Real (M/L, Oneshot, post-Graduation fic) TEEN 8/26

[Dangermousie]

Title: Real
Summary: Liz contemplates her life on the run, M/L
Disclaimer: don't own, don't profit
Author's note: I have just recently discovered Roswell, but can't get it out of my head. I especially wonder about what happened to them all post-Graduation.
Rating: Teen
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She pulls on the fraying blanket for warmth, moving slowly so as not to wake him. They’ve been driving for 12 hours straight and he is exhausted. She cannot see the shadows under his eyes, present even in sleep, but she knows they are there.

Sleep won’t come to her, though. Not yet.

The girl is going places. That’s what everybody thought. That’s what she thought, too. There she was, Liz Parker. Daddy’s girl, Mommy’s girl, good girl. Excellent student, clubs, honor roll. Big help to her parents in their restaurant, service with a smile. Responsible, level headed, mature. Definitely going places. That one won’t stay in Roswell, they used to say. Of course not. College, graduate school, career. Straight lines, clear paths, simple choices. She would see the far away places and travel the world. She will work and enjoy it, and come home to someone nice and steady and enjoy it too.

And now here she is, a teenage bride on the run from the FBI. No college degree, unless she takes correspondence courses under an assumed name while in hiding. Yes, she doesn’t think it’s likely either. Steady world of safe goals she’d thought she wanted is gone. The government might come for her, or for any of the others, any moment of any day, find them and kill them, or study them like lab rats some think they should be.

If it was a story she had read, it would be romantic: hiding from the bad guys together with your true love at your side. Reality is different. Reality is fear, cold in the pit of your stomach, paranoia over a look that is too long or a word that’s out of place. It is trying to find money and food and clothes inconspicuously. It is doing good in secret, as if it were a crime. It is waking up and forgetting which state they are in today, and realizing it doesn’t really matter. It is walls that are too thin so they have to be quiet, and the nights where there isn’t any privacy at all.

Reality is the look in his eyes when he doesn’t know she is watching: happiness still tinged with faint edges of disbelief that here they are (wherever “here” happens to be that day) together, that he has her for keeps. She knows this is what his look means because that’s what she feels as well. Happiness is him smiling at her, as they walk out of their makeshift rest stop at dawn, the ground still frosty and the sky pale blue tinged with the remains of red. There are days where the comfortable hum of conversation turns into a loud hilarious mess, and she laughs, and he laughs, and Maria and Michael and Isabel and Kyle laugh, and everything is all right with her world, even if none of them can remember what was so funny the day after. There are evenings when she leans back into the crook of his arm at dinner, and afternoons where she watches him drive, hands loose on the wheel. There are conversations, spinning into elaborate, or full of short syllables and broken words and punctuated with kisses, and there are silences which feel even better than that. And at night they come together, tangled and earnest and still a bit shy, unsatiated, insatiable, thin walls be damned. Sometimes it’s fast and desperate, and sometimes slow and languid. There’s playful in there, too, and she learns all about making him laugh and moan at the same time. Her mornings and evenings, her afternoons, days, nights run together, a kaleidoscope of real.

She turns on her side and he shifts in his sleep, unconsciously trying to draw her closer. His face is slack in sleep, and unguarded. She can see the outlines and planes of his face, melting into the darkness around them. His arm is warm on her waist.

Reality is Max.