la vue!
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