Thank you all for waiting! Next part won't take half as long, I promise-promise
Max and Dave were not very... cooperative 
XXXVIII
Fire
cont.
“Tess was… not like us,” Max said as he contemplated the half-empty soda can in his hand. Outside, it was a dark, gray morning with snow lazily blanketing the woods not so far away. It was the perfect kind of weather for the type of thoughts that were racing through his mind, bare trees looking as desolate as he had felt not so long ago in his life.
He was standing by the window while Dave kept putting his puzzle together on the other side of the black, wooden desk. Max felt like one of those puzzle pieces now, being flipped onto one side or the other to fit into Dave’s view of their lives. “Or rather, we were not like her,” Max amended, looking at the window in front of him, frowning, the can in his hand now forgotten.
“That’s an interesting way of phrasing it,” Dave commented, meeting Max’s eyes by the reflection of the glass, silently asking him for an explanation.
“We were… too human, I guess, too many earthly attachments. Nothing like we were supposed to be. Nothing like her or what she was expecting from us. At all.”
It was hard to talk about Tess. Harder than Max had expected. Too many wounds, too many conflicting thoughts, and worst of all, too many unanswered questions still lingered in the air. It was too easy to get lost in a sea of half-truths, assumptions and questionable intentions. The silence stretched on with Max barely aware of it, not from reluctance to answer Dave’s latest question of who Tess had been, but because Max truly didn’t know where or how to begin.
“What exactly do you want to know about her?” he asked above a whisper, half turning his face, so his profile was all Dave could see.
“Anything,” Dave answered, almost hypnotically flipping pieces. “Everything,” he added, this time stopping to look at Max. “You don’t strike me as a one-night-stand kind of guy. You’ve been reckless in the past, but not that kind of reckless.”
Dave’s words had an odd effect on him. It made him relive too many old memories of a time better left forgotten. He’d been going through hell and, ironically, he didn’t know how to start conveying those facts either. Sometimes he wished meeting Tess had all been a bad dream… Sometimes he wondered if anything of what Tess had said had been true at all. But most of the time, when he thought about those months, he just felt a strange mix of failure, shame and disappointment. He’d felt so alone then, more than at any other point in his entire life.
“I’m not going to judge you if that were the case,” Dave said, sensing Max’s sudden stillness, misunderstanding the cause behind the heavy silence that had so abruptly settled. Max fully turned to face Dave now, still unsure of what to say.
“It wasn’t like that,” Max answered a bit too harsh, some of his inner frustrations shining through. Taking a short, deep breath, he tried to calm himself, looking at the puzzle instead of Dave. Seconds ticked by on an imaginary clock, yet he could not find the right words to explain what had happened with Tess. “Is there anything you regret?” he finally asked in a cheerless tone, maybe buying himself time, maybe wanting Dave to understand how he felt about the subject. Either way, he found himself actually curious about the answer now that the question was on the table.
Dave let go of the piece he was holding, and slowly reclined on his black leather chair, thoughtful. “A few, I guess,” he said at last. “I trusted in the wrong people once, though that led me to Jake. I’ve misjudged some others, but usually I only lose money, so that’s not so bad. Seldom have I fallen and not gained something in return, so I usually don’t regret failing. I don’t like it, but it doesn’t keep me awake at night either. Few things do,” Dave added as an afterthought. Losing his thoughtful look a few moments later, he centered on Max again, expecting him to continue.
“How much… do you… actually know about Tess?” Max cautiously asked, narrowing his eyes.
“Not much,” Dave admitted with a short sigh, “not much outside what you’ve told me this week, which means your shapeshifter knew quite well how to keep his tracks covered. It’s quite impressive in this day and age, if I must say. Almost everything leaves a paper trail, and Tess’s was as clean as they come. What little I found was that she moved around a lot, which actually tells me more about him than her. If she wasn’t leaving silver handprints behind, then he was the reason they were moving around so much. She must have known half the continent by the time she was 12.”
How ironic, Max privately thought, that Tess got to see the world and ended up despising it anyway. They could barely decide where to go to college for fear of being separated, let alone go to another country. Why did Tess never seem to appreciate such things?
“She never talked about her trips?” Dave asked, intrigued.
Max shook his head. “She never talked about her past much. She was… focused on her future. She was always… so intent on bringing up Antar and our ‘destiny’ that, honestly, it never occurred to me that she might actually want to talk about anything else.” He tried to picture Tess talking excitedly about some exotic place she might have seen, but utterly failed. There was hardly a time when he remembered her smiling, let alone sharing something non-alien that she might have found interesting.
“According to school gossip,” Dave continued when Max didn’t elaborate, “Tess was pretty much a loner if she wasn’t around one of you, though she was not unpopular. She got good grades, and kept out of trouble, so there was not much to get from the teachers.” Dave paused for a second, as if mentally shifting sheets on an imaginary file. “She dated Kyle, moved in with him, but since his dad was the Sheriff not many people made much out of it… Then she dated you for a short while, and then… she disappeared. Just as she came, she went. It really is surprising for someone who use to be the queen of an entire planet. You gotta give it to her, she knew how to keep a low profile.”
And how… The dark thought crossed his mind, remembering how long Tess had been controlling Alex without anyone suspecting a thing.
“I didn’t even notice the first day she was in school,” Max conceded in a rather frustrated manner, his eyes going to the half-made puzzle again. Memories of happier, easier times came to him then. Of afternoons spent with Liz when everything wasn’t so complicated. With no destiny in sight, no running away, no alien enemies.
Just the Unit.
Max involuntarily shivered. He turned to the window to disguise it, unwanted memories following him along with Dave’s gaze. How do you know women so well? Tess’s first words to him echoed through his mind. The answer was easy: He didn’t.
“You have to understand something very fundamental about Tess,” Max said, barely above a whisper, though the room was so silent it didn’t really matter, “She had the power to make you believe just about anything. You would literally see what she wanted, and she could wipe away your memories and replace them with new ones. Reality was never a sure thing around her.”
His mind kept reliving that time, of Tess placing thoughts about them together… And it hadn’t been just the idea that he was somehow cheating on Liz that had terrified him, but the profound feeling that had invaded him that he was no longer the same. Something had awakened in those weeks, something he had never truly been able to lock back up: the sense of being alien. Worse, the sense of being alien to himself.
Ironically, this he had been able to forgive with time. Hadn’t Tess grown up thinking he was her husband and king? That they were ‘meant to be together’ as she proclaimed at every chance she’d had at the time? How much different would Max have been had he been in her place? Growing up alone, yearning to find others like him, family. No, he couldn’t hold it against her, though he did warn her that he did not appreciate being mindwarped. She’d said she was sorry. He’d say it was okay. So easy.
So wrong.
Next time she did it, it was to make him believe that he was making a connection to his son. And to this day, Max could not forgive her for that. Not playing with him like that.
“Regardless, you let her in,” Dave pointed out, slightly narrowing his eyes.
“We thought she was one of us,” Max agreed. “It was only natural…”
Sometimes, on rainy days and lonely roads, Max thought that maybe Tess too had thought that she was one of them. That if he’d tried harder to include her, maybe she wouldn’t have turned on them. That if he’d done more he would have prevented her from killing Alex at the very least, and maybe even make her a part of their group at best. Was it really so bad to be human? Was it so repulsive to want a normal life? He could never shake the feeling that on some distant planet, their former selves had been married, had cared for each other, and had even somehow ensured they would be together afterwards. Didn’t that count for something? In this new version of their lives, he had to admit that things didn’t quite add up on the romantic side of it… but still, she was part of their puzzle, and for a while she’d seemed to awkwardly fit…
In retrospect, for a while too, he saw her as a friend. When his life was falling apart, he saw her as a confidant. And when being human hurt like hell, being alien became the only way he could hold onto some semblance of sanity. And being alien also meant accepting his destiny. I’m ready to wake up now…
The light in the room flickered, and Max immediately stopped his train of thought, quickly raining in his rising anger. Hardly ever did he allow himself to get too deep in these thoughts, but losing his focus now was unacceptable. Dave looked up at the light bulb, and then slowly lowered his eyes to Max, and then to his puzzle.
“You all have the strangest reactions when you’re talking about her,” Dave said, his hand reaching for a far away piece, hazel eyes tirelessly searching its place.
Something hit Max with those words. The thing that made talking about Tess so difficult, Max realized, was that he’d never done it. Who would he have sought to talk to about her? During the months after Tess had left for Antar, Max had tried Michael, but Michael could only take a serious conversation for so long. Isabel had wanted her dead. Maria had had very vivid ways of describing how exactly that death should occur. Even Kyle would shy away from it, one of the rare topics he wouldn’t talk about. Liz was just out of the question, plain and simple.
And then Tess had come back, had died, and they had found themselves on the run. Max had talked to Liz once about their past mistakes, but it wasn’t as if he had detailed every single thought, doubt and suspicion he’d had about Tess out loud, the way he did in his mind.
Shaking those rather somber thoughts, Max refocused on the present.
“You thought she was one of you,” Dave repeated Max’s words in order to retake the conversation, “that explains why she was around. But it doesn’t exactly explain why Liz wasn’t,” the older man said as he fit another piece.
“I don’t understand,” Max replied, honestly not sure what Dave was fishing for here.
“Liz spent the entire summer in Florida in 2000. I’ve got plenty of records to confirm that. Tess had just moved in… so why was Liz moving out?”
The new apparent focus on Liz took Max by surprise, even though in his mind the uncensored answer easily came, because she could run and I couldn’t. He recovered fast, however, answering Dave’s seemingly random question. “Liz thought it would be best for me… if she wasn’t around… in the middle of my destiny.”
“And Tess took advantage of that?” Dave asked, stopping again as if this point in the story was more important than all the others.
Honestly? No. If anything, she’d taken a rather stoic approach once he’d told her that there was nothing between them beyond a kinship of sorts. Reluctantly, Max shook his head.
“Maria didn’t buy it,” Max elaborated with a sad half smile. “When Liz left and Tess stayed in the background, Maria never thought I should… you know… believe Tess’s words anyway… She never liked Tess.”
When that summer from hell had begun four years back, and Liz had gone to Florida, he’d just turned to Maria. She was his only link to his soul mate, and there were so many things he was desperately trying to block from his mind, starting with Pierce and ending with a message from his real mother. He was barely 17, and already he’d escaped torture and survived the FBI, just to find out that a war was waiting for him back “home”, assuming he hadn’t brought it to this home, while everyone was waiting for him to lead, especially Michael. But to lead where? To fight what? It didn’t matter, he was supposed to know. He was always supposed to know.
You know what? Maria had said one night when he was feeling particularly low, harshly placing a Cherry Coke on the table, the contents spilling a bit from the force of it. Screw them all. They want you to be the hero, well, sorry. But no. You’re dealing with a lot of crap that for some reason you don’t want to share with them, and that’s fine. But you need to take care of yourself before you can -or should- take care of anyone else.
Spending time with Maria in those days had been soothing. She was the only one who knew what had happened to him, and the only one who wasn’t looking at him for answers, but rather letting him be silent, sitting in a half obscured booth by the corner. He’d needed to be surrounded by familiar places, safe places, and slowly but surely, he’d put himself back together under Maria’s soft, green eyes, even if she was equally hurting because of Michael’s refusal to be with her.
He would have drowned without Maria’s reassurances that Liz’s rejections had nothing to do with him as a person, and his own self assurance that Liz being out there and not in here was better for her safety anyway. If Roswell was doomed, if he was calling back the bad guys, it was better for Liz to be as far away as possible than by his side keeping the shadows at bay. Shadows that were aplenty for months without end.
“She really is very protective of you, you know?” Dave casually said, as he narrowed his eyes at a piece, trying to figure out where to fit it. “She’s Liz’s best friend, and Michael’s love, but I think… I think she’s the one who keeps you honest to yourself when everyone else fails. She’s incorruptible like that…”
It was a rare thing to hear from someone who Max would technically consider a threat. It took him by surprise to hear such well defined observation, indeed, but part of him wondered if there was some possibly dangerous undertone. Was Dave threatening Maria or merely remarking something he found noble?
“Just like Jake,” Dave added as an afterthought, a warm smile spreading as he fit the piece in its proper place. It wasn’t much, but it was enough of an opening for Max to get some much needed background.
“How did you meet Jake?” Max asked, trying to sound casual about it. Dave raised an eyebrow, expectant. Maybe surprised. Max wasn’t really sure, except that Dave didn’t look all that happy about the question itself. It made Max feel awkward, and too aware of the silence in the room, the harshness of the light, and the vague tingling in his fingertips. Max hated being nervous.
What he didn’t know was that getting the answer to his question would be getting information that just a selected few had ever known. How Dave and Jake had met was a tangled story buried in dark corners that no one wanted to touch. Not even Dave.
) and just know that it's not lack of interest or will that keeps me from the story, but rather uncooperative characters. And work. 
Tess is such a complicated character to write from outsiders' points of view. She messed up the dynamics of the group in so many levels, yet in this story we don't hear her voice (evil, misunderstood, confused, whatever) so all there is left is everyone's feelings regarding her, which considering the voting in 4A&B, does not seem promising. Still, Max must have seen another side of her, something that clicked with him, or he would have never started "dating" and ultimately sleeping with her. So I want to explore that and the circumstances surrounding that decision, even if my dreamer heart cringes at that...
